Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro: How do you normally relate to rules?

Two extremes on a spectrum: ultra compliant on the one extreme… ultra-rebellious on the other extreme.

I’m ultra compliant.

I want to know that what I am doing is absolutely right.

I don’t want anyone to be angry with me.

I get tied in knots if I ever even THINK I could have POSSIBLY broken a law of the land.

But deep down, I sort of resent that… like even though I’m compliant, I still wish that I didn’t have to follow the rules.

And even for us ultra-compliant people, rules don’t exactly give us the warm and fuzzies, right?

Which is why the topic we are going to talk about today is difficult for us to understand: ..that God’s LAW is an expression of God’s LOVE for his people.

The law of God that we find in the Old Testament was part of his COVENANT with the nation he had rescued out of slavery and was now forming.

A lot of people generalize the Old Testament as a time when God was harsh and ruthless… and then all of the sudden he became warm and fuzzy after Jesus died on the cross...

They make a false claim that the Old Testament is all law and wrath and the New Testament is, in contrast, all grace and love (which they define as God having no expectations of his people)...

And that’s just not a helpful way to think about it… and it reveals DEEP misunderstandings about how the story unfolds and how God’s character never changes.

The word for steadfast love… or covenant-keeping love is used almost 250 times in the OT...

And so to think of God’s character as UNLOVING or harsh as he gives his law and interacts with his people in the OT is deeply flawed.

So to make sure we don’t fall into those wrong assumptions, we need to understand the nature of God as a COVENANT keeping God.

We are in our sermon series called, “God’s Story, My Story,” and we are learning to find our place in God’s unfolding story of salvation through Jesus Christ.

God has a place for us in his story…

And today we are finding our place in the part of the story where God establishes a COVENANT with a specific nation: the nation of Israel.

He delivered them out of slavery… he gave them a national identity… he promised to be their God and he would be their people… and he gave them a law to live by.

He established a covenant… a binding promise that governed his relationship with them...

And that covenant has great value in helping us understand our own relationship to God.

It’s because he LOVED them and he wanted them to LOVE HIM.

Now we have to be careful with this because we are not Israel…

In the first two sections of the story, we had a lot in common with the characters… we were all descendents of Adam… we all shared in his sin… and our ethnic heritage didn’t matter much…

But now God is calling out a specific nation.

And I don’t THINK anyone here is of pure Jewish descent… and this part of the Bible is written specifically TO the nation of Israel...

I want to be clear today: the church did not REPLACE Israel… God is still going to keep his promises to them…

So that should make us ask the question, “Does this part of the Bible even matter to us?

Does it even apply?

Is it FOR us?”

And the answer is YES! because WE are SAVED by Israel’s Messiah… our Savior King is actually their Savior King… the one God promised to THEM...

And through him, we will get to share in Israel’s blessing as Jesus Christ’s returns to establish his Kingdom…

but we are God’s people… and we live under a new covenant that is established on the covenant he made with Israel… he is still a covenant keeping God.

But we live under a new covenant that is established on the covenant he made with Israel…

So the story of His specific covenant with the specific nation of Israel can teach us a lot about our story here today.

And the story of His specific covenant with the specific nation of Israel can teach us a lot about our story here today.

And so

God’s purposes and plan for his covenant people have not changed.

And this is OUR heritage.

OUR history because it is JESUS CHRIST’S history.

So here’s the Big Idea we want to pursue today:

Big Idea: Draw near to the covenant-keeping God.

Now this word covenant isn’t a word we use very often… the most we use it is when we are thinking about a marriage covenant… and even then, that concept is lost in our society for the most part as marriage is less and less viewed as a binding, unfailing contract...

A covenant is simply a binding promise that defines and governs the relationship between two parties.

Last week we talked about God’s PROMISE to Abraham… really what he did was he made a COVENANT with Abraham.

He established a relationship between the two parties and defined the terms.

His offspring would become a great nation…

We last left off in Genesis with God’s promise to Abraham: to establish him in a land and to bless him through offspring that would come from him…

He called Abraham to walk before him and be blameless… that he would be Abraham’s God… the one in whom Abraham would put his trust...

And says that Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness…

He was not blameless because he never sinned… but because he believed God.

And God made some very one-sided promises to Abraham… let me just remind you of those promises that we talked about last week… and bring you up to speed, setting the context for what we are going to study today.

You can follow each event in your notes and up on the screen… maybe just move your finger along as I move along here...

His offspring would become a great nation…

You’ll remember that he promised Abraham land… and blessing… and offspring…

He promised Abraham that His offspring would become a great nation…

And his offspring would include the one promised to the woman in the curse of .

God gave Abraham and his wife Sarah a son named Isaac who was the child of promise… and he confirmed his promise to Isaac.

And I put in your notes a sort of timeline of everything that happened between and … what we are talking about today covers a LARGE portion of the story in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, and Ruth.

God gave Isaac two sons named Esau and Jacob, and Jacob became the one who received Isaac’s blessing… his name was later changed to Israel...

And God gave Jacob (or Israel) 12 sons… these became the forefathers of the 12 tribes of Israel.

Now one of these brothers was Jacob’s favorite… his name was Joseph...

And because Joseph didn’t have a lot of humility or wisdom in how he spoke to his brothers, they sold him into slavery in Egypt.

They intended that for evil, but God intended it for good… because he took Joseph through some pretty difficult times to raise him up to be second in command in Egypt....

And it was his wisdom that saved Egypt from a famine.

During that famine, his family came to Egypt looking for food… and that was where they were staying at the end of the book of Genesis.

The book of Exodus opens remembering the family of Jacob in Egypt… but fast-forwarding 400 years…

a Pharoah arose who did not know of Joseph… he got scared of these Israelites multiplying and overtaking him...

And so he subjected them to harsh slavery.

They cry out to God, and the end of tells us that God remembered his covenant that he made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob…

The story continues of how God saved Israel out of the hands of a new Pharoah with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm…

He sent 10 plagues on the Egyptians until Pharaoh let them go...

Only to chase them down again...

But God pulled back the waters of the Red Sea, allowing Israel to cross on dry ground...

And he dropped those same waters on the Egyptians when they tried to pursue...

So God brought them to this mountain called Horeb or Sinai… and there he established his covenant with them.

He gave them moral and religious and civil laws...

He gave them a blueprint for the tabernacle…

But they continually sinned against him...

They grumbled and complained and made idols…

And their sin kept them from God.

The book of Exodus ends with Moses… and therefore everyone else… UNABLE to enter the tabernacle they just built.

Enter Leviticus - Leviticus establishes ritual laws for removing the uncleanness that is associated with guilt and death...

I was going to go through ALL of that, but I decided not to because I still want you listening by the end…

It calls for moral and physical purity to enter into the holy space of God.

God wanted to make a way for his people to commune with him even though they carried the guilt of sin.

And so God gave them sacrifices and purifications to take away the sin and uncleanness associated with death.

And it’s SUCCESSFUL… the book of Numbers begins with the fact that Moses is IN the tabernacle hearing from God…

But as they begin to move from Mt. Sinai to the Promised Land, they show their lack of faith in God...

And there are a LOT of numbers in the book of Numbers… but there are also a lot of events that carry the story forward...

But there is a lot that carries the story forward...

And God judges their sin and waits a whole generation to deliver them into the promised land.

God gives instruction for how Israel is to set up their camp… getting them ready for what SHOULD BE a two-week long journey through the wilderness...

So the brief is this: Abraham’s descendents grew into a large nation that was enslaved in Egypt.

God moves his people from Sinai after being there a year...

They were at Sinai for a year getting ready… now it’s time to move… And he moves them toward the land he had promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob… the land of Canaan.

And he moves them toward the land he had promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob… the land of Canaan.

Not only that, but by the end of the book of Numbers, even MOSES is not allowed to enter the promised land because of his own sin...

The only problem is that they send out twelve spies, and 10 of them report that the land is full of big, scary giants and there is no way to defeat them.