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Preacher: Ross Macdonald Scripture: Exodus 3:6-8
To be paying very close attention to how God is revealing Himself to Moses even in the dialogue that we find carrying on from v. 4 and following. Of course, last week we began considering God in terms of the God who calls.
That was the whole focus last week. We read, God called to Him from the midst of the bush and said, Moses, Moses. So this fiery spectacle broke out. The bush that was ablaze and yet was not being consumed.
And as Moses turned to go investigate,.
The Lord called out.
From the midst of the bush to Him. So we consider the first thing we see about God is He's the God who calls. The God who makes Himself known. The God who takes the initiative to draw people unto Himself.
And of course, this blazing sight, as Moses drew near, the voice then said, stop.
Come no further.
The ground that you tread is holy ground. So the God who calls and says, come near, is also a holy God. So sinners cannot draw near. And we talked about how Moses himself is sort of preparing us for what Israel will do later in the book of Exodus.
As God brought Moses literally out of the clutch of the Egyptians, out of Egypt in exile, that's what Israel's going to do. As God brought Moses near to Mount Sinai, and then said, come no further, that's what Israel's going to experience as they're brought near to Mount Sinai.
And the holiness of God is what will occupy the tabernacle as we draw the close of Exodus. And then it will carry on to the book of Leviticus. And so the holiness of God becomes the major theme until we pick up the narrative with the book of Numbers.
This, therefore, chapter three is setting up not only the rest of the book of Exodus, but really the rest of the Pentateuch, the rest of the first five books of Moses in the Old Testament. So we considered the God who calls.
This morning, we want to consider the God who knows. And the God who delivers. The God who calls is the God who knows. He is the God who delivers. And we'll have applications when we draw to an end. Now, let me preface this.
As we're spending time working through chapter three, you ought to do this regularly no matter where we are in the Word of God. But especially here in Exodus 3, you should be reflecting on whether or not God has truly revealed Himself to you.
Some of the questions you can reflect upon as you consider this is, do I know God in this way? Do I understand Him in this way? And because I'm understanding Him in this way, do I yearn to know more about Him?
Do I hunger to understand more of His ways? Do I hunger and thirst after His righteousness? These are the kinds of questions you ought to be asking yourself as we consider God revealing Himself here in His Word.
So beginning in Exodus 3, verse six. Moreover, He said, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hit his face for he was afraid to look upon God. The first thing we see in verse six is that God knows, that's our first point, God knows His covenant promise.
God knows His promise. I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. We're brought back to the narrative of Genesis where God had made Himself known at first to Abraham in the land of the Chaldeans when He called him out of Ur to the land that He would bring him.
Now He's doing the same thing to Moses in seed form. I'm revealing Myself to you, the God who calls, and I know the promises I've made to your fathers that they would be brought into a land. And so I am doing with Israel, my people.
The initial I am, notice, I am the God of your father. That initial I am is preparing us for verse 14. I am who I am. So we're brought deeper into the plot of Genesis. And we're reminded, whether or not the people that were crying out for deliverance at the end of chapter two, when God heard their groaning and then made Himself known in the land of Midian to Moses, whether or not they knew, whether or not they understood, whether or not they remembered the promises that God had made, God knows the promises He has made.
If all else forget,.
God knows what He has promised and God will be faithful to complete His promise. And He's revealing that to Moses. Here is the faithful outworking of all that I have purposed in redemption. This is the promise kept from Genesis 3 .15, the promise made to the seed of the woman here brought into the land of Midian.
If you want to understand what I'm about to do, Moses, you must understand what I promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is all part of the same act of redemption. So here we have God revealing Himself, the God of Abraham, the fear of Isaac, the shepherd of Jacob.
And how does Moses respond? He hid his face for he was afraid to look upon God.
We have this little description.
As an interlude for the dialogue. He cowers and puts his face toward the ground. This was not formal. You know, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. Oh, how pleasant to meet you.
This is not formal. This is not well-prepared. He immediately drops like a heavy bag of potatoes.
To the ground.
He melts into the earth as it were. As we see later in Scripture, we'll see it again in Exodus 33. We'll see it in Judges with Manoah. We'll see it throughout the storyline. No man can look upon God and live.
It's not natural for man to stare into the brightness of the sun. Neither is it natural for a sinner to approach the holiness of God. And so this fear wells up within him. He's immediately profoundly aware of his own sinfulness, his own insufficiency.
Do you remember God is the one who drew, called Moses near? He's the God who desires, the God who calls Moses, Moses. But as Moses comes forward, keep back because of his holiness. Don't you see the reversal with the sinner?
I think of Peter in Luke chapter five. What happens when this great miracle of the great catch is brought to the fisherman who had just been sort of humoring Jesus? All right, you know, preaching to the lost is your department.
Fishing is my department. No offense, Jesus, but this is not carpentry.
This is fishing.
It's a very different type of trade. And you may know all of the oracles of God, but I know a lot more about fish. And then he gets the greatest catch of his life, which all the local men in the coffee diner always said, oh, here's Peter.
He's claiming this great catch.
Yeah, yeah, we've heard all the stories before.
But you remember what happened in Luke five when he understood that Jesus was divine? What did he say? Stay back. I'm a sinful man. That's what we see God essentially saying to Moses, stay back, come no further.
But as Moses draws in toward this recognition that he's dealing with the holy God, he's more than ready to stay back. He drops down on his knees and hides his face. And so we're reminded that Jesus is this angel of the Lord speaking from the midst of the bush, revealing himself from the midst of the flames.
And as he says in John eight, before Abraham was, I am. God knows his covenant promise. And God does not abandon his covenant promise. I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, meaning I have not abandoned my promise to them, neither will I abandon my promise to you.
I've never canceled my promises. I've never marginalized them. I've never adjusted them after the fact. I'm not like a man. I'm not like a shrewd lawyer. I'm not like a business man in this increasingly litigious society.
When he says, you will be my people, I will be your God, that's a promise that he holds. It's not a promise that we keep. It's a promise that he holds. Notice in Mark chapter 12 that Jesus appeals to Exodus three in order to refute the Sadducees.
Remember, the Sadducees did not believe that God had inspired Scripture beyond these first five books of Moses. So they only saw as Scripture the first five books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
Anything else was maybe helpful reading, but it wasn't inspired by God. And so they're challenging from that point of view, how is it that anyone could believe that there's a resurrection as the Jews that weren't Sadducees commonly believed?
They knew that there was life after death and that at the end, because of God's faithful promises, the dead would be raised to be with Him. So Mark chapter 12, Jesus answers them. Are you not mistaken, he says, because you don't know the Scriptures nor the power of God?
Listen, you will always be mistaken if you don't know the Scriptures and the power of God. And I would say you need both if you would not be mistaken. Lots of scholars know the Scriptures as a dead letter, but they don't know the power of God, they're mistaken.
There's lots of people, and maybe we have relatives in this way, who seem to have a love for God and they seem to be acquainted with the power of God, but they don't know the Scriptures. And often they are mistaken, blown about by every wind of doctrine for that very reason.
If we would not be mistaken, we must know the Scriptures and the power of God. And then Jesus presses the rebuke, concerning the dead, that they rise.
Have you never read?
That's often Jesus' response.
Have you not read?
Are you a teacher in Israel.
And you don't know these things?
That's Jesus' response quite often.
Have you not read in the book of Moses? All right, you only believe in the first five? Okay, I'll use the first five. Have you not read in the book of Moses? In the burning bush passage? If you didn't know this, they didn't have chapter and verse numbers back in Jesus' day.
We see that in Luke four, as he's looking for the place where Isaiah says. And we have it here in the burning bush passage. That's how it's known. Numbers, chapter numbers and verse, aren't you so glad that someone one day woke up and said, I think we need chapter and verse numbers?
I'm thankful for that.
How God spoke to him saying, I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. Have you not read this? Do you not understand? He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living. He does not say, I once was the God of Abraham.
I used to be the God of Isaac. There was a time long ago, over 400 years ago, where I was the God of Jacob. He says, I am. I made a promise to them that they would be brought into a land everlasting to enjoy the blessing that I will bring upon the nations.
That's a promise I made. And though they're dead, they will experience the truth of that promise. I am the God of Abraham. I am the God of Isaac. I am the God of Jacob. He's not the God of the dead, nor are his promises dead, nor are they forgotten.
He knows what he has promised. He is the God of the living. But there's more that God knows. Look at verse seven. There's more that God knows. And the Lord said, I have surely seen the oppression of my people who are in Egypt.
I have heard their cry because of their taskmasters, for I know their sorrows. So we have this translation, I have surely seen. It's the best way English translations try to get at just how emphatic this is.
There's many different ways you can emphasize activity in the Hebrew language. And here we have what we call an infinitive absolute with a perfect tense, and it's just, it's bold, it's glowing, it's neon.
Seeing, I have seen, I have surely seen, I've really, really seen what's going on in the way that I'm going to act and respond now. Now the time has come. And so we see not only the God who knows, the God who knows his covenant promise, but the God who knows not only all things.
Of course, we recognize he's always seeing, always hearing. Exodus two and three brings us nothing new in terms of God's capacity. The God who knows all things. Theologians articulate this by describing his omniscience.
God is all-knowing. That doesn't just mean he knows facts. It means he knows all potentialities for every part and particle of all that he has made or could make. If there's anything that could possibly be known, it only can be known because God knows it.
Anything that we understand is merely understanding after what God has understood. Our thoughts following after God's thoughts. His ways being higher than our ways. God knows, but what does God know specifically?
I know their sorrows. I know their sorrows. God, who does not forget his covenant promises, says, I also know my people's sorrows. I know their sorrows. Do you think after 40 years of dwelling in the Midian Desert that Moses had thought much about his people's sorrows?
I can imagine he thought about it frequently. As months went by and as years went by and as decades went by, it must have just been an every now and then thought. There was a lot to do with Zipporah and Gershom and Eleazar and Jethro's cattle and just the daily grind.
Do you think it was a constant thought to him about the life and the world and the oppression that he had left behind in the land of Egypt? You could read accounts of people that defected from the Soviet Union during the Cold War or even modern accounts today of people that defect from North Korea and maybe they are living in South Korea.
And of course, the immediate concern and all that consumes their thoughts is the land that they left behind and the affliction of the people that they were once among. But if you let 40 years go by, those thoughts are quite passing.
We already know because of the end of chapter two that God has heard and has seen and is going to respond to his people's suffering. But Moses doesn't know this when he's drawing near to the fiery bush.
He doesn't know it. He's just doing what he's done a thousand times before. He's bringing the sheep to pasture. And then in the midst of God revealing himself to Moses, the I am, the God of the covenant, he also reveals to Moses, I am the God who knows the sorrow of my people.
You may have forgotten Moses, but I have not forgotten. I know the suffering of my people. Please notice it is not Moses who's bursting at the seam after 40 years and saying, God, please do something down in Egypt.
Free your people.
Don't you know they're suffering? It is not Moses who seeks God in that way. It is God who seeks after Moses and says, I know their sorrow and their suffering. And that's why I'm sending you back. You may have forgotten and you need to be reacquainted, but I have not.
Consider God reveals himself first and foremost as a holy God who calls his people, a holy God who knows his covenant promise, and a holy God who knows our sorrows. He's a holy, infinitely blessed God who knows our sorrows and our misery and our grief.
Just take a moment to ponder the sheer condescension of what it means for God who is infinitely blessed to stoop down and acquaint himself with our sorrow. Remember what I said about the verb know in Hebrew?
It's a Swiss Army verb. It has dozens of functions. It's not simply know as an intellectual fact. It's the verb that is used for the height of intimacy between a husband and a wife.
Adam knew his wife.
God intimately acquaints himself with our sorrow. Though he is infinitely blessed and enthroned over all, he has an eye and a ear and a heart toward our grief. Does that not stun you? We come to Revelation 4 and we have in this vision that John has on the exile of Patmos, this vision of the throne of God.
And I'll spare some of the details here, but he uses all sorts of imagery that's resonating with many allusions and passages to the prophets and even to the book of Moses here. And he's drawing together all of this imagery to communicate not only what he's seeing, but the significance of what he is seeing.
And so he sees not only the great throne in the spirit, but he sees the one who sits upon the throne.
In that appearance.
And in the midst of that throne, he sees surrounding him 24 thrones. Significance there, not go into this in too much detail, but 12 being often, especially in the book of Revelation, but often recognized as a number representative of God's people, 12 tribes, 12 apostles.
So we have this imagery, the 12 being doubled. It's hard to understand that fully. It could be speaking to his people of old and then his people in the new covenant, the 24 elders representing the fullness of his people.
And they're clothed in white robes and they have crowns of gold upon their head. They're kingly priests, a kingdom of priests. That's a descriptor of 1 Peter uses, drawing out of Exodus itself to describe the people of God.
And so in the heavenly throne room surrounding him is the fullness of his people, a priestly kingdom. And then in the midst of that throne, which is sitting on the sea of glass, if you could picture the cosmos as having this sort of crystalline ceiling, the throne is on top of that.
He is over all. And there's nothing that is not done according to his will, as some of us were saying yesterday morning. And in the midst of the throne are four living creatures. Really confusing imagery, but it's drawn out of Ezekiel, the living creature that is like a lion.
What's a lion, especially in an ancient Middle Eastern context, it's the king of the beasts, the king of the wild animals. We still talk about the kingly lion. And then the second creature was like a calf, sort of the representative head or symbol of domesticated animals.
And the third living creature had a face like a man, a man who has position over all. And then the fourth living creature was like an eagle in flight. So you've gone not in order of predominance with man having dominion over all of these other creatures, but rather in the scale from the bottom to the throne.
You've gone from the wild beasts up to the domesticated beasts, up to man, up to the heavens where the eagles fly to the very throne above the cosmos over it all.
And what happens?
We read, they do not rest day or night. This is representative of all that God has made, every level of his creation. This is what Psalm 19 describes as the heavens declaring the glory of God. Here's a window into what that actually looks like.
All that God has made continually worshiping him. And so those creatures representative of all of creation do not rest day or night saying, holy, holy, holy Lord God Almighty who was and who is and who is to come.
And John says, whenever these living creatures began to give glory and honor and thanks to the one who sat on the throne, who lives forever and ever, all of the people of God, not only all the cosmos, but all of the gathered people, the 24 elders, they fall down before him who sat on the throne and they throw their crowns before the throne.
And they say, you are worthy to receive glory and honor and power for you created all things and by your will, all things exist. This is taking place without cessation day and night. God in his infinite splendor and majesty, the only one worthy of worship, receiving the fullness of cosmic worship as the one who created all things by whose will all things exist.
And this glorious one knows my sorrow. The infinite then becomes the finite. The eternal one then enters time, becomes a creature to time. The immutable one becomes immutable, born unto a woman, born under the law.
The invisible one becomes visible. The creator becomes the creature. The sustainer becomes dependent. The almighty one makes himself weak. God then becomes man.
Why?
So that he may know the sorrow of his people. We go back to this verb of knowing, this intimate, mysterious union, the consummation of a marriage that makes two one flesh. When Jesus says he knows our sorrows, it's because he united himself to our sorrows.
He became one with us, not one around us, not one beside us, one with us. And that would be condescension enough if the story stopped there, but we keep going further. I was reading with Corey and Mike this past week an excerpt from Thomas Brooks.
We've been reading together each week a few pages of Thomas Brooks. I think one of the best, if you've never read Puritan books, you ought to read Thomas Brooks. He's a great way to start getting your muscles in shape to read the Puritans.
He's very easy to get into. Don't go to John Owen first unless you're a vet.
You're seasoned.
Start with old Tommy Brooks, T. Brooks. But listen to how he, and this goes to show the devotional life where it's not enough to think about the infinite becoming finite or the creator becoming a creature, but it's not just the incarnation that leads us to the end of the Bible.
That's just the beginning of how God has brought about his redemption. So just listen to this. That Christ should come from the eternal bosom of his father, we saw the eternal bosom of his father in Revelation 4, that's what that looks like.
Unceasing worship and splendor and glory. And what did he come to? A region of sorrow and death. That God would be manifest in flesh. That he who was clothed with glory would be wrapped with rags. That he who filled heaven and earth with his glory would be cradled in a manger.
Do you know what a manger is? It's not a cute little decoration you put out at Christmas time. It's an animal trough with the drool of cattle oozing over the sides. That the almighty God should flee from weak man.
The God of Israel come into Egypt. The God of the law made under the law. The God of circumcision circumcised. The God who made the heavens working at Joseph's simple trade. The carpenter who now craps wood for a season.
That he who binds the devils in chains would be tempted. That he whose is the world and the fullness of the world should hunger and thirst. That the God of strength should be weary. The judge of all flesh condemned.
The God of life put to death. The one who is one with his father should cry, my God, why have you forsaken me? The one who had the keys of hell and death on his belt should lie imprisoned in a tomb. That the head before which the angels do not, do cast their crowns should be crowned with thorns.
The eyes which are purer than the sun put out by darkness of death. That ears which had heard nothing but the hallelujahs of saints and angels hear now blasphemies of the multitude. The face which is fairer than the sons of men.
To be spit upon.
The mouth and the tongue which spoke as never man spoke accused for blasphemy. The hands which once freely swayed the scepter of heaven nailed to a cross. You see what Brooks is doing? Do you really get what it means for God to know your sorrows?
It's like a child. You know, I remember as a young boy, my aunt up in Maine, my aunt, I was too young to understand it, but cancer took her life at a young age. And I remember my mom taking my sister and I and we would go to visit her and it seemed like each successive time we saw her, she was less recognizable to us until she was sort of covered in hospital linens and bed bound and emaciated.
And of course, being a little kid, you're constantly hurting yourself, constantly climbing and falling off things. And so maybe I'd bump my knee or scuff my hand and I'd come crying to my aunt Carolyn.
Look at this little wound.
As she's there suffering unimaginable pain. And what does she do? She doesn't say, how dare you come to me.
With your little wound.
You know, you won't care about that in five minutes, but look at my suffering. What does she do? She weakly is trying to comfort me. Isn't that a picture of the God who knows our sorrows? We come to him with the equivalent of paper cuts and he stretches out his nail pierced hand to comfort us.
He knows our sorrows. It's so easy for us to say, man of sorrows, well acquainted with grief. We don't even understand the beginning of what that means. He's the God who knows our sorrows. And because he knows our sorrows, secondly, he is the God who delivers.
The God who calls, the God who knows, the God who delivers. Verse eight in Exodus three, I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, to bring them up from the land to a good and a large land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites and the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites.
So here we're getting a preview. We've already seen at the end of chapter two that God is now going to respond and we take a step forward in chapter three to see that God is stepping in to Moses' life because Moses will be raised up as the deliverer of his people.
And what is he delivering from? The house of bondage. What is he delivering to? A good land, a large land, a land flowing with milk and honey. I don't know what comes to your mind's eye when you hear that description.
It's of course not a natural product. It's not like you can find a spring of milk as you're walking through the wilderness or honey oozing off of trees, right? These are cultivated agricultural products, which mean the land has such an abundance that it's like even the most precious things of agricultural production flow like streams.
That's how good this land will be. The list of the nations, of course, it's somewhat jarring to us, but it helps us locate, yes, this truly still is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob because this is the land that God promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
And it also points us forward to the coming conquering of that land. Nations are within it and you must dispossess them. And so it sets us up for the narrative of Joshua as we get out of the book of Moses.
But the main thing that I would draw your attention to is this, I have come down to deliver. He's the God who calls, the God who knows, the God who delivers. It's for this reason that God has come down.
This imagery of God coming down is often used. We've seen it several times in Genesis. It's used with God being about to judge. He comes down to see what the Babel builders are doing. He comes down to look at Sodom and Gomorrah.
So God often comes down in preparation for judgment. And that's certainly what he's doing here in Exodus 3. I have come down because I'm going to judge Pharaoh and I'm going to judge the Egyptian empire, but with judgment comes deliverance.
I've come to deliver. Why is there judgment? So that there will be deliverance. So he does not say, I've come down to judge. No, no, no, he's come down to deliver. And if you don't understand that, you won't understand the Gospels.
He comes down to deliver, but how does deliverance come? It comes through judgment. It comes through judgment. Notice that God says, I have come down to deliver, even though everything that we're about to read as we head toward next week is God sending Moses as the deliverer.
So this is God's act. This is God's desire. This will be God's doing, even though he's using Moses as the human counterpart to his act of deliverance. And of course, this is meant to show us that Moses is a mere type, a mere stand-in.
The whole Exodus event is a mere type, a mere stand-in for the true deliverance, the true redemption from the house of bondage, that which Jesus will accomplish on behalf of his people. The great summary of Stephen in Acts 7, verse 35, where he said, Moses is going to be a deliverer by the hand of the angel who appeared to him in the bush.
We've already said that angel is the angel of the Lord. It's the Lord himself. It's the pre-incarnate Christ. So Stephen is pointing out that even the great deliverer, Moses, was given to us so that we could understand the true deliverer, Jesus.
I have come down to deliver. God came down to deliver. That's the gospel in five words. God came down to deliver. That's the gospel in five words. So altogether in verses six through eight, we see the God who knows, his covenant promise, knows his people's sorrow, and for that very reason, he is the God who delivers.
So let's apply these in the time we have left. We've been talking about God's self-revelation. It's interesting, after the Enlightenment, there was a great shift in systematic theology where there was almost a repudiation of supernatural revelation and an exclusive pursuit of what we could call natural revelation or natural theology.
Of course, Enlightenment skepticism, the sort of rationalism of the day, they thought we should only ascertain what can be ascertained about God according to our reason or our analysis of human perception, and so we discount special or supernatural revelation in order to make solely exclusive natural revelation or natural human cognition.
But of course, that makes theology, that makes Christianity, that makes everything we're looking at in Exodus 3 utterly unintelligible. This is not something that's happening in the mind of Moses. This is something that's happening in reality before all who could be there.
This is not something that happens in a visionary's dream. This is something that plays out in history. Theology, as Louis Burckhoff would say, the great theologian from a few generations ago, theology would be impossible unless God reveals Himself.
We don't work our way up through the natural world or understanding human beings and human motivations. We don't start here and work our way up to God or understanding anything about God. God is hidden to us.
God is not known unless He reveals Himself, first and foremost in His Word, but not even just in His Word, as if then we'll build our way into the Word to know Him. But no, even in our heart, Hebrew doesn't distinguish, they don't distinguish between heart and brain like we modern Westerns do.
God has to do a revelation of Himself in your heart if you would know Him. It is not, Burckhoff again, it is not, as many would have it, some deepened spiritual insight which leads to an ever-increasing discovery of God on the part of man.
And I just feel like, you know, I feel like there is something beyond and this is just how I feel, I feel like, like, like, like. It is not, as many would have it, a deepened spiritual insight which leads to an ever-increasing discovery of God on the part of man.
No, no, no.
It is a supernatural act of self-communication. It is a purposeful act on the part of a living God. I am the God of Abraham. Supernaturally revealing Himself to His people. Here again, we're reminded, as we were reminded last week, God must take the initiative.
If we're gonna enter into a relationship with God, that's not something we can muster up from our bootstraps. God must reveal Himself to us. God must break through our minds and our hearts and our lives and our stubborn wills.
Lorraine Bettner, contemporary to Burckhoff, well worth reading. If you come tonight to our study of the 1689 Confession, we're really gonna be focusing on this issue, chapter five, paragraph four. And so take this as a preview or an appetizer for coming tonight.
Lorraine Bettner makes this point that God must take the initiative. A bird with a broken wing is free to fly. Well, how does the will correspond?
We have a will.
Reformed theology is consistent. We have an exercise of a will that's unconstrained. In that sense, it's free. God does not do violence to our will. And yet everywhere, the scripture has a uniform testimony that man is wholly insufficient, wholly unable.
You can do nothing apart from me, Jesus says. So how do we put these things together? Well, Bettner says a bird with a broken wing is free to fly, it's just not able to. The natural man is free to come to God, but he's not able.
How can he repent of his sin when he loves it? That's what Marty was saying about this man, Adam. It's confusing, it's mystifying to me why I can't come to the Lord. There's no great mystery here. Men love darkness rather than light.
How can you repent of sin? How can you hate sin in order to repent of it.
When you love sin?
This is the inability of the will under which all men labor. Man's ruin lies in this. He cannot come because he will not come. We're not peering into the sovereignty of God that exists within his eternal decree so that anyone sitting in this room hearing me can say, oh, alas, if only I understood his sovereign decree, then I would know if I was truly able to come.
But until then, I simply wait and I hope that God will be merciful. I actually really want that. This might be surprising to you. I actually want God to save me. He hasn't done it yet. You're not listening.
You have not come because you will not come to assume that because a man has the ability to love, he therefore has the ability to love God. It's as wise as saying that because water can flow, it can flow uphill.
Or because a man can cast himself off of a high building that he can transport himself back up again. That's what we mean by the fall. Adam alone was uniquely able to give God the love that God desired to show God the righteousness that God required to dwell with God and the blessedness of God's original purpose and design.
But Adam fell from that. And so the broken wing and the man who's leaped off the building, that is our position this morning. Unless God reveals Himself. If you would receive deliverance from God, if you would receive the mercy from the God who knows you, knows you, everything about you, your sorrows, not only must He reveal Himself to you in this way, but He must reveal yourself to you.
We often, you'll hear people in this church, we don't just pray that God would show him or her grace. We often say, Lord, show them their sin. Show them their rebellion. Make them feel the guilt and the weight and the conviction of your holiness, Lord.
You must come to a knowledge of yourself if you would have a self-revelation of God. If God is to reveal Himself to you, it will also reveal yourself to you. For you to begin to understand the glory and the holiness of God is to understand all the ways you're not glorious and you're full of sin.
Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? That's not a chorus we hear very often. As the great preacher Henry Mahan said a generation ago, finding a sinner is a hard thing nowadays.
It's a rare thing nowadays. He went in, Lars was telling me this, he went in to do a hospital visit to someone in the congregation, who knows what his name was, and he says, he sat down there and he opened up his Bible and he took a deep breath and he said, well, George, you know that you're a sinner, right?
And George sort of contemplated and he said, well, I certainly am not a perfect man by far, but to say I'm a sinner, no, I would not say that I'm a sinner, pastor. And Henry Mahan closed the Bible and said, I've got nothing for you, George.
Walked out of the room.
I've not come to call the righteous, Jesus says. But the sinners, do not hide your sins as Achan once hid from the Lord if you would find mercy from God. But at the same time, remember that the God before whom nothing is hidden, the God to whom we must all give account, remember, if you're fearful that you can trust him, remember that he knows our sorrows.
He became one with us for this very reason. Unbelievers don't recognize that as they should. Frankly, believers don't even recognize that as they should. I was reflecting this week on my life of how little I bring my sorrows to God.
You know, Lord, you're my savior and you've saved me from these sins and my guilt, but then off in my own little corner, I have these various sorrows and I just think, well, this is just mine, and I wallow in them.
And all of a sudden, Jesus is less precious to me. He's not the redeemer of me, body and soul, in every aspect of my life, including even the smallest sorrows. But I can go to him with those. Maybe you're young and you're only thinking of God in terms of a transactional savior.
You commit the sin, you ask for forgiveness, he forgives the sin, and he's a redeemer for your whole life, your whole body and soul. The sorrows of being anxious and lonely, the sorrows, sometimes the very physically wrought sorrow of depression, that's not something to hide to the Lord, that's something that he knows intimately.
And to bring that to him.
So you can get his redemption from that. I was sharing with Tony something I heard this week as well about the old hymn writer, Thomas Dorsey, who very tragically in a sudden found out about his wife in about a month before her due date, dying in the midst of childbirth.
And he got this telegram and he rushed back home to find his beloved wife, Hattie, dead. And the child was delivered, but was very weak and struggling to survive. And later that night, his son also died.
And he locked himself in a room for days, inconsolable. He had just been about to go lead a number of praise courses at a revival in St. Louis. And his friend who finally was able to spend some time with him after he had buried, he buried his son on top of his wife in the same casket as he mourned.
And his friend knew that one of the ways that Thomas Dorsey connected to the Lord was through his giftedness with music and writing and the devotional life that poured out onto the pages and the tunes.
And so he'd sit in front of the keyboard and he had no desire to touch the keys, no desire to string something together. But eventually he just started playing with things almost as a distraction to get his mind off it.
And he began to just utter, Lord, Lord. Trying to find words for the grief of his heart,.
For the sorrow.
And his very wise friend, his very bold friend said, no, George, precious Lord, precious Lord. He's not the Lord far off. He's not the Lord distant from your sorrow. He's precious to you, precious Lord.
And he wrote to him, precious Lord, take my hand. Do you see? Precious Lord, take my hand. He's the God who knows our sorrows. And for that very reason, he can truly deliver us. This is not a one size fits all deliverance.
This is the God who intimately knows you and your sins and your guilt and your sorrows and your misery, that he would deliver you and redeem you from those very things. We must have deliverance. I was reading John Owen this week.
Had the choice of saint of God, Owen says, with all the grace he's received, just one of the many enemies. And he's talking about indwelling sin, opposition from within and from without. Just everything that opposes a Christian trying to live the Christian life.
Just take one and let it be the weakest. The weakest thing within, the weakest thing without. Even the weakest, if separated from the strength of God and lying under continual exhortations to be watchful, keep a close eye on your walk, that man could as easily move a mountain with his finger.
He could as easily climb to heaven on a ladder as he could stand against that one single weak enemy. Adam in paradise had no lust within him to entice him, had no world around him under the curse to seduce him.
And yet at the very first assault of Satan, he fell. If he could not do it, made an original righteousness, what hope do you and I have as believers? We must be delivered. We must be delivered. Notice that when the gospel grace comes to the life of the Christian, it's not given to us as a baton in some baton race.
I think I shared with you, I should send out the video. It's fun, it's funny to watch. Perhaps it's verging on schadenfreude, taking delight in another's misery, but there's this wonderful video clip of I think it's a pre-Olympic trial where it's a baton race.
And I think the team from China, somehow they missed the baton. And so they had to kind of go back. Meanwhile, everyone is blasting ahead. And they got it wrong like three times in a row. By the time they finally went, like the whole race was over.
That's not how God gives us his grace. Here's this pristine grace and it's perfect. And as soon as his fingertip comes off it,.
You'd fumble and drop it.
It's not that way at all. He doesn't say, I did everything for you.
And now it's your turn.
And I hope you make it. That's not the grace of God. We don't begin with grace and then complete the race in our own flesh. That's the problem that the Galatians had. And Paul said, you were running well, what happened?
You thought that you could begin by grace and then finish by works. You thought that by self effort and persistence.
And sheer will,.
That you could somehow live this Christian life successfully. Why did Jesus say, and this ought to be a daily prayer,.
That daily we pray to the Lord.
Lead us not into temptation, but deliver. He doesn't say, pray this way. Lead us not into temptation, but help us to have the wherewithal to muster up all that we need, to be able to stand and fight and just remember all those lessons that we learned and really dig down deep in that core of strength that I really have as a Christian.
Deliver us. Deliver us. So how does this deliverance take place? The deliverance is not something just initial. Deliverance from the bondage of sin and the guilt of sin, from its guilt and from its power, as the hymn puts it, but it's this ongoing deliverance.
And what does that look like in actuality? It looks like the intercession of Christ. The intercession of Christ is the believer's deliverance. Who is He who condemns? It's Christ who died. Furthermore, He's also risen, who is even at the right hand of God, who makes intercession for us.
Therefore, He's also able to save to the uttermost those who come to God through Him because He ever lives to make intercession for them. Intercession in the throne room of God looks like deliverance in the life of the Christian.
Can you trust the one who knows your sorrows?
Yes.
Before you've ever come to Him?
Day by day after you've come to Him?
As a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear Him, for He knows our frame. He remembers we're but dust. As we close, I want to share with you a hymn, but I just, in looking up this hymn, I didn't know anything.
I've heard of Joseph Hart. He wrote hundreds and hundreds of hymns, but I discovered something this week that I did not know about him. Joseph Hart was born in London in 1712. His early life, according to his own experience, which he put as a preface to many of his later hymns, he said it was a mixture of loose conduct, serious conviction of sin, and many endeavors to amend his life, many endeavors to change his life.
Before I go on, let me just say, does that characterize your life today, sitting here and then? Loose conduct mixed with serious conviction of sin and many endeavors to change your life. And this is what Hart said of himself.
It was not until 1757 that he came upon a permanent change. It was 11 years before he died. We must have deliverance. Do you think you begin the Christian life by grace and you complete it by works? Do you think that after loose conduct and serious conviction of sin, that you just can make resolutions and amendments to go no further or no farther?
Then you don't understand that the gospel grace, which was given to you at the first is meant to sustain you to the last. That it is the God who keeps His covenant promise, the God who knows His sorrow of the people.
It is God who begins and completes the Christian's life. It is the God who completes the race on behalf of His people. We must have deliverance. And so I close with these words from Joseph Hart. Come ye sinners, poor and needy, weak and wounded, sick and sore.
Jesus stands ready to save you,.
Full of pity, love and power.
Come ye thirsty, come, welcome. God's free, bounty, glorify. True belief, true repentance, every grace that brings you nigh. Let not conscience make you linger. Nor of fitness fondly dream. That had characterized most of Joseph Hart's life.
Nor of fit, if only I was fit. All right, this week's gonna be a new, I'm gonna do better this time. Nor of fitness fondly dream. All the fitness He requires is to feel your need of Him. Don't resolute to be made whole.
If conviction of sin has shown you that you're broken, all that is needed for you to draw near to Him is to recognize you do so as one who is broken. Harry Reeder, this is the most beautiful illustration I think I've ever heard.
I was at a Ligonier conference many years ago and Harry Reeder shared this. I was watching the video of it. And he said, there's only one way to fill a broken vessel. You think of a vessel, a container, and it's shattered and you hodgepodge it back together and there's all sorts of cracks and gaps and you keep week by week trying to pour water in and it just leaks out.
How are you ever going to fill this vessel? How are you ever going to be full with the glory and the beauty and the desire and the hunger and the thirst that ought to accompany the Christian life when you're a broken vessel?
And Reeder said, there's only one way you can fill a broken vessel, immerse it. We take little bits and charms and graces of Christ and we try to pour it in our broken vessel and as soon as it's in, it's out.
But if you immerse yourself in the beauty and the glory and the humility and the meekness and the wonder of who Jesus is and what He has done, you shall be full. Come ye weary, heavy laden, lost, ruined by the fall.
If you wait until you're better, you will never come at all. Let's pray. May we come, Lord. May we come to You as we are even this day. May sinners come to You this day. Weak, broken, ruined by the fall, vile, guilty, stubborn.
In our flesh, haters of what is sacred, haters of what is good and right. In our flesh, continually doing the things we know we ought not to do, continually falling short of the things we know we should.
May we come to You. Come and welcome to You who keeps His promises, the very promises we break, who keeps His covenant, the very covenant we break. May we come to You as the one who knows our sorrow, not from without, but from within.
Not from afar, not even near, but from within. Lord, You know Your people's sorrows. Give us a fuller glimpse in depth of what that means. May our whole life be bound up to You. Our thought life, our emotional life, our affective life, our hopes, our fears, our ambitions, our desires.
May they all be touched by the hand of the Redeemer and the physician. May we just trust His prescription. May sinners draw near to You, Lord. I pray specifically in this body, Lord, if You would give the grace of revealing Yourself to one who loves their sin and hates You.
Though it may not appear that way to anyone else, that is the reality this morning. They love their sins and therefore they hate You. They have not come because they will not come. Lord, show them their brokenness.
Immerse them by Your Spirit into Your person and work, into Your atoning blood. Immerse them and make them whole. And may we as a church have opportunity to outwardly immerse them as well. These things we ask in Your Son's name, amen.