Exodus and the Kingdom of God (4)

​“Moses took half of the blood and put it in bowls, and the other half he splashed against the altar. Then he took the Book of the Covenant and read it to the people. They responded, “We will do everything the Lord has said; we will obey.” Moses then took the blood, sprinkled it on the people and said, “This is the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words.” (Ex 24:6-8)
 
We’ve been talking about the kingdom of God from the story of Exodus. There were two purposes for which God delivered the Israelites out of Egypt. The first purpose was to set them free from the oppression of the Egyptians. Exodus 2:22-25 says,
 
“The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. God heard their groaning… God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them.” (Ex 2:23-25)
 
But freeing them from their suffering was not the only reason God rescued them. He also wanted to bring them to the land of Canaan. These two purposes are written about in Exodus 3:8, which says,
 
“So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey…” (Ex 3:8)
 
And all of this was based on the covenant He had made with their ancestor, Abraham. In Genesis 15, God promised Abraham that He would give him many descendants and that He would give them the land where he now stood as an inheritance. He also showed Abraham that He would fulfill this promise through the Covenant of the Torch.
 
But God also told Abraham that his descendants would be strangers in a different country and be enslaved there for four hundred years because the sin of the people living in the promised land hadn't yet reached its full measure, which shows that one of the reasons God wanted to bring the Israelites into Canaan was to drive out the evil practices there.
 
We can find this purpose in Leviticus 18:24-25, in which God said to the Israelites through Moses, “Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, because this is how the nations that I am going to drive out before you became defiled. Even the land was defiled; so I punished it for its sin...” (Lv 18:24-25)
 
Here, the phrase “these ways” basically refers to sexual immoralities and child sacrifice, which is also written about in Leviticus 18. They were detestable to God.
 
These verses reveal God's purpose in bringing the Israelites out of Egypt. God wanted to bring them into the promised land, which was full of wickedness, so that they could drive out the evil practices and build a nation where God’s commands would be obeyed and His will would be done.
 
That’s the very definition of the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is wherever His people are obeying His commands and following His will under His sovereignty. That's the reason I say the essence of God's covenant with Abraham is the kingdom of God.
 
All the things that God promised to give Abraham by making the covenant with him are important elements of the kingdom of God, which means that what God truly wanted to accomplish by delivering the Israelites from Egypt was to build His kingdom in the promised land.
 
And all of these stories apply to our salvation. The exodus is a tangible model of our spiritual salvation and subsequent journey. This means that it is not the end for us to be forgiven of our sins and saved through the sacrifice and death of Jesus.
 
What we see from the exodus of the Israelites is that there’s a greater purpose for which God saves us, which is to make us His holy people who follow His will and fight against evil so that His kingdom may be built and expanded on earth through us.
 
That’s the reason I say the gospel of Jesus Christ exists to serve the gospel of the kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed. As we sang earlier, “The cross of salvation [is] only the start.” We were saved for more. We were redeemed for more. Every Christian is called to be a kingdom maker on earth by following God’s will, not the ways of the world, and by obeying His commands.
 
That’s the kingdom perspective I believe all Christians must have. This perspective will make us more passionate about knowing and keeping God's word. We should know that the reason Jesus died on the cross is to set us free from the effects of sin so that we can truly meet the righteous requirement of God’s law.
 
So, if we’re saved by God’s grace through Jesus Christ but neglect the purpose of our salvation, we make His precious sacrifice meaningless.
 
On Mount Sinai
Back to Exodus, God didn’t guide the Israelites directly to the promised land after delivering them from Egypt because He first needed to prepare them to be His people who would be able to build His kingdom there.
 
This preparation took place on Mount Sinai. There, God did three important things to prepare the people of Israel for His purpose.
 
1) God Gives His People His Law
First, God gave them His law for them to obey as we talked about last Sunday. The land of Canaan was defiled because of the evil practices of the people living there, and God wanted to build a nation where His will is done through the Israelites. For this to happen, it was necessary for them to know and obey God’s law.
 
God said, “… Do not follow their practices. You must obey my laws and be careful to follow my decrees. I am the Lord your God.” (Lv 18:3-4)
 
To make the Israelites obey His law, God descended on Mount Sinai in a terrifying way with thunder, lightning, fire, and smoke and with a loud trumpet sound.
 
He did this to make the Israelites fear Him so that they would obey His commands. As Moses said, “God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning” (Ex 20:20)
 
2) God Makes A Covenant with His People
The second thing God did to prepare the Israelites to be His holy people was to make a covenant with them on Mount Sinai, which is written about in Exodus 24.
 
Because the Israelites were so afraid that they didn’t want to hear directly from God, they asked Moses to listen to God and bring them His words. So Moses went up the mountain and God gave Moses His law there. The laws are written in Exodus 21-23.
 
After that, Moses came down from the mountain and told the Israelites all of God’s words and laws. And this is how they responded. Exodus 24:3 says, “they responded with one voice, “Everything the Lord has said we will do.”” (Ex 24:3)
 
Based on this response, God made a covenant with them. Verses 4-8 says,
 
“Moses then wrote down everything the Lord had said. He got up early the next morning and built an altar at the foot of the mountain and set up twelve stone pillars representing the twelve tribes of Israel. Then he sent young Israelite men, and they offered burnt offerings and sacrificed young bulls as fellowship offerings to the Lord. Moses took half of the blood and put it in bowls, and the other half he splashed against the altar. Then he took the Book of the Covenant and read it to the people. They responded, “We will do everything the Lord has said; we will obey.” Moses then took the blood, sprinkled it on the people and said, “This is the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words.” (Ex 24:4-8)
 
Here, we find the two important components that were used for the covenant ceremony—God’s word and blood.
 
The ceremony involved two steps. First, Moses took the Book of the Covenant and read it to the Israelites, and they responded to it by saying, “We will do everything the Lord has said; we will obey.” Second, Moses took the blood of the covenant and sprinkled it on the people.
 
By doing these two things through Moses, God made a covenant with the Israelites. It was at this moment that they officially became God’s people.
 
The Israelites had been God's people even before this covenant. However, their relationship with God was not formal because it was based on the covenant God had made with their ancestor Abraham, not with the Israelites themselves.
 
So until God made the covenant with the Israelites, He did not punish them or rebuke them when they served other gods in Egypt or followed their wicked ways. But, after God made a covenant with them, it became a great sin for them to worship other gods.
 
The two things used in the ceremony—God’s word and the blood of the covenant—were essential for them to become God’s people. And this is also true of our relationship with God.
 
In his first letter, the apostle Peter defines Christians as those who are “chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, to be obedient to Jesus Christ and sprinkled with his blood: Grace and peace be yours in abundance.” (1 Pt 1:2)
 
The apostle Paul also defines the church as something “[God] bought with his own blood” (Ac 20:28)
 
What we know from these verses is the fact that we can have a covenantal relationship with God through the blood of Jesus Christ. Just like how Moses sprinkled the blood of an animal on the people of Israel when they responded to God’s word, our hearts were sprinkled with Jesus’ blood when we believed in Him and responded to the gospel we heard, which means that we, like the Israelites, have a covenantal relationship with God through the blood of Jesus.
 
That’s the reason Jesus called His blood “the blood of the covenant”. He said,
 
“Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Mt 26:27-28)
 
Jesus’ blood is the blood of the covenant, which means that it does more than just forgive us of our sins. It also makes us God’s people bound by His covenant. By drinking Jesus’ blood, we not only experience the forgiveness of our sins, but also enter a special relationship with Him.
 
So, why is it so important that we have entered into a covenantal relationship with God? It is important because it shows that God is sovereign over our salvation and over everything we do as His people.
 
God’s Commands and God’s Covenant
God didn't just give the Israelites His law; He also established a special relationship with them through the covenant. God’s commands and His covenant are the two important things through which He works to build His kingdom on earth.
 
Even though the law and the covenant both come from God and are closely related to each other, there is a big difference between the two in terms of who carries them out.
 
The fulfillment of a command depends on the person who receives it, not on the person who gives it. 
 
For example, growing up, the word I heard most often from my parents was "study.” If we consider it a command, then the fulfillment of the command “study” depended on me, not my parents, even though they were the ones who gave the command.
 
If I listened to my parents and really studied, it means that the command was obeyed, which didn’t happen very often. However, if I disobeyed my parents’ order to study, it means that the order wasn’t fulfilled regardless of my parents’ will.
 
So, the fulfillment of a command depends on the person who receives it, not the person who gives it.  We see countless examples of this in the Scriptures.
 
For example, in Kadesh Barnea, God said to the Israelites, “Go up and take possession of the land I have given you” (Dt 9:23). This is the command given to the Israelites. However, this command wasn’t carried out because they refused to go into the land after spying it out for forty days.
 
The verse continues, “But you rebelled against the command of the Lord your God. You did not trust him or obey him.” (Dt 9:23)
 
So, even though God gave the Israelites the command to go into the promised land, it wasn’t carried out because the people of Israel chose not to obey it.
 
This is the weakness of a command. No matter who gives them or what the intentions behind them are, the fulfillment of a command depends on the person to whom the command is given.
 
That's why God also uses covenants and promises along with commands to accomplish His purposes. Unlike a command, the fulfillment of a promise depends on the one who makes the promise, not on the one to whom the promise is made. No matter who the recipient of the promise is, the fulfillment of the promise depends on the one who makes it.
 
We can also see an example of this from the book of Exodus. Long before God commanded the Israelites to go into the promised land, He had promised Abraham that He would bring his descendants there. And this eventually happened, even though it was delayed for about 40 years because of the disobedience of the first generation of the exodus.
 
So, according to the Scriptures, one of the ways God works to fulfill His purposes is by working through His covenant and commands.
 
And this is good news for us. If our salvation depended on our obedience, then none of us would be able to have perfect confidence in our salvation. But thankfully, our salvation depends on God’s promise to save us and on what He has done and will do regardless of who we are. That’s where our assurance of salvation comes from.
 
There are many important promises in the Bible, such as God’s promises to Abraham, Moses, Joshua, and David, but the most important one is about the coming of the Messiah. And, as we can see from the New Testament, every promise about the first coming of the Messiah that was written about in the Old Testament was perfectly fulfilled in the life of Jesus.
 
But there are still promises about the second coming of Jesus that remain unfulfilled. However, we can have confidence that Jesus will come back with His kingdom and restore us to Himself because we know the One who made this promise. He is God almighty, who is faithful to His covenant. 
 
And this is what the day Jesus returns will look like according to the Bible. The apostle John saw visions from God and wrote down what would happen in the book of Revelation. Revelation 7:9-10 says,
 
“After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.” (Rv 7:9-10)
 
David also saw that day and wrote, “May the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you rule the peoples with equity and guide the nations of the earth. May the peoples praise you, God; may all the peoples praise you… All the ends of the earth will fear him.” (Ps 67:4-7)
 
Even though this day hasn’t come yet, we know it will come when these words of promise are fulfilled. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone who reads, knows, and even believes the promise will participate in it when it actually happens.
 
God always works faithfully to fulfill His promise, but He also wants His people to join in His mission to bless all nations and bring them to Him by obeying His commands. And, the history of Israel also shows us that only those who actively obeyed God’s command were able to see His promise fulfilled and enjoy it.
 
The same command and promise to enter the promised land were given to both the first and second generations of the exodus, but only the second generation could actually participate in the promise because they obeyed the command, unlike the first generation.
 
This means that, even though God has promised to make His kingdom come on earth, only those who actively believe the promise and obey His commands to make it happen can participate in its ultimate fulfillment.
 
As Christians, we’re commanded to love God and love our neighbors. We’re also commanded to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ and make disciples of all nations.
 
These are the commands that we, who have been brought into a covenantal relationship with God by the blood of Jesus Christ, are to remember, obey, and follow.
 
I hope and pray that all of us here today can truly understand who we’ve become in God by Jesus’ precious blood of the covenant so that we may follow God’s will for us, actively join in His mission to build His kingdom on earth, and obey His word. My hope is that we all may enter the kingdom of God when it comes true with the second coming of Jesus Christ.
 
Let’s pray.
 
[Prayer]
Dear Lord, thank You for giving us this great chance to remind ourselves of who we are in You and the promises we are given as Your people, covenanted by Jesus’ precious blood.
 
We thank You for every promise You’ve faithfully fulfilled and will fulfill in the future. We thank You for ceaselessly working for our salvation.
 
Now Lord, we want to participate in Your mission for the world by following Your will and obeying Your commands. Please continue to remind us of who we are, give us the desire to love Your word, and strengthen us to obey it so that we may be used as Your vessels through which You build Your kingdom on earth and so that we may all participate in Your kingdom when Jesus comes back.
 
We pray in Jesus’ precious name, Amen.
 
[Reflection Questions]
1) Is there a promise from God that you want to see fulfilled in your life? Do you have a verse that reminds you of this promise?
 
2) What do you think is the relationship between God’s commands and God’s covenant? Do you think they are related to each other or not?
 
3) Christians are those who are bought by and sprinkled with Jesus’ precious blood of the covenant. How do you think Christians should live out their covenantal relationship with God?