The Everlasting (Exodus 1)

I’ve been wanting to read this book for a while, so let’s do it. God, draw me nearer to You, help me think and meditate on Your beautiful word, for man cannot live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from You (Deut. 8:4).

Exodus chapter one: our favorite family returns in the sequel to Genesis. God told Abraham in the book of Genesis everything that would happen to his descendents (the nation of Israel) in the book of Exodus and the following books of the Bible:

“Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nations that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions.” (Genesis 15:13-14)

One reason we can know that God is God and trust that He is in control is that He knows the future. At the end of the Bible Jesus says, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Revelation 22:13). There, I just quoted from the beginning of the Bible and the end. God knew the very words that would be in Revelation when He spoke to Abraham in Genesis. He knew the events of the world and the Bible in between, He knew every person that would live, how that person would act, how all those actions would lead to the birth of His Son and He knew how people would react to all these events now, 2,000 years after His Son was born. This is incredible! He also knew every name that would be added to His kingdom, He knew our names before He even spoke to Abraham. In Paul’s words:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundations of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. (Ephesians 1:3-4)

Before God made Mount Everest He knew my name and that Jesus Christ would die in my place, also dying in many others’ places; so that I could stand blameless before Him, so that my heart’s purest desire – to be with my Lord Jesus Christ – may be fulfilled. Praise God! Why does He do this? Paul goes on: “In love.” God does this in love for us, so that we may be blessed and so that He may be glorified. Before the sun was lit, He knew He would save me so that I may delight in Him forever.

Praise be to God! Our God is in heaven, He is in control forever! Never will His throne be shaken, never will He be defeated or overthrown, never will He be anything less of value than He is now, has been, and forever more will be.

In comparison the universe – all of God’s creation – is always expanding, according to astronomers. If the universe, which is simply God’s creation, is always growing, stretching to infinity, how much more infinite is its Creator! How much farther His power and might expands beyond the beyond, beyond the farthest reaches of space.

This reminds me of an old fear I had: What if God isn’t that great? Let me rephrase, I don’t mean to say, “not great at all”, but what if He is only great to a degree, and then it levels off? What if His power does cap off, even if (if God can be “measured”) it is at the millionth zero? Even at that power God would still have a number, a cap that He could not surpass. To me this is extremely unsatisfying – even if God still was the greatest Being in the universe, if He wasn’t infinite, but finite, only powerful and great to a certain degree, that would be disappointing (to say the least!).

Thankfully, this is not true. The Lord is as great as your feeble imagination can imagine, and He is infinitely more so! Our brains can’t even handle how deep and beautiful our God is, how many mysteries of His character have yet to be revealed, how unending He is!

Lord, you have been our dwelling

place

in all generations.

Before the mountains were brought forth,

or even you had formed the earth and

the world,

from everlasting to everlasting you

are God. (Psalm 90:1-2)

From never-beginning to never-ending. This is hard for me to grasp at times simply because I’m human and have a very limited perspective. Everything humanity knows has a beginning and an end, the houses we live in, the food we eat, even our own lives have a start and end date. History has a beginning, time itself has a beginning. And God created it all, so He gave creation its start date. Its hard and unnatural to imagine something without age – but God is! He tells Moses, “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14). He is who He is. He cannot be compared to anything. In fact, that may be why its hard to understand Him sometimes, because He is incomparable.

We often understand something by comparing two things. If, for example, I am looking for new music and find a band that looks interesting, I can get a quick understanding of what they are like if someone tells me, “They are like the Beatles” – a comparison helps me understand. Of course, once in a while you run into a band that is unexplainable, you simple have to listen to the, think about them, study them if you want to understand them. We like this, it is a rare thing to find something that is unique. But ultimately the bands we do think are unique aren’t, somebody else will sound like them (and, if nothing else, they are still playing music, which is not unique for a band). If it is the unique we are looking for, the only truly unique thing that has ever existed is God. Nobody is like Him. Nobody ever will be! If there was anybody else who has been around “from everlasting to everlasting” then they would already exist right now because they’ve always existed. But nothing besides God has existed forever. If somebody were to arise now to compete with God for His uniqueness and character they would automatically be disqualified from such a useless competition because they have a starting date. God does not and never will. And He never will have an ending date.

“I am who I am.” (Exodus 3:14)

So back to Exodus. God, the Lord of history, brings the whole house of Israel to Egypt. Jacob, the father of Israel, knows God and is a believer. At the beginning of Exodus his family has become a part of a foreign culture with different gods and different beliefs. One of the themes of Exodus and one of the reasons I love it is because God uses the country, these people, these events, to show Egypt and the world who the true God is. How many Egyptians came to believe in the Lord at this time? I’ve never thought about that before, but in Exodus God is not only saving His chosen people from physical slavery and oppression He is also saving many Egyptians from slavery to idolatry and paganism by simply revealing Himself for who He is: “I am that I am.”

What we know about Egypt today is that they used to worship many gods. There were gods for the sun, moon, stars, life, death. It is interesting that this belief system has consistently been around in human history. Today people will pray to a stone god who is the patron god of (fill in blank) with sincerity the same way that people did thousands of years ago.

We are made to worship, we are made to glorify our Creator, but when we stop worshipping the Everlasting and start worshipping something with a beginning and an end date we are creating idols. And we do this all the time, whether we are bowing down before a carved statue or we are bowing down to the thing we love the most (like alcohol or sex.) We need to worship the right God, the One, the true God, who exists in three persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the God who frees and redeems lives, as we will see in Exodus.

7/4/09

Our God is Sovereign (Deuteronomy 2)

There is a very dangerous idea creeping into the Christian church today known as “open theism”, basically the idea that history is partly open-ended. Or, to put it a different way, that God is making things up as He goes. Perhaps this allows that He foreknew events that were and are to happen, but at any rate He did not plan them. The God who created atoms and chemical combinations and osmosis and stars and the planets and light can not control history, but He’s doing His best to shape it how He wants it.

This is a blatant lie and it completely obliterates God’s sovereignty. Does it really sound like the God who created time doesn’t control the events that happen within it? And on top of that He's not a machine who can simply predict all possible outcomes. God is not a computer that can simply calculate all the different possible events of history from which He chooses the best one, no, God is God and in complete control.

I think this theology is coming about as an easy response to the question of “Why does God allow bad things to happen?” At first this response is comforting: “Okay, God didn’t plan for that to happen, it’s not His fault, He’s trying to deal with it like me.” This comfort grows thing when we realize that in order to accept this we lose the person of God! How can you have a perfect Being with perfect power who can’t control the future? And if God can’t stop bad things from happening, who can?

When suffering and pain happens to us it is much more comforting to know that God is sovereign, God is in control, and He will see me through this. It may be harder to swallow at first (“Why would God allow this to happen to me?”) but in the end we have more hope and a firm foundation if we acknowledge our God is in complete control.

But somehow for us, just like Israel in Deuteronomy 2, its hard to know what God’s up to and its hard to know why He would allow us to face such trials. Here in Deuteronomy 2 the nation of Israel has been turned away from the Promised Land and forced to wander around for many years in the wilderness. This is a trial, and a hard one.

But once again, this is a trial that God is in complete control of – not as a bully who’s simply trying to see who can last or survive, or who can “pass the test”, but as a loving God who wants people with obedient and loving hearts.

When you think about it, if you look to your life or other’s lives you find that we often grow the most in trials, in the most difficult moments of life. We find strength or character we didn’t know we had; if you believe in God you come out the other side of trial with a fuller faith and a stronger conviction in God’s saving hand.

In the New Testament, after Jesus had rose again and the good news was spreading and people were becoming Christians daily, the Apostle Peter wrote a letter to believers who were being hunted and murdered for their faith. The Roman Empire was a little different than the United States and to say you believed in Jesus often meant death. This was largely because Caesar was God and to say Jesus was God was treason. But as Christians, we’re not really allowed to say anything else. So many Christians faced severe trials where they had the choice of leaving the faith or dying, often painfully These Christians were so changed and so convinced that Jesus had died for them and Jesus was God that they chose death over life.

Peter wrote to address such suffering. Imagine Peter, a church leader, a pastor, overseeing churches and seeing people’s lives change, and as his church grows people start getting murdered. Imagine being a pastor and not knowing who would make it to church next Sunday because your people were being hunted and killed – imagine officiating as many funerals as weddings.

Yet Peter does not write about the persecution of the church as a horrible misfortune that is out of God’s hands, but rather, he place their situation right in it. In fact, read how Peter begins his letter:

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ,

To those who are elect exiles of the dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood:

May grace and peace be multiplied to you. (1 Peter 1:1-2)

Look at his language! He doesn’t just call them “exiles”, he calls them “elect exiles”, as in, they had been chosen to be exiles, and Peter emphasizes “according to the foreknowledge of God the Father.” God appoints where we live and when we live there, and He is in complete control over the location of every one of these exiles. And with the benefit of hindsight we can now see that the gospel would not have spread nearly as quickly as it did if it hadn’t been persecuted and dispersed. So what was a horrible time where it seemed like God had no control, God had complete control.

The letter continues:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!

Look at what joy and faith Peter had in God even in the midst of persecution!

According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith – more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire – may be found to result in praise, and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. (1 Peter 1:3-8)

For a letter written to a dying people this is unexpectedly joy-filled. This is not a depressing war-time speech to “Give it all you got” and “Hold on to the end”, no, the persecuted believers are heading towards Christ and His victory, through which they have gained everything! The future is unimaginably glorious and bright for those who believe in God. In comparison to such joy present sufferings are endurable and they will pass. As the writer of Hebrews puts it:

…let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfector of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. (Hebrews 12:1-3)

Christianity is one of the only religions that can offer an answer to suffering because it will pass. As it says in Revelation:

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. (Rev. 21:4)

Ever since Jesus rose from the dead and promised to return we have been in a situation much like Israel wandering around in the wilderness. They were longing to settle in the Promised Land, we long to be with Jesus. They faced daily trials in the wilderness and so did the Christians Peter wrote to and so do we.

But this period of waiting is not in vain: Jesus is perfecting our faith and growing us to be in His kingdom, just like He was growing and perfecting Israel’s faith before entering the Promised Land. During this trying time Moses is told by God to tell Israel:

For the LORD your God has blessed you in all the work of your hands. He knows your going through this great wilderness. These forty years the LORD your God has been with you. You have lacked nothing. (Deut. 2:7)

God knows every struggle we go through and He will see us through it. Through struggle and trial we learn things we never could without struggle and trial, such as the beautiful truth that God is always with us, and He is all we need. Come what may tomorrow, should I lose my family, a place to live, food to eat, friends, everything I live by, I still have Jesus; and that can never be taken away from me:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written,

“For your sake we are being killed all

the day long;

we are regarded as sheep to be

slaughtered.”

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, no r height nor depth, no anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:35-39)

Jesus is true comfort when pain and suffering strike, not only because He loves us but because He knows exactly what we are feeling, and He gave up His own life in obedience to God:

In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence. Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. (Hebrews 5:7-8)

And:

For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (Hebrews 4:14-16)

God cares deeply about Israel’s suffering in the wilderness and about our trials today, and He will see us through everything because He Himself has suffered everything for us. In order to stay obedient to God the Father God the Son became flesh and took on all of our weaknesses and allowed Himself to suffer and be murdered in place of us for our sins. It is because of Jesus we have hope and confidence in what is to come, now that we have been made clean and pure by His death. Now we can press into God and long for the Promised Land – that is, to be in God’s presence, with Jesus – and know that any amount of suffering and waiting will be worth it. But even now we are not alone, and I’ll close with Jesus last words in Matthew:

“And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20)