Biblical Framework
Charles Clough
Lesson 47
We
are still working our way through the Exodus event. Last time we started in by trying to show some verses of
Scripture throughout the Exodus that, in fact the Exodus was a momentous
event. This is the kind of thing I
can’t emphasize too much, because if you don’t emphasize it you get in
trouble. What happens is that we like
to sweep Biblical events like the Exodus under the rug and make them incidental
to the flow of history, so the story goes some what like this when you study
history: gee, the Egyptian civilization and the Babylonians and the Sumerians,
those were the key players and the great events of history were, say, the rise
of Sennacherib and his invasion of the middle part of the Mesopotamian area and
out southwest etc., or the Pharaohs campaigns into Palestine, never mentioning
the fact that one of the most momentous events is the Exodus. “The god of this world has blinded the minds
of them who believe not, lest” they receive the gospel truth. [2 Cor. 4:4] We often quote that like it’s applicable
only to Jesus and the cross but we have to remember that the god of this world
is busy reconstructing history and he’s trying to reconstruct history so as to
make the Word of God not true, to have it mythologized, to have it not quite
really true true and that will
eat away your faith because no matter how much you want to try, if you are
really secretly harboring unbelief it’s like a fifth column, it just wipes you
out.
It
takes and saps your spiritual strength if you harbor unbelief and frankly, most
of us harbor unbelief because of the way we were educated. We were educated in a world view since we
were children that basically is unethical of the whole view of history and it
takes you years of your life, it takes decade after decade to get your head
straight after indoctrination like this.
The only way to do it isn’t reading books; it is just reading THE book,
the Bible. What I am trying to say in
this class is, that when you read the Scriptures, you want to read them as
history and really mean business, that when the Bible says something happened
in such and such a reign, it really did happen. It is not a storybook.
This is history and it should be put on the shelf with all the other
history books. It is the same thing,
because if we do not have that, then everything else falls apart.
This
is why on page 48 I pointed out this strange Egyptian papyri that was found and
anybody reading the papyri, just go down through the seven or eight different
citations I got from that papyri and you can see that it is talking about
something very, very remarkably parallel to the Exodus. The problem is that
scholars stumble over this piece of evidence because this happens six centuries
before the Exodus, according to the existing chronology. It’s sort of like, golly, three quarters of
the world’s surface is covered by sedimentary rock and sedimentary rock only
happens in water, but, that cannot be the flood, that’s billions of years
before the flood. It’s the one
thing. We see the evidence in front of
our face but because of our presuppositions, the basic starting point we look
at, the perspective with which you look at these things, is so messed up that
the evidence is effectively nullified, even though it’s all around us.
Someday
when Jesus comes back and there is such a catastrophe when He does come back
and the physical universe is altered and the sun and the moon are affected and
this meteoric showers and there are all kinds of geologic catastrophes on
earth, when that event happens, all of a sudden people will say, gee were we
right about the evidence of all those rocks.
Maybe those were a previous catastrophe. But it won’t be until we get shook up with that kind of a
cataclysm that it’s ever going to change the way most people think. So we cannot stress enough as we work
through those events that these are real events. The fact that people can say, well, you don’t really have any
extra Biblical support for this, yes, we do, but the extra Biblical support is
being explained away.
We
continue looking at the Exodus and I want to start by turning to Deut.
4:34. For those of you who are new to
the Old Testament, remember the way the Bible is built, the first five books of
the Bible is the Torah. The Jewish way
of dividing the Old Testament was Torah, Prophets, and Writings. That’s their organization of the Old Testament
and that’s why it is referred to in the New Testament, you can see that in the
Gospels. So those are the three
divisions, and those three divisions, at first glance, look kind of not right,
because when I’ve used the word “prophet,” the word “prophet” sounds like
somebody who prophesies about the future.
But the word “prophet” the way they are using the word means somebody
who is depicting the works of God, whether it’s past or future, and for the
last year and a half we’ve been looking at the Torah. The Torah are the first five books of the Scriptures, the books
of Moses. These books are seen by
liberals in university campuses, and in some religious history courses in
school, we have five books of the Scripture that can’t possibly be written by
Moses. That’s the prevailing view, and that they were written later on and put
into the name of Moses. So once you do
that, then you don’t have genuine history, so you can kiss off those five
books, there they go out the window. I
remember growing up in a liberal church where a guy got up to preach and he’d
go into the Gospel of John and he’d give the whole introduction to the Gospel
of John, it wasn’t what the book was about, it was who wrote it, we can’t
really tell who wrote it but we know for sure the Apostle John didn’t write it,
there were a million people living in that day, a million other people could
have written it, but we’re sure that John didn’t write it. And that’s how we start teaching the
reliable Scripture.
Deuteronomy
is the last of those five books. And
the thing about Deuteronomy is… you know the chemical table, Deuterium 2,
Deutero and Nomi “nomos” is law,
the second law. This is the second
giving of the law. So that’s how you
can remember as we go through these in the Old Testament. If you can kind of get your mind in gear
about these events and have little tricks to memorize their names of the
Scriptures, it will help you through the Bible, because very few Christians,
frankly, are too well versed in the Old Testament. In Deut. 4:34, which is Moses second giving of the Law, he quotes
God, and verse 34 is God’s own interpretation of the Exodus event. Remember last year every time we would go
into the flood, or we would go into the fall, or we would go into Adam, or we
would go into Eve, I always try and go back to the New Testament and other
passages of the Bible to let you see how other authors of the text interpret
that text. I mean, here we are, twenty
centuries away, and we are telling these guys that you really did not get the
word. This is how it ought to be
understood. No, these guys understood
it very well; we’re the ones that are the stupid ones, going back 20 centuries
trying to tell them how to interpret their own Bible. So it’s good to go back and find out how these guys interpret it. Here’s God’s own interpretation, right here
in verse 34, and the importance of verse 34-35 is that it undeniably asserts
that the Exodus event, was a critical event in history, unique and never
repeated.
Let’s
look at the text carefully. Deut. 4:34,
God’s being sarcastic here, “Has there ever been a god who tried to go to take
for himself a nation from within another nation by trials, by signs and wonders
and by war and by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm and by great
terrors, as the LORD your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes?” In other
words, it’s a rhetorical question, go ahead, name a god, did Horus do that? Did
the gods of Mesopotamia do that? Tell
me one. It’s a challenge, it’s an open,
frank challenge to show Me, show Me any evidence of history of this ever
occurring like this, name it. And this is the sort of challenge the Bible
throws out. But what we’ve done in our
modern time is we’ve totally wiped the whole thing out by reinterpreting
history such that we’ve lowered the profile of the Exodus.
Now
we want to move on in our notes on page 49 to the other side of the event of
the Exodus. We are still looking at the
meaning of the event. We are trying to
get our hands on this thing that is mentioned here called the Exodus. We will never get into all the details. But we want to be sure that we understand
some of the emphases in the scripture about this event, so that we know and
understand what God wants us to think about when we think about the
Exodus. We said, try to use the Old
Testament text as an imagination loading device, to load your imagination with
pictures and the pictures you get are plentiful. The Old Testament is full of imagery that is tremendous to load
our minds with because ultimately this is the nature of our God and we can even
in Christian circles get false notions because we read only sections of the
Bible. The only way we correct our
notions of who God is and what He is really like is to go through all the
Scriptures and get some sort of panoramic view and it’s fresh to go into new
areas of the Scriptures to see how God looks as he appears here versus how he
looks when he appears over here. So, what we want to do tonight is we want to
move to the other side of the work.
We
said that the work that is in here, basically what we are going to see next
time is the work of judgment, salvation, the same kind of theme we saw in the
Noahic flood. This is the great
doctrinal picture of the Exodus. We
have looked at the judgment on Egypt.
Now what we want to do is come to the other side of that equation, the
salvation, see what it looks like a little bit more. And, we are going to deal with the problem as I pointed out from
my notes on page 49, the reluctant Israelites.
And, it may strike you as odd, and we want to look at these verses, why
were the Jews reluctant to be saved?
They were not rushing to get out of Egypt. It is remarkable that God not only has to judge the Egyptians, he
has to go through all sorts of contortions, as it were, to get his own people
out of the world system and coax them, and eventually force their hand, to make
them leave Egypt.
To
see how well embedded they are, look at Ezekiel 20. The reason Ezekiel is quoted here, why Ezekiel’s involved with
this, we’ll get later on, Ezekiel, Isaiah and Jeremiah are the prophets that
lived when the national fell. And
these guys are looking back to see the pattern of God’s working in history, so
they are very good historians, all of them.
In Eze. 20:6, he sees God and God speaks to him, the Word of the Lord
comes to him. “I swore to them, to bring them out from the land of Egypt into a
land that I had selected for them, flowing with milk and honey, which is the
glory of all lands. [7] And I said to them ‘Cast away, each of you, the
detestable things of his eyes, and do not defile yourselves with the idols of
Egypt; I am the LORD your God. [8] But
they rebelled against Me and were not willing to listen to Me; they did not
cast away the detestable things of their eyes, nor did they forsake the idols
of Egypt. Then I resolved to pour out
My wrath on them, to accomplish My anger against them in the midst of the land
of Egypt. [9] But I acted for the sake of My name, that it should not be
profaned in the sight of nations among whom they lived, in whose sight I made
Myself known to them by bringing them out of the land of Egypt.[10] So I took them out of the land of Egypt and
brought them into the wilderness.” You see God is not really too pleased with
this Exodus process. It didn’t go
smoothly.
Let’s
see another evidence of this. Turn to
Joshua, the next book after Deuteronomy.
Joshua rehearses the same sad tale.
It’s a commentary on human nature. Joshua 24:14, “Now, therefore, fear
the LORD and serve Him in sincerity and truth; and put away the gods which your
fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the LORD.” This is why in the notes I went over and
showed some of the Egyptian art forms and we’ll review these for just a minute,
just to think about this, here’s the god they’re talking about. This is the artistic picture of what was on their
minds. This is how they thought about
the universe, their lives, their nation, reality in their life. In that picture
we’re looking at Pharaoh, painted at the same height the gods are, so Pharaoh
was the grand integrator, as the king-dictator he was the state. All hope was pinned to Pharaoh because
Pharaoh kept the cocoon together. In
the midst of a chaotic universe, Pharaoh gave order, Pharaoh gave peace,
Pharaoh gave security.
This
is the world view of Egypt, and when it says they worshiped gods we’re not
talking about little statuettes. We’re also talking about the world view that
went along with those little statuettes.
Remember this particular art form, the pillar. We said that there’s an artistic rendition of the faith of Egypt,
where we pointed out that here is earth, here is heaven, the sun, and here very
carefully separated from the earth, very carefully separated from the those two
lines, the welfare scepters, and in between the name of Pharaoh, that Pharaoh
is the mediator between heaven and earth, it is Pharaoh who holds everything in
it’s place. So the state, the grand integration of the environment, of man, of
government, and we must not disturb that. The highest calling of an Egyptian is
to preserve the order, not overthrow the order.
So
you can see when we talk about the reluctant Israelite, they had fallen into
the same thing. As much as they complained about the state and the slavery to
that state, when it really came to the issue of freedom, they weren’t too
excited. So we want to also turn for
the grand climax to the analysis to Deut. 9:24. All the other verses I’ve put
in the notes, but I’m just emphasizing some of the key verses where you have
God’s analysis of this. Why are we
going through this? Because one of the
things we want to learn about ourselves in this Exodus event is that the nature
of the people who were saved is not too removed from our own nature. The Bible presents man warts and all, and we
don’t kid ourselves, but we are sinners, and being attracted to God isn’t
coming naturally, whatever attraction we have for God is the work of the Holy
Spirit in our hearts, but our hearts apart from that work are in pretty sad
places. Here’s an example, here’s God’s
own analysis of the heart of the people.
It’s not them, it’s also us.
Deut.
9:24, “You have been rebellious against the LORD from the day I knew you.” How’s that for a real neat analysis of the
people who were saved in the Exodus. We
romanticize in our fantasies about this Exodus event, it was so catastrophic,
so wonderful, oh gee, these people just singing praises to God and going out of
Egypt. Yet the analysis you get in the
text is very sober, that they were reluctant to leave, it was a strange work,
they weren’t quite trusting this God of Moses, and they were much more
comfortable in this sort of structure than they were listening to Moses. This gave security, this gave order, they
were familiar with this. This business
of going out in the desert with your wife and children, and God knows where
we’re going to go. That wasn’t too favorable in their eyes. So now we come down
to an analysis, on one hand we see a terrible judgment on the Egyptians, on the
other hand we see a reluctant Israel, sort of dragged out of Egypt kicking and
screaming, and we want to see if we can pull this together. As I said on page 49, “What is the big
picture of the Exodus? What we’re going
to do now is look at the Exodus event from the perspective of Abraham. We go over this again and again but we can’t
have too much review.
The
call of Abraham preceded the Exodus. So
the call of Abraham was a set up for the Exodus, so to get the meaning of the
Exodus, what we are going to do is we are going to go backwards just briefly to
the call of Abraham and ask ourselves, what do we learn about God’s program
with Abraham, the very program now that triggered this Exodus event. And if you remember when we are doing that
we said that the big things that we learned with Abraham is the truth of election
and the truth of justification because in the New Testament those two things,
every time you see Abraham’s name, those two things are in the background. So since the Holy Spirit, every time He
talks about Abraham, He talks about those two things, he says okay, well that
is what I am supposed to learn about that narrative of Abraham. If that’s the modus operandi, if that is the
way God is going to work, then the Exodus event is going to show those in
action. In Abraham’s case it was the
individual; in the Exodus, it is a nation.
This is Abraham’s family expanded.
So, what we want to look for is evidences in the Exodus event of these
two things; these two works of God operating.
The
first thing we want to do, which I am doing on page 50 is we are going to deal
with the evidence of election. What is
election? Election is God’s choice
among a field of sinners as to His plan of salvation. The plan of salvation has shape, it has boundaries to it. And God beforehand designed the plan of
salvation with boundaries. Everybody
finally is not saved and so there are boundaries there. And election deals with that boundary
problem. Why is it bounded this way and
not that way? Because God willed that
history operates that way and it is the only answer that you can come up with
finally. So, in the Exodus event, what
is the boundary? The boundary simply is
that in this Egyptian society, that looked like this, God chose a subset of
that to extract out of it. And that
people, that nation, was elected and chosen and removed from that world system. The Exodus is a picture of believers being
yanked away from the world. Christian
commentators have talked about this for centuries, this is not new; devotional
literature has emphasized this. You
read the great devotional literature, it’s always talking about making an
analogy between Egypt, and the world, the Exodus is the believer being saved
out of the world. That’s good theology;
that is the parallel, this goes on.
On
page 50, this quote I have, Rushdoony is talking about it in political terms,
but it applies spiritually, and in the case of the Exodus it was both spiritual
and political. Slaves, and I’ve got a
misquote here so please correct it.
“Slaves, true slaves, don’t want to be rescued from freedom; their
greatest fear is liberty…. Even as a timid and fearful child dreads the dark,
so does the slave mind fear liberty: it is full of the terrors of the unknown.
As a result, the slave mind clings to the statist or state slavery,
cradle-to-grave welfare care, as a fearful child clings to his mother. The advantage of slavery is precisely this,
security in the master or in the state.”
A marvelous statement!
What’s
good about slavery? It’s an institution
that has happened again an again in history, so it cannot be all that bad. It is to a degree kind of, shall we say,
popular. Why is slavery popular? Why is
it popular with the slaves? Because their destiny is all set for
them. It’s secure, the master provides
and so there is a comfort, strangely, there is a comfort in servitude. So that means that when Moses comes to the
slaves, the Jewish slaves, he is disturbing this. Everything at least is orderly here. But when Moses walks in, just like when God called Abraham out of
Ur, this is an unknown. Now we have a
surprise event, now we have some unpredictable new factor in our lives. Now all of a sudden everything else has to
be jerked around and reorganized around this strange new thing. This is discomforting, this is disturbing.
So
the Exodus was disturbing, and it’s disturbing because it’s an insertion that
instead of this where man organizes it from alpha to omega, from a to z, it’s
all man’s organization, the wonderful organizing of man, all of that is sort of
pushed aside and in it’s place we have this.
We have an invisible God, unlike Pharaoh. We have no kingdom.
Pharaoh has a kingdom, he has pyramids, he has an organization. This God does not have anything yet, He promises
but He has not shown us anything. And we’re to supposed to risk the wrath of
rebelling against Pharaoh, risk our home, risk our wives, and risk our children
on the word of Moses, to abandon this wonderful order that man has
structured. Do you see the tension
here? That’s election interfering and
it is a revelation of the fact that, going back to God’s character now, God has
character and those attributes keep showing up all over. Here is God’s sovereignty, God is holy, God
is love, and God is omniscient. This
attribute over here is omnipresence.
His holiness shows up. These
attributes start showing up when these acts occur and we become face to face
with a God who is dangerous.
That
is why C. S. Lewis in his book has such a neat passage in the Chronicles of Narnia and one of the girls,
one of the little boys in the story sees Aslan and he talks to the beaver and
he says to the beaver, “is he a good lion?”
And the beaver says, “yes, he’s a good lion, but he is not a tame
one.” Now just think about that for a
moment. Lewis captured it
beautifully. He is a good lion, but he
is not tame. Now put those two words
together and what do you have? You have
the fact that if he is not tame, he’s wild and if he’s wild, who’s in control,
him or you? He is in control! So this lion is not tame, he’s not part of
this, this order. So that’s kind of
scary, but the fact that he is a good lion means, that even though he is a wild
one, he is good, so I wind up not able to trust my leashes, my plans, my cages,
but I have to trust his what? His
character! And what is faith? It’s trusting God’s character. So this whole fight and struggle of the
Exodus has to do with whether the Jews are going to realize that they are being
called out as a unique people to bear testimony to God’s character and to trust
it.
To
see how God works, let’s turn to a series of verses beginning with Exodus
5. We want to deal with these verses
that are quoted in the New Testament.
In Exodus 5:15 there is a little story.
It is one of the many instances; I’m going to take you through four or
five of these instances. See if you can
see the common thread. “Then the
foreman of the sons of Israel,” this is the slave chain gangs that were
building the pyramids or building whatever needed to be built. “…came and cried, ‘Why do you deal this way
with your servants?’” they cried out to Pharaoh. [16] “There is no straw given to your servants, yet they keep
saying to us, ‘Make bricks!’ And behold, your servants are being beaten; but it
is the fault of your own people. [17]
But he said, ‘You are lazy, very lazy; therefore, you say ‘Let us go and
sacrifice to the LORD.’ [18] So go now and work; for you shall be given no
straw, yet you must deliver the quota of bricks. [19] And the foreman of the sons of Israel saw that they were in
trouble because they were told, ‘You must not reduce your daily amount of bricks.’
[20] When they Pharaoh’s presence, they met Moses and Aaron and as they were
waiting for them. [21] And they said, to them, ‘May the LORD look upon you and
judge you, for you have made us odious in Pharaoh’s sight and in the sight of
the servants, to put a sword in their hand to kill us’.”
What
was happening here? There’s a rupture
happening, there used to be order here.
The Jews at least got halfway along with the Egyptians. Now along comes Moses and he is a
troublemaker, he stirs up. To quote a
recent speech “we haven’t got unity.”
The fragile unity is being shaken here by this Moses, and he says that
now you stirred up trouble in verse 21, you’ve made us odious in Pharaoh’s
sight. And Moses, of course, feels the
heat, what am I doing here? I am not
having success; all I am doing is irritating people. So he goes to the Lord and says Lord, why have you brought harm
to these people? Why did you ever send me?
Ever since I have come to Pharaoh to speak in your Name, he has done
harm to these people and you have not delivered your people at all.” Now think about what’s the meaning of this
is. The Holy Spirit put that in the
text of the Scriptures. What is he
teaching us here? About God and His
work! What does God have to do to the
people in calling them? There has got
to be a separation.
So
let’s watch the separation take place.
Turn to Exodus 8:15. It doesn’t
happen overnight. In the middle of the
plagues, all of a sudden the frogs are dealt with. They pile them up in heaps and they stunk, verse 14. “But when Pharaoh saw that there was relief,
he hardened his heart,” just as the Lord had said. Now verse 19, “Then the magicians said to Pharaoh, ‘This is the
finger of God.’ But Pharaoh’s heart was
hardened and he did not listen to them, as the LORD had said.” Verse 32, “But Pharaoh hardened his heart
this time also, and he did not let the people go.” Exodus 9:34, “But when Pharaoh saw that the rain and the hail and
the thunder had ceased, he sinned again and hardened his heart, he and his
servants. [35] And Pharaoh’s heart was hardened, and he did not let the sons of
Israel go, just as the LORD had spoken through Moses.”
What
do you think is going on here? What is
this work? How discouraging for
Moses. He is not getting Pharaoh to let
them go. But what is the big work here?
Think about the whole significance of this Exodus event and ask yourself
this question. Suppose Pharaoh had let
them go, then what would have happened differently then if he had not let them
go this way. Think about that question
a minute, because there is part of the meaning of this whole elective
disruption that is going on here. What
would be the difference between the Pharaoh saying, “okay, go ahead, you’ve got
my permission,” and “no you don’t have my permission, you are staying here,”
and boom, he gets nuked. Now what’s the
difference between those two scenarios from the big viewpoint of history in
God’s works? Okay, who is ultimately in
charge? If Pharaoh had said yes, by
whose permission would be Jews have their freedom? The work of man. Man’s
work would be the ultimate principal.
The final say would be in man’s mouth.
But by having Pharaoh say, “no, you’re not,” and breaking him, it
becomes now the work of God and God becomes the ultimate cause. So that is the difference. The Exodus is like a modern political
movement or a revolution, but it’s a strange revolution because man isn’t in
control of it, God is in control of it.
So there is one of the central points.
The
Bible is also quick to add, because you notice every one of these verses we
said, “his heart was hardened” or “he hardened his heart,” and then it always
qualifies it. Remember what that clause
was? What was that clause we saw after
every one of those? “As the LORD had said.” So Pharaoh was hardening his heart but God knows about it all
along. So who’s finally in charge of
even Pharaoh hardening his heart? God
is. See the elective power of God? When God chooses to work His way in history,
there is nothing that stands in his way, even the rebellion against him has
been ordained. Now that’s the hard
thing. Even the rebellion against him,
He has ordained. Why has he ordained
it? Let’s review the question
again. If Pharaoh had not hardened his
heart and let the people go, you would see this much of God. By letting Pharaoh harden his heart, and
nuking him, you see this much of God.
So what is the controlling principal of history? The glory of God, whether it is the plan of
salvation, whether it is sanctification, whether it is creation, or whether
it’s the end judgment. The ultimate
rationale between why history flows the way it does is for the glory of God. God will be glorified! And that’s tough for us, because we want to
sort of have God on a committee and we want Him to help us. I mean, we are willing to join God on a
committee where we have a vote too. But
God does not seem to work by committee and this is offensive, this is deeply
offensive to the flesh. To deal with a
lion that is not tame, good and I have to trust his character instead of my
plans on taming him. I guess what I am
struggling to do here is, this is the nature of how the Old Testament looks at
faith. It is a very meaty, powerful
view of faith. It is not a mystical
view of faith, totally misinterpreted and if you just read the New Testament
and if you just get kind of a gooey, mystical view of faith. In the Old Testament it doesn’t work that
way. In the Old Testament these guys
always had faith, but it was always this God that we can’t control whose
character we have to trust and He even hardens Pharaoh’s heart. That’s the one with whom we have to do, so
it is a big God.
Look
at some of the verses that show Him hardening Pharaoh’s heart. In Exodus 9:12,”And the LORD hardened
Pharaoh’s heart, and he did not listen to them, just as the LORD had spoken to
Moses.” Who’s the subject of the verb in verse 12? Is it Pharaoh hardening his heart or is the Lord hardening
Pharaoh’s heart? You see, God is doing
the hardening. In Exodus 10:20, “But
the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he did not let the sons of Israel go.”
Who is hardening Pharaoh’s heart? The
Lord is hardening Pharaoh’s heart.
Verse 27, “But the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he was not willing
to let them go.” Who is hardening
Pharaoh’s heart, Pharaoh or the Lord?
The Lord is hardening Pharaoh’s heart.
Now this is the mystery that we cannot reconcile because remember, we
said last year, that when we look at the attributes of God, the thing that we
always have to keep in mind is that God is infinite. We are creatures that are finite and therefore, these attributes,
as for example the attribute of sovereignty, while they correspond to our
choice, this is a creature characteristic, this is a Creator characteristic and
there is a similarity between these.
But there is not a one to one correspondence between these and we said
that is the doctrine of the incomprehensibility of God. The doctrine of the incomprehensibility of
God does not say that God can’t be known; it says yes, He can be known, but He
can only be known by what He reveals of Himself to us. We’re the receivers; we can’t conquer him by
our brains. We can’t think through a
perfect theology in which He fits because He’s always there with stuff that we
do not know about or maybe even never will know because of who He is.
So
that’s what is happening here. In some
way Pharaoh is choosing but in another way, God has already chosen. And this is sort of a picture of Satan. Pharaoh here is almost like a Satan
picture. God is hardening Satan’s
heart. Let’s think about how God
hardens Satan’s heart, how God hardens Pharaoh’s heart. What were the processes that God used to
harden a heart? This is where it gets
kind of scary, because the process happens in every church service. How did God harden Pharaoh’s heart? By giving him more revelation? Think about it. Every time Moses walked into the Pharaoh, he operated as a god.
Do
you want to see this? Exodus 7:1. When Moses starts out, God calls him as an
analog to himself. Notice this, this is
a real strange verse. “Then the LORD
said to Moses, ‘See, I make you as God to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron shall
be your prophet.” Now in that case, if you
read the context there, Aaron had the mouth and Moses had the brains. Now most of us, usually we either have good
mouths or good brains, but we usually don’t have both, and too many of us have
diarrhea of the mouth and constipation of the brain. The point here is that the prophet was the one who is
speaking. Apparently Aaron was the guy
what was doing all the preaching, even though it says it was Moses talking to
God about it. But Moses was reticent,
we don’t know why, whether he really had a speech impediment or not, but he
confesses in an eloquent dialog with God in Exodus 4 that I don’t want to
speak, I can’t speak, I am not a speaker, I can’t be the representative of
this. And that’s when God… in a verse that
a friend of ours years ago had a son with a congenital defect, he had operation
after operation to fix this little boy.
And the mother, who is a Christian friend of mine, said she sat with her
son time after time, going through Exodus 4.
You know what verse she used?
When God talked to Moses and Moses was saying, I can’t do it because I
have an impediment, I’m just not normal, I can’t speak well, and God says “who
made the blind and who made the deaf? I
did.” And it was such a comfort, this
woman would use that verse for years to help her son through all these trials
and this trauma of these constant visits to the hospital and the surgical
procedures that had to be done. It was
a tremendous verse.
But
in Exodus 7:1, God says to Moses “you are going to be as a God to
Pharaoh.” Now the problem here is, is
that if Pharaoh is here, and Pharaoh thinks he’s God and along comes Moses, and
Moses actually has the Word of God coming to him, Pharaoh’s got a choice. Now Pharaoh can go positive or he can go negative
when faced with this. So what happens? Number one trial comes in, which way does
Pharaoh go? Pharaoh goes negative. Number two trial comes in, what happens?
Pharaoh goes negative. So what’s
happening to Pharaoh’s heart? Every
time advanced revelation pours in, I reject it. More revelation; I reject it.
More revelation; I reject it.
More of the Word of God; I reject it.
More of the Word of God; I reject it.
What kind of process is that analogous to today?
What
we want to do is we want to show how all this process of hardening Pharaoh’s
heart was linked to the covenant of Abraham.
We just got through saying that God is incomprehensible, that we will
never figure him out completely, but God is rational, God is not
inconsistent. We said when He gave the
covenant to Abraham, remember the three blessings were: the land, the seed,
worldwide blessing, okay? And we said
that that contract was laid down in history so that we would have a yard stick and
we could measure God’s behavior. The
Exodus is God’s behavior. So look at
many times, let’s start again a chain reference, turn to Exodus 2 and let’s
observe how many times during this Exodus event, it is related to none other
than the covenant with Abraham and his call.
The Exodus is not unconnected, not something that hangs by itself. Exodus 2:24. So God heard their groaning; and God remembered His covenant with
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” [25, “And God saw the sons of Israel, and God took
notice of them.”]
Exodus
3:15, “And God, furthermore, said to Moses, ‘Thus you shall say to the sons of
Israel, ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of
Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is My name forever, and
this is my memorial-name to all generations.”
Exodus 4:5, “that they may believe that the Lord, the God of their
fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has
appeared to you.” Exodus 6:2, “God spoke further to Moses and said to him, ‘I
am the Lord, [3] and I appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, as God Almighty….”
I have all the verses on page 51 if you want to look at the chain.
What
I am trying to say here is that the Bible presents a coherent, rational purpose
to history. History is not a pile of
marbles. There’s a plan to it. Here’s the application for us and our lives:
if the big place has a plan then that means your life and my life are
planned. So we take comfort in the fact
that if the big place has a plan, we’re part of the plan. Now that is exactly opposite of the way we
are taught in the world. The whole
existentialist motif in the 20th century is that there is no plan,
everything is chaos. And then, gee, we
wonder why the kids are on drugs, we wonder why nobody wants to learn
anything. Well, why should they want to
learn? I mean, if the kids are smart,
they’ve just taken up the worldview. The worldview says the whole idea, the
whole picture is meaningless so, hey, live that way then, don’t come to me and
tell me I have to do this, I have to do that, this cause and effect, when you
just have also told me that there is no big purpose or plan in my life. You can’t have it both ways.
That’s
one of the things that the Scriptures give that nothing else gives. And we Christians, we Bible-believing
Christians, are the only people left that have a rationale for the big
picture. Nobody else has a plan out
there, it’s all guess work, it’s all hot air, the bologna people. And then there are sober people that have
really thought this through, the real dark people, the dark existentialists,
they’ve thought it through and they have come to the conclusion that there is
no purpose. And what did Hemingway do
to end his life? Put a shotgun in his
mouth and blew his brains against the wall!
Now that’s the logical results.
If I believed that way, that’s probably what I’d do. That’s living consistently with your
worldview. The mystery is why more
people don’t blow their brains out. I
was just reading a statistic yesterday.
Do you know how many suicides we’ve got in the military? The United States Air Force right now has a
suicide every five days, because of the way we’ve treated the military, the
morale is so low that people are willingly taking their lives once every 5
days. Now that is a logical result of
pressure, it’s a logical result of tension; it’s a logical result of not having
the big idea. But we have the big idea
here and that is what God is saying.
Moses, what you are observing here is the work that I planned back four
generations ago. I haven’t changed my
plan; the big idea is still in place.
Now
what we want to do is come to the other half.
We want to come to the other part of the meaning of the Exodus. We said actually there was election and
there is also justification. God not
only elects, intervenes, separates sovereignly, but what did we argue about
justification? What was necessary for
God to come into the heart of a believer?
God cannot come into our hearts, unless our hearts are made righteous in
some way, unless we are credited with a righteousness. But we can’t have a righteousness until God
comes in our heart. So what comes
first, the chicken or the egg? That’s
the problem. And that was what
separates Protestants and Catholics because Catholicism insists that God cannot
do anything until the heart is changed, so if God changes the heart that is the
source of righteousness. The
Protestants say no, first God has to make the person righteous judicially and
then He can do something in their hearts, and you can’t have it both ways. I mean, that was the Protestant
Reformation. In the Exodus something
very similar happens and we want to look at Exodus 3 because now God is going
to take up residency in a sinful nation and it’s remarkable to see how He does
this, because this is analogous to Himself taking up residency with us. Paganism, because it is built on unbelief,
doesn’t resolve guilt. Now every man is
guilty, all men and all women, deep in their heart of hearts know very well
they’re sinners before God, and have a residual guilt. Psychologists can see
evidences of this, but Freud has his theory about it and someone else, Adler
has his view and this and that and there are all kinds of views of this. But basically when you dig down deep in the
heart, you find a mess. And the
question, what’s this mess all about?
Well, the mess is that we are guilty before our Creator; that’s the
mess.
On
page 51, again quoting Rushdoony, he has some very astute insight although I don’t
agree with everything he says, but he has some astute things here. If you look at those two we’ll start to set
up for Exodus 3, which we finish next time. “For a man with all the limitations
of man to claim to be as God is to indulge in a dangerous fantasy; for a state,
with all the limitations of man compounded, but the power of the sword added to
it, to claim to be as God is desperately dangerous and suicidal as well.” This is the power of the grand pagan estate. “The politics of the anti-Christian will
thus inescapably be the politics of guilt.
In the politics of guilt, man is perpetually drained in his social
energy and cultural activity by his overriding sense of guilt and his
masochistic activity. He will
progressively demand of the state a redemptive role. What he cannot do personally, i.e., save himself, he demands that
the state do for him, so that the state, as man enlarged, become the human
savior of man.” And that’s Egypt,
that’s an exact profile of Egypt.
Pharaoh was the savior.
Now
along comes God and God is going to live in this mess. And if you turn to Exodus 3:13, a revelation
is made. And the question is: what is
this new name of Jehovah? This is one
of the most famous verses of the entire Bible, verse 13, because it’s when a
man went face to face with God and asked Him who he was, “Then Moses said to
God, ‘Behold, I am going to the sons of Israel, and I shall say to them, ‘The
God of your fathers has sent me to you.’ Now they may say to me, ‘What is His
name?’ What shall I say to them?’ [14] And God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM’;
and He said, ‘Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, I AM has sent me to
you.’” Now the question Bible scholars
have tried to ask is, what is this I AM, where does it come from?
Remember
I said watch the burning bush; remember the burning bush incident. Moses was out there and he saw this bush
burning and the bush wasn’t consumed and he’s going what is going on here? And so he goes over and God speaks to him
out of the fire. Well, to make a long
story short, what we have here in this name and we’ll start with this next
time, but the name I AM appears to have this connotation, I AM understood with
you. Just as God was in that burning
bush, the bush almost being a picture of Israel, in their affliction God spoke
out of the fire, “I am with you.”
There’s always the connotation, and this is why justification enters in
because a Holy God cannot be with you unless somehow He, God, has dealt with
the righteousness issue, “I am with you.”
Here’s
what that name looks like. In the
Hebrew, the verb “to be” looks like this [
] and like all verbs, it goes from right to left, you read Hebrew that
way, you start here and go left and you have prefixes on these verbs so if you
have done Latin or Greek, you know about prefixes and suffixes and if you put a
prefix like this, it means “He is”.
Well, now interestingly, down through history, the Hebrew name for God
looked like this [ ]. In Hebrew there are no vowels so these are
all consonants. So when reading from
right to left, this is “y” or “j” in English, “h” and this is “w” or “v” and
this is “h”. And what has happened over
the years is that there would be these little pointers and these little vowels
stuck in there and people would remember that and they’d write it in the
text. The problem was, the Jews were so
afraid of this name that they wouldn’t pronounce it and down over the centuries
they lost the vowels, so nobody knows where the vowels are in this name. All we know, is called the Tetragrammaton,
meaning “tetra” four, there are four letters there and it’s anybody’s guess on
how to pronounce it. So what the
English Bible translators did, is they took the words out of Adonnai, which is
the word for master and they made this thing sort of a short “a” which became
an “e” and this “o” and this is kind of an “ae” type sound and they injected
those vowels in here. And what does
that spell? J-E-H-O-V-A-H.
However,
Jehovah can’t be His name because those vowels that you see in that word didn’t
come from the same noun; they were borrowed from another noun that means
“master”. So that gets back then, well
what is this? I always like to bring
this up every time the Jehovah’s Witness come to the door. The point is that only the closest pronunciation
to this that anybody has come up with is, instead of trying to do this stuff,
go back to the verb “to be;” take the hint from the verb to be and its vowels,
and you come up with “y” or “j”, Yahweh, and that’s why in scholarly work
you’ll see the God of the Old Testament called Yahweh, and that’s because they
are filling the vowels back up from the verb to be, not borrowing the vowels
from Adonnai to get it stuck in there.
So
in the King James text, there were translating teams that did that at a convention,
and if you look in your King James Bible and I think the American Standard
Version, I don’t know committees, you have to read, in translations it’s become
increasingly important to read the preface, because in the preface in your
Bible you’ll see where the translating team gives their conventions, their
translating conventions, and you will want to read that. But in the King James the translating
convention was this. That Adonnai,
whenever that occurred would be translated like this in the English text. Capital “L” lower case l-o-r-d, Lord. Whenever this thing was translated, they
wanted to distinguish that from Adonnai, so that the translating team would put
Capitol L-O-R-D, LORD. When I first became a Christian, I thought when you read that out
loud you were supposed to read that word louder. But what that was, was not that at all, it was a translating
convention so you could distinguish those two.
The team was just telling you, we at this point weren’t dealing with
Adonnai, we’re dealing with the Tetragrammaton. And then, of course, you have God.
That
is the story of God’s name and we are going to start there next time because
the name I AM occurs and becomes a code.
The remarkable thing is that you often hear “oh Jesus never claimed to be
God.” What we are going to do next week
is go to the New Testament and find out that Jesus takes that code and at
various points in His ministry He drops that code word out and every time Jesus
drops the code word out, there’s all kinds of ramifications, powerful
ramifications in the immediate environment.
So it is one of these small little things but it is a sign of who wrote
this book and how over the centuries He was self-consistent, no mistakes, plan
still in progress.