Remember

Good morning, church.

Today's reading is from Exodus 13.

The Lord said to Moses, Consecrate to me all the firstborn, whatever is in whatever is the first to open the womb among the people of Israel, both of man and of beast, is mine.

Verse 3.

Then Moses said to the people, Remember this day in which you came out from Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

For by a young for by a strong hand the Lord brought you out of this place, no leavened bread shall be eaten.

Verses seven through eight.

Unleavened bread shall be eaten for seven days, no leavened bread shall be seen with you, and no leaven shall be seen with you in all your territory.

You shall tell your son on that day, is because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt.

Verses eleven through sixteen.

All the firstborn of your animals that are males shall be the Lord's.

Every firstborn of a donkey you shall redeem with a lamb, or if you will not redeem it, you shall break its neck.

Every firstborn of man among your sons you shall redeem.

And when in time, when it in time to come your son asks you, What does this mean?

You shall say to him, Be a strong hand, the Lord, brought us out of Egypt from the house of slavery.

For when Pharaoh stubbornly refused to let us go, the Lord killed all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both the firstborn of man and the firstborn of animals.

Therefore I sacrifice to the Lord all the males that first open the womb, but all the firstborn of my sons I redeem.

It shall be as a mark on your hand, or frontlands between your eyes, for by a strong hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt.

And verses nineteen through twenty-two.

Moses took the bones of Joseph with him, for Joseph had made the sons of Israel solemnly swear, saying, God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones with you from there.

And they moved on from Succath and encamped at Etham, on the edge of the wilderness.

And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them along the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, that they might travel by day and by night.

The pillar of cloud by day, and the pillar of fire by night, did not depart from them before the people.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Yeah.

Great, thank you.

Good morning.

Thank you for joining us this morning.

My name is James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

It's a joy to gather together with you all.

I missed you all last week as I was preaching at Christ Presbyterian Inglewood.

They bring your greet they bring they send greetings from Christ Presbyterian Inglewood, way down south, uh on the south side of the city.

As I shared with them, between them and us, we've got this place surrounded.

So that's the good news.

Um but it's a joy to preach at JP's church, and it's a joy to have JP, Pastor JP, preach uh here at Redemption.

Uh he's awesome and has a great accent.

So that helps too.

All right, let's pray together and then we'll move into our text for the day.

Holy Father, we thank you for your steadfast love and faithfulness to remember us as your people.

Lord, we forget you even throughout the day.

We forget your promises towards us, the goodness that you have given to us, the mercy that you are eager to show to us, Lord.

We forget these things, but you do not forget us.

You always remember us.

You care for us, you work out all of the details of our lives, Lord, for a goodness that you desire to bring us into in Christ Jesus.

Lord, we praise you for your faithfulness.

Lord, we praise you for bringing peace in some measure to the world, Lord, which is in great conflict, Lord.

We praise you for the peace that is in Israel and Gaza.

Lord, we pray that that peace that you bring might be a foretaste of the peace that you might bring through your kingdom, Lord.

In our hearts, in our church, in our nation, in the world, Lord, you will bring your peace.

And only in you and your coming will final peace truly arrive.

Lord, we pray that you would bring that peace.

And for now, Lord, we pray that you would strengthen us to pursue the kingdom that you have promised to us, that you have promised to bring.

And Lord, we thank you that by your blood you have purchased our citizenship in the heavens.

Lord, let us not forget that.

Let us remember it in our hearts.

To the praise of your glory.

In Jesus' name, amen.

So remembering, that's what this passage is about.

Uh two weeks ago now, we were in Exodus, and we saw the event of the Exodus itself.

They finally, you know, exodus, they left Egypt, and they moved, they moved along, and they were able to, uh, on the night of the Passover, the Lord moved through and he killed the firstborn sons of Egypt, and Pharaoh was thrown into rage and terror, and he cast the Israelites out of Egypt, and they were freed.

And now, right on the other side of that exodus, even before they are pressed up against the Red Sea, even before the parting of the seas, the Lord is setting in place institutions of remembrance for the exodus that the Lord has accomplished on behalf of his people.

He desperately desires his people to remember the salvation that he has worked for them.

Our modern culture is designed to erase memory.

That is part of our intellectual heritage.

We stand on the other side of a great erasure that has taken place by modernism.

In moderns, they were some of the first people in the 17th century and 18th century to refer to themselves as modern.

It's not that we just look back and call that sort of uh class of intellectuals modern.

They called themselves modern.

And they called themselves modern over against the heritage that they would have received from the medieval church and from the era of Christendom.

They said, we are not thinking in those superstitious ways anymore.

Instead, we are guided by rationality and by reason.

And this was the way that they described, now we understand what true knowledge is, we are not participating with that superstition anymore.

And that is our sort of cultural, idiosyncratic, cultural heritage, that we are a people who erase the past because we think of the past as a place of uh antiquated superstitions.

And it is a place where the truth was hidden, but we have now been enlightened to the truth by our rationality.

But you can also see it just in your ordinary, even in more contemporary transformations.

When I uh would go and visit my grandparents' house, they had pictures all over their home, and the pictures that they had were of their old family members.

And they were framed in like little circle frames, and there would be pictures of their old family members.

If you come to my house now, the artwork that you will see on the wall is um from John Kushnerov's grandmother that was in his basement, and I went and got it because I wanted some art in our house, and he was like, Can you if you'll take this out of my basement, you can have it.

And so there's not much heritage being described in the artwork on my walls, but it's because photography has changed.

Photography used to be about a link to the past.

You would take out scrapbooks.

Did uh any of you have a scrapbook club?

Or perhaps your mothers or aunts have a scrapbook club and you go to scrapbook stores and you would purchase things and you would make you would scrapbook together.

Do any of you know about that?

Have that sort of sense?

Well, that's about putting pictures in a place, and then you know that later you will come and you will reminisce about the past.

That's not what pictures do anymore.

Pictures don't travel through time, they don't preserve the past anymore.

Uh, the way a picture works now is you take a picture and then you immediately text it to whoever you took the picture for, and it's not about time.

Pictures aren't about time anymore.

Pictures are about space.

See, this is my theory, this is my working theory of photography and its transformations in the uh since 2007 and onward, which you can read uh on JSTOR.

So there's a um uh the so photography used to be about time, preserving things from the past.

Now technology is about space.

It's about uh taking people who aren't present here and making them present here, right now.

And then you look at the picture and then it it goes away forever, and you never look at it again, and then you pay 1099 a month to Apple for the rest of your life until you die.

So that you can have those pictures but never look at them again.

So there's this idiosyncrasy of our culture of not remembering.

We don't remember, we don't uh remember who you are, which I think is Mufasa or Rafiki, I'm not remembering exactly right.

See, I don't even remember that.

But it's not just an idiosyncrasy of our culture, it is human to forget.

It is a uh it's a fact of our humanity.

We are a forgetful people.

It is not that just you with uh and us with our iPhones are are suddenly forget for forgetful people.

This has been true forever, and that's why God is so interested in preserving the memory of what he has accomplished for his people.

Because based around this memory, they will hold fast to the Lord because they'll remember that the Lord held fast to them.

If they forget that, then they will not even have an identity as a people.

How could the Israelites possibly understand who they are?

What is distinctive about them if they forget that the Lord, by a strong hand and an outstretched arm, rescued them out of Egypt?

If they forget that, do you know what they become?

Just any other nation.

The Lord has no particular affection for us.

He does not call us his people.

Why would we call him our God?

They would have they they wouldn't remember, but if they remember, we are the ones who the Lord chose among all the nations of the world to draw out of Egypt with a strong hand and an outstretched arm.

When they remember that, then they remember who they are.

They remember who their God is.

So God is so interested right away, immediately after the event happens, he's most interested in their remembering it.

You have to remember.

So he gives them two institutions of remembrance.

The first institution is the feast of unleavened bread, which we've already looked at, but we'll look at again in this instance, as it's not just something that they'll participate in uh on the night of Passover, but is now given to them as an annual institution of remembrance.

And the second institution of remembrance is the uh the redemption of the firstborn sons.

So two institutions, the feast of unleavened bread, and second, the redemption or consecration of the firstborn sons in Israel.

So first, the feast of unleavened bread in Exodus 13, 3, it says, Then Moses said to the people, Remember this day in which you came out from Egypt, out of the house of slavery, for by a strong hand the Lord brought you out from this place.

No leavened bread shall be eaten.

The Feast of Unleavened Bread, as we've talked about before, seven-day feast that culminates in the Passover, and the seven-day feast is uh all kinds of food and feasting, and there's no work, and you gather together in kitchens and you make food with your family, and you argue about whose house you're gonna go to for those sorts of things.

You guys have families and holidays, it's like that.

And on in the the central fact of this feast is that there's no leavened bread.

It means all the sourdough starters are thrown away.

It really means that.

It's as simple as that.

That the the leaven that they would that every home would have had to take a pinch out of and then mix in with flour and water and let it rise, that that leaven is to be thrown away from every house.

And what does that mean?

Why this feast of unleavened bread?

Why is God calling them to this?

Well, the leaven represents all that they would have gained from Egypt.

It represents the affliction that they received in Egypt, because the leaven would last in a home for sometimes years, the same clump, but they are saying, no, that is removed from you.

This past of pain and suffering that you have endured will be removed.

In Deuteronomy, this unleavened bread is referred to as the bread of affliction, because that's what they're remembering.

God wants them to remember that their time in Egypt was a time of affliction, because he knows that they will soon forget, that as they move into the wilderness, that they will begin to actually long for their time back in Egypt, back in slavery.

He understands the corruption of our hearts to long for our old sinful days as a time of respite from the pain that we're experiencing in the present station that the Lord has us in his life.

That is the way that this works for us, that the oppression that the Egyptian, excuse me, that the Israelites were under in Egypt, they will forget and think of as a time of provision.

And so will we think of our time in our life before coming to the Lord.

We will think of the sinful old days, and we will not remember the pain that we experienced that accompanied that sin.

And so we will return to those places of sin in despair, not remembering that the reality of those places are a place of affliction.

And so this is our remembrance.

We remember that we do, we do not go back to those places of sin because they are a place of affliction.

Here's what the, in a New Testament context, here's what the unleavened bread sounds like.

It sounds like 1 Corinthians 6, 9 through 11, where Paul writes, Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?

Do not be deceived, neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God.

And such were some of you.

But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and by the Spirit of our God.

In Egypt, the pain that the Israelites suffered, their oppression, was the oppression of Pharaoh over them.

But we know that that is only a type and a picture of the oppression that we experience from Satan, where by our sin we chain ourselves to Satan and the things that he desires to lead us into death.

Now, what is the unleavened bread?

Here is the unleavened bread.

It's that beginning of verse 11, which says, And such were some of you.

That is the bread of affliction.

It is you remembering what you were taken out of.

It is remembering that by the work of the Lord you were freed from the patterns of sin that lead to death in your life under the oppression of Satan.

That because of what Jesus did, such were some of you.

The bread of affliction was yours, but it is no more.

That leaven which worked in you, that leaven of sin which worked in you that led to death, you have been freed from.

God has done it.

So just as the Egypt just as the Israelites could not have freed themselves from Pharaoh, just as they did not have the strength to free themselves from the greatest empire that the world had known, so do we not have the strength to free ourselves from the affliction that we experience and from the rebellion of our hearts that comes from our sin.

But we have been washed in Christ Jesus.

We have been justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of God.

Such were some of you.

That is the remembrance of the bread of affliction.

Such were some of you.

What does that mean?

It means you couldn't save yourself.

What does the bread of remembrance mean?

It means that we have been saved by the Lord.

That is the first institution of remembrance, the feast of unleavened bread.

So you remember what you have been saved from.

We remember what we've been saved from.

The second is the firstborn sons.

If the first institution of remembrance looks to the past of what you've been rescued out of, then the second institution of remembrance looks to the cost that has purchased your future.

Because firstborn sons are like the future of the family.

That's what they should be understood as.

Every firstborn of a donkey you shall redeem with a lamb.

Or if you will not redeem it, you shall break its neck.

Every firstborn of man among your sons you shall redeem.

So what is happening here?

The Lord is saying that all the firstborn of men and of your animals, these belong to me.

The Lord is saying that the firstborn are mine.

They're the Lord's.

And so, well, what do we do about that if the firstborn are the Lord's?

Then you purchase them or you redeem them from the Lord.

So for an animal, we get an example here.

All the firstborn of your animals are males.

So you're thinking, like, okay, well, what if I have uh the firstborn is a donkey?

I know you're thinking this.

And the firstborn donkey, well, that's not a clean animal.

So I can't sacrifice the firstborn donkey in the temple, that it'd be bringing an unclean animal into the temple.

And so the Lord, he understands this, and so he get right ahead of this question that I know was on the all of your minds.

He gets ahead of this and he says, Um, then you redeem it with a lamb.

You redeem the firstborn of the unclean animal with a clean animal.

And what about for sons?

What about humans?

There's there would be a sacrifice made.

Now this was institutionalized into a more cash transaction.

We uh see that uh later on in Numbers it's described that uh the firstborn son would be redeemed with five shekels.

So five shekels would be brought as an offering into the tabernacle for the firstborn sons uh to be redeemed by the Lord.

So this means that they would be consecrated, set apart, and a purchase would be made from the Lord to preserve the life of the firstborn sons.

So why the firstborn sons?

What's going on here?

Now, of course, in ancient cultures it was typical to practice primogeniture, which is the right of the firstborn to inherit what came from their father.

And the uh but this is the the Bible's take on primogeniture is is not so uh uh plain as just if they're the firstborn, they get it.

It doesn't work so clearly because, for example, the firstborn of uh Israel, the firstborn of Jacob, uh Reuben, he doesn't get any, he doesn't get anything.

And neither does the secondborn or the thirdborn because of their violence.

In fact, uh Jacob looks over all of them and he goes to the fourthborn, who is Judah, who he makes this prime inheritor of what happens.

And the reason is because Jacob was choosing the character of the son for the one who might be blessed to uh then carry on the name of the family.

So the strictness of primogeniture does not overshadow the necessity of strong character in the distribution of this in the families.

But what we're remembering here is that the firstborn belongs to God.

That's the point of this.

And that's because the firstborn, what does this mean to God?

What does the firstborn mean to God?

The firstborn is the identity of the family.

The firstborn is the hope that the family name will be carried on into the future.

Because the family name and the possession of the land are preserved under the firstborn son.

And so the firstborn, in a sense, stands as a representative of the whole family.

So when the firstborn son is consecrated to the Lord, then it is saying in that the firstborn son stands in place of the whole family, therefore the whole family is consecrated to the Lord by the work of the firstborn son, by the setting apart of this firstborn son.

So the future of the family is protected and given to the Lord.

That's what's being said in the consecration of the firstborn son.

The firstborn would receive a double portion.

So that means they'd receive two-thirds of the inheritance, and the rest of the family would split up the one remaining third.

And the reason that the firstborn, along with receiving two-thirds of the inheritance, the firstborn held the responsibility for the care of the parents and for the care of the whole family.

That fell to the responsibility of the firstborn sons.

That's why often we see in Scripture the authority resting with brothers.

You know, you'll notice that it is when Jacob gets married, uh, the one who marries off Rachel and Leah is not Rachel and Leah's father who negotiates that deal, uh, but it is Laban who is Rachel and Leah's brother.

That's because as the firstborn son, he is the one who cares for the family.

He is the one who carries on this family name and preserves the family.

So you can see the importance of the firstborn son as a representative of the family.

They are the ones who take on the responsibility for the family as a whole.

And so what the Lord is saying when he's saying, consecrate to me the firstborn sons, is he is saying, Your future is in my hands.

And the firstborn sons that belong to me mean I will preserve you as the family of God.

I am the one who will preserve this whole nation that I have made.

And you will you will practice that, you will practice remembering that.

Because if you start to think that the firstborn sons belong to you, then you will think that your future is merely in your hands, and that what might ever look pragmatic or useful for you to do, or whatever hope you might have for the future of yourselves as a people, you might think that that depends upon you, your work, your labors.

And you will forget that it fundamentally, at the most absolute level, the most practical level, the firstborn sons, the future of the people of God belongs to God.

So we have these two institutions of remembrance.

The first institution of remembrance calls us to remember what we're leaving behind and how the Lord freed us from the sin that we are leaving behind.

And the second institution of remembrance, the firstborn sons, calls us to entrust our future to the Lord.

These are remembrances of atonement, and these are remembrances of a hope of a future that belongs to the Lord.

These are good things to remember.

But there's also a pedagogical use to both of these.

In unleavened bread, there's instruction to teach your children when you're eating this, to teach them that we eat this because the Lord rescued us by a strong hand out of Egypt.

And then there's a pedagogical use for the firstborn sons as well, where listen in verses 14 and 15 it says, And when in time, and when in time to come your son asks you, What does this mean?

You shall say to him, By a strong hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt from the house of slavery.

For when Pharaoh stubbornly refused to let us go, the Lord killed all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both the firstborn of man and the firstborn of animals.

Therefore I sacrificed to the Lord all the males that first open the womb, but all the firstborn of my sons I redeem.

They haven't even crossed the Red Sea yet.

And the in it at the top of the Lord's mind in his instruction are the children who didn't get to see the Exodus.

He's thinking of the children of these people that he is bringing out.

And he's saying, they didn't get to see what you've gotten to see, but they ought to know what the Lord has done for them.

And the only way that they will know what the Lord has done for them is if you, the ones who have seen it, tell them.

If you tell them what it is that I've done.

And so you have these institutions that I'm giving to you, says the Lord.

And when you have the feast of unleavened bread and they say, Why are we walking around the house throwing all the leaven out?

Oh, remember who we are.

We're the people who the Lord freed us from affliction.

We used to be slaves in Egypt.

We were slaves for 400 years in Egypt.

But the Lord, by a strong hand and an outstretched arm, he freed us from that affliction, so we leave that in the past.

And then when they're consecrating the firstborn sons, and you they all had to get dressed up, and a new nephew was coming into the family, and they walk out and say, Why are we doing this again?

Why do we have to do this again?

And they and they would say, Oh, remember, remember, you don't know, you weren't there, you didn't see it, but there was a night.

There was a night where the Lord redeemed us.

And the way that he redeemed us was at the cost of all the firstborn sons of Egypt.

They all died and we were set free.

And the reason that we were not killed, the reason that our firstborn sons were not killed on that night, was because the Lord gave us an instruction to redeem our firstborn sons under the blood of a lamb which covered our doorposts.

And so we remember that our future, the firstborn sons of our people, belong to the Lord, because we were purchased by the Lord.

We are his.

And the son would say, Oh, so that's who I am.

That's who you are.

You are the one who was purchased by the Lord.

You belong to him.

You are his child.

You are his people.

Remember this.

I know you weren't there.

And the only way that you could know is if I tell you and you were there.

And that's how they would know.

That's why this is so important.

You can see in these institutions of remembrance the heart of the Lord for the children of his people.

This is the pattern throughout all the scriptures that the promise is for you and for your children and for all those who are far off.

And so, right when the Exodus happens, the Lord is immediately, I mean, it's so, it's before the Red Sea, you know, it's this happens so quickly.

And he's his heart is on the children of the people whom he has saved that haven't gotten to see this yet.

And the instruction is for that to be passed along.

And this, of course, is our instruction still, because the promise is still for us and for our children.

And so it is our responsibility as Christian parents who have been entrusted with these children to be the ones who tell them who they are.

To share with them, why is it that we at the end of service we come in and we you eat that bread and you drink the wine?

Oh, here's why I eat this bread and I drink this wine.

It's because we were slaves to sin.

I myself was a slave to sin.

But the Lord Jesus Christ, he broke his body, he separated his body and his blood, so that I was redeemed by the Lamb of God.

And now I belong to the people of God, and you belong to the people of God.

And so I eat this bread and I drink this wine, so that I do not forget the redemption that has been purchased for me.

We are the ones who have been, we will teach them, rescued through the waters.

That's why you were baptized.

And that's why when you confess Christ as Lord, we invite you to the same table, because these promises are yours.

That's who you are.

So one of the things that we've instituted lately, haha, a little plug for a thing we're doing at the church, you will find one of these in the back of right when you walk in, and what this is is a family worship guide.

Now, this family worship guide includes the scripture that we'll be covering next week, and it includes a psalm that we will be singing together, and it includes a catechism from the Westminster Shorter Catechism to memorize.

Three things: a psalm, a scripture, and a catechism.

Because we want to equip you as a church to be looking forward to our weekly time of remembrance, Sunday mornings, so that we might pass down the wonder of this inheritance, that we might pass down, we might teach the ones who weren't there, because we're the ones who weren't there, we're the ones who didn't see.

And then it was passed down to us so that we might take up the same faith as the ones who did see, receive the testimony of the ones who were there.

This is the heart of the Lord, that we might preserve his glorious name and his glorious works of redemption for our families, that these might be passed down.

So, two institutions of remembrance.

We see the importance of what we're remembering.

The final thing that I want to look at in this text for today is the care that the Lord shows to his people as he demonstrates to them that he remembers them.

We remember the Lord because he remembers you.

After these institutions of remembrance, it's told to us that Moses took the bones of Joseph with him.

For Joseph had made the sons of Israel solemnly swear, saying, God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones with you from here.

Four hundred years ago, Joseph, before he had died, made the people of God a promise that his bones would be taken up out of Egypt.

Things looked so good in Egypt when Joseph died.

When Joseph died in Egypt, the Pharaoh was a believer in the God of Abraham.

All of the glories of God were being demonstrated in the nation of Egypt because the the Pharaoh himself sent people to go, and Egyptians gathered to mourn the death of Abraham as they were recognizing that he was the true prophet of God.

So Joseph, if he were to look out with his own eyes, he would say, This is the promised land.

This is a glorious place for us to be.

But Joseph had the eyes of faith.

And so he knew that there was a true promised land that was given to the people of God, and it was not Egypt.

The true promised land that was given to the people of God, Joseph did not take his eyes off of.

Even at death, he remembered it looking forward in a hope beyond what he could see.

And the Lord honored that faithfulness.

Because who can remember a thing for 400 years?

Nobody in here can remember a thing for 400 years.

The only being that works at 400-year-long scales is the Lord.

I think that's why he does it so often.

I don't know if often is the right word, but it seems like he likes to work at these incredible timescales because they are timescales which causes people like us to stand back and say, this could only be the Lord's doing.

There must be one eternal in the heavens who is guiding these stories into glory.

And so Moses gets to take the bones of Joseph and bring them up out of Egypt.

The one who brought them in, he brings up out of Egypt.

And what does that show?

What is the testimony of those bones?

You know, bones and blood, they're always crying out, bearing witness to something that has taken place.

And what do these bones of Joseph testify to?

The Lord keeps his promises.

The Lord did not forget his people.

Why do we remember the Lord?

Because the Lord first remembered us.

Even if we had forgotten him and wandered away from him, he does not forget his people.

He remembers them.

He remains faithful to them.

And he desires to show their glory in him.

One more thing to remember about the Lord, of which there's so much more to say, and we'll get more opportunities to talk about this, especially at the crossing of the Red Sea.

But in 13, 21 through 22, the way this chapter ends, it says, And the Lord went before them by day, in a pillar of cloud, to lead them along the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, that they might travel by day and by night, the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night did not depart from them, did not depart from before the people.

So much to say about this pillar of cloud and pillar of fire, these manifestations of the glory of God, which shows the people his presence with them and guides them into this future that he has for them.

But we won't look exactly at those now.

For this morning, I want us to just gather one principle from this.

The Lord is with his people.

When the people of God are wandering through the wilderness, where does God dwell?

He dwells with them in the wilderness.

I don't know what the heavenly courts are like.

I've read Isaiah 6.

It's full of a robe.

There's fire and angels singing.

But when God's prayer, when God's people are in the wilderness, then the Lord delights to be in the wilderness.

When the Lord's people are wandering, living in tents, then the Lord wanders and lives in a tent, the tabernacle with his people.

When the people of God are settled in the place that he had promised to them, then he establishes himself where they are settled in the temple.

But what is our great promise from the Lord?

That Jesus Christ promises us, and I am with you always to the end of the age.

And so in this pillar of cloud and this pillar of fire, we see this truth that the Lord remembers his people, and he is with us.

So we are to remember him.

What is our remembrance supposed to be like?

I skipped over this, but I'm going to jump back to it.

In Exodus 13, 16, it says, It shall be as a mark on your hand or frontlets between your eyes, for by a strong hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt.

It shall be as a mark on your hand or frontlets between your eyes.

So let's talk about the mark on your hand.

It means that everything that you do, everything that you you do, because when you do stuff, you use your hands.

Look at me.

Doing stuff, using my hands.

And then it's like your hands are marked.

Your hands are marked by it.

So when you look out in front of you and you take on that, you know, first-person shooter perspective, and you see your hands, you say, Oh, these are these are for the glory of God.

Because it was by the Lord's strong hand that he rescued me.

So what is my purpose here?

What am I meant to do with my life?

It is to glorify the Lord in all that he is calling me to do.

What are my hands for?

They belong to him.

They are to be obedient to him.

And then there are frontlets between your eyes.

It's like, you know, when you close your eyes?

If you're looking out at stuff, then your attention is on that stuff.

When your eyes are closed, then you go to your mind's eye, to your imagination, to the to your memories.

And what he's saying is when you close your eyes, the memories that I want to come up for you are to be of the goodness of the Lord towards you.

So that when you close your eyes, you remember, therefore, there's now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Because the Lord has set us free.

There's there's he who did not spare his own son, but delivered him up for us all, how will he not also with him freely give us all things?

The question is, where it when you are in despair, when you are in stress and anxiety, when you close your eyes or you in you and you consider what will I do next with my hands, you're going to some memory.

You're going to some hope in your mind.

And the Lord is saying, Let the hope be me.

Let the memory be my faithfulness to you, because I do not forget you.

I do not forget my people, and I am always with you.

How much more do we know this even without a pillar of fire and a pillar of cloud?

Because we remember our Lord Jesus Christ, who did not just separate us from an oppressive nation or an oppressive political figure, but who freed us from the true oppression of sin and death, so that we might be cleansed.

He is the firstborn of all creation.

He is the firstborn from the dead.

And that firstborn of all creation died in your place, so that you might be redeemed by his blood, so that you, because of the death of this firstborn, are redeemed into the family of God.

And so what is yours to remember then?

What do you remember?

You remember that he ate the bread of affliction, so that he might invite you to partake of the bread of presence, the bread of his presence with you, that his blood was poured out so that you might come forward and drink the wine of joy, because of the redemption that he has accomplished on your behalf, that he, after he rose from the dead and ascended into the heavens, he sent pillars of fire to come down on his church, so that their tongues might be loosed and they might gain a unified understanding of his presence with them by the Holy Spirit, so that they might know we, his People might know his spirit is with us.

We are united in him.

The Lord will never leave us or forsake us.

I was not there at Pentecost.

I did not see the tongues of fire come down.

I did not hear my neighbors who spoke different languages in my own tongue.

I did not listen to the sermon of Peter, which led to the salvation of thousands.

I wasn't there.

I wasn't born yet.

I couldn't have known it.

I couldn't have seen it.

But I remember because that memory has been passed down to me.

It's been preserved for me within the church.

It's been given to me and handed to me.

And when I remember that, I remember what the Lord accomplished for someone like me.

And I learned this is the most important part of my story.

Who am I?

I am the one who's been redeemed by the firstborn of all creation.

Who can separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus?

Nothing, nothing, nothing in nothing in creation, nothing in the heavens, nothing in the earth, not their height, nor depth, nor life, nor death, nor anything else in all creation can separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

How would your life be different if you remembered that?

Remember.

Come together today.

Come to the table this morning.

Remember.

Are there any questions today, Tim?

Great, then let's take communion.

And I hope you can see what we're doing when we take communion together this morning.

In 1 Corinthians 11, which I just know is in here somewhere.

Paul writes, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you.

That the Lord Jesus, on the night when he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, This is my body which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

So in the night before he is betrayed, the Lord instituted his own institution of remembrance.

And he took the bread and he broke it.

And he said, This is my body.

And he took the cup.

And he said, This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.

And in this institution, he calls us to a weekly practice of remembering, remembering your story.

You weren't there.

You weren't at this Lord's Supper.

The children who would be born in the wilderness were not there.

They did not see the Exodus.

They did not walk through the sea and look to the left and look to the right and say, whoa, what's going on here?

They couldn't have remembered.

They weren't there.

How could they know?

Their parents told them.

It might not have been your parents, but somebody told you.

And when they were told, they believed.

And when they believed, they knew that those promises that were given then, what God has accomplished then was on my behalf.

I am his people.

This is my nation.

This is my people.

This is who I am.

We are the sons and daughters of the Most High, because the firstborn of all creation laid his life down that we might be adopted into the family of God.

I wasn't there when it happened, neither were you.

But we remember together this morning.

That's why the Lord gives us this.

Let me pray for this Lord's Supper.

Lord God, we partake of the Lord's Supper this morning in remembrance of you, and we proclaim the death of Jesus Christ until you return again.

And not just his death, but the resurrection of our Lord, who sent the Holy Spirit that we might be with you.

Lord, we pray that you would remove from us the afflictions of our sin, cut the fleshly nature away from us.

And Lord, that you might, by the work of Christ, by the redemption of the firstborn, Lord, that we might be brought into a glorious future with you.

And Lord, we pray that we might remember that you have accomplished all that is needed for that to happen, and that we might partake of this Lord's Supper by faith and remembrance of something that we didn't see, and hope of something that we haven't seen yet, but we know we will, which is your glory covering the earth like the waters cover the sea.

Lord, we lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.