Union Church

Exodus 33:12-23 - Exodus and Easter

Listen along as we wrap up Exodus and see the hope of Easter.

Exodus 33:12-23

“For a while” is a phrase whose length can't be measured. At least by the person who's waiting. - Haruki Murakami

“We don't believe something by merely saying we believe it, or even when we believe that we believe it. We believe something when we act as if it were true. Actions are not impostions on who we are, but are expressions of who we are. They come out of our heart and the inner realities it supervises and interacts with.” Dallas Willard 

Exodus 34:6-7 

Romans 8:34-39

1 Peter 1:3-7

2 Cor 3:16-18

Exodus 23:1-9 - A Jealous God

Exodus 23:1-9 - Faith

Title: A Jealous God

 

“The jealous God”— doesn't it sound offensive? For we know jealousy, the green-eyed monster, as a vice, one of the most cancerous and soul-destroying vices that there is.”

- J.I. Packer

 

I was dreaming of the past

And my heart was beating fast

I began to lose control

I began to lose control

I didn't mean to hurt you

I'm sorry that I made you cry

Oh no, I didn't want to hurt you

I'm just a jealous guy

- John Lennon

 

“Were we imagining a God, then naturally we should ascribe to him only characteristics which we admired, and jealousy would not enter the picture. Nobody would imagine a jealous God. But we are not making up an idea of God by drawing on our imagination; we are seeking instead to listen to the words of Holy Scripture, in which God himself tells us the truth about himself. For God our Creator, whom we could never have discovered by any exercise of imagination, has revealed himself. He has talked. He has spoken…”

- J.I. Packer

 

“There are two sorts of jealousy among humans, and only one of them is a vice. Vicious jealousy is an expression of the attitude, "I want what you've got, and I hate you because I haven't got it." It is an infantile resentment springing from unmortified covetousness, which expresses itself in envy, malice and meanness of action. It is terribly potent, for it feeds and is fed by pride, the taproot of our fallen nature. There is a mad obsessiveness about jealousy which, if indulged, can tear an otherwise firm character to shreds. "Anger is cruel and fury overwhelming, but who can stand before jealousy?" asks the wise man (Prov 27:4). What is often called sexual jealousy, the lunatic fury of a rejected or supplanted suitor, is of this kind.

But there is another sort of jealousy: zeal to protect a love relationship, or to avenge it when broken. This jealousy also operates in the sphere of sex; there, however, it appears not as the blind reaction of wounded pride but as the fruit of marital affection. As Professor Tasker has written, married persons "who felt no jealousy at the intrusion of a lover or an adulterer into their home would surely be lacking in moral perception; for the exclusiveness of marriage is the essence of marriage" (The Epistle of James, p. 106). This sort of jealousy is a positive virtue, for it shows a grasp of the true meaning of the husband-wife relationship, together with a proper zeal to keep it intact.”

- J.I. Packer

 

“For your Maker is your husband,
the Lord of hosts is his name…” 

(Isaiah 54:5a)

 

“For I feel a divine jealousy for you, since I betrothed you to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ. 

(2 Corinthians 11:2)

 

“There is no need to be disturbed by this. Jealousy is a resentment of rivals, and whether it is good or evil depends on whether the rival has any right to be there. Since God is unique, and there is no other, he has the right to ask that we worship him alone.”

- John Stott

 

“A counterfeit god (idol) is anything so central and essential to your life that, should you lose it, your life would feel hardly worth living.”

 —Timothy Keller

 

25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. 28 In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, 30 because we are members of his body. 31 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. 

—Eph. 5:25-32

 

Exodus 19:1-6 - Sinai Pt. 2

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Notes//Quotes:

Text for reading: Exodus 19:1-6 - Scott
Title: Sinai pt. 2

“We can imagine our octogenarian mountaineer in joyful fellowship with the God whose patience he had exhausted at this spot some months earlier.”
- Christopher Wright

10  “He found him in a desert land,
and in the howling waste of the wilderness;
he encircled him, he cared for him,
he kept him as the apple of his eye.
11  Like an eagle that stirs up its nest,
that flutters over its young,
spreading out its wings, catching them,
bearing them on its pinions,
12  the LORD alone guided him,
no foreign god was with him.”
—Deut. 32:10-12 ESV

“Oh, that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the pots of meat and when we ate bread to the full! For you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” - Exodus 16:3 NKJV

“It’s three months since they've left Egypt. They started a new calendar the moment they stepped foot out of Egypt. So now time is being reckoned in relation to his work of deliverance. And he tells them, we're entering into covenant. If you obey me and keep my covenant, then out of all the nations, you're going to be my treasured possession.” 
- Carmen Imes

“9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. 10 Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. 
- 1 Peter 2:9&10 ESV

 

Exodus 14:5-31 - Deliverance and Doubt

Listen along as we continue our series through Exodus.

Notes//Quotes:

Exodus 14:5-31

“The story of God is the story of salvation, centered on the One whose name means “Yahweh is salvation,” and here is what that looks like: deliverance from slavery and certain death, announced by faith, and received as a gift through trust and obedience.” - Chris Wright

“With our modern curiosity, we tend either to explain the phenomenon (and deny the miracle) or to think of it solely in miraculous terms (and resist any natural causation). Our text, however, sees the event from both perspectives as equally valid. On the one hand, the Bible itself provides a perfectly natural explanation. A combination of wind and movement of the sea caused a dry corridor for a temporary period, long enough for Israel to get to the other side. On the other hand, who rules the wind and the waves? We have just read the whole narrative of the natural disasters inflicted on Egypt by Yahweh using the forces of creation for his own purposes. This event, no matter what the natural causes, was Yahweh’s doing (he caused the wind to drive back the sea) through Moses’s agency (he stretched his hand and raised his staff). Two other points turn this natural event into a miracle of salvation: first, that it should happen at precisely the time when the Israelites needed it to; and second, that the danger surrounding them was only too evident—the sea was still there in the threatening darkness (the walls of water on either side) but was held back long enough for all to cross in safety.” Chris Wright

Ezk 18:23

Prov 3:6-7

“The way of trust is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, not into some predetermined, clearly delineated plan for the future. The next step discloses itself only out of a discernment of God acting in the desert of the present moment. The reality of naked trust is the life of the pilgrim who leaves what is nailed down, obvious, and secure, and walks into the unknown without any rational explanation to justify the decision or guarantee the future. Why? Because God has signaled the movement and offered it his presence and his promise.” Brennan Manning

“Almost anything in life that truly matters will require you to do small, mostly overlooked things, over a long period of time with him.” Zach Eswine

Exodus 12:1-13 - Passover

Listen along as we continue our series through Exodus.

Notes//Quotes:

Exodus 12:1-13

“Liturgies aim our love to different ends precisely by training our hearts through our bodies.”. - James K.A. Smith 

Exodus 12:29-32

13:17-22

Whenever Israel returned to God in such times of national repentance, covenant renewal, or restoration, they returned to the foundational historic event of their national existence—the event on which their identity and faith was founded: God’s great demonstration of compassion, justice, and redemption, the exodus. They needed to be shaped again by the story that had first shaped them and respond to its promise and its demand in renewed worship and obedience. They needed to tell and hear again the story they were in, the story of God and God’s people, and then live in the light of it.For us, individually or as Christian communities, times of revival and renewal will always include going back to the cross and resurrection of Christ, back to the redemption story that defines the good news for us and the world, the story that shapes our identity, our mission, and our future. As it was for Israel, the road to renewal and restoration for us has to be the road of remembrance. For even as Christians, we so easily forget the story we are in. We need, just as much as the Israelites, to hear and tell again and again the story of God, the foundational biblical narrative of our redemption, and then live in the light of it. Chris Wright

Jesus is a teacher who doesn’t just inform our intellect but forms our very loves. He isn’t content to simply deposit new ideas into your mind; he is after nothing less than your wants, your loves, your longings - James KA

Exodus 7:1-13 - There Will Be Frogs

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Exodus 7:1-13

 2 Tim 3:16-17

“One could object that it is not worthy of God to wield the sword. Is God not love, long-suffering and all-powerful love? A counter-question could go something like this: Is it not a bit too arrogant to presume that our contemporary sensibilities about what is compatible with God’s love are so much healthier than those of the people of God throughout the whole history of Judaism and Christianity? If God were not angry at injustice and deception and did not make the final end to violence God would not be worthy of our worship.” - Mirolsav Volf 

6:6-8

“How are we to interpret all this? With humility, would be a good place to start. There is (and always will be) a mystery in holding together the sovereignty of God and human moral responsibility for our own willed choices and actions. Yet we must, without hesitation, insist that the Bible affirms both, frequently and unequivocally, however difficult it is for us to reconcile them in our human logic” - Chris Wright

“The entire created order is caught up in this struggle, either as cause or victim. Pharaoh’s antilife measures have unleashed chaotic powers that threaten the very creation that God intended.… Water is no longer water; light and darkness are no longer separated; diseases of people and animals run amok; insects and amphibians swarm out of control. And the signs come to a climax in the darkness, which in effect returns the creation to the first day of Genesis 1, a precreation state of affairs. While everything is unnatural in the sense of being beyond the bounds of the order created by God, the word hypernatural (nature in excess) may better capture the sense. The plagues are hypernatural at various levels—timing, scope, intensity. Some sense of this is also seen in the recurrent phrases to the effect that such “had never been seen before, nor ever shall be again” (10:14 cf. 10:6; 9:18, 24; 11:6). Terence Fretheim

“It cannot be accidental that God used ten plagues to teach the Egyptians that he is sovereign and that their gods were of no account. At the time of the exodus, both the Israelites and the Egyptians used a decimal counting system, which meant that the number ten tended to connote a full, complete, sufficient quantity of anything being explicitly enumerated. A run-through of the whole decimal list from one to ten provided more than enough demonstration of God’s power over Egypt for anyone to get the message.” Doug Stuart

“after six occasions of pharaoh hardening his own heart, we at last read that God hardens his heart, it is not so much that God is causing him to make those choices but that God gives him up to the choices he has shown himself determined to make and allows the consequences to take their course” Chris Wright

Romans 12:14-21

Exodus 5:1-9, 6:1-8 - The Battle of the Gods

Listen along as we continue our series in Exodus.

Exodus 5:1-9, 6:1-8 - Scott Reading
Title: Battle Of The Gods

“The exodus is a battle of the gods, in which only one can emerge from the ring victorious…The conflict between the deities: Egypt's against Israel's, the false against the true, the serpent against the seed, Pharaoh against the Lord. It is a mismatch. Battles against the Lord always are.”
—Alistair J. Roberts & Andrew Wilson, Echos Of Exodus, (pg. 41)

“Their words in 5:1 have all the hallmarks of a bold prophetic word, beginning with the classic “Thus says Yahweh” (author’s translation) and framed as a simple imperative, “let my people go.” At first reading it sounds impressively courageous as a direct word from God. Except that it was not. That speech in verse 1 was not actually what God had told Moses to say to pharaoh, and the narrator knows this, since he records Moses and Aaron reverting in verse 3 to the words God had actually given Moses in 3:18. — Christopher Wright

“That “long tradition” includes not only Job and the writers of many a psalm of lament, not only the poet who produced the prolonged and searingly poignant protest called Lamentations, but also the prophet Elijah (1 Kgs 19) and, especially, Jeremiah, whose depression and desperation lead to outbursts of astonishing honesty, some of which employ Moses’s imploring “Why …?” (e.g., Jer 12:1–4; 15:10–21; 20:7–17). That “Why …?”—echoing through the pain of so many in the Old Testament—is heard from the cross at the moment of that greater exodus that Christ accomplished there. And indeed, it was a “Why …?” taken straight from the Scriptures that shaped Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34; Ps 22:1). We know why. And Jesus, too, knew why. He was doing what he had come to do, bearing in his own divine-human self the full and terrible weight and cost and consequences of the sin of the world. But the agony of doing so draws forth this cry of dereliction. Even in the silence of heaven at that moment, we may hear the echo of exactly what God said in answer to the “Why?” that Moses asked.”
- Christopher Wright

"Standing on business" means to firmly prioritize your responsibilities, commitments, and personal values in a professional or serious manner, essentially indicating a dedication to taking care of your business and following through on your words with actions; it implies a sense of duty, assertiveness, and a no-nonsense attitude towards achieving goals.”  
- Google Ai

“God just gets on with business. This is really good news for you and me because sometimes we lack faith in God, we lack enthusiasm, and we're not sure if God is going to make good on his promises. God's promises however, do not depend on us, they depend on him. And so, even if we're in a period of discouragement, we're not in danger of derailing God's plan. God will carry out the promises that he made with or without our participation. And here, God isn't just going to save the ones who are on his side and who are excited, he is going to save all of the Hebrews. He's giving them time to come around and by the time they leave Egypt, they will be on board and he will be able to rescue them.”
- Dr. Carmen Imes

Exodus 3:1-6 - God With Us

Listen along as we continue our series through Exodus.

Text: Exodus 3:1-6
Title: God With Us

“What Moses does mean by this? Did he mean that he became a foreigner to those who no longer accepted him? To the Egyptians, the Hebrews, or that now he's in Midian and he doesn't belong here either? Moses is a misfit and he has this hybrid identity that doesn't really belong.” 
— Dr. Carmen Imes

“What is the significance of the fire’s being in the bush but not of the bush? It indicates that the fire Moses saw was independent of the bush—it was not using the bush for its fuel. That’s why the bush wasn’t consumed. It was burning from its own power. It was self-generated. This is a biblical example of what we call theophany, meaning “God made manifest.” The God whom we worship is a spirit. He is invisible, and His invisible substance cannot be seen by the human eye. But there are occasions in redemptive history where the invisible God makes Himself visible by some kind of manifestation. That is called a theophany, and it’s what we see with the burning bush.” — R.C. Sproul

 “God is not only identifying himself as Yahweh, the God who made a covenant with Abraham to bless him and multiply him and bring him into the land and make him be a blessing to all nations. Not only is He that God, but at the same time He’s defining who Moses is. He belongs in that covenant people and the God of his father is that God, the God Yahweh. So he's grown up in an Egyptian context where there are lots of deities, lots of temples, lots of priests worshiping these different deities, and in his first encounter with God he finds out simultaneously who God is, and who he is, and that settles things for him. Going forward, his hybrid identity gets resolved and I think this is how it works actually for all of us. When we come to fully encounter the God of the Bible (Yahweh who revealed himself in Jesus)…as we come to know Yahweh we come to know ourselves. There's no real way to know who we are outside of knowing who God is, who God has created us to be, and who He's called us to be.” — Dr. Carmen Imes

“Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other. For, in the first place, no man can survey himself without forthwith turning his thoughts towards the God in whom he lives and moves; because it is perfectly obvious, that the endowments which we possess cannot possibly be from ourselves; nay, that our very being is nothing else than subsistence in God alone. In the second place, those blessings which unceasingly distill to us from heaven, are like streams conducting us to the fountain. Here, again, the infinitude of good which resides in God becomes more apparent from our poverty. In particular, the miserable ruin into which the revolt of the first man has plunged us, compels us to turn our eyes upwards; not only that while hungry and famishing we may thence ask what we want, but being aroused by fear may learn humility.”     — John Calvin

“Yahweh is and always will be “God with”—God with those who faithfully obey his sending; God with his people in good times and bad; God with the poor and needy in their affliction; and eventually, Immanuel, “God with us.” —Christopher Wright

Questions:
1. Can I celebrate the slow nature of character building? 
2. Am I attempting to know myself apart from looking outward and upward?
3. Have I truly encountered the God who is with me?

Exodus 2:1-25 - Subversive Sovereignty

Listen along as we look at Exodus 2.

Notes//Quotes:

Exodus 2:1-25

“The one universal balm for the trauma of war was tea. It was the thing that helped people cope. People made tea during air raids and after air raids, and on breaks between retrieving bodies from shattered buildings. Tea bolstered the network of thirty thousand observers who watched for German aircraft over England, operating from one thousand observation posts, all stocked with tea and kettles. Mobile canteens dispensed gallons of it, steaming, from spigots. In propaganda films, the making of tea became a visual metaphor for carrying on. “Tea acquired almost a magical importance in London life,” according to one study of London during the war. “And the reassuring cup of tea actually did seem to help cheer people up in a crisis.” Tea ran through Mass-Observation diaries like a river. “That’s one trouble about the raids,” a female diarist complained. “People do nothing but make tea and expect you to drink it.” - Erik Larson

Heb 11:23

God’s story is not one in which individuals or whole nations are simplistically portrayed as immutably good or bad. People change, times change—and the only constant is that God works in and through the see-saw and reversals of history to accomplish his purpose. - Chris Wright

“If God had perceived that our greatest need was economic, he would have sent an economist. If he had perceived that our greatest need was entertainment, he would have sent us a comedian or an artist. If God had perceived that our greatest need was political stability, he would have sent us a politician. If he had perceived that our greatest need was health, he would have sent us a doctor. But he perceived that our greatest need involved our sin, our alienation from him, our profound rebellion, our death; and he sent us a Savior.” - D.A. Carson

Waiting requires living by what I know to be true about God when I don’t know what’s true about my life. - Mark Vroegop

2 Peter 3:8-13

Exodus 1:7-22 - God Makes a Way

Listen along as we begin our series through Exodus.

Notes//Quotes:

Exodus 1:7-22

Books do not usually begin with the word “And.” But Exodus does, in the Hebrew text, and so do Leviticus and Numbers: the second, third, and fourth books of the Bible. You would not know this from most modern English translations, presumably because it is not considered good literary style to begin a sentence, never mind a whole book, with “And.” In Hebrew, however, although these are clearly whole books in their own right, each of them begins in a way that clearly connects them altogether as part of one long story that began in Genesis and stretches to the borders of the promised land by the end of Numbers. Deuteronomy, however, begins with a fresh telling of the same story and ends where it started, so does not need the connecting and forward-moving opening word “And.” - Chris Wright

The Pentateuch as a whole—the Torah—constituted the foundation of Old Testament Israel’s faith and identity, and the book of Exodus sets in place some of the largest theological blocks within that foundation. It showed Israel who their God was, who they were as God’s people, how God’s desire was to dwell in their midst, and how the grace of God was the only guarantee that their journey with God (or rather, God’s journey with them) could continue - Chris Wright

“Ironically, Genesis presents the mother of all Israelites oppressing an Egyptian slave, while Exodus presents an Egyptian king oppressing Israelites as slaves. To that degree, Sarah foreshadows pharaoh’s role, just as Hagar’s story prefigures Israel’s story” - Victor Hamilton

“The pogrom has reached its height. All Egypt has been recruited to destroy the population explosion of the enemy” Brevard Childs

The first exodus comes in the midst of a plot that should be familiar to anyone who has read the garden story in Genesis. The people of Israel are fruitful and multiply and fill the land, but the serpent-like king is tricksy, and he attacks the women, with a view to destroying their male descendants. Yet in contrast to the garden story, the women outmaneuver him. - Alastair Roberts

The unmissable proclamation heard in the openings of all four gospels, then, is simply this: “God is doing it again!” The God of Abraham is keeping his promise. The God of Moses is confronting the world’s pharaohs. The God of the exodus is on the way to save his people. Except that the ultimate confrontation and victory will not come about by God sending plagues upon the Romans but by God the Son becoming the Passover lamb, his flesh broken and his blood shed on the cross for the redemption not only of Israel but of people from all nations who put their trust in him. From this point on, the New Testament is replete with echoes of exodus and new-exodus themes, along with its references to the covenant and law given at Sinai, and the tabernacle - Chris Wright