Answers in Genesis--Fall 2016--Lesson 7: God Calls Moses

It's been cool lately to, we've been behind the children in the past, but now we're like right on track with them and so it's been pretty fun like driving home from church and the kids will be talking about what they learned in Matt Kaufman's class and they'll be like, oh, that's what we were talking about. So we're like last week with those raise your hand if you were here last week to see those videos. Yeah, so my kids saw those videos too and so we're just like, can you believe that we're just geeking out about all the information.

yeah, that was just really, really interesting stuff.

And so that's part of what we're gonna, we'll do a little bit of review from last week. I'm gonna try not to bore you guys every week with too long of a review. The, the main question, one of the main questions we're gonna try to get into this morning. Hopefully you saw the email last night.

Is does God use imperfect people to accomplish his plans? Does he? Well, that's a good thing. Otherwise, none of us would be useful.

but we see that in our text today. in our prayer family ministry, as you guys know, we're going through the seven seas of history. The lesson today is called God Calls Moses. Part of our quarter called God is in control, and boy, we are sure seeing that.

that God is in control of history and so that's just jumping off the page in every lesson. so we're gonna do a little bit of review, study a couple of texts from Exodus and hopefully make some good application. In the past, we've, we keep emphasizing the authority of God's word. Really cool to look at that archaeology stuff last week, but even if we didn't find archaeological demonstration for every single pass of scripture, we still depend on the authority of God's word because it comes from God Himself and it's without air because God cannot lie.

He's preserved it for us. Still gives us responsibility to preserve his word, but he is also sovereign in his preservation. Solo scriptura, cry of the Reformation. we've been encouraging the proper hermeneutic, literal, historical, grammatical.

We will continue with that throughout the class. Acts of Jesus, not what? Ice of Jesus And then as we apply the Bible to all of life, we know that the Bible is not a science book, but where it does talk about scientific things, we would say we want to have a biblically influenced geology. The Bible talks about a flood, so that should affect our geology.

We're seeing God's sovereignty in history. We're not just talking about his historicism. It just says history just happens randomly. we're seeing that God is actually in control of history and we've seen that.

In Genesis and now the Exodus passages. and then last week, we introduced this concept of traditional chronology of the history of Egypt versus, a, a reformed. approach to the history of Egypt. And while it was Doctor Downs that was doing the video last week, a lot of his research is coming from an archaeologist named David Roll.

And And so the concept is just like We see actually several different cultures. Israel and Judah would be an example is you have overlapping kingdoms., this research says that there's overlapping dynasties in Egypt and that the reason that, traditionally, when you turn on your National Geographic story or, yeah, story, mythology, they say that you don't find any evidence of, the exodus, you're not finding evidence of Jews, in Egypt. Doctor Roll and others would say it's because they're looking at the wrong time period.

So last week we looked at a couple of pieces of information just by way of review.

In 1966, there began to be an excavation of a place called Tel Eddaba in the eastern delta of Egypt. And according to this excavation, which has taken quite a long time, that people aren't knocking down their doors or knocking down the doors to get to digs of this type, and so it's taken a while to dig it and to evaluate it. but there does seem to be evidence of a large Semitic speaking population in this area that lived there during the 13th dynasty. does anybody remember any of the evidence that was presented last week with this particular dig of What were some of the things?

Yeah, Cynthia. Yeah. Yeah, so they've got, several of the houses have these boxes that are buried before the below the floors and and babies in the boxes 2 and 3 deep, which would definitely suggest, something traumatic is going on during that time period. Anything else that you guys remember from that particular day?

Yeah, Dan. Yeah, so there's evidence that they just left all their stuff. It would almost be like we're talking about this earlier this week in another lesson. I don't know if you guys remember your American history when FDR signed.

I forget the term, but 9066, basically that made Japanese citizens on the west coast potential threats and then they were given a very short period of time. Haumi was telling me. I guess his dad, if he remembers correctly, they had about a week to gather their belongings. It was only what they could carry in their hands and then they just had to leave their stuff behind.

So if you were to walk into a Japanese home, you would just see all of their stuff there, and you would come to the conclusion these guys left in a hurry, right? they were not given much time to get out and get to the various, internment, what has, what's the word, internment camps, Manzanar and so on. And so the same type of thing here is archaeologists are looking at the homes and seeing that type of evidence that these people Had left fairly quickly and so that would put Moses being born during the reign of Amen.

Amenemhat Aminimhet 3.

I'm not real good at my Egyptian pharaoh pronunciation. so he'd be the last pharaoh of the 12th dynasty reigning for 46 years. this Pharaoh had no sons to inherit his throne, which could explain why he might accept Moses as a future heir. I like the weasel words when it comes to this stuff, could mean, might mean, because we really don't know for sure, right?

these are just trying to reassemble the evidence and, make some educated guesses. So that's a little bit from last week. Let's see if there's anything else that we want to talk about. Now, let's go ahead and let's open in our Bibles, first of all to Exodus chapter 2.

Exodus chapter 2. And we're going to read, these 10 verses in their entirety. And then we're gonna make some observations of the text. And then we're gonna try to draw some conclusions from the text.

And Every time I read this material, it's just fascinating. OK, starting in verse 1, Exodus 2, I'm reading from a New King James. And a man of the house of Levi went. And took As a wife, a daughter of Levi.

I think we're gonna, I'm gonna do, ask some questions and do some running commentary as we read through the text if that's OK. It's a little easier for me than trying to remember everything that we just read, but So in verse one, where did the, the married couple, what tribe did they both come from? Yeah, there we go. Levi.

So the woman conceived and bore a son, and when she saw that he was a beautiful child, she hid him 3 months. Now personally, I don't think that means that if he was ugly, she would have turned him over to Pharaoh, but, all mothers think their children are beautiful, right? So she looks I can't give up this child. And.

You guys, everybody has memories of seeing your child for the first time, right? I just remember, all my children were born C-section and I saw all of them born. And so I just remember, first of all, I just remember. Seeing my wife opened up on the table, that was quite an experience.

And then, but I remember Sam coming out, no, no, Josh, and the thing that hit me was he looks like my dad. It just shocked me. I had no There was, I don't, I don't know why that never occurred to me that he could possibly look like my dad and but when he was born I, I, I was just shocked by it and then when Anna came out, I was like, she looks like my mom. I just, both times I was just completely shocked.

OK, verse 3. So she, she hides. at this, at this point, we don't know what his name is. It's not Moses, right?

We'll find that out later. We're not really sure what is What he would have been named, but in verse 3, when she could no longer hide him. Why would she not have been able to hide him? Yeah, there you go.

Yeah, making a lot of noise. She took an arc of bulrushes. for him, dabbed it with asphalt and pitch, put the child in it. And laid it in the reeds by the river's bank.

And his sister stood afar off to know what would be done to him. Now the sister's pretty young at this point, but do you guys, do we have any evidence later on of who the sister is? Yeah, we've got Miriam. So, so Miriam's hanging out.

So notice what's different here in verse 3 compared to say, the Prince of Egypt movie. Yeah, Yeah, it went floating down the river with crocodiles trying to jump out and, and eat the baby and lo and behold, it kinda, eventually the ark kinda Comes into this peaceful area where The princess is bathing. No, she just, she goes and she actually puts it in, in a pretty, I guess what you think of as a safe area by some reeds, calm water, and just waiting to see if anybody's gonna come along.

Yeah, yeah, hoping that would, hoping something, I don't know what she's thinking, but hoping that something's gonna happen.

Yeah, but definitely the sister, probably underneath, we're guessing, but probably in being instructed by mom is hanging out watching to see what's gonna happen. Verse 5, then the daughter of Pharaoh came down to, to bathe at the river. And her maidens walked along the river and when she saw the ark among the reeds, she sent her maid to get it. And when she opened it, she saw the child and behold, the baby wept and she had compassion on him and said, this is one of the Hebrews children.

So the baby weeps. She's got some options here, as especially as the, as the daughter of Pharaoh, she definitely knows the edict. And And, and looks and sees the baby, knows this is one of the babies of the Hebrews and realizes right away, put 2 and 2 together, what's happened here. There's a mother who's trying to save her baby, the baby's crying and, and so she has compassion upon the baby.

Mothers feel this, fathers feel this when you feel, you hear your baby crying and the different types of cries, right? And when I, when, before we had any children, that made no sense to me. But then after we had children, you could tell as especially as they as they get older, that's a cry that means somebody took a toy away from somebody else, right? That's a cry that means I fell down and scraped my knee or that's a cry that says I'm tired, I need a nap, right?

You just get the Philly he's been and, his parents, but, you have compassion and then you Obviously with with other people's kids, sometimes you have compassion, right? Sometimes you're in the middle of Denny's hearing somebody else's kids and you're not, you don't have so much compassion. before Katie and I, this is off the subject, but before Katie and I had our own kids, I can remember us sitting in restaurants. Just being very highbrowed about other people's crying children and man, when we have children and we come to a public restaurant, we will not allow them to cry and we will have, have them in control.

And then once we had our own kids, the Lord gave us a great amount of or much more humility. I wouldn't say a great amount of humility, but much more humility. 11 final sideline, I used to be a dog person. I, I hate to admit this, but my, my kids have started feeding cats, and so we've inherited cats, at least two main cats, and there's actually a compassion that begins to rise up in my heart when I hear them meowing for food in the morning.

I never thought that would ever happen to me. But I wake up in the morning, the, the cat hears me get up, hears us get up and all of a sudden starts meowing. And I've always hated cats. Well, actually I, I used to always say I love cats.

They're delicious. But, but now there's something rising up and so some compassion rises up in the heart of, of Pharaoh's daughter here. And so in verse 7. then his sister, so this would be, Miriam, said to Pharaoh's daughter, hey, by the way, shall I go and call a nurse for you from the Hebrew women that she may nurse the child for you?

And Pharaoh's daughter said to her, go. So the maidens went and called the child's, or the maiden went and called the child's mother. Then Pharaoh's daughter said to her, Take this child away and nurse him for me, and I will give you your wages. So the woman took the child and nursed him and the child grew and she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter and he became her son.

So she called his name Moses, saying, because I drew him out of the water. just, an amazing turn of events, really. You're thinking that your child's gonna die. You put your child out in the river, all of a sudden, Pharaoh's daughter finds the child.

You can imagine Miriam thinking, just wondering what's going to happen. She hasn't read Exodus 2, right? This is happening to her. And so she doesn't know if the if the daughter's gonna just tell the maidens to dump the dump it over and dump the baby in the river or she's gonna take the child.

But then to be able to, for the mother to suddenly be able to nurse her own child after wondering whether the child was going to survive and then get paid wages to do it, the Lord is just providing here in amazing ways. so you can just imagine the joy. But I wonder what must have been. What her emotions must have been to take Moses to Pharaoh's daughter and, and turn over her child now to a pagan.

Egyptian. in one sense, probably Moses was being homeschooled, right, for the first several years of his life, and then she has to go from basically just turn him over to the pagans and just trust the Lord, here's my child, raise him in the education of the Egyptian gods. And then so she just gets to sit back and And pray and pray that God is going to, to raise him up and use him. And so pretty some pretty amazing things.

Let's go back and just rehearse a couple of things here. Let's see if we've hit Everything So if the daughter of Pharaoh. Was actually the daughter of this particular. This particular pharaoh that we're talking about, Amen M Het.

That would make her Soic Nephrew, Sobek Nephrew. is that in your guys' notes at all? Do you guys see anything in there in Sobek Nefruw? From last week?

OK. And and so last week there was the suggestion, and again this is just a suggestion that yes she came down to the river to bathe, but if this was Sobek Nephrew who was not able to have her own children, last week we suggested that what bathing might this have been. Yep Yeah, so perhaps coming down, it's a ritual washing to the fertility god and hoping to have a child. Perhaps, again this is weasel words, perhaps that's part of what God was doing.

she sees the child, perhaps sees this as a provision from the God, I don't know if it's happy or hoppy. And so we see definitely God's sovereignty, don't we, in this, in this whole story. And just think of your own, your own life. If you've, I'm assuming that probably the vast majority of you that want to be here at 9 o'clock on Sunday morning are born again.

And so think of your, your own testimony and just how God has woven things together, to allow you to get saved and have the opportunity to hear the gospel. I know for me. I've, I've shared some of my testimony, but, we were living in Bakersfield. With my mom for a time, some crazy things happened there to where we ended up with my grandparents up in Bishop while my dad was, there was a change of custody because of some of the craziness.

And so up in Bishop we started going to this good news Club. My aunt was taking us to a good news Club and we were hearing the gospel on a weekly basis and so I'm hearing the word. I didn't get saved, and none of us got saved at that time, but then eventually we come down to live with my dad who's not a believer and he hires a babysitter, a live-in babysitter, and we were. Not the most well behaved children at that time, so much so that this babysitter quit.

And the second babysitter quit and so finally he interviewed an older crusty Christian gal who's, she's been a nanny for her whole life and she had another job that was gonna pay her more money and but my dad was just like, please come work for me. I can't give you as much as they're gonna give you, but would you please work for me? And she said, if you let me teach the kids about Jesus and the Bible, I'll come work for you. And he said, as long as you don't talk to me about it, that's OK.

And so she said deal and so she came in and and moved in with us and began teaching us the Bible every day. And my dad allowed it to happen and. And so that's where we began to come underneath the influence of the gospel and then a week before she moved out I became born again and then my parents were like what in the world did we allow. Yeah, they thought I was involved in a cult for a while because I wanted to go to church.

I was reading my Bible at 14. I was in my room playing my guitar, singing, and they're like, what in the world? He's joined a cult. He must, he's, he's doing, might, I think, I can't remember if it was my dad or my mom, but they actually asked me if I was on drugs.

Because I was singing and playing my guitar in my room. It's like Anyway, it's funny. But all of this stuff, it's like you look back and it's like at at certain points, you'd just be like, what in the world is going on? But the Lord had his hand on the whole thing and he was bringing us into direct contact with the gospel.

And, and then later on, Melissa and Michelle both get saved and now Matthew's over here teaching and, and so the Lord has, has been good. any questions you guys have about this particular text? I think we've done. I've, I've done what I wanted to do with it.

Any questions you guys have? Alright, let's open up now to chapter 3. and in between what we're skipping over here is Between that text and the text we're going to jump into right now. Moses gets raised in the school of the Egyptians.

But he, there's, we don't know exactly how it happens, but he seems to retain some aspect of his Hebrew heritage, right? Because by the time he hits, from what Steven tells us way over in Act 7, once he hits around 40 years old, he's looking out and he's seeing the injustice. He's very bothered by the way that his people are being treated. Now, Could be that he still had ongoing contact with his mom and and family.

he must have been old enough to have some memory of that he wasn't necessarily Egyptian. there's no evidence of any of the sibling rivalry that you see in the various movies and stuff like that. but he does look out and he sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew and he looks this way and he looks that way and then he kills the Egyptian, bury buries him in the sand. So we've got, a major leader of the Jewish faith starts off his career as a murderer.

it's not like he went to the authorities or reported he just murders a guy and buries him, and then as you guys know the story, the next day, the word has got out and, and then I'd forgotten this part of the text, but the text actually says that Pharaoh is trying, goes after now to kill him. So Pharaoh wants to bring justice and apprehend him and have him killed and so, so he takes off, ends up in the land of Midian. Comes into contact with Jethro or rule and then marries Zipporah, starts his own family, becomes a shepherd, and him becoming a shepherd right there, that tells you something about how much he's kept his Hebrew heritage because if you guys remember, are shepherds well liked by Egyptians?

No.

So if he had totally been assimilated to Egyptian culture, I can't imagine him becoming a shepherd. so he, he does go out, he becomes a shepherd, and that's where we pick up the story now and so let's, let's take a look. At Exodus 3 and we'll make some running commentary here. And feel free to stop anytime if you have questions or, commentary yourself.

So, let's look at verse one. Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian. We're not exactly sure we would have, we're not really sure what priest he would have been. But he is a priest.

Of some god, we're, we're not sure if he would be a priest of the God of Yahweh. And he led the flock to the back of the desert and came to Horeb. the mountain of God. Horeb, what's the other name that we see in scripture for Horeb?

Yeah, so Mount Sinai. And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire from the midst of the bush. And so he looked and behold, the bush was burning with fire, but the bush was not consumed. I want you to keep an eye on this angel of the Lord stuff as we, as we're moving through the text.

So he comes upon a bush, it's burning. It's not being consumed. That would be a pretty amazing sight, right? And so then Moses said, I will turn aside and see this great site why the bush does not burn.

So when the Lord saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, Moses, Moses, and he said, here I am. Now, up in verse 2, who is in the bush? The angel of the Lord. Yeah, the angel of the Lord is, is the one that is being said to appear to him in the bush.

in verse 4, who is calling to Moses from the bush? Yeah, God. And so this is part, this is part of the mystery of this, this angel of the Lord that shows up. We, it seems like we saw this back in Genesis when you had 3 individuals that show up to talk to Moses, Abraham, right?

And then 2 take off, but then the Lord hangs back and so there seems to be this mixing together of the angel of the Lord with the Lord. Theologians refer to this as what we would call a theophany. Or even someone would call it a Christophane, a pre-incarnate vision of Christ. and so the angel of the Lord does seem to be identified as God Himself.

And so here we. If we look at the. So the Moses says, Here I am, in verse 5, he said, do not draw near the place. Take your sandals off your feet for the place where you stand is holy ground.

Moreover, he said, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look upon God. This seems to be the universal reaction when people receive direct divine revelation. But, we read through the text of scripture and As you're reading through chapter by chapter, it all comes so fast.

You'd almost get the impression that God appearing in direct divine revelation just happens all the time. But by people's reactions, you can tell this does not happen all the time. this is, an unusual occurrence, and many, like in Moses's case, he's afraid and many times people are afraid that they're going to die. Verse 7, the Lord said, I've surely seen the oppression of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry.

Because of their taskmasters, and I know their sorrows, so I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up from the land. to a good and large land. To a land flowing with milk and honey. To the place of the Canaanites and the Hittites and the Amorites and the Parasites and the Hivites and the Jebusites.

where have we heard this language in the past? Yeah, in Genesis, particularly. who would have received an initial promise like this. Yeah, so Abraham is being promised to be brought into a land and so Abraham does receive part of the promise and the fact that he has a child and then his family does begin to multiply.

But way back, if you guys remember, I think 2 weeks ago, God had prophesized to Abraham back in chapter 15 that your people are gonna, they're gonna be taken away into captivity. They're gonna be there for a time, but then I'm gonna bring them back. Now what do we do with the idea That God is saying, I'm gonna bring you back to this land that That's flowing with milk and honey. And But he's acknowledging that currently this is the place of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Parasites, and so on.

That God is basically calling him into a land that is currently occupied. What do we do with that? Is this just Age-old ethnocentricism where you've got one people just coming in to dominate another people. And Israel's just writing their mythology, their meta narrative to say we have rights to that land, and God has basically given it to us and so we're gonna come in and take it by force.

Yeah. Yeah. God Exercising his sovereignty. Yeah, so Dan's basically saying that this is God's in control.

God is doing things within a certain time frame and he's the one that ultimately is in control and owns the land and so he's giving it to his people and we have to accept it because it's God's word. Yeah, and I'd, I'd agree with that largely. Yeah Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, so yeah, God's judgment, God was gonna use Israel to bring judgment upon these lands. Yeah, and yeah, we have lots of evidence both in, in scripture and and outside of scripture of the types of atrocities that the Canaanites and these other peoples were committing., the destruction, killing their own babies, burning their babies, offering them to MAC, and, and so on and so forth, which, which really it raises the question of worldview. and what, what we often hear when we're taking courses of history and whatnot is, is that you have This idea, that there's just this historicism and you have one group of people that just coming in to dominate another people totally unjustly that and there's no sense of control or reason or rhyme, it's just domination and then a particular people gets cast in a certain light.

There's a, a book I read several years ago that had to do with the Incas, the Aztecs, and the Mayans.

And, and this particular book was written from a perspective that was more. The traditional view of each of these tribes before a reconstruction view that developed in the mid-twentieth century of the Aztecs, Mayans, and, and Incas. And so they're drawing upon a lot of older sources and and I remember reading through the material and, and found it very compelling and then one of my buddies, Saul Aguilar, he's a Good friend, but he, he's, he knows a lot about, Mexican history, and as I was talking with him about some of this material, he was like that, what, that is right on.

And basically the approach was, is that the Spaniards and the conquistadors when they came to Mexico, the traditional Mexican view of that history was this was a good thing, that the Aztecs were a, they were a terror to the, to the land.

Everybody was in abject fear of the Aztecs. these were not, today if you take a course on, on, on Aztec history, they're gonna cast it as as something like, hey, we think of them as being so terrible and bad but that was their culture. These people would, they would hunt down other tribes, kidnap man, woman, and child, and their god, Quizaotal would, they would take a child up to the top of one of their pyramids, and the more tears of fear they could get out of that child before they ripped his heart out, the more pleasing it was to the god.

So imagine, just day after day, we're talking about.

Everyday bloodshed, hearts being ripped out of children to their God. That's the type of stuff multiplied that was going on as far as what we can tell with the Canaanites, the Amorites, and so on. just that type of offering to their gods, not to mention all the crazy sexual immorality that comes with the pagan system. It's one of the reasons, if you look at some of the reasons why Mel Gibson made his movie Apocalypto.

Has anybody ever seen any of that, Apocalypto? Yeah, his burden in making Apocalypto was to demonstrate what the Aztecs were really like. And to try to build some compassion for some of the other tribes in the area and why the other tribes were so willing to align themselves with the Spaniards. And so what you hear today in a lot of the secular approaches to Mexican history is that the A or the conquistadors and the Spaniards were these terrible people and in every culture there's gonna be nobility and depravity, so we're not saying that the Spaniards had no depravity and no false motives and stuff like that.

But there's a reason why everybody was very excited that they showed up. All that to say When God in His sovereignty from a biblical worldview is saying, I am going to bring you into this land to move them out because they have in the, in the terminology that's used in Deuteronomy, they have polluted the land with bloodshed. he's waiting for the sins to fill up of the land. this last week, I had a kid who was delivering an apologetics card on environmentalism.

It is environmentalism in conflict with Christianity? And he went and he quoted Deuteronomy about pollution and said, yeah, the Bible says that we should not pollute the land and throw trash around because Deuteronomy says that if we pollute the land, God's gonna remove you from it. And I said, what, that's really good. I'm glad you brought that up.

You misunderstood pollute there, but you brought up an interesting thing. What's the pollution that God really, really cares about? Bloodshed, sexual immorality, that's the pollution where God's gonna remove people from a land and that's what's, that's what we see going on here, with the Hittites, Parasites, and Hivites. OK, none of that I just said, I'll charge you for, that's all free.

OK, so, verse 9, Wait, where are we at? I've lost track. Is it verse 9? OK, so now, therefore behold, the cry of the children of Israel has come to me, and I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppressed them.

come now, therefore, and I will send you to Pharaoh, and you may bring my people, the children of Israel out of Egypt. So, so he's gonna use, God is gonna, he's always, he's always using, and what's the word? He's a God of means, and so the means that is being used here is Moses. And as we know the story, this is the first time Moses is hearing this stuff.

We know that he's going to start making excuses and we can chide him for making excuses. But if we're really trying to put ourselves in his shoes, right? He's left a place where he's known, he's a known murderer. Pharaoh was, he's got a death warrant on his head.

He's living now as a shepherd with his family's poor and his kids, and he's enjoying the good life. Why in the world is he gonna go back to a place where he has a death warrant? And, and do this stuff that God is, is telling them to do, not to mention just the, the crazy bigness of the thing that God is talking about. And so, but Moses said to God, who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and that I should bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?

Two objections. I'm gonna go to Pharaoh. So the objections, it doesn't seem like the objection would be I'm gonna go to Pharaoh because I've never met him, right? he's part of his family.

I'm gonna go to Pharaoh, this guy who wanted to kill me, and, and I'm gonna try to, to bring out your people. Verse 12, and he said, I will certainly be with you. This is God's response, and this shall be a sign to you that I have sent you. When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain.

I don't know about you, but that, if I'm in Moses's shoes, I don't know that that really assures me. yes, God's gonna be with me. OK, you're, you're in a bush that's not burning. That's pretty good.

But here's the sign, you're gonna, I'm gonna come back after this ordeal's all over and I'm gonna serve you on this mountain. OK, let me give my other excuse. Then Moses said to God verse 13, indeed, when I come to the children of Israel and say to them, The God of your fathers has sent me and they say to me, who, what is his name and what shall I say to them? Now some people see this as an excuse, some people see this as just Moses asking another question.

Personally, my read, you guys might feel differently, is that Moses is just He's just raising just about everything he can to get out of this deal. it's kinda like, when I tell my son Sam, this is doesn't even match the level of intensity, but, for the sake of argument, just bear with me. I tell Sam it's time to go to bed. At night.

And what happens? I'm hungry. I'm thirsty. Can we go jump on the trampoline?

Let's, can you tell me a story? There's about 67 things and I'm normally willing to fulfill about 2 or 3 of them, right? But he's, but here Moses is This is a huge deal. So, but God says, I am who I am.

And he said, thus you shall say to the children of Israel, I am, has sent me to you. There's a ton that we could say about just God calling Himself, I am, we'll come back to that in a moment. Moreover, God said to Moses, thus you shall say to the children of Israel, the Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob has sent me to you. This is my name forever and this is my memorial to all generations.

Go and gather the elders of Israel together and say to them, the Lord, God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob appeared to me saying, I have surely visited you. That's the same language that's used back in Genesis 15, and you. And seeing what is done to you in Egypt, and I have said, I will bring you up. Out of the affliction of Egypt to the land of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Parasites, and Hivites and Jebusites to a land flowing with milk and honey.

That's not cow milk, by the way, it's probably talking about goat milk. Then they will heed your voice. And you shall come and you and the elders of Israel to the king of Egypt, and you shall say the Lord God. of the Hebrews has met with us, and now please let us go 3 days' journey into the wilderness that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God.

But I am sure that the king of Egypt will not let you go, no, not even by a mighty hand. So I will stretch out my hand and strike Egypt with all my wonders, which I will do in the midst, and after that. He will let you go, and I will give these people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, and it shall be when you go that you, shall not go empty-handed, for every woman shall ask of her neighbor, namely of her who dwells near her house, articles of silver, articles of gold and clothing, and you shall put them on your sons and on your daughters, and so you shall plunder the Egyptians.

So here Moses is getting the full.

foreshadowing from the Lord. God's just telling a blow, blow blow, here's what's gonna happen. which is interesting because it, it doesn't always happen that way. When Jesus called the disciples, he just said, follow me.

And then they just learn about things as they're traveling along with Christ, but here. the Lord for some reason gives Moses a total foreshadowing of what's gonna happen. You're gonna go, you're gonna talk to him, they're not gonna listen, or Pharaoh's not gonna listen, and so on and so forth. so let's, let's, make some observations and draw.

Some conclusions from the text here. We see a number of different attributes of God that seem to, flow out of the text. One is just the idea that God tells Moses to take his sandals off his feet. And the fact that Moses is terrified when he first comes into contact.

With the Lord would seem to speak of God's holiness. The idea of his moral separateness, but also the essential idea is difference. Holy holiness definitely does have the idea of Of moral separation, but the big idea is separation and distinction. and so we see right in this context, what we would call the creator-creature distinction, and this runs throughout the whole Bible.

So, one of the ways to define holiness would be there is a difference between us and God. God is God and we are not. And Moses feels that there's a real sense of fear that comes over him because of that. And that's something that we need to keep in mind as we're reading the scriptures and as we're teaching in our classes here at Cornerstone, trying to disciple children and so on, is there really is such a thing as a creator-c creature distinction and, and we as Christians, we believe and we affirm.

the philosophy of what's called dualism. Dualism That God created the world and He is separate from and not to be confused with His creation. The culture that our kids are growing up in, when I say kids I'm talking about college age and down, the millennials, they are breathing the dogma of monism. There is no distinction between God and the creature that either we are divine ourselves and we just need to look within to find the divinity or in an atheistic sense, there is no divine and so we're all, we're just ultimately all one with creation.

So it's, it can be Peter, Doctor Peter Jones separates it into this, he tries to simplify it by saying there's one and twoism. Christianity, if you look at Romans 1, Paul talks about God is the creator of all. And he's put knowledge of himself in his Creator, in his creatures, but we have suppressed the truth and unrighteousness, denied God, and we worship the creature rather than the Creator. And so all worldviews can basically be summarized in a, in a lack of the acknowledgment of the holiness of God that there is no creator-c creature distinction.

There's no separation. We are God or there is no God. And when you look out at our culture today, that explains a lot of what is going on today and why there are so many issues that seem to be just a denial of this dualism. When you look at Genesis one, what do you see?

From the very in the beginning, God created. So you have God separated from his creation. Then you have light and dark, day and night, water and land. Animals and humans, male and female, parent and child.

Throughout the narrative, there's this dualistic system which also involves us moving in history towards an end, what we call a teleological end where there will be a separation at the end of history between heaven and hell. That's the way the Bible rolls and so it's all built upon Genesis one, God created, in the beginning God created. In fact, Doctor Peter Jones says that verse, the rest of the Bible is just a commentary on Genesis 1:1. And today, what are we seeing?

We're seeing a rejection of the binary. The vast majority of people in just local churches that I talked to, binary is a strange word. Walk on a college campus today and everybody knows what binary means. Binary is something that's been enforced from our culture.

It's a, it's a paradigm that has been enforced on this Western culture upon us. It's a falsified view that we need to reject. Ultimately, what they're rejecting is holiness. And and so and so that's why people today are rejecting the gender binary and they're not rejecting the gender binary meaning male and female in a vacuum.

This is a complete move from dualism to monism. It's a complete move from Western Christianity. In 2009, Newsweek came out with an article that basically said that the United States is now Hindu in its overall philosophy. What do they mean by that?

That we are now Hindu in our philosophy? It means we have now, we've, yeah, we're all one. The big idea is all religions have pulled a piece of the pizza and we all have part of the truth, but if we can bring the pizza back together, we'll have the whole truth and we'll find total unity because really we're all divine and we just need to look within to find the divine. There's no creator creature distinction, there's no holiness.

And so here, here on, right here in this text, we see a creator-c creature distinction between God and Moses. And that God is going to go in and pull his people out who are separate from another people called Egypt, that's a pagan people. And then he's gonna bring them out and prepare them to go in and move another group of pagans out of Israel. And the Bible portrays this as good, that there is a distinction between those that worship God.

And those that don't worship God, whose ultimate end is in some crazy immorality. Not that everybody is gonna be as wicked as the Canaanites and burning their babies, but that ultimately a separation from God leads to destruction. Yup, Barbara. Hm.

Yeah So Barbara's mentioned in an article that indicates that if we call Christ just our friend, and that's the only way in which we think of him, we're actually diminishing Christ and contributing to this monistic view. Yeah, I, I think there could be some validity to that. however, we do know that God is transcendent and he is the great I am, that's in the bush and we have this sense of holiness, but he has chosen to bridge the gap which doesn't blend us. We don't all become one like with nirvana.

But he does visit us and it does seem like there is a category of calling him friend, but like you said, you are my friends if you Do whatever I ask, right? So it's a unique friendship. I would never walk up to you guys and say, hey, I'll be your friend if you do whatever I ask. I can't do that because I'm a creature.

I'm just a creature. But Jesus isn't merely 100% human. He's also God. And so he can walk up to his creatures as a man and say, I'm your friend if you do whatever I ask.

so that's the creator creature distinction. He can do things that we simply could not do, right? Otherwise it would be a complete contradiction. Yeah, Bob.

Yeah. Yes. Yeah, yeah, you, yeah, Bob saying in Genesis 3, the temptation was take this fruit and you will be like God. God, God has something he doesn't want to let you have.

You'll be like Him if you participate in, in the tree. So yeah. I'm, I'm geeking out on this whole dualism monism thing. I've been studying it all week and then, and then just around the topic of holiness here and, and, and seeing the distinction between what God is saying.

Tele Moses to do, I encourage you guys to, to maybe investigate that a little bit. What got me into it this week and we'll have to end is, the students in the apologetics class are studying the topic of Transcendental meditation. Is Transcendental meditation in conflict with Christianity? And I was just thinking, well, transcendental meditation, I don't know how, what a big deal that is, but I know it's, it, it, I know it's not right, but I don't know what it is, but let's go ahead and study it.

And then the more we were studying it this week, I had no clue what a big deal this thing is. it's everywhere. we watched a video this week that starts off with Jerry Seinfeld, Ellen DeGeneres, Clint Eastwood, and a bunch of other Hollywood stars all saying they do transcendental meditation. It's great.

I've been doing it for 40 years. It's helped my life. It's scientific. here's all the ways it's gonna benefit you.

And then you start really researching this stuff, and it's all based on monism. that there is no distinction between us and God. The divine is inside. You're trying to clear your rational self so that the divine can come out and wander around and really bring you into your true creativity.

And, and Peter Jones, Doctor Peter Jones, he's the guy that's really done all the big work on this. That's the conference I attended a couple of weeks ago, the Two Loves, and, and he sets the whole thing that we're dealing with with homosexuality and gender and stuff like that. That's just the fruit of this larger cultural move that has happened. His, I'll end with this, he, he, he, he tells his testimony that he grew up with John Lennon.

In England. They, they hung out together, they grew up on the same street, they played music together. the reason that he didn't end up following in John Lennon's steps is John Lennon was allowed to go to clubs and his parents would allow him to go to clubs. So John Lennon grew up and joined the Beatles.

He grew up and became a theologian. And so, but he came over from England to the United States in 1964 and he thought he had died and gone to heaven. Because he, he was coming from Europe that had rejected God largely and, and was in total full, the full throes of secularism and comes over to the United States and the United States is, is still predominantly a culture that is imbibing a Christian worldview, not perfect, but, but Christianity is, is everywhere. And so he comes over and he's just like, man, this is amazing and he studies, he goes to school here, then he goes back and he teaches in France, in his words, pagan France and so he's there for about 27 years, comes back to the US in 1991 and he says, I thought I had died and gone to hell.

He goes, I could not believe how the United States culture had changed in 25 years. And he began to just study and try to figure out what is the essence of the change. Why did it go from this to where it was in the 1990s and now it's only advanced. And his bottom line, what he's, what he's, the conclusion he's come to is Romans one.

Is that our culture was largely built upon a creator-creature distinction, but just like, like Mos or Paul demonstrates in, in chapter one that we've got in the way of virtually all of the other, what most cultures do when they depart from God is they suppress the truth and the righteousness, they begin to worship the creature rather than the creator. We've moved from dualism to oneism, twoism to oneism. And so, and then he documents that through many different sources. And he, he mentioned a book by a guy named Goldberg, I think it's Peter Goldberg called American Bader.

And in this book, American Invader, he tries to document how the the United States, while, while the average person on the street wouldn't say I'm Hindu. He, he documents how that the United States is largely now Hindu in its thinking. and he gives several different examples of that and how the people just, they don't recognize it. They don't really even think about it.

we, we, we were talking about yoga and I know I could step on toes here. We, we ended up talking about yoga and it's overlap with transcendental meditation this last week and I just thought yoga, it sounds like yogurt, sounds like, what could be so Yogi the Bear? it just doesn't seem like it's all that big of a deal. but a couple of things started to tip me off that there might be some concern.

One was Al Mohler wrote an article in 2010 where he interviewed a yo, a yoga lady who wrote a book and then he offered some critiques of yoga, how that it doesn't match with the Christian worldview because it's intricately tied to a Hindu worldview. And so he, he, he, he offered some warnings about yoga. He said after that article, they got thousands of letters. And he's never been so harshly critiqued on anything he's ever said on his radio program or in his writing.

We're talking about, think about all the stuff that Al Mohler says and writes about. This is the biggest topic that he's ever been critiqued on and so his staff, they were just swamped trying to respond to all these letters and reading through them. Then he wrote a follow-up article giving 1010 things he learned from his critique of yoga. The first thing he said is if you critique yoga, people are going to respond.

The 5th thing that he said is out of all the thousands of letters they received, not one gave a theological response to his critique of yoga. All of the responses were basically like yoga has helped me. It's, it's reduced my stress. It's, it's brought, brought me closer to Christ.

How dare you critique yoga? There wasn't any theological response. So that tipped me off. I'm like, OK, well, maybe Al Mohler's out there.

But then a few weeks later, a Hin a a yoga scholar writes a follow-up article and says, I agree with Al Mohler. This is a Hindu yoga scholar and says Al Mohler has it right. You cannot divorce yoga from its Hindu roots or its monistic roots. Westerners that are trying to, to divorce the two have no idea what they're talking about.

in fact, he uses an example. He says folks in India are looking at the United States seeing 20 million people involved in yoga. It would be, it would be like us looking at India and saying 20 million, 20 million people in India are getting baptized and partaking of communion. That'd be the equivalent.

And so when they see 20 million of us doing yoga, they're like wow, I can't believe there's so many people in America that are now Hindu. The 3rd thing that tipped me off is John MacArthur has a little debate. On CNN of all places with an emergent pastor named Doug Pagett on Christian yoga. And, and Doug Pagett, anything that comes out of the emergent church, I'm already going, shaking my head going, OK, something's wrong here.

So MacArthur and Doug Paget are debating on CNN about the use of yoga. And Doug Paget says all of the things that we would be worried about. Yoga has, it brings us closer to God. It's, it's a way to, we want in our spirituality, we have a joining of the mind and the body and so we come and we practice this and it's, it's helped a lot of people reduce stress.

It's helped them in their life, and MacArthur comes back on and says, I need to respond to that. How does the Bible say that we reduce stress? If you want to curl yourself into a pretzel and exercise, that's one thing. But why would we borrow an ancient heretical practice from a false religion, apply it to ourselves and and and use it somehow to get closer to God?

Because there is nothing in the Bible anywhere close to that. So all that to say, I had a little shift in my opinions this week on that topic. Encourage you to research it for yourself. Al Mohler, John MacArthur, a Hindu scholar, and then I'm driving home and my daughter tells me, hey, everybody's doing the yoga challenge.

I'm like, what's the yoga challenge? She goes, it's on YouTube. Everybody's doing it. She lists many of her friends that are all doing the yoga challenge.

And then I find out. I wanna, I don't even know why I say this. Well, let's just say that one of my children in my household was doing cosmic yoga. It's on YouTube.

Anybody ever heard of cosmic yoga? It's a little, it's like a little cartoon for kids that basically teaches them the, the intro introduction to yoga. Yeah, it's cosmic yoga. It's like, it's almost like a PBS type thing to just basically teach kids the basic essence of yoga.

And, and the more I'm reading about it, and I'm, I'm going over here. I just want to encourage you guys to check it out for yourself. It doesn't seem like this is a practice that's merely just for exercise. Yoga comes part and parcel with meditation.

If you're not meditating, you're not doing yoga. And, and the meditation aspect of yoga is to be, is a concern. And even the exercises themselves, they're not just, you're not just putting yourself into random shapes. the Hindus all know what those random shapes mean and signify and so on.

You can research it for yourself. Anyway, you guys might want to tar and feather me now, but that's OK. Yeah. Oh yeah.

Yeah stretch Yeah Yeah, so Kim's talking about her daughter doing some yoga in her athletics, then going to India and seeing what it really means, come back saying I'm not doing that stuff anymore. Can I do some alternative? I've heard similar stories. Moses just got, Moses Tay just got back from China.

And he was just saying, you guys have no idea, if, if you think you're somehow divorcing. Yoga, it is a religious practice that was brought over, to the US. The Beatles had a big part of it. Interesting.

You've got Doctor Peter Jones on the one hand that's talking about this monism and then the Beatles are the ones that brought a lot of this stuff over to the US. Yeah, final comment, Alison. Yeah, Oh. Yeah.

Praying to your dead relative. I know that fits within the Buddhist system. I don't know, I'm not, ask me this next week because I'm studying Hinduism this week. I'm not sure if, if in the Hindu system there is a praying to their dead relatives.

Not sure. there is a thing called yoga flying, however. you guys could check that out. Anybody ever seen the yoga flying?

Yeah, they basically hop because they're expecting one day they're gonna get to the third level of levitation. Marish, the, the Maharishi who came over in the 196 early 1960s, basically he wants to build 3000 palaces. And if we can get a critical mass that is 1% of the world's population to do transcendental meditation and do yoga levitation, then we'll bring world peace to the whole world. That's the ultimate goal of Transcendental meditation is to get everybody to levitate.

And it's, it's really sad to see these people hopping around on mattresses at a university campus. For a class. That's unbelievable. Let's go ahead and pray.

Lord, we thank you so much for your kindness to us. You are a holy God and you are God and we are not. And when we look at your word, well, there's certain things from one perspective that could make us uncomfortable, we see that you're the Lord of history. You're the one that looks out and sees righteousness and unrighteousness.

You're the one that ultimately has the right to bring judgment, to bring mercy. And, and we thank you for your wisdom. you are God, we are not. We pray that you continue to help us learn from these wonderful texts of scripture.

Help us to be able to look out into our world and to think about our world through this lens of, of, through the proper glasses of the Bible and, to not be tricked by any of the, the false teaching that is all around us. And we pray for the generation rising up that you'd especially help them to stand in a world that seems to be darkening, but we're thankful that the light will shine even more brightly and ultimately you are the win, the winner in the end in Christ's name. Amen.