Word & the Wild

This is Word and the Wild, a one year Bible adventure with friends. My name is Owen, I'm your host and your guide, and together we are on this 12 month journey as a podcast plus community where we read the Bible for ourselves, but not by ourselves. This week, it's week six, my friend, we've already crossed over that one month mark.

Right here as we are crossing the desert with moses and the israelites. We're out here in exodus Where God gets personal and when we push in for that close up of who God is, the image we see, it's a little bit intimidating to say the least. So hello and welcome in. Special welcome to our word in the wild plus community members.

It's their support of this nonprofit endeavor that makes space for all of us here on this Bible reading adventure.

Now with that, no more chatter, let's jump into the conversation about Exodus. And it all starts with these magnetic toys that I have in my hand right here. So let's go.

Yeah, you heard that right. I've got you at the table with me and I've got these magnetic toys. You can hear me snapping them together. And With these toys, I want to invite you into a little thought experiment with me as we get into conversation about Exodus. Okay. All right. And it does involve these magnetic toys I've got in my hand.

Yeah. My son loves these things. He's the kind of kid who's all about, you know, action figures and stories. And so these toys are right up his alley, super creative. See, you've got a whole box of these little parts here and you can use them to build your own monsters. Okay. They've got, uh, they're all magnetic.

They're interchangeable. Um, and you can snap them together and all kinds of combinations. So, I've got, uh, this here, I'm going to give this little guy a one eyed purple head, alright? And, I can snap some body segments in here, give him a couple of orange arms, in fact let's give him four orange arms, there we go, and then a couple of green feet, little dinosaur tail.

Got all these possible combinations, right? So, uh, so here's my little thought experiment. Okay. When you yourself, you slow down for a minute and think about God. Okay. Think about God. How do you put God together from all the things that we know about him? You know, imagine that all of his attributes, his characteristics, his facts about his personality, all the things you know about God are like these little magnetic monster toys.

How do you snap them together to create your personal idea about God? I

see one of the complaints slash concerns I get from people pretty often here as a guide on this stretch of the story that we are in right now is one of the complaints I get is that the God that they know. And they understand their idea of God is, is different from the God they see in Exodus. And in this upcoming stretch of the Old Testament, we're about to get into.

And truth is they don't like that difference. But I, I'd like to, I'd like to put an idea out there. I'd like to say that, uh, you aren't looking at a different God than the God that you know, if, if, uh, you've been selecting the parts you use to build your idea of God from a limited selection of what we usually get from, I don't know, worship music, YouTube teachers.

You know, TV preachers, pop psychology sermons, how- to books, you throw in a few well worn pages of the old Testament that we all go to again and again. And, and you, you build your, uh, your idea of God from all of that. Well, you've got a very limited idea about God. And you end up with this God, this picture of God coming from, you know, the New Testament from Jesus, not even all the New Testament or Jesus, just the select parts.

Okay. You got a very limited selection of what to build your idea of God with. And you end up with a view of, of a God who fights Your battles, who walks your path with you, who accommodates your wishes. Um, and you don't, you don't get a view of God, who the kind of God who chooses who and where and why he fights.

You get a God who comes to meet you at your own whim. You don't get a God who walks you through the wilderness. To bring you to a holy mountain to come and meet with him. And, and before you know it, your idea of God and your relationship with him, it, it takes the shape of a little magnetic monster of your own making. Built out of the parts of God's attributes and personality that you know and like and prefer. And, and rather than coming to the mountain to encounter and serve the real God,

like you see in Exodus. You know, you get your, your toy monster here, uh, and it becomes just another way to serve yourself. You make, instead of me being made in God's image. I end up with God made in my image. And Exodus, man, like it or not, Exodus challenges this perspective, this small and self- focused idea of God, and that can be uncomfortable.

But here's the thing, if you love the idea of God that you get from Jesus, you get from the New Testament, then you have to appreciate what we see here in Exodus. Because Exodus is where God gets personal. It's where we learn his name. It's where we see his heart, and we peek into his motivations. Exodus is where God's response to the tragic events of Genesis 3, where Adam and Eve made that fateful choice to taste the forbidden fruit...

it's where God's response to all that really starts to take shape. Um, and if you want an idea of God. You know, putting them together from the pieces, uh, that includes ideas like salvation, being a Savior, rescue, being a, coming to your aid, fighting for you, uh, redemption, rescuing you, buying you back, uh, then, then you need Exodus because Exodus is where all of these ideas about God and the story? They all enter the plot

in a, in a strong, forceful way right here in Exodus, see Exodus is where God makes bold moves. He starts to carve out his people from among the nations of the world. He does it in a miraculous way and he sets them on a very different path. And if we're honest, it's a wild path. I mean, it's a path through oppression and enslavement.

It's through plagues. It's through the sea. It's through the wilderness. And it's through amazing and, and honestly, frightening encounters with this fierce creator God, a God of both compassion and accountability. In Exodus, we see that rescue and redemption, these nice, sweet praise song worthy ideas that they're really I mean, rescue and redemption is a violent affair.

You don't just walk out of Egypt. It's, it's fire and hail and blood. To free captives and redeem and enslaved people: it's not done in a boardroom. It's done on a battlefield. There's a real sense in which salvation is savage. And God has no qualms with flexing his muscle on behalf of a people that cry out to him for help.

And so as much as God is a God of love, He is also a God of war. As much as the polytheistic religion that we see from the Egyptians, um, that tries to separate the attributes and power of this creator God into just a whole myriad of little gods with limited capabilities. Manageable little gods, building their little toy monsters, okay?

Yahweh, on the other hand, the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, does not allow you to pull him apart that way. Uh, there's no division of powers. He's got them all. You want to encounter God, fire, water, land, sea. Fine, he doesn't care where you want to face him. He's the God of calamity, just as much as he is a God of compassion.

Every space, every venue, it's all his. He owns this world and yes, he wants to be known, but when you approach, you had best be ready to face him. This is the Exodus. And this is not just an Old Testament idea of God. This pulls all the way through the story. Jesus himself quotes Exodus to teach the religious leaders of his day a lesson about God and about himself.

And so, if you find yourself thinking that the Exodus God, the Old Testament God, is different, from that baby born in a manger, God, I gotta warn you. You could not be more wrong. And as we see in Exodus and beyond, you don't want to be wrong about God. To be wrong about God, either by opposing him as an enemy, or by trying to approach Him on your own terms.

Oh, no, no, no. To be wrong about God is to put yourself at great, great risk. To know the real God as He really, truly is. We see time and again in Exodus, we're seeing it this week. That's the only safe bet.

After the crazy chaos of life after Eden that we see in Genesis, and then the detour through the jungle of Job, where we discovered that God's highest good is for Job and for us, to leave behind the second hand hearsay, folksy wisdom about God, And to experience him for ourselves. After all that, now we step into Exodus.

Where God moves in to reassert his complete control of creation through those plagues. And he re centers the story right where it belongs. Recenters it on God himself as the source of the good life. Rescue, redeem, reestablish relationship with humanity who walked away from him and took its own path.

This is the plot of the Exodus and we see inside God's move to deliver the Israelites from Egypt. We see a big pivot point in the plot of our story. It's really the hinge point in many ways. Not only does it change the course of history for the Israelites, when God rescues them from Egypt, but through it all, we get to look into God's motives in a way that sets up, I'm talking major, major themes in his interaction with people from this point forward, all the way through the story.

And so as your guide here, I want to highlight four key why's that we see from Exodus himself, itself in God's own words, for himself, he explains the whys behind his moves in the Exodus story. Why does he take the path of rescuing those Israelites and walking them out of Egypt in such a dramatic way? So I see four of them here and I wanted to share them with you real quick.

The first one, and these are all, I'm going to give you where I see it in the story. Cause I want to, I want you to anchor into what the Bible itself has to say about this. So the first one I want to tell you, number one. It is, is the why behind the Exodus story first, because God wants to keep his promise to Abraham.

You see that in Exodus 2:23. He's very clear about that. That's a motive for him. A second motive, uh, he wants to respond to his people's cries for help. He hears their cries. It moves him to action. You see that in 2, in 2:23 as well. And then in chapter 3, verses 7 and 10. There's a third reason and that's to show his power and spread his fame through his enemies.

Pharaoh pits himself as an enemy against God. He wants to go heads up with the Lord and the Lord explains that he's going to flex his muscle for the purpose of showing his power and spreading his fame throughout all the earth. You see that in chapter nine, verse 13 through 18. And then there's a fourth why behind God's motives, uh, in the Exodus story.

His motive for what his moves, you could say, is to let everyone know that from God's point of view, there are two kinds of people in this world. There are his people and there is everyone else. Not super popular point of view, but this is, this is not me. This is, this is what God himself says. You see it in chapter 11 verse seven there in Exodus.

God leaves no doubt that being one of his people is where you want to be. There are his people. And there's everyone else. And these major themes, they mark God's moves, not only in Exodus, but through the rest of the story. God does what he does. The why behind his moves, uh, is to keep his promises. To respond to cries for justice and freedom, to use his enemies, to show his power, and to remind everyone that the only safe place to be is to be with him as one of his people.

God often takes his people down tough and surprising roads. We're seeing that in Exodus in spades. But the bottom line is, if you are with God. Then you are in a good place. It doesn't matter if you're huddled up in your home with with blood on your doorposts and or if you're standing in the middle of the Red Sea If you are with God, God is with you and you are exactly where you want to be.

That's the story of Exodus And in many ways, that is the story itself. Really, that's the story. In fact, we're going to see these themes come up time and time again. Uh, and while, uh, this time around in Exodus, it was the blood of a lamb that signals safety on the night of that 10th and final plague. Many years from now in the story, we're going to see that it's another sacrifice

who provides shelter from God's anger under the cover of his blood. We're going to see another sacrifice who will make a way for people to become one of God's people. Uh, will make a way to move from being God's enemy to being God's friend, which is where you want to be. And like this Exodus story that we're reading now, that Exodus

will all start after a long silence. 400 plus years, and it will all start with a baby placed by his mother somewhere you would never expect to find him. And just like this story, that baby will grow up to lead God's people to freedom. That time has not yet come. So for now, it's Moses. Leading God's people from the Red Sea across the desert by an unexpected way toward the Sacred Mountain, Mount Sinai.

We've been here with Moses before at this mountain. Remember the burning bush where he first encountered God? And God gave him his name, he said, I am, he said, my name is Yahweh? It was holy ground when Moses took off his shoes and God revealed something deeply personal about himself. He is Yahweh the I am now that time.

Moses was alone. This time, he brings a million Israelites with him. And once again, God will meet Moses there, at that mountain.

And just like that, we're ready to go! Word and the wild! It's a one year Bible adventure with friends! All you Word in the Wild Plus community members, I'll be seeing you in the wild this week. That's our private online community space. Everyone else, hey, don't be a stranger. Subscribe to this podcast and follow Word in the Wild on Facebook.

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Big ups, LumaVoz. Thank you for giving us a podcast home. And with that, my friend, we're out of here. I'm Owen, your host and your guide. And until next time, I will see you out there in the word and the wild. Have a great week.