God of Glory

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

Today, we are coming to the end of our series, Know God, where we are looking at the law in Exodus to try to discern who God is, which is a little strange. It's like reading an instruction manual to see what the manufacturers really wanted for this product. It's just a really strange endeavor. And the law can sometimes just seem really opaque, really difficult to digest. And so you're reading about all these different things that we should do or shouldn't do, or what about this case and what about this case? And where we've been the last couple of weeks is we've been talking about the tabernacle. So talking about the tabernacle, it is a strange enterprise because we are talking about an ancient Near Eastern context, right? So we're going back roughly 6,000 years or so. And we're trying to just get our heads into that world, into that context. And it's not always very easy.

However, we've been trying. We've been looking at it. We've been showing pictures. We've been trying to figure this out. And as we come to the end of Know God, next week we're gonna begin another series called Return to God. And it's where we're gonna be picking up a couple of different stories in the book of Exodus. But today we're actually gonna be at the end of Exodus. So the end of our series, Know God, is also gonna be the end of the book of Exodus in Exodus 39 and 40. And we're gonna start in Exodus 39, 32. And in many ways, these verses, what we're gonna be reading today, is the culmination of the book of Exodus. It is where all of this has been leading to. It's what the actual Exodus, the actual leaving of Egypt and God establishing himself a people, it's what it's been leading toward.

And as we begin to read, we talk a lot about the Old Testament being meditative literature, right? We talk a lot about how if you read the Old Testament once and it's a little difficult, just read it again. And then read it seven more times and it's probably gonna start making sense. But it takes a while, right? It takes a while to kind of for it to make sense. What we're doing as we teach through this is I'm kind of giving you, I've read this several times over, I've read commentaries, I've done the work, I've read it in Hebrew a lot of times and I'm looking at it and we're kind of parsing this out together. But I'm trying to help you understand not just what the text is saying, but how the text is saying it. So that we can get a gravity of kind of what's going on. Okay, so as we read, just understand that's kind of what's happening. Let's start in Exodus 39 verse 32.

It says, thus all the work of the tabernacle of the tent of meeting was finished. And the people of Israel did according to all that the Lord had commanded Moses, so they did. So according to all they commanded Moses, so they did. So they had finished building the tabernacle components. Okay, the tabernacle components, it's kind of hard to explain, so I'll show you a picture of kind of what it looks like. We've got a picture, I swear, yes, there it is. So this tabernacle, by the way, shout out, if you have not watched the House of David on Amazon Prime, you are missing out. Full recommendation, full. That's rare for me. I always give all these million caveats to my recommendations. No, no, go for it. Binge it, it's totally worth the time. In the middle of season two, they show this and it's pretty accurate. By the way, the House of David's pretty clear. They throw in extra elements for drama, et cetera,

but they're clear about that. So again, full recommendation. Okay, but this is kind of what the tabernacle looked like. And you can kind of see all these things that we've been talking about before. We've got like the bronze basin, we've got the inner cord and the outer cord, and all of this was completely movable. So they would set this up and tear this down and set it up and tear it down, set it up as they kind of moved around, okay? So they had finished building all of the components of this. So they had finished stitching everything together. They'd finished, and it doesn't look like much here, but that's actually about a third of a football field. I mean, that's pretty big going on there. And so to stitch all of that, to have all that together, to get all the wood, all the gold, all the utensils hammered out, like all of that, that was what is happened. That is what is finished.

Look at verses 41 through 42 of 39. They presented the finely worked garments for ministering in the Holy Place, the holy garments for Aaron the priest, and the garments of his sons for their service as priests, according to all that the Lord had committed Moses. So the people of Israel had done all the work. So they got all the temple components fixed. They got all of the priestly garments made. We talked a lot about this. They've got all those priestly garments. Again, even in the house of David, they showed Samuel in the whole priestly garment, and it was pretty accurate. I mean, it was pretty well done. I'm just telling you, you should go watch it. Okay, especially after we just finished this series. I'm just saying it's gonna come alive in maybe a little bit of a different way. It's pretty on point. Okay, so they made the priestly garments. Skip down Exodus chapter 40, verses 18 and 19.

It says Moses erected the tabernacle. He laid its bases and set up its frames and put in its poles and raised up its pillars. And he spread the tent over the tabernacle and put the covering of the tent over it as the Lord had commanded Moses. Okay, by the way, it says that Moses did all these things. Moses is managing all these things. So he might not have done it himself, probably didn't do it himself. He's commanding a lot of different people to do it. So this is like a big community thing, like a barn raising. I don't know if you know, I think it's the Quakers. I'm not sure who does it, but they build a barn in a day, right? But it's the whole community coming together to put a barn together, okay? We're getting a few nods. Other users are just like, what the heck is a barn raising? Okay, let's just keep going. Okay, from these verses all the way to verse 33,

to chapter 40, verse 33, they set up the entire tabernacle, the whole thing. They take all of it together. They set up the ark in verses 20 and 21. They set up the table and the bread in verses 22 and 23. They set up the lampstand. They set up the altar with the burning incense. They make the first sacrifice on the altar in verse 29. They set up the bronze basin in verse 30 through 32. They set up the outer court, which is kind of that big outer ring. In verse 33, they set the entire thing up. And what you don't get, as I'm preaching this right now, what you don't understand is that when you read 45 verses that all are talking about how they're setting it up, the intent in reading it that way is to make you understand that it was painstaking. It's to make you understand that it was a bit of a labor to get all this stuff together. Because even as you're reading it,

it kind of feels like it repeats itself a little bit or it's going into way too fine of a detail. But what it's trying to communicate to us today, to the reader, to everybody, it's trying to communicate this thing took time. This thing took months. We are several chapters in to the tabernacle being built in Exodus. Several chapters in. And it has just been painstaking. And so by the time we get to the end of verse 33, it says, so Moses finished the work.

It ends that, it ends with that. So Moses finished the work. There's this moment in time right here where the blood, the sweat, the sacrifice, it all comes to fruition. It all kind of comes together. I've never built a tabernacle. Maybe that surprises some of you. It was not part of my seminary education. Never built a tabernacle before, but I have remodeled, I built a deck in my backyard, but I've also helped remodel the building, this building actually. In fact, many of us helped remodel this building. And if you don't know, when you walk in, there's a welcome center and it used to look like, oh well, it didn't used to look like this, but I got a picture, I swear, yeah. So that is where the welcome center is right now. It used to be the church office, okay? We demolished all those walls and we laid down some carpet and we switched the lighting and we, you know,

all of that, we did all that. And if you don't know, at the beginning of this year, in January, our whole church, like, I mean, it was like 50, 60 of us all came together. And for one week, for one week, show the next slide. Yeah, for one week, we had all of our doors out on sawhorses right out there in the fellowship hall. We had people in here that were putting up soundproofing. We were staining every door. We were painting the doors that we weren't staining. We were remodeling things. We were going all out to change up the way that the building looked. And the best part about that was not sanding the doors. The best part about that was not saying, no, Levi, you put the soundproofing the wrong way. It wasn't that. That was not the best part for Levi or for me. It wasn't, that wasn't the best part. The best part was the end, right? The best part was whenever it was finished.

The best part was that Sunday on January 10th that we got to walk in here into a brand new building, at least brand new to us. It felt new to us with a brand new name, Chisin' All Fellowship. And all of it was new. And I remember, I remember people that hadn't been here a while, they came back by and they saw the inside and I hadn't told them about it. And they just were aghast. I mean, they were like, this looks so different. This looks so good. And it wasn't like I was proud because I did all that work. I mean, I was like relieved. I was overjoyed. I was, it was just this thing, this feeling of goodness because it was complete. And the reason, part of the reason that feels good is not just because it was different but because it brought a new reality. It brought new possibilities. My wife and I have just rearranged our downstairs which that might not sound like much to you

but it was the same for a long time. And we have just become empty nesters. And so that's kind of a wild time for us. We don't have kids at home anymore. So that's weird. And it's, yeah, it's just a little different, a little strange but we've also like rearranged the whole room. And what it's kind of signaled for us, what it's helped us see is that it's like new possibilities. There's new things that are able to happen now. I think the closest maybe we can come to this is, if you ever tried to fix something for a really long time, anybody, you got some, I got some nods in here, yeah. I tried to fix the sink once for a really long time. I ended up doing insane things that I completely regret right now.

But I was really glad that I finally got that sink completed. I think the sink got the better of me but hey, the sink's done. For you guys, I don't know if it was a sink, maybe it was a deck, maybe it was electrical work, maybe it was putting a shelf up that just didn't wanna go up. Maybe it was assembling the IKEA furniture that did not want to assemble, okay. I don't know, I don't know what that is for you. But if you've ever worked on something, like worked on it and worked on it and you hit a barrier and you had to turn left, you hit another barrier, you gotta turn right. You're just trying to work the thing out the best you can.

And then it finally works. Like it finally clicks. I had this, so we have a binding machine here at the church, right? And I bought it off Amazon. And boy howdy, buying things off Amazon, that's kind of a craft shoot, right? You don't know what you're gonna get here. And so I got the binding machine and Larry, Larry Smerk and I are trying to fix the binding machine because I've done too much weird. I pushed something too hard. So I'm trying to, how do we do this thing? How do we fix it?

At the end, so we tried, I mean, Larry and I tried for probably an hour and a half, maybe longer, trying to like, we unscrewed it. I mean, we're trying to do everything. Well, we finally put it back together and I was just so frustrated about it. And Larry was too, in his own Larry way. He was smiling, but he was super frustrated. Okay, what it took was me just holding the binding machine. I kid you not, holding the binding machine four feet off the ground and letting it go.

That was recommended by the way. It wasn't just me being frustrated. I dropped and it works. It worked. I was like, you are kidding me. All we had to do was drop this thing from four feet. It worked. That feeling right there of like when it finally worked, all that frustration, all of that mess, it just melted away because now I had a working machine. It was all worth it. It's how I've heard women describe having a baby. Obviously, I would not know anything about that. Please, don't say, wow, you don't know. Okay, yes, I don't know. But my wife has told me, yeah, there's a lot of pain. There's a lot of suffering. But on the end, you get a kid. Like how good is that? And that there's just some, it just makes all the pain worth it. This, all of that that I'm just trying to describe here, this is what Israel is feeling right now as their work is complete.

As they've banded together for months to try to figure this out. As they've gone through many highs and lows on this trek with the Lord that started with them being slaves in Egypt. And now they're here, they're kind of dumped out here. There's supposed to be a nation. God's giving them rules. They're trying to figure it out. And now, now, in this moment right here, I'm sure it's emotional. I'm sure there were people that were just weeping when it was finally done. Because for them, it was a new reality. It was a new step into the future. This is what happened when they finished. Let's read verses 34 and 35. It says, then the cloud covered the tent of meeting and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. And Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because the cloud settled on it. And the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. Guys, that right there, the glory of the Lord,

some will call it the Shekinah glory, kind of goes by a name. The glory of the Lord filling a temple. That only happens three times in history. Here's the first time when Solomon builds a temple, it happens again, it's about 500 years later. And about a thousand years after that, when God establishes his church, the Holy Spirit comes down and fills people. This is the first time that's happening. This is after months of work. And as soon as they're done with it, a new reality opens. Look at verses 36 to 38. This is the end of the book of Exodus. This is like how it is. This is what the writer of Exodus wants to leave us with. It says throughout all their journeys, whenever the cloud was taken up from over the tabernacle, the people of Israel would set out. But if the cloud was not taken up, they did not set out until the day it was taken up. For the cloud of the Lord was on the tabernacle by day

and fire was in it by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel throughout all their journeys. I wanna point out a couple of obvious things here and you might miss it if we're just kind of reading about this and we're kind of wondering what that looked like, a cloud and a pillar of fire. Like what's that, what's kind of going on there? Although God never ever changes, that's true, God does want to lead us in new ways. God never changes, but God is not trying to do

like the greatest hits of how he's led you before. He's doing something new. With Israel here, he's never done that before. He's never led them with a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire. He's never done that before. This is brand new and it wasn't going to happen until the tabernacle was built. And when it was built, God's like, okay, good. Now I'm gonna lead you in a totally different way. However I led you before, however, whatever was happening before, that's not gonna happen anymore. This is going to happen now. God wants to lead us in the same way with new challenges, new heights, new people who need the Lord. And maybe if you don't know the Lord today, the Lord's inviting you into something. And look, you don't get to know all that the Lord has in store for you. You just know and trust that it's a good journey. So I wanna just make two points on this. One is looking forward and one is looking backward.

The first point forward. As we just read these verses, this is indicative of the kind of relationship that God wants with his people. This is indicative of the kind of relationship that God wants with his people. The pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire, they help us see how God wants to lead us. Because the way that God is leading us here, leading his people here, it's intimate, right? He's not sending an angel. He's not even speaking through Moses on this. He himself is leading his people like a shepherd in his flock. God himself is saying, I'm gonna put my cloud on there and whenever I leave it on there, you stay. If I pick it up, you go.

It's intimate. It's personal. And this is why today, this is why I kind of likened it to what happened with the church, wherever we're filled with the Holy Spirit. God wants to lead us the same way. This is why we have the Holy Spirit. God's not hoping that we just follow a set of rules and somehow stumble on the good life. That's not the plan. The plan is that God wants to make you and I new on the inside. And to do that, he gives us the Holy Spirit. He fills us the same way he filled the temple, the tabernacle in Exodus 40. He fills us with the Holy Spirit in the same power, in the same way that he's filling the tabernacle with his glory. Jesus also wants to lead us in the moment.

There are many encouragements from the Lord Jesus as we follow him that the Holy Spirit is going to give us what we need in the moment. He's gonna give us the words to say, not before, not so we can write it down, but he gives us in the moment. Sometimes you and I want to obey God and we wanna do it on our own terms or in our own timing. We put all these parameters on how God can move, should move, move in a way that makes us feel comfortable. God is way less interested in you feeling comfortable than you are, like way. In fact, he knows that part of your discomfort is you growing in maturity, is you growing into the lightness of his son. That's gonna take several uncomfortable moments from you. That's gonna take several moments where you aren't sure that you trust what's on the other side of what the Lord is calling you to do. And this is what it is to walk by faith.

It's to take a step where you have to trust God. Not necessarily where it doesn't make sense, but where it makes sense to God. You've gotta be able to take that step and trust him for it. This is how to become a Christian in the first place and this is how to continue to walk with the Lord. It doesn't ever stop. Walking with the Lord is not just one big leap of faith and then you're cool forever. It's a journey you're continuing on. And sometimes the steps that you're asked to make make very little sense to you. Coming here from a church that I was at made very little sense to me. It made very little sense to the church I was at. It made very little sense to my wife. It made less sense to my children who were all teenagers at the time. But this is where the Lord was calling us to be. And some days, some days, I'm like, yes. This is exactly where the Lord wants me, yes.

And then some days I'm like, what have I got myself into? What is this? More good days than bad. But still, it's moment by moment where the Lord wants to lead me the same way he wants to lead you. And yeah, it's not a pillar of cloud over your living room or a pillar of fire at night. I'm not trying to be overly literal here, but I am saying that the Lord wants to guide you intimately, personally, day by day, step by step. The Lord wants to do that. This is like why we read the Bible in the morning on our own. This is why we have a prayer time. This is why we commune with the Lord God because he wants to lead us. If you're following me, but not following God, you're doing it wrong. I'm not your personal Lord and Savior. This church is not the kingdom of God. Okay, just so we're all clear. We are together as a family to point people to the one we're following, to point to the kingdom that won't ever fade.

That's our job. Follow the Lord. What I want you to do, I wanna take a minute, I wanna pray right now. I wanna just do a guided prayer with you and I'm not asking you to say anything out loud. I'm not gonna ask you to raise your hand. I'm not gonna ask you to do anything like that. I just want you to be in a spirit of prayer with me. If that takes you, bow in your head, close your eyes. Awesome. But I want you to pray with me right now. And I wanna begin to give you some questions to consider and then we're gonna pray together. What situations are you trying to navigate right now? What barriers are you trying to handle? What areas of your life have you held to closely? Pray with me right now. Lord Jesus, we want you, we need you to lead us forward.

We need you to show us the way. We need you to guide us. How do you want us to take a step forward in this thing that it just feels like there's no way around it. Feels like it's just really frustrating. Lord, help us to trust you with it. Give us the strength to pray to you for it. And it's your name that we pray, amen. This is the first thing that God wants to teach us. He wants us to understand that he wants to navigate us

moment by moment and that's looking forward. Now let's take a second and look back. I want you to understand and I tried to really give it to you in the text itself and you know, if you've been with us for a couple weeks, you kind of understand that there is a grind. There is a middle grind that was all happening and it's often forgotten in the process, right? That what we're seeing now is the result of people months ago, of Moses months ago. And this is a lot of communication. This is a lot of order. This is a lot of collection of things. This is all, this is slow and steady sacrifice with no tabernacle insight. You got some woman in her home who's just like weaving

blue and scarlet and purple yarn together or string or lace or whatever, I don't know. She's weaving that all together. And all she can see is three strands coming together in one strand. You get another person, another guy, who's maybe he's in a shop in his house and he's just taking a hammer. He's just beating out a golden fork. He's just beating out a golden fork. Can you imagine how weird that would be to be beating out one golden fork? It's just a strange thing to consider, right? Or maybe, maybe you got the really cool job of like engraving the onyx stone, right? But it's not super easy to engrave. It takes, maybe you messed up on an onyx stone or two. Maybe you had a really frustrating day and you were like, you were supposed to put a lomid, but you put a calf. Oh no, Hebrew jokes, I got them.

There's this middle grind that's happening and it's stuff that's beating a golden fork and seeing the glory of God filling a temple that feels really far apart, right? It doesn't even seem like it's in the same category, right? Weaving things together and watching a pillar of fire descend on the tabernacle. Once it's complete, those two things don't even seem like they're in the same ballpark. They're not. Because one is the slow, boring, everyday work of preparation and the other is the culmination of all of that work. Because you can't have fire falling without somebody spinning yarn. You can't have fire falling without somebody making a fork, without somebody carving wood, without somebody harvesting lumber. All these things sound super boring and I'm sure they were. I'm sure they were. And it's a grind. This is the middle grind. This is the stuff that we forget about.

Getting up day in and day out to handle all these little things, to stay on top of what the Lord has given you. The Lord's given you these things. And you're like, you know what, God, it just seems so small and so insignificant. I don't know. Like, I don't know. What is this kind of leading up to? What's this? Look, you don't get that picture. You don't need that picture. You couldn't even believe or handle that picture if you had it. Some of the funniest things I hear, and if you've ever said this to me, I'm sorry in advance, is, some of the funniest things I hear is, you know what, if I just knew, if I just knew the future, I would believe more. If I just knew what God would do with this, then I would give him the thing. Then if I just knew, listen, if you and I knew the plan that God had for us, we would mess that up too. We would trip over ourselves trying to make it happen.

And we'd take the credit when it did. And we'd take the blame when it didn't. We cannot handle God's plan, you and I. We're finite people. We don't understand. But we can trust God in the middle of it, in the middle of that grind, that everyday things. This is something that we work on in our life groups. We're gonna have a life group interest meeting in a couple of weeks, November 1st. So in about a month, we're gonna have a life group interest meeting after the service. If you're interested to know more about that, please attend that thing. But this is something that we work on in life groups, where daily the encouragement is that we are getting before the Lord in a quiet space. We are reading the Bible. We are listening. We are praying. And we are interceding for others. Weekly, we are meeting in a home group. We are coming together as a church body to worship here, right?

Monthly, many of you are serving. You're serving your church family. You're giving money as a sacrifice to the Lord. And today, you're gonna stay late and you're gonna eat pizza, okay? It's hard work. You're gonna stay late and eat pizza. And we're gonna watch a Cowboys football game. It's gonna be great. Okay, okay, somebody's excited. I was like, somebody be excited for that, okay? Look, sometimes, sometimes, going to home group,

we don't understand how it connects to the glory falling on the temple. We don't understand how it connects to the Holy Spirit filling our lives and helping us grow in the lightness of Jesus Christ. But you know what? Maybe one time, like just going home group one time, it's not the same, I get it. But over and over and over and over and over and the daily grind and the weekly grind and the monthly grind and the making sacrifices, all these things that we do day in and day out, it's in preparation for, this is what we hope, you ready? It's in preparation for the Lord to move. For the Lord to do and accomplish things that only the Lord can do.

This is why you and I do the daily, weekly, monthly grind. Because we do it in hopes that the Lord is going to do things that we can never do. The middle grind, here's the thing I want you to, the middle grind is fueled by the new reality that's coming. The middle grind is fueled by the new reality that's coming. That moment that God's glory filled the temple was the culmination. So let me just ask you,

do you hope for God's presence in your life? Is that you? Do you hope for that? Do you want that? Here's my encouragement then, let's prepare for it. If that's your desire, then let's prepare for it. Let's encourage each other in this. When we prepare to meet with the Lord, God wants to bless that. He doesn't want to just bless the culmination, he also wants to bless the preparation. And so instead of, and I'm gonna call Jacob back up here,

instead of wishing somehow, go ahead, instead of wishing that you would have prepared, instead of wishing that you would have prepared, let's take a moment right now and prepare. We're gonna have an extended time where we're gonna be singing a couple of different songs. Here's my encouragement to you. If the Lord is calling you to begin to, to begin to pray to him, if the Lord's calling you to, throw a capo down,

if the Lord's calling you to begin to pray for him, pray to him for something that you'd need, if there is a burden on your heart, if there's something that you need to kind of figure out the way forward and you don't know, here's my encouragement. Start preparing for that now, start asking for that now. Look, some of you, you've been waiting on whatever the Lord was gonna do, and you feel like you've waited too long. You've been waiting for the Lord to maybe give you a job, you've been waiting for the Lord to remove this obstacle, you've been waiting for the Lord to heal your marriage, you've been waiting for the Lord to, listen, the encouragement is that those who wait upon the Lord will renew their strength and they will mount up on wings like eagles, they will run and not grow weary, they will run and not grow faint. I'm missing a word, it's fine. The Lord promises that when we wait on him,

that he will show up. Today, right now, I wanna encourage you, as we sing, I'm gonna encourage us to stand as we sing, as we do that, my encouragement, sing from the heart. Let the words inspire you to pray. Why don't we stand right now and let's start singing.