Bulletins - Brookdale Baptist Church

At Calvary
Revive Us Again
His Mercy Is More
Speak, O Lord
Exodus 19-24
Have you watched a nature documentary with towering, aerial footage of majestic mountain ranges accompanied by dramatic, soaring orchestral music intended to emulate what it must be like to soar above the clouds like an eagle?
Or perhaps you recall the breathtaking moment in the “Test Drive” scene at the middle of How to Train Your Dragon, when Hiccup soars fly in perfect harmony, higher and higher into the clouds and evening sunset beyond the horizon. As wind rushes past them, the famous, rhythmic music of this scene grows and pulses majestically. The world looks small below them and above them stretches an endless blue sky.
This moment marks the beginning of a new relationship that will change the shape and purpose of their lives not only as individuals but together. In this fictional world, these two characters – once at odds – are about to embark on a series of many great adventures together that will require of them an all-new way of life and will deeply affect the people of the world around them.
God formed a special relationship with his people.
This is what happened when God rescued his people from four hundred years in Egypt, which had culminated in a long period of slavery and oppression. As we learned last week from Exodus 1-18, God saw the slavery of his people and he saved them.
You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Myself. (Exo 19:4)
As God swooped down to save his people from slavery, he carried or led them to a mountain between Egypt and the Promised Land, called Sinai. The traditional site of this mountain is approx. 8,000 ft. tall known as Jebel Musa, about the height of four Freedom Towers stacked on top of each other.
This is the site where God formally established a special relationship with his people, the nation of Israel. By doing this, he was fulfilling a centuries-long promise made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and he did so by forming a covenant with them.
Ancient covenants at that time in history were called “suzerainty treaties,” official agreements between a conquering king and the people he conquered. They explained how the conquering king would care for and protect his new people and explained how this new relationship would function in daily life. In other words, it explained the new cultural, social, and sometimes religious expectations of this new relationship.
In Scripture, a covenant is a formal, solemn expression of God’s relationship to his people and their special relationship to him. Douglas Steward explains, “The first half of Exodus is all about rescue from forced service to a pagan nation, and the second half is all about proper service for the one true God by keeping his covenant.” God had rescued rather than conquered the Hebrew people so that he could form a special, caring, protecting relationship with them forever.
Ancient suzerainty treaties followed a standard pattern which consisted of six parts:
Opening: identified the giver and the receivers of the covenant
Prologue: explained the nature of the relationship between both parties
Stipulations: explained various responsibilities the people would have to their new king
Witnesses: listed important persons who could vouch for the authenticity of the treaty
Documentation: an instruction to write down the covenant as a permanent record
Sanctions: a set of blessings and curses tied to good and bad responses by the people
All six of these parts of such a treaty are present in God’s covenant with Israel and would have been recognized by them as such. The details of this covenant begin in Exo 20:1 but are continued and completed with the book of Leviticus, all of which was given at Mount Sinai over a period of nearly eleven months.
The book of Numbers gives additional guidance to the people during their 40 years of traveling in the wilderness, based on what God revealed in Exodus and Leviticus. Deuteronomy (which literally means “second law”) repeats and reapplies what God revealed at Sinai to the next generation of his people as they prepared to enter the land he had promised them. And God did all this to form a special, committed relationship with them, beginning at Sinai.
As he says in Exo 19:4, “I brought you to myself,” and in 19:5, “You shall be a special treasure to me above all people.” This is what God does when he saves people – he brings them into a close relationship with himself and they become a special, valued treasure to him, more than an ordinary, unsaved person.
God showed himself in a special way to his people.
As we read the beginning of this covenant relationship between God and Israel at Sinai, we see something very obvious. Though God was forming a close, committed relationship with them, coming close to God was both a captivating and terrifying experience.
God came to them in a “thick cloud” (19:9) His presence was marked by “thunderings, lightnings, and a thick cloud on the mountain” and “the sound of a trumpet” which “was very loud” (19:16). When the people saw and heard these things, they trembled.
The mountain was “completely covered in smoke,” and was on “fire,” and “it’s smoke ascended like the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mountain quaked greatly” (19:18). “The blast of the trumpet sounded long and became louder and louder (19:19).
Because of this terrifying experience, the people remained at the base of the mountain and sent further up the mount only Moses in some cases and Moses and some other key, leading men on other occasions.
At the end of this awe-inspiring experience, “a cloud covered the mountain” (24:16), and “the glory of the Lord rested on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days.” “The sight of the glory of the Lord was like a consuming fire on the top of the mountain” (24:17).
As God established this new, close relationship with his special people, he wanted them to realize how awesome, majestic, and terrifying he truly was. He did not want them to have a lesser, lower view of him, but to understand his greatness and glory. And this is important for us today. As Hebrews 12:28-29 tells us from the New Testament (NT) today:
Let us have grace, by which we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear. For our God is a consuming fire.
This has not changed from the Old Testament (OT) to the New. Our God was a consuming fire then and he is a consuming fire today. The Christian author, C.S. Lewis, tries to explain this awesome glory of God by how he describes the lion Aslan in his stories called The Chronicles of Narnia. The little girl, Lucy, asks Mr. Beaver, about the Aslan the great Lion, “Is he—quite safe?” To this, Mr. Beaver replies, “Safe? … ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
And so is our God. He is not little. He is not weak. He is not convenient. He is not easy to approach or understand. But he is great, and he is terrible, and he is good in every way, and he wants to be your God in a close and personal way – to be your guide and your protector, your true, forever King, as he did with the people of Israel.
Not only did God form a special, covenant relationship with his people and show himself to them in a special, terrifying way…
God gave a special purpose to his people.
He said to them, “You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exo 19:6). From this, we see that God was not forming this close, special relationship with them only to be enjoyed by themselves. He did not intend for this to be an exclusive, isolated, reclusive relationship. He intended this special relationship to be the way that he would show the rest of the world his greatness and goodness through them and that, through them, he would draw the rest of the world into a close relationship, as well.
Priests are people who stand between God and other people so that through their experience with God and service for God can help bring other people also into a closer relationship with God. And while the nation of Israel would eventually benefit from the service of special, assigned priests at the tabernacle and temple, they were all considered by God to be priests to the rest of the world.
Today, the church no longer practices a formal priesthood. As the NT book of Hebrews clearly teaches, there are no longer priests in the church as there were priests in Israel, performing special, assigned services of sacrifice and worship. But we are all priests before God because of the salvation that Christ has provided.
You are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light... (1 Pet 2:9-10)
God has given us – as he gave the people of Israel – a special task, to represent God to the people around us. For Israel, this was why God gave them the law. Through the law…
God revealed a special lifestyle for his people.
When we speak about the law in Scripture (or about God’s law), our minds typically zoom in on what we call the “Ten Commandments,” and for good reason. After God brought his people to Mount Sinai and revealed his terrifying, captivating glory to them, he spoke to them from the mountain.
Exo 20:1 says, “And God spoke all these words, saying …,” and when he spoke, it was the Ten Commandments that he gave to them. And after he gave these words to them, the people were afraid.
All the people witnessed the thunderings, the lightning flashes, the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they trembled and stood afar off. Then they said to Moses, “You speak with us, and we will hear; but let not God speak with us, lest we die.” And Moses said to the people, “Do not fear; for God has come to test you, and that His fear may be before you, so that you may not sin.” So, the people stood afar off, but Moses drew near the thick darkness where God was. (Exo 20:18-21)
From this we see that contrary to prevailing perspective, God didn’t give the Ten Commandments to Moses privately at the top of Mount Sinai, he gave them directly to the people from the mountain in booming, terrifying voice that they could hear for themselves. And after this terrifying experience, they asked Moses to communicate to God for them alone so that they would not have to go through that experience again.
From this we see the Ten Commandments are an important feature in God’s covenant with Israel. But it is important to understand how they are important, for they are not important in the way that many people assume them to be.
Many people believe that the Ten Commandments give us ten rules to live by, and that how well we live by them will somehow determine the closeness of our relationship with God, the genuineness, quality, or degree of salvation from sin, and odds of entering heaven after death. But this is not the case. God did not give Israel the Ten Commandments as a method, means, or way to have a relationship with him. He gave them to Israel as a result of and because they now hada relationship with him.
Remember – God had already saved them. God had already redeemed them. God had already declared his relationship with them. All any of them needed to do was believe on him alone as their God and Savior.
Think of it this way. At the Overmiller house, we have certain expectations and rules for behavior, ways that we expect those in our family to treat one another and people around us. We do not hold our neighbors to these expectations because they are not in our family. And if our neighbors choose to follow these expectations and rules, they will not become members of our family as a result.
So, people who attempt to follow the Ten Commandments do not become God’s special people. But God’s special people who have already been saved by him and given the special purpose of representing him to the world and bring other people to faith in him were to follow these commands in love.
To understand these commands even better, we should also acknowledge that they are not called commands. They are only called “words” (Exo 20:1). For this reason, many rightly call these “the ten words.” And this helps us better understand the purpose of these instructions. In ancient times, people did not view laws as tedious, technical commands and rules with many loopholes, limited only to what was stated. They were viewed, instead, as general, guiding, universal principles with many appropriate applications.
No Israelite could say: “The law says I must make restitution for stolen oxen or sheep [Exod 22:1], but I stole your goat. I don’t have to pay you back,” or “The law says that anyone who attacks his father or mother must be put to death [Exod 21:15], but I attacked my grandmother, so I shouldn’t be punished,” or “The law says that certain penalties apply for hitting someone with a fist or a stone [Exod 21:18], but I kicked my neighbor with my foot and hit him with a piece of wood, so I shouldn’t be punished.” (Douglas Stewart)
From this summary of ten key general statements by God about how his people should behave as priests and representatives of God to the world, God would go on to reveal a total of 613 more specific commands. These more specific commands are helpful because they helped the people of Israel apply the principles of these “ten words” in a wide range of specific ways appropriate for their situation, but those commands all tie back in one way or another to these ten original statements of the covenant.
Perhaps even more interesting is how God tucked away in later statements of the law two specific commands which Christ himself later said were the two greatest commands of all (Mt 22:37-39).
Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”
The first command, to love God, is given in Dt 6:5 and the second, to love others, is given in Lev 19:18. You might ask, “Why didn’t God just give these two most basic, overarching commands at the beginning of his relationship with Israel at Mount Sinai? Why did he wait until later?
The best answer seems to be that God, in his wisdom, knew that doing so would not cause his people to understand the breadth and gravity of their calling as priests of God. By giving the ten commandments first, then all 613 commands afterwards, he caused generation so people to first think carefully and realize fully how wide-reaching his expectations for his people truly were. Only then are we able to recognize the breadth and wide-ranging extent of the two overarching commands to love God and love others.
As we read the Ten Commands, though, and the more detailed instructions that follow, we see clearly that the people God has saved must live a different, special kind of life – one that cherishes, pursues, and values what is in the best interest of God and others over self. And this makes sense, because we have been redeemed by a God who has loved us this way and are called to reveal such a loving God to others.
As the king of this new people, God had saved his people from slavery so that they would show his love to the world. Since he had loved them and promised to care for and protect them as his people, he wanted them to pass that love, care, and protection along to the world around them, so that they, too, would come into a saving relationship with God.
The Secret Garden, written by Mary Sebag-Montefiore in 1911, tells a fascinating story. When Mary Lennox first arrived at Misselthwaite Manor, an imposing but largely abandoned estate, she was a lonely, bitter, and misunderstood orphan. She thought the world and the people around her were cold and harsh. But everything began to change when she discovered a neglected garden hidden behind an overgrown gate.
As Mary nurtured the garden back to life, she also helped a boy named Colin, a sad and sickly boy who lived at the Manor gain freedom from his feelings of fear and discouragement. By bringing him to the garden, Mary formed a close and special relationship with Colin and together, they embraced a new purpose – restoring the secret garden so that it would bringing joy, health, and healing to others, too.
When God rescued Israel from slavery in Egypt, he brought them to Mount Sinai so that he could form a special, close relationship with them. And with this special relationship, he gave his people a special purpose – to represent and share his love, salvation, and goodness to the world around them. Like The Secret Garden, this relationship was meant not only to be carefully tended but shared. For Israel, this would happen as they lived out the special live that the “Ten Words” and resulting instructions explained, revealing what love for God and love for others looked like. And this was all because God had shown such indescribable love to them.
In closing, let me remind us of Paul’s words in Gal 3:24:
The law was our tutor to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith.
The commands at Sinai were meant to reveal God’s holiness and our need for a Savior, whether we learned these things from people of God who lived out those words or whether we learned them by reading and hearing Scripture for ourselves.
Today, through faith in Christ, we receive salvation from the slavery of sin and enter into a special relationship with God for ourselves. He rescues us, forgives us, and makes us his people. And as his people, we must live out the purpose of our new covenant relationship with him: to love God and love others, to reflect his holiness in the world throughout our lives.
Philip Ryken and R. Keny Hughes put it this way:
Like the Israelites, we are a kingdom of priests. Theologians call this the priesthood of all believers. God has made us his treasure, bringing us from slavery to royalty and setting us apart for his holy service. Since we are saved for God’s glory, our service is to worship God, to glorify him by declaring his praises. But we also have a mission to the world—not to rule it, but to serve it. The way we serve is by leading holy lives. What distinguishes us from the rest of the world is our personal godliness. Or at least it ought to, because the way we live is part of God’s plan for saving the world.
God is faithful to his people, he is faithful to his covenant. Will you be faithful to the new and special purpose he has given you in Christ? This is the purpose of our new relationship with God. This relationship is not for ourselves alone but for the people around us who need to know him and who need God’s salvation.
Exodus 32-34
David and Marissa spent years planning the house they would build together someday. They made sketches and Pinterest boards, had late‑night conversations about the number of bathrooms, where the windows would face, and how big the kitchen island would be. When they finally had enough money to begin, their dream was coming true.
They met with the architect, walked the land, and prayed over the foundation together. Everything was moving forward until the moment that nearly ended their dream.
While Marissa was out of town visiting her parents, David made a choice he thought was harmless: he hired a contractor friend, someone Marissa didn’t trust, to “speed things up.” He signed papers, approved changes, and even rearranged part of the design. “In the end,” he reasoned, “Marissa would accept the changes and see that he knew better.”
That didn’t’ happen. When she returned and saw what he’d done, she felt betrayed, cut out of the very project that was supposed to represent their close relationship and future together. For the first time, she said the words neither of them expected: “Maybe we shouldn’t do this.”
The house wasn’t the problem. The blueprints weren’t the problem. The relationship was the problem. Unless that was repaired, the new house would be over before it began.
Everything stopped. No more meetings. No more decisions. No more action on the build site. But after days of honest conversations, apologies, and a renewed commitment to build together, the house plan moved forward once again to completion.
As with David and Marissa, the people of the newly formed nation of Israel had a building project underway. It was the tabernacle, the place where God would dwell with them. But before a single board could be raised for God’s house, something happened that threatened to derail the project.
The people turned away from God. (32:1-6)
Placed in the middle of this book is a shocking, surprising scene. After God had spoken the ten words (or ten commandments) to Israel from Sinai with a thunderous voice, as the mountain was engulfed in flames and smoke and shaking with violent tremors, the people requested that God would speak only to Moses instead. So, Moses went to the top of the mountain to receive the rest of the covenant from God for Israel. Exo 24:18 says he was there for forty days and Exo 32:1 tells us it felt like an extremely long time for the people.
It had only been a matter of weeks to a few months since God had rescued them from slavery in Egypt. Until that time, Moses had been with them every day, but now he was gone, and the people had no idea when he would return – if ever.
Rather than wait patiently for Moses to return, the people grew restless and uneasy. In Egypt, they had been surrounded by images, monuments, paintings, and statues of Egypt’s many gods. Of the many gods worshiped by that culture, bulls were:
revered for their strength, fertility, and divine connection, bulls were central figures in religious ceremonies, agricultural rituals, and royal symbolism. Representations of these sacred animals appeared in sculptures, reliefs, paintings, and amulets, reflecting their profound significance in Egyptian theology. (www.historyandmyths.com)
So now, in the absence of a human leader and of any tangible, visible image of God himself, the people felt insecure and uncomfortable. During this time, they were receiving a regular source of water and a daily supply of manna from God. But they were also parked indefinitely. After an initial burst of excitement, travel, and progress, they had now paused at the base of Mount Sinai with no leader, no direction, and nothing visible to follow. So, they pressured Moses’ brother, Aaron, to make an idol for them.
To make this idol, they donated some of their own gold jewelry, which Aaron would melt down and pour into a mold. This would not have to be a large idol and could have been made within a day or two. During this time, Aaron also made an altar, which he placed between the people and the bull idol.
Once this altar and idol were in place, the people gathered for a day-long worship celebration. They offered the same kind of sacrifices which they would eventually offer to God in the tabernacle and they celebrated by eating, drinking, and dancing.
Scripture gives no indication that they did immoral or sensual things – only energetic and festive. Also, Scripture gives no indication that the people were worshiping another god. They called this idol “the god that brought us out of the land of Egypt” (32:4) and Aaron called their celebration “a festival to the Lord” (32:5). The problem was not in exchanging God for a false god. It was worshiping God in an inaccurate way which wrongly portrayed and misrepresented God.
The second word or command God had very recently given to Moses spoke clearly:
You shall not make for yourself a carved image—any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. (Exo 20:4-5)
This was a separate and distinct command from the first, which forbade them from worshiping another god. This second command forbade them from worshiping God by using idols to portray or represent him. As Douglas Stewart explains:
Building an altar in front of a god/idol conformed to the expected positioning of sacrifices in idolatry; it guaranteed that the god would see the offerings made to him and accept them. By contrast the orthodox biblical positioning of the altar in the courtyard of the tabernacle, and later temple, so that there was no direct line of sight from the ark in the holy of holies to the altar because of the curtain/veil hiding the ark was actually a positioning that required Israelites to have the faith to understand that the one true God actually saw what they did for him without having his idol right behind and facing the altar on which they did it.
As Jesus himself would one day say:
God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth. (Jn 4:24)
By worshiping God in an idolatrous way, the people were not only disobeying God’s second command given to them only days before (20:4-5), they were violating an agreement they had solemnly agreed to keep (24:3, 7):
All the people answered with one voice and said, “All the words which the Lord has said we will do.”
He took the Book of the Covenant and read in the hearing of the people. And they said, “All that the Lord has said we will do and be obedient.”
From this episode, we see two important personal, spiritual lessons for ourselves today:
First, we should resist any tendency to worship God as an idol. This is why we do not place a crucifix at the front of our auditorium or face a crucifix when we pray at home. Even though we might believe that we are worshiping God by doing these things, we are misrepresenting God and portraying him to ourselves in an inaccurate way.
econd, and more importantly, we must recognize that as frail, weak human beings, we are so easily drawn away to idolatry, not only from forces and influences outside us, but especially from within our own hearts.
An early church leader, called Ephrem of Syria, wisely observed that Moses’s absence gave the Israelites an opportunity to “worship openly what they had been worshiping in their hearts. No one was tempting them with an idol – they simply desired and produced one from their own hearts. The people had a strong desire to return to a materialistic version of God – something concrete, manmade, tangible, and visible.
We do the same today. We have a hard time loving and serving an invisible God, so we gravitate towards more material, tangible, and visible things. But whenever we turn to other things to meet our needs, satisfy our desires, and guide our lives – even if we believe these things themselves to be good – then we have made and worship an idol.
That’s why the Apostle John told believers, “Little children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 Jn 5:21). And theologian A.W. Pink said this:
Man must have an object, and when he turns from the true God, he at once craves a false one.
An idol doesn’t have to be a statue. It can be anything through which he hope to experience or receive those things which only God can provide, including ultimate and complete satisfaction. When we look to our jobs, hobbies, careers, politics and politicians, money, education, homes, relatives, children, and spouses to provide what only God alone can provide and to be what only God can be, then we do what the Israelites did.
So by placing an idol between them and God, even in their attempt at worshiping God, the people did not worship God at all but turned away from him.
Moses interceded to God for the people. (32:7-35)
This moment would not be forgotten, because it became part of Israel’s permanent soundtrack for worshiping God, recorded as music in Psa 106:19-23:
They made a calf in Horeb and worshiped the molded image. Thus they changed their glory into the image of an ox that eats grass. They forgot God their Savior, who had done great things in Egypt, wondrous works in the land of Ham, awesome things by the Red Sea. Therefore, He said that He would destroy them, had not Moses His chosen one stood before Him in the breach, to turn away His wrath, lest He destroy them.
This psalm emphasizes what the rest of Exo 32 explains. God was deeply displeased with his people for turning away from him by making an idol and attempting to worship him through that idol, but he forgave them because Moses interceded for them in prayer.
As the people participated in their idol worship activities, God informed Moses of their behavior. Both God and Moses were rightfully angry at this turn of events, especially in light of all that God had done for them in the weeks and months before and since he had just recently established his solemn covenant of commitment to them, in which they solemnly agreed to love and follow him.
But in these tense moments in which Moses felt the righteous turmoil in his soul, God revealed to Moses that Israel’s disobedience and disloyalty was so egregious that they deserved to be abandoned and destroyed. With this sobering realization, Moses (it says) “pleaded with the Lord his God” (32:11) to remain patient with his people and forgive their sins. Then again, after Moses had returned to the people, assessed the situation, and assigned proper consequences, he again prayed to the Lord to “forgive their sin” (32:32).
What was the result of Moses seeking God’s forgiveness for the people?
God renewed his covenant with them. (33:1–34:28)
The next two chapters (Exo 33-34) explain how Moses explained to the people God’s heartbroken response to their failure. God was saddened and indeed, very angry. Unlike our anger as sinful people. When God is angry, he has every right to be angry and his anger is right. And when God is angry, it shows us what really matters, what is really important, and the way things really are. We might view what the Israelites did with that idol as somewhat harmless and easy to forgive. But from God’s perspective, it was egregious and horribly wrong. Do we view our own idolatry that way?
What is remarkable here, though, is that despite his just anger against his people, God responded to Moses’ prayer by forgiving the people and renewing his covenant with them. To do this, God instructed Moses to return to the top of the mountain to receive the words of the covenant a second time, including the Ten Commandments. While this was going on at the top of the mountain, God made his presence very real to Moses and said:
The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation. (Exo 34:6-7)
Here God affirmed to Moses that though he was angry towards the people for their egregious sin, he was also – at the same time – merciful, gracious, longsuffering, good, true, and forgiving. At the same time, also, he does not overlook sin. So, by “visiting the iniquity of the fathers…to the third and fourth generation,” God meant that he does not overlook sin. If one person or one family or one generation of his people turn away from him, they would experience the consequences of doing so, but God would also continue to be faithful to his people, refusing to abandon them in the big picture over centuries of time, even if one person, one family, or one generation turned away.
And this will be a real emphasis for us as we go through this “Forever Faithful” preaching series in the next few months. As we look through the prophetic books of Hosea, Habakkuk, and Malachi, we will see how often and how badly God’s people turn away from him over centuries of time. But we will also see how faithful, loving, merciful, and loyal God is to them, generation after generation.
Relationship with God requires mediation.
A key takeaway for us today, though, is this – that relationship with God requires mediation. As we noted earlier, our hearts are so quick to make idols. John Calvin once famously said:
Man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols. Man’s mind, full as it is of pride and boldness, dares to imagine a god according to its own capacity; as it sluggishly plods, indeed is overwhelmed with the crassest ignorance, it conceives an unreality and an empty appearance as God.
We can look down on and see the problem with Israel making and worshiping a golden calf, but can we look down and see the problem with the idols that we are making today? Because our hearts are so strongly drawn to make idols and to view God in a more finite, limited, and inaccurate way – as something far less great, far less holy, far less infinite than he really is – then we need mediation
We need mediation in two ways. First, we need other people to intervene for us, to point out when and where we have erected idols in our hearts, where we have turned away from God. This is a hard thing to do, because idols are very personal things – often as personal as spouse, children, and family themselves. Our career, our money, our wrong religious ideas, our cultural taboos – all of these things are very personal when held, so for anyone to intervene and say, “that’s an idol,” is very hard to receive.
For this reason, we should thank God for anyone – any pastor or friend – who is willing to be like Moses and call out the idolatry in our lives. We should also be willing to be such a friend, and when we do make a sincere attempt, may we do so with the selfless, serious prayer that Moses himself modeled for us. He did not just march up to the people and call out their sin, he did so only after he had first spoke to God from his heart and saturated his heart and mind with the promises and aspirations of God’s Word.
Second, are most importantly, we all need a mediator not only like Moses but better than Moses – far better. That person is Jesus Christ. Listen to what Hebrews says about this:
Therefore, holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling, consider the Apostle and High Priest of our confession, Christ Jesus, who was faithful to Him who appointed Him, as Moses also was faithful in all His house. For this One has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses, inasmuch as He who built the house has more honor than the house. For every house is built by someone, but He who built all things is God. And Moses indeed was faithful in all His house as a servant, for a testimony of those things which would be spoken afterward, but Christ as a Son over His own house, whose house we are if we hold fast the confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm to the end. (Heb 3:3-6)
Here we see that Jesus Christ, not Moses, is the mediator we all need. He not only revealed God to us and prayed for us (as Moses also did), but he lived, died, and rose again in our place. He not only revealed to us where we have turned away from God and broken God’s covenant, but he fulfilled our obligations to God for us and makes us completely acceptable and pleasing to God in spite of our many failures. What an amazing mediator he is, there is no one like him.
Have you turned to Christ to receive God’s full forgiveness from sin? And if so, have you fully embraced and accepted what it means to be completely accepted and loved by God in spite of your many failures and continual tendency, still, to worship idols?
Imagine a farmer who paid top price at the county fair for a beautiful thoroughbred cow. He was convinced she would be the answer to all his needs. He expected her not only to give him milk, but to provide his meals, grow his wealth, and somehow bring him personal happiness, too. Day after day he waited for his cow to do what no cow could ever do—and day after day he grew more frustrated and disappointed.
It’s a silly picture, of course; no reasonable person would expect a farm animal to be the source of all good things to a person in life. Yet this is exactly what we do when we place our money, hobbies, careers, children, or even our spouse in the place that only God can fill. When we expect other things – including good things like our spouse, children, and more – to be what only God can be, we set ourselves up for the same disappointment, and we place those things between our hearts and the God who alone can sustain, satisfy, and renew us.
What’s more, we break the very heart of God, the God who alone rescues his people, made a covenant with his people, and lives within his people. But thank God, because of Jesus Christ our mediator, he is the God who renews his covenant, restores his people, and forgives our sins if we will trust in him alone. If we return to him, we will see that he is “merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth” (34:6-7).
Free From Guilt And Free From Sin
I Will Sing of the Mercies of the Lord

God formed a special relationship with his people.

God showed himself in a special way to his people.

God gave a special purpose to his people.

God revealed a special lifestyle for his people.

The people turned away from God. (32:1-6)

Moses interceded to God for the people. (32:7-35)

God renewed his covenant with them. (33:1–34:28)

Relationship with God requires mediation.