Coromandel Baptist Church

Sunday 18 January 2009 Psalm 105:23-45; Luke 9:28-36

Exodus Central

This week we begin a series which, Lord willing, will occupy our attention for the first half of the year. The book of Exodus is a meeting place of many biblical themes and it thus occupies a central place in the understanding of God’s dealings with his people. While we may say that covenant is the overarching theme, the book is replete with many important biblical realities.

Redemption and deliverance; law and worship; God’s transcendent holiness and his near presence; sonship and identity; promise and fulfillment; divine sovereignty and human accountability; grace and obedience; God’s action in signs and wonders as well as his unseen hand in providence; remembering and forgetting; these and many related motifs will capture our attention as we travel through the book. We are introduced to the great figure of Moses; the amazing concept of Passover; the real and powerful action of God as the Shepherd of his flock; and the intensity of the spiritual battle which the Lord fights on behalf of his people and for the honour of his holy Name. We are given the revelation of that Name in his words and his deeds. We are shown the nature of his people ‘warts and all’ and thus come to realize that without God’s grace we are all done for. We are shown the persistence of God’s presence with his people, so that they may not be finally abandoned, however much his judgements may be enacted in order to shatter their false confidence in themselves or their idols. In these and other ways Exodus is necessary for us to provide answers to the questions “Who is God”? and “Who are we, as God’s people?”

Studying Exodus will necessitate some understanding of the realm of ancient Egypt with its religious systems and assumptions, as well as the wider world of the ancient near east (ANE). We will come to meet Pharaoh, who stands as another god (in his own view, the true and only god!) against Yahweh, and also see the fascination and attraction of ‘gods many and lords many’ in the ancient world. We will see the murmuring and grumbling of the Lord’s own people, as well as the fear that God’s covenantal care of them elicits among the nations. We will see that God’s Old Testament people, Israel, received the great gift of the Law…as a redeemed people, not in order to become a redeemed people. And the redeemed people are given great attention.

When we consider that the opening eleven chapters of Genesis span the millennia from creation to the days of Abraham, and the rest of Genesis is devoted to the story of Abraham and his descendants, we are amazed to discover that four whole books (Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, are Deuteronomy) are given over to the events of one generation of forty or so years. And when we see that the book of Joshua follows on (thematically as well as historically) from these books, and that the rest of Old Testament history is seen in the light of the events of the exodus and the giving of the Law, then we see something of the significance of the material we are giving ourselves to study. Just as the ‘exodus’ that Jesus has accomplished through the cross and resurrection forms the central point of the life of the Church, so the exodus under Moses formed the central point of the life of Israel for all its subsequent generations.

In all this, we are taken to the heart of biblical revelation. The revelation of God brought to us in the book of Exodus prefigures and prepares us for the coming of God himself in the person of his Son, in whom God accomplishes the spiritual exodus of the redeemed race. We can not underestimate how important the theme of the exodus is to our understanding of the New Testament, as virtually all categories for describing Christ’s work (e.g. Christ as our Passover; the Lamb of God; the one who makes propitiation for our sins; our great High Priest; etc.) are prefigured for us in the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. We are also given our introduction to the relationship between the covenant arrangements that God has put in place. How does the covenant formed with Israel at Mt. Sinai relate to the covenant with Abraham, for example? What is its purpose? In what way is it one with the covenant with Abraham, and in what ways is it distinctive? What are its limitations? And why was it put in place? What is its purpose in relation to the coming of the Christ and the establishment of the new covenant in his blood?