Deliverance

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Preacher: Ross Macdonald Scripture: Exodus 14:21-31

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Well, here we are as we finish out chapter 14 together this morning. We are finally on our way out of Egypt.
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Of course, the way out of Egypt is through the path of the sea, and so that's what we're considering beginning in verse 21 together.
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Now, we've been tracking the presence of God for the past few weeks.
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We've seen God's guiding presence in the day by a pillar of cloud, by the night as a pillar of fire,
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His illuminating protection. Of course, we left off at chapter 14 last week where God was darkness to the
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Egyptians, darkness to the enemies of His people, and yet light to His people. So in His protecting presence, the very presence that brought protection and will bring salvation to His people brings darkness and destruction to the enemies of God.
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The same presence of God is life unto one and death to the other. The same saving gospel of God brings life to those who are being saved, death to those who are perishing.
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God's protecting presence, of course, is encapsulated in Psalm 105, which we considered in part last week.
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He spread cloud for a covering and fire to illumine by night. Well, we are still in the thick of the night.
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The darkness is only beginning to wane, and as the darkness wanes, Pharaoh, we'll see, is about to pour his forces forth through the sea to try to bring about a great destruction upon the people of God.
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But God will deliver them. So in verses 21 through 31, we'll sort of move through in three distinct movements.
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Verses 21 and 22, we see the division of the sea, the division. In verses 23 and 25, we have the drive of Pharaoh's forces, and then 26 to 31, the deliverance of the people of God.
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So the division, the drive, and the deliverance. And then we'll unpack with verse 30 and 31 some application toward the end.
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Beginning in verse 21, Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the
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Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night and made the sea into dry land, and the waters were divided.
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So the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea on the dry ground, and the waters were a wall to them on their right hand and on their left.
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Moses stretches out his arms once more. It's been several chapters since we've seen this enactment of Moses, but with every plague we saw him lift up the rod, that sort of extension of the power of God, the might of the hand of the
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Lord, and whenever his hands were cast down, so was the plague cast down upon the land of Egypt.
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Here God once more tells His mediator to stretch out His hand, and with that human hand outstretched, we see the hand of God outstretched.
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God is the one that is acting through the mediator, through Moses. Of course, that brings us to gospel fulfillment, that God is always acting in and through the mediator by the
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Spirit. God is the one acting, that's very clear. The Lord caused the sea. We don't read that Moses stretched out
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His hand and Moses caused the sea. Moses is merely a vessel being used by the power of God.
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And what God does is He brings about a strong east wind. Now, God uses the means of the wind, but this doesn't take away the miraculous nature of this great act.
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And unfortunately, there's all manner of naturalistic explanations that try to downplay the activity of God.
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And it's almost like Bible scholars get very excited when they can come up with some sort of naturalistic theory, wind set -down theory.
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We can use swamp boats, the powerful fans on their motors, to recreate something like the
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Red Sea crossing. And I don't think we have to jump through these kinds of loops. God uses means,
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He employs nature, but He does so in a supernatural way. Calvin, I think, says this so well.
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He's certainly able to dispel waters without any motion of the air. He doesn't need to raise a strong east wind to divide the waters.
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But what is He showing forth in bringing forth a strong wind, a strong ruach, a strong spirit?
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All the same word in Hebrew. He's showing that it's the Spirit who is moving to divide the waters.
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Now, in a moment, we'll see why that's very significant. But for now, just note, God can do this any way
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He sees fit, and He sees fit to raise a wind, a ruach, to divide the waters to bring forth salvation.
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Of course, this division is beyond the ordinary operation of nature. And that's why it breaks the people out into the
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Song of Moses in the next chapter. They understand that this is a miraculous deliverance of God.
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In order to save His people, the Lord chooses to bring them through water. And this is a very important theological theme in Scripture.
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Whenever we see a miracle, it's not God putting on a magic show. Jesus doesn't go around in the three years of His ministry trying to convince people that He can conjure up all manner of power.
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He's not a parlor trick, but rather the miracles are emblems of God's saving activity.
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So there's added significance or weight to demons being cast out, to the blind receiving their sight, to the lame being able to walk, the paralytics jumping up for joy.
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This was the good news, Luke 4, that Jesus came to proclaim. In their very hearing, they would know
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He was the Promised One. He was the long -awaited Messiah. C .S. Lewis explained this so well.
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Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story written across the whole world in letters too large for most to see.
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Miracles blind as much as they reveal. It's only those who understand the nature of the Gospel that understand the nature of the miracle.
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The Lord here is bringing about a division. Again, a very important theological theme.
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Psalm 77, beginning in verse 19, recounts this. Your path in the great waters.
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Your footsteps were not known. You led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron.
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Significant that God's path is through the sea, through the waters. All through the book of Exodus we've seen water as an emblem of peril.
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Moses was delivered from the waters that would have otherwise consumed him. The chaos waters, the deep, the place of absolute violence and wrath.
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These are the waters that the psalmist constantly takes up. The floodwaters that rise up and threaten his life, and yet God lifts him up from the waters for God sits above the floods and thrones.
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It's significant that God makes the sea into dry land. We have it bookending our passage at the end of 14.
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It's repeated both here and at the end, that God turned the sea into dry land.
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We read it again. Israel went into the midst of the sea on dry ground.
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Now it's been some time since we've rehearsed this, but I trust you remember from Genesis we spoke about understanding
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God's work of redemption in a four -fold way. We begin with God's work of creation and where sin or man's depravity is at work,
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God's creation turns back on itself. And so God answers that rebellion with decreative judgment.
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He sends judgment in such a way that creation is turned upside down. Rather than stars being fixed, the stars fall from the sky.
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Rather than dry ground emerging from the waters, the dry ground is submerged in the waters.
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And all of this is very significant. In Genesis 1, God brings forth a division. Dry ground appears from the deep.
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And then what happens? Man's depravity, the fallenness of man, is answered by the decreative judgment of the flood.
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Though He spares Noah and his family, God submerges all of the earth back into water. Rather than dry land coming out, the dry land is forced back, plunged into the deep.
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But in His work of salvation and mercy, God spares Noah and his family, and dry ground emerges once more.
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And so we have this picture of renewal, of redemption. It's the same thing going on here in Exodus. And then again in Joshua, when we get to Joshua and they're crossing over the
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Jordan River, the ground becomes dry. A path is made through the river for the people of God.
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Again and again we have this image of that decreative judgment of the flood or of the deep being made dry ground for the deliverance of God's people.
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It's a picture of salvation. And that is why, brother and sister, we baptize.
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Not something we'll go into depth this morning, no pun intended, but there's some significance to us being submerged into the waters and brought forth.
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It's a submersion into the wrath of God, into the crucifixion of Christ. That being raised from the waters is like being raised into the new life, the resurrection life of our
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Savior. Now not only is the ground dry, but the waters are like a wall to them.
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You can do what every cinematographer and animator has done for many decades now and try to imagine that scene.
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I wish you were all good artists because I would just love to know what this scene looks like in your mind as we employ our imagination.
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For me, an eight foot deep pool will not do. I think of walls of water, a pathway perhaps a half mile wide.
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There are millions of Israelites traveling through. This would have been absolutely immense.
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Remember, it's dark. God's presence is light to his people, but it's dark.
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And I can only imagine the mist. I can picture Israelite boys and girls, if they're like my kids, look at the starfish we found, look at the shells that we got.
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We gotta get going. The chariots are coming. You can picture this scene.
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The waters have now become a wall, a corridor through the sea, all retained by the hands of God, as though by his spirit he has submerged his hands into the waters and separated the pathway, guiding them out.
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And yet it takes great faith on the part of God's people to walk through the sea. It's always an act of faith to walk through the deep, to walk through the waters, to walk through that corridor of darkness.
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And so in this very way, the people of God, seeing God's great deliverance, exercise their faith in following his way.
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And that is always the nature of our deliverance. The Lord guides, the Lord guards, and so they proceed by faith.
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They walk by faith, not by sight. If God had made a way, they could trust him, that as this work has begun, he would continue them through until the end.
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And of course, that which they probably feared at the beginning becomes the very song of joy by the end.
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The darkness and the threat becomes light and joy and peace. And so this is the division of the water.
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And notice in verse 23 and following we have the drive. Now the whole narrative focuses on what the
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Egyptians are up to. We leave temporarily the people of God and we see the Egyptian forces mounting up.
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Verse 23, The Egyptians pursued and went after them into the midst of the sea, all
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Pharaoh's horses, his chariots, his horsemen. All Pharaoh's forces, essentially, are now streaming into this opening.
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They have blood in their sight. The people of God are within reach.
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They have bows drawn and swords raised, spears prepared to strike, and the charge has begun.
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You can imagine those who are in the back. Have you ever seen videos of Black Friday? When the doors open and waves of panic as there's sort of a stampede in through that narrow opening of the storefront?
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That must have been something like what the people of God felt at the back. As they feel the horses' nostrils breathing down their back and there's this push, this stampede of activity toward the front.
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The darkness is just beginning to pass. Rays of light just begin to pierce the night.
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And this must have given the Egyptian forces great confidence. Remember that the chief god of the
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Egyptians was Ra, the god of the sun. And so perhaps Yahweh owns the night. That ninth plague of darkness was severe.
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But now the light has come. Ra is with us. Forward Egyptians! Unfortunately, they chose to drive forward at the worst possible time.
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And God, of course, in protecting His people, troubles them. We read,
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He took off their chariot wheels and they drove them with difficulty. So God looks at them through the pillar, this sort of look of wrath, of judgment upon the enemy of His people, and He frustrates them in their pursuit.
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He strips their chariots of the wheels. Now the Hebrew verb there would perhaps better be translated
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He turned aside. But the root most likely is to bind or to clog. We can't imagine that all the wheels just sprung off and now they're sort of sledding across the sea floor.
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But it's effectively as though He removed the wheels. That's the point. They're clogged. They're bound up.
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And so they're driving through with difficulty. The dry ground is already beginning to moisten.
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And so the wheels are beginning to sink and the chariots are getting frozen in the sea floor. This morning watch now is becoming light.
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And God, as He's troubling them, is freezing them in such a way that the people of God can have this holy confidence.
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God is paralyzing the chariots of the enemy. And we need to take heart that so often it seems that God's people are in peril, and yet in a moment
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God can cripple their advance. We need to take heart. He often does it in such a way that we feel the threat, we feel the breath of persecution, and we're fearful, as many of the
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Israelites were fearful. But take heart that the same God who opened the sea is the
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God who cripples the chariots. And He has a purpose in allowing the forces to even get that far.
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He has a purpose in allowing the Israelites to cry out for deliverance. And so it always is with His people.
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But we also see this utter folly of sin. These Egyptian forces forgot the plagues.
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And now they're driving after the people of God with greater and greater difficulty.
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It's an absolute display of human arrogance. This is what God does with the great and rebellious empires of the world.
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They're reduced to cowardice. What do they cry out at the end here? Let us flee. Monty Python, run away.
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That's all they can do. The Lord is fighting for Israel. They recognize, and notice they're the first to recognize, that the
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Lord is fighting for the people of God. So before the lips of Moses describe
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God as the warrior on behalf of His people in chapter 15, the Egyptians under God's judgment are forced to praise
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God even in His wrath, as the psalmist would say. The Lord is fighting for His people.
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The Lord always fights for His people. And He brings forth this great deliverance.
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We go from the division and the drive to the deliverance. Verse 26, The Lord said to Moses, stretch your hand over the sea, that the waters may come back upon the
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Egyptians, on their chariots and on their horsemen. And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea and when the morning appeared, the sea returned to its full depth, while the
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Egyptians were fleeing into it. And so the Lord overthrew the Egyptians in the midst of the sea.
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The waters returned and covered the chariots and horsemen and all the army of Pharaoh that came into the sea after them.
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Not so much as one of them remained. Do you remember what He said earlier in this chapter? You'll never see these
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Egyptians again. No one will ever see these Egyptians again. So far has
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God removed the enemies from His people. But the children of Israel had walked on dry land in the midst of the sea, and the waters were a wall to them on their right hand and on their left.
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So we have this nice refrain, the bookending of the event with this verse 29. The Lord saved.
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I would push for a translation, the Lord delivered Israel. And it's the same word, and the same word is translated throughout the
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Old Testament, either as saved or delivered. And there may be contextual reasons why one could be preferable.
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And almost all translations just go with saved here. The Lord saved Israel. Has that nice connotation of salvation.
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But I prefer deliverance. Because we're being brought through the sea, God is delivering
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His people. And I think perhaps it's best understood in this way. We don't often speak of deliverance.
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And I think sometimes we miss the connotation of salvation because we don't use the word deliverance often enough.
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So I'm going to go with deliverance and I hope I can get to that for you shortly. The Lord delivered
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Israel that day out of the hand of the Egyptians. We constantly find the cry of the psalmist, deliver me from the hand of my enemy.
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Deliver me from the clutch of my tyrant or my slave master.
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The Lord delivered Israel that day out of the hand of the Egyptians. And Israel looked and saw all the
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Egyptians dead on the seashore. The Lord overthrew.
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The verb there is literally shook off or shook away. In Nehemiah 5, He shakes
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His garment. And He's like, this is how God is shaking out the defiled among His people.
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And that's what God is doing here. He's shaking down, throwing down, shaking off the enemy.
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The scene is devastating. It's a devastating judgment. It's a complete military rout.
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Norman Schwarzkopf in Desert Storm couldn't have dreamed of a victory like this. Not so much as one remained.
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There wasn't one avid swimmer that made it back to shore and ran to tell the others.
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Every single enemy had been slaughtered. What a vivid picture of judgment this is.
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Not one remains. The judgment of God, it comes in a sudden.
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How fast did that water come crashing down? I can only imagine the weight, the thunderous collapse of that water.
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Almost as soon as they could even react to it, it was upon them. And so often, that is how God's judgment falls upon the unrepentant.
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God owes no warning. He doesn't have to do what often in World War II the
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Allied bombers would do. They'd go through a town and they'd drop leaflets, you're about to be bombed. God doesn't need a megaphone to say warning, judgment is coming.
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And so judgment can come all of a sudden. And death will often surprise an unrepentant sinner.
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It will often surprise their family and their loved ones. You can begin to question
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God in this way. James Orr was writing a few centuries ago, but still anticipating this sort of reaction, which comes from a misunderstanding of the supremacy and holiness and majesty of God.
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And so we say, what a waste of human life. How unlike a God of mercy.
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And James Orr says, no. How striking a testimony of the reality of retribution.
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You're on borrowed breath. Borrowed time. Borrowed rain. Borrowed sun. God owes you nothing but judgment.
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The delay is the mercy. When it comes crashing all of a sudden, that is not a cause for any grievance.
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That is simply a solemn reminder of the righteousness of retribution. God will not always permit sinners to defy
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Him. And that is why the psalmist so often in recounting this episode of the
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Red Sea Deliverance use it as an opportunity to plead for mercy. Plead for mercy.
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Because as all God's people need to recognize, they understood there was no difference between the
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Israelite and the Egyptian apart from God's grace. God could have chosen Egypt to be
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His people and made covenants with them. And all of this would have been reversed. But God chose Israel to be
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His people. And so the psalmist begins to cry out in Psalm 106 moving toward this very narrative.
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Remember me, O Lord, with the favor You have toward Your people. Visit me with Your salvation, so I may see the benefit of Your chosen ones, that I might rejoice in the gladness of Your nation, that I might glory with Your inheritance.
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We have sinned against our fathers. We have committed iniquity. We have done wickedly.
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Our fathers in Egypt did not understand Your ways. They didn't remember the multitude of Your mercies. They rebelled by the sea.
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Do you hear that? They rebelled even at the hour of their deliverance.
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Where did we leave them off last week? Grumbling and complaining. We've been brought here just to die?
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I wish we never were brought out. I wish we stayed in Egypt. We would have been better off. And the psalmist here is saying, they were in rebellion.
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What sets them apart from the Egyptian? The fact that God had made promises to them.
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That God undertook to save them. That God promised an inheritance to the seed of Abraham. That God was a
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God rich in mercy. And though they had forgotten those mercies and rebelled at the sea, nevertheless, they were delivered by God.
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According to His faithfulness. And so the psalmist says, You saved them for Your namesake. To make
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Your power known. You see, that's why the psalmist is beginning this episode with visit me with Your salvation.
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I know I don't deserve it. I know nothing sets me apart from anyone else but You.
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And that is just what God does. He rebuked the Red Sea, the psalmist writes.
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It dried up. He led His people through the depths as though the wilderness.
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He saved them from the hand of Him who hated them. Again, He delivered them. And redeemed them.
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And the waters covered their enemies. There was not one left. You can go to the Worcester Art Museum, which
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I commend you to do. It's been a while now since I've been there. But I used to love going there. And I believe in the 19th century gallery, it's sort of 18th, 19th century gallery toward the right when you enter.
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There's a study of a painting done by Benjamin West of the destruction of Pharaoh's army.
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And it's rather small. It's not a finished piece. It was a study for something larger that he did. But it's this incredible image, especially for its time.
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The way that he structured the image is so atypical for the 19th century.
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But again, it's a study, so that would make sense. But basically, it's all these Egyptian forces and horses and chariots sort of in a laundry cycle.
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They're all being flipped around and turned upside down. And the scene is of utter panic. And it's such a striking snapshot of what that judgment looked like.
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But again, with projection toward the Gospel, we're reminded that the judgment of God is the means by which
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God's people are saved. Judgment must fall if God's people are to be saved.
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Now, another way we look at this judgment of God, this retribution of God, is we look at the larger flow of the story of Exodus.
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Michael Morales is so helpful in his book on Exodus bringing this out. We remember that in Exodus 4,
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God made the demand upon Pharaoh, let my son go, let Israel go, or I will kill your son.
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That was Exodus 4. You remember Exodus 1, how Pharaoh had ordered all the firstborn sons of Israel to be thrown into the waters, to be killed in the deep.
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And now here in Exodus 14, God is following through on his demand. You killed the firstborn sons of Israel, and so I will kill your son.
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You threw My children into the deep, and so I will throw your children into the deep.
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So this is retribution upon the empire of Egypt. God bringing just judgment upon their evil.
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And then we fit this together. There's sort of this poetic justice, but it's also tied in with this
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Passover redemption. Remember, God redeems the firstborn son of His people.
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And so all this together paints this picture of salvation. It's the justice of God and the mercy of God.
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It's retribution upon evil, and yet mercy upon the people that He has loved.
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And now, because of that love, the enemy lays dead behind. The promised land, glorious in its potentiality,
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Moses himself understood that God had delivered. Again, same word, but translated differently.
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In Exodus 18, when Moses explains to Jethro all that had happened, he says this.
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Moses told his father -in -law all that the Lord had done to Pharaoh, all the hardship that had come upon the people on their way, and how the
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Lord delivered them. And Jethro said this, blessed be the Lord who has delivered you, who has delivered the people from under the hand of the
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Egyptians. And so we have this picture of delivering. You know, I'm playing with the possibility that in a microcosmic way, this narrative is embedded in the
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Lord's prayer. You have the serpentine enemy of the people of God, Pharaoh, rushing toward them in destruction, and God delivers them.
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And the Lord taught us to pray, deliver us from the evil one. In Nehemiah 9, we have the same picture of God's great deliverance.
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You divided the sea. They went through it as on dry land. Their persecutors You threw into the deep like a stone into raging water.
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And this is God's promise to His people that He will deliver them. Isaiah 46, Listen to Me, O house of Jacob, all the remnant house of Israel.
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You have been upheld by Me from birth. You've been carried from the womb even to your old age.
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I am Me. Even to the gray hairs, I will carry you. I have made.
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I will bear. I will carry. Even I will deliver you. So here is
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God carrying His newborn nation, as it were, through the waters of judgment to the dry land of promise.
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What's the implication? Well, for application, I simply want to take verses 30 and 31 and draw it out.
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So we have three responses to God's deliverance. So in verse 30, we have
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God's deliverance, right? And so the Lord delivered Israel that day out of the hand of the
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Egyptians. Then we have three responses. Thus, verse 31,
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Thus Israel saw the great work which the Lord had done in Egypt. And so the people feared the
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Lord. And so the people believed the Lord and His servant Moses.
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So do you notice, the Lord delivered, and as a result, three things. The people saw, the people feared, and the people believed.
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The Lord delivered, the people saw, they feared, and they believed.
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Let's begin with seeing. The people saw. The Lord's work of salvation is something to behold.
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Something to see. It has occurred in history. As, not worth reading for other reasons, but as Henri de
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Lubac, who is a French philosopher, and he said,
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Christianity is not one of the great gifts of history. History is one of the great gifts of Christianity.
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Within history, we see, we behold the saving activity of God.
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It is something for the people to see. Not just these Israelites who had been delivered through the
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Red Sea, but every generation of Israelites afterward recounted in song and in festival and in poetry and devotion, in public teaching and in sacrifice.
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Constantly the people were looking at what God had done. The Lord's work of salvation is something we are meant to behold.
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We don't do it physically with sight. We do it, rather, with the eyesight of faith.
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We do it with the eyes of our heart. Christians will know, perhaps, what
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I'm getting at with that. Where do I look? An inquisitive seven -year -old might say, what do you mean, see?
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What am I looking at? A picture book? A historical site? What do you mean, behold what the
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Lord has done? You have to look with the sight of faith, with the eyes of your heart. You look back and you behold.
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Though you can't physically see the Mount of Calvary, with the eyesight of faith, you look back.
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You know your guilt was there. You take refuge under the shadow of the cross. Some of the most moving times of seminary, it didn't happen very often, but it was always a blessing when it did.
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Or when the professors, I can think of two in particular, they'd be so caught up in what they were saying. Though they taught the same course year after year for decades, they'd be so caught up that they'd have to stop.
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And tears were just streaming down their cheeks. I remember my systematic professor, he would sort of move around and talk like this, and very composed and thoughtful and very quiet.
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You'd almost think he was emotionless. He was talking about the love of God and Christ and what union with Christ means for the believer.
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And he sort of turned his back for a moment and we thought, oh, he must be lost in his thoughts. And he just had to take a two -minute break because he was weeping.
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He had known everything he was teaching for 30 years. But he was seeing, he was beholding it with the sight of faith.
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And we look back in this very way to the great work of salvation that God has done and we behold it.
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So part of this is understanding not just the Exodus event in itself, but all that the Exodus event is pointing forward to.
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The full display and presentation of the Gospel. Remember that before Israel was to be free, they had to pass through the waters.
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And as Alistair Roberts, in his tremendous book, Echoes in Exodus, as he points out, we've just lost the ability to understand the significance of waters to the ancient mind.
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We, of course, have all sorts of railways and tunnels and incredible structures that bypass water and we get water where we need it to be.
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We don't think of water as a natural border in the way that an ancient would have. Water is a border, not only of geographical space, but even of time.
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Not only is it a boundary marker physically, but even spiritually. And all of this is part of the
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Exodus narrative. We were brought into Egypt, this land of waters, surrounded by the waters, as it were, between the great river of death with all of the
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Hebrew sons buried beneath, and the Red Sea. We're caught in the land of waters.
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Only one way out of that bondage, out of that dominion of the serpentine ruler. And it's going to be through the waters of death.
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Through the waters of judgment. And so Noah passes through the deep and puts his foot upon a new world.
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Jacob passes through the deep. Remember the brook Jabbok? And he's given a new name.
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A new identity. New life, as it were. Joshua crosses through the waters and puts his foot into a new land of promise.
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John brings the repentant through waters and they emerge into a new kingdom.
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Jesus comes and pours forth living water and all of the boundaries and borders and all of the judgment that separated the people of God is dissolved in those waters.
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Jew, Greek, male, female, slave, free, all are one in the baptism of Christ. And even more than this, we see
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Jesus as a deliverer like unto Moses. There's a stunning allusion that I think is easily lost.
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In the beginning of Mark, we have Jesus being taken out of the water.
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And when He's taken out of the water in Mark 1 .10, He sees the heavens being opened, being sort of torn open before Him.
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And that's exactly what's taking place in Exodus 2. Moses is named Moses because He was taken out of water.
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The same exact phrase in the Septuagint. Mark knows that. And he's saying a greater deliverer has come.
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One that was taken up from water. So what is true of Moses is true of Israel.
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It's the people of God being brought through water. And Jesus as Israel must repeat
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Israel descending into the waters of judgment in order to emerge victorious. In other words,
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Israel's baptism through the sea is a foreshadowing of Jesus' baptism through the sea, which is a great picture of Him being submerged into the judgment of the cross and emerging forth victorious in the resurrection.
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That's the good news of the Gospel contained in Exodus. We are meant to behold it.
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Whenever you hear the good news of the Gospel, you are beholding what the Lord has done. You hear in order that you may see.
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You attend the Word of God in order that you may behold what manner of salvation you have received.
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The Word goes forth, we see with eyes of faith the great thing that the Lord has done. And all of this is rooted, is bound up in God's deliverance.
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Let me give you a few examples of the way this language of deliverance is employed. Of course, deliverance is rooted in the
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Gospel. We begin with satanic agency, human agency, like Pharaoh or the
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Egyptian forces. Matthew 26, the Son of Man will be delivered up to be crucified.
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Luke 24, not only will be, the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified.
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This must happen. He must be delivered up so that God may bring about deliverance.
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And this brings about God's sovereign and determined purpose. Isaiah 50, verse 2, is my hand so short
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I cannot ransom? Do I have no power to deliver? Behold, I dry up a sea with my rebuke.
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Romans 8, 32, he who did not spare his own son but delivered him up for us.
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How shall he not with him also freely give us all things? So our greatest need is now satisfied because Jesus who was delivered up by evil human and satanic agency had also been delivered up by the determinate purpose of God.
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He was delivered up for us all. And so we can say, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?
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I thank God through Jesus Christ. This is what He always promised. Israel will be saved,
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He says in Romans 11, even as it is written, the Deliverer will come. One greater than Moses.
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The Deliverer will come out of Zion. He will turn ungodliness away from Jacob. In Galatians 1, 4, our
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Lord Jesus Christ who gave Himself for our sins that He might deliver us from this present evil age.
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So all throughout Scripture we behold the deliverance. You might wish that you could have been an
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Israelite and see God move in that way. You might wish, if only I could have been on the banks, my heart pounding, adrenaline coursing through my veins as the forces closed in on me, and then miraculously
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I see the deep open before me and all of the people of God moving through it and then it closing and covering our enemy.
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If only I could see God move in that way. How rich my faith would be. How strong my walk would be.
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But brother, sister, you have received a far greater deliverance than that.
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Those Israelites perished in the way shortly after. We have an everlasting deliverance.
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We have a deliverance of our very souls, not just our bodies from the clutch of Pharaoh, but our souls.
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Our souls having been delivered by the redemptive blood of the
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Passover Lamb. A far greater deliverance. Angels probably don't care to look into a split sea, but angels long to look into the deliverance that you have received.
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How could it be that God would send His own Son and shed His blood to deliver you from the deep and the dark and the evil and the wrath?
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The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. This was the
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Lord's doing, and it's marvelous in our sight. So we see.
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The Gospel is something marvelous in our sight. But secondly, notice, not only do we see, we fear.
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The Lord delivered and the people feared. Now clearly, fear here is not being struck with terror.
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The idea is God moved in such a mighty way that they were flooded with awe, and they in their own way sort of fell to the ground.
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Reverence had overtaken them. So this is a filial fear. A response of awe to the might of God.
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To the salvation of God. This is not a fear of terror. Calvin explains this.
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He says fear here is used for reverence. And it led to duty.
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It was an attraction for the people to devote themselves to God because of the deliverance that they so sweetly and delightfully experienced.
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But notice that this fear, this natural reverence was short -lived.
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As it always is for those who do not have the Spirit of God at work in them.
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Even times of great activity of surprising twists and turns in the life will dry up and be forgotten.
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That fear, that reverence will never last unless you are truly saved and have the
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Spirit of God. And notice that this fear is tied with forgiveness. I want to keep in mind that deliverance equals forgiveness.
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And forgiveness brings about fear. Let me try to put that together. So Colossians 2 .13.
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I almost want to put someone on the spot because we memorized this at Menadnock this summer. I have to read it myself.
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God has delivered, there we are back to the language, God has delivered us from the power of darkness, conveyed us into the kingdom of the
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Son of His love, in whom we have redemption through His blood, that's Passover imagery, the forgiveness of sins.
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So we have deliverance and that is forgiveness, right? Deliverance equals forgiveness.
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But then that forgiveness leads to fear, almost counterintuitively. Forgiveness leading to fear.
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Psalm 130, three and four. If you, Lord, should mark iniquity,
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O Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with you so that you may be feared.
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There's forgiveness with God so that He may be feared. That's not the most natural thing that we would tie to forgiveness, is it?
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If the Lord marks our sins, we're utterly lost, but God forgives our sins through the blood of Christ and that leads to what?
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Fear. Fear here, just as in Exodus 14, cannot be a fear of facing judgment,
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God just saved them. It can't be a fear of facing wrath, God just forgave the sin.
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Do you see the logic of the psalmist? If what we find with God is forgiveness for our sins, then all terror is cast away.
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Perfect love has cast out fear. But not reverence, not humility, not awe, not broken, devoted gratitude.
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This is the fear of God that the psalmist has in mind. An unshakable knowledge that God will never mark iniquities against you.
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That He has forgiven your sins becomes the very soil from which the fruit of fear of reverence grows.
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There's no escaping this connection. Fearing God is the fruit of being forgiven. So when you meet someone who flippantly can speak of being forgiven, like I think
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I mentioned to some of you on Thursday, when I had the biopsy this week, and they're saying, don't swallow, don't breathe, don't move, and I've got this needle in my thyroid and I'm trying to sit still, and this guy asked what
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I did, and I said, oh, I'm a pastor. He's like, oh, that's great. All right, don't swallow, don't breathe, don't move.
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You're going to feel pinch burn, pinch burn, and there's this needle. And I'm like, ugh. He's going, yeah, I'm Roman Catholic, my wife's
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Lutheran, it's all the same. And I'm like frothing at the mouth, and he's like, yeah, you know, we're all forgiven one way or another.
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And then he gave this laundry list of good deeds. Oh, I've done medical missionary trips to Kenya. We love our pastor, she's great.
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And I'm like frothing at the mouth, trying not to move, heart rate. Why is his heart rate increasing so much?
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When you can speak about forgiveness so, oh, God just forgives. You do your best, you try hard.
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We all are crooked timber, but you just do the best you can and God forgives. He understands. Psalm 134 cannot understand that kind of reaction.
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If you've been forgiven, the fruit of receiving that genuine forgiveness will be shown in absolute reverence and devotion to God.
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Forgiveness is with you that you may be feared. And those who have truly been forgiven are those who say,
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I will never bring dishonor to my Savior. I dare not insult
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Him. How could I do something like this against Him? My life, my all belongs to Him now.
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That's what Psalm 130, verse 4 has in mind. Not this shallow, get out of hell free, cheap grace.
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Something that has understood its blood -bought grace. And it demands my life, my all.
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This is the reason why we fear God. Forgiveness, as much as any act of God reveals
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His incomprehensible majesty. Want to know how great the Lord is? It's not just in that He split a sea or crushed an army.
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The greatness of the Lord is that He sent His own Son so that He could forgive you. That's the greatness of God.
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It's incomprehensible. What eye has seen, what ear has heard this manner of wonder.
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And the reason why God shows mercy in this way is that His people will be bound to Him in gratitude and humility, in breathtaking awe of His love.
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Thomas Adams said, no man more truly loves God than the one who is most fearful to offend
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Him. No man more truly loves God than the one who is most fearful to offend
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Him. It's like that with a friend. A close friend. Someone that you just love and you adore.
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And you trip over yourself to make sure in no way that you've offended them. You don't want to do anything that would cause them any awkwardness, any hesitancy, any sense that something might be off.
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You go far and above and beyond to do anything to prove your love. To show your gratitude.
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To say, I love you. In so many different ways. And so it is for the Christian. There's a joy in our knowledge of forgiveness.
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But not only is there joy, there's fear. There's a reverence now. My sins have been forgiven and they did not deserve to be forgiven.
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I did not deserve to be forgiven. So my whole life now will be clothed with humility.
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I am a God -fearing man because I'm a forgiven man. I'm a humble, quiet, patient, long -suffering man because I'm a forgiven man.
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Forgiveness belongs to the Lord so that we may fear. I love what
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Spurgeon says on this in his Treasury of David. He says, none fear the Lord like those who have experienced
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His forgiving love. Again, counterintuitive, but true. Gratitude for pardon produces far more reverence for God than all the dread inspired by punishment.
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You see that? Try to stir up devotion and reverence in a person's life just by threat of judgment.
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It will be very short -lived. It will be scattered. It will be fickle. But when someone lays hold of the pardon of Christ's blood, there you have reverence.
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There you have gratitude. If the Lord were to execute justice on all, Spurgeon says, there would be none left to fear
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Him. The reason He's forgiven is that He may be feared. If all were under His deserved wrath, despair would harden them against fearing
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Him. It is a grace which leads the way to holy reverence for God.
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Grace leads the way to reverence. Now, we have to keep that in mind, brothers and sisters, by the way, because I think just as this is counterintuitive for the individual in their walk of faith, it can be counterintuitive to a church.
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We think there's not enough solemnity, there's not enough reverence, there's not enough humility and gratitude, so we better start preaching judgment.
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That'll really get people stirred up in humility before God. No, it's actually the other way around.
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You preach judgment in order that you may magnify the free and rich grace of God in and through Christ.
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And in doing so, that floods a person's heart and mind with gratitude and awe. Grace leads the way to reverence.
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Third and last, the Lord delivers and the people believed. The people believed the
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Lord, we read, and His servant Moses. In the recounting of this episode from the
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Gallery of Faith in Hebrews 11, we read this, By faith they passed through the
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Red Sea as by dry land. When the Egyptians attempted to do so, they drowned.
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Now, the main thing we're connecting here is belief. They believed the Lord. In Hebrews 11,
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By faith they passed through the Red Sea. So they believed the Lord. That's how they passed through.
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That's why they passed through. That's why they were brought through. And so it must be for everyone. Only by faith are we brought safely through, are we delivered.
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There is no deliverance apart from faith. There is no salvation apart from faith. Now, faith is a gift from God, but it's a gift that is received and must be exercised.
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In John 6, we read of Jesus saying, This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom
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He sent. They believed the Lord and His servant. Jesus says, this is God's work, that you believe not only in Me, but Me as the servant who
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God has sent. And this is the will of Him who sent Me, that everyone who sees the
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Son and believes in Him may have everlasting life. Christianity is a lot more than the exercise of faith.
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A lot more. But it's certainly not less. Christianity is the life's act of faith.
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It's a way of faith. It's a constant appropriation and reappropriation of faith.
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I have trusted in the Lord, therefore let me not be put to shame. Lord, I have trusted
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You. I have believed You. To whom else will I go, Lord? This is the will, Jesus says, of Him who sent
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Me, that everyone who looks to Me and believes in Me will be saved. I'll raise them up on the last day.
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So Christians don't engage in speculation or wishful thinking. Christians act in faith.
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We don't just assent to the truth of the Gospel. We give our hearts over to the Lord. The faith that God looks for, the faith that God supplies, is not superficial belief.
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It's not a hedging of odds. It's not Pascal's wager, though I think he was doing some cool Calvinistic angles there.
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No, it's a solid, firm, resolute confidence. An absolute trust in who
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God is and in what He's done, and in what that means. That is the faith that delivers. John 8,
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Jesus said to them again, I'm going away, and you will seek Me, but you will die in your sin.
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There's a seeking after that doesn't actually engage in faith. It doesn't lay hold of it.
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Even the weakest among them could say, Lord, I believe, but help my unbelief. But they weren't even willing to do that.
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They're interested to follow. They're interested to see. What teaching do you have? What sign will you show? Why wouldn't
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He just show up in my life and do something? If He just revealed Himself, if He just did something,
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I don't want to put Him to the test, but if He did something, then I would believe. Do you know what Jesus would say to you in such a state?
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You will seek Me, and you will die in your sins. Where I go,
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He says, you cannot come. The Jews were confused by this. Is He going to kill
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Himself? What is He talking about? Why is He saying, where I go, you cannot come?
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And He says to them, you're from beneath. I'm from above. You're of this world.
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I'm not of this world. This is why I said to you, you will die in your sins. For if you do not believe that I am, you will die in your sins.
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So, John's whole Gospel, it's amazing. You do a word search. Just go to Bible Gateway or Olive Tree or whatever you use and type in belief.
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Look at the Gospels and see how frequently that word appears. Look at the synoptics. Look at Matthew, Mark, and Luke. See belief here and there.
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A smattering. And then look at John and scroll through the pages of how frequently
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John is depicting and articulating and presenting what belief looks like and what it requires and what it doesn't look like.
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And here at John 8, we have this great distillation of what belief is. There can be a seeking after.
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There can be a curiosity. There can be an interest. You will follow Me, Jesus says, and you will die in your sins.
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Why? Because unless you believe that I am He, you will die in your sins.
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It's not enough to show up. It's not enough to follow after. It's not enough to have some disinterested curiosity.
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It's not enough to say, well, maybe someday after I'm done chasing and pursuing all these other things in my life that I want to have established and worked out and when
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I'm an old man in a sweater vest with salt and pepper hair, maybe then I'll give my life to the Lord. Fool, your life is required this very night and unless you believe, you will die in your sin.
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He who believes is not condemned, but he who does not believe is condemned already.
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John 3, 18. So you're not on the fork in the road.
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Oh, I always knew when I turned 17 I'd come to this fork. Will I choose belief or unbelief?
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Which will it be? As if you're neutral. No. If you don't believe, you are condemned already.
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You're already on a path a headlong path to destruction. You will die in your sins.
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That's what Jesus says. But if you believe in him, you are not condemned.
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So what does Jesus do? How does he articulate? Well, Jesus came to Galilee at the beginning of Mark.
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We read that he was preaching. We don't think of Jesus as a preacher very often, but Jesus was preaching at the beginning of the
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Gospel of Mark. And he's going around Galilee and this is what Jesus was preaching. The time is fulfilled.
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The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the Gospel. That sounds like what every preacher ever since has preached.
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The time is now. Repent and believe in the Gospel. You cannot believe in the
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Gospel unless God gives you belief. Faith is a gift. You cannot exercise what you have not received.
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And that's why Jesus says repent and believe. Repentance is a surrender.
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It's a turning around. It's saying, I see the weight. I see the guilt, Lord. I recognize my need and I recognize my helplessness to satisfy that need.
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Lord, I'm turning to you. I'm crying out to you. I repent. In that very act of repentance you are believing.
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I turn to you and believe that you will meet my supply. You have answered my need. You have sent your own
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Son that I would not be condemned. And if I believe in him, he will raise me up at the last. He himself has promised that all who the
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Father has given to him will come to him. And he promised that if I came to him, he would never turn me away. But he also said, if I don't, that I will die in my sins.
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If you come to SLBC tonight, and I hope you will, we're talking about effectual calling.
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We understand that there's a deliverance that you cannot produce or manufacture on your own.
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This is a deliverance that God ordains. And I don't, I'm not worried about having to qualify and footnote and measure out all the
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Calvinistic mechanics underneath this nature of God's call because if you have a hard heart, you don't have ears to hear it, it will make no sense to you in either direction.
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But more for the believers to understand the nature of this call. This effectual calling is what leads one to repentance and belief.
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That's why it's so important. We don't repent and then believe and then
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God says, oh now, I will give you a new birth. Now, I will give you my
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Holy Spirit. Now, all these things will come about. No. The effectual call takes place mysteriously.
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It was so ordained from the beginning of the foundation of the world in eternity past and yet, in this call,
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God is opening up the mind and putting the heart of stone to a heart of flesh and giving the will desires that have never been there before.
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The one who had no form that He should be desired is now altogether lovely. Draw me away.
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As the Song of Solomon says. This call leads to the response.
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God is calling by His Spirit and the sinner begins to respond and what does that response look like?
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Repentance and belief. Repentance and belief. Anthony Hokema put it this way in his book,
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Saved by Grace. He's talking about the call. He says, let us suppose you're drowning with an earshot of friends on the shore.
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You cannot swim. Wishing to respect your integrity as a person, wanting to enable you to help yourself as much as possible, one of your friends standing on the shore, an excellent swimmer, shouts to you, start swimming!
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The advice is well meant, but it's worse than useless. You can't swim.
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What you need, and what you need desperately, is for that friend to jump in and tow you to shore with powerful strokes so that you will be saved.
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What you need is not advice. Not even good advice. Not even gracious advice. You need to be rescued.
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And so it is. We don't choose.
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We're chosen. We don't follow after Him. That's the way to die in your sins.
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We repent and we believe that we might be saved. That is how Christ dives in and drags a sinner to shore.
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It's too much of a compliment, frankly, to say that you're swimming and you recognize you're in ruin. A better image, and Hokema would know this, is you're a carcass.
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You're a corpse. But if God has given you
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His Spirit, if He's affectionately called you, you may repent and believe the Gospel. You may not know that that's what
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He's done, that that's what He's been doing in your life. But this very day, you may repent and believe the Gospel. And this is what it means to find forgiveness.
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This is what it means to find that joy unspeakable that leads to fear and reverence. Something in your life that had never been there before.
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The Lord now looking upon your sins. And as far as from the
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East as from the West, He's removing them. William Bradshaw on this point says, the
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Lord looks upon my sins, they're now before Him, and we should never rest until we have by repentance moved
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Him to blot them out. Why do you repent and believe? You're saying, God, I hate what
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I've done. I hate who I've become. I hate what my sin is and what it's meant and what it's cost.
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Blot it out! Forgive me! And Bradshaw says, the more we remember our sins in repentance, in this act of coming to belief, the more we remember our sins, the more
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God forgets them. Let me give you a picture as we sort of come to a close here.
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Let me give you a picture of what this call and what this belief looks like. It's a glorious picture, one of my favorites from Acts chapter 8, the
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Ethiopian eunuch. Philip, of course, has been instructed by God to go and encounter this man.
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And Philip runs to him, we read, beginning in verse 30. And here's him reading Isaiah. And so he asks the all -important question, do you understand what you're reading?
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Do you understand what you're hearing? Here's the Word of God. Do you understand it? How can
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I unless someone guides me? The Ethiopian eunuch says. And he's earnest to understand it.
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I wish everyone that came to hear God's Word was as earnest as this man. This burning desire, not, oh, this is going long.
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Crock -Pot's going to be cold. I hope we can leave early. No, this burning desire.
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I need to understand. I want to go deeper. What is being communicated here? How can
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I understand this unless someone guides me? Please come sit with me. Show me. And he turns to the place in Isaiah where it says this.
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There's no chapter numbers or verse numbers in these days. Just the place. He was led as a sheep to the slaughter.
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Like a lamb before its shearer is silent, he opened not his mouth. In his humiliation, justice was taken away.
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Who will declare his generation? His life has been taken from the earth. So the
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Ethiopian, looking at this depiction of the Messiah, of the
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Savior, of the Promised One being slaughtered willingly. He's silent. He opens not his mouth.
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His life is taken. And he says, of whom does the prophet say this?
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Of himself? Of some other man? And Philip opened his mouth, and we read this, verse 35.
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Beginning at this scripture, he preached Jesus to him. What a beautiful picture.
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Beginning right where you are, beginning right where you are, he preached Jesus. He didn't give a biblical, theological explanation of the covenants.
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He didn't open up the divisions within Isaiah and situate them in their context.
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He preached Jesus. He preached Jesus. Now, I don't know how concise
01:03:28
Philip was. I imagine it was a lengthy walk, maybe something like the road to Emmaus. But they're going down this road together, and I can only imagine what the text doesn't describe, but we all know, if we're
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Christians by experience, the absolute awe. And how this
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Ethiopian man began to hang on every sentence and every word. What about this? And what about that?
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And everywhere he turned, he found some new gem. Some new glory. Some new delight.
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And so as they're walking down the road, his heart's being flooded with the sense of who Jesus is, and why
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Jesus came, and what Jesus did when he came, and why Jesus had to die.
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Why it was that the Lamb was slaughtered. Why his life was taken from the earth. And what that means for all who believe in him.
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And so on this way, Philip is watching the same joy that he had once experienced now wash over this man.
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This new life that's been imparted. He's now repenting and believing the story of who
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Jesus is and what Jesus has done. And as they go down the road, he says, look, water. What prevents me from being baptized?
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Tells you something about what they were talking about. I like to think they were talking about Exodus in part. This is what
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Philip says to him. If you believe with all your heart, you may be baptized.
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If you believe. If you believe.
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You don't have to sign up. You don't have to go through this whole process. You don't need 30 months of training.
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You don't need to get to some tier of inner knowledge. You don't have to pass out a certain number of tickets or go through the program or download all the
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YouTube educational promo videos and answer some final exams. If you believe with all of your heart, you may take unto yourself the sign of having been crucified with Christ and risen with him in new life.
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If you believe with all your heart, you can be a Christian today.
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And this is what the man said. I believe that Jesus Christ is the
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Son of God. I believe. This was not something that he stumbled into.
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This was something that God had performed in his heart, in his mind, in his very soul.
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He exercised faith. I believe that Jesus Christ is the
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Son of God. So as Philip is opening up the Word, he's beholding what
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God has done and he's filled with this reverence for God and who
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God is and what God has accomplished for him and he believes. He sees, he beholds, he's filled with reverence and he believes.
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So it was for the Israelites. So it was for the Ethiopian eunuchs. So it is for all of God's people.
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So it could be for you today if you would but repent and believe the Gospel.
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You could be a Christian today. He saved them for his namesake.
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He saved them from the hand of him who hated them. He redeemed them from the hand of the enemy. The waters covered the enemy.
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There was not one left and they believed his words.
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Let's pray. Father, thank you for your
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Word. Lord, thank you for the Gospel, the saving message of what you have done and through your
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Son by your Spirit for your people. Lord, I pray for all of us here that we would be flooded with reverence when we consider your forgiveness and the fact that you have not marked our iniquities upon ourselves, but you marked them upon the tree where you crucified your
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Son. Let us be filled with reverence, Lord, and reverence unto joy and utter peace, awe.
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Forgive us, Lord, when it wilts and cracks and begins to disintegrate.
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May the Gospel be ever new, ever fresh. I pray, Lord, if there's one or more here,
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Lord, who have a hard heart, stony heart, Lord, stopped ears, they cannot see, they cannot behold, won't you even now open their eyes?
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Give them a new heart. Give them new desires and a new will after you. That they could have the same experience, the same testimony of the
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Ethiopian eunuch, that they could see, be filled with that reverence and awe and believe unto salvation and be baptized, be a
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Christian with all that that means for their present life in a fallen world in the hope of glory to come.
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Refresh our hearts, Lord. Give us a sense of urgency to go forth and spread this saving message.
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Let us not hide such light under a basket, Lord. Let it break out. I pray,
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Lord, that you would be with mothers and fathers in particular, that you would help them not to grow faint or lose heart in constantly rehearsing the story of the
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Gospel again and again and again to their children. We pray, Lord, you would do a great work in our midst, a great work in the generation to come.
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We pray, Lord, there would be many such Ethiopian eunuchs in our midst, in this very place,
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Lord, in this very region. As I think of preparing for the conference this weekend and discussing evangelism and discipleship,
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Lord, might you light a flame within. Move us,
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Lord, and stir us and use us in great ways. Put the song of Zion in our lips,
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Lord. May we go forth victoriously in the kingdom's advance, all for the glory of your