Exodus 33
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Good morning. It's a joy and a privilege for me to greet you on behalf of the saints that have already gathered today twice in Ras Al-Khima, United Arab Emirates. I don't take that for granted that I'm able to say that because of the Lord's faithfulness to Jenny and to me in that place. It's a joy to serve you with the Word of God today. as Alex mentioned at the beginning we lived here, we were members here from 2009 to 2012 those were very busy years in our lives and those were precious years in our lives we absolutely loved the time the Lord gave us here in this place, in this body and we praise God for all the work that he did in our lives and those years fueling us to go do what we're doing now to the glory of God's name and fame on the other side of the world.
Remarkably, to the praise of God, we've been there almost 14 years now. And we praise God for Tim and Jen Jackson being with us. I somewhat joke that I've still yet to see Jen Jackson sin. So if you know Jen Jackson, remarkably, we've now lived through our first war. If you've lived through a war, I can help you out on how to get through that. when it broke out, Jenny and I were actually outside of the country. And by God's grace, we got back in.
And I say that because the Dubai airport was one of the first critical infrastructures that was bombed. And we obviously needed to get back in. Our children were in the country and we weren't there. But I was so thankful to get back in. Because in that moment, I realized what a gift it was the Lord had given me to be where I am in the world. And you've heard a lot, and you may still hear a lot about war on our side of the world. You've heard about that. What I want to say to you is that that's the news on earth, but the news in heaven is that the word is going forward.
And it's multiplying. And this is what we're committed to, whether it's in our church or outside of our church with other responsibilities. We want to see the word make progress and multiply on the other side of the world where there is such great need. so when you hear of the war think of the word and think of its multiplication and pray that the Lord would use us to that great end that's the privilege of our lifetime to live over there and to minister in these ways and it such a privilege for me to hopefully serve you with the word of the Lord this morning and lift your eyes to see the glory of Jesus So you can go ahead and turn to Exodus 33.
Exodus 33. As you turn there, I want to ask you what you do, what do you do when you know you know you've blown it? When you've failed and there is nowhere and no way to hide? What do you do when everything that you've hoped for for your life is suddenly gone and your hopes are dashed?
I thought a few months ago that our time in the United Arab Emirates was very possibly coming to an end. And I did not want it to be. We were seeing the Lord's help and good fruit. The Lord was opening doors for the gospel. And we thought that the war might upend everything. rock bottom after you've known real highs whether it's in life or ministry is a terrible and hard place to be I think part of the problem for many people when it comes to the scriptures is that so many foolishly think that the scriptures have nothing to do with real life when it is the scriptures and the revelation therein that is the story that tells you what real life is actually like in this world.
And there are people in the Bible that we meet along the way that help us to this end and there are chapters. There are events that sugarcoat nothing. they reveal humanity and the God who is and all of his realness that can give the most hopeless of Christians hope this morning I am preaching such a chapter to you Exodus 33 is a chapter in which the people of God have hit rock bottom their hopes are shattered when we come to this chapter in Exodus 32 the chapter before God people have sinned a great sin These are the people who saw the Lord, Yahweh, send plagues down on Egypt.
And now because of their own sin, their idolatry, Yahweh the Lord has sent plagues on them. They are in the wilderness. They are away from the land. The exodus itself and all of its great purposes is in jeopardy. So this chapter is the aftermath of a failure. And I wonder if that's where you've ever been in your life.
I wonder if that's where you are as you sit here this morning or maybe you've not blown it but maybe your temptation is to get whatever you want without the Lord well in this chapter we see the God who gives rock solid hope to the hopeless and he gives a warning to those who would have success without him.
Here's the main point of this chapter. God's gracious presence is God's greatest gift. God's gracious presence is God's greatest gift. Guard it as your greatest privilege. Guard it as your greatest privilege. I'm going to walk through the chapter through the three scenes of the chapter. And the three scenes are mourning. That's M-O-U-R-N-I-N-G.
Mourning, meeting, and mediation. Mourning, meeting, and mediation. And we will read the text as we work through the chapter. So let's begin with mourning, scene one. Mourning, M-O-U-R-I-N-I-N-G. That's verses one through six. Let's read the word of the Lord. The Lord said to Moses, depart, go up from here, you and the people whom you have brought up out of the land of Egypt to the land which I swore to Abraham Isaac and Jacob saying to your offspring I will give it I will send an angel before you and I will drive out the Canaanites the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites.
Go up to a land flowing with milk and honey. But I will not go up among you lest I consume you on the way for you are a stiff-necked people. When the people heard this disastrous word, they mourned, and no one put on his ornaments. For the Lord had said to Moses, Say to the people of Israel, You are a stiff-necked people.
If for a single moment I should go up among you, I would consume you. So now, take off your ornaments that I may know what to do with you. Therefore the people of Israel stripped themselves of their ornaments from Mount Horeb onward. So this is a failure. If you were to put yourself into Moses' shoes or his sandals at this moment in verse 1 when we read the Lord commands him to depart, you and the people whom you, notice it's not I the Lord, whom you have brought out of the land of Egypt.
Now yes, they are to go to that land that is flowing with milk and honey, but it's with an angel, not the angel going before them. But verse 3, the Lord says, I will not go up among you lest I consume you on the way. Would you take that deal? God's place without God's presence. God's blessings without God.
It is so easy to say you wouldn't take it. But I think a quick glance at the world we live in says otherwise. We live in a world that wants God's blessing, that wants His stuff, but has no interest in having God. A world that is very satisfied with the notion of heaven that would be perfectly happy if God himself were not even there. So the benefits of God, but not God.
God is merely there to give me whatever my ultimate desires are. But of course it's not just a quick glance at the world, is it? It's also a quick glance at the church. Perhaps individual Christians who are happy with a little gospel. As long as it doesn't cost me very much. Very happy with a convenient Jesus. as long as He doesn't interfere with my good life or my social world.
It's not really the Lord that is wanted. It is the stuff the Lord can give. It's also in the church. It's on the mission field. Churches and missionaries happy with more numbers without any concern for God's presence or power. a church in a missionary world that can be so allured by the pull of pragmatism rather than biblical priorities or a church that accommodates the world in an effort to be winsome when the real goal is to never have any real conflict with the world lest we read this text and ever think that this kind of temptation is foreign to us, we must first see ourselves in it. We can be way too happy to pursue success in the eyes of the world, and God is nowhere to be found. Here, because of His own people's
idolatry, their failure to believe their covenant Lord during the delay of the mediator in chapter 32 the Lord makes clear to Moses your people can have the land but they will have it without their God and so the question at this moment in Exodus is this it is the great Exodus from Egypt with all of Yahweh power and mighty redemption for the world to see is it all now going to end at this road that is called failure Everything was great.
But the Lord is not going with this people any further. And I wonder if you've ever been there in your own Christian life when you know you've blown it so badly, it's over. Whatever you do in that moment, in that hopelessness, you know before the Lord, it matters. The Lord said to this people, you can have the stuff, but you will not have me.
And tragically, but yet wonderfully, when God's people were faced with this deal verse 4 they mourned a mourning of repentance God had been with them in terrible circumstances but he would be with them no more and if he were to go with them it would mean their total consumption now to take a step back and to understand where we're dropping in into this point in Exodus means we must know that from Exodus 25 to 31, seven chapters, God gave to Moses very detailed instructions just to prepare Moses and his people for God himself to be present with them in fellowship with them through the tabernacle of all the people on the planet in the ancient Near East, this people alone would have the presence of the Lord
but not now. That unimaginable privilege was no longer an option. And in their mourning they stripped themselves of their adorning ornaments. So this is God's people completely exposed. They are spiritually naked before God. They have failed and they know it. No surprise to any of you I did not grow up the son of royalty, but I have lived in a land now of sheikhs and royalty.
And I have to imagine when I think about these boys as they grow up and knowing they're going to be future sheikhs with unimaginable power in this world. That I hope at some point they realize the immensity of the privileges and the responsibilities into which they been born In this text, we have a slave people who were powerfully and publicly rescued by the Lord, suddenly realizing the immensity and privileges into which they've been redeemed.
And their idolatry has put it all in jeopardy. Those chapters for the instructions of the tabernacle are not needed any longer. No land, no amount of milk or honey can make up for the absence of the gracious presence of God. This is a disastrous word. And so they mourned. Hear this warning. Whatever it is that would tempt you to get what will look like success and blessings to the world, but will cause you to lose the presence of God will not be worth it.
It is better to be faithful with little, to just plod in ordinary ways, than to go after whatever that is and end up faithless. We should be warned there are things that we can do that will look impressive to the world. It will even get the world's respect and applause. But God will not be in it. I think of the world of ministry and missions, sizable churches or movements that can be built, but are not dependent on the presence of God and His power.
They look impressive, but they will not stand when everything is made plain on the final day. Jenny and I, with some of our children, had the tremendous privilege last week to be in Turkey. We had the privilege to be there with Afghan and Iranian refugees who fled to that land. I was able to teach the book of Revelation to them, and it obviously was not lost on me that they had all lost their homelands because of their faith and their faithfulness to Jesus.
And what an encouragement it was to me to see them long to know the word of the Lord and what a special encouragement it was to me to look in their eyes for men and women, brothers and sisters who have lost their homeland and so much more in this world and take great hope, not in heaven in the abstract, but in that place where God will dwell and be present with his people in fullness In a way that is incomprehensible to us at the moment Exodus teaches us that the gracious presence of God his presence is what gives his people our power and our life This is the privilege.
So what marks you off as a Christian and what marks your church and my church off is not what we've done or we've accomplished. What marks us off is our God. and I wonder if you've taken the gracious presence of God in Christ for granted never let it be said that we've become bored with fellowship with communion with the triune God has that promise I will be with you become to you old hat it is the almost unthinkable privilege that the Holy Spirit would indwell a people never take that for granted you know one way you can determine whether you have is if you've become lax in your own life in areas where God is not lax you've treated casually sin that God does not treat casually it is so easy for us in our own lives
to just kind of normalize what the Bible has not normalized to accept it as part of life it's easy to take salvation for granted and so to drift toward the very sin that our salvation has saved us from so redemption wonderfully brings to us privileges but it brings us great responsibilities and God's redeemed people in this text have failed in those responsibilities by verse 6 God's people are stripped and exposed and they mourn in the wilderness I mean think of this people only weeks before they were at the heights they were seeing the appearance of the glory of God at Sinai and now they are at rock bottom and if you've been following Jesus for any length of time I have to believe you've been at a point where you have wondered in your Christian life maybe in ministry is this it?
Is it over? What does the future hold when all you see is failure? When hope feels so distant that you don't even dare to consider it? When as we have here, there is a way forward. It will be a kind of success, but God will be God's people can have the land but without the gracious presence of the one who promised to give it to them it is a sobering thought in the Christian life and in ministry that we can look successful we can win the praise and the admiration of people but God's blessing is not on us God's presence is not in the midst of it.
This is a chapter that begins with a disastrous word to a failed people. But there is a glimmer of grace and hope. In the fact that they mourn. Their sorrow and love for the covenant Lord is such that they are not interested in this deal. For the land is not the point. The point is the presence. and so their mourning leads to a meeting. That's our second scene this morning.
Meeting, verses 7 through 11. Now Moses used to take the tent and pitch it outside the camp far off from the camp and he called it the tent of meeting and everyone who sought the Lord would go out to the tent of meeting which was outside the camp. Whenever Moses went out to the tent, all the people would rise up and each would stand at his tent door and watch Moses until he had gone to the tent. When Moses entered the tent, the pillar of cloud would descend and stand at the entrance of the tent and the Lord would speak with Moses.
And when all the people saw the pillar of cloud standing at the entrance of the tent, all the people would rise up and worship each at his tent door. thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face as a man speaks to his friend when Moses turned again into the camp his assistant Joshua the son of Nun a young man would not depart from the tent so their mourning leads to a meeting a meeting at the tent of meeting We get a glimpse here of what life was like for God people before God had graciously given His presence to them in the tabernacle And unlike the tabernacle, which would be in the midst of the camp, we see verse 7, the tent was pitched outside the camp, far off from the camp.
That's emphasized again at the end of verse 7. we should notice that God's people had no confusion over how much of a privilege and how serious the presence of the Lord is if the tabernacle instructions in chapter 25 through 31 teach us anything it is this that Yahweh the Lord is holy and his holiness makes him dangerous in the midst of unclean, sinful people.
So in the Bible, the Lord's presence is a problem before it's ever a privilege. His grace is seen in making provision to protect the people from His presence. And it is seen in all that the Lord had already done, apart from any of His people's knowledge, to reveal the pattern of the tabernacle to Moses, that His presence might be in the camp in their midst. This is a people who would be marked off by their God, the true and living God, no longer outside the camp, but in their midst.
And so when Moses went outside of the camp to that tent, it was a big deal. Verse 8, all the people watched. You can imagine the seriousness of Moses going out to this tent to meet with Yahweh the Lord after this terrible failure. They're rising up. They're standing at their tent doors. Their individual, their collective future hangs in the balance. It's nowhere near a perfect analogy.
Most analogies fall short. But it's like Middle Earth. Frodo Baggins making it to Mordor to cast the ring into Mount Doom. All the hopes of the people of God rested on this meeting of Moses with the Lord. And they knew that the Lord met with Moses in a different way than he met with them. Verse 9, when Moses entered the pillar of cloud, descended, the Lord would speak to Moses. For Moses as the covenant mediator fellowship with God was a reality When he saw the cloud the people would rise up and they would worship This people understood the gravity of this moment If there would be a future for God's failed people, Moses is the pivotal hinge.
So when God's people saw the pillar of cloud at the tent, they stood and they worshipped at the tent door. We see so clearly how different this is from the confusion that marks so much of the church in our own day. That God's people were not confused. That the height of fellowship with God is marked by any casualness or triviality. They had seen the Lord's presence in power.
and their repentance is demonstrated by the reverential seriousness that marks them in view of it. Never lose your awe of the privilege of the holy presence of God. Never take for granted what you have the privilege to experience here together. Gathered in the presence of the Lord by the Spirit every single week. It is amazing that ordinary church gatherings all over the globe are the greatest taste of heaven.
This side of heaven that we will ever get. Don't take it for granted. Every week we're being pointed forward to a day when what we know in part we will know in fullness. Forever. But not at this moment. Moses, the man of God, meets with God outside the camp because there's no provision. For his presence within the camp. And remarkably. The God of the Exodus. Condescended.
To meet with this man. A sinful man. In a tent. Our great hope in the Lord. Is that our covenant Lord. Condescends to be with his people. In ways that given who the Lord is. Are unimaginable. and I wonder if you need hope to stand on this morning hear this by his own initiative the Lord who sits enthroned above the cherubim the Lord before whom mighty angels hide their faces so pursued fellowship with his sinful people that he meeting with Moses in a very unimpressive tent Here is the God who condescends to his people in ways his people could have never imagined and certainly could have never demanded.
And he has not changed. In what was an unspeakable privilege, verse 11 the Lord spoke with Moses face to face as a man speaks to a friend. In the last few years, I mourned the death of my own father. I am sure that there are some here who have mourned death in your own lives. In death, we learn in a unique way, hopefully in a redemptive way, how precious someone's presence is.
how precious it is just to be with them when it's suddenly taken away but here it's it's not even a mortal whose presence is being taken away it is God's presence that would be no more and you should sit in the gravity of that you should feel the grief of that Moses understood that their future our future is only worth striving toward if God will be graciously present in it.
And for God's mourning people, for that to happen, what did they need? They needed mediation. And that's the third scene of this chapter. Mediation, verses 12 through 23. Mediation. Here's Moses in the tent meeting with the Lord and we read beginning in verse 12. Moses said to the Lord, see you say to me bring up this people but you have not let me know whom you will send with me yet you have said I know you by name and you have also found favor in my sight now therefore if I have found favor in your sight please show me now your ways that I may know you in order to find favor in your sight consider too that this nation is your people. And he said, my presence will go with you and I will give you rest. And he said to him,
if your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here. For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people? Is it not in your going with me? And the Lord said to Moses, this very thing that you've spoken I will do, for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name. Moses said, please, show me your glory.
And he said, I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name. the Lord and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy but he said you cannot see my face for man shall not see me and live and the Lord said behold there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by then I will take away my hand and you shall see my back but my face shall not be seen I love Moses' guts this is a man who has seen too much of who his God is to accept failure this is a man who has he has grown in the knowledge of the Lord he has matured in his
mediation and so he mediates He intercedes. Failure is the present of God's people, but Moses is determined it will not be their future. Do you see how the Lord has shaped Moses such that Moses knows the Lord? Such that Moses, this man who at the burning bush wanted nothing to do with the Lord and all that he wanted Moses to do in Egypt, now he's staking everything in his being on it.
he wants the presence that the Lord had promised and revealed to him Moses has gone too far with the Lord to turn back so this is the kind of mediation that only comes from someone who knows they are bound to the Lord and the Lord is bound to them. Moses knows he has a stake in the Lord. Listen to him. Verse 12. You say you know my name.
I found favor in your sight. If that's the case, show me your ways that I may know I have found favor. Consider too that this nation is your people. And he says it again in verse 15. If I don't have your presence, do not bring us up. I think it's only when we understand that he is the covenant Lord and by grace alone we are his covenant people that we pray these confident kinds of prayers.
That we really do plead with God, his word with him and we pray to him based on the grounds he's given us in his word. When we understand the covenantal boundedness of the Lord to us collectively to us individually we really do shake off guilty fears and we ask. Moses is such a different man than he was at the burning bush. Hesitant, afraid, making every excuse not to trust the Lord. Here's Moses bold and assured.
He's come to know Yahweh. He knows what he is like. And he's mediating. He's interceding in light of it. There's a lesson for us in our own prayer lives. In his book, A Praying Life, Paul Miller writes, many people struggle to learn how to pray because they focus on praying, not on God. If you want to grow in prayer, you don't need techniques. You need to grow in your knowledge and your delight and your treasure of God.
We see that in Moses as he's growing in the knowledge of God. He knows the Lord and do you see how that's affecting his intercession? As you know him you will pray confidently to him according to his character and his purposes. Moses is not a man who will take the deal. He is not content with the land without God's presence. If we do not have your presence, do not bring us up from here.
You remember when Moses was absent from the people on Sinai What did the people want They wanted something visible in his absence Now, it's Moses who fears that God will be absent, and he wants something visible. What does he want? He wants to see God's ways. And why? That's the only way he will know he has God's favor. God's failed people do not need success. they don't need the land we most need the favor of God and so Moses will not quit asking for God's favor it is remarkable that he keeps reminding God who had not forgotten by the way that it wasn't Moses who brought them up from the land of Egypt it was the Lord Lord you redeemed this people Moses knows the Lord and he knows his people and what does God assure Moses of in verse 14 my presence will go with you
and I will give you rest that's it right end of chapter God promised his presence not for Moses he wants more verse 16 how shall it be known that I and your people have found your favor oh Lord it is your going with us that makes us distinct from every people on the face of the earth. So do you see that God's gracious presence, His favor, was not just necessary for the provision of God's people, it was fundamental to their identity.
It is God's favor, evidenced by His presence, that makes God's people distinct. This is the evidence of how far Moses has come. Moses does not want to leave that wilderness if it means he's leaving without God's presence it is better to stay in the wilderness with God's favor and presence and be distinct than to inherit the land flowing with milk and honey without it see now we're getting somewhere in this chapter if we don't have your favor if we don't have your presence do not bring us up from here.
If we don't have your presence, I don't want that new job. If I don't have your presence, I don't want my circumstances to change. I don't want that opportunity. If I don have your favor and your presence please withhold ministry or professional opportunities from me If we don have you oh Lord please don't let us grow as a church. Here we have the kind of prayer that understands what marks us off and what makes us the people of God. It is better to be thought of as nothing in this world and to have God's favor than to have the whole approval of the world and to have compromised.
There is such a warning to churches and missionaries. I think to understand this is for us to understand what success and failure in the Christian life and ministry is all about. How much does it matter to you to have the favor and the presence of God and be distinct? This is every church's stewardship. Guard this with a singular focus.
The presence of the Lord among us is our great treasure. So do God's failed people. They have no future. What will God say? Verse 17. This very thing that you have spoken, I will do. For you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name. Notice the movement of the chapter. It moves from failure to favor. this is the God who graciously gives his favor to failed people, to failed Christians to failed missionaries and ministries and churches, why?
so that God's people might be distinct he will give his presence to this people that this people might make much of God, and what I love about Moses is he wants more verse 13 show me your ways, verse 18 show me your glory God's ways, God's character, God's glory all the same I love the guts of Moses and I love the grace of God I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name the Lord I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious show mercy on whom I will show mercy but he said you cannot see my face for man shall not see me and live So what Moses asked to see here is not wrong.
It's an impossibility. Moses is asking to see the glory. He wants to see the face of God. Moses will not let mourning be the last word of God's people. Do you see what Moses seems to really grasp about the Lord, Yahweh? he understands that with the Lord his mercy really is more in wrath Yahweh remembers mercy Moses was determined God's failed people would be God's favored people Moses mediated with God do not be confused he did not manipulate God for here we meet the God who is self-revealing whose presence with His people is bound up with His own sovereign goodness.
He is the self-existent God who reveals Himself at the bush. He is holy. He is bound by nothing outside of Himself. He is free to show grace and mercy to whomever He chooses. He will not be manipulated. He cannot be mastered. He is the sovereign who acts mercifully by his established mediator. So we're meeting the God who condescends, but we should never be confused. He dwells with his people on his gracious terms, not ours.
All right, I want to give you a very brief missions update. On our side of the world, we are not impressive. Not in the least bit. We are very outnumbered. We're so ordinary. Most of the people where we live would not be impressed with us, but in Christ. Just like all of those unimpressive churches that were popping up all over the Roman Empire after the resurrection of Jesus, we have God's favor.
We have His presence. We are distinct. And that changes everything about how we calculate what is and isn't impressive. For them then, and for us now, however much we make of this is what revealing how well we understand what it means to be the people of God in this world Don take it for granted It is no small thing for the one true and living God to give Himself to us.
To make this provision for us to have fellowship with Him in this way. It wasn't then. It isn't now. God's failed people have a future because God chose to give them grace and mercy. And yet, while Moses has God's favor, he will not see God's face. So what in every way it was that Moses spoke to God face to face, it was clearly accommodated. It was written about in language we can understand.
even in the presence of God a man great as Moses needed some kind of mediation so what did God do? He provided the rock He would hide Moses as the majestic glory of God passed by do you see the grace of God? His provisions are always better than we even know how to ask and yet what was an impossibility for Moses would not be and impossibility forever.
Now we see in a mirror dimly. Then we will see face to face. For no one has ever seen God but Jesus who is at the Father's side. Jesus has made him known. This is a shocking condescension of God in this chapter, but of course it's nothing compared to when Jesus, the very Son of God, condescends not in the glory cloud at the tent, but in human flesh. Remarkably, the God who gives His presence to this people in the wilderness comes into the world to be bodily present in Jesus.
And remarkably, when He was here, He hid His glory. You could only see it as you saw Him righteously obey the Father perfectly. His glory could be seen perfectly at the cross where he mediated for sinners. So Moses may have mediated, interceded for God's people, but Jesus, the one mediator between God and man, died for God's people so that all that the Father had given him might be with him where he is Jesus lived and died so that sinners could be with him where he is And the resurrection proves that it is true In Jesus, we who have so obviously failed have found God's favor.
Through Jesus, we who have failed God can be sure that in the very not too distant future we will inherit God's place with his presence and we will live. If you know that you have failed God terribly there's more hope in Jesus than you can imagine. He doesn't ask you to work. He asks you to believe. To turn from your sin and to believe in him. This is the God who saves failures for there is no one else who thinks they need to be saved.
Brothers and sisters I want you to take heart. The cross of Christ stands immovably firm. It testifies to you that God has chosen to show His favor to failed people. Whatever your circumstances presently are, whatever you might be in, be sure that your God who gave His favor in response to Moses' mediation is not going back on His favor in view of the finished work of Jesus. Moses here is praying and pleading with the Lord unsure of what the future holds.
You never do that. You pray and plead completely certain of it. Moses could have failed in this mediation but Jesus Christ who ever lives to intercede for each of his own will not fail. So what was it that made Moses not accept failure? it had nothing to do with Moses it had everything to do with God if God's covenant breaking people went forward without God that would have changed nothing about God but it did change I mean about God's people but it would have changed everything about their future and who they were whatever your hard or bleak circumstances are that you faced in Christ you're not facing them with any uncertainty about God's favor.
You face them guaranteed that Christ has secured your future and your future is life in the presence of God because God has provided the mediator Because of the finished work of Christ, the God who dwelled in the tent and the tabernacle, the temple, now by the Holy Spirit, dwells in you. We have the risen Christ in heaven. We have the Holy Spirit on earth. What do you do when all that you've given yourself to fails?
when you know that you've hit rock bottom will you bank everything on God and His glory who in Christ sovereignly gives grace freely gives mercy who in His severe mercy and His strange goodness He delights to bring His people to places of failure so that we might lose all hope in ourselves that we might lose all hope in this world and all the measures of success that it offers so that we will hope and plead everything on Him.
If the Lord has brought you to that place, or when He does, God really is being more gracious to you than you can imagine. Here is our God. He had a future for His people. He has a future for His people. And what is it? Our mourning will turn to rejoicing. he will bring us to his place with his presence and ultimately for them then and for us now we will see God's face and we will live so whatever your circumstances this morning a war weeping wandering out in the wilderness it is that fact that we will be with him in his place in his presence that sure future that is worthy of all of our waiting and is worthy of our worship.
Let's pray. Our Father, we give You thanks and praise for Your Word to us this morning. In Exodus 33, we ask, O Lord, that You would give us hearts to believe Your promises. We pray You would strengthen us to live by faith until that day when our faith is turned to sight. We pray, O Lord, that we would know more of the privilege of your presence and we would guard it in our own lives and together as your church. We pray this in the strong name of the risen Jesus.
Amen.