God's Loyal Covenant Love

The sermon text reading for today is Exodus chapter 34, verses 1 through 7.

Exodus 34:1–7

You can find this passage in the Sanctuary Bible on page 129.

Please listen as I read God's Word.

The Lord said to Moses, Chisel out two stone tablets like the first ones, and I will write on them the words that were on the first tablets which you broke.

Be ready in the morning, and then come up on Mount Sinai.

Present yourself to me there on top of the mountain.

No one is to come with you or be seen anywhere on the mountain.

Not even the flocks and herds may graze in front of the mountain.

So Moses chiseled out two stone tablets like the first ones and went up Mount Sinai early in the morning as the Lord had commanded him.

And he carried the two stone tablets in his hands.

Then the Lord came down in the cloud and stood there with him and proclaimed his name, the Lord.

And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin.

Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished.

He punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.

Here ends the reading.

Good morning, everyone.

Hope you are doing well today.

My name is John.

I get to serve as the lead pastor here at Elmwood.

And if I have not yet had the chance to meet you or connect with you, I would love to do so sometime this morning.

I'm going to be right out in the main foyer after the service and would love to connect with you there.

These first few weeks of a new school year are the time when people typically are visiting new churches.

And that may be the case for some of you here today, is that this is a season of your life where you are exploring a new church community because you're in college or some other life circumstance has you uh exploring that.

And if that describes you today, if you're here and you're just exploring Elmwood, uh I want to invite you to consider giving us three Sundays.

And the reason is because you can't get a picture of what a church is like by just sort of dropping in on one Sunday and then leaving.

And so uh we just encourage you that if you are new, uh we'd love, love, uh we'd be so honored if you would give us uh a few Sundays, come to the welcome party, get to connect with some other people, and in doing so, you'll be able to see what kind of church this is and what we are all about.

Uh before we get in the message today, uh one quick thing is college students.

Normally there's like way more of you here.

Apparently you're here today.

Okay.

There's some of you over here as well, uh, but usually that that's the that's the section of college students, but now you're sort of spread out all over, which uh which we love.

Uh today, right after the service, we're having this semester's first college lunch.

So uh we're gonna feed you pizza and we wanna just connect with you and hang out and get to know you, give you the chance to connect with other college students who are here at Elmwood as well.

Uh so if you're college age, okay, if you're like, I graduated last year, you're a col you're a college student, just come, okay?

If you're like right within that region there in that age demographic, uh, please come.

If you came for the first time today and you had no idea this was happening and you didn't let us know you're coming, we bought extra pizza for you, okay?

We bought extra pizza to make sure that we would have enough when people showed up unannounced.

And so if that's you, uh, we just want to encourage you to join us.

Uh head right after the service, right down that main hallway, down to the fellowship hall, and uh we'll love to connect with you and see you there.

Uh with that, let me invite us, invite you to join me in a word of prayer as we come to these verses.

God, what we most need this morning is to see and encounter you.

Lord, as we look at this passage today that uh so clearly uh describes your character, we ask God that you would give us eyes of faith to see.

That you would help us to uh uh personally uh internalize these uh characteristics that you have revealed to us.

God, we love you, and we ask that you would by your spirit that you would do your good work this morning among us, that you would teach us and instruct us, and that you would uh do a deep heart work in us to transform us.

God, we want to leave here change people, and so we ask that you would uh be kind to us now in these moments, and that you would uh accomplish just that today.

So, God, we look to you for these things, and we pray all this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

For as long as I can remember, I have lived in the wilderness of chronic health problems.

Some of those have been named, like there's a diagnosis, there's a label that you can put to it, and some of those are the kinds of things that a doctor will look at you and say, I really wish that we had answers for you, but we don't know what's going on, we don't know why you're feeling this way, we don't know what's causing this, and so we're sorry, we wish we could help.

This past summer, when we were on sabbatical, we went camping with some friends of ours, as we do each year, and as we were on one of our hikes, we came across a tree that I thought uh that just it caught my attention.

And of course, I've seen lots of trees like this in my life all the time.

You see these kind of things.

And I think it was because I was on sabbatical and the stuff that I was thinking about and processing, this really sort of stood out to me in a fresh way.

And the moment that I saw this tree, the first thought that came to my mind was that tree depicts how I feel most days.

Still standing, but with roots that are exposed and worn bare.

For those of you who have maybe experienced chronic health problems of your own, you know exactly what kind of thing I am describing.

The bad news is that all of us, every single one of us, will experience life in the wilderness.

We will all experience seasons that feel desolate and dry and lonely and barren and hopeless, and none of us are exempt from this because we live in a broken and in a fallen world that has been ravaged by sin.

So the bad news is that if you're not experiencing a wilderness season right now, just wait.

Because one is coming.

That wilderness season for you uh might be something like for me, related to your physical health.

It might be spiritual, it might be vocational, it might be relational, financial, it might be a season of deep grief and loss, it might be a season of addiction, it might be a season where you have to grapple with the choices of other people and what they have done to you and how that's affected you.

It might be a season of you having to grapple with the things that you have done to others and the way that you have hurt other people and the things that you have said or done that you can never take back, or it might be something entirely different.

So the bad news is that we're all gonna go through a season of the wilderness, and the good news is that the wilderness is one of the unexpected places where God loves to meet with his people and do his good formative work in them.

We've been in a series of messages called Finding God in the Wilderness, and what we are doing over the course of this fall is we are exploring different stories from the Bible in which God's people find themselves in the wilderness.

And uh in the Bible, you'll see there's a common theme that you know, people find themselves in the desert or in the wilderness, and it happens all the time.

And what we've been looking at is how these seasons of the wilderness, as unpleasant and as unwanted as they are, they are never a waste.

Those wilderness seasons provide an opportunity for us to experience and to encounter God in ways that we simply could not otherwise.

So, today what we're gonna do is we're gonna look at this story of the nation of Israel in the wilderness, and my hope is that as we do so, we will come to a greater understanding together, not just sort of intellectually, but deeply and internally, come to a greater understanding of the unceasing faithfulness of God for us.

So let's look at these verses, and as we do, the first thing that we can see as we think about the story of the Exodus is we see the continual unfaithfulness of God's people.

So, one of the Bible reading principles that we talk about often here at Elmwood, if you've been around, you know this.

We we oftentimes say it's so important that we read the Bible in context.

This is especially true if you're reading stories or narratives, and it's particularly important this morning because this account that you heard read today is at the sort of the tail end of a section in the book of Exodus that began really back in chapter 19.

And so what we have to do is we gotta sort of pull back and look at the story from a bigger perspective, and as we do so, what becomes really clear to us as we sort of just survey the story of Israel in the wilderness, what becomes clear is the failure and the unfaithfulness of God's people in the wilderness.

We see this in a couple different ways.

Uh, we see, first of all, that they are quick to forget what God is capable of doing.

In the wilderness, God's people are quick to forget what God is capable of doing.

So the story of Exodus is that God's people were enslaved in Egypt.

God came to their rescue, he miraculously delivered them out from Egypt, and his plan was to bring them into the wilderness so that he could be with them and enter into a covenant relationship with them.

And in order to get them into the wilderness in the first place, he had to part the waters of the Red Sea so that they could pass through and leave the Egyptians behind who were chasing after them.

As soon as the people stepped foot in the wilderness, okay, like you're reading the story, and it's like God delivered his people, and the very next thing you read is how they grumbled and complained against Moses and against God because they didn't have enough water to drink.

And as you're reading this, you're thinking to yourself, these people literally just watched a miracle with water.

And now they're complaining and grumbling, and they're they're they're worried and they're anxious and they're wringing their hands thinking they're gonna, you know, they're gonna die of thirst in the wilderness because they don't have enough water, and you're like, Do you remember what God just did?

And so they're filled with worry and anxiety, and they grumble against God and against Moses because they are so quick to forget what God has already done for them, and also then to sort of project that forward into this is what kind of God he is, this is what he's capable of doing.

And so they forget, they're quick to forget what God is capable of doing.

The next thing we see is that they misremember their former life in Egypt.

So God delivers them out of Egypt, they complain about water, and then the very next thing is they complain about food.

They don't have enough food to eat.

And so listen to what they say.

In Exodus chapter 16, verses 2 to 3, it says, In the deserts, the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron.

Exodus 16:2–3

The Israelites said to them, If only we had died by the Lord's hand in Egypt, there we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us into this desert to starve this entire community to death.

Now, if you're reading this description of what they remember about life in Egypt, you're like, these people are talking as if they used to live like on a cruise ship.

All right?

Like, man, we had everything we wanted, we never had any needs, there was always enough food.

Man, it was so good.

And really what they're saying here in Exodus 16 is they're saying, we wish God would have just left us alone.

Because in their minds now, Egypt is a place of life and a place of flourishing, and the wilderness, that's the place of death, when really the opposite is true.

So you see that their memory of Egypt is totally distorted.

They're totally misremembering what happened, and their memory is so distorted that they would rather go back to where they came from than to be with the God who just rescued them out of slavery in Egypt.

So they're quick to forget what God is capable of doing.

They misremember their former life in Egypt.

And the third way we see them failing and acting unfaithfully in the wilderness is they approach God on their own terms.

And we see this in the account of chapter 32, where we see the golden calf.

And so what's happening here is God has led his people out of Egypt.

They grumbled, they complained, God remained patient and was faithful to them, brought them to Mount Sinai, where he entered into a covenant relationship with them.

God then sent Moses up on top of the mountain where he's right at that moment, he's receiving instructions for how to build this thing called the tabernacle, which is the place where God's presence is going to dwell with his people.

So this is kind of a big deal.

Moses is up there, he's up there for over 30 days, and so the people begin to become impatient and they begin to sort of wonder and they say, Well, we don't know what's happened to this guy.

Did he die when he was up there?

We don't know.

Did he just like walk off the backside of the mountain and leave us here?

We don't know.

And so what they do in that moment is they decide the best thing to do, instead of waiting, instead of trusting, is they cast Yahweh into the image of a golden calf.

Even though this is in direct violation of commandment number two, where God said, Don't create any idols, don't create any images.

Now, of course, that means don't create images or idols that represent other gods.

But it also means don't take me and reduce me down to this statue or this piece of wood or stone or metal.

Don't cast me, the invisible God, into some image.

And so they, in violation of that commandment, they did just that.

Even though God told them, you are not to relate to me in the same way as the nations around you relate to their gods, which is to create these little idols and statues.

It says, You are to come to me on my terms.

You're not to come to me on your own terms and approach me the way you want to, you're to receive from me the way that you are to enter into relationship with me.

And so this is what we see of the people in the wilderness.

They are quick to forget, they misremember their former life, they approach God on their own terms, and as we sort of survey this story of Israel in the wilderness, what is supposed to land with us as readers is just how unflattering of a picture this is.

This is this is ugly.

These are supposed to be God's people.

And we see this ugly picture.

It's unflattering.

And isn't it so easy for us to criticize them?

To look down upon them and say, Man, if I was there, I would have been the faithful one to God.

I would have obeyed God's instruction, I wouldn't have done what they did.

It's so easy for us to criticize them when in reality these stories ought to function like a mirror for us.

Our sin expresses itself, and our unfaithfulness to God expresses itself in very different ways than it than it did in these stories, for sure.

But we are capable of the exact same kinds of unfaithfulness as they are.

We find ourselves living the same kinds of unfaithfulness that they did.

So, like Israel, we can be so quick to forget what God has done and what God is capable of doing.

And when we forget that, our lives become characterized by fear and anxiety and worry.

When we forget that, it leads us to press, it leads us to force things to happen in our own time, in our own strength, in our own way.

It leads to us not being able to slow down and to stop and to rest, because if I stop, the world's gonna stop turning.

We are capable of forgetting what God has done and what he's capable of doing.

This is this is fresh on my mind because uh we just, our leadership team just finished creating the 2027 proposed budget, and uh budgeting in the church world can be a kind of a scary thing, okay, because we have no guarantee of any income, right?

The income we receive in the ministry happens because of the willing donations of the people that call our church home.

And so throughout the years, what we've done as a leadership team is we've had to just continually remind ourselves, okay, we need to be good stewards, we need to be really careful in how we budget and what we budget.

And there are times where we just have to look at each other and say, do you remember that one time when there was this really big unexpected expense we had and we didn't have enough money to pay for it?

And the Sunday that we announced this big expense to the church, there was a lady who was here at Elmwood who hadn't been here for over 40 years.

She was a member in the 70s, and she was at her own church in the car, getting out, and the Spirit of God said, Go to Elmwood today.

And she's like, Oh, whatever, I'll follow God's word.

So she went to Elmwood and she heard us make this announcement and saying, Hey, here's this need we have, and she wrote us a check for$30,000.

Okay, that like true story, this happened.

Okay, and this is one of the like miraculous ways that God has provided.

And every time we start thinking about it and talking about money and budgeting, we have to remember, okay, this is what God has done for us in the past.

This is how God has provided, this is how God is capable of providing in ways that we could never possibly imagine, even if we tried to imagine how he would do it.

But sometimes we are so slow to remember those things.

We're quick to forget them, aren't we?

Not only this, we we misremember our former life.

Sometimes we forget what it was like to be dead in our sin.

And as a result of that, we find ourselves going back to old habits and old practices that used to define our life before knowing Jesus.

We typically don't put it this uh this bluntly.

But if we're honest, there's times where we think, man, life was better when I was calling the shots.

Life was better when I was in control of my life and could do whatever I wanted.

We forget what it was like to be dead.

We forget what it was like to be dead before God, without God, without hope in the world.

And like, let's just be real.

Following Jesus is it's hard.

The life of following Jesus is a call to die to ourselves daily.

Dying is hard.

And there's times where you look back and you think, man, true was easier when I could do whatever I wanted.

And we can misremember what our former life was like, and then we end up going back to those things.

Lastly, we can approach God on our own terms.

There's dozens of examples of this, but I'll just give one here.

We can fall into the trap of believing that if we follow the rules, that if we just obey God in everything we possibly can, then God owes us a good life.

He owes us a life with little pain or suffering or sickness or problems.

And what that reveals is that we're not coming to God on God's terms.

Really, what we're doing is we're saying, God, here's all these things I've done.

You owe me then a good life as a result of this.

And you can tell, right, your response to when you do experience suffering or you do experience difficulty, and your response is to sort of become angry and say, God, look at what I've done.

The response is to say, God, after everything I've given for you, this is the life I get.

And when we find ourselves thinking that way, it reveals we're not coming to God on his own terms.

We're coming to God on our terms, saying, God, if I give you this, this is what I want in return.

So these things, we are capable of being unfaithful in the exact same kinds of ways as the people in the wilderness generation.

We can be unfaithful to God in those same ways.

And so the question that was as the question that was pressing for them in the Exodus story is as relevant for us as it was for them.

And the question at the heart of this whole Exodus story is what is God gonna do with these people?

What is a holy God gonna do with these unholy people who seem bent on rebellion against him?

What is a faithful God going to do with unfaithful people like this who continually, over and over again live unfaithfully?

What's God gonna do?

And the answer is very simple He will remain faithful.

So the first part of the story is we see the continual unfaithfulness of God's people, and the second part is we see the covenant faithfulness of God for his people.

God will not abandon his people.

And the reason for that is given here to Moses in chapter 34.

Moses, in this moment, in the text that you heard read today, Moses is looking for assurance.

He's looking for God's assurance that God is not going to abandon his people, that he's not going to destroy them, that he's not going to leave them behind, that the people aren't going to go on and God is going to be, you know, is going to stay back and not go with them.

He's looking for assurance, and the assurance that God gives to Moses is he tells him, he announces his character.

And so it's in the face of the sin of the people that God provides comfort for Moses.

And in essence, he does it by saying, Remember who I am.

That's where the comfort, that's where the assurance comes from.

And so he reveals himself.

He reveals himself in verses 6 and 7, where he announces himself, saying, The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving, wickedness, rebellion, and sin, yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished.

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

So what we see here, if we sort of put this into two different buckets, the first thing that we can say here is God reveals himself as unceasingly faithful.

He's unceasingly faithful to his people.

We see these five character traits here.

Now each of these could get their own message, but the one that stands out above the rest of them is this word love.

Now, in our English use of the word love, we use that word in like a million different ways, you know, from anything to I love tacos to I love my spouse and everything in between.

Okay, so that word carries a lot, does a lot of things in English.

This specific word that is translated here into our English translation is the word love, is a very specific Hebrew word, which means it refers to God's loyal covenant love.

It refers to God's faithful covenant love that will not give up in spite of and in the face of the unfaithfulness of his people.

So when he says he's abounding in love, in this loyal covenant love, what he's saying is that he will not leave his people behind.

So he is unceasingly faithful, but he's also unwaveringly just.

And we see that in this second part down here, where he talks about not leaving the guilty unpunished, punishing the children and their children for the sins of the parents to the third and fourth generation.

Now, uh, he is not saying here, okay, God is not saying, I'm gonna punish your grandkids or your great-grandkids for the sins you commit today.

That's not what he's saying.

What this is saying is God will not turn a blind eye when the sins of one generation are willingly lived out in generations to come.

The children and the grandchildren that continue to perpetuate the generational sins that started with the parents, God's not going to turn a blind eye to that.

He is just.

But one of the most important things I think we can see and recognize in this is uh the how out of balance the numbers are.

Okay, so look at this with me.

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

Okay, three to four.

What he says about his faithful covenant love is that it ex he maintains his love to thousands.

So three to four and thousands.

And I think if we're following the parallelism here, we're supposed to understand this as meaning he punishes to the third and fourth generation, yet he maintains his covenant loyal love to thousands of generations.

So God is revealing his character in a way to Moses that puts his faithful covenant loyal love at the forefront.

He's highlighting that aspect of his character, and that is what brings the comfort in the face of the fear and the worry that Moses has that God is going to abandon his people.

And in spite of their sin, God says, I will not abandon my people.

It's against the dark backdrop of Israel's sin that we see the beautiful, bright light of the character of God.

In these verses here in Exodus 34, we see God's love described, right?

It tells us what he's like.

As we follow the story of the Bible forward, what we see is the character of God, his covenant, faithful love, then embodied in the person of Jesus.

As we look at Jesus' life and then his death on the cross, what we see is that Jesus embodied a life of faithfulness to God.

In his thoughts, in his words, and his actions, in everything he said, and everything he did, in every motive, in every posture of his heart, he lived in perfect alignment with the Father.

He lived a life of faithfulness that we were supposed to live and have failed to live.

In addition to this, Jesus embodied God's covenant love for us.

As we look at the cross, what we see is the lengths to which God was willing to go to rescue us, the lengths to which God was willing to go to save us and to remain faithful to us.

We sang this morning a beautiful hymn, Holy, Holy, Holy.

It talks about God in three persons, blessed Trinity.

For all of eternity, God has existed in Father, Son, and Spirit, one God, in perfect love and communion and harmony and joy and beauty.

And the Son was willing to take on human flesh and to suffer and to die for us.

The Father was willing to send the Son to suffer and to die for us in order to absorb within himself the curses that we deserve because of our unfaithfulness.

He was willing to absorb the pain and the sting of our sin, and in doing so, God proved his love and his faithfulness for us.

In the cross, God proved his love and his faithfulness, not just for humanity broadly, he proved his love and his faithfulness for you.

He will remain faithful to his people.

Let me leave you with this application.

There is hope for when we fail.

There's hope for when we are unfaithful to God, sometimes by choice, sometimes accidentally.

There's hope for when we fail.

There's hope for when you fail.

As we will explore in more detail next week, the wilderness is a place of testing.

And so often we fail the test, don't we?

We fail the test.

For some of us, that means lots of quiet compromise.

Little sins that you let go that are maybe visible to no one except you and the Lord.

Sometimes that sin is quiet.

Sometimes it's small.

Sometimes our failures are more public.

They're more visible, meaning that they involve or they affect more people.

There's maybe bigger consequences or stronger consequences because of those things.

But whatever the case, the point is the same.

If you are in Christ, he will remain faithful to you.

If you are united to Jesus by faith, God will remain faithful to you.

And we know that because he's already proven it.

He's demonstrated the lengths to which he's willing to go in order to remain faithful to us.

He's not going to abandon us now.

So if you are in Christ, he will remain faithful to you.

So if you're here today and you are sitting under the weight of your sin and your failure and your unfaithfulness, and that way is heavy on you, look to the cross and remember that if you are in Christ, God will remain faithful to you.

If you're here today and you struggle to forgive yourself for things that you've done or for things that have been done to you and you don't know how you can ever move past it, if you struggle to forgive yourself, look to the cross and be reminded that if you are in Christ, he will remain faithful to you.

If you're here today and you wonder whether the things that you have done are forgivable by God in the first place, maybe you're worried that you have sinned your way past the reach of his grace, look to the cross and remember that if you are in Christ, he will remain faithful to you.

And if you're here today and you have not yet experienced God's faithfulness for you personally, maybe you're here today and you now have language that you didn't have before, where before it was like, yeah, there's some personal failings, some things I did wrong, but all of a sudden now today you're like, okay, I have been unfaithful to God.

It's a much bigger deal than I failed my own standards.

Okay.

If that's you, you can leave here today knowing him.

You can leave here today knowing his faithfulness is for you.

And so I invite you to trust him today.

If you make a decision to follow Jesus today, we're going to come to the communion table now, and we get to receive the body and blood of Christ.

And if you made a decision to follow Jesus today, the communion table is now for you.

If you made a decision to rededicate your life to Jesus today, the communion table is now for you.

But for all of us who come here today, whether for the first time or for many times over, we come here today and we come confessing our sin and our idolatry and our unfaithfulness to God.

But we don't come here today moping around with our heads hung low because of how bad we are.

We come here today, yes, fully recognizing our sin and our own faithfulness, and we receive the broken body and shed blood of Jesus, which reminds us of his unceasing faithfulness to us.

So, friends, come to the communion table today and be encouraged.

God is faithful to you.

He will remain faithful to you.

As we come to the table, let me invite you to take just a moment for silence and confession, and then we will come and receive Christ together.