Month: August 2023

Morning Musing: Exodus 12:14-15, 19-20

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“This day is to be a memorial for you, and you must celebrate it as a festival to the Lord. You are to celebrate it throughout your generations as a permanent statute. You must eat unleavened bread for seven days. On the first day you must remove yeast from your houses. Whoever eats what is leavened from the first day through the seventh day must be cut off from Israel. . . .Yeast must not be found in your houses for seven days. If anyone eats something leavened, that person, whether a resident alien or native of the land, must be cut off from the community of Israel. Do not eat anything leavened; eat unleavened bread in all your homes.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Every nation has a rhythm. There are things that come around every year that everyone celebrates together. These festivals and ceremonies help to give that nation its own identity. Observing them each year is important to the health and longevity of the people. If they lose sight of these, they will gradually begin to forget who they are. At that point, they begin to enter the dangerous territory of losing themselves. God wasn’t simply leading the people of Israel out of Egypt in the Exodus. He was building them into something they had never been before: a nation. As a part of this process, they needed to begin to develop an identity. In the event of the Passover, God was not simply bringing judgment to Egypt, nor simply helping Israel punch their ticket out of there. He was laying the foundation for a ritual that would define who they were as a people. Let’s talk about what is going on here.

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Morning Musing: Exodus 12:12-13

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“I will pass through the land of Egypt on that night and strike every firstborn male in the land of Egypt, both people and animals. I am the Lord; I will execute judgments against all the gods of Egypt. The blood on the houses where you are staying will be a distinguishing mark for you; when I see the blood, I will pass over you. No plague will be among you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the ministries I follow fairly closely has a phrase they repeat pretty regularly. It goes like this: ideas have consequences; bad ideas have victims. When we believe things that are wrong, not only will we do things that are wrong, but bad things will eventually come to us and those around us. The wrong beliefs of the people of Egypt had finally brought them to the point we find ourselves addressing this morning. God was bringing judgment against the nation in the form of the death of all of its firstborn. We have talked about it once before. We’ll talk about it one more time in the days yet to come, Lord willing. Today, let’s take a look at a couple of details in this next part of the story that give us a better picture of what was really going on here, and the nature of God’s perfect justice.

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Morning Musing: Exodus 12:1-2, 11

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“The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, ‘This month is to be the beginning of months for you; it is the first month of your year. . .Here is how you must eat it: You must be dressed for travel, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. You are to eat it in a hurry; it is the Lord’s Passover.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

In John’s Revelation, when the last apostle is recording his vision of the various judgments that will culminate in the end of the world, in two of the three series of seven judgments, the final judgment is silence. Just as we are approaching what we are sure must be the end of everything, we are greeted instead with silence in heaven. Read in context and on its own terms, the moment is truly jarring because of how very unexpected it is. That’s a little like what we get here. We are ready for God to unleash His full fury on the Egyptians. Instead, we get something rather different from that. Let’s begin something new today as we explore together how God finally fulfilled His promise to bring His people out of Egypt.

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Building the Body

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This week we kicked off a brand-new teaching series called, Nuts and Bolts. For the next few weeks, we are going to be exploring some of the ideas we introduced in our last series in a bit more detail. We have been talking for the last few weeks about how the church got its start. Knowing that history is good, but it doesn’t tell us how the church was designed to work. That’s what we’ll be addressing in this series. In this first installment, we are going to start with what the church is in the first place. Join me as we talk about what it is and what one powerful implication of that is for our lives. Thanks for reading and sharing.

Building the Body

I remember a season growing up when my dad would make monthly trips to Hutchinson, KS. He went there to attend the board meetings of Collins Industries, a small bus and ambulance manufacturer, for whom he had done some legal work over the years. Now, Hutchinson is located in the middle of nowhere Kansas. I’ll grant you that’s most of the state, but Hutchinson really earns the title. Normally, kids probably wouldn’t have any interest in going to the middle of nowhere with their dads for a business trip. But Hutchinson had one really cool thing going for it: a world class space museum. 

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Digging in Deeper: 1 Thessalonians 4:13

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“We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, concerning those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve like the rest, who have no hope.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

We live in a hard, sad world. We are surrounded by brokenness everywhere we look. It takes all different forms and shapes and sizes. But the worst brokenness of all is death. Death takes us away from life and purpose and meaning and everyone and everything we love and who loves us. It is a profound disruption of our lives whenever it occurs. And so, when we face it, we grieve. Yet how we grieve matters and says a lot about how we happen to see the world. Disney’s latest film offering, The Haunted Mansion, takes us right into the thick of these big, hard questions, and forces us to reckon with them. Let’s talk about the movie today and why it’s not what you might think.

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