“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:35 – CSB – Read the chapter)
Followers of Jesus have used all kinds of means to identify themselves over the centuries. Symbols, titles, national identities, and so on and so forth. We do this because we want to know who’s saved and who’s not. Now, too often we’ve gotten off track from Jesus’ teachings and used this knowledge for a variety of nefarious purposes, but we’ve also been more noble in our aims. For all the ways we identify ourselves, though, Jesus gave us a marker, a way to tell who are His followers and who aren’t. It’s very simple, He said, just love like He does. I got to participate in bidding a final-for-now farewell to a great lady yesterday. Let me tell you about Peggy and being someone who loves one another.
“The Lord said to Moses, ‘Come up to me on the mountain and stay there so that I may give you the stone tablets with the law and commandments I have written for their instruction.’ So Moses arose with his assistant Joshua and went up the mountain of God. He told the elders, ‘Wait here for us until we return to you. Aaron and Hur are here with you. Whoever has a dispute should go to them.’ When Moses went up the mountain, the cloud covered it. The glory of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it for six days. On the seventh day he called to Moses from the cloud. The appearance of the Lord’s glory to the Israelites was like a consuming fire on the mountaintop. Moses entered the cloud as he went up the mountain, and he remained on the mountain forty days and forty nights.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
We live in an instant society. We are so used to getting just about everything immediately now, that the idea of waiting for something for just about any length of time is wildly unappealing to us. And yet, things that happen instantly are rarely as good as those which take a little longer to develop. This is the case with all sorts of different things in life. As much as we want to hurry up, so often we have to wait. When God called Moses to Himself to give him the covenant laws for the people, it didn’t happen overnight. In fact, it took a pretty long time. Now that the covenant is in place, let’s take a look at Moses’ going to receive it and the events surrounding his departure.
“Then Moses went up with Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and seventy of israel’s elders, and they saw the God of Israel. Beneath his feet was something like a pavement made of lapis lazuli, as clear as the sky itself. God did not harm the Israelite nobles; they saw him, and they ate and drank.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
Starting out something new with God feels good. It’s exciting. We pour ourselves into it and into Him. Everything is going just as it’s supposed to go. Now, this doesn’t mean everything is going to stay that way. But getting off on the right foot is better than getting off on the wrong one. This next passage is unexpected and, honestly, kind of weird. But it’s pretty important. Let’s talk about why and what’s going on here.
“Moses came and told the people all the commands of the Lord and all the ordinances. Then all the people responded with a single voice, ‘We will do everything that the Lord has commanded.’ And Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord. He rose early the next morning and set up an altar and twelve pillars for the twelve tribes of Israel at the base of the mountain. Then he sent out young Israelite men, and they offered burnt offerings and sacrificed bulls as fellowship offerings to the Lord. Moses took half the blood and set it in basins; the other half of the blood he splattered on the altar. He then took the covenant scroll and read it aloud to the people. They responded, ‘We will do and obey all that the Lord has commanded.’ Moses took the blood, splattered it on the people, and said, ‘This is the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you concerning all these words.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)
One of the things I always talk about with couples when doing their premarital counseling is that marriage is supposed to be a covenant, not a contract. We don’t distinguish very well between those two ideas today, and often think about marriage in contract terms rather than covenantal ones much to the detriment of our marriage relationships. In the ancient world, people were more accustomed to the idea of covenants and better understood just how serious they really were. After having heard the basic contours of the covenant God wanted to make with them, the people agreed to His terms and went forward with the covenant. Let’s take a look here at part of how this process unfolded.
We’ve talked a lot about the church lately. Part of the reason for this is that I am convinced that one of the biggest reasons followers of Jesus don’t live fully up to the glorious calling we have in Him is because we don’t fully understand what the church is and has been called to be in Christ. I want to fix that. This week and next we are talking about God’s purpose for the church and how we as a church can be a part of fulfilling it. You may not be a part of this church, but if you are part of the church, there’s something here for you to know. And if you’re not a part of any church, this is a good primer on the calling you are missing out on by your absence. Let’s look at what God’s plans have always been and how we can be a part of them.
Dwelling Place
I had the opportunity to talk to someone recently who is at the beginning of their journey into engaging with the Scriptures in pursuit of a deeper, fuller, richer, more robust relationship with Jesus. This young person has also made the choice to engage with the Scriptures from the standpoint of faith, assuming that they are true and that God will make answers available to tough questions at some point in the future. These are both really good things that are to be encouraged in every single person who starts down this path. But one of the things this individual observed to me is how crazy it seems that Israel slaughtered all of those Canaanite people at God’s command when they were moving into the Promised Land. Well, this led us into a conversation about all of the different factors we have to keep in mind when engaging with a story like this if we are going to be able to make any kind of positive sense out of it. These include things like God’s character as revealed by the rest of the Scriptures, the nature of God’s commands in the first place, how Israel and other ancient peoples received and processed commands like we find here, the nature of the culture of the ancient world, how God has always worked with and revealed Himself to us, and so on and so forth. The bigger point here, though, is one we should not miss and to which you may or may not have given much in the way of critical thought before: Understanding the ways God is revealed in the Old Testament narrative through the lens of the New Testament can be tricky.
The Nexus 