Pastor Stephen Pierce preached Exodus 34:6-7. He said that the Bible is a mosaic of God’s redemptive work. Lector: Erin Warmbier
Pastor Stephen Pierce preached Exodus 34:6-7. He said that the Bible is a mosaic of God’s redemptive work.
Lector: Erin Warmbier
Peace be with you! My name is Stephen and I’m one of the pastors here. Hope the summer is treating you well.
If you’re new to Sojourn, we preach through books of the Bible. We just finished up the book of Hebrews and in the fall we’ll be going through the book of Mark. Going through books of the Bible is called Biblical theology. Taking all the themes in the Bible and putting them together is called systematic theology. So Biblical theology is going through the Bible line by line and systematic theology is ordering those lines into topics. You’ve got to be able to navigate both of those to understand the full council of God. But if you take a step back and think about it, you ever wonder, “Why do we care so much about the Bible?”
Well first you have to ask, what even is this thing? That’s an important questions to answer before using something.
There’s a comedian named Brian Regan. And he talks about going to the gym. He goes, they tell how all the machines work and then they just leave him. And he forgets everything that he’s been told. So he decides just to go to the first machine he sees and try it. And as he gets on people are starting to watch him. He’s feeling the pressure to do it quick and right. So he gets his arms where he thinks they should go and his legs where he thinks they should go and he just starts to move. And then someone comes up to him from the gym and says, “Sir could you get out of the painter’s scaffolding?”
He was using the scaffolding for something it was absolutely not made for. And we can do that with the Bible if we’re not careful.
So, with that being said, let me ask you, “What is the Bible?” That is a complicated question. Any sort of simple answer you give needs further explanation.
The bible is more than the sum of it’s parts. It has some history, but it’s more than just history. It has some moral and ethical commands, but it is more than moral and ethical commands. It has some theological ideas, but it is more than theology. The Bible is stories and poems and morals and ethics and history and theology and host of other things. What are all these pieces doing together?
Well if you think about it, all these small pieces fitting together in this masterfully written book of multiple different authors is like a mosaic. All these small pieces of history and theology and ethics fit together to reveal one picture.
But what is it? Well a one sentence answer can’t do it all justice, but for this morning I would like you to consider this definition: The Bible is a mosaic of the God’s redemptive work.
Where do we get that idea? Well, we see what the Bible says about itself.
Romans 16:25-26 says, Now to Him who has power to strengthen you according to my gospel and the proclamation about Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery kept silent for long ages but now revealed and made known through the prophetic Scriptures, according to the command of the eternal God to advance the obedience of faith among all nations
and
Luke 24:27 says Then Jesus took them through the writings of Moses and all the prophets, explaining from all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.
and
1 Tim 3:15 says, and you know that from childhood you have known the sacred Scriptures, which are able to give you wisdom for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
So according to these verses the scriptures, when considered as a whole, are God’s revealed plan for saving humanity and the center of that plan is Jesus. We can only know about God and his plan if God reveals it. Going back to the mosaic imagery, if the Bible is made up of a bunch of tiles, when you’re zoomed in, you might see just one story, but when you zoom out, and you see all of those stories, you see Jesus.
So if that is what the Bible is, what do we do with it? Well, the first step would be to read it. Ok, but how do we read it? People start cults when they read this thing poorly. So let’s just give some basic ground rules. So we’ve got three rules for reading the Bible well.
1) What does this say?
2) What does this mean?
3) How does this point to Jesus?
In order to show you this hermeneutic at work and the complicated nature of the Bible, we’re going to look at how the same words show up in the Bible but mean different things and point to Jesus in different ways. The verse we read this morning is the most quoted Bible verse in the Bible. It shows up here in Exodus 34 for the first time and is quoted over 20 different times through the rest of the scriptures. So we’re going to use this verse to understand how the words may say the same thing, but what they mean and how they point to Jesus are different. So let’s take a look at this passage.
What does it say? This is when Moses asked to see God. God puts Moses in the cleft of a rock, covers him with his hand.
“And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.”
What does it say? Well first it it says, “This is God speaking.” The verse also says the Lord is compassionate and gracious abounding in love. He blesses and punishes guilty people and their children. So what does that look like in real life? How do we see the character of God in action?
That’s a great question. And the second step of our hermeneutic. First step is what does it say. Second step is to ask, “What does it mean?”
Well, the fact that it is God speaking means that God is revealing himself. This is where we get that part of the definition of the what is the Bible. It means that in order for us to know God, God has to reveal himself. We can know some things about him, such as he’s glorious as we see in Psalm 19. That’s could natural revelation. But to know about God himself and his nature and his plans, that’s called special revelation and that only happens when God speaks. We can’t just find him on our own. We knock. He opens the door.
What else does this verse mean? It says he is gracious and compassionate. You see example of the Lord being gracious and compassionate. When he has freed the Israelites from slavery, they complain about God. They say they will worship God forever but within about 2 hours they’re worshiping a golden calf. God says he is going to kill all of them but Moses requests that he not do that and God relents. He is gracious and compassionate and forgives sin.
But then we have other stories like in Joshua 7 where Achan steals from God and his whole family is punished.
And how you read this passage shapes how you engage with God and with others. If you read this say, “God is love. He does not punish.” Then you might say our behaviors do not matter. Do whatever you want. Or you might focus on the second half of this verse and say our behaviors are the only thing that matters. If you want God to love you, you have to obey or he’ll punish you and your family.
Or could it be that God is both loving and merciful and also just and fair? I think that is the answer. But how can that be? And who gets to define what is love and what is justice? We have so many stories about people who do awful things getting a good
deal out of life and people who are good people get an awful deal. What does the Bible say about that?
Well, again, the Bible does not speak to every situation. If someone says give me a Bible verse for why God is allowing this awful thing to me, you can’t. You don’t have a verse that says, “Bill is going to get cancer because he did not read his Bible enough but he’ll get better if 5 people pray for him." We do have answers to what God has revealed to us which is how he is using all things to redeem us. He is using all things to bring his people back to him.
We don’t have answers to why God allowed mercy in one specific situation but not in another. We have to use all of these smaller stories and passages so that way we can see the bigger picture of what the whole Bible is about. “The Bible is a mosaic of God’s redemptive work.”
How do we see these characteristics of God at work in redeeming humanity and bringing him to himself? That’s our third step in our hermeneutic which is “How does this point to Jesus?” The redemptive story of the Bible, the story of how God brings his people home to him, is centered on Jesus. Everything that God reveals is pointing to Jesus. How do we know that? Jesus said so. On the road to Emmaus in Luke 24 he tells two of his followers that the Law and the Prophets are all pointing to him.
So step one is “What does it say?” This verse describes the character of God. Step two is “what does it mean?” The verse means that God is loving and merciful and just and fair.
Step 3 “How does this point to Jesus?” It shows us that God is loving and wants to forgive sins in order that we might live with him in paradise again. How can God do that and be just and fair? Sin deserves death and eternal separation from God. That is fair and just. How is it that God can be merciful and just? It would seem impossible. There would have to be a human who would be willing to take the debt and punishment that a sinner deserves and trade places with them. But that would only work for one human. We need a human who could have eternal life within them. But the only being that has eternal life within themselves is God. We’d need someone who is fully man and fully God who would be willing to absorb the death and evil that humans have brought on themselves. But such a thing is impossible. Oh wait. That’s the fuller revelation of God in Jesus Christ that Romans 16 tells us about.
This is what the Bible is. “The Bible is a mosaic of God’s redemptive work.”
Over the next three weeks we will continue to look at the Bible and how to read it well. Next week, we’ll be looking at how people can take the scriptures and twist them. Then we’ll come back and expand on this idea of how to read the Bible well. And in our last week we’ll put all of these ideas together to learn what is the purpose of the Bible.
But for this morning, take time consider what the Bible is. This wonderful, masterfully written literary work compiled over thousands of years written but multiple authors that withstood the test of time and relentless opposition that has changed lives and shaped destinies. What is this thing?
Let’s pray.