1482 - “Meeting God in the Wilderness” Exodus 25

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Each weekday, Dr. Crisp will be discussing biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Tune in daily to start your day right and deepen your understanding of how to better walk the way and enjoy the journey. Here's your host, Dr. Tony Crisp.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Welcome to On the Way. This is Tony Crisp, and this is Podcast 1482. Today we're continuing the series of the story of the Crimson River. We're tracing the Word of God and sacrifice and the great river that runs from Genesis to Revelation that tells the marvelous story of redemption. And so today we're going to be in the book of Exodus, and we're going to be in chapter 25. Now the reason I'm starting there is because I want you to see that the story of redemption has to do with worship. Not just with the blood sacrifices, we've dealt with those, and if you want to look those over, the offerings, you can read about those in the book of Leviticus, chapter one through five. The five offerings are given, the five sacrifices are given for the Old Testament people of Israel, that is, those people that God brought out of Egyptian bondage, and those were to be throughout the ages, and these were never for salvation. They were for a people who'd experienced the salvation and the redemption of God. They were acts of faith. Hebrews chapter ten says there is no way it is impossible. It's not possible for the blood of bulls and goats and rams and lambs to take away sin. And as I spoke to you yesterday about Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, I'm emphasized this because many people that are sitting in churches every Sunday and every day during the week that they have uh special services, they believe that Israel was saved through animal sacrifice. And you say, Well, how do you know that? Because people have expressed that to me and I've shared with them, no, everyone's saved the same way by taking God at his word, by trusting God's redemptive work in the person of Jesus. The Messiah came in his name is Jesus. He's coming back again. When he comes back, he's not going to die for man's sins. That's once and for all. And just like Adam got us into the cursed world, Jesus is one day going to get us out of it. But right now he is getting the curse out of us. And the greatest challenge for God, as you read through the Bible, which nothing is a challenge for him, I'm using that anthropomorphically, that is, in man form, was not getting the Israelites out of Egypt. It was getting Egypt out of the Israelites, because chapter twenty five of the book of Exodus brings us face to face with Mount Sinai. In chapter twenty, God gave Moses the law, and that took less than one chapter, actually. It's ten words, it's uh ten phrases that God gave, what we call the Ten Commandments, but it's called in the language of the scholar the Decalogue, because it's basically ten words, ten phrases. That took God less than a chapter to do that. But it when he wanted to teach the people how to worship, then he took chapters twenty-five through forty, fifteen chapters. Now why would God bring them out of Egypt and bring them to Sinai? Well, God gave the answer to that to Moses. You remember it was Mount Horeb or Mount Sinai that Moses met God, and he met him through a burning bush, a bush that was on fire, but it wasn't consumed. And remember the scripture says that Moses, keeping the sheep on the backside of the desert, he turned aside to see what this great phenomena was, and he met God. He met God where? In the wilderness. And so this is exactly what happened. God said, I want you to go get my people, and not just turn them loose. I want you to go get my people and bring them here because I want to meet them in this desert, in this wilderness. Now, this is very important because we've got to realize that God could not take the people into the land of Canaan, the land of promise that he had promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and to Joseph. He instead had to take them through a wilderness experience because for four hundred years they had been in a polytheistic culture. The Egyptians had a god for everything. They had a picture for everything, an image for everything, a bull, a calf, a goat, a fox, a snake, whatever, the sun, the moon, the stars. They worshiped everything, it seems, and for four hundred years, if you're living with a people and you do not have a central place of worship, but you're serving as slaves, it's easy to get embedded truth or more proper. It's easy to get embedded false doctrine and falsehood into your life. If you spend that much time with anything or anyone, it's going to have an effect on you. And God brought them out to Mount Sinai. He said, Moses, I want you to go get my people. I've listened to them, I've heard them, but now it's time because I promised Abraham and I told him that he'll come into the lamb. It's going to be after four hundred years, and it's not time for them to come out yet, because I'm still waiting on the people of Canaan, because their sin has not reached the top, but when it does, that's going to be it. Now that's what God said in Genesis 15. The Amorites and the sin of the Amorites is not yet to capacity. When it does, I'm going to bring the children of Israel back, and I'm going to bring them out of bondage with a strong and mighty hand. And that's what he did. Now I'm telling you all of that to remind you that the reason God said to Moses, You go get them out of Egypt and you bring them here because I want them to worship me. I want them to understand who I am, what I've done, and how they can serve me for the rest of their days. And that's what God did. And so when he brought them there, yes, he gave them the covenant. He gave them the law, the Mosaic Law, as it's called, which was a conditional covenant. God said, I'm going to bring you into the land, but when you get there, you're only going to be able to stay in and enjoy it if you walk in my ways. I'll bless you for obedience and you'll be disciplined if you disobey. And that's exactly what God was faithful to do. But at Mount Sinai, he not only gave the law, but he gave Moses a pattern. As a matter of fact, what we need to understand is that everything that was given to Moses was a small replica of the heavenly worship center. This is what God said. He said in chapter twenty-five, then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, Speak to the children of Israel that they bring me an offering from everyone who gives with a willingness in his heart. You see, God wants us to give. Now where did they get all the gold and silver and cloth and fabric and all of the riches that they had? They had nothing. They were slaves. But if you'll recall, God gave the people favor, the Jews, the Israelites, the Hebrews, favor with the people, and the scripture says in the King James that they spoiled them with gold and silver and all the things that they had. So God had given the Israelites everything they had. So they willingly gave to the Lord an offering to build this tabernacle, and later the same thing was true with the temple. Any building plan that God had in the Bible, it was built with free will offerings. He said, Then you shall take my offerings, and this is the offering which you shall take from them gold, silver, bronze, blue, purple, scarlet thread, fine linen, goat's hair, ramskins dyed red, badger skins, acacia wood, oil for the light, spices for the anointing oil, for the sweet incense, onyx stones and stones to be set in the effid and in the breastplate. And let them make me a sanctuary, a worship center, that I may dwell among them, according to all that I show you. Listen to this, that is the pattern of the tabernacle and the pattern of all of its furnishings. You shall make it. So you shall make it, just according to the pattern. And so Moses was told over and over again a same thing in verse forty of chapter twenty-five. It says, And see to it that you make them according to the pattern which I shall show you on the mountain. Now what's he talking about? He's talking about a tracing. Do any of you remember the old typewriters that we used to type on? Many of us who are my age and even younger than I am, they typed on typewriters. They learned the keyboard. There was no such thing as a keyboard as such. It was a typewriter. What it was, it was a set of keys that had all of the letters engraved and raised on a keystroke. It was an extended arm, and that would press against the paper when you pressed down on the keys. It would hit the paper, but before it hit the paper, there was a ribbon of ink, of red and of blue sometimes, of black, and that key, whether it was a A, a B, a C, a K, a L, a M, whatever it was, it would hit the ink and the impression of that, the tracing of that would go on to the paper. And that was called typing. Well that word tupos in Greek is the word for type. And what it is, it is a tracing of the real thing. This is what Moses did. He got a tracing, a schematic, a blueprint of the real thing in heaven. Now you say, where did you get that? Well, God gave it to him, but in the book of Hebrews 9 and 10, it says that he did everything according to the real thing in heaven. It was just a model. Now a model is a small imitation of the real thing, and that's exactly the definition here. And so these things that God did with the children of Israel in the book of Exodus and the book of uh Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy, these were stories of God meeting his people in the wilderness and getting them ready to go into the promised land. And part of that was the worship center, and after they got into the land, and that tabernacle was set up in Shiloh, Shiloh, which was in the middle of the country in the tribe of Ephraim, it was there in Shiloh for three hundred and sixty-nine years before the temple was built in Solomon's day on Mount Moriah, on Mount Moriah, the place where Abraham, a thousand years earlier, had obeyed God and was ready to offer up his son. That is the place where the temple was built, the second temple was built, and the third temple will be built, and if there's a fourth temple, it will be there as well. Someday I'll explain to you why some believe there will be a fourth temple, and there may be. And all I can tell you is the worship center in the wilderness, which was a small replica, an earthly replica of the one in heaven. That's what the Bible teaches you. You can search it for yourself, was to teach the people how to approach God. You can't approach God any way you want to. You can't get saved at any time. You can only get saved when you are drawn, when you want to, and there's no promise that you'll always want to. I've talked with men who said, I have no desire to be saved. I thought about it when I was younger, but I'm not going to do anything like that now. And they had hardened their heart, and as far as I know, they died lost. And it grieves my heart to even say that, but I've talked with many people over the years that said, I have no desire to be saved. I ought to get ready to do that when I want to. Well, no, you won't. No man can come unto Jesus unless the Father draws him. And when he does, you have an opportunity to respond. But there's no promise that that drawing will continue. Every one of us know enough to take a step into the life that we have, and if we fall short of that, we fall short of the grace of God. In other words, God offers it, and he reaches out his hand and says, Here's what is for you. If you fail to receive it, you fall short of the grace of God. That doesn't mean that you're saved and you fall from grace. It means you fall short of the grace of God that was offered to you. And that's what the Lord does. And so I want you to understand that according to Romans chapter 16 and verse 4, but especially in 1 Corinthians chapter 10, these very things that we're talking about now, the apostle Paul said, these things happen so that we might learn how to please God, how to obey God, and we might learn from how he dealt with his people, Israel, in the Torah, in the book of instruction, which is the five books of Moses. All of these things happen for our learning and our admonitions, so that we might understand what it's like to walk by faith and not by sigh. Because the children of Israel had to do that. So do we as those who are followers of Jesus the Messiah now. Well, that's all the time I'm going to take. It's been close to 15 minutes, and I know I went extra long yesterday, but I pray to God that as you follow these, the Lord is speaking to your heart. And I'll see you tomorrow as we walk on the way. This is Tony Crisp.

SPEAKER_00 14:27

Thanks for listening to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Tune in every weekday for information on biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Fridays are for your questions. Email your questions to questions at TonyCrisp.org, then just listen for your question to be answered on Friday's podcast. That's questions at Tony C R I S P dot org. Thanks for listening and have a blessed day on the way.