Foundations for the Redeemer - Pastor Greg Addison - February 8, 2026

Ministering to the heart of Western Arkansas's River Valley for over 165 years, welcome to Chapter and First, the Bible teaching ministry of Fort Smith's First Baptist Church.

You'll find sermons and teachings from Pastor Greg, our ministry staff, and guest speakers.

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I want you to turn to Exodus 19.

I'm going to talk about this foundations for the Redeemer.

We talked about last week.

And I want to make sure we don't just miss this.

It's a whole lot more fun to go talk about, you know, interesting in some ways to talk about the Red Sea and dumping the sea on the Egyptian army and the plagues and all that kind of stuff.

In fact, I want to encourage you, we are adding some sermons and messages to the Sunday morning deal to help encourage your reading.

On Tuesdays, most of the businessmen's luncheons, I'm tracking along with the reading and talked about the plague of the frogs last week.

Pastor Dave, in many of the Thursday lunches with our senior adults, is another passage that he's working through.

And so it's a great opportunity just to add to this journey of reading together.

But this is a significant moment I want you to see here.

Exodus chapter 19, verse 1.

Exodus 19:1

The Bible says, in the third month, on the same day of the month, the Israelites left the land of Egypt.

They came to the Sinite wilderness.

Now it's good.

You see how quickly God is moving, He's moving them through.

Also, a lot of times, if you're into numbers in Scripture, the number three often refers to the person of God.

And so this is just a description here on exactly three months, the number of God.

God has brought them to this place where He's going to begin establishing them as his nation.

And so this is the work of God.

They traveled from Rephedim, came to the Sinai wilderness, and camped in the wilderness.

Israel camped there in front of the mountain.

Now, this mountain that we come to, this will become significant.

You're beginning to see the plot of land that we refer to as Israel.

Now God is beginning to bring his people into that.

He's beginning to work there.

And so you'll begin to see certain of these geographic locations become highly significant, including this mountain.

Verse 3, Moses went up to the mountain to God, and the Lord called to him from the mountain.

This is what you must say to the house of Jacob and explain to the Israelites.

So God is going to give to Moses what he's going to say to the people.

So this is not God speaking to Moses about Moses, but he's instructing Moses how to instruct the people and this beginning journey now as a nation.

You'll also see that he refers to the house of Jacob and explain to the Israelites.

Now, if you've been in church any amount of time, you've heard the phrase the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

When you hear that, those are affirmations of God's promise and covenant to his people.

He refers to Jacob and then the Israelites.

So he gets that name.

Jacob's name was changed to Israel.

God changed that as a part of the covenant to establish and moving forward.

And so you see here when he talks to Moses, he is reminding Moses, these are my covenant people.

I am covenant God, and what I'm saying right now is highly significant.

This is about the covenant, Moses, and what we're doing.

So he tells him, this is what you tell them, you have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I carried you on eagle's wings and brought you to myself.

Now, if you will carefully listen to me and keep my covenant, you, the people of Israel, you will be my own possession out of all the peoples in the world.

And then he says, Even though I possess the whole world, you are my people, and you will be my kingdom of priests and my holy nation.

These are the words that you are say to the Israelites.

So this is a hugely significant moment, and it's easy to blow through it.

It's one of the reasons that I love this chronological reading because we're going to begin to see this foundation as we look at it today for bringing the Redeemer and connect it to places in the New Testament.

For example, this statement, You will be my kingdom of priests and my holy nation, is repeated in 1 Peter chapter 2.

1 Peter 2 · chapter mention

So let's see why that's significant.

First, here, what God tells Moses is he is establishing a people to point to him as God and his plan for redemption.

That's the significance of this statement, my kingdom of priests and my holy nation.

What is the role of a priest?

It is to serve the God that they worship and point to him so that the people around them that they serve will know that's God and point them to that God.

And of course, this is Yahweh God, this is the King of kings and the Lord of Lords, this is the one true God.

So what he's saying is, as my people, your role as a people, as a nation, not this person called to be a priest or not the descendants of Aaron or whatever.

We'll get to that later.

What he is saying is, as I establish this nation, I am establishing a people to point to me.

I am establishing a people who are going to live in a way and worship in a way and function in a way that it calls the world to look so that they can look up and see the person of God.

Now, that's important because you begin to understand even more the significance of what Peter said in 1 Peter chapter 2.

1 Peter 2 · chapter mention

When speaking to Christians, he walks through the Old Testament, Jesus comes and accomplishes the gospel, and now, as the redeemed people of God, the Church of Jesus Christ, those of us who've known Jesus as our Savior, he goes back and repeats this purpose, and he says, now we are the royal priesthood and the holy nation, the redeemed people of God.

And so when you see here the purpose of the Israel nation to be the beacon that the world looks at to see God, it becomes a very significant thing for us to understand in 2 Peter.

We are literally to be a beacon before the world of Jesus and redemption through his name.

And this passage of Scripture in 1 Peter becomes even more significant as you're reading through and you understand this moment where Peter quotes Scripture.

Not only does God establish a people, but he establishes a nation.

A nation.

And this is a significant deal.

What does it mean that he's established a nation?

Well, in just a moment, we're going to begin to read, and you can go to the next screen.

We're going to read and start reading.

And if you're reading with us, you've already started.

We're reading about laws and all this kind of stuff.

And don't do this and don't do this.

And if you dig a hole and an oxen breaks his leg in the hole, and you've got to give him this stuff, and all, you know, we read and all that kind of stuff.

Two things that people don't like to read in the Bible.

We love the Bible, but we don't like these are boring to read these.

We don't like reading genealogies, right?

82 pages of so-and-so begat so-and-so begat so-and-so, and you can't even pronounce the names anyway.

I heard somebody say half those names, they look like somebody fell asleep at a keyboard when they were typing them.

Right?

The other thing we don't like to read is Leviticus.

Don't do this, don't do this, don't do that.

Half that stuff doesn't even make sense.

We don't even understand.

Like, what's that all those laws about?

We got these pages and pages and pages of these laws, right?

You got all these dietary laws, and you got all this kind of stuff.

Like we're reading on, like, we just don't like those.

But they are in Scripture for a reason and they serve a purpose.

And if you will go back and make sure you read carefully these first sets of laws, and then you go to the sacrifices, and then you go to the tabernacle, what you understand that we've started reading and we will continue to read is God is taking the race of Jewish people and He's creating them into a nation.

And when you read those laws, if you pay attention to them, it's a hugely significant matter.

When God establishes the Ten Commandments, and then the 600 or whatever laws that come after that, that sort of unpack that, it was it was it was shocking to the world around them.

No nation had ever seen laws like these before in the time of Moses and the time when God issued them.

If you think about what the world was like, we just came out of Egypt.

Pharaoh thought he was a god, and he worshipped all kinds of weird gods that were lesser than him, and they sacrificed babies to the fertility god that gave them their harvests or whatever.

When someone who was rich died, they would put you in this tomb and they would entomb all this food and wealth and all this stuff for you to take to the next life, and they would take your slaves and servants and they would entomb you there with them, and they would live till however long they couldn't breathe anymore, and they'd die in there with the corpse in the sarcophagus.

I mean, it was bizarre how people were living in all of these false religions and weirdness.

There were nations that were just warrior nations, and basically they lived by the law of the sword.

My sword's bigger than yours, and I got more soldiers than do you, so we're just gonna kill you all and take your stuff, and that's the way life works.

I mean, it was loot, rape, and pillage in a lot of the parts of the world.

All of these structures were evil and they were all a mess.

There were significant class structures in the world at that time.

And if you were born in this class, you had no hope.

That's just the way it was.

And stuff like that.

People who were vulnerable, it was awful living in that world because you had no hope.

Life was miserable, and there was never hope to get anything out of it.

When you begin to unpack those laws that are established following from the Ten Commandments, you see a radically different picture of humanity and the world than had ever been created at that time.

There are certain things I want you to think of.

Now, it's a little bit unusual for us as Americans in our culture to read some of that because it looks normal to us.

It's hard to understand how dramatically unique it was when God created this system of laws that had never been created before.

Because we have an underpinning in our government structure, you've heard the phrase Judeo-Christian philosophy or Judeo-Christian ethic or whatever, where our laws coming from Western Europe, where there was a you know church biblical type thing, uh, and a specifically coming from England that was built on a common law that was unique.

Their common law literally was built on the structure of these laws.

And so when you hear Judeo-Christian ethic, that means Judeo-Jewish Christian, Old Testament and New Testament, similar philosophy of thought.

The laws that began in our nation was English common law, and the textbook for lawyers at that time that were understanding the common law, the textbook was written by a guy named Blackstone.

You may have heard that story before.

Blackstone made it clear that English common law, for the most part, was built on the structure of the Ten Commandments.

Common law, you have two types of law.

You have the legislative law that's passed and written down by a legislature or given by a monarch or something, and then you have the common law, which is the function of laws that help us as a society do commerce, treat each other properly, all that kind of stuff.

And those are understood by judges in the court and they apply those common laws, and those are built on the Ten Commandments.

So it looks halfway normal to us to read some of these things.

But if you go back and do a little bit of history lesson and step out of our American Judeo-Christian culture and you look at what was created, it was shocking.

There was a clear understanding under Jewish law, as you see as God established it, that people matter.

There's a strong foundation of the sanctity of life.

There are no classes in Jewish structure as God created it here in the foundation of the nation.

Individuals were individuals.

There were incredible protections for the vulnerable, foreigners who were traveling who could be taken advantage of.

The poor, widows and orphans.

If you've read the structure, you've read the thing about, like if a guy seduces a virgin, he's got to pay all this money for all that.

Was because it was a sin and a crime, because a young girl in that time was a vulnerable person, not able to control herself.

The law protected her.

As you read through that, there were protections for women in that culture that never existed in other nations, as an example.

And because of that foundation, what we would call Western or Judeo-Christian world has continued to advance protections for women in a way that other nations, cultures, and legal systems around the world still haven't.

They still haven't accomplished that.

And yet, this foundation that we see that God places, it puts a premium on individuals and the care of individuals.

It also puts a premium on responsibility.

You are responsible for what you do.

And so God is establishing a standard of righteousness in this nation, and he is teaching that you are responsible for your choices and whether you behave in a righteous fashion or not.

There are things in here like we would refer to due process and trials.

And he talks about lawsuits.

If a poor person goes to the law, go brings a lawsuit, you're not to push against them just because they're poor.

If there is a death that happens that people are involved in, there's a process you have to determine.

Was that a murder?

Was that an accident?

Was that a manslaughter type deal?

Last summer we talked about the cities of refuge and the picture of the gospel that that is.

And some of those legal underpinnings that we take for granted that were literally created by God Himself as He established a nation to stand out and be unique in the world to illustrate the coming of the promised Redeemer, of the standard of holiness that you have to follow in order to be a follower of God through the Redeemer and the process that He would of forgiveness He would create.

So it's important, I think, for us to acknowledge in a lot of ways that our underpinning or fundamental structure of government and law is rooted in this Old Testament structure.

But the purpose of that was for God to establish a nation.

And if you'll remember when we talked about cities of refuge and that process last year, one of the places where God is describing that, he says, When the nations around you see you, they will see you as a righteous people.

And so God is saying, you have to function differently than the world around you.

You have a purpose that is unique, and you are going to illustrate the standard of righteousness.

You are going to illustrate proper worship.

You're going to illustrate a standard of holiness and punishment for sin and personal responsibility to make a choice to follow Jehovah God, and you are going to function this way as my people, as a lighthouse to point the way for the redeemer that we will bring.

Now it becomes even more significant when you look over into 1 Peter, and he says, We're a royal priesthood and a holy nation when you're beginning to unpack the creation of the nation of Israel and their purposefulness.

Finally, you get to the last standard.

God established a standard of holiness to call people to redemption.

We have the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, and you know those or most of them and can recite them and you'll walk through them.

But here's the discussion that we have to understand.

What God is pointing out in a world that doesn't understand sin, that right and wrong, it's whatever you make it up to be, and all that kind of stuff, we are, God is establishing as the fundamental structure of his people, I have a standard of holiness that you must meet.

And the purpose of the Ten Commandments is to elevate that standard of holiness and to point out to us, none of us are holy.

As the Bible says in the book of Romans, all have sinned and fallen short of God's glory.

Jesus, the Bible says, did not come to abolish the law or destroy the law.

Jesus came to fulfill the law.

The law still serves the same purpose in a sense of pointing out our sin.

But here's what happens.

As you begin to read about sacrifices and all this stuff about sprinkling blood on the people and the blood and the covenants and the blood sacrifice, and as you see, the tabernacle and all that sort of stuff, what you're understanding is God is telling people, you are a sinner, I'm going to judge you by my holiness.

But I have provided a means of forgiveness.

And everything in their Old Testament worship is a picture of the Messiah who would come.

It's fascinating to read the tabernacle and to study all that.

Many of you have done that.

You know it's incredible.

When you first stood out and you read five, eight pages of that, and you're going, like, what do I care what the rings were and like the poles this wide and this tall and all that?

Like, what do I care about all that?

Well, when you begin to study it, you realize that every single detail and aspect is a picture of Jesus.

All of the gold, all of the wood, all of the colors, all of the structure, all of that is a picture of Jesus.

And then they brought their sacrifices into the picture of Jesus, and the sacrifice is a picture of Jesus.

And he's teaching them: without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins.

There must be payment for your sin.

You have violated my law and standard of holiness, and only a blood sacrifice can pay the price for that sin.

In other words, the wages of sin is death.

When Jesus came, Jesus lived a sinless life.

He lived fully in compliance with the law.

Jesus never broke the law, he fulfilled the law.

And where the law for all of us would say Greg is going to be judged, and Greg is going to go to hell unless he turns to the promise of the Redeemer that God provides.

Jesus is that Redeemer.

Jesus completely fulfilled the law.

He lived in accordance with God's holiness.

He was holiness.

Therefore, there would be no judgment or death attached to the person of Jesus because he was sinless.

He met the standard of the law.

But that meant as the Redeemer, he could voluntarily go to the cross, and there he could die a death that was sinless with no adjudgment attached to it.

It's a free death, if you will, that can now be applied to someone else.

And when You come to Jesus as your Savior, you are recognizing under the law, I am a sinner and my sin must be punished.

But you're recognizing that God loved us so much that Jesus stepped out of heaven and he died in my place because he fulfilled the law.

He was holy.

A holy person died.

And if I will place my faith in him and trust in God's promise of redemption through him, his death becomes a substitute payment for my sin, and his righteousness is imputed or placed on me as a Savior.

Jesus fulfilled the law.

He didn't come to destroy the law.

Jesus used the law.

If you remember in here, the Bible says, with the sanctity of life and all those laws about murders and killings and all that other stuff, Jesus said the law is to point out your heart.

The law says, do not kill, but if in your heart you hate someone and you verbally curse them from hatred in your heart, you have done the same thing.

You have violated that sense of law or holiness.

And you know you must ask for forgiveness and turn to the Redeemer to be saved.

And so what happens?

Galatians chapter 3 tells us that the law was a schoolmaster, or maybe a guardian, if you will.

Galatians 3 · chapter mention

It's that teacher that we're under.

Scripture has imprisoned everything under sin's power because no one can meet the law.

So that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe in him.

Before this faith came, we were confined under the law.

We were imprisoned until the coming faith was revealed.

In other words, there was nothing that could save me under the law except for the promised Redeemer who had come.

And now that Jesus has come, he has fulfilled the law, it is the coming faith that has been revealed in Jesus, and now he frees us from the penalty of the law because he saves us.

And only he can save us.

In Hebrews chapter 7, all throughout the book of Hebrews, but including in Hebrews chapter 7, it talks about how you had a high priest who would go through these ceremonies that you're going to read, but he it was he was relying on the promise of the Redeemer who would come.

Hebrews 7 · chapter mention Hebrews 7 · chapter mention

He was still a man, he had still sinned, he was bringing those sacrifices, and the Bible said he would have to cleanse himself before he went in, and then he would bring the sacrifice on behalf of the people, and all of that is their faith pointing to and believing that one day God would send a redeemer.

And now Jesus has come and he's the ultimate high priest because he has accomplished what all that we're reading about now was projecting and prophesying would come.

And so now, because we are saved under Jesus, if we know him as our Savior, because we have given him our life and because he has saved us, we are now, as 1 Peter says, we are now the royal priesthood and the holy nation.

All of a sudden, that passage of Scripture in 1 Peter becomes radically more significant.

If you think about the uniqueness of the nation of Israel, and when God put in laws and a standard and all of that that the rest of the world didn't understand and they started to look to, and God is elevating that, we as the church, as the saved people who've placed our faith in Jesus Christ, we've realized our forgiveness from the law.

We are to stand out in the world every bit as much as the nation of Israel stood out in its historical development.

We're to be as strange and peculiar and different to the world around us as the Jewish structure was to the nations and the people around them.

We are to have the significant lifestyle that is different than the world around us, that causes people to see Jesus and to turn to him.

Our lives should be that beacon that calls for the world to see that God has set in place something different than anybody else will ever tell you.

That he, as Almighty God, has established a process for us to be forgiven and to be redeemed.

And that process is invested in those who have placed their faith and worship him, and we are to bring that to the world around us.

Our faith is not our own, it is the one God has created to bring redemption to the world.

I grew up hearing people say stuff like this: Well, you know, you shouldn't really talk about religion, you're going to offend people or whatever.

We are a royal priesthood to the world around us.

Our role and purpose in being is to illustrate the gospel and point the world around us to Jesus, the Savior, the promised redeemer.

Our pursuit of holiness should be in such a way that we are pursuing Him.

That's why Peter says, Be holy because I am holy.

We are trying to strive for holiness in our lives as Christians because Jesus redeemed us and saved us from all of that, and because we have a purpose.

It is our calling and purpose in being to be the example of God's redemption to a world that needs to be saved.

Paul said this in his letter to Timothy, one of his letters to Timothy.

For this very reason I was saved.

He didn't say so I wouldn't go to hell.

He didn't say so I wouldn't be, you know, I could walk with Jesus.

He didn't say because my marriage would be saved, or I'd be pulled out of this, whatever.

Paul said this, for this very reason I was saved.

To be an example of God's mercies to those who can and need to be saved.

Our purpose in being is to be the nation that God has established to shout the name of Jesus and illustrate the redemption of the gospel.

Man, these these moments in the Old Testament that we see give great depth and understanding to the moments that we see in the New Testament.

Two things I want you to think about before we close.

As the people of God, are we striving for that purpose to be so different?

We're a lighthouse of God's standard of holiness and plan for redemption.

On Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, are you an example of God's holiness and plan for redemption?

In the workplace, on the ball fields, all of these places that we interact with people who need Jesus, are we that standard that we're called to be?

As radical as the nation of Israel was to the world around it, we are to be that unique in the world around us.

Second thing, if you've never been saved, I want to invite you to give your life to Jesus.

I hope through this, as you're reading and understanding this, there are two things that should grab your heart and mind.

Number one, the incredible extent to which God went to create a way for you to be redeemed and to point the way that Jesus is the redeemer.

And hopefully, in some way, some of this may hit you in a unique way that you haven't thought about.

And I want to invite you to give your life to Jesus Christ today.

I want you to bow your heads as we close.

And if you've never been saved, I want to invite you, in just a moment, I'm going to pray God's people are going to stand and sing a testimony of salvation.

We'll have deacons and ministers here at the front or whatever.

We're here just to help you in your journey.

Nobody arm twists you.

We're not trying to talk you into anything.

Pastor Waggrup used to say all the time, anything he could talk us into, somebody else could talk us out of.

But if you've if you really understand and the Holy Spirit has spoken to your heart, we want to be here to pray with you, give you some scripture.

If we need to set up meetings during the week, have coffee, whatever, we're always glad to do that.

We are here to help you in your journey.

And if you've never been saved, I want to invite you to give your life to Christ or to make a commitment to sit down with one of us and let's talk through that together, pray through that together, and answer any questions you might have about being saved.

Lord, we thank you for today, and I thank you for the richness of Scripture.

And I pray, Father, that in my sort of babblings that come out, that the Holy Spirit will show the incredible unity and richness of Scripture and how it all works together.

And I pray as we're reading through this chronological Bible and Scripture that we'll see these moments and connect these dots and we'll see the extent to which you went to bring a redeemer to the world.

For God so loved the world means so much deeper truth when we see through Abraham, through Moses, through Israel, through sacrifices, through prophets, that Jesus comes and all of that you did to identify him as the Savior.

Lord, I pray if there's someone who needs Jesus through the word, through our love as a church, through the work of the Holy Spirit speaking in their hearts, you'll give them a freedom to respond to your call to salvation.

We pray these things in the saving name of Jesus and all God's people since.

We pray this message has been a blessing to you and helped to strengthen your walk with Jesus.

Please know we want to minister to you and pray for you.

Send an email to contact us at fsfbc.org and let us pray for you and help you in any way we can.

Thank you for listening to chapter and first, the Bible teaching ministry of Fort Smith at the First Baptist Church.