Pastor Darren: So we have been on our own journey.
Pastor Darren: An Exodus of sorts.
Pastor Darren: An Exodus through Exodus.
unknown: Wow.
Pastor Darren: Okay.
Pastor Darren: Just so you know, up here, I'm treating laughs and groans equally.
Pastor Darren: If I can get either one, I mean it's worked.
Pastor Darren: So, quick update as we've journeyed through Lent here and through Exodus, week one, we're talking about being that baby on the river and kind of uh uh moving through life with all the different influence that life offers.
Pastor Darren: Then we talked about God coming to us in this burning bush with uh a something better, a better way to live life.
Pastor Darren: Then we make our commitment in faith, right?
Pastor Darren: The blood on the door, and God delivers us.
Pastor Darren: Uh then the journey itself gets kind of difficult as we realize that uh that enslavement, or the Israelites realized that enslavement from back then at least came with some stability.
Pastor Darren: Now they're wandering, they're eating manna, they're eating quail.
Pastor Darren: Finally, God provides in a different way for this community of people that are adrift, right?
Pastor Darren: They're wandering through the wilderness.
Pastor Darren: God offers them these ten commandments for them to follow.
Pastor Darren: So if you're reading through them, you'll probably notice these aren't just individual instructions or guidelines or even commandments.
Pastor Darren: These are communal guidelines as well, right?
Pastor Darren: They're for us as individuals, but they're also for us as a community.
Pastor Darren: It's not just about how we're going to live, but it's also how are we going to live together, right?
Pastor Darren: So we can tell this kind of by the nature of the list.
Pastor Darren: The first five are kind of me and God.
Pastor Darren: How are we going to live together, me and God?
Pastor Darren: How am I going to live and trust God?
Pastor Darren: And then the last five are a little more social.
Pastor Darren: Social and communal, me and everyone.
Pastor Darren: For me, I use this cross kind of metaphor to kind of keep me in that mode and in that mindset.
Pastor Darren: So um, so why don't we take this litmus test here?
Pastor Darren: This little uh uh set of uh guidelines, these commandments.
Pastor Darren: How many have uh broken some of them just today?
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: Right this last week, you know, have you wrestled with some of these?
Pastor Darren: The last one to me might be the hardest, that coveting.
Pastor Darren: You know, it's one thing to be able to stop my behaviors, the things I say.
Pastor Darren: It's another thing to be in my head and stop me from from coveting things.
Pastor Darren: Sometimes I think it might be an easier test if we went the other way.
Pastor Darren: I mean, how many of you got five out of ten just this week?
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: That's commitment in its own way, too.
Pastor Darren: You've got to dedicate time, you gotta be organized.
Pastor Darren: That's a lot to get done, is what I'm saying to you.
Pastor Darren: So a little bit of breakdown, some of the exegesis, the deconstruction of the passage.
Pastor Darren: This is stuff I get largely from Pete Enns, who's uh part of uh the Bible for Normal People, a website you might enjoy, and a podcast that me and Stephen actually enjoy a lot.
Pastor Darren: Uh, I got about five points, I think, worth uh worth pointing to.
Pastor Darren: How many are engineers?
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: Okay, five.
Pastor Darren: So get your pencils out.
Pastor Darren: You can list all five.
Pastor Darren: You're welcome.
Pastor Darren: All right.
Pastor Darren: First of all, this is just the beginning of things as concerns laws.
Pastor Darren: The Pentateuch, right?
Pastor Darren: The first five books of our Bible are really full of laws.
Pastor Darren: It's laws and then it's narrative.
Pastor Darren: Laws and narrative.
Pastor Darren: 613 laws that are part of that Pentateuch.
Pastor Darren: And you'll see that it's really one large story of the laws being given and us kind of wrestling with them, and then God responding with new laws to help us with and just to grow together.
Pastor Darren: And part of the ultimate goal of all of this is that we might live our lives in a way that point to God and who God is.
Pastor Darren: We follow these laws, and then people come to understand the loving God that we follow.
Pastor Darren: So, a second point of deconstruction, these laws or the Ten Commandments, as written, they really are kind of a response to their deliverance, right?
Pastor Darren: God, God came and delivered them, and now it's your job to follow God's laws.
Pastor Darren: God came through, now we need to come through.
Pastor Darren: I wanted to point that out just because that's slightly different than the understanding that I've been working on with this theme.
Pastor Darren: To me, I it's more of an understanding of God coming to us, promising us a new way, and not really quid pro quo, but more us just saying, Yes, I want that better way.
Pastor Darren: I want that life.
Pastor Darren: So just a little bit different experience of God and different theology.
Pastor Darren: Another one, and here's some good fun Bible words for you.
Pastor Darren: The early Israelites, they were not monotheists.
Pastor Darren: Ah, you thought you thought they were, didn't you?
Pastor Darren: You're like, oh yeah, those early Israelites, of course they were monotheists.
Pastor Darren: Anybody even had that thought in their life yet?
Pastor Darren: No, monotheists, we tend to think that Judeo-Christian faith has always been this monotheistic faith, meaning there's one God, right?
Pastor Darren: And we worship the one God.
Pastor Darren: Well, we can tell from these commandments that they weren't monotheists, they were actually monologists.
Pastor Darren: Did I say it wrong?
Steve Langberg: Monologers.
Pastor Darren: Monologers.
Steve Langberg: Monolatrists.
Pastor Darren: Monolatrists.
Pastor Darren: Oh, see, this is why I'm glad Stephen walks with us here.
Pastor Darren: He keeps me.
Pastor Darren: I can run a church, but he knows the Bible really, really well.
Pastor Darren: This is what I'll say.
Pastor Darren: So, in any, those are people who understand that there's multiple gods, they just believe the God of the Israelites is the best God, the strongest God, the God that was able to free them from their enslavement.
Pastor Darren: So, uh a bit kind of interesting for a lot of people who study this kind of thing.
Pastor Darren: Um, also, we should be careful when we start talking about comparing Old Testament and New Testament, Old Testament being about law, New Testament being about grace, you know, and the mindset of the New Testament fixes the Old Testament or evolves into, right?
Pastor Darren: And we kind of minimize our Old Testament.
Pastor Darren: We should remember that grace came before the law, right?
Pastor Darren: God delivered the Israelites, an act of grace for the Israelites, before the law comes.
Pastor Darren: So grace has always been a part of the faith.
Pastor Darren: It's not something that comes along with just with Christianity.
Pastor Darren: Finally, number five, engineers, I got to my fifth one.
Pastor Darren: There are two versions of these commandments.
Pastor Darren: It suggests that there were two different communities of faith that were tracking these and keeping these.
Pastor Darren: And when it came time to put it all together into one Bible, they decided to keep both.
Pastor Darren: And if you're interested in digging in, uh, the commandments themselves are pretty similar.
Pastor Darren: It's actually how they uh describe the response and the reasoning for the commandments.
Pastor Darren: It's a little bit different.
Pastor Darren: You'll find that the the list from Deuteronomy, different than our list from Exodus, is a little more humanistic.
Pastor Darren: Commandments were made for and out of love for the humans to be helping them as opposed to instruction, as it comes off in Exodus.
Pastor Darren: So there, a little meat on the burger for you right there.
Pastor Darren: Those of you who like to study this stuff.
Pastor Darren: So, what are we going to make of it?
Pastor Darren: How does this matter to us today?
Pastor Darren: You know, I've been talking about this overarching understanding of Exodus, not just as a journey that's taken by this ancient people and this ancient land, but actually a journey to faith, as a metaphor for this journey to faith.
Pastor Darren: And along that line, we're at this point on that journey to faith, where the people who were formerly enslaved had all of their lives dictated for them, now had to figure out how to live without that dictation, without those laws, without the guidance, without that oppression, they had to be taught how to live.
Pastor Darren: So when we take that in a more metaphorical sense and bringing that sense of how am I on this journey to faith and deepening?
Pastor Darren: How am I or was I enslaved to something, connected to something that uh I needed to move away from and needed instruction about to be able to get to that place?
Pastor Darren: I know did any of us take uh the Lenten season a little more seriously and give up something that you liked maybe a little bit too much, or something that isn't so healthy for you?
Pastor Darren: Did anybody go on that journey?
Pastor Darren: Or maybe you left here on a Sunday morning recognizing that something kind of had hold of you, just a little bit more than you were comfortable with, hold in the way you'd rather God had that focus.
Pastor Darren: And so you've tried to minimize it a little bit, right?
Pastor Darren: You've tried to to get some of that control back, you've tried to get that focus back on God, only to find it wasn't that easy.
Pastor Darren: It's not that easy to to let those things go behind.
Pastor Darren: All right, Jane, I have to ask.
Pastor Darren: Uh oh.
Pastor Darren: I meant to ask you before.
Pastor Darren: We had confession, me and her.
Pastor Darren: Can I share your confession?
Pastor Darren: Oh, thank you.
Pastor Darren: This is why Jane's going to heaven.
Pastor Darren: And it's why I'm not.
Pastor Darren: So we had full confession, and Jane was telling me that her thing that draws her back, that thing that grabs at her, Big Mac double fries.
Pastor Darren: Hey, amen.
Pastor Darren: Amen.
Pastor Darren: I go to that church every now and again myself.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: Sometimes it's hard to give that up.
Pastor Darren: And I use food a lot because I feel like that's accessible, right?
Pastor Darren: You use a word like sin, and we're like, oh, here comes the Bible stuff.
Pastor Darren: But when I start talking about, oh, have you ever tried to give something up?
Pastor Darren: And food is just that easy one, because we've all got a little something.
Pastor Darren: Just a little something.
Pastor Darren: And if it isn't food or something in that range, it might even be something weightier, like an emotional thing, a personality thing, a weight you were trying to change to make yourself better, and you're trying to let something go, and you realize it is a lot harder to do than you might think.
Pastor Darren: And we laugh at these silly Israelites who started to pine for their abusive master, the Pharaoh.
Pastor Darren: And we have to ask ourselves, are we really that much better?
Pastor Darren: Pining for whatever that thing is that we know is not right for us, and yet we're finding our way back to it.
Pastor Darren: We're being drawn back to it.
Pastor Darren: To me, uh there's uh a program called the Bible Project Video, and these are these are resources I pointed you at toward at the beginning of Lent, and it does a really good job of shaping a fuller understanding of what we think might be going on here.
Pastor Darren: We learn from Scripture, in particular in Exodus, we follow the law to make God known to the world.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: So we do those commandments and we live out this story of God giving us guidelines and us trying to follow the guidelines, and God continuing to grow with us as we stress and wrestle over these guidelines, that ultimately we're trying to express the God that we know so that others might see that God.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: And for us as Christians, Christ is the fulfillment of that law.
Pastor Darren: In fact, he even calls himself the fulfillment of that law.
Pastor Darren: So, what what does that mean?
Pastor Darren: Do you remember when he summarized the Ten Commandments?
Pastor Darren: Some of you might have that on your mind.
Pastor Darren: He brought it down to two.
Pastor Darren: Some of you are gonna remember it.
Pastor Darren: Love God, love neighbor.
Pastor Darren: Do you remember this cross I was making earlier?
Pastor Darren: Love God and love neighbor.
Pastor Darren: It's kind of how our Ten Commandments are set up, right?
Pastor Darren: Love God, the first half, love neighbor, the second half.
Pastor Darren: I think this this is why it it helps me to remember that when I make the cross with it, he will remember that that the Ten Commandments mirrors that, that he's summarizing the Ten Commandments, but there's this addition of love.
Pastor Darren: The love is significant, really significant.
Pastor Darren: When we add this component of love to our commandments, there's a layer formed that goes a bit beyond just behavior.
Pastor Darren: An example.
Pastor Darren: To love somebody means I gotta go even past keeping myself from living out whatever anger that I might have.
Pastor Darren: Jesus made God known by showing the love that God holds for us.
Pastor Darren: A love so deep it included loving enemies.
Pastor Darren: In other words, Jesus made God known to the world by loving the world.
Pastor Darren: I think the invitation to us, the invitation for us today is that we're we're on this journey, right?
Pastor Darren: We're taking this journey, and it's going through rivers, and it's going through burning bushes, and it's going through blood on the doors, and parting seas, and eating manna, and eating quail, finding some water, all with this promise and this hope of finding this better way that God is offering.
Pastor Darren: And on this journey, God offers us a bunch of laws.
Pastor Darren: You can see how it probably feels like.
Pastor Darren: The difference is when we follow these laws and we make God known by following these laws, we also make God known to ourselves.
Pastor Darren: When we live out these laws, when we leave out these guidelines, it not only becomes real to those who experience us on that journey, but it becomes real for us in our hearts.
Pastor Darren: We're reminded of the value of that authority in our lives.
Pastor Darren: So when we're struggling in all the ways that life offers challenge, part of our prayers every week, when we are struggling, we can remember that there was a time when God's love did win my heart, did win in my life, and not only that, but it was good.
Pastor Darren: We made a point to look for God, and God was there, maybe not in the way we thought, maybe even hoped for, but God was there with us.
Pastor Darren: And when we sit in our own wilderness trying to understand exactly how we are supposed to be moving, somewhat freed from our former gods and temptations, but still being tempted by those old masters by living these laws, by living these commandments, we give ourselves a glimpse of that better way.
Pastor Darren: And the more glimpses that we get, the fuller the picture is, the fuller that life experience is.
Pastor Darren: God becomes real for us when we live these commandments.
Pastor Darren: Maybe Paul in our New Testament says it best in his letter to the Romans.
Pastor Darren: This is chapter 13, verse 8, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.
Pastor Darren: When we love another, we make God's love real for that person.
Pastor Darren: But let's not forget we make it real for ourselves as well.
Pastor Darren: Amen.