The Covenant of Obedience

We are going to open and have a look at the covenant of Moses, the covenant made with Moses and Israel. Now if you've been following us online, we've been working through a series that traces the whole story of the Bible. It's an epic undertaking to preach about the Bible and to try and squeeze that in into eight or so weeks is a daunting task. But the question is, how do we cover the story of the Bible that spans thousands of years, that deals with hundreds of individual lives and touches hundreds of thousands of lives in extension. The narrative from beginning to the end is this gracious story of God and how He attempts to rescue humanity.

And we see throughout the Bible and in this series the various attempts of God to try and reclaim and rescue a fallen humanity, a humanity that is at huge peril. One of the things that I hope for us to get out of this series is to be able to understand the big picture of the Bible. That is what is really, really important in this series, for us to understand why the Bible unfolds the way it does and why there are certain people that the Bible sort of apparently zooms in on. The Adams and the Noahs and the Abrahams and the Moseses and all those guys. Now over the past month, we've seen a pattern emerge where God makes a covenant with some big names.

Like I've said, the Adams and the Moseses and so on. God makes a promise and that is called a covenant. A covenant, which is a firm promise. It is something that is really, really solemn and serious. And we've seen that a covenant is an agreement between God and human beings where God promises blessings if the conditions are kept and threatens curses if the conditions are broken.

Now we understand that these covenants, these agreements, these promises are parameters that God wants to set in place for humans to flourish. These are covenants. These are agreements that God makes with us for our behalf, for our benefit. They are far from being stark. They are far from burdensome agreements.

They are always far more dependent on God being kind than humanity to be good and perfect in obedience to them. They are really imbalanced towards God's mercy and kindness. We saw in the previous few weeks, there was a covenant of works, the covenant with Adam and Eve, moving on to the covenant of common grace, which is the covenant, and then the Abrahamic covenant, which is sort of the beginning or the very, very specific outlaying of the covenant of grace. And that covenant of grace really then runs through. Although, I would argue it starts here already, that's where it's communicated more specifically, and it runs through all the way to the end of the Bible.

Today, we come to the next covenant God makes in the story of the Bible. And again, it's not a surprise that it's another big name. It's Moses. Now after Abraham, we see that God had indeed been faithful to Abraham, if you know the story. Abraham and his descendants grew.

Abraham, as part of the covenant, God promised him that he would become a father of many nations, that he would have many sons. And through that, his descendants would become a blessing to the world, a blessing to the nations. And we see in the story that Abraham's descendants grew and grew and grew. Abraham has a son, Isaac, and Isaac has another son called Jacob. And then Jacob has 12 sons who become the patriarchs of the 12 tribes of Israel.

They eventually settle in a place called Egypt with the influence of their brother Joseph. And over four hundred years, the Bible points out that Israelites flourish in Egypt. They multiply. They grow. They are fruitful like God said they would be.

But two things happen in those four hundred years. Israel forgets who God is. They start worshipping the gods of the Egyptians alongside Him. And then secondly, Pharaoh becomes afraid of the growth of the Israelites. He worries that these people, these foreigners living in his country will overthrow him.

So what does he do? He enslaves them. He uses them to build the cities, the great cities, and the great statues of Egypt. And so Israel are in trouble after four hundred years of that promise to Abraham. Exodus 2:23-24 starts like this.

This is how the story of Israel in Egypt starts. The people of Israel groaned because of their slavery, and they cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God, and God heard their groaning. And God remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. And if you know the story, through an incredible act of grace, God rescues Israel from Egypt through the leadership, through the vessel-ship of Moses.

Now the question we have to ask is why does God rescue Israel? I'm sure there probably were other slaves in Egypt. Why rescue Israel? Was it because they were particularly faithful to Him?

Was it because they were particularly a good people that did good things? Exodus 2:23-24 says, no. God saves them because He had promised Abraham that He would. He is covenant bound on His own honour and character to act on their behalf. And so God grips Israel wonderfully. That is, the book of Exodus says that God carries Israel through the desert like a son is carried on the shoulders of their father as they flee the Egyptians, and God then brings them to this place called Mount Sinai.

And at Mount Sinai, God wants to reestablish and reconfirm and remind Israel of this covenant, of this promise. And at the foot of Mount Sinai, God gives the Israelites His law. And He says, this is my desire. This is my will for you to live in obedience to me, in faithfulness, covenant faithfulness. He gives them the ten commandments.

In Deuteronomy 4:13, this is how Moses describes the reason for these ten commandments. God, he says, declared to you His covenant, which He commanded you to perform. That is the ten commandments. Like any covenant like we saw last time, this covenant that is reaffirmed and re-promised again has blessings and curses attached. Israel, over four hundred years, had forgotten the promise to Abraham.

And so God lays out several times across those forty years in the wilderness, the blessings that He wants to give Israel for their faithfulness to Him. I want to be your God. I want you to be my people. That covenant, God reemphasises the blessings and the curses attached. And like we said, there always are blessings and curses involved.

Firstly, we see that things haven't changed since the beginning. They come down to the exact same blessings that God gave to Adam and Eve and confirmed with Abraham. Three blessings: place, people, and presence. Place, people, and presence. In Exodus 23, God promises a place, a new paradise for Israel.

This will be yours. I will bring you to the place that I have prepared. I will set your border from the Red Sea down south to the Sea of the Philistines and from the wilderness to the Euphrates. Exodus 23 shows one of the blessings. God will also give them a people.

God says in Exodus 23:26 and 30, none shall miscarry or be barren in your land. They will multiply like they were meant to under Adam and Eve. Little by little, I will drive your enemies out from before you until you have increased and possessed the land. And then in the same chapter, Exodus 23:20, God promises His presence with them. Behold, I send an angel before you to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place I have prepared.

Now this promise of presence is hugely emphasised in the story of the Exodus. Remember, the angel of the Lord is seen in the great pillar of smoke that rested on the camp of the Israelites, the pillar of smoke by day and the pillar of fire by night. It is the presence of God. However, that becomes the focus of Exodus chapters 25 right through to the end in 40. Almost entirely the space of Exodus is concerned with His presence. Because these chapters outline the makeshift temple that was going to be constructed for God in the Israelite camp.

The tabernacle, it was called. The tent of meeting. God is set up in the heart of the Israelite camp as they travel through the wilderness. God dwells with His people, therefore, in a special way. This is all to show the nations around Israel as they're travelling through this barren land that God is with them, that He has chosen them especially. As well as these blessings which are not new, just reconfirmed, God again lays out the danger of covenantal unfaithfulness.

He says there will be severe consequences, curses, implications, consequences will happen if they are unfaithful to God. Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 spell these out very specifically and you can, by all means, go and have a look at them yourselves. Leviticus 26, Deuteronomy 28. But here's a summary in Deuteronomy 28 for the consequence of covenantal unfaithfulness. God says, whereas you were as numerous as the stars of heaven, you shall be left few in number because you did not obey the voice of the Lord your God.

And as the Lord took delight in doing you good and multiplying you, so the Lord will take delight in bringing ruin upon you and destroying you. You shall be plucked off the land that you are entering to take possession of it. And the Lord will scatter you among all peoples from one end of the earth to the other. And there you shall serve other gods of wood and stone, which neither you nor your fathers have known. And so here we find the heartbreaking and terrifying consequences of rejecting God and His covenant.

Can you see this is the inversion of the blessings? The blessings are removed. You shall be left few in number. People has been overturned. The blessing of place will be removed.

You shall be plucked from the land. And then most horrifying, the blessing of presence is removed. You shall serve other gods of wood and stone, which you nor your fathers have not known. So now we've seen the blessings. We've seen the curses again.

What are the conditions of the promise? What did Israel have to do to receive these blessings? Well, is where the ten commandments come in. The ten commandments are a sign of Israel's faithfulness to God. Obedience to these laws, God says, shows whether Israel is faithful to God or not.

How? Because it shows the faith behind these deeds, these actions that show a love for God. The commandments show that they trust God. Now this is where we kind of have to pause because we need a little bit of correction to our theology maybe here. There are many Christians today that think that the Old and the New Testament are split directly on the law, that we have the Old Testament that is all about doing things and keeping the law, and the New Testament is all about grace.

But if you think this, you are wrong. Perfect obedience to the ten commandments was not a condition to God's love, was not a condition to maintaining covenantal faithfulness with God. Let me stress this again. Israel were not saved based on their perfect obedience to the law. Because why would God think about this.

Why would God give all those other laws for sacrifices if He expected them to live by it perfectly? Why would God create something called the day of atonement where once a year, a goat would be sacrificed on behalf of Israel and their sin? Why would God allow for people's inability to obey the law to be part of holding onto the law perfectly? Why does God give the ten commandments? It's because it reveals the heart.

It reveals the heart. If the ten commandments aren't the condition for keeping the covenant, then what was it? Why did God give us the law then? Why all this focus in the Old Testament on the law? Because the law shows who you love.

The law shows who you love. You remember a few months ago, not very long ago at all, we actually went through a series on the ten commandments. And as we worked through it, we saw again and again that these things that God gave His people, these laws, had three functions. Three functions. Firstly, and most importantly, the law of God brings God honour.

It honours the God we love. The very fact that we commit ourselves to living with peace with one another, the very fact that we live healthy, good lives, striving for unity and love. By this very act, we bless the heart of our Father in heaven who is pleased when we do this. But the reason we do this is because of something incredibly important and something that has happened even before we've decided to live obediently. We live the laws because we have been rescued.

We live these laws and these commandments because we've been saved, and that was not different for Israel. Israel, remember, cried out to an unknown god, and God heard them, and God rescued them. They were saved before they were doing the right thing. God gives them the ten commandments then, the law to love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your mind, with all of your strength and your soul.

Why? Because God had found them dying in Egypt and then set them free and says, now love me. Come back to me. What do we do when we want to thank our rescuer? We do anything they want.

You do absolutely anything they ask of you when they've saved your life. And Israel had been rescued by God apart from any faithfulness to Him out of pure grace, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham and He rescued them. And then at Mount Sinai, He says, this is who I am. This is what I love. I love life, therefore you shall not murder.

I love truth, therefore you shall not lie. I love faithfulness, therefore you shall not commit adultery. This is who I am. And now that you know who I am, love me. Love me.

So Christian, we need to be reminded this morning that we obey God because we love Him. We obey God because we love Him. We obey God because we want to please Him. Why? Because our God has saved us.

He is our rescuer, and now we do whatever He wants us to do. Secondly, obeying God is good for us. It brings joy. Psalm 19:8 says, the laws of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart. The apostle John writes that God's commands are a joy, not a burden.

The fact is the way that God has constructed our lives works perfectly, works best when we live according to that plan. Remember the promise. Remember the blessing that God gave Adam and Eve. You shall flourish. You shall multiply and fill the earth, and you shall enjoy it.

He said to them, the earth and all its intricacies and beauties is our playground. It is the lie of Satan, however, that tries to convince us that God is robbing us of living this abundant life. Time and time again, we see that obedience to God's will brings joy. Obey God and you will have peace. Obey God and you will have happiness.

Obey God and your life will be good. And then the third biblical reason for obedience to God is that it blesses the world. It blesses the world. Just before God gives the ten commandments in Exodus 20, in chapter 19, God says this to Moses. He says, now therefore, if you will indeed hear my voice and obey my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples. God says.

For he says, all the earth is mine, but you shall be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. The apostle Peter builds on this in the New Testament. He says to the Christians, you Christians, you church are a chosen race. He uses the same language, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvellous light. Priests.

Priests are what we are. Now remember what a priest is. He's a go between, between God and people. God has chosen a certain people, first Israel and now the church, to show, to declare, to live out the excellencies of God. By obeying God, we live a different life to show others.

We are different. We are different. This idea should be a blessing to us, and this difference should be attractive to the world.

Remember what God promised Abraham? Your descendants will fill the earth. They will become as numerous as the sand on the seashore, and you will be a blessing to the nations. And so this is something important for us as church to remember. Holiness, godlikeness is mission minded.

It is not becoming a monk somewhere on, I don't know, the Gold Coast hinterland, although Gary and his family are living that way. It is not going and living in a monastery somewhere and trying to not become soiled in some way. Holiness is mission minded. It is about reaching out to the people and inviting them to come to this amazing God. This God who wants to give blessing.

Blessing. Holiness is mission minded. Christian, you are meant to stick out. You will stick out. In the same passage, Peter writes, keep your conduct among the Gentiles honourable so that when they speak evil against you, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.

Obedience to God blesses the world. But all of these things, these three things are just symptoms of something that lies much deeper and is something that the law exposes. It reveals the heart. Whether or not you obey God's will, whether or not you are living in covenantal faithfulness to Him, it shows who you truly love. When we start to understand the magnificence of this covenant promise, this amazing golden thread woven throughout the story of the Bible, we see that God has been lovingly creating a people who will be different from the world purely because He has desired to set them free, and they will be different from the world.

They will be different from the world. Now Satan will try and tell you. Satan will try and tell you that you shouldn't be different, that you should shrink back and look like the rest of us. Get drunk like the rest of us. Sleep around like the rest of us.

Abuse your privilege like the rest of us. Indulge in the same talk as us. Idolise the same things as us. But you see, when we look no different to the world and when we disobey God's laws, then we have become the world. And if we have become the world, we are not God's special people anymore.

How can this be though, we can ask? Isn't it just about having faith? Aren't we saved by faith in Jesus alone? Absolutely, we are. But if we have indeed become just like the rest of the world, fully indulging, fully consuming, fully engaging, casting off the rule of God, then the breaking of the law is probably just showing your true colours, who you really love.

Your good deeds won't save you. That's true. Your good deeds can't save you. But your bad deeds, they may just show who you really are. You don't love God, therefore, you love yourself.

Jesus is not your beloved saviour. He is a means to an end. You believe that you can live like the world and have Jesus on your side, but you fail to understand, you've set yourself up directly against Him. The law shows that you hate Jesus and you love yourself. Jesus used the analogy of a fruit tree.

Remember that? He said, you will know them by their fruit. Those who love Jesus, those who follow Jesus, or those who don't. Jesus said, you will know them by their fruit. Now to push that analogy a bit further this morning, imagine two fruit trees.

One is dead, the other is alive. How can you tell that one is dead or alive? Well, potentially from whether they have leaves or not, but more specifically, whether they have fruit. Right? A living tree will bear fruit.

A dead tree will not. Now does fruit on a tree make it alive? Not really. You could technically stick-tape an apple onto a dead tree and nothing changes. It is still dead.

Fruit on the tree is evidence that the tree itself possesses life, that it has roots that seep in moisture and life, leaves that absorb sunlight. There is strength in its leaves, in its twigs. In the same way, God says, you can be dead in your sin, utterly consumed with living your life in any other way than God's. In fact, you may be running at a hundred miles an hour to sink your teeth into everything but God, but you are dead. You are dead.

Your heart, God says, is stone cold dead. Your mind is shrivelled up and corrupted. And we may say, but we do a few nice things from time to time, but that is just stick-taping an apple onto a dead twig. This might be us this morning. This may be you this morning.

And if it is, I need you to listen. You have to stop. You must repent. You must come to the Lord again. If you are convicted by these words this morning, you must stop sinning and filling yourself up with this world.

Come back to God, repent, and put your faithful obedience in Him. But even then, I must stress to you, even then, you won't be saved by that decision. You can only be saved by His forgiveness. Forgiveness. The fact is that many years ago, God sent His Son and made that possible.

As a glorious fulfilment of the story will show us, this story of promise, Jesus came to absorb your sin, to become dead and shrivelled up in your place so that, as the Bible says, God made Him who knew no sin to become sin for us. So that in Him, we might become the righteousness of God. If you are a dead tree with stick-taped fruit, don't go away this morning without making a change. And I don't care how drastic that is. I don't care how painful it might be.

Please make that change and receive the reconciliation that God wants your heart to truly have. Talk to someone, talk to me after the service or during the week, but don't let this chance slip by. But then there may be others. Others of us sitting here who are saved, who know they are saved, who know they have received this new life, who are living their lives in honour and glory to God. To them, to you, I wanna say stand firm.

Stand firm. Resist Satan. Resist the noises and the messages that just sweep over us. Remain steadfast when the world tries to lure you back and pray for those who have. Pray for those who have fallen away.

Pray for them. Will you please reach out to them? Show them and explain to them the mercy and the grace and the love of this God who they are missing out on. Hold out this gospel to them. So God makes this particular covenant with Moses and Israel.

It's not a new covenant. It is the same story. That in view of His great mercy, His incredible rescue, that they should continue to be His people by living lives that are different. Lives that are good. Lives that they will get blessing from.

Lives that will be good for the nations around them. Lives that bring joy and pleasure to the God who they love. Friends, our God is so good to us. He's done such incredible things for us. Let us live joyful, happy, peaceful lives in honour to this God.

Amen. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we desire to live lives that are free of guilt, free of shame. We thank you, Lord, that You have rescued. You rescued.

You are a God who rescues. We thank you for the nation of Israel. We thank you for their incredible rescue. We thank you for the promise and the covenant You established again with Moses and them. We thank you that through them, Jesus would come.

That through Him, He would obey and keep this law of love completely. That when we disobey and we show our hearts as unfaithful to You, that we show our hearts as unloving towards our good God and rescuer. Lord, Jesus did not. Jesus did not. And we thank you, Lord, for His payment, His sacrifice, Him becoming the sacrificial lamb on that day of atonement two thousand years ago.

Thank you that You've taken care of our sin. And now, Father, You've set us free to live lives that bring glory and pleasure and honour to You. We thank you for the Spirit who we've been reminded of again today that is living in our hearts, that is empowering us, convicting us, growing us to live lives that are wonderful and beautiful. Lord, please continue and finish this work that You have started in us. Lord, please don't leave us to our own devices.

And Father, right now, give us the conviction, give us the strength to make the changes that we've been convicted of. Father, we thank you that You love us all the same. We thank you that You will not, by Your own promise, by Your own covenant, leave us. By Your very honour, based on Your character, God, You remember us. You will not forsake us.

And so, Lord, like we've already sung this morning, we give our lives to You. We give our lives to You. Take it and use it, God. We pray for those who don't know You, those who have walked away from You. God, we pray for their hearts.

We pray for their minds. God, use us to communicate and to bring the blessing of Your salvation to them. All the glory goes to You, God, for what You have done. In Jesus' name, we say this. Amen.