How Does God Introduce Himself to Us for The First Time?

Hello.

Morning, everyone.

Greetings.

Welcome to Christ Community Church.

I'm glad you're here today.

Bless you.

If you're a teenager or in elementary school, obviously everybody knows to be dismissed because y'all are leaving.

Let me see.

Okay.

Wednesday night, this Wednesday night, Alan and myself are going to go down to Calvary Rescue Mission at Crumpin Third.

We're going to make supper like we do.

We do this once a quarter.

We're going to make supper for about 50 or 60 homeless guys.

Alan's already asked me what we're going to make, and I don't know yet, but uh we'll make something.

Yummy.

If you want to come and help us, uh come around four or five, and um I'll already be there cooking.

And um, you can come and help us fix it and put it out and serve it and clean up.

And so if you'd like to do that and just be a blessing to some men that need to be reminded that God loves them.

That's just the bottom line.

Uh they need to be reminded that God loves them.

And so if you'd like to come and help us this Wednesday night, please do.

Uh Thursday night, we gather, our church gathers at Cherly and I's home.

It's actually your home because it's in your name.

Yes.

But we gather at Sherry's home.

And uh uh we have a little Bible study at 6 o'clock on our back porch, and uh, and then we pray, uh pray for you, is who we pray for.

Uh uh, and so uh if you'd like to come, last Thursday night was extra special.

Dang, it was just if you were there, it was a good time.

Um we had a great discussion and um uh a great time of prayer.

We start at six, we end at seven, and I shoo ye out because I want to go to bed.

So um you were not, we don't stay late.

And uh, but you're welcome to come Thursday night at six if you'd like to be a part of that.

And then tonight um at Kim and Jerry's house, we're gonna have our is it our last, Tommy, our last?

Oh, okay, not our last, second to last uh gathering.

Uh we do this once a month at Kim and Jerry's house, and uh we just gather and do some small group discussions about different topics.

And this week or this month, it's a little different in that uh Colin is gonna lead the discussion tonight at Kim and Jerry's, and it starts at five, right?

Which is even better than six.

Um, but uh it'll start at five, and we'll have pizza and stand around and talk.

And then we'll have a discussion, and Colin's gonna lead it on and relate or help us understand how art is used in the Bible uh in a very significant way.

So he's gonna help us sort of sort of open our eyes to what the Bible teaches us about art.

And so if you'd like to come and be a part of that and get to know some folks, uh, you sure are invited.

Anything I've forgotten?

I can't think of a thing.

Okay.

Um you pray for us.

Lord Jesus.

Would you have your way in our lives this morning?

We're here for different reasons.

We come with different needs, different battles, different problems, different longings, but we come to the one that we believe is a fountain of life.

And we come to one who not only possesses an abundance of life, but one that we believe delights in sharing that abundance with those that are in need.

And that's us.

Would you please let us drink deeply today from that fountain?

Let us eat at your banquet table.

Let us let us be carried in the arms of our shepherd.

Please.

Please help us.

Have mercy on us today, we ask in Christ's name.

Amen.

Um we're gonna begin a new series today, and it'll, Lord, my plan is to get us through May.

I'm not promising that.

I promise we'll get through May, but we might not be finished with the study, then we'll see how fast y'all listen.

But um I was thinking when we were preparing this study, I've been working on this for about two months.

I was thinking about that passage in John, the Gospel of John, where Jesus spends all day teaching the multitudes, and at the end of the his time, the multitudes say, dead gum, this Larry paraphrase, but it's close.

They go, dead gummit.

That's that's tough.

The words you're sharing with us uh today, they're hard words.

They're not light and fluffy, and we are the world, and you're good, and I'm good, and we're all good, and let's just all stay good.

They were some tough words that Jesus shared with the multitudes, so tough that the reaction to the majority of the multitudes is that they left.

They said, This is not what we were wanting to hear, so we're we're going home.

And they did.

And Jesus turned to the disciples, his twelve, and he said, Are y'all gonna leave too?

And Peter, he could he could say the wrong thing often, but he could also say the right thing.

He looked at Jesus and just I can just see the sincerity and the childlike uh innocence and faith in his words.

He looked at Jesus and said, Jesus, where would we go?

You possess the words of life.

Not necessarily easy words, but they're words of life.

And they stayed.

And so today I want us to begin a study, and we're gonna camp out.

I'm still too far away, dang it.

Uh, in Exodus 34, verses 6 and 7.

Exodus 34:6

That's what we're gonna, we're gonna break these two verses down and look at them for a month or so.

Um let me just start off by saying that the longer I've read my Bible every day for 45 years, it's a big deal to me.

Kim's mama and Kathy's mama came up to me last night, Marky, and she said, Because you were nagging me, I started reading my Bible every day for two years ago, and I'm still reading it.

I'm still reading it every day after two years.

And I said, Good.

God bless me in my nagging.

And um anyway, I was very pleased with that.

Well, I've been, I don't just tell other people to do that, I do that too.

And after 45 years of reading my Bible every day, I'm more convinced than I've ever been that the Word of God is a trustworthy source of life, of truth, of wisdom.

And if I want to experience truth, not the truth of the news media, and not the truth of my culture, and not your truth, and not even my truth, but that which is true regardless of how things change, it's true.

If I want that, if I want to know what's true, if I want wisdom and I do, I long, I am I came out of the womb just eat up with foolishness, but I want to be wise.

I I uh experience death every day.

A lot of it is self-inflicted, some of it's not, but I I want life.

I want life, I want truth, I want wisdom, and after 45 years of studying the Bible every day, I'm more convinced than ever that the Bible is a trustworthy source of those things.

I have said to y'all a number of times over the years that it's very important that we remember the primary reason that the Bible was written to us.

If you don't get this, if you don't remember this, you will mess up.

The primary reason that the Bible was written to us was to reveal God to us.

His character, his priorities, his ways, his plans.

And it's important that we remember that the Bible is not primarily a how-to book, how to have a happy marriage, how to be good parents, how to be well off financially, how to experience healing in my emotions, how to become a moral person to get a glimpse at how everything's gonna end.

The Bible is a wonderful source for every one of those things.

It will help me understand, it will help you understand how to experience healing in our emotions, how to become healthy, how to be more wise with our money, how to have a better marriage, and to be better parents and to be a moral, a better or more moral person.

And it does give us some glimpse into how this whole thing's gonna end up.

I'm not denying that.

The Bible sheds very valuable light on those issues, but that is not its primary purpose.

The Bible's primary purpose from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22 is to reveal to us who God is.

And it is my deepest, this is not a this is not just some kind of a hyperbole or some kind of a thing just to say to impact you emotionally.

This my wife would tell you, it is the it is the truth of my life.

I have no greater desire in my life than for you, the people of this church, to know and trust and love the Bible of Yahweh.

And in the process, to know and love and trust the Yahweh of the Bible.

They are connected in a way that cannot be separated.

If you want to know the Yahweh of the Bible, the Yahweh of the universe, the one that created you and is in control of everything that happens, you get to know his book, the book of Yahweh, and you'll get to know the Yahweh of the book.

And you'll get to know him, you'll get to love him, and you'll begin to trust him.

And I'll say one more thing, and then we've got to get going.

I said this to my, I meet with a group of y'all guys on Wednesday mornings, and I could tell there was a little recoil the other day when I said it, but I mean it.

The eternal life that Jesus offers us, anybody can understand that, and anybody can grasp, can embrace that.

I don't care who you are.

Smartest person in the room, dumbest person in the room, oldest person in the room, youngest person in the room.

Anyone can understand and embrace the eternal life that the Bible offers to us if we want it.

But hear me well.

You and I will not understand or embrace the word of God without hard intentional work.

Eternal life's free.

Anybody in this room can take it, can receive it today by faith as a gift.

But I don't want, I just don't want eternal life.

I want to understand the one that's giving me eternal life.

Well, buddy, you are up for the challenge of the ages.

To understand and embrace the truths of God's word, it is not, the Bible was not written to the lazy or to the faint of heart.

It takes great, intentional, steadfast hard work to understand the truths of God's Word.

Anything you want to add to that, friend?

No, not yet.

Okay.

All right.

Well, you're about to jump in here with both feet.

I'm coming.

Um we're gonna take the next few weeks and we're gonna look at a passage of scripture.

It's actually the passage of scripture where God chooses for the very first time to clearly introduce Himself to us.

And what's unique about this passage is I got into it.

This was not my original purpose or plan, but as I started studying these qualities or attributes that God chooses to use to introduce himself, they're not all of his qualities or attributes.

That's limitless, that's endless.

But these were the ones he chose to introduce first.

Um what I discovered is that it's a wonderful, you study Exodus 34, 6 and 7.

You learn how to study these two verses.

And what you'll wind up learning is how to study and understand the rest of the Bible.

It's an incredible template on how the whole Bible works, how to study and understand the whole Bible.

And so my goal is for us not just to grasp Exodus 34, 6 and 7, but to use it as a template to understand how to study the rest of the Bible.

So, would you like to read Exodus 34, 6 and 7, please?

Thank you for him.

So the Lord passed in front of Moses, calling out, Yahweh, the Lord, or Yahweh Yahweh, the God of compassion and mercy.

I am slow to anger and filled with unfailing love and faithfulness.

I lavish unfailing love to a thousand generations.

I forgive iniquity, rebellion, and sin.

But I do not excuse the guilty.

I lay the sins of the parents upon their children and grandchildren.

The entire family is affected, even children in the third and fourth generations.

Okay, thank you.

Yep.

Anything s what what what you're a literary uh genius?

Genius.

And uh we are, and um, you're a scholar, a literary scholar.

I read a lot of books.

And write books and teach books.

Um what what are those two?

Number one, just so you know, we I'm gonna I keep saying two verses because it's verses six and seven.

You know, when Moses wrote this down, there were no verses.

There are no verses in the original manuscripts, there's no chapters, very few book titles.

We've we've put titles on these books just to keep them, you know, how do you study it without some kind of a breakdown?

But there were no verses, so this was one continuous thought, verses six and seven, when it was originally written.

But what what stands out to you in those two verses, first of all?

Okay, so two things.

One, I I appreciate as far as the words on the page, I appreciate the balance of the verses.

You know, there's a a nice little kind of list of things that he is, um, and we'll be talking about that.

And then there's a shift that says, and yet with all of this, but I do not excuse the guilty.

So I like the balance of almost the same number of words.

Uh but more.

But more, um, there's in that balance, there's a tension, right?

And there's always a pivot point in a balance.

If something's perfectly balanced, there's a there's a spot, an apex, I suppose, where the thing is balanced.

And then there's tension on either side.

So you give a little more weight to this, it's gonna go that way.

If you give a little more weight to that, it's gonna go that way.

And this tension between this, these words of compassion and mercy and slow to anger, unfailing love, he says that twice, uh, to a thousand generate, forgive.

And then also this tension between, but I do not excuse the guilty, which if we pay attention to that, that's exactly how I I don't know you well enough to say it, but I would say, I bet that's what we want, right?

We do not want the guilty to be forgiven, to be excused.

Forgiven is different, to be excused.

So I relate to that.

Uh, I don't want the guilty to be excused either.

Um but I then must see myself as a fallible human being.

And so there's a tension there between all this lavish of love and grace and forgiveness.

I forgive and all of it, right?

Iniquity, rebellion, and sin.

All of it.

Well, we'll look at those three words.

But I do not excuse the guilty, which is again, I say, exactly what we want.

He forgives, but he doesn't excuse.

That's what you okay.

So there's a there's a attention there, yeah.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

See why I married her.

Um and you know that tension.

We talk about this on the back porch just so you know.

But you, those are your ideas.

I didn't give those ideas to you.

Um I love that.

Um and that tension is what I when I said earlier that this is an incredible template to use for studying the bigger Bible, um, we've got to own that tension.

In fact, not only do we need to own it and accept it, we need to look for it.

Because one of the things that the Bible writers, all of the writers, and they do it, not only do all of them do it, they do it all the time.

It's a part of the structure of the Bible.

Therefore, we should look for it, is that tension between two important truths?

Um, some people could call them contradictions.

The Bible never suggests that.

In fact, the Bible writers seem to just be okay.

It's just you are a great mom, but you're also a great writer.

Well, how can you be both?

You just are.

You just are.

We are multifaceted people.

God is a multifaceted.

Multifaceted, in fact, he's an eternally faceted person.

God, the Bible says, is sovereign, but he also sovereignly gives us free will.

How can that work?

God, the Bible declares, cannot sin.

But the Bible continually gives us examples of where God uses our sin.

You say, well, how do no, God doesn't use sin.

Do you read, remember Easter and all those bad people sinned by killing the Son of God?

Did God use that terrible, terrible act of sin to bring you and me salvation?

Yeah.

So God cannot sin, but He doesn't hesitate to use the sins that people commit.

The Bible declares repeatedly that God is transcendent.

That's just a$25 word for apart.

He is apart from us.

When you look at the universe, when you look at creation, is that God?

No.

That is not God.

That is the creation of God.

God is apart from his creation.

But the same Bible declares that God is with us.

Emmanuel.

He's so close to us that he's in us.

And he's in our the breathing.

In fact, I think y'all sang today, guys, something about the breathing of in and out or something like that.

I think I remember you some of the words.

He's so close that there it you can't distinguish God's intimacy with God's transcendence, and yet both are true.

The Bible declares that God continually is seeking us.

Just like the lady who lost the coin, she was seeking for that coin.

Just like the shepherd is seeking for lost sheep.

But in the very same chapter, it tells us about a dad who is waiting for his son.

He's not seeking, he's waiting.

So this tension between a seeking God and a God that is desperately, heartbrokenly, passionately waiting on us to turn to Him.

And the list goes on and on.

The very fact the Bible says that salvation is a gift, and yet we're told to work out our salvation.

Faith is a gift, and yet we should renew and strengthen and deepen our faith.

Hope, I could go on and on.

What did I say?

Oh, joy.

Joy is a great one.

I read that this morning.

That joy is a gift of God, and yet Paul says, I am working with you to deepen your joy.

How can these things all be true?

I don't know all that.

What I know is there is an intentional tension between certain truths and other truths, and we don't need to be, we need to come to God for eternal life like little children.

But we don't need to remain children.

Only children say, nope, I can only have one thing that's true.

Sorry, that's not the God the Bible suggests.

We've got to be okay with this tension.

In fact, we need to look for the tension and discover what that reveal about God and his plans for our lives.

Many such tensions fill the Bible, and the Bible writers seem unbothered by these tensions.

In fact, they just accept them as being true in its revelation of who God is.

This book invites us to discover who God is.

It does not invite us to find validation for the God that we want, the God that we wished was.

The God that we're in fact, the God that the Bible offers to us is the most uncomfortable, frustrating, irritating, uncooperative person that has ever existed.

And if we're not comfortable with that, don't read the Bible because you will get very discouraged very quickly.

Okay, Exodus 34.

You got a copy of the scriptures?

I wish you'd turn there.

Exodus 34, 6 and 7.

Let me give you the background real quickly.

We're going to move along here.

Go back a few chapters, chapter 19, Exodus 19.

God has led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, brought them through the Red Sea, plagues and all that, through the Red Sea, wandered around in the wilderness, water and manna and all, and water out of rocks and manna and the quail and the whole thing.

And he leads them to Mount Sinai.

When he gets to Mount Sinai, something very special happens.

God calls Moses up on top of Mount Sinai.

I've actually been to Mount Sinai.

I've actually stood where Moses stood.

One of the coolest experiences of my life.

And Moses was standing in the presence of God, and God offered to Moses, I'm going to use a term that scholars would use, and that is, he offered them a marriage covenant.

He said, I choose Israel to be my bride.

And this is the marriage covenant.

And I want you to take it down to the people of Israel, and I want you to offer it to them and invite them to be my bride.

Moses takes this marriage covenant, goes down the mountain, offers it to the Israelites, and lo and behold, the Israelites to a person all say, I do.

We will.

We accept.

We want to be the bride of Yahweh.

We accept that.

So Moses goes back up the mountain to talk to God and tell him that they've accepted his invitation and to get more instruction on now what does that mean?

What does that look like?

How does that work?

Moses hadn't gotten back up on the top of Mount Sinai five seconds.

I'm exaggerating a little bit.

And the Israelites, they say, well, where's Moses?

What's going on here?

We're not happy with this deal.

Nobody's here to take care of us.

And they immediately turn to a golden, they make a golden calf, and they betray their marriage covenant to Yahweh, and they turn to another God, if you will.

They break their marriage covenant and they begin to worship this false God.

God tells Moses, You need to go back down the mountain and confront the people and tell them that this is not right.

Any more than if one of us found our mate living, you know, we caught him in a bad situation.

We wouldn't like it a bit.

And so God sends Moses down the mountain to confront him.

Moses goes down, he confronts them and rebukes them.

And I'm really summarizing a lot now.

But when that's all done, Moses realizes this is bad.

And he is terrified, just to let you know, he is terrified that God is going to divorce Israel and replace Israel with a new bride.

And that's exactly what God tells Moses.

I'll make, I'm done with it.

We hadn't been married five seconds.

They're already committing adultery.

Where's the love?

Where's the trust?

Moses, I'll make your descendants a new nation, and I'll marry your descendants.

Moses being Moses, he runs back up the mountain and he gets in a cave at the top of Mount Sinai, and he begins to beg God, please don't do this.

Please don't divorce Israel.

Please don't replace Israel.

I don't want my descendants to be a new people.

I want you to keep this bride.

Yes, they're as hard-headed and stubborn and fickle and unfaithful and ungrateful as any bride's ever been.

But please don't replace them.

Please don't divorce them.

And while Moses is in this cave interceding for God's people, begging God not to do this, God comes in a storm, which he often does in the Bible.

He comes in a big storm to the mouth of this cave and reveals himself to Moses.

And that's Exodus 34, verses 6 and 7.

Exodus 34:6

That's what God says to Moses when he reveals himself to him, when Moses is praying in this cave.

And what's significant, there's three things that are very significant about this revelation that God gives to Moses of God Himself.

First of all, this is the very first time that God ever really clearly reveals his attributes, at least some key attributes of God in the Bible.

Very first time.

Second thing that's significant is that it's God revealing these attributes himself.

This is not one of the Bible writers, Moses, observing God or listening to God and then saying, Oh, this let me tell you what God's like.

This is not Moses talking, this is God talking, this is Yahweh talking, and Yahweh, he chose these specific attributes or qualities out of all the qualities that he could have picked, he chooses these attributes to reveal to Moses and then through Moses to us.

It's a super strong point, and it makes sense to us without even saying anything about it.

But the strength or the difference between a first person point of view and a third person point of view.

So when somebody's talking about God, that's great.

And true.

Today you are talking about God's true.

But for a person to speak about the if if if a person and God can be honest, so if a person can be honest and speak about themselves, that's got more weight than if someone else says, Well, I think Kathy's great.

Well, that's great.

But for a person to speak about themselves and it be true, is the weightiest of all voices.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Um, the last thing that's significant about this passage is that it's the most repeated two verses in the entire Bible.

Very significant.

When the Bible wants to stress something, there are other ways that the Bible does this, but the number one way that the Bible stresses that something is not only true but important, it repeats it.

Just like your mama.

What was important to your mom?

What was the most important thing to your mom?

Well, I can tell you right now, it's whatever she said the most.

If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times.

That's probably important.

Well, that's exactly the way God is.

And that's exactly the way he wrote the Bible.

When he wanted us to get something and not forget something and embrace it and obey it, he would repeat himself.

And these two verses, Exodus 34, 6 and 7, are the two most repeated verses or statements, if you will, in the entire Bible.

When the Bible wanted to not only stress the importance, but when the Bible repeats things, it often adds to it.

It fleshes, it'll make a statement.

We're going to see this here in just a second.

It'll make a statement, but it will only make a partial statement.

It'll only give us, it'll make a truth, it'll say, it'll declare a truth, but it'll only give us so much of the truth.

And if you want to know the rest of the truth related to that statement or that idea, you've got to look for other repetitions of that idea, and they will add things to it to give us a complete idea of what they're talking about there.

And sometimes this repetition is by one writer.

If you read a book of the Bible, especially in the New Testament, that's not necessarily true.

I'd just say when you read a book of the Bible, you can tell what that writer valued most, wanted to stress most, was what did they, what words, what phrases, what sentences, what word pictures do they repeat the most?

Well, what they're communicating is this is really, really important.

Okay?

Then, take it a step further, when other Bible writers read earlier passages of scripture, earlier scrolls or earlier books, what they thought was important, most important, they'll re-quote and they will add to it.

And what's neat about that is it's one thing for me to tell you what Moses meant when he said something.

It's very different when David tells you, or Paul, or Isaiah, or Jeremiah.

When Bible writers tell us what earlier Bible writers meant or were saying, that's very, very significant.

Very significant.

And I was gonna ask you, Shirley, um is that true of other great literature?

If I want to understand what Dostoevsky or Tolstoy or Shakespeare means, what by when they wrote later works, did that help explain earlier things?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, uh if you read, like if you were, if we were to read an inst the entire volume of work by any given writer, you know, all the pieces, um, you would notice, I I can think of it in Flannery O'Connor, I can think of it in John Steinbeck, you would and and plenty more.

You would notice the later pieces reflecting the same truths that they had said in their earlier pieces.

And then if you if we can ever, and this happens here in the Bible, if we can ever get their voice commenting on what they've said before, that's even better.

Like Flannery O'Connor wrote a piece of fiction about, excuse me, non-fiction, about her fiction that explained it.

Well, that's as good as it gets.

Yeah, nobody else could give an opinion about that.

That would be as good as the he might not like her work, but she says, I wrote these pieces, and this is what I intended to do, then you know you know fully.

You got you have all the information.

So when later Bible authors who were operating under the inspiration of Scripture take an earlier passage and they tell us what that earlier person meant, or they tell us, or they add to what that earlier person said, and I'm gonna give you some examples here in just a minute, that carries weight.

That should matter to us.

Oh, now I see, now I understand, because no, in no aspect of life can anyone, including scripture, make a statement that encompasses all that is true about that idea.

The statements would, the sentences would run for eternity.

You just keep adding and adding and adding.

Well, then you can't study it, you can't embrace it.

So the Bible will make true statements, but there's just so much truth that is possible to be in that statement, and then later writers will add to that to help us have a fuller, more developed understanding of what's important, what's being said.

The best way to grasp what one Bible verse or one Bible author means is to let other Bible verses and other Bible writers explain and add and develop to that idea.

The best explainer and interpreter of the Bible is the Bible itself.

That's where God develops and clarifies what he was saying in earlier verses.

So, nope, just a few minutes we've got left.

Let me just jump right in here with you.

I want to focus just for a minute, or today we'll get into the good stuff, the fun stuff, the blessing stuff starting next Sunday.

I want to just go to the back.

I want to go to the hard stuff, just real quickly, where uh the Bible says, or God says, that He doesn't leave the guilty unpunished.

He punishes the children and the grandchildren for the sins of the parents to the third and fourth generation.

I just want to appeal to you.

That is that's hard.

That's tough language.

But what's interesting about that language is if you uh go to Numbers 14, which is uh about a year later, and you uh what you do is you find Israel.

They've left Mount Sinai and they've gone to the boundary of Israel, of the promised land, right, and they're on the bank of the Jordan River, and the uh uh and they're about to enter.

And right before they enter the promised land, somebody comes up with a good idea, sort of, and says, Hey, we ought to send some spies into the promised land to check out the land first before we just roar in there.

We don't know what we're gonna get into.

And so that's what they do.

They send 12 spies into the promised land.

And they, I don't know how many days, 40 days, or I don't know, they're in there for a while.

And they come back and they give this report to the people of God.

And what they say very briefly is, oh my gosh, we witnessed a great land with a great abundance of fruits and vegetables and farms and just everything's great.

But we also saw great fortified cities, and those great fortified cities are inhabited by great big giants, and we will never be able to conquer this land.

That's what ten of the twelve spies said.

And those ten spies, they were so passionate in their words that they persuaded the entire nation to turn around and go back to Egypt.

They said, We're not going in there and getting our families whipped.

We're going back to Egypt.

We'd rather be alive slaves than dead landowners, is basically what they said.

And, oh, read, read.

Let me let's go on and read what it says in Numbers 14, chapter uh verses 17 through 19.

Read that for me, please.

May the Lord's strength be displayed just as you've declared.

The Lord is slow to anger, abundant in love, forgiving sin and rebellion.

Now notice Moses, this is Moses again.

These are his words.

And he quotes the first part, verse six, but he only he summarizes it.

He just quotes a couple of the good qualities.

I'm using my language, but he quotes a couple, he summarizes the first part, verse six.

Okay?

Forgiving sin and rebellion, yet he doesn't leave the guilty unpunished.

He punishes the children for the sins of the parents to the second and third, to the third and fourth generation.

In accordance with your great love, forgive these people's sins just as they've as they've continued since they left Egypt until now.

Did you hear what Moses said?

He basically says, God, you don't leave the guilty unpunished.

So would you please forgive the guilty?

Well, that didn't seem right.

You would think if Moses, again, Moses is interceding with God, please don't kill them.

Please don't destroy them.

Yes, they're hardheaded.

Yes, they're rebellious.

Yes, they're a terrible mate.

Yes, they're unfaithful.

Yes, they won't trust you.

And God, you are a God.

You've already told me a year earlier on Mount Sinai that you don't leave the guilty unpunished.

But then he adds, then but the part that he elaborates on is verse 7.

He says, you don't leave the guilty unpunished, but God, would you please forgive the guilty?

Do you see how in Moses' mind, God not leaving the guilty unpunished?

There's a tension, but it's not a contradiction.

Therefore, God, because you don't leave the guilty unpunished, please forgive the guilty.

My point, and then we're going to look at one more verse before we end.

My point is simple.

In Moses' mind, there's something more to this God not leaving the guilty unpunished.

There's something else going on.

It's not just, oh Lord, we're doomed.

Yeah, God wants to be nice to people, but if people don't act nice, they're doomed.

That's not the way Moses saw this, or he wouldn't say, yes, you don't leave the guilty unpunished.

Please forgive the guilty.

There's something else going on in Moses' mind there for him to make that statement.

He asked God to forgive.

You won't forgive, you won't fail to repay the guilty, so please forgive the guilty.

For Moses, there was no contradiction between God in his mercy and God in his justice.

Verse 7 communicates something more than what we're just perceiving when we read it.

Verse 7 seems to not hinder God from forgiving us.

One more verse, and we'll, I wish we had, I could do this with a bunch.

This verse, Exodus 34, 6 and 7, it is repeated in the Bible over 30 times.

Not all of it.

Sometimes what's repeated, if you notice there, Moses flipped two of the qualities, and he left some of the qualities out.

So sometimes the whole two verses are quoted, repeated, sometimes only part of the verses are quoted or repeated.

Sometimes they're flipped so that there's a part of it that's being emphasized that the writer does not want us to miss.

Sometimes all of it's repeated, sometimes part of it's repeated, sometimes it's repeated, but the order is flipped, and that all matters.

So one more time.

So God tells the people of Israel, you don't want to go into the promised land?

You don't think I'm big enough, bad enough, tough enough, wise enough, uh uh sovereign enough to get you into this land that I promised your your father Abraham that I would give you?

Okay, you don't have to go in.

Have it your way.

Okay?

And for 40 years they wander in the wilderness until all of them are dead.

So jump with me now to Deuteronomy chapter 5.

Deuteronomy 5 · chapter mention

Deuteronomy chapter 5, verses 6 through 10.

Deuteronomy 5:6–10

We'll end on this.

This is 40 years later.

40 years later, God is right back in the same spot that he was in Numbers 14.

But now he's talking to the people that were in Numbers 14, they're all dead.

So now he's talking to their children who have now all grown up and now they're adults.

And basically what God says in Deuteronomy 5 is your parents really screwed up, don't follow suit.

Don't make the same mistake that they made.

Your parents missed out on the promised land.

Don't do the same.

And so here, God are yes, God speaks to the people through Moses, and he quotes Exodus 34, 6 and 7.

And here's what he says.

All right, would you read that, spouse, please?

Deuteronomy 5, 6 through 10.

Yeah.

Yahweh said, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of slavery into Egypt.

Have no other gods before me.

Don't make images of anything in heaven or on earth in the waters.

Don't bow down to worship them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God or passionate God.

Punishing the kid, the children for the sins of their parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.

But, and there's that constant shift, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.

Moses adds something, or God adds something.

Anybody notice what he adds?

Notice what he says.

I am a, it says jealous.

I don't know why our translations say jealous, so it's the word that every one of your translations say.

That word is can equally be translated passionate.

I am a passionate God, punishing the children for the sins of their parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.

God adds more truth to flesh out, to fill in, to clarify what He's trying to get us to see, and that's simply this.

And this is, we'll talk about this in the weeks ahead more.

Okay, I'll help y'all understand this more down the road.

But the point that I want us to see today is what the Bible is saying when it says that God does not overlook the wrongs that people do, and that that is passed down to future generations.

It's not just that my great-granddaddy lived a terrible life, which I'm not, I don't know if he did or he didn't.

I think he did actually, but anyway, that's a whole nother thing, and that somehow, because of my great-grandfather's bad life, God is punishing me.

That is not what it's saying.

What it's saying here in Deuteronomy chapter 5, in numbers 14, and in Exodus 34, is simply this.

Deuteronomy 5 · chapter mention

That when I live a life of consistently telling God no, you're not gonna be the boss of me.

I'm not gonna follow your ways.

I'm not gonna love you.

I'm not gonna love others like you want me to.

I'm gonna love me, and I'm gonna live for me, and I'm gonna do things my way.

That pattern of living, which God interprets as you hate me.

That's the word he uses.

Those, bless you, those that hate me, those that live lives that declare, I don't love you, I don't trust you.

That pattern of life, that example of life, is witnessed and tragically, we all many of us could raise our hands, when we children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, when we witness that kind of life, tragically so often, we find that life appealing.

We find that life intoxicating, thrilling, and we embrace it.

And then we follow suit, and our grandchildren do the same, and our great-grandchildren do the same to the third and fourth generation.

When there's a pattern, it's not this idea of generational curse.

I know that many of you would embrace that or believe that.

And that's fine if you do.

Uh I would I would challenge you to think through that, but I'm suggesting to you today that what Moses or what God is saying about Himself in these passages and many others that I wish we had time to look at is simply there is power, influential, destructive power in living a life that is consistently declaring and demonstrating no.

No to God.

I won't follow you, I won't love you, I won't live for you, I won't yield to you.

And when that life is displayed in front of our children, so often they embrace it.

And when it's displayed in front of their children, tragically they embrace it.

And so on and so on, and so forth.

And you can see the point that I would love for us to leave here today is this.

What God is trying to reveal to us is that God will not force us to love him.

By definition, you can't force anybody to love.

And in God's infinite power, he cannot force us and will not force us to do the one thing that he longs for us to do the most.

And that's to love him.

To love him and trust him, to give him time to reveal his beauty and his character and his faithfulness and his passion for us.

All he needs is time to reveal those things to us, but it takes time.

And he invites us into this covenant relationship, and he invites us on a journey with him so that he can begin to reveal those things to us.

But if we decide, no, I'm gonna do it my way, not only does that have indescribable consequences, destructive consequences in our lives, but it has similar consequences in the lives of those that we're closest to and that watch us most clearly.

And God says it can be passed down.

That example, the power of example, we need to be very well.

That's scary, Larry.

I think it's supposed to be.

That's intimidating, Larry.

I think it's supposed to be.

That makes me uncomfortable.

I think it's supposed to make us uncomfortable.

I think it's supposed to humble us and make us get up in the morning with joy and confidence that we have been invited into a covenant relationship with the Creator of the universe and invited into a deeper relationship with him, but I think it should scare us.

What if I say no?

What if I say, God, I'm too busy?

I'm uninterested.

That didn't appeal to me.

That is it's supposed to be uncomfortable.

It's supposed to be scary, it's supposed to humble us.

The goal being, I believe, that we should get up in the morning and say, God, thank you for inviting me.

And God, I come.

Well, that song that we've sung before, I come.

I come.

I want to know you.

I want to love you.

I want to trust you.

I want to follow you.

It'll be a terribly failed attempt at doing so, but I'm coming.

And if I do well, it's because of you.

And if I don't do well, you promise me you'll give me another chance.

Hooray! Hooray! And I'll come tomorrow, and I'll come the next day, and I'll come the next day until we get this good and strong and better.

And that's what God asks of us.

Just come.

Get to know me.

Let me begin to have my way in your life.

You'll never regret it.

And your third and fourth generations of children that begin to witness this, it transforms from three and four generations to a thousand generations.

A thousand generations of those that know and love and trust.

The God that is inviting me and you to just get to know every morning.

Or whenever you do it.

Anything you want to add, friend?

You know, time is a funny thing.

It is an earthly construct, not an eternal one.

But the further we walk away from a thing, the longer we think because of time constraints, that that's all we can understand.

It's going to take that long to go back.

And in eternity, that's not true.

And and the eternity that we're already experiencing here on earth makes that not true.

So what I mean by that is sometimes people think, oh, I've gotten so far from God, it'll take, I'll never get back.

Because God doesn't deal with constrained time like we do.

That's not true.

It's the turn.

And then you're back.

Oh, we might have to give up some stuff or stop doing some stuff or quit abusing somebody or yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it doesn't take as long to come back as it does to get far away.

Not in God's.

I love that.

Dead gumming, I love that.

Just like with our grandchildren.

They get mad and roar off down the road, and for them, they've walked a lot of steps.

But when they turn around, we're standing right there.

We're right here.

The distance, you thought you were going a long way away.

I was still six inches behind you the whole way.

Good luck getting away from me.

Whole way.

I love that.

Thank you.

Bless you.

All right.

Y'all didn't do good on the time today for sure, but we'll we'll do better.

Um Batty, would you and Rita come help me?

And Larry, would you and Bryce come help me?

And John and Jennifer, would you yeah, yeah.

No, no, no.

All I need is four.

Everyone.

Yeah, y'all just you four come.

Yeah, here we go.

We're gonna take the Lord's Supper, and I'll make it brief so that y'all can get out of here and get to the Piccadilly.

So um, we pause each week to celebrate that act of God 2,000 years ago when his son chose to die on a cross horribly as a sacrifice for our sins.

I believe what we've sung today is eternally important.

I believe what Shirley and I tried to teach today is eternally important.

But C.S.

Lewis would say, and he did often, the most important moment on Sunday morning is when we eat the bread and the wine.

When we eat and drink and remember that we are loved by the God of the universe so much that he sent his son to die for our sins.

That moment of being reminded, of remembering, I am that loved.

Regardless of the week I've had, regardless of how screwed up I am, regardless of how often I failed, I am that loved.

And so I invite you to come.

We have open glasses of juice, and you can take a piece of this bread.

We've also got covered ones that got the juice and the bread in them.

If you can open it, Lord help you, on that deal.

But um, anyway, I invite you to come.

I invite you to come and to eat and to drink and to remember that you are that love, that the God of the Bible, the God of the universe, he is a God of compassion, he is a God of grace, he is slow to anger, he is a God of covenant love, and he is a God of faithfulness, a God of faithfulness.

And we should rejoice that that God has invited us into covenant relationship with Him.

And if you've accepted that invitation, whether you're a member, you know, member of our church or not, that doesn't matter.

None of that matters.

This is the Lord's Supper.

It's not our supper, it's the Lord's Supper.

And so, if that is a covenant that you've embraced, then you come and you eat and you drink as they sing and play.