New Life Baptist Church, College Station Texas

After spend­ing nine months in a book of the Bible, you get pretty attached to it. End­ing the Exo­dus series last night was bit­ter­sweet — bit­ter because we have learned and grown so much through it; sweet because we get to move on to other great books and lessons.

In a book as won­der­ful as Exo­dus, it’s hard to pick just one thing as the main take­away. But if I had to choose, I would say that the great­est les­son I’ve learned through Exo­dus is that God keeps the promises He makes. Just con­sider a few:

• God promised Abra­ham that his descen­dants would be enslaved 400 years, but that God would bring them out with great wealth. At the out­set of Exo­dus, the peo­ple have been enslaved for about 400 years. In 2:24–25, we read, “And God heard their groan­ing, and God remem­bered his covenant with Abra­ham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the peo­ple of Israel — and God knew.”
• God promised Moses that he would lead the peo­ple out of Egypt, and when he did, he would serve God on Mount Horeb (3:12). In Exo­dus 19, this promise is fulfilled.
• God promised Pharaoh that if he did not let Israel go, then He would kill Pharaoh’s first­born son (4:22–23). In Exo­dus 12:29–32, we read that every Egypt­ian house­hold had some­one dead in it.
• God promised to dis­ci­pline His peo­ple for their sin (32:34), and He did visit their sin upon them in the form of a plague (32:35).
• God promised to keep His covenant with Israel, even though they had rebelled against Him (34:27–28). God did not dis­own His peo­ple, but kept them as His own.
• God promised to fill the taber­na­cle with His pres­ence and dwell in their midst (25:8), and once the taber­na­cle was com­plete, God’s pres­ence filled it (40:34–38).

What we see in the Book of Exo­dus is that God makes promises and keeps them, time after time. Michael Lawrence notes, “If we want to know this God, then we must under­stand the bib­li­cal story of promise and our promise-making God. In a very pro­found sense, the Bible is noth­ing more than the story of a sin­gle promise, made by God him­self, and how he kept and will keep that promise. When we under­stand this story, we are also in a posi­tion to be able to help those whose lives have been wounded by the pain of bro­ken promises” (Bib­li­cal The­ol­ogy in the Life of the Church, 166).

So the fact that one of the main take­aways from Exo­dus is that God makes and keeps promises shouldn’t sur­prise us; that’s con­sis­tent with the rest of the Bible. And that’s not just neat infor­ma­tion; it is truth that helps us know God, trust God, and min­is­ter to oth­ers who have been hurt by the bro­ken promises of par­ents, spouses, friends, and insti­tu­tions. It is truth that helps us wor­ship and min­is­ter. That’s a great takeaway.

In last night’s mes­sage (“God Demands Purity and Enables Wor­ship”), we saw that an encounter with God demands a response, and that our response will either be hard-hearted rejec­tion of God or soft-hearted repen­tance and faith.

We saw in Exo­dus 23:23–24 that when Israel pos­sessed the Promised Land that they were required to dis­place the pagans and to break down all the altars they used to wor­ship false gods.  The rea­son is given in verse 33 — if Israel allowed either the peo­ple or the altars ded­i­cated to the false gods remain, they would be tempted to sin against God by wor­ship­ing those same false gods.

Sure enough, Israel didn’t get rid of all the peo­ple or the altars to the false gods as they were com­manded, and as a result they began to sin against God by wor­ship­ing false gods like the nations around them. And that is because we can­not court idol­a­try with­out being enticed by idols. The ques­tion for us, then, is whether we are court­ing idol­a­try by refus­ing to crush the things in our lives that lead us to wor­ship false gods.

Maybe we have refused to “crush” the credit card because we love serv­ing the false god of mate­ri­al­ism through buy­ing more stuff. Maybe we have refused to “crush” the com­puter because we love serv­ing the false god of sin­ful sex­ual sat­is­fac­tion through pornog­ra­phy. Maybe we have refused to “crush” the social media accounts because we love serv­ing the false god of our own egos through con­stant post­ing, check­ing, and reposting.

God takes idol­a­try seri­ously because He alone is God and wor­thy of wor­ship. If we have encoun­tered God, then we must respond to Him. The ques­tion will sim­ply be whether our response was one of repen­tance and faith.