*I’m recovering from a cold this week and my voice just isn’t there. You’ll have to accept just reading this one today. Happy Monday!
“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We observed his glory, the glory as the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
Have you ever been around one of those people who were just different in the best possible way? Something about them – and you never could quit put your finger on exactly what it was – just drew you in. You wanted to be near them. At the same time, you never quite felt like you deserved to be near them. The closer you got, the more you became aware of just how much you fell short of their goodness and you didn’t really like that. The odds are pretty good that what you experienced from that person was a taste of the glory of God. As we get closer and closer to Christmas Day, let’s reflect today on one of the greatest gifts of God’s coming near in Christ: glory.
We are now officially into the season of Advent. For the next few weeks, we are going to be working through a new teaching series looking at just why Jesus came to Earth and what that means for us. In this first part, we’ll answer the question and reflect together on the glorious nature of this powerful truth. Here’s a sneak preview: the reason Jesus came is you. Let’s talk about it.
Why He Came
I want you to think for a second about a time when you heard a dramatic conversion story. Those can be really powerful. I once knew a chainsaw artist who specialized in making eagle’s nests. He carved some pieces for a prayer garden one of the Boy Scouts at our former church made as his Eagle Scout project. They were pretty amazing. In talking to him a few times, I learned that he had never done any art of any kind, let alone chainsaw art, before he became a follower of Jesus. He was mostly just interested in doing drugs. Almost as soon as he accepted Jesus, though, he felt a calling to art, and had been making it ever since. Maybe you’ve seen the movie, The Jesus Revolution. It tells the story of the rise of Chuck Smith who would go on to pastor the Crystal Cathedral church in Orange County, CA. The movie also features the conversion story of Greg Laurie, the pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship, and a prominent speaker and author. Like my chainsaw artist friend, Greg was into all kinds of drugs before becoming a follower of Jesus. The experience that pushed him over the edge in the direction of the Gospel was when he was driving down the road with some buddies who were all high on LSD, and they saw a glowing vision of heaven in the distance on the side of the road. It wound up being a sign for a funeral home. The experience literally scared him back to the straight and narrow path from the broad path leading to destruction he had been sliding down. Do you know who else had a pretty dramatic conversion? The apostle Paul. And his story is one that I’d like to give a bit of our attention this morning.
“Now at midnight the Lord stuck every firstborn male in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the prisoner who was in the dungeon, and every firstborn of the livestock. During the night Pharaoh got up, he along with all his officials and all the Egyptians, and there was a loud wailing throughout Egypt because there wasn’t a house without someone dead. He summoned Moses and Aaron during the night and said, ‘Get out immediately from among my people, both you and the Israelites, and go, worship the Lord as you have said. Take even your flocks and your herds as you asked and leave, and also bless me.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)
God is going to one day bring judgment on the earth for all the sin that has been committed on it over the course of human history. Now, a great deal of sin was covered by Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. Actually, all of it was covered, but this covering only extends to those who have been willing to receive it. That’s the problem. Not nearly everyone has accepted His gracious gift. Many have and will yet decide to bear the weight of their sin on their own. They pridefully believe themselves capable of handling the load. They will be proven disastrously wrong in the end. That will indeed be a terrifying day. We know this because the mere snapshots God has given us of judgment in the Scriptures are themselves terrifying to behold. The final plague was a judgment against the sins of Egypt. Let’s talk about what is going on in these hard verses, and why they point us to a God worthy of our devotion.
“Then Moses summoned all the elders of Israel and said to them, ‘Go, select an animal from the flock according to your families, and slaughter the Passover animal. Take a cluster of hyssop, dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and brush the lintel and the two doorposts with some of the blood in the basin. None of you may go out the door of his house until morning. When the Lord passes through to strike Egypt and sees the blood on the lintel and the two doorposts, he will pass over the door and not let the destroyer enter your houses to strike you.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)
Blood is really important. That’s true physically, of course, as we die if we lose too much of it. It’s also true in various other symbolic ways. Relationally speaking, we talk about blood relatives versus those who are just relatives by marriage. Familialy, there is the saying that “blood is thicker than water,” meaning we are going to have closer relationships with our family members than non-family members. When they put ratings on movies, part of what determines how restrictive of a rating a particular film gets is how much blood gets splattered across the screen. Bloody violence gets rated higher than non-bloody violence (think Deadpool versus Star Wars). Blood has also long played an important role in our religious practices. This was the case in the first Passover. Let’s talk about why and what is going on in this next part of the story.
“The Lord said to Moses, ‘Pharaoh will not listen to you, so that my wonders may be multiplied in the land of Egypt.’ Moses and Aaron did all these wonders before Pharaoh, but the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he would not let the Israelites go out of his land.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
Let me give you a bit of a peek behind the curtain this morning. I often write the introductions for these posts several weeks before I write the rest of them. These introductions serve as placeholders so that when I come back to actually write the full post I have a bit of a reminder of what I was thinking when I was first studying through a particular passage. As a result, I’m often studying one part of the text while writing about another a few chapters back. On occasion this lets me see connections between two different parts that I might otherwise miss. Way back at the beginning of chapter 7, just before God set Moses loose on Pharaoh, He told him (again) what was going to happen. The words He used then were remarkably similar to these words right here. Let’s come back to them again and touch yet again on this theme of Pharaoh’s hard heart. From that, we’ll spend a moment reflecting on why all of the repetition we find in this story is so important.
