Exodus 23 - Bribes, Corruption & The Angel of the Lord (Part 2)

Exodus 23 on False Reports, Bribes, and Justice

Exodus 23.

You shall surely bring it back to him again. If you see the donkey of one who hates you lying under its burden, and you would refrain from helping it, you shall surely help him with it. You shall not pervert the judgment of your paw in his dispute.

Keep yourself far from a false matter. Do not kill the innocent and righteous, for I will not justify the wicked. And you shall take no bribe, for a bride blinds the discerning and perverts the words of the righteous.

Also you shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the heart of a stranger, because you were strangers in the land of Egypt. Six years you shall sow your land and gather in its produce. But the seventh year you shall let it rest, and lie fallow, that the poor of your people may eat, and what they leave the beasts of the field may eat.

In like manner you shall do with your vineyard and your olive grove. Six days you shall do your work, and on the seventh day you shall rest, that your ox and your donkey may rest, and the son of your female servant and the stranger may be refreshed.

The Sabbatical Year and the Sabbath Pattern

And in all that I have said to you, be circumspect, and make no mention of the name of other gods, nor let it be heard from your mouth. Three times you shall keep a feast to me in the year. You shall keep the feast of unleavened bread.

You shall eat unleavened bread seven days, as I commanded you at the time appointed in the month of Apip, for in it you came out of Egypt. None shall appear before me empty. And the feast of harvest, the first fruits of your labors which you have sown in the field.

And the feast of ingathering at the end of the year, when you have gathered in the fruit of your labors from the field. Three times in the year, all your males shall appear before the Lord God. You shall not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leavened bread, nor shall the fat of my sacrifice remain until morning.

The first of the first fruits of your land, you shall bring into the house of the Lord your God. You shall not boil a young goat in its mother's milk. Behold, I send an angel before you to keep you in the way and to bring you into the place which I have prepared.

Beware of him and obey his voice. Do not provoke him, for he will not pardon your transgressions. For my name is in him. But if you indeed obey his voice and do all that I speak, then I will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your adversaries.

For my angel will go before you and bring you into the Amorites and the Hittites and the Perizzites and the Canaanites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, and I will cut them off. You shall not bow down to their gods, nor serve them, nor do according to their works, but you shall utterly overthrow them and completely break down their sacred pillars.

So you shall serve the Lord your God, and he will bless your bread and your water. And I will take sickness away from the midst of you. No one shall suffer miscarriage or be barren in your land. I will fulfill the number of your days.

I will send my fear before you. I will cause confusion among all the people to whom you come and will make all your enemies turn their backs to you. And I will send hornets before you, which shall drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite, and the Hittite from before you.

I will not drive them out from before you in one year, lest the land become desolate and the beasts of the field become too numerous for you. Little by little, I will drive them out from before you until you have increased and you inherit the land.

And I will set your bounds from the Red Sea to the sea, Philistia, and from the desert to the river, for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand, and you shall drive them out before you.

You shall make no covenant with them nor with their gods. They shall not dwell in your land, lest they make you sin against me. For if you serve their gods, it will surely be a snare to you.

Bribes, Foreigners, and the Expansion of the Ten Commandments

Okay, this will be part two of our study in Exodus 23. Last week, we began the chapter by spending a fair amount of time on the first few words, how you shall not circulate a false report. And that, of course, we said was a very relevant topic because of all the lies, misinformation, and conspiracy theories that are just floating around out there like I don't think I've ever seen before.

So if you missed it, or if anyone watching online missed it, I'd encourage you to go back and listen to part one of Exodus 23. And I would just add one more comment to that whole subject. Obviously, we should be careful with these things.

We shouldn't go off the deep end. But just remember, because something is labeled a conspiracy theory, that doesn't necessarily make it false. The biblical teaching on the end times about a one-world government under Antichrist, one-world government, one-world religion, and a one-world economic system, that has already been labeled conspiracy talk.

So just because something is labeled conspiracy theory doesn't necessarily make it false. Conspiracies do exist, right? We all know that. And a theory is exactly that. It's a theory. Might be right. Might be wrong.

Might be partially true. So I'm just saying that you never know. You never know with some of these things. But obviously, there are some things that are just beyond the pale. And we just need to be careful.

So we talked about all that. And then the topic of showing partiality, kindness to your personal enemies. Did the Lord give anyone an opportunity this week to show kindness to one of your enemies? Okay, well, if he did, you can share it afterwards.

Some of you might have been praying, Lord, please, no. Don't make me do this. But basically, verses one through nine gives us miscellaneous laws. Verse six says, do not kill the innocent and righteous.

And I'd commented that many of these things that we are going to be reading about, these basically take the 10 commandments and then expand on the commandments. Verse eight says, you shall take no bribe.

For a bribe blinds the discerning and perverts the words of the righteous. So if Moses was going to be a godly leader of the nation, then Moses could not take any bribes, right? Because people that take bribes, that's how you corrupt a system.

So he could not take bribes or as modern politicians call them, donations. Obviously, I'm not saying that every donation is a bribe because that's not the case. But this kind of thing does happen and it threatens to corrupt any government.

This kind of thing happens all the time. There's a quote unquote donation that's made and it's clearly understood that we're gonna give you all this money and you're gonna do this for us. I mean, that's the way it works.

And there probably have been many decent people who went to Washington DC with good intentions. But once they got there and they faced the system, they were tempted and then some probably corrupted by taking bribes and kickbacks.

So what are some biblical examples of this? I was trying to think in Acts chapter eight, do you remember Simon the sorcerer? He tries to influence the apostle Peter by offering him money, trying to buy this miraculous power of the Holy Spirit.

Would Peter take the money? No, what did he say? Your money perish with you because you thought the gift of God could be purchased with money. And then in Acts chapter 24, the apostle Paul is in prison with Felix the governor.

And it says that Felix was hoping that Paul would offer him a bribe to let him go. Paul probably could have been released from prison if he offered a bribe. So it's very clear in the Bible, you are not to take bribes, you are not to offer bribes.

The only bribe that we allow is maybe telling your teenager, hey, come to church and I'll take you out to ice cream afterwards. I might have tried that once or twice. Actually not church, church is a given.

I did that once on a Wednesday night, so I'm gonna confess. I was not able to bribe them. And then verse nine talks about how you shall not oppress a stranger or a foreigner. The golden rule would apply here.

Treat others the way you would wanna be treated. So the Israelites, you remember, they were once strangers, they were foreigners in Egypt. Our citizenship is in heaven. So we are like strangers and pilgrims on the earth.

So we want to treat the stranger well. And all of these things, again, they're an expansion on the, really the second table of the law, the second half of the 10 commandments, which Jesus summarized by saying what?

You shall love your neighbor as yourself. All right, in verse 10, we see now an expansion on the Sabbath law. Not only were God's people to set apart one day per week, the Lord now shows them that they are to observe a sabbatical year regarding the land.

So even the land needs rest. The people need rest. The beasts of burden need rest. Now God's saying even the land is gonna have to have a rest. Verse 10, six years, you shall sow your land and gather in its produce, but the seventh year you shall let it rest.

This was a law that was completely unique to Israel. And I just like to read what Matthew Henry says about this. He says, every seventh year, the land was to rest. They must not plow or sow it. What the earth produced of itself should be eaten and not laid up.

This law seems to have been intended to teach dependence on providence and God's faithfulness and sending the larger increase while they kept his appointments. It was also typical of the heavenly rest when all earthly labors, cares, and interests shall cease forever.

Any questions or comments on that? All right, nothing so far.

Dennis.

Is it the law that Israel broke and that's why they had 70 years of captivity in Babylon?

Great minds think alike, I guess, because yes, absolutely. Yes, absolutely. That's good. So the law was neglected in Israel and they ignored it again and again. So remember, it's once every seven years.

So this went on for a long time. So after the 70th time, the Lord allowed the Jews to be taken captive into Babylon for 70 years, one year in captivity for every year they did not allow the land to rest.

So God says, you didn't allow the land to rest. Now I'm gonna make sure that it rests. I'm gonna take you all to Babylon. And you can reference 2 Chronicles 36, 21, which explains that. Why did they ignore it all this time?

Who knows?

But they might've thought, this doesn't seem like a big deal. You know, thou shall not kill that serious. Thou shall not commit adultery that serious. But this sabbatical year for the land, that's not a big thing.

That's how they treated it, clearly. So they might've thought it was a minor thing. So when God sees that his people are willfully disobeying again and again and again, does God see that as a minor thing?

Obviously not. Israel might've even thought, you know, we've been doing it all these years, hundreds of years. God doesn't seem to mind. After all, he's not doing anything about it. Must not be a big deal.

And then boom, the hammer fell. So the moral of this story, the best time to repent is now. Just because it doesn't seem that God is doing anything about it, he's going to. So Jim, you had a hand up.

I'm just wondering if, cause they did this, they were supposed to do this every seven years. And then it would get to 49 years. And then the 50th year would be a year of Jubilee. And I'm not certain that they ever celebrated that 50th year as a year of Jubilee.

I don't remember. I think I've read something one time that they had never done that as a nation. And that's something God said, the 50 years, 49 years, you're supposed to have it as a year of Jubilee.

Can anyone speak to that? Check that out. Bring it to us next week. Let us know what you found.

All right.

The Angel of the Lord as a Pre-Incarnate Christ

Verse 13. And in all that I have said to you, be circumspect and make no mention of the name of other gods, nor let it be heard from your mouth. So don't even mention other gods. Now let's remember with a general rule of interpreting scripture, you have to take everything in context.

We know that, but you have to compare scripture with scripture. Maybe a little light bulb goes off in your head and say, well, Moses is writing this,.

Getting it from God.

Moses writing, don't mention other gods. Well, then you think, wait a minute. Moses mentions other gods. Moses mentions Baal. He mentions Moloch. So Moses is mentioning other deities. So how do we reconcile this?

Well, I think the best way to understand this is that we conclude that the names of false gods should not be mentioned, except either by preachers who are warning of these things or by a historian who, when the facts of history, you know, they can't be otherwise set forth.

So those seem to be the two exceptions, but obviously God's people should not be talking about other gods. And you could kind of think about this when you mention Allah, the God of Islam, or when you mentioned some other deity from the Hindu religion, what are you saying about that?

Unless you're making the point that, hey, these are false gods. They obviously shouldn't have a part in our day-to-day conversation. Verses 14 through 19 gives instructions about celebrating three important feast days.

Verse 17 says, three times in the year, all your males shall appear before the Lord God. And then he mentions the feast of unleavened bread, which we've already talked about with the Passover. Then there is the feast of harvest, which is also called what?

There are two other names for it. What's that?

First fruits.

First fruits. Well, that might be another one. There's the feast of weeks in Pentecost that marks the beginning of the harvest. And then there is the third feast, the feast of in gathering. This is also called the feast of what?

Booths or tabernacles. So feast days were very important to the Israelites. Now, starting in verse 20, to me, this was the most interesting part of the whole chapter. This really caught my attention. He says, behold, I send an angel before you to keep you in the way and to bring you into the place which I have prepared.

Beware of him and obey his voice. Do not provoke him for he will not pardon your transgressions for my name is in him. But if you indeed obey his voice and do all that I speak, then I will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your adversaries.

So behold, I send an angel before you.

Of course, you wonder,.

Who is this angel? Now, the Hebrew word Malik can be translated three ways. So there's really three possibilities of who this angel is. The first way you can understand this Hebrew word is that it's a human messenger who speaks for God, something like a prophet.

So this could be a human messenger because angel means messenger. So that's possibility number one. You remember from Sunday, the book of Revelation talks about the angels of the seven churches. Most commentators agree that these are most likely the pastors or the preachers of these churches.

So option number one, it's a human messenger or this could be an angel like we normally think of an angel, heavenly being, or the third option would be a theophonic angel. And you know what that is by now.

A theophonic angel is basically a manifestation of God himself. So the question is, who is this angel that's being referenced here? Okay, Jim says Jesus. Larry, what do you think?

I'm going with option three.

Theophonic angel.

Yes.

All right.

Well, I think you guys are on the right track. So who is it? Well, some liberal theologians have speculated that Moses is the angel. Did anyone have that thought? See, when you deny the supernatural, when you deny that heavenly angels even exist, there's really not a lot of options.

So for the liberals, there's really only one option that it's a human being. I do not believe that at all. So I do not believe it's Moses. So I think clearly option number three is the best option. And here's what's interesting about it.

He seems to be identified with God himself. God's name is in him and he has the ability to forgive sin. Right. So he seems to be identified with God. But at the same time, he's distinct from God. He's not God.

He's the angel.

So it's like he is God, but he is distinct from God at the same time. So in this week, I think we see an Old Testament hint of the of the Trinity. I saw a hand.

Yes.

OK, it's capitalized. Just like when you're talking about God with the masculine pronoun, he you're talking about God or Jesus, it's always capitalized.

Right.

So Jesus was the God man.

He is the God man.

So this could be really a pre-incarnate Christ.

Right. Because if he's identified with God, but he's distinct from God, you think of John one, one in the beginning was the word. The word was with God. And the word was God. So Jesus is God, yet he's distinct from God.

Same with this angel. So, yes, we would then believe that this is a pre-incarnate Christ who is with the Israelites in the wilderness, which is exactly what Paul said in first Corinthians 10. The rock that followed them was Christ.

Christ was with the church.

In the wilderness,.

I think is that axe. Maybe I'm getting that mixed up. But so, yes, we believe it's it's Jesus. So in order for Israel to be blessed in the land, remember, this is kind of the old covenant agreement. You do what I say and I'll bless you.

You disobey and I'll curse you. So to be blessed in the land, they had to obey the angel, obey Christ, obey God. And if they did that, then their enemies, God promises their enemies will be totally cut off.

But was that the case? Did that happen? No, because we read throughout Israel's history, you know, they're being afflicted by the Philistines, et cetera. So obviously they didn't fully obey. Otherwise, God's promise would fully have happened.

The Canaanite Conquest, Idolatry, and the Theocracy of Israel

Verses 23 and 24. For my angel will go before you and bring you into the Amorites and the Hittites and the Perizzites and the Canaanites and the Hivites and the Jebusites. And I will cut them off. You shall not bow down to their gods nor serve them, nor do according to their works, but you shall utterly overthrow them and completely break down their sacred pillars.

So when Israel entered the land, part of the conquest was to eliminate the names of the false deities and to destroy, utterly destroy their monuments and sacred pillars. And isn't it interesting that that practice has gone on throughout history?

Do you remember when the Taliban took over in Afghanistan? And I think it was in 2001. Some of you may remember this story where the Taliban had destroyed these giant monuments built by Buddhists. So there are these Buddhists, of course, they viewed them as idols, which I think Christians.

Would view them the same way.

But there are these ancient Buddhist statues and the Taliban went in with bombs or dynamite and blew them all up. Who remembers this? And the world community, the world community was outraged. But that's what happens when there's a revolution or when a new group is in charge, when there's a new government, that's the kind of thing that happens, which is exactly why we've seen this in our country over the past year and a half with the tearing down of monuments and the breaking down, pulling down of statues, because the people that are doing this are revolutionaries.

I'm not giving you my opinion on them. I'm just telling you that's what is happening. The old way and Canaan has to be torn down. The old America has to be torn down before you can build up the new nation.

And it's not just that the old religion has to go and the new religion comes in. Clearly, that's what's happening with the Israelites. The name of Jehovah is now going to be proclaimed.

In the land,.

Not the Canaanite deities. But that's the same with us. And again, if you never apply scripture to the modern day of things that we're actually going through, then it just doesn't seem, OK, yeah, this happened thousands of years ago.

What does this have to do with me?

I mean, that's a common.

Common question people ask. But in Israel, we understand this is a good thing, right? The Canaanite, I don't think you're going to find a Christian who's going to defend the sacred pillars of the heathen.

I hope.

I hope you're not going to find that. So that's what's happening with Israel. That was a good thing. The worship of Jehovah. That was the only worship allowed.

In in Canaan.

And we had mentioned a few weeks ago. Israel was what? What's the word for this? When this is the way things are run. Israel was a begins with a T, a theocracy. So Israel was a theocracy. People today, they think that's a bad word.

And just to be clear, so nobody misunderstands. I am not. I am not advocating that we have a theocracy here in the United States. I have no confidence they would choose the right faith. So we don't want a theocracy in 2021 America.

That would not go well at all. That is not what I'm saying. But in reality, whether people admit it or not, there will be, you could say there is, but there will be an official religion sanctioned by the state.

It's unavoidable. They might not even call it a religion, but you can't get around this. There will always be an official state sanctioned religion. Think about it. If the Christian ethic is rejected in the United States, which it has been clearly, something has to take its place.

What has taken its place? Well, we see social justice, kind of the woke multicultural secular. I don't care what you call it, but it's the secular religion. And although they may deny that it is a religion, make no mistake about it.

The people are devout in their adherence to it. I would argue that they're more devout than your average evangelical is devout to their faith. At least that's the way it seems. Just consider the so-called secularists.

They have their own creation story with the Big Bang and evolution. They have their own eschatology, their view of the end of the world with climate change. They have their belief system and they are devout and they are willing to proselytize, meaning they want to convert everybody to their way of thinking.

And when someone disagrees, they have their own version of the inquisition. It's called cancel culture. So you can say it's not a religion. It absolutely is. It's a belief system. You can't avoid that.

So don't be fooled. Every nation has to have an ideology. Every nation has to have a set of beliefs. But at least with the land of Canaan, they're going to have the worship of the Lord God. That we know for sure was God ordained.

That's a good thing.

Jim.

I don't know if anybody noticed that the Moldavian church, I'm not sure that it's still up there on their little bulletin board or their sign out in front of the church, but they said the Big Bang Theory.

God said it.

Bang. Yeah.

Yeah, that was pretty unique.

God spoke and bang.

Yeah.

Spoke everything into existence. So God is giving his people commandments and they're still relevant for us today. At least the principles that we see are still relevant for us today. So the Lord through Moses is very specific as to what Israel was to do.

Blessings, Prosperity Teaching, and the Warning Against Compromise

Verse 25. So you shall serve the Lord, your God, and he will bless your bread and your water. And I will take sickness away from the midst of you. No one shall suffer miscarriage or be barren in your land.

I will fulfill the number of your days. Now, were there any women in the land.

That were barren?

I mean, you can think of Bible stories where that happened, right? So here's another passage that is ripe for being taken out of context. So it's important to note that these earthly blessings were part of the old covenant given to Israel.

But they're often distorted by the modern prosperity preachers. So the self-help, prosperity gospel preachers on television to promote their doctrine, they almost always have to go back to the Old Testament scriptures.

Because in the New Testament, you don't see these same promises. The promises to the church are largely heavenly promises. And there are the things about, oh, like if you're godly, you'll suffer persecution.

That doesn't work very well with the whole prosperity message. So they always go back to the Old Testament scriptures. And they might seize upon a statement like this, where they will say, the Lord says, I will take sickness away from the midst of you.

See, that's a guaranteed for healing if you will just do this, this. And oh, yeah, send me your money. That's the key for them, usually. Yeah, the Lord did say this. I will take sickness away from the midst of you.

God said it, didn't he? Here's the key.

Who did?

If, but who did he say it to? He said it to Israel as part of the old covenant. And it was conditional, which they didn't really follow through. So he said it to Israel. On top of that, he said it to the nation.

OK, he said it to the nation. You simply can't take this as a personal guarantee to every single individual. You can't do that. That no person would ever get sick or that no woman would ever have a miscarriage.

So we need to rightly divide the word of God and understand what God is saying, who he's saying it to. Does this apply to us? Hey, here's how it applies to us. If you live a godly Christian life, you probably are going to be more healthy than the heathen who's in all sorts of different things.

I mean, that's true, right? God may bless you with all these things, but it's not a personal guarantee for every individual.

Dennis had an experience in Ireland where across town there was a group of people who were praying fervently for.

Well, we lost a fellow.

By the name of Trevor McCulley. He died of a brain aneurysm or something,.

And but there was a lot of.

Fervent praying going on.

I mean, we were.

We were friends. Reformed Presbyterian minister, really smart guy and everything. Well, he died left behind a wife and what, four children? And those people across town, this is what they came out and said.

There must have been sin because this is why he died. And it was it was really hard. I was losing my sanctification with him. It was really hard. It's so offensive.

That's a nice way of putting it.

What I hate about false doctrine,.

Right?

It hurts people so unnecessarily,.

Right?

And that was a very early experience for me of that and helped me tremendously to hate false doctrine, right? Early on.

Amen, I can understand why. Alright, one last thing.

We're going to cover.

Starting in verse 27. God tells how he will fight for Israel, drive out their enemies. I love this. Verse 28, he says, I will send hornets before you. Remember last year we heard about the murder hornets.

Maybe that's what these were. Maybe they've been around for a while. I will send hornets before you. So when Israel comes into the land, says in verse 32, because this eventually they made it in after 40 years of wandering.

Verse 32, regarding the heathen, the Lord says, you shall make no covenant with them, nor with their gods. They shall not dwell in your land, lest they make you sin against me. For if you serve their gods, it will surely be a snare to you.

So in conclusion, why did God warn them? Because that's, that's what he knew would eventually happen. And this happened when King Solomon took the throne. You remember, what did he do? He married foreign wives.

And he married 700 of them. And people have, think they know why he did it. Part of it was because this is how you secure treaties and good relations with foreign nations. The King would marry one of the other King's daughters.

And with the foreign wives came what? The foreign gods. And it most certainly was a snare. So that when Solomon died because of his sin, God didn't judge Solomon for the sake of his father, David. But when Solomon died and his son took over, God split the kingdom in two.

So once again, we see that for God to bless a nation, there must be obedience to his law.