Who Is Yahweh | Pastor Greg Ford Sermon | One Church Columbus

If you have your Bibles turned to Exodus chapter 5, uh Exodus is not hard to find in the Bible.

Exodus 5 · chapter mention

It's the second book of the Bible.

So if you just start all the way at the beginning in Genesis, pretty quickly you'll get to Exodus.

So we're going to be in chapter 5, verses 1 and 2.

If you don't have a Bible with you, we'll put the scriptures up on the screens for you.

Okay, starting in verse 1, it says, afterward, Moses and Aaron went up to Pharaoh and said, This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says.

Something that will help you to get the most out of that time.

Two words.

And the words are revelation and response.

Revelation and response.

The word revelation simply means God revealing himself.

So one of the ways God reveals himself is through his word.

And so anytime you're reading or studying, you want to be asking yourself, what is the principle?

What is the character quality?

What is the value that we see from God here?

What am I learning about God?

And so that first part, that revelation, sometimes when you're listening to a preacher or a teacher, they may do a good job of articulating that and saying, here's, you know, precisely what this text is giving us about God, but some aren't.

And whether they're good at it or not, you should be doing that in your own head, asking the question, Lord, what am I, what am I to learn from this about you?

And the cool thing about that is if you're asking that question, the Holy Spirit will illuminate things.

And it might be something completely different, or in addition to the thing I might be talking about, or another teacher.

They may be bringing one form of application, but one of the cool things about God's word is in different seasons and in different people, God may speak something unique to you if you have your antennas up.

So revelation.

The second one is response.

In other words, what I learn about God gives me a clearer view of God, but then it gives me a clearer view of me and my situation.

And so now I'm thinking application.

Again, in each of these messages, I try to do that week after week to say, okay, what do we do with this?

Maybe it's an opening question we need to wrestle with, or maybe there's some self-evident, obvious application.

But whether the speakers do it or not, or the teachers do it, you should be doing it.

Lord, what what do I need to change?

What is my response now to this revelation that I've been given from God?

And this is how you go from just a message being academic, and I just got a little bit more information now, I know some stuff, or just a rah-rah speech that pumps you up, gets you excited, and then dissipates when the emotions die.

It takes it from that to transformation.

So revelation, response, is how now this word takes root in my life and then now turns into behavior and action.

And so I want you to keep that in the back of your mind today and moving forward, okay?

And that's we're gonna use that as we look into uh the scripture today.

You know, I just read out of Exodus, and Exodus falls under a larger heading of the first five books of the Bible that are essentially bundled together and known as the Torah.

All right, so we have Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

Um sometimes you'll hear the Torah referred to as the law.

So there are times in the Gospels when Jesus is talking about the law and the prophets, the law and the prophets.

The law he's referring to the Torah.

The word Torah doesn't literally mean law, it actually literally means to instruct or to teach.

Okay, so when we think law, one of the challenges we have is we think law, like if you have a law book, you would think about statutes with bullet points that are precisely spelling out a rule of some kind.

Of course, in the Torah, you do have rules or you have uh commands.

So 613 uh to be exact.

But when you look at the Torah, you find actually that the first 69 chapters of the law is narrative.

So the Ten Commandments, right?

The first technical Ten Commandments don't come until Exodus 20.

So you have a bunch of stories, which again doesn't mean it's less pragmatic or practical.

It just means that it's a different way of learning and teaching.

So you have to kind of look at these stories, and that's where it can be really powerful because you take the narratives, you take the stories, you maybe sit in community and you start to compare notes and what you're seeing and hearing and what you're learning and thinking about it from this angle, and then you think about it from that angle, and we're sharpening iron sharpening iron together.

But when you think about again the Torah and the instruction, today I want us to look at a really powerful principle that we have here in Exodus chapter five that will instruct us, and I believe God wants to reveal some things that we need to respond to.

So we go back to Exodus chapter 5, verses 1 and 2.

Exodus 5:1

Um, we're gonna use our framework we use here quite a bit of the Bible as literature and history before we jump into the theology.

So those two things help us inform good interpretation and theological conclusions.

Um, okay, so let's let's jump in.

We go back, Moses and Aaron go to Pharaoh and say, this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says.

Okay, so when you read it in English, whatever your English translation, pretty much all of them say Lord.

So Moses is saying, the Lord told me, right?

If you go into Hebrew, in the Hebrew, you're gonna see that the word there is the word Yahweh, and Yahweh is like the personal name of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

So there are other words that show up as God in the Bible, like Elohim or Adonai.

And like Elohim, for example, it would be a generic word for God, of talking essentially about, you know, the powerful being of the universe.

In fact, there are places in uh the Bible that refer to Elohim when it's talking about false gods, but it's the term they would use for God.

And so, but you see, Yahweh is speaking specifically of the God revealed through the Torah, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

And you're gonna see here that they say, hey, Yahweh said to let his people go, and Pharaoh says, Who is Yahweh?

Who is Yahweh?

Now that question is designed to really be like an anchor for the entire Torah, right?

The book of instruction.

And it's really instructing us or teaching us that answer, all really wrapped around that question of who is God?

Who is this Yahweh?

Um, okay, the other thing you see in here is the word know.

So he says, I do not know the Lord, uh, and so I will not let Israel go.

Now, this word is the Hebrew word Yada, okay, the Hebrew word yada.

This is really important, okay, that we understand this word to really understand and to get the instruction we're supposed to get out of the book of Exodus.

So the word yada has a range of meaning, but it translates often into the word no, but it's much more than just an academic understanding of content.

So it's more than saying, like, hey, I can answer that question correctly or fill in the blank.

Um, what it really is, is is a relation relational.

So yada is used all the way back in the beginning of the Bible in Genesis, um, in actually when Adam and Eve made a baby, okay, it says that Adam Yadad his wife, okay?

Adam knew his wife.

So if you're reading it in the King James, it'll say Adam knew his wife, okay?

And so it's referring not just he was aware of his wife, it's referring in that sense to sexual intimacy.

But it's not always, Yada isn't always used that way, but you get the idea.

It's beyond just an awareness into an empathy, into a deep understanding or relationship.

And so um, where it shows up here when you have uh Pharaoh saying, I don't know Yahweh.

He says, I don't Yada Yahweh, I don't know him.

Where it's the way it's used here is in a geopolitical treaty terms.

So in other words, think you have two nations, and and one nation saying, I know that king, or I know that nation is to recognize their authority, to recognize their authority.

Now, please understand this.

In the ancient mind, um, their framework for deity or gods was the nation that was the biggest, that was the strongest, that had the most military might, uh, the best economy, whoever was at the top of the food chain, they were the ones who had the best gods.

So if you if you and I go to into battle and you defeat me, my only conclusion, there's only two conclusions I can come to.

One is your gods are better than my gods, your gods overpowered my gods.

Or the second is my god's powerful, but he's mad at me.

He's angry with me and he's punishing me, he's disciplining me for something I did that made him unhappy, and that's why he allowed you to beat me up.

Okay, so when you have Pharaoh here, and we'll just take a quick second to go a little bit more into the Egyptian theology, okay, their theology and cosmology, cosmology being the creation of the world, they believed the world was in chaos, and the gods, again, they're polytheistic, they have a pantheon of gods, the gods came together and brought order to the chaos.

And when they brought order to the chaos, they handed, they handed um authority over to the king Pharaoh.

So Pharaoh, in their mind, in his own mind, is a demigod.

In other words, he is in life, he is the physical manifestation of the god Horus, and when he dies, he will then become a physical manifestation of the god Osiris.

So he's a god, and their gods are the best because they're the biggest empire in the world.

So now, with all that context, okay, Moses and Aaron come in and say, Hey, the slave god, Yahweh, you know all those people that have been in slavery for 450 years, okay?

Their God, Yahweh, said, Let his people go.

And Pharaoh, predictably, is like, what?

Or who do you think you're talking to?

There is no theological framework that says I need to acknowledge that.

This is a slave God.

I am Pharaoh, okay?

I am at the absolute top of this globe, and I answer only to the gods.

Pharaoh's job was to maintain what was called mot.

Okay, in the in the um uh uh Egyptian lexicon, the word mot essentially means order and justice.

So if he's pleasing the gods and maintaining order in the world, then all is good.

He's doing his job.

So in his mind, this is one you blow off.

Like, how would you even say this?

So when he says, I don't know Yahweh, he's not necessarily saying I've never heard of Yahweh, he's saying I do not recognize the authority of Yahweh.

Now, this word uh Yada is really significant, and be the range of meaning really is like a thread that runs through uh not only the book of Exodus, but really the rest of the Torah.

So let's I'm just gonna kind of take you real quick and show you so that this really we get what we're supposed to get out of it.

It instructs us properly.

And if you go back to the beginning of Exodus, Exodus chapter 1, verse 8 and 9, it says, Then a new king or a new Pharaoh to whom Joseph meant nothing came to power in Egypt.

Exodus 1:8

Now, my translation says uh who Joseph meant nothing, but some of your translations would say, Who uh a Pharaoh who knew not Joseph.

And this is the word Yada.

So it's talking not just about the individual Joseph, but it's it's giving the reality that not only did, again, you think Old Testament Joseph in the book of Genesis, who was in a good relationship with Pharaoh, he had gone from a slave to the prime minister of Egypt, and it says, now some generations passed, okay, and so now Joseph is known, but he's in the past.

But this new Pharaoh says, I don't care about Joseph.

I don't feel any loyalty to Joseph, I'm not intimately connected to Joseph or his people, okay?

And so it uses the term here, Yada.

So you have uh Pharaoh who says, I uh didn't know Joseph, and look what he says here, verse 9.

That lack of connection led to a lack of empathy and actually fear taking over.

It says, look, he said to his to his people, the Israelites have become far too numerous for us.

They're getting big, they're getting powerful, they're multiplying quickly.

And so he starts to see their power and their numbers, it scares him.

Their power scares him.

It says in verse 10, come, we must deal shrewdly, wisely with them, or they will become even more numerous.

And if war breaks out, they'll join our enemies and they'll fight against us and leave the country.

Now, look at this.

He's worried about a couple things.

One, he's worried that this group of people that have been under his thumb are going to grow too big, become too powerful, and become a threat to him.

But the thing he says at the end is not only that they would fight against us in battle, but he goes, What I'm really worried about is that they'll leave.

Why would he be so concerned about them leaving?

Well, he's worried about them leaving because they are his workforce.

They are the ones that are building the distribution centers and the supply centers and Pitham and Ramsey and taking all of his selfish ambition and turning it into brick and mortar.

They're brickmakers.

And so his fear is that they will leave, and now Mott will be disrupted.

And what will that do to his relation relationship to the gods and how he's doing?

And so his his ambition, his personal ambition, has caused them, has caused him to be scared of their potential and want to keep them right where they are.

And so he dehumanizes them, essentially sees them as productivity robots.

And it's pretty diabolical because he realizes, man, I see what they could be.

And if they become their potential, it could be at my expense.

And so in doing that, he tries to subdue them.

Okay, so a big part of this question, who is Yahweh, is going to be taught to us, instructed in the Torah, in a contrast between Yahweh, how he thinks and how he behaves, and Pharaoh and how he thinks and how he behaves.

So what we have of Pharaoh is Pharaoh sees people simply for their use to him and their productivity, not their full potential.

So that's Exodus 1.

Exodus 2 is it says the Israelites groaned in their slavery and they cried out, and their cry for help, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God.

Okay, and again, here it uses the term Elohim.

So this is them in their pain calling up into the heavens.

To be clear, the children of Israel did not yet know Yahweh.

This is one of those generic calls into the heavens.

I am in bondage, I am suffering, I feel hopeless, I feel like a robot.

I'm just doing the same thing over and over again.

I don't know how to get out of this.

And they groaned because words weren't enough.

They cried into the if you're up there, if you're real, if you're up there, please help me.

And so they're crying to a generic God, but it says that Yahweh hears them.

It says, and then uh God heard their groaning, he remembered his covenant with Abraham and with Isaac and Jacob, and God looked on the Israelites and was Yada about them.

So it so again in English it translated as concerned.

Um I believe it's in the ESV, it says, and God knew.

But what it's doing is painting a picture of this group of people who are crying out, and instead of them just being seen as production drones and robots to just do my bidding, he looks down and he's the God who hears the cry.

He's the God who remembers the covenant, he's the God who looks and sees, and then knows Yada and empathizes and understands and enters with you.

So it's sort of the first layer of this question, and we're sort of answering it retroactively when Pharaoh asks, who is Yahweh?

Well, Exodus 1 and 2 contrast a king or a leader or a demigod who only cares about himself and his own agenda and his own reputation and his own exploits and his own legacy, and would reduce people to a spreadsheet.

Would reduce people beyond their soul and caring anything for their soul of simply what they can do for him.

And then you have Yahweh, who is the God who hears the cry of the lowest person in the whole society, the God of that one.

And he hears their cry.

Before we go any further, let's just take a moment for revelation.

How do you see God?

How do you see God?

Do you live in this perpetual state that I can't quite live up to his expectations?

That God is simply disappointed with you because you weren't productive enough.

Maybe if I do more of this, maybe if I can accomplish that, and maybe if I can get this done, and I can get better at this, and I can improve over here, then God will be happy with me.

Or do you understand that God is the God who feels your groan when you don't have words?

We've all been in the place where you cry a tear or you cry something outwardly into the heavens, going, is anybody listening?

And Yahweh is revealed in Exodus.

Who is Yahweh?

He is the God who hears your cry.

And so now Yahweh hears the cry and says, I've heard your cry, and I want to bring you out.

And he goes to Moses and he says, Moses, um, I want you to go and I want you to lead them out.

And of course, this is the burning bush story where Moses sees this phenomenon of this burning bush and it's not being consumed.

And God starts speaking to him.

Moses, you know, here's what I want you to do.

And Moses is like, Okay, how's this gonna work?

Because I'm gonna go to this whole group of people and say, hey guys, follow me.

Because God said, you know, Elohim said, like, who?

Who who should I say in the name of who?

And he says, Well, tell him, I am sent you.

The one who was and is and is to come, the one in whom all this holds together, the one who is, the one who exists, the one who is supreme.

Say, the I am sent you.

And in chapter three, it goes from the I am, and to God says to uh Moses, he says, When you go to Pharaoh, tell him Yahweh.

It says it's pretty cool in chapter six in Exodus.

God says, I've always been here and I've always been dealing with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but nobody knows my name till now.

So I'm giving you my name Yahweh.

I've I held my name till this moment, and I'm giving you the name Yahweh, and that's what you go tell him that Yahweh sent you.

Which is again, it's part of uh go down the ground.

It's it's it's a third person of I am.

It's essentially it's a way of saying that this is the God who was and is and is to come.

So he goes to Pharaoh, and this is this is where now he goes.

And notice what he asks him.

He says, God, Yahweh wants you to let his people go.

Yeah, I know in your framework the slave God can be completely disregarded, but you need to understand this is the I am.

And he's the God of the slave.

I know you have no framework for that, but this is the truth.

And he says, He wants you to let his people go.

Did you?

See the request?

Into the wilderness to have a festival of worship.

We're not even saying go forever.

Just can we go to the festival, have a festival in the wilderness?

Give him a break.

Okay?

Now, this is Pharaoh's worst nightmare.

For two reasons.

One, this is his workforce, so we're gonna give these guys time off.

Now my spreadsheets just fell behind.

So because all he cares about is productivity, okay, we're gonna lose productivity.

That's bad.

But that's not the worst part.

The worst part is if you take my workforce, who I have adequately demoralized to the place that they don't even know who they are anymore, and they're so scared to do anything about it, they just keep showing up and working and just making another brick because I tell them to, because they've lost their souls.

They have no soul left.

Okay, so it's either what am I what am I gonna fight it?

I can't fight it.

I guess I just I've just resigned my life to just doing this guy's bidding.

And so you you're telling me you want me to let all of them go to the wilderness and find God?

Go to the wilderness and worship God, have a revelation of a God who loves them?

A revelation of God so that they see God clearly and then they understand their own value?

Like we said last week, that their souls would be souling, that they would reself, that they would rest and get their bearings, and actually see something beyond the quota that I've given them?

How is that gonna go?

They go out there and find themselves and then they look around and go, there's a lot of us?

They're just gonna come back and go right back to being a robot.

No, this might be like a moment of liberation.

And so Pharaoh not only says no, but look look look what happens in uh chapter 5, verses uh six.

It says, that same day Pharaoh gave this order to the slave drivers and the overseers in charge of the people.

You no longer supply the people with straw for making bricks.

Okay, before this, the state would give them straw, then they would make bricks.

But it says, no, uh, don't even give them straw anymore.

Let them go and gather their own straw.

But require them to make the same number of bricks as before.

Don't reduce the quota.

They are lazy.

That's why they're crying out, let us go to sacrifice to our God.

Yeah, okay.

We're cloaking worship.

They're actually just lazy.

He says, make the work harder for the people so that they keep working and pay no attention to the lies.

I've turned them into robots.

I want them to find their souls.

And so Pharaoh's answer is to make the work harder.

Again, the answer to who is Yahweh is much of that is taught in the contrast between Pharaoh and Yahweh.

Chapter 5, verse 9, make the work harder for the people.

Chapter 6, verse 6, here's how Yahweh responds I am Yahweh, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians.

So you have Pharaoh who doesn't care about your soul, that's heaping weight on you, has you right where he wants you, and you have Yahweh, who is the lover of your soul, who wants to restore your soul by removing the heavy yoke that's upon you.

I want to deliver you from this.

Of course, we know Pharaoh's not going down without a fight.

And this is where now, if you're familiar with the Exodus story, the story of the plagues come in.

Okay.

Now, this is really good stuff because if you're not careful, if you just read that, it seems like God is just, you know, sort of randomly just throwing these punishments out until Pharaoh taps out.

But this the word Yada is really important.

Okay, so if you're a little bored in your Bible study, I'll give you something fun to work on this week.

If you go and look up Yada to know, okay, you're gonna see it in chapter 5, Exodus 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.

And the whole time, this is now where the plagues are starting to enter, and God says, I'm gonna give these plagues because I want my people to know who I am.

I want you to experience me.

I want to know you.

I know you, I want you to know me.

And then he says, I even want the Egyptians to know me.

He says, I want Pharaoh to know me.

I'm gonna do all of this as revelation, and then you can choose whoever will respond to that revelation in whatever way you're willing and your free will to do.

So the plagues are actually a systematic dismantling of Mot.

Right?

So what it's doing is taking uh their cosmology and reversing it.

So they thought the world was chaos and then it came to order.

Pharaoh is powerful to keep it in order.

Well, what happens is all that order and power Pharaoh thought he had as a demigod, Yahweh unravels it in front of him.

So what does he do?

He takes the Nile, which is their source of life.

The Nile's flood predictably every year, saturate the crops, things grow, and so the Nile is where life is, and Yahweh turns the Nile into blood, into death.

He takes their ecosystem, the frogs and locusts that have a place in the ecosystem, and the ecosystem becomes chaos, and the frogs are everywhere, they're swarming, locusts everywhere.

He takes the sun, which their myth was that the sun god would make the sun go up and down.

There was this whole myth around that, and God takes the sun and it doesn't come back for days.

And so what is he doing?

He's taking their their belief, their their cosmology, and their theology.

And now Pharaoh is realizing he's not as powerful as he thought he was.

He tries to get all of his magicians and every all the religious people to do stuff, and this is so good.

Everything they do to try to reverse what Yahweh's doing only makes their situation worse.

That's a whole word right there.

When God's up to something and you try to fight it with something, it's gonna get worse.

And so the whole thing gets worse, and now you've got this powerful cautionary tale because you have Pharaoh who is hard in the way he treats others, and Yahweh mercifully is revealing himself, revelation, and his response instead of stepping back and going, maybe my framework was wrong, maybe my theology was wrong, maybe the way I viewed myself or other people is wrong.

What you see is that the hardness that he put on others starts to come back into his own heart.

And his heart becomes harder and harder and harder.

And in the hardness of his heart, he goes down and he takes some good people with him.

And he goes down.

And so God delivers them.

Now I'm not quite done, but I want to pause here for a second.

Revelation.

Response.

What do we get from this?

What do we learn about who is Yahweh?

I think two things, I mean, there's more than just this, but there's two things that came to mind right away from me.

The first one is for me and you to be reminded that Yahweh is the God who hears a cry, who remembers his covenant, who looks and sees, and who knows.

Yada.

He feels what you feel, he understands.

Beyond just a knowledge or an awareness, into a concern, into a connection.

I gotta think there's gotta be some today.

That it's been one of those seasons that maybe the hardest one of your life to keep your poise in public.

And yet when you're by yourself, you don't know what to say.

Sometimes it's just silent, inner suffering, groaning, tears.

Sometimes it's spew and psycho babble into the air.

If you're up there, do you hear me?

Friend, be reminded today.

Yahweh knows.

He knows.

He cares.

Sometimes we think we almost have this uh what C.S.

Lewis called chronological snobbery.

We can almost look back to these ancient stories and think, oh, that was so long.

Gosh, I wonder how many of us still have like theology that rhymes with like the ancient Near East, that we kind of look at everybody who's at the top and who's powerful.

And we we look and think that the you know the gods are God are favoring them, and here I am, and I've been forgotten about Yada.

He knows you, he hears you, he sees you.

You know, it's interesting because you think of just how subversive this was theologically, that the God of the slave would actually be the greatest God, and that would ultimately lead them out.

And yet, you think about it, right?

You look at Israel, I'm sure in some ways we can all relate to Israel where you're groaning or you're suffering or you're struggling, and then we can all relate in some ways probably to Pharaoh in areas where we maybe have dug our heels in.

Um by the way, when the Holy Spirit in moments like this reveals something to you, have the wisdom, no matter how many people you've tuned out.

Don't be so hard of heart that even God can't get a message in sideways to you.

And that takes a great deal of trust and a great deal of humility.

But there are moments I've been there where you're sitting there and this person talked to me about it and I didn't buy it, and that person talked to me about it, and I felt like I was being attacked, and that person talked to me about it, and I said you weren't perfect either.

And then the Holy Spirit's speaking to me about it, and I have to decide: am I gonna go Pharaoh or am I gonna repent?

Am I gonna respond to the revelation?

And so there may be something God's been trying to speak to you, and it's come in a lot of ways, and you've figured out how to talk yourself out of being receptive, but maybe God's speaking something to you from himself today.

Will you respond to it?

But the thing about Pharaoh is even though to the naked eye, you know, he's up here, you know, as the king, and he's deceived himself and thinking he's a demigod, his ego's gotten the best of him.

Some of us have had that issue too.

At the same time, he's still a human.

And think about the fact that God gave even Pharaoh, with all of his brutality and terrible decision, one opportunity after another to turn.

And friend, I just want to encourage you, kind of tied to what we said last week, God bless you.

You're divine breath, but you're also fragile humanity.

Don't get so pharaoh that you think you're somehow bigger and better.

Allow the Lord to speak to you in your brokenness.

And anywhere you have pharaoh-like authority, in your own home, on your job site, like we would be irresponsible to not take a moment, take a beat, to say, Lord, is there anywhere that I started to get a Pharaoh mentality instead of a Yahweh mentality?

Is there anywhere I've started to see people as pawns in my great scheme?

Is there anywhere that I started to see people on the spreadsheet and that's it?

That I've stopped listening to people's cries, I've just called them lazy.

I I've stopped seeing them in their humanity.

I only see how they fit in with what I'm trying to do and what's gonna boost me up and what's gonna do for me.

Lord, give me the eyes of Yahweh.

So, in a sense, like Pharaoh, we all have our own struggles, and God hears that.

And at the same time, we respond not only to the God who hears our cry, but to become like him.

It's the last service, so I'm just gonna say everything I want to say, okay?

Thank you.

I know, whatever.

I know.

Some of you are clapping, some of you are like, dang, I should have got up early.

I'm not gonna go that much longer, but I want to get this all out.

Um, thousand years later, right, Jesus shows up.

So you have the rest of the Torah answers the question, who is Yahweh?

by showing Yahweh's character and Yahweh's value system.

The ultimate fulfillment, though, of who is Yahweh comes through Jesus.

So you remember in John 14, Jesus is with one of his disciples, and he's talking about the Father, the Father, in my father's house, there are many rooms in my father.

And his disciple Philip goes, Show us the father, and we'll be satisfied.

It's kind of a version of who is Yahweh?

Show us the Father, that's what we're all curious about.

What's God like?

Show us the Father.

And Jesus says, Philip, have you been with me all this time?

You don't know.

If you've seen me, you've seen the Father.

So the ultimate expression: who is Yahweh?

Yahweh's the one who hears the cry.

Who is Yahweh?

Yahweh is the one who cares and loves.

Who's Yahweh?

He's the one who descends and comes down.

God among us, God with us, tabernacles among us.

He's the one who leads his people out of bondage.

He's the God of salvation.

And so, with Jesus, if you want to know what God is like, you look at Jesus.

And this is why so much of Jesus' language is like coded in Exodus language, come to me, says, All you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I'll give you rest.

I hear your cry.

Take my yoke upon you.

Learn from me.

So you'll find rest for your soul.

For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

And so it's through Jesus that we have the ultimate expression of who is Yahweh.

That last thing.

When God, Yahweh leads the nation out of the hand of a terrible, cruel Pharaoh.

He brings them out of bondage, but notice, he doesn't take them out of bondage and release them into full autonomy.

So it's not like this out of Pharaoh's hand into the wilderness, do it your way.

When he goes to Pharaoh, he says, Let my people go.

So when Yahweh frees them from a cruel king, he's not freeing them from a cruel king into just do whatever you feel like or do whatever you want to do.

What he's doing is leading them in paths of righteousness, right paths.

He's saying, come away from a cruel king to a good king, to a king who hears your cry, who loves you, who is not intimidated by your potential, wants you to flourish to your potential, but come and follow me.

He's inviting you to be known by him and to know him and to follow him.

And this is why, again, when we come into new covenant language with Jesus, that's why we say we accept and receive Jesus as savior and as Lord.

A lot of times people want to talk about Jesus as Savior.

He saved me from my sin.

He saved me from myself.

He saved me from my past.

He saved me from, he saved me, saved me.

He got me out of the bondage, but now he's my Lord.

I will follow him.

I have decided to follow Jesus.

No turning back.

So now I receive him as both Savior and Lord.

Today I want to give you an opportunity to just sort of sit with this word for a moment, to allow God to speak to you, and then we'll uh we'll take a moment and pray together.