Now let's turn to the Word of God to the Old Testament reading first on the book of Exodus. On the third new moon, after the people of Israel had gone out of the land of Egypt, on that day they came into the wilderness of Sinai. They sat out from Rtheim and came into the wilderness of Sinai and they encamped in the wilderness. There Israel encamped before the mountain while Moses went up to God. The Lord called to him out of the mountain saying, thus you shall say to the house of Jacob and tell the people of Israel, you yourselves have seen what I did into the Egyptians and how I bore you on Eagle's wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all the peoples or all the earth is mine and you shall be to me a kingdom of priest and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel. So Moses came and called the elders of the people and set before them all these words that the Lord had commanded him. All the people answered together and said all that the Lord has spoken we will do and Moses reported the words of the people to the Lord and the Lord said to Moses, behold I am coming to you in a thick cloud that the people may hear when I speak with you and may also believe you forever and then the New Testament, the first letter of St. Peter, but you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who has called you out of darkness into his marvellous light. Once you were not a people but now you are God's people, once you had not received mercy but now you have received mercy. The word of the Lord, you may be seated. The story before us is the story of God's ancient people in their approach to Mount Sinai. Mount Sinai is the place where God uttered the law, the ten commandments and of course many other commandments that went along with it to Moses is servant. Sinai is the place of law giving. The expectation is that God would give the law the people would hear receive and obey the law but three months before God gave the law to his people he had already redeemed them, he had already saved them. The saving work of the love and the mercy of God is first in the priority of our relationship with him. It is what God does before anything that we do. I, the Lord says before you have saved you, redeemed you, called you, sent you apart the story of the Exodus as a tender one when you read the first chapters of Exodus for years or about three centuries God's people had been literally lost in Egypt's land. They had gone down there 70 people that's all and now they had become a mighty group but they were slaves in the land of Egypt and the tender verses in the early part of Exodus said the Lord remembered Israel. That is the Lord had never ever forgotten them and he knew that one day his plan would call for him to have a mighty deliverance and a salvation of his people. I don't care how long you've been in sin's slavery. God has not forgotten you and he said he remembered them not for their own sake because he will remind them that they were a feeble people, not very attractive, certainly not very wealthy and certainly not very dominant in that ancient world. In fact they were kind of a pathetic, pitiful people but God had set his affection upon them because of the promises he had made to their ancestors. Their father Jacob his father Isaac, his father Abraham. God had made a covenant and a covenant that he was going to keep an eternal covenant and everlasting covenant. A covenant that was unilateral that he has God says I'm going to do it. Period. That's a unilateral covenant regardless of what you do or don't do I'm going to accomplish my purpose. It's the while the years had taken its toll upon Israel. God's people in Egypt. He now redeems them. He brings them out. Wonderful story you all know it very well of what God had to do in dealing with him raising up the man Moses putting him 40 years in the wilderness to train him for the job that he would have for another 40 years in the wilderness. Brought him back the encounters with Pharaoh and the government, the system there and all the plagues and all the things that happened and how reluctantly and repeatedly Pharaoh would let them go and then changes bind and back and forth. God and Moses and Pharaoh and the people and then miraculously on the night of the Passover. God moved miraculously striking the first born and liberating his people oh let me just say that's the way God always delivers his people is by striking the first born. We have our salvation here this morning because the first born of all creation Jesus Christ himself was struck the blow of God's wrath in order for us to be freed. God saved his people. He saved him first and foremost. He delivered him miraculously. You know the story of the Red Sea and Pharaoh's armies and all of that happened there. God did his work first. He saved them first. What point are you trying to make Ron? It's this. You don't become saved by keeping the law. Your salvation is the operation of God's love and mercy and redemption. His atoning work, his sacrificial work. It's what he does for us as his own people that he set his affection upon and his love upon and rendered his mercy and grace to us freely without price and without cost to us but great cost to him. It's three months later as they crossed slowly moved across that peninsula. Three months later that God brings them to the mountain of the law. God does not ask his people to be obedient to him in order that they might be saved. He's already saved him. He's already redeemed him. He's already bought them out of the slavery of their sin. Now he brings them to a place of expectation where now he sets before them the terms of a bilateral covenant. The promissory covenant God made to Abraham is being fulfilled all throughout redemptive history all the way from Abraham to Christ into us but the obligatory covenant now is supposed to pull them. That is a covenant whereby they are obligated and they're obligated to respond to God's mercy and God's grace and God's goodness. God reminds them. He preaches them the gospel of how he had delivered them and as though they were on the wings of eagles helpless they but yet the soaring of the eagle had delivered them and brought them out of the land. He says, I want you to do this. He said, I have brought you to myself. Just think about that. That's the love and the mercy of God. If you heard in your old heart and have a settled conviction in your soul that the Lord has brought you to himself, you whoever you are whatever you have done wherever you have been the Lord has brought you to himself. That's how we come to Christ by way. He brings us to himself. Oh what a tender scene here. Analogies and imagery will be used all through Scripture that talks about God as a bridegroom and his people as his bride. The prophets, especially Ezekiel and others, Hosea and others will make big emphasis of this sort of imagery but it's there. It's tenderness. The Lord sought and found and brought his people to himself. Then he puts an if clause in the covenant. Now therefore, after I've brought you to myself, after I have saved you, after I have redeemed you, after I have brought you to your place of salvation and your standing before me, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant. God wants his people to do two things. He wants us to listen. It means to harken, to stop, to heed, to hear the walksday, the voice of God. Have you listened for the voice of God? Do you hear the voice of God in Scripture and in your soul as the Holy Spirit makes Scripture live of the Word of God? Do you hear His voice? Do you hear the tenderness? Do you hear the love? Do you hear the acceptance? Do you hear the forgiveness in the voice of the Lord? The wooing, satiating, soothing voice of the supreme love of all the universe. That's what God wants us to do. He wants us to hear His voice and keep my covenant to heed, to obey, to follow its mandates, to avoid all that is prohibited, to do what He says, to not do what He says, not to do.
Keep my covenant. He says, if you will do this, you will be my treasured possession among all the peoples. Well, all the earth is mine, Lord says, I have it all. It all belongs to me in the sense that I created it, and in the sense that I am sovereign over it, but in this special, salvific, redeeming, loving intimate sense, you will be my peculiar personal treasure. By the way, there's very few places you can look in Scripture and not see Christ, and here's one of them. This, of course, is the Lord speaking to Moses, who speaks to the people. That's the first instance of what exactly has happened. That's historically what's taken place, but if you'll listen to this a little bit differently, and think of the Father speaking to the Son, to the Father speaking to Christ, who is the representative and the substitute for all the people, who in His own body and His own flesh embodies the people. Listen to what the Father says. If you will obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession. That's the Father saying to the Son, you are indeed the pearl of great Christ. The treasure found in the field by the plowman who sold everything he had and bought the field in order to get the treasure. That's who Christ is. He is the treasured possession among all the people. Then he says, you shall be to me a kingdom of priest and a holy nation. I reread, I couldn't help myself, I started a little bit, and then I just kind of got carried away. I went back and read the story of Abraham, how that God had called him and he just never, ever got around to get in that covenant the way it's supposed to be done. God says, I'm going to make of you a great nation, a holy nation, and He's went along years and nothing, no children, no promise of children, and He says, I'll tell you what, I'll make my servant, Eliezer, how about that? He'll be the one that will start the great nation. Lord says, no, no, no, it's not Elie. Later on, you know the story, He said, I'll take my wife's handmaid, Hey, Gar, and her offspring, and my our child, our precious little boy, Ishmael, oh, Ishmael would live before the Lord. He's the man who, oh Lord says, it's not going to be Ishmael, and time goes by and God says, I'm going to give you a child, and of course you know the story, Sarah laughed. They named the little boy laughter, but he was a little boy, and he was from the loins of Abraham and the womb, the barren womb of Sarah. By the way, God brings forth a lot of things from a barren virgin womb so often, and there we had the little boy, and then the little boy didn't barely make it to manhood, till the Lord says, I want you to sacrifice him, only one hope of having a generation to follow, and the Lord calls for him. And what are the interesting passages too, was there's a passage in there, I don't know if you ever pay any attention to it, but in the middle of the whole narrative God talks about how Abraham's brother, Nehor, had 12 sons, eight boys by his wife, Milka, and then four by a concubine, 12 children right off the bat, Abraham's brother, what would God say? Poor Abraham had one little boy, that was him. That's because God knows what he's doing, and he knew what he was doing, and he was making sure that everybody would know that the genesis, the origin of God's treasured people, his holy nation would be of God's doing, and not of man's doing at all, and that's the way God has done it. He has brought every citizen of that nation into that nation by birth, a miraculous new birth, a birth from above, and God has built up that nation over the centuries. Here's God's people at the foot of the mountain. Well there's a lot of places to preach out of this text, I'm out of time, but I am going to show you one that just sort of was interesting to me back there in verse two, so they set out, and they came into the wilderness of Sinai, and they encamped in the wilderness. That's something you don't want to do very often in your life, and if you do it, you don't want to stay there very long, but quite a few of us live from time to time, encamped in the wilderness, in the barren, howling wilderness, the preeminent symbol of the curse that is upon the ground, where the thorns and the cactus and the fistles are, and the whole wheat will not grow. There they were encamped in the wilderness, and the next verse says, well that's the same verse, they encamped in the wilderness, there Israel encamped before the mountain, what a place to be, you're encamped in the wilderness, the barren wilderness, the wilderness of Sin, and you're facing the mountain of God, you're facing God, the mountain of God, there's no more terrifying place to be in your life in motion, than being in the wilderness right in front of God. Let me tell you the only reaction you can have when you know the righteousness and the holiness and the eternality and the immensity and the power of God Almighty, there's only one human emotion that will dominate the soul, and that's that of terror if you're in your sin and there stands God in his holiness, his righteousness, his purity, a two pure of eyes to even look upon iniquity, there he stands before you. No wonder so many people try to get rid of God the best way they can, to say he does not exist, to call him a figment of the human imagination, to belittle him, to try to take away any attribute of power, and certainly power attributes of holiness and righteousness, to dethrone his judgment, to belittle him in any way, but the right response and the proper response was the response of the people of Israel. They were camped in the wilderness in their sin, facing God, and all they knew were terrors, their own the mountain was smoke and fire and earthquake and trembling and rumbling, and there was this real, deafening sound of a trumpet that just blared out. I don't know if you've ever been under an alarm or an extreme a siren or an extreme loud noise, but after a moment it unnerves you, and that's where the people were, and standing before God in their condition that they were in, they were horrified, terrorized, and even begged that they would not have to deal with God, that there would be somebody between them and God, let it be Moses, let Moses go talk to God, let Moses come back to us, let Moses speak with God, we'll hear Moses, that God himself we will not encounter, and that's so often our hearts, isn't it? We'll hear somebody, but we won't listen to God, we won't encounter God, we'd rather have a prophet, we'd rather have a guru, we'd rather have some kind of spiritual guidance, not God himself. Well I'm out of time, but let me mention one more thing because if I don't mention this I haven't preached yet,
Peter, the Apostle Peter, in his short letter, draws from two great sources in the Old Testament. One is this experience of Israel, the other is the prophecies of Hosea which will not get into, but this is what he says of the believers, of you and of me, Christians, by the way Christians who were at that point, many of them Gentiles, not descendants of Abraham, but had been brought near and brought into the covenant of faith. You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. God took his people out of slavery, brought them to himself at the mountain. God has taken us out of darkness, the darkness of sin, the darkness of ignorance, the darkness of condemnation, the darkness that is nothing but an emotional precursor of an eternity without God. The outer darkness is brought us by Christ who is the royal priest, the king in the priest, and he has brought us to himself to his marvelous light. That's what coming to God is, it's coming to the light of the world, the light that lights the souls of humanity, the light that brightens, that gives off the life of God himself. He's brought us out of darkness into his marvelous light. There's an expectation, and that is that we'll show forth the excellencies of him, to show forth the excellencies of him. That is to praise him, that is to speak of him, that is to lift him up, that is to honor him, that is to hear his voice, that is to heed his commandments, that is to live as his people.