Good morning.
I'm delighted to be with you.
All the more to bring the word of God to you.
If you would, please turn to Exodus 15.
I want to read verses 1-21.
This is known as the Song of Moses.
It's a very important song.
It's the song that Israel sang after they were
delivered from Egyptian bondage.
When God took the people out of Egypt,
the greatest superpower on earth,
this band of ragtag people,
and routed the Egyptians,
they responded to what God had done by singing this song.
It's known as the Song of Moses.
What's interesting is this is also
appropriately referred to as the old song.
You'll see why in a little bit.
It's a very important song,
but it's also in some sense an outdated song,
but not outdated.
I like to leave you guys with puzzles until I unravel them.
But let's read this, verses 1-21.
This is the word of the Lord.
Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the Lord.
They said, I will sing to the Lord for he is exalted.
He has thrown the horse and its rider into the sea.
The Lord is my strength and my song.
He has become my salvation.
This is my God and I will praise him.
My father's God and I will exalt him.
The Lord is a warrior.
The Lord is his name.
He threw Pharaoh's chariots and his army into the sea.
The elite of his officers were drowned in the Red Sea.
The floods covered them.
They sank to the depths like a stone.
Lord, your right hand is glorious in power.
Lord, your right hand shattered the enemy.
You overthrew your adversaries.
By your great majesty, you unleashed your burning wrath.
It consumed them like stubble.
The water heaped up at the blast from your nostrils.
The current stood firm like a dam.
The watery depths congealed in the heart of the sea.
The enemy said, I will pursue.
I will overtake.
I will divide the spoil.
My desire will be gratified at their expense.
I will draw my sword.
My hand will destroy them.
But you blew with your breath and the sea covered them.
They sank like lead in the mighty waters.
Lord, who is like you among the gods?
Who is like you, glorious and holiness?
Revered with praises, performing wonders.
You stretched out your right hand
and the earth swallowed them.
With your faithful love, you will lead the people
you have redeemed.
You will guide them to your holy dwelling with your strength.
When the people's here, they will shudder.
Anguish will seize the inhabitants of Philistia.
Then the chiefs of Edom will be terrified.
Trembling will seize the leaders of Moab.
All the inhabitants of Canaan will panic.
Terror and dread will fall on them.
They will be as still as a stone because of your powerful arm
until your people pass by, Lord.
Until the people whom you purchased pass by.
You will bring them in and plant them
on the mountain of your possession.
Lord, you have prepared the place for your dwelling.
Lord, your hands have established the sanctuary.
The Lord will reign forever and ever.
When Pharaoh's horses with his chariots and horsemen
went into the sea, the Lord brought the water of the sea
back over them, but the Israelites walked through
the sea on dry ground.
Then the prophetess Miriam, Aaron's sister,
took a tambourine in her hand and all the women
came out following her with tambourines and dancing.
Miriam sang to them, sing to the Lord,
for he is highly exalted.
He has thrown the horse and its rider into the sea.
And may the Lord bless the reading and hearing
of his inspired and life-giving word.
Well, one of the, if really the bedrock foundations
on which we stand as Christians individually and corporately
is our confession that Jesus is the Christ,
the Son of the living God.
That's but one of the manifold ways by which scripture
communicates the eternal deity or Godhead
of the Lord Jesus Christ.
When scripture refers to him as the Son of God,
it's not to be understood in the same sense
in which we are referred to as sons of God, women included.
The church is called the bride of Christ,
the individuals are called sons of God, even women,
because it was sons who inherit in scripture.
And all are included in the inheritance of sonship,
according to the scriptures.
Through Christ we all have the spirit of adoption.
But we are adopted as sons.
Christ is not adopted, he's God's son by nature.
He is all that the Father is in his essential being.
And so to give you some of those other ways scripture
expresses this, in Colossians 2,9, Paul said,
in Christ dwells all the fullness of deity in bodily form.
He uses a particularly strong term
to speak of Christ's divine identity.
Elsewhere it says that Jesus is Lord,
that to confess him unto salvation
is to confess him as Lord.
And then he immediately quotes an Old Testament verse,
Joel 2, and he says,
all who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved.
And when you look back to that text that he's citing,
the underlying Hebrew word for Lord there
is the covenant name of God, his distinctive name.
So over and over again scripture speaks
of Christ's divine identity.
Son of God is simply one of those ways.
This title brings out something about the fact
that he's not only what the Father is by nature,
a son is what his Father is by nature,
but it also brings out the personal distinction
of the son from the Father.
He is what the Father is, God, but not who the Father is.
He's the son, not the Father.
And so the scriptures can speak repeatedly
in the apostolic salutations, grace and peace to you
from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Notice personal distinction,
but also two divine titles are used for these two persons.
Father's called God, the son is called Lord.
Sometimes it's the opposite, the son will be called God,
the Father will be called Lord.
But personal distinction equal divinity,
one in essence, one God, together of course
with the Spirit who's mentioned in other places.
So this is the great foundation of our faith.
It's this on which we stand
and it's this in which we glory.
We glory in this truth.
It is a glorious truth and I hope
to unpack some of that today.
But, now hear me carefully, deacons,
if anybody tries to leave before I finish this thought,
tackle them, but hear me carefully.
That confession is inadequate and even satanic
if it is not joined with a confession,
a conviction about Christ as the one who came
into the world to die for sinners
and rise again from the dead.
Now I know that's a strong statement,
but surely if you've read the Gospels,
you know that what I've spoken is the absolute truth.
In Matthew 16 when Jesus put the question
to the disciples, who do people say that I am?
And they came back with various answers.
You're a prophet, you're Elijah,
you're John the Baptist, come back from the dead.
Jeremiah, one of the prophets of old.
Jesus said that's all inadequate, didn't he?
He said it this way, but, so he uses the adversative,
but who do you say that I am?
In other words, that's not right.
Who do you say that I am?
And then Peter spoke up on behalf of the apostles
and said you are the Christ, the son of the living God.
Jesus blessed this confession as far as it went.
Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah,
flesh and blood has not revealed this to you,
but my Father who's in heaven.
And then Jesus immediately on the heels of that,
what does he do?
He says okay, now you've gotten the point.
You know who I am.
You're following the course of the Gospels.
He's brought them to this place,
and now that they understand who he is,
he's going to tell them what he's come to do.
And he says the son of man is gonna go up to Jerusalem.
He's gonna be taken, he's gonna be beaten,
he's gonna be killed, and rise again three days later.
And at this point, that same Peter
who gave that blessed confession objected.
Absolutely not, it even says he rebuked Jesus.
I often marvel at this.
How do you on the one hand call him the son of God,
and then turn around and have the temerity to rebuke him?
I don't know how those two things go together,
but in Peter's mind, these two things didn't go together.
You're the son of God, you're gonna die
in a cursed shameful death on the cross.
Peter was very much like all sorts of people
out in the world, Muslims, Jews.
My wife's a Jewish believer in the Lord Jesus Christ.
I've had extensive interactions with her families,
with others.
I know by personal experience and endless encounters,
evangelizing and so forth, Jews, Muslims, others,
these two things in which we glory, they stumble over.
How could Jesus be the son of God?
He's a human being.
Now it's one thing, and this is sometimes
how our beliefs are miscast, it's one thing
if we thought of God the way ancient pagans did.
The gods of ancient paganism were just a stone's throw
away from being men themselves.
There was nothing for Zeus to parade around like a man.
He wasn't much greater than a man.
He could throw some thunderbolts and so forth,
but what beyond that?
He wasn't, as in Christian theology,
the God who is greater than all the cosmos.
Okay, once you start thinking about the God
that scripture talks about, the incarnation
suddenly becomes a stupendous wonder.
You could wake up every morning wondering
how that could be possible.
Remember what Solomon said at the dedication of the temple?
When he dedicated the temple to God
where he had promised to dwell,
Solomon believed that promise but marveled.
Why?
He said, heaven, even the highest heavens cannot contain you.
How much less this house which I have built.
So in his very prayer where he's dedicating the temple
knowing that God's coming to dwell there,
he's expressing his wonder.
I don't understand.
He's not protesting, he's not saying it's not true.
He's just saying, I don't fathom it.
I don't understand.
How could you, the infinite God whom nothing can contain,
how could you dwell in this temple?
He didn't understand how these two things go together.
It seems to be a detracting from his glory.
It seems to, in fact, it's a form of humbling,
a form of humiliation in some sense
for God to tabernacle among men.
It's a stupendous stooping, if you will.
Well, these great truths are a stumbling block to people,
but all the more that this figure that we say
is the eternal God, one with the Father and Spirit,
became man, and then he went to the cross and he died.
How can you say that this man is the Lord?
And how does Paul put it?
Remember, I said there's various ways
that Christ's deity is spoken of.
Well, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2,
if they had understood, meaning the rulers of this age,
they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
Again, note the juxtaposition, crucified the Lord of glory.
Crucifixion was the greatest form of humiliation, shame,
that the ancient world had devised.
We usually think of it in terms of its pain,
and certainly it was, don't wanna take that away,
but one of the things that Scripture emphasizes
about the cross is the shameful nature of it.
It was shameful.
Jesus is being hung there on full display.
That's why when Paul says things like to the Galatians,
you stupid Galatians, he says, who has bewitched you?
Gotten you to go off after this other gospel.
Who has bewitched you?
Christ was clearly placarded before your eyes
as crucified.
It's saying like it was put up on a billboard,
but there's also this allusion to the cross itself
as a public display.
Jesus is being openly shamed and mocked, right?
That's what's happening at the foot of the cross.
So these are two truths that we believe,
that we stand on, that we glory in,
but they're also a scandal to the natural man.
They're things that are, in their minds,
impossible to believe and altogether scandalous.
Well, what's interesting when you think about
the Old Testament revelation of God
is how the God who is not a man in his essential
or eternal nature seemed to delight
in talking about himself in human ways.
Maybe you haven't noticed this,
you've probably noticed it to some degree,
but hopefully now you'll see it even more often.
Over and over again, God in scripture
speaks about himself and is spoken about by the prophets
in ways that you'd speak about a human being.
Again, God in his essential nature is not a man.
He's unlimited, he cannot be contained.
He's not confined to a temple,
though he was gonna dwell there.
In Numbers 25, it says, God is not a man.
In 1 Samuel 15, God is not a man.
So the Old Testament's clear, God is not a man.
But what do you do over and over again
as you're reading through scripture
and you see, first of all, what we call anthropomorphisms.
There are times when scripture talks about God's hand,
his mighty hand, his outstretched arm.
We read it in Exodus 15.
It even says there, I don't know if you caught it,
but at one point it says that Pharaoh and his armies
were congealed in the heart of the sea
at the blast of God's nostrils.
God's nostrils?
It talks about his hand, it talks about his nostrils,
it talks about God walking among his people.
This is all over the place,
and there are some pretty shocking ones that you miss.
And sometimes it's because our translations
will try and translate these things into our own idioms.
And sometimes that's helpful,
and sometimes we miss something,
but it happens more often than you'd think,
even in our translations.
Often when scripture talks about God being angry,
what it says is it literally is making reference
to an inflamed nose.
You know, when people get angry,
their nose sometimes gets red or hot.
And so that's how it expresses anger sometimes.
So God's nose is inflamed, his nostrils blast the sea,
and Pharaoh and the armies are congealed,
his outstretched arm, he tosses their soldiers,
their chariots into the sea.
Again, this happens over and over and over again.
One of the things you might have missed,
because our translation sort of smooths over this,
but in Exodus 15 three, it says here in the CSB
and some other translations,
it says the Lord is a warrior.
Well, here's what it says literally in the Hebrew.
The Lord is a man of war.
The Lord who delivered Israel from Egyptian bondage
is portrayed as a man who's a warrior.
He went out to war.
He went out to war against the gods of Egypt.
If you look at Exodus 12, it mentions that he's doing battle
with their gods.
The plagues corresponded to different things
related to these gods, things over which they were assumed
to have power.
So God is routing their false gods.
He's going forth in Egypt and he's overtoppling
these deities that they worship,
behind which are demons, according to scripture.
Deuteronomy 32 tells us that when they sacrifice to idols,
they're sacrificing to demons.
First Corinthians eight through 10,
when Paul's dealing with whether we can eat food
sacrificed to idols, he points out in the course of that,
he points out that Christians are not to partake
of the table of demons.
So he's contrasting with the Lord's table.
We come to the Lord's table, we eat his supper
in remembrance of him, and so we don't partake of this.
This is to partake with demons.
So back of these things are demons.
When the Lord goes through Egypt to deliver his people,
he's routing the demons.
He's routing Satan and his hosts.
Pharaoh and his legions are but the face of this.
Back of it is this demonic activity that's taking place.
So the Lord is rescuing his people
and routing the satanic forces behind them.
And of course, he's also doing other things,
like the Passover, who could miss that?
Before Israel can leave Egypt,
they have to sacrifice the Passover lamb.
Only then can they go through the waters
and make their way towards their promised rest.
It's a beautiful picture.
But the point here is that God not only talks about himself
in these very human ways, he seems to delight in it.
He goes out of his way.
As you read your Bible from now on,
I hope you'll pay more attention to this.
What do you think God is doing with all of that?
One of the things I'll submit to you here,
I'm gonna push this further in a moment,
but I submit to you that what God is doing
is he's getting you comfortable
with the idea of him as a man.
He's getting you used to it.
Getting you used to saying, you know,
the Lord walked, let's say, from Nazareth to Jerusalem.
By the way, the Old Testament talks about
God walking all the time.
If you look at Exodus 14, when it talks about
the pillar of fire and cloud,
it talks about it moving before and behind Israel.
The Hebrew word there is he was walking.
There's a man, if you will, God in the form of a man,
concealed by the cloud and the fire,
walking in their midst.
The reason that the people of Israel, one reason,
they're told that they have to go outside the camp
to go to the bathroom is because the Lord walks among you,
it says.
He walks among them.
It's not simply for health benefits.
I'm not saying it doesn't include that,
but we always wanna go to these things
to explain some of the rules given in the Old Testament.
No, it's because God dwells in their midst.
He walks in the camp, so you go outside the camp.
So God is very comfortable talking about himself this way,
and he wants us to get comfortable with it.
But then he ups the ante in case we miss it,
because we miss a lot.
He ups the ante and shows up frequently
in human form, doesn't he?
The God who supposedly can't become a man,
Muslims, Jews, every other group that's not Christian,
the God who's not a man shows up in human form.
Now some of these are along lines we might expect.
If you look at the theophany, that's a fancy term,
I was called a theologian.
You know, truth be told, I'm a guy that was converted
in 1993 in a prison.
I got out in 1995.
I'm just some thug off the streets.
But, and I think in one sense, we're all theologians.
We all, it means knowledge of God.
All of us, if we're believers, we have knowledge of God.
But theologians do like to use fancy words,
and sometimes I use them only to get people's attention.
Theophany is just a fancy way of saying an appearance of God.
Two Greek words, God appearing.
God appeared often in human form.
Some of them are very much, if God's going to appear,
then you kind of expect it to be this grand event.
And that does happen.
Read Ezekiel.
Ezekiel's vision by the Khabar River in Ezekiel 1.
Incredible vision.
When Ezekiel tries to relate it, first of all,
he spends more time describing the beings
that attended God and the chariot.
He talks about the cherubim and the wheels intersect.
You gotta read the text to see what I'm talking about.
And then, towards the end, he'll briefly talk about
the figure on top of the chariot.
But he doesn't feel like he can adequately express
what he saw, so he keeps saying like, like, as, as.
It was like this, it was as this.
So the idea is this is such a grand, glorious image
that I saw that I don't feel that my tongue
can adequately express it.
That's something I would expect if God's going to appear
to man on earth.
But then you turn to a passage like Genesis 18.
That's as mundane as it gets.
Abraham's in his tent, he looks up and he sees
three men walking towards him.
Abraham gets up and he quickly rushes to meet their needs.
Not because he knows who they are, he doesn't at first.
They're just men and he tells Sarah, make them food.
He's doing all these things to prepare
and eventually it dawns on him who one of them is.
It's the Lord.
But at first it's not apparent.
So he, again, God, the God who talks about himself
in human terms now shows up in a palpable, audible,
human way.
Everything about it is he even eats, he eats with them.
God shows up in human form and eats with them.
It's a remarkable, remarkable fact.
And it's remarkable to me when people like Jews
say God can't do something and I think,
well, what are you talking about?
This is there in your text.
I didn't put these things there.
No Christian put them there.
This was all there for thousands of years
before Jesus came on the scene.
God put those things there.
He has no problem doing it and telling us about it.
And that's one theophany out of scores of theophanies.
God does this over and over again.
So now add to the picture.
I said I think God is comfortable talking about this way
because he wants to get us comfortable talking about it.
But now he's showing up in human form.
Now how can you say God can't do this?
God did do this repeatedly.
Now these aren't the incarnation proper.
These are just temporary appearances of God.
The incarnation won't take place until the first century.
But all this shows that God is very much capable
of appearing to human beings and appearing in human form.
And then added to this, again, upping the anti-scripture
repeatedly talks about the one who's coming in the future
as the Lord.
I mentioned before that this song that Israel is singing
at the sea is the song of Moses,
but it can also be called the old song.
Now here you're gonna understand why I say that
because you'll recognize this.
You'll have recognized from your own reading of the Bible
that sometimes it makes reference to a new song.
A new song, but if there's a new song,
well then there's an old one, right, at least one.
And if this one is new in comparison,
there's some relationship between these two.
If you look at Psalm 96 or Psalm 98,
you don't have to look at these, or Psalm 144 or 149,
you can look at these later.
These are Psalms and they talk about a new song.
God's gonna put a new song into the mouth of his people.
Well, I wanna show you one in particular from Isaiah
in just a moment, but I wanna set it up this way.
In chapters one through 39 of Isaiah,
it's mostly doom and gloom.
God speaking of his chastisement on Israel
for their waywardness and other nations.
Sometimes it's an interesting picture.
You have God chastising Israel by some nation,
and so he's speaking judgment on Israel,
but then he turns around and he's chastising this nation
for chastising Israel.
And the reason is because when God is chastising Israel,
he's chastising them for holy reasons,
for his own good ends.
He's trying to correct his people.
But these other groups that are being used
as instruments in his hands,
they have altogether different intentions.
They have wicked intentions, so God's gonna chastise them
for the wickedness of their hearts.
But that's what you're getting in Isaiah one through 39.
There are some rays of hope and sunshine here and there,
but it's not the focus of those chapters.
But seven, 14, a virgin will conceive,
Isaiah nine, six, unto us a child is born.
Those are rays of sunshine, but mostly doom and gloom.
But once you get to chapter 40,
here's a good way to remember this, by the way.
First 39 chapters, a lot of doom and gloom.
The last, how many chapters?
27.
39 and 27.
39 Old Testament books, 27 New Testament books.
Suddenly what you get in chapter 40 through 66,
27 chapters, is the prophet begins to talk about
people gospelizing.
It's a term you don't probably hear a lot,
but in Isaiah 40 through 66, you have this term
that comes up repeatedly, where he talks about
good tidings going forth, good tidings.
But it's literally the word good news, gospel.
But it's a verbal form, they're part of,
they're gospelizing, they're going out
and spreading the good news.
So whatever's happening in chapters 40 through 66,
it's all about this thing called the gospel
that Isaiah calls it.
Well, the opening of this, I bet again, you've all read,
you all know this, if not from Isaiah,
then from its repeated quotation in the New Testament.
Isaiah 40 opens by saying, a voice of one crying
in the wilderness, prepare the way for the Lord.
So a voice is going to cry out that the Lord is coming,
prepare for his coming.
But did you catch this?
It says, a voice is crying out in the wilderness,
ba mid bar, that's a reference.
Any Jewish ear hearing that thinks of the wilderness,
when God took them out of Egypt into the wilderness.
So immediately, it conjures up in the mind
of any Jewish person, anybody familiar
with the Old Testament, the Exodus.
God took them out of Egypt into the wilderness,
and he was coming, he was leading them and taking them
into their promised rest.
So Isaiah opens up by this allusion,
and all the way through these chapters,
there's reference after reference to the Exodus.
And then at certain points, it begins to say things like,
that old Exodus, you're gonna forget all about that.
God's gonna do something greater
that will cause that to pale by comparison.
That'll be a thing forgotten.
It'll no longer be what you look back to.
Those things of old.
The old is gonna pass away, something new is coming.
Well what's interesting is you're moving through this,
basically what the Lord is saying through the prophet
is God's gonna do a new Exodus.
There's gonna be a better Exodus.
And wouldn't you expect then,
if there's gonna be a better Exodus,
if that first Exodus put a song in their mouth,
wouldn't there be a new song?
That's what the new song is all about.
Let me show you something in Isaiah 42.
In Isaiah 42, better pull these out.
You guys chose a very small print Bible.
Isaiah 42, very interestingly,
the prophet Isaiah, on the one hand,
he's announced that the one who's coming to accomplish
this new Exodus is the Lord,
but he suddenly shifts and begins to speak
with the one who's gonna do this as the servant of the Lord.
So he's on the one hand Lord,
but then also servant of the Lord.
Somehow he can be both.
Now that works if you believe in a God who's triune,
Father, Son, and Spirit.
One person can be Lord and yet relate to the other
in a certain way, even in this way.
But in Isaiah 42, notice what it says.
This is my servant, I strengthened him,
this is my chosen one, I delight in him.
Sounds like the baptism, right, of Christ.
The Spirit comes upon him and says,
this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased,
in whom I delight.
I have put my Spirit on him, he will bring justice
or righteousness to the nations.
He will not cry out or shout
or make his voice heard in the streets.
He will not break a bruised reed
and he will not put out a smoldering wick.
He will faithfully bring justice,
he will not grow weary or be discouraged
until he has established justice on earth.
The coasts and islands will wait for his instruction,
so this one will not only be for Israel
but for people far and wide.
This is what God the Lord says,
who created the heavens and stretched them out,
who spread out the earth and what comes from it,
who gives breath to the people on it
and Spirit to those who walk on it.
I am the Lord, I have called you for a righteous purpose
and I will hold you by your hand,
I will watch over you and I will appoint you
to be a covenant for the people and a light to the nations,
the Gentiles, in order to open blind eyes
to bring out prisoners from the dungeon
and those sitting in darkness from the prison house.
I am the Lord, that is my name
and I will not give my glory to another
or my praise to idols.
I don't know if you catch what just happened there
but he's saying this one does have my glory
and to him praise does belong.
He's saying I won't give this to any other
but it does belong to him.
But it goes on, it says,
the past events have indeed happened,
now I declare new events.
I announce them to you before they occur.
Now watch this, verse 10, sing a new song to the Lord.
Sing his praise from the ends of the earth.
You who go down to the sea with all that fills it,
you coasts and islands with your inhabitants,
let the deserts and its cities shout,
the settlements where Kidar dwells cry aloud,
these are Gentile areas,
let the inhabitants of Salah sing for joy,
let them cry out from the mountain tops,
let them give glory to the Lord
and declare his praise in the coasts and islands.
Now watch this, verse 13,
the Lord advances like a warrior,
literally like a man of war.
He stirs up his zeal like a soldier,
he shouts, he roars aloud, he prevails over his enemies.
This is the new song,
it's talking about the Lord coming,
also identified as the servant of the Lord,
and again he's called a man of war.
The Lord is going to come again,
a new exodus, a greater exodus.
When you turn to the gospels,
and here I'll use Mark,
but each gospel does this in its own way.
What do you have at the beginning of Mark's gospel?
This is the beginning of the gospel,
Jesus Christ the son of God.
Just as it is written in Isaiah the prophet,
behold, I will send my messenger before your face,
a voice of one crying out in the wilderness,
prepare the way for the Lord,
make his paths straight.
So Mark tells you that when Isaiah said this,
he's talking about the son of God,
that's what it means to call him the son of God.
He is the Lord and he's coming,
and somebody's gonna prepare his way.
When we go through the gospel,
what do we see Jesus doing?
You may not be used to looking at it this way,
but you see Jesus going through Israel like a warrior.
It's a very different war that he's fighting,
but he's going through as a warrior.
Remember how John the Baptist announces him?
He says, I baptize you with water,
but there's one standing among you
who's mightier than I,
whose sandal straps I'm not worthy to unloose.
But he says mightier than I,
the idea is this one is strong,
this one is powerful.
And then as Jesus goes through the land,
what is he doing?
One of the things you see him doing repeatedly
is casting out, driving out the demons.
Because he's come, it's like there's this influx of demons
into the land of Israel.
They're there to oppose his coming,
and Jesus is going through and he's just wiping them out.
He's wiping them out.
And one of the things the demons say is,
have you come here to destroy us before the appointed hour?
Have you come to destroy, we know who you are.
We know, have you come to destroy us?
They understand who he is.
You have the power to cast us into hell.
So Jesus is going through like a mighty warrior,
and think here again how this is pointed out.
Remember when Jesus is accused of doing this
by the power of Satan?
And Jesus says, if that's the case, then Satan's divided.
How can a kingdom divided stand?
If Satan's casting out Satan,
then he's undermining himself.
What he says is, no, what has to happen
and what is happening is, in order to loose
or take away spoils from the strong man,
you have to bind him.
You can't just go in a guy's house and take his goods.
You have to bind him or he's gonna try and stop you.
Well, it says that Satan's likened to a strong man.
Jesus is stronger still.
The whole point is that Jesus is the mighty one
who's come to bind Satan
and then despoil him of his captives.
Jesus is a warrior.
He's going through and he's routing the enemy.
You see this over and over again.
In fact, think of the Gerasene demoniac in Mark five.
Jesus goes into the tombs.
There's man there.
And the man is demon possessed.
And Jesus said, what is your name to the demon?
The demon says, legion, for we are many.
A legion is a military unit.
And what does Jesus do to this military unit?
He casts them out into a herd of pigs
that then go down in embankment and are drowned in the sea.
Sound like the Exodus?
He has cast them into the sea.
Well, there's this question that goes up.
We know who this is.
We know what he's come to do.
He's come into the land like a warrior.
He's driving out the demons,
delivering his people from them.
We know who Jesus is.
Mark's told us.
He's the son of God.
Even the demons have told us,
though Jesus doesn't want us so much
hearing it from their lips
because he keeps telling them to be quiet.
We have it from his own testimony
and the apostles and the father.
But the question that keeps going up from people
is who is this man?
Who is this man?
He's a man.
Now he's doing things that don't compute.
They don't comport.
He's a man.
But this man is walking on water.
This man is raising the dead.
This man is giving sight to the blind.
This man is telling Satan to depart,
casting people into the sea.
Who is this man?
Look at the end of Mark four.
Who is this man?
At the beginning of Mark six, it says,
where did this man get this wisdom?
Isn't he the carpenter's son?
By the way, even here, there's something very rich.
They don't see the irony.
They don't see the irony in their own words.
They say, where did this man get this wisdom?
Isn't he the carpenter's son?
In the Old Testament,
when Moses was given the instructions for the tabernacle,
there was an individual who was going to construct it,
oversee it, the master craftsman.
His name was Bezalel.
His name means in the shadow of God.
And it says this man was full of the spirit and wisdom.
He was a master craftsman, a carpenter.
The term carpenter in the New Testament
is not very specific.
It's broader.
It means a workman of some sort.
It doesn't specify exactly what he may be carpenter,
but the term itself doesn't inform us of that.
Jesus is the son who's come to build the true temple,
of which we are.
We are the true temple.
We are a living temple being built together,
joined to Christ who's the chief cornerstone.
Jesus is the true temple builder, the true Bezalel.
He's not only full of wisdom,
he is the very wisdom of God incarnate.
When Paul said, in Christ dwells the fullness of deity
in bodily form, the whole context is Paul talking about him
as the wisdom of God.
In Christ dwell all the treasures,
or deposited all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
If you look at Proverbs 8 when it talks about wisdom
and wisdom says the Lord possessed me
from the beginning, from eternity.
I was with him.
I was a master workman by his side, Proverbs 8.30.
Right after that, it talks about wisdom building a temple.
And then it says that wisdom is serving the guests
bread and wine.
It's beautiful, go read it at some point.
Well what's happening in the gospels is people are stumbling
over the very thing that the Old Testament
was preparing them for so that they would not stumble.
So that they would not be like contemporary Muslims
who scoff at these things.
So that they would not be like contemporary Jews
who scoff at these things.
And I don't mean to limit it to these groups.
These are just two prominent examples
of people who stumble over this.
But they shouldn't.
If they learned the lessons that were being taught to them
by God through Moses and the prophets,
then when Jesus came, they wouldn't have stood there
dumbfounded.
Remember what Jesus said to the disciples
on the road to Emmaus?
He says how slow, how foolish are you?
And I don't exactly know the inflection
or the look on his face, but I,
how did you not see all this in the scriptures?
That the Christ must first suffer
and then enter into his glory.
These two truths are not antithetical.
I'm the son of God, I'll go to the cross.
I'm Lord and man, I'm Lord and servant,
all these, these are not antithetical.
Don't you have a book that talks about this?
It almost reminds me of me in a certain way.
I'm terrible about reading directions.
I have these microphones I got not long ago,
little lapel things, and I haven't been able
to bring myself to read the directions.
So I had to farm it off on one of my friend's sons
who will read these things.
I'm over there stumbling along thinking,
I don't wanna waste time reading this book,
and then I spend more time trying to tinker
with these things, and you know,
but it's like, is that what these guys were doing
with the Old Testament?
They didn't learn these lessons?
God comes, Jesus comes on the scene
and he's doing everything that God did.
In fact, I didn't point this out,
but if you, if you go back to Mark three,
remember this is New Exodus stuff, right?
What does Jesus say when he talks about
Matthew 12 or Luke's version really points this out,
but Jesus said, if I cast out demons by the spirit of God,
then the finger of God, or if I cast out demons
by the finger of God, you know, then you know in effect
that I'm not just some emissary of Satan.
But that's an illusion back to the Exodus, isn't it?
The magicians are trying to duplicate what Moses does,
and then at some point they can't duplicate what he does,
and so they say, this is the finger of God.
Okay, we've been bested here, Pharaoh, we can't help you.
So this is one way that it's alluding to the Old Testament,
and then after that what happens?
In Mark four, Jesus delivers the disciples from the sea.
The boats storm tossed and he delivers them from the sea.
This man delivers them from the sea.
That sounds like an old story, doesn't it?
And then after that, what does that man do?
That man, after that, delivers the garrisoned demoniac
from a legion of demons.
So the finger of God, followed by sea deliverance,
followed by destruction of a legion of Satan's forces.
You're seeing the Exodus pattern?
This is, these are all Exodus events,
and it's following the exact order.
What follows that in Mark's Gospel?
In Mark six, it tells us that he fed thousands of people,
thousands of Israelites in the wilderness,
Baamidbar, in the wilderness.
He feeds a multitude of Israelites.
This is an old story.
These guys are reliving Israel's history.
And then what happens after that?
Well, we learn that the disciples didn't get it.
They're still fumbling along.
They don't get the point of all this.
And so Jesus recapitulates it.
He does it all over again.
After the miracle of feeding the thousands,
I always say thousands, because I can't remember,
is it five at this time or four?
Because there's two different ones.
But Jesus then, in Mark six, puts the disciples on a boat.
This time he doesn't get on it with them.
He sends them out on the boat.
He dismisses the crowds.
He goes off on the mountain to pray.
And a long time later, he comes back to the shore.
And it says they were halfway across the lake.
And the lake was like seven to eight miles long,
so they're about at least three and a half miles out.
And it's nighttime, pitch dark.
And it says he saw them straining at the oars.
I don't know about you,
had trouble seeing this CSB Bible right here.
Three and a half miles away, out on the sea, nighttime.
And Jesus sees them straining at the oars.
Good reminder that he sees us in all our afflictions.
But they're out there.
He sees them, and he's doing this
because they didn't get the point.
He's doing it all over again.
Okay, you guys need it twice.
And then it says that he went walking out to them on the sea.
And it says he intended to pass by them.
You ever stumbled over that?
I used to, I used to think, well, that doesn't make sense.
Jesus is just gonna leave them high and dry,
or maybe not so dry, right?
But that's Exodus language.
Moses said, show me your glory.
Nobody can see my glory and live, Moses.
But I'll put you in the cleft of a rock,
and then I'll pass by you.
And I'll declare my name to you.
When Jesus passed by this storm-tossed band
of Israelites on the sea, he said to them,
take courage, and the English versions usually say,
take courage, it is I, don't be afraid.
The Greek says, take courage, I am.
Don't be afraid.
He's passing by them to declare his name to them,
because they don't get it.
That's why he's gonna pass by,
not to leave them high and dry, but to reveal who he is.
And it continues, after that, Jesus delivers somebody
from a demon again, and then that's followed
by another feeding of thousands in the wilderness.
And then you've got the capstone of all this.
First, ask yourself, what happened in the Exodus events?
You had the plagues on Egypt, Passover lamb,
you had the Red Sea crossing,
then you had them in the wilderness,
the multitudes are fed, and they're making their way
to Sinai, and then at Sinai,
Moses ascends the mountain to God,
where God appears in human form again,
that thing he delights to do.
They meet with God on the mountain,
and as a result of it, Moses' face is transfigured,
he comes down the mountain, and he's glowing,
and he puts a veil over himself
so that the Israelites are not frightened
at his appearance.
Well, after all these things in the gospels,
Jesus takes disciples with him,
Moses took Aaron, Nate, Abed, and Abihu,
Jesus takes Peter, James, and John,
and they go up the mountain, the Mount of Transfiguration.
It's unending, it's the Exodus events.
But there's something remarkable here,
and I'll try and make these comments
in the next few minutes,
and then make some application of all this,
but if you look at the Old Testament
when they get to Sinai, there's something striking
that you can easily miss, but shouldn't.
This is revolutionary.
In Exodus 24, it says,
then he said to Moses,
come up the mountain to the Lord.
Contextually, the he there is the Lord.
So then he said, he is the Lord.
So hear this again.
Then he said, come up the mountain to the Lord.
It's an odd way of saying it, isn't it?
He should have said, come up to me.
I don't mean to correct the Lord.
I mean, if what I'm about to say isn't the case,
then this is what you'd expect.
And by the way, even Jewish sources puzzle over this.
It's a stumbling block to them.
Why does God talk like that?
It's as if God is inviting them to come up the mountain
to see and talk to somebody else,
that he's calling Lord.
If you look in the immediately preceding chapter,
the Lord has just told Moses
that I'm going to send somebody ahead of you,
my angel, my messenger.
In Hebrew, angel doesn't always refer
to a created heavenly being.
It usually refers to men, by the way.
50% of the time, it refers to men.
33% of the time, it refers to a distinct figure
from normal beings that we call angels.
It's the angel of the Lord.
The angel of the Lord is a divine theophany.
Okay, it doesn't always refer to a creature.
You have to determine from context how it's being used.
But he says, I'm gonna send my angel,
my messenger ahead of you to prepare your way.
And it actually says he's gonna guard you,
and then it says guard yourselves against him,
meaning don't sin, he'll be in your presence.
It won't be good for you if you sin.
And then it gives you a series of reasons
why you're to listen to this one.
The Lord says, you're to listen to him.
Listen to him, this one.
Listen to him.
For he won't pardon your transgressions.
For, before I get to that for,
let's think of the first for.
Don't rebel against him.
He will not pardon your transgressions.
This messenger has the prerogative
to hold them accountable for their sins.
He has authority over sins.
The angel of the Lord elsewhere
has shown exercising that prerogative in a positive way.
In Zechariah three, right?
Joshua, the high priest, is standing clad
in filthy garments before the angel of the Lord.
Satan's standing at his right hand to accuse him,
and the angel of the Lord says,
take off his filthy garments and clothe him in clean ones.
He put a clean turban on his head,
and then he says, see,
I have taken your iniquity away from you.
That's a prerogative of the angel of the Lord.
So this figure has authority over sin.
And then it tells us why.
For my name is in him.
In this one, in here's my very name.
God's name means his very nature, his essence.
When God talks about dwelling in the temple,
sometimes it says he's gonna dwell there,
sometimes it says his glory dwelt there,
sometimes it says he put his name there.
God is his name.
That's why we can say the name of the Lord
is a strong tower.
It's not just this abstract way of referring to him.
It represents God himself.
So when it says this one has my very name,
it's identifying this one as a divine person.
So now think about Exodus 24.
When the Lord says, come up the mountain to the Lord,
he's talking about that figure who bears his very name.
This is who they're going to see on the mountain.
Now look at the Mount of Transfiguration.
The Mount of Transfiguration in Mark 9,
Matthew 17, Luke 8.
Mount of Transfiguration,
Jesus is transfigured,
but the transfiguration occurs before
the divine glory comes down on the mountain.
Unlike Moses who radiates the glory of God
because he was in the divine presence,
Jesus is transfigured openly in their sight,
antecedent to the Father descending on the mountain.
But then catch this, here's the catch.
Well, before that,
there are two figures from Israel's past
that appear on that occasion.
You all know who, right?
Elijah and Moses.
Both of these figures encountered God on Mount Sinai.
I don't have time to talk about Elijah.
They both encountered the angel of the Lord on Mount Sinai.
First Kings 19, go look, or is it second?
Elijah encountered him on Mount Sinai.
Moses encountered him on Mount Sinai.
Well, here it is, deja vu again for Moses and Elijah.
Hey, we've been here before, we've done this.
But then what does the Father say?
The Father descends and he says,
this is my beloved Son, listen to him.
The exact words that God said in Exodus 23,
I'm gonna send my messenger ahead of you, listen to him.
Anybody who doesn't listen to him, he says,
will be cut off from the people of God.
Your eternal status among my people
turns on whether you listen to him.
And this is immediately on the heels,
remember this is on the heels of Peter
giving the good confession but then stumbling.
He can't go to the cross, these two things don't go together.
This is part of the reason the Father's coming down
and saying listen to him.
Okay, it may not make sense to you,
but it doesn't have to, listen to him.
I love this, this in fact is one of the great applications
of this that I wanna make.
I look at the world's philosophies
and I'm not pretending to be the world's best philosopher,
not by any stretch, but I've studied some of them
and I can tell you that it's almost as if it's
one unending history of the next guy
refuting the guy before.
This guy, the early pre-Socratics said this
and the next guy came and said no,
that can't be the case for this reason.
Just unending and any philosopher can tell you that.
Philosophers of history will tell you
each guy refuted the guy before him.
It's just this one unending series of pitfalls.
Well, I realized one day, it's almost like
if you think it through, in order to know anything
you'd have to know everything.
Honestly, because if you think about it,
everything you know could be altogether changed
in a moment with the introduction of one new fact.
So here's the way I like to illustrate this.
If you opened a door, let's say you walk out here
and you open a door and you see two men
holding down a young man on a table
and one of them shoving a sharp object into the young man
while the young man is screaming out in horror,
you might initially think, oh, this is terrible.
What's going on here?
But now let me give you a little more facts.
Suppose one of those men is a doctor,
the other is the young boy's father.
The young boy was bitten by a venomous snake,
he hates needles, they need to give him a cure immediately.
Now it's a whole different story.
It's a whole different story, isn't it?
Well, imagine, the world is full of facts
you don't know anything about.
You could turn a corner, there's a new fact
that changes everything you think.
Now there's only one being in all of existence
for whom there's no new fact around the corner.
Who's that?
It's the Lord God, right?
Now think about this.
If he reveals something to you,
he reveals it to you out of his inexhaustible wisdom.
He could not possibly be wrong, there's no new fact.
Everything he tells you, you can be absolutely certain
is true because he is true.
This gives, all believers should give all believers
great comfort in life as you move through.
You don't have to know everything.
You only have to know the one who knows everything.
You only have to listen to him.
You only have to listen to him when he says,
not only I am the son of God, but I'm going to die
in a cursed death for sinners.
You only have to listen to him and believe what he says.
You have every ground for confidence.
And hasn't he demonstrated that he is worthy of your trust
in all of this?
Who put together a book like this?
What I've told you today, I'm scratching the surface.
I'm scratching the surface of things that I've learned,
but I know that what I've learned as a whole
is only scratching the surface.
I could live the lives of 10,000 Methuselahs
and never feel like I've exhausted the book of the Lord.
The point is, you still can see for as little as we see
when we read scripture, you still can see.
This is a book unlike any book.
You could read this for a lifetime and not see
some of the things I was pointing out,
because I did, I mean, I've been reading the Bible
for 30 years.
Some of the things I told you, I mean, I don't remember
exactly when I learned what, but you know,
could have been last year, after 30 years.
The Bible's full of things that are,
they're on the surface, but then there are other things
which, once you see them, they're so obvious,
you think, how could I have possibly missed them?
And who could make a book like this?
It's incredible.
You have every reason to put your confidence in this one.
And now think of the stakes.
Remember, I talked about the stakes.
Everything turns on your response to this figure.
It did for Israel in the past, and it does for you today.
If you're a believer here this morning
in the Lord Jesus Christ, then you have an absolute ground
for your confidence.
You have a bedrock foundation beneath your feet.
You have something in which to rest your hopes
in the face of eternity and in the face of everything
that happens in life.
You have a Lord who orchestrates everything.
He even puts people on boats that will eventually
be storm-tossed for their good.
I love this story for this reason.
They're there out on this storm-tossed sea
because he put them there.
When I am in a situation, something happens,
I think, hey, Jesus put me here.
It almost reminds me of, I don't know if you saw
this old movie, Clash of the Titans, I think it was,
where it's got Zeus up there and he's moving pieces around
and it's like he's, of course, our God is,
as I've already said, is greater than the loftiest conception
of Zeus in any pagan mind, but my point is that the Lord
controls heaven and earth.
Everything's at his disposal.
No sparrow falls to the ground without him.
And so that's not bad news if you're a believer.
You've got confidence.
He's orchestrated this for my good.
It will result in my eternal welfare.
The question you should be having in this situation is,
why am I here, what is he teaching me, why is this,
but you can be confident, it's for your good.
But think about it if you're on the other side
of the equation.
If you're not in Christ this morning,
if this is not who you believe in,
you're on the other side of that same God
who upholds all things, who controls all things,
the winds, the waves.
You're on the other side of that God.
There's a question and answer I used to teach my kids
when they were younger and the question was,
and you can hear this in two ways.
The question was, can you see God?
And they were taught to reply, no, but he can always see us.
Now that to me is good news.
Every one of God's attributes is good news as a believer.
It's good news to me that God sees everything
that's happening to me.
There's no situation that was a surprise to him.
But it's not good news if you're not a believer.
He sees everything.
He sees the disciples three and a half miles out
on the lake at night.
He sees your darkened heart.
He sees a heart that's at war with him
like Pharaoh and his hosts and the demons.
You don't wanna be on the other side of this Jesus.
But you don't have to be, that's the glory of it.
He invites sinners to come.
He says, come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden
and I will give you rest.
This is the message of the whole Bible.
This is the Christian faith.
This is what you believe if you're in Christ this morning.
This is what I hope you will continue to press into
as you read the word.
I hope you'll read it with new eyes.
Every Sunday you should feel like that.
You're reading it with new eyes.
You've learned something new.
Now there's something new contributing
to your reading of the word.
Now as you read the word, it should be jumping off
the page to you when God says something about his finger
or his hand or him walking.
Yeah, these are figures of speech before the incarnation
but they're leading somewhere.
And of course he's appearing in human form
and saying he would.
This is the message of the whole Bible.
This is our foundation.
This is our confidence.
It's not something to be ashamed about.
I know Muslims and Jews, and I will make this my closing,
but I know Muslims and Jews scoff at this.
They mock at this sort of thing.
But they're mocking at the very thing
that is their only hope and our only hope
and it has the most sure foundation beneath it.
We have thousands of years of preparation for this
and they're just gonna scoff at it.
They're scoffing at the wisdom of God.
He's given them every reason to see this is true.
And if they don't believe it, it's not because
he hasn't done everything to lead them straight to this
as the conclusion.
Those who don't believe in the Lord Jesus Christ,
who've heard this message, have no excuse.
And even apart from this message,
they have no excuse for sinning against God.
They know the law of God.
They have a conscience.
And so they should, if they're truly concerned
about their sins, they should be seeking out
what's the solution.
They should be trying to find the person who has the answer.
This is the answer.
It's given to us in the whole Bible.
I pray that you'll continue to improve upon this.
I always wanna tell people when I preach,
I haven't said the last thing,
and you're supposed to improve upon what you hear.
That means you go home and you're meditating on it
and you're rolling it over
and you're searching the scriptures.
I haven't said the final word,
so I hope that you'll go home with that in mind
and will reflect more on this.
And I'll conclude with that.
Let me pray real quick.
Lord, we thank you for this word.
We thank you for its revelation of you.
We thank you for the confidence that it gives us,
the sure confidence.
May we put our trust in Christ if we haven't this morning.
May we grow in our faith if we've been believers
for a day or 50 years or more.
Let us deepen our faith.
Let us be stronger in faith.
And let us live out our faith,
all the more confidently, all the more zealously.
Let us proclaim this faith to others,
knowing that it's true, knowing that it's glorious,
knowing that it's their only hope.
We ask and pray all this in Christ's name, amen.