A God Given Life

 October 23 2022

Exodus 19:1-6, 20:1-17, 22-24

         It seems right now that there are a lot of shows being produced that are called fantasy series one of which is the prequel to the Lord of the Rings movies which is called Rings of Power. I came across an article on this type of show and I found that the way they are described was an interesting way to think about them because the author said that these shows employ what he called world-building. What he meant by this is that series like the Rings of Power are built on writing which constructs new worlds which are very different from our own. As I thought about this I remembered that J. R. R. Tolkien, who wrote the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit literature does exactly this in his creation of the land in which these stories are set, the land of Middle Earth. Tolkien even went so far as to create a whole new language for the elves in his stories to speak. Tolkien’s good friend, C. S. Lewis also was a world builder having written many of his works in the fictional land of Narnia, a place where the animals speak having not yet lost their ability to do so. It is amazing how writers are able, out of nothing but their imaginations, to make whole new worlds come to life through their words.

         As I meditated on what God does when he brings the people of Israel to the holy mountain of Sinai, I couldn’t help but come away with this idea that what God is doing is world-building. God is taking a people who have been beat down for decades, people who only knew of themselves as being slaves, a people who had lost all hope, and God is going to do something amazing with the likes of them. The way God is building this world is the same way that authors build there worlds and that is through the use of words, words that carry meaning and power. Imagine being a slave whose only value came through how hard you could work and when you became wore down unable to pull the load, you were cast aside, and then imagine you hear that the God who has rescued you from that life of slavery is telling you that you should consider yourself to be his royal treasure.  Can you believe it? To be transformed from a former slave to being the kings greatest treasure, all that is needed is for you to hear those words and believe that they are true.What God is doing through these words of his is to get these slaves to enter into a new world, to leave the old world of slavery and misery behind them and step into this new world that he is bringing about. What it takes for this new world to be built is the willingness of these former slaves to join God, partner with him, take these words that the Master Author is speaking and bring them to life. This is what is happening just three days after they had watched Egypt disappear in their rear view mirror.

         As these rag tag lot approached Sinai, they hear that although they are indeed free they are, none the less, the possession of God, and not just any possession but what the name suggests, the kings greatest treasure. It was this king who had been to them like a great eagle who had placed his young upon his back and had flown them away from harm and danger. Now, as they came to God’s holy mountain, God speaks to these former slaves and God lets them know that out of all the people on earth, the earth which God claims as his own, it was these people with which God is going to build a brand new world right in the midst of the old one. They were to be, God tells them, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation. No longer just a very large family but now instead, they are a kingdom, a nation and not just any kingdom or nation but rather they were to be priests, holy just as the God, who had set them apart from all of the other nations on earth, was himself holy. So new and strange was this description of who they now were that even now the meaning is not very straight forward. What does it mean for these people to be a kingdom of priests? There were no other kingdoms like this. There were of course kingdoms with kings and those who served them but to have a kingdom where everyone was considered a priest was a mystery in need of understanding. So too was the term, holy nation. God, of course was holy, the place where he resided was by his presence made holy but just how could this holiness of God so infiltrate this nation that it could be said that this nation alone, out of all of the other nations, this is a holy nation? Are you beginning to see just how very new and different was this world that God was building out of the people of Israel?

         The foundation of this new world that God was bringing forth was, of course, God’s act of hovering over his people on that night when death entered into the land of Egypt. There God placed himself in between the people of Israel and the destroyer who took the lives of all the firstborn of Egypt. As we may recall, God had told the people of Israel that they were to take and slaughter a lamb and place its blood upon the doorframe and the door posts. This lamb died in the place of those for whom death was coming on that fateful night. So, every home that dreaded evening was a house of death yet out of these houses of death in which the people of Israel dwelled, they alone came out with their families intact. So, it wouldn’t be a stretch that they were to know that God had given them a life beyond death, that this God alone was the one who gives life to the dead and calls into existence those things which do not exist. This is the same faith of Abraham, the ancestor of the people of Israel. It was this faith that Abraham had that caused him to be reckoned righteous in the eyes of God. God, through his deliverance of his people on that fateful night was bringing them to that same level of faith that Abraham had obtained.

         The importance of understanding that God alone is the one who can bring forth life from the dead is crucial to have a right mindset with which to grasp what we know as the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments were the words which God was speaking to these people with which God was building a new world. You see when God tells his people that they were to place no other gods before him, God is reminding them that he alone is able to bring life out of death. There is no carved image that comes out of our imagination which is able to defeat death because we cannot, on our own, imagine anything beyond death; only the one true living God leads us to believe in life beyond the boundaries of death. When we are certain of the ultimate greatness of our God then we are to speak of our God, bear his name, carry his reputation out in to the world. When we speak about God we had better do so in a manner worthy of who are God is. Again and again, we are reminded in Scripture that we are to magnify the Lord which means that we are the ones to make God great. The way that we are to know just how we are doing in making God great is whether or not those around us come to know the great God we know. The word translated as “vain”, is a word which means to have no fruit. God is saying then that when his people speak of him, telling others that he is a God who is able to bring life out of the dead, the people who do not know him should want to know him and come to believe in the God who alone is greater than the power of death.This is the fruit God expects.

         So, if we keep this emphasis that our God is the God who gives us life out of death, then the rest of the Ten Commandments begin to make sense. Why remember the Sabbath, and keep it holy? We pause from our labor to worship God as a witness to a watching world that it is God who gives us life and not the work of our flesh. We honor our fathers and our mothers because they are the ones through whom God has brought forth our life. You shall not murder can be thought of as you are not to take a life that God has given to someone. If God has given a person their life then God alone is the one who can take that life from them. You shall not commit adultery because it is God who has given life and all that is necessary for a person to create life with another person, so again if God has brought two such people together then no one else should tear this union apart. You shall not steal which means that God has given us life and has provided all that is needed for life so to take what God has provided another person for their life is nothing more than unbelief in the providence of God. And then there is  the commandment that you shall not bear false witness against another which again goes back to God being the giver of life and if you speak falsehoods against another’s life you are really speaking against the God who is the giver of that life.

         So what these Ten Commandments do is to describe what a world would look like if the people of that world knew that there was a God and that this God alone was stronger than death, a God who could speak life out of nothing at all. If this is who you know God to be then of course, it changes everything. Knowing that our God can bring life out of death means that our God is God alone because he is beyond what we could ever imagine any god ever being, beyond this world held in the grip of death. A God as great as this, of course, we are going to speak greatly about him, of course we will want others to be intrigued by the God who gives us the possibilities beyond the boundaries of this world. When we have a God so awesome as to be able to do the unthinkable and the impossible are we really going to be able to rest in his ability to provide all we need to maintain this life we have been given? Of course! Will we honor those through whom God worked to bring us into existence? It just makes sense doesn’t it? And the way we treat others, if we know that God has given them life and has given them everything they need for life just as he has done so for us, wouldn’t you think that would change the way we live together? I would hope that it would. All of this just leads us them to the tenth commandment that God told his people that they were not to covet what their neighbor had. We are left wondering just how can you command people to not do something that dwells in a person’s heart such as the act of coveting does. Yet it is right there, in the heart, that the answer is to be found. It is the heart which must be satisfied with the life that God has given to them. This satisfaction is to spring forth from the heart of gratitude because we know that this life we have is a gift. The focus is supposed to be on the God who gives and not on the “what” that he has given to us. God in his grace has chosen us to know him and to experience him as a God who gives us life. The awe of just being able to know  this God, that he is willing to do anything for us, those who are so unworthy of receiving anything from a God so magnificent, this is what should be the focus of our hearts, not how green the grass might be over the neighbors fence.

         So with these words, God is speaking forth and building a world with the people he has rescued from slavery. What has to be remembered is that the Ten Commandments are for those who know that God has given them life out of death otherwise, the life of the flesh, which God’s people were to have nothing to do with, would instead destroy the relationship God has with them. If the Spirit comes and hovers over God’s people and gives them life then the Ten Commandments take on a whole different meaning then when one is trying to create a life of their own through their own effort. When the Ten Commandments become a marker of ones own effort then they will become just another source of bragging rights and a hotbed of hypocrisy.

         So far then what God has done is that he first, changes the identity of the people of Israel. God wants them to no longer think of themselves as slaves but rather they were to know that they were people who were greatly treasured by the God who had rescued them. They had been set free to join God in becoming something brand new, a kingdom of priests. This is what their destiny would be if they would only but hear the words of God and believe that what God speaks is true. What God spoke were the Ten Commandments, in all reality they were but ten words, which spoke of how life should be and could be if they would hold fast to the belief that this God who had rescued them was the God who could bring life out of death. If they knew God in this way then all of their relationships, all of their life would find its proper order. Then God goes on to speak to his people how they can have a way to experience the assurance of his presence with them. The God who resides in the highest heavens desired that his people know the closeness of his coming and abiding with them. God tells his people that all they need to do is to make an altar of earth, something any person could form and fashion. This was a God who did not insist on gold or silver; no, this God just needed an altar of just plain old dirt. All that was needed was an altar formed out of the ground they walked on and some wood and the appropriate sacrifices. Simple and easy enough for anyone to do, in fact, when Moses first offered sacrifices there at the foot of Mount Sinai he called some young boys to help him. There was no need for complicated rituals or priestly garb; no, just a simple place of worship would do.  The people of Israel were to pause and worship God in this rather undignified way anytime, we are told, that God caused his people to remember his name, that he was I am who I am, the God unchanging. When God’s people would remember that God was their shield, willing to place himself between them and death and danger, when they remembered that their God was the God Almighty, they were to stop, dig up a mound of earth and offer up a life to God. If they worshipped God in this way, God makes a promise to his people that he would come to them and, he also adds, that he would bless them. What God says here is very significant because these words of blessing should make us remember the original promise to Abraham, that through Abraham all of the families on earth would come to experience the blessing of God. In a world held under the curse of sin, this realization all of us have that we all are vulnerable, able to experience loss, and pain, damage, and death yet also realizing that there is nothing that we can do to prevent any of this from happening to us, into such a cursed world, God promises to reverse the curse and bring blessing. Here, in the story of the people of Israel we find that in these descendants of Abraham, God is bringing his blessing, his presence, uniting himself with them so that they might experience the goodness and glory of heaven. It is this assurance that the God who can bring life out of death, the God who can bring something out of our nothingness, this is what reverses the curse in the lives of the people who worship God.

         So, what we have then is a nation made up of people who are experiencing the blessing of God, every person receiving the blessing, bearing that blessing in their everyday life for when this assurance that God abides with us transforms a persons life that life becomes to look like the life described in the Ten Commandments. People who bear the blessings of God are known as being priests, and since this blessing of God controls their life and how they interact with one another we can begin to see how this new strange, kingdom God is bringing about is governed not by enforcement through power and coercion but through the transformation of the heart. Now, when we read this, can we hear Jesus in these words? Can we see that the kingdom he came and proclaimed was at hand is the same kingdom God had in mind right here with the people of Israel? Jesus too has spoken of how it is that we can have the assurance of God’s abiding presence with us when in the fourteenth chapter of John he tells us that if anyone one loves him, they will keep his word, and the Father will love them as well, and they both will come to them and make their home with them. The reason we love Jesus is that he is the sacrifice, the Lamb who was slain for us so that we might know God as the God who can bring life out of death. All that we need to sacrifice then is work of our flesh which is cursed so that in receiving the life of Jesus we might at last receive the blessing of God’s abiding presence, living life in obedience to the Word of God. Amen!