[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, thanks so much for listening to this message. My name is Jason and I'm one of the ministers here at the Madison Church of Christ. It's our hope and prayer that the teaching you hear today will bless your life and draw you closer to God. If you're ever in the Madison area, we'd love for you to stop by and study the Bible with us on Sundays at 5pm or Wednesdays at 7pm if you have questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison Church, you can find us
[email protected] be sure to subscribe to this podcast as well as our Sermons podcast. Madison Church of Christ Sermons thanks again for stopping by. I hope this study is a blessing to you.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Alright, so first of all, a couple things.
If you haven't in my class before, you didn't know this last week I tend to ask a lot of questions. I think if I throw a lot of questions out, like something will stick and we'll have a conversation. So the one thing I forgot to mention last night is we are live streaming this class, so when you make a comment I'm probably going to repeat it just so that those who are on our livestream will be able to hear your comments as well. A couple things we talked about last week. Gary and I talked about that. It was pretty interesting for us that in Exodus 34 God tells Noah no, God tells Moses to chip out his own tablet and that God would write the commandments back on it. We don't really see that with the first set of commandments. And then Jared and I were talking about how different versions do that, the Lord, the Lord, different ways. But it's all to emphasize that this was that proper noun of Jehovah, of Yahweh when he talks about it. So if you Remember in Exodus 34, 6, 7, God introduces Himself and he basically these are the way we talked about that when we do introductions that oftentimes we will tell something about ourselves to whoever we're introducing. So when God introduced Himself, he called himself compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin, and does not leave the guilty unpunished. That was his kind of introduction to Moses. And we talked about that at that particular time in the Israelite history. It was something that they could really use because they were very rebellious and that God used that introduction. And so I gave you homework. The first homework was to look up phrases that began with God is or the Lord is and gave Attributes. Anybody come across something that maybe stuck with them for the rest of the week on that particular part that they'd like to share?
I think the one thing for me was the number of times, you know, we kind of always talk about how that the God in the Old Testament maybe didn't match the God in the New Testament. And people have that idea. But yet when you look at those phrases, we see God described more as compassionate and gracious and loving in the Old Testament than any other attribute as well. And that should come across. So tonight we're going to do is we're going to talk about candy, my favorite topic, and then we're going to go to numbers. So this is going to show my age. Okay? But when, I don't know, maybe some of you older might remember it, but when I was young, charms would come up with these suckers, right? Lollipops, whatever phrases. But they were always half sweet and half sour. And so then they came out with the ones that the. The green apple candy with the little soft caramel, not as good. But the Charms pops were great. And so you would go. At least I did. I'd collect bottles, take them to. There's a little drugstore that we could ride our bikes to, take them there, turn the bottles in, and then we'd buy as many Charms pops as we could. But half was sweet and half was sour. And it would never fail as you were doing that, that at some point, all the sour hit that spot on your tongue that kind of made you squint a little bit.
But it was a little bit of both. And we're going to come back to why this may be important a little bit later. And then your reading assignment was numbers, chapter 14, verses 1 through 25.
So let's talk, as you turn there, let's talk a little bit about what took place before.
We see this in numbers 13.
So in numbers 13, right. We wound up seeing that, of course, the Israelites, they're out of.
They're out of Egypt and they're on their way to the promised land. And then we see that they sent scouts into Canaan to kind of survey and spy out the land. How many scouts did they send?
[00:05:43] Speaker C: 12.
[00:05:44] Speaker B: They sent 12, right. What came back?
Well, two came back positive, right? 10 of the scouts. 10 of the scouts came back and they had this report that basically told the Israelites that they couldn't take the land and that they shouldn't even try it. Right. And then you had two, Joshua and Caleb. And they came back and they told A different story. And then what was the response of the people? The people believed the 10 more than they believed what Joshua and Caleb had mentioned. Right? So let's look at numbers, chapter 14. Let's go through verses 1 through 12.
Then the whole community broke into loud cries and the people wept. That night all the Israelites complained about Moses and Aaron. And the whole community told them, if only we had died in the land of Egypt, or if only we had died in the wilderness. Why is the Lord bringing us into this land to die by the sword? Our wives and children will become plunder. Wouldn't it be better for us to go back to Egypt? And so they said to one another, lets appoint a leader and go back to Egypt. Then Moses and Aaron fell face down in front of the whole assembly of the Israelite community. Joshua, son of nun and Caleb, son of Jephunneh, who were among those who scouted out the land, tore their clothes and said to the entire Israelite community, the land we passed through and explored is, is an extremely good land. If the Lord is pleased with us, he will bring us into this land, a land flowing with milk and honey, and give it to us only. Don't rebel against the Lord and don't be afraid of the people of the land, for we will devour them. Their protection has been removed from them and the Lord is with us. Don't be afraid of them. While the whole community threatened to stone them, the glory of the Lord appeared to the Israelites at the tent of meeting. And the Lord said to Moses, how long will these people despise me? How long will they not trust in me, despite all the signs I have performed among them?
I will strike them with a plague and destroy them. Then I will make you into a greater and mightier nation than they are. So a couple things as we look through this, right?
So the people are so upset about the report and they take those 10 spies report so much that they're even willing to go back to Egypt. Now what were they in Egypt?
They were slaves. So they're willing to go back to Egypt or go back to slavery. Now you got to remember, right, we always talk about the New Testament being the teacher and the shadow of things to come. I want you to understand the simile and the pattern that you have a group of people who are wanting to go back into slavery and not be free. And so that's a parallel to what we see in the New Testament and our Christianity. But they go back. Notice it says that Moses and Aaron fell on their Face in front of the people. Joshua and Caleb tore their clothes and they made that impassioned speech. But at the end of the day, the people want a stone.
Moses and Aaron and pick a new leader and go back to Egypt.
So we see in the last part that God's not pleased and he shows up. But look at the phrasing. It's not God that shows up, but how's it phrased in verse 10?
The glory of the Lord. Why do you think it's important to understand the glory of the Lord?
Any thoughts? Does the glory of the Lord approve of unfaithfulness?
Is the glory of the Lord match this rebellion?
I mean, I think God shows his glory for them to see or maybe to see the mistake that they're making. It's not that he shows up in a burning bush or he shows up as this great voice or he shows up in a cloud of smoke or a pillar of fire, but rather they see this glory somehow. Right? They see the glory.
Let's look at some thoughts. Let's talk about God's decree. What do you think about God's statement that he's just going to destroy them all?
What's your idea of that? Going back to what we read in Exodus, what do you think about that response?
Pretty much the same as what he had in Exodus. When Moses came down, they were worshiping the golden calf. Right.
Even though he made that introduction to Moses and I'm sure Moses shared it, they still fall back in this rebellion.
Does it keep in those qualities that we looked at in Exodus?
Right.
God punishes, he's forgiving. But at the end of the day he still punishes those who are wicked.
[00:12:01] Speaker C: Have you ever done something nice for somebody and they rejected it or spit in your face about it?
You get real mad about it. You don't really take it very kindly.
[00:12:11] Speaker B: Yeah, no you don't. And when someone is.
When you've helped someone and they don't show, either they, as you said, spit in your face or they don't. They do something totally counter. Right.
[00:12:29] Speaker C: The exact opposite of that. Right. Projection.
[00:12:33] Speaker B: Why do you think the people.
Why do you think the people believe the 10 and not the 2?
Which one's human nature?
Fear.
You know, we often say, okay, if one person says it, if two people say it, maybe if three people say it, then I know it's a fact. Right? So I think it's human nature to look at the majority and maybe believe the majority versus the minority, even though the minority is appealing to that non human or that Spiritual self. Right.
What do you think? Which of the qualities that we have in Exodus 34 does God seem to be deploying and applying here versus the qualities that are less prominent? We go back to that list, and what's he showing to me? He's, you know, he says he's slow to anger, but as we've mentioned, it's just this continuous thing. And so he now he's going to go to actually punishing those that are wicked. So let's go to look at. Start with verse 13 and look at Moses response.
But Moses replied to the Lord, the Egyptians will hear about it. For by your strength, you brought up this people from them. They will tell it to the inhabitants of this land. They have heard that you, Lord, are among these people, how you, Lord, are seen face to face, how your cloud stands over them and how you go before them in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. If you kill this people with a single blow, the nations that have heard of your fame will declare, since the Lord wasn't able to bring this people into the land he swore to give them, he has slaughtered them in the wilderness. So now may my Lord's power be magnified just as you have spoken. The Lord is slow to anger and abounding in faithful love, forgiving iniquity and rebellion. But he will not leave the guilty unpunished, bringing the consequences of the father's iniquity on the children to the third and fourth generation. Please pardon the iniquity of these people in keeping with the greatness of your faithful love, just as you have forgiven them from Egypt until now. So Moses kind of has these two arguments. That first argument is that the Egyptians are going to hear about it. Why do you think Moses makes. Or what's the significance of that argument? Don't you think that the Egyptians went through the plagues, they went through all that to let the people go, and then once they let them go, God destroyed them.
Think about how the Egyptians are going to put the spin or take that when they talk to the. To everybody else within that region, right? So Moses is appealing to this whole idea that it would hurt God's image, it would hurt God's power maybe, if that happened, right? You know, so far, look at what God did. God controlled nature.
He brought on all those plagues, but he can't control or look out for his own people.
So Moses uses this argument or this rebuttal of why he shouldn't do that.
Then you notice what he does. That second part is what does he say? He almost goes right back to that introduction that we read about back in Exodus. He appeals to the qualities of God and who God is.
In verse 17, some might think that if God forgave them. Right. Going back to what Brandon said, when we forgive people, oftentimes we may be viewed as weak.
That's a weakness that we just let that person keep stepping on us, stepping on us, stepping on us. But Moses argues that actually if he forgives those people, it's really a sign of strength, more of strength than one of weakness. And then notice he especially calls upon God's great love to forgive those sin of these people, as God's been doing the whole time. Right. So let's talk a little bit about this.
Of all those qualities in Exodus, what is Moses really, really pushing?
Of all those seven qualities we read from Exodus, what is Moses main argument and what's he really appealing for?
He's really appealing for forgiveness. Forgive these people.
We know that you're slow to anger, but mainly forgive the people.
What is missing? Do you notice if we compare what we see in numbers 14, 18 to what we read in 34, 6 and 7, do you notice anything that's missing? Do you notice any, any differences?
There's a few he leaves out. Moses leaves out some in Numbers. He kind of leaves out the compassionate and gracious. He does talk about being slow to anger, abounding in love, forgiving sin and rebellion. Notice he does put in there. He doesn't leave the guilty unpunished, punishes children and then the grandchildren. Right. So it's not a word for word of everything. But Moses uses God's introduction and God's description to make that argument for the people. All right, this is where maybe we get some questions.
Looking at what Moses says and his prayer, what do you look at that as? Is that a prayer? That's a worship to God. Is it a prayer trying to be manipulative and manipulate God? What do you think? How would you characterize what Moses is saying and appealing here?
[00:19:27] Speaker D: It's very similar to what Abraham did to Sodom and Gomorrah.
[00:19:32] Speaker B: Right.
[00:19:32] Speaker D: We can find, what was it, 100, 50, 10, 5, right. People, would you save him? And I guess the difference here is it's, I mean that the thing with Abraham does sound beneath this is less so. It's more of a plea, it sounds like to me, as opposed to what, what Abraham's doing. But I would look at them as the same light. It's just this conversation, trying to plead on behalf of the people to save them.
[00:20:06] Speaker B: So the comment was, it's very much like Abraham when he bargained to save Sodom and Gomorrah, that God accepts that kind of bargaining. But here, Moses, it's more of a worship tone than maybe a manipulative tone. And why is that?
What does Moses lose if God saves and forgives the people?
When we talk about Abraham being the father of all nations, God says, here, let me wipe out the Israelites, and I'm going to make the great nation out of you. Okay? Who was going to be spared when God wiped everybody out? God said, he's going to. Some translation says, God says, I'll spare the leaders. So I'm assuming that'd be Moses and Aaron, probably Joshua and Caleb, since they were the spies who gave the good report. But the thing is, is that Moses had the opportunity to be the father of all nations, if you will, because God says, I can make a greater nation out of your descendants than I can out of these.
Can we change God's mind?
It kind of looks like Moses did here, right? Moses was going to destroy the people and God relented. So do you think that's changing God's mind?
[00:21:33] Speaker C: It seems to me to be more of a test of Moses here in a sense. You could argue that Moses changed his mind, but God already had the conditions in place to say, well, I'm going to destroy them, but if he gives a good defense for not I, I just won't do it. I'm convinced either way that it'll work.
[00:21:59] Speaker B: That's a very good point. And let's kind of build on that a bit. What was when it came to the Israelite people? What was God's will for the Israelite people?
Or what was his overall will when it comes to the Israelites? Who would come from Israelites?
Jesus. Right. So if we go all the way back to Abraham, God makes this promise to Abraham that from his seed there would be a great nation, there would be the Savior who's going to come from his seed. So God's will is that Jesus would come through that lineage.
Well, at this point in Numbers, just like we read in Exodus, there were two ways for God's will to be resolved, right? One way is you forgive all the people and you let them go on. The other way is you destroy those people and you do it through Moses. Because Moses is related to Abraham, Jesus is related to Moses. So the lineage would stay the same. His will wouldn't change. There would just be two paths, if you will, for that Will.
I think when we always talk about praying that his will be done and praying and keeping in mind God's will, I think part of that is understanding that we're not going to be able to change God's will.
But that will of God may have many paths that God is going to use to bring that will to his fruition. Right.
I don't know if I'm so comfortable saying that Moses changed God's mind, because I think that when we think about changing our mind, oftentimes we change our mind when we're wrong. And I don't think God's wrong.
I think it's more of that. Moses appealed to God's will, and God could have done it either way, you understand? I feel like sometimes when we say changing God's mind, we give God that humanistic idea of a mind, and oftentimes we change our mind.
I thought we had the greatest paint color in our kitchen until Amy said, no, that's not the paint color I want. So I've changed my mind now on the paint color. Right. And so oftentimes when we change our mind, it's because we're kind of wrong. So. But I do think this is an interesting study from a prayer perspective.
[00:24:51] Speaker E: I think God thought all along that Jesus was going to come. If Jesus came through Moses, then he didn't come through Judah.
All right? And when Jacob blessed his sons as he was about to die in Egypt, the blessing to Judah says, the scepter shall not depart from the Jude from Judah, or the ruler staff from between his feet until tribute comes to him will be the obedience of the peoples. So to me, that's kind of a, you know, precursor to God's promise to David that because David was in the tribe of Judah, so that couldn't happen if God made Moses the person. Because Moses was son of Levi, not Jew.
[00:25:48] Speaker B: Correct. But when God said, I'll save you and the leaders and destroy all these other people, you know, to me, that was his will, didn't change. But he had another way to fulfill that promise to Abraham in some way, who wound up getting saved. Yeah. And Fancy, you mentioned that Caleb was.
[00:26:13] Speaker E: The tribe of Judah.
[00:26:16] Speaker B: Yeah.
Would he have been preserved if God had told him to kill?
And I would assume so because he did not suffer the fate of his people in the other part.
So let's look at God's. So Moses makes this argument. Now let's look at God's response, picking up in verse 20. And then the Lord responded, I have pardoned them, as you requested. Yet as surely as I live, and as the whole earth is filled with the Lord's glory, none of the men who have seen my glory and the signs I performed in Egypt and in the wilderness, and have tested me these 10 times and did not obey me, will. Will ever see the land I swore to give their fathers. None of those who have despised me will see it. But since my servant Caleb has a different spirit and has remained loyal to me, I will bring him into the land where he has gone and his descendants shall inherit it. Since the Amalekites and the Canaanites are living in the lowlands, turn back tomorrow and head for the wilderness in the direction of the Red Sea.
So we see that Moses asks God to be a forgiving God, and God agrees to that. But it's kind of like those suckers I show in the first slide. There was really no way to separate the sweet from the source.
You had to take it all together. And so God has all those qualities.
So God forgave them, but he had to punish them for their rebellion and their iniquity. You can't have in those suckers. You can't have the sweet without the sour. So God's punishment was anyone who was there in Egypt, who'd been wandering, they're not going to be allowed to enter the promised land, just Joshua and Caleb, because God is who he is. So he has to leave. He can't leave that evil unpunished.
He had no choice.
He had to be that, because that's just who God is.
When you look at that response, does that seem consistent with God's introduction to Himself in Exodus chapter 34?
Yeah, very consistent, right? The good as well as the bad part. So let's talk a little bit about our application.
So we talked about that sweet and sour candy.
My kids, I like sour things. But, like, my kids get these.
They're kind of like Sour Patch something.
But they're the oddest thing I've ever eaten.
They're just so bitter, right? You have that candy just so bitter. But imagine if we ate sweet all the time.
Or we. You know, I love sweet tarts. The bad thing about sweet tarts is, like, when I go to the movies, Amy will always get me. She'll stop and get a box of candy. She'll always get Milk Duds, always get sweet tarts, and I'll eat them all in the movie. And the bad thing about eating that whole box of sweet tarts is your tongue is just. It makes your tongue so sore, right? So you got to have A balance. I think this is the way we are sometimes with God.
I think sometimes we want one side of God, but we don't necessarily want the other side worse. I think sometimes we want one side of God for us and we want the other side of God for somebody else. Right.
And so I think one thing that we see in these verses is that God is who he introduced himself as being that, yes, he forgave the Israelites, but he could not let their iniquity or rebellion go unpunished or he wouldn't be God. You had to wind up seeing both sides of that coin. Has anybody heard of Dietrich Bonhoeffer?
So he was a German church leader during Hitler and the Nazi regime. He wrote a book in 1937 called the Cost of Discipleship. And if you haven't read it, to me, it's as relevant today as it was when it came out in 37. Right. But he has this. He introduces this term called cheap grace.
So this is the way he defines cheap grace. He defines cheap grace as the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, talking about baptism without talking about church discipline, talking about communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, and grace without Jesus Christ.
So that's what he did for cheap grace. Then he has another term he uses called costly grace. And costly grace confronts us as a call to follow Jesus. It comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels a man to. To submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him. It is grace because Jesus says, my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
He describes those attributes about God that discipleship and grace has to have that cost.
So let's talk about, talk about this.
How might, when we look at what Bonhoeffer says about cheap grace, how does that apply? And I know we're going to kind of do this a little loosely. How does that apply to Moses request for God to forgive all those guilty Israelites?
Now flip back to what he talks about as cheap grace, because he just.
[00:33:10] Speaker C: Appeals to God's mercy and his character and not other people doing anything to like repent or change.
[00:33:18] Speaker B: Absolutely.
For those who are livestreaming, the comment was it appeals to forgiveness.
The Israelites had no repentance.
They're wanting to stone Moses and Aaron and get a new leader and go back to Egypt to go back into slavery. There was no repentance on the Israelites part, but Moses was appealing to God to forgive them. Even without that Repentance, Right. Cheap grace.
Now, we all know that we get grace and we get grace. Talking more about that, do we seek out cheap grace as Bonhoeffer has described it?
This is a tough question. I'm going to be quiet. I'm going to make somebody talk.
[00:34:13] Speaker D: I'd say probably the biggest struggle is the grace without discipleship part. I feel like a lot of us, probably, at least for me, I grew up in the church, so I understood from an early age forgiveness. I understood repentance. I understood baptism, communion, confession. But discipleship is kind of one that is really hard to understand. And we're all constantly trying to get better at.
[00:34:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think oftentimes we seek it because, you know what we want forgiveness.
But maybe we're not crazy about the idea of church discipline.
We want all this. But, you know, James, what does James say about confession?
That we're to what, we're to confess our sins to each other.
That doesn't mean that we walk down front one Sunday. That means every day we confess our sins to one another.
Means when we show up for men's breakfast on Tuesdays, we talk about our struggles, we talk about things that we're doing. We need help. Right. So oftentimes we want communion. What's communion? Right. Communion is the unity, the union of one another, the disciple, the fellowship, the discipleship. We want the closest with one another, but we don't want to tell anybody what's going on.
We don't want to tell anybody what I'm struggling with. We don't want to tell anybody how I sinned this week.
And so what happens is we want all the good stuff, but oftentimes we don't want to deal with what it's going to cost us as being that disciple.
So let's go to this one.
The first one's a yes or no. Okay. Has cheap grace become a marketing tool to get more people in the church? You think, okay, now those who are nodding yes, then the second question is, okay, how. How is it doing that? Why. Why do you. Why did you say yes? That. That cheap grace is a marketing tool to get more people to accept Christianity and more people in.
It's because we emphasize all these things, but we don't necessarily tell them the cost associated with it.
I told somebody a week or two ago, I was talking to someone and they mentioned that. What they did. And I said, well, I was helping out a friend. And I'm like, well, you need to get new friends.
If the friends you have, if you're helping a friend do this.
That's not very much of a Christian image. Then you need new friends.
Tell someone once you accept Christianity, there's a cost.
It may cost you those friends.
There are people, brothers and sisters we go to church with here. It's cost them their family because once they got baptized, their family turned their back on them. Right. And so, yeah, oftentimes we use that good stuff to have them accept and get in. And maybe we ought to be talking about a little more of the whole message, Right? So how would you explain, if you run into someone who's seeking God, how do you explain the idea of costly grace to them?
[00:38:00] Speaker C: Show them that passage where Jesus says, you gotta hate your father and mother. I guess.
[00:38:05] Speaker B: I mean, it's like that sweet and sour candy. It's like the introduction of God. Yes, God is a loving God. He's slow to anger and he forgives. And he has the ability to love thousands upon thousands and millions and billions of people.
But yet on the flip side, he has to punish the wicked, punish those things. And, and so we talk about this costly grace as meaning that there is a cost of that discipleship.
And I tell everybody it's a loss of self.
It's kind of like I got married in my 30s and so if I wanted the latest video console, game console or the latest video game, I'd just go buy it. Well, suddenly I was married and she came to the marriage without a car. So now I had to buy a car and the video games, Right. And so there's that cost.
Do you think the idea of a God who punishes wickedness, do you think that's unappealing in contrast to a God who only gives out love and forgiveness?
So I'm going to say this, and I hope I don't step anybody's toes. Have you ever met someone whose parents gave them everything?
I think the saddest verse in the Bible is when it talks about David and Absalom. And the Bible says in all of Absalom and his son's life, David had never said anything to make his son mad. I made my son mad right before church.
Right. But to think about a parent who the whole life never said a word to their child, that upset him. Right. I mean, I think as we think about the attributes of God, I do think the idea of God being a fair, a just, a loving God is like having that fair and just loving parent. Right. I mean, I think it. It does wind up having that appeal.
Okay, so any comments before I move the homework I feel like I've talked a lot tonight.
Okay, so here's what I want you to do this week. For homework, when we talk about meditating on the Scriptures, what does that. What do you envision about meditation?
To me, meditation is when you take that verse and you just say it over and over again in your head, almost to the point where you're trying to memorize it. It's like you take that verse and you just kind of chew and dwell on it. So this week, I really want you to think hard about Exodus 34, 6 and 7 and numbers 14 and 18.
I'd like, whether you use a bound Bible or digital link them. If you have a bound Bible out beside Exodus 34. 6, write numbers 14:18. If you're in numbers 14:18, write Exodus 34. 6. If you have digital Bible, you can do that as well. But link those two verses. And then for next week, I want you to read Nehemiah 9 and then verses 1 through 38.
Okay? And then if it keeps going like today, next week's lesson, I may switch to Noah.
If y'all have anything like my yard right now.
But let's do a quick prayer and then we'll be dismissed. Heavenly Father, we thank youk so much for the time we have to study from youm Scripture. Father, thank youk so much for the wisdom of community and the wisdom of unity and the wisdom of the church. Father, help us as we go through this week, dwell upon those verses that talk about your attributes for our Father. We know that you are a loving, compassionate God. Father, help us in our daily walk to, as we encounter those, to share that message with them. Keep us through the rest of this week, and it's in Jesus name we pray. Amen.
