Matt Chandler - Wisdom and Mission

If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab those. We’re going to be in Exodus chapter 17. If you don’t have a Bible with you, there should be a hardback black one somewhere around you; I want you to grab that. As always, I want you to see that I’m not making any of this up, but we’re actually just reading the Word of God, which is the Word of God. Whenever I get the opportunity to do a wedding, I almost always want to draw people’s attention to the reality that there’s something bigger going on than just the wedding itself. We read in Ephesians chapter 5 that when a man pursues a woman and they are married, that’s a picture of God’s pursuit of us in Christ; that’s what Ephesians 5 says. I want to draw their attention to the fact that these flowers, the candles, the white dress, and the flowers on the floor that a kid awkwardly and beautifully, with great cuteness, has dropped on the floor—all of that signifies something bigger underneath. God is trying to communicate to us, and it is painted on the canvas of creation: His pursuit of His people in the man’s pursuit of the woman. In our chapters today, we have an ambitious desire to go from 17:8 to 19:2. If you’ve been at the village for a while, you’re probably starting to think if you need to cancel that lunch. You don’t; we’re going to do this in a good amount of time. But there’s something bigger going on in this story than just the story. It’s bigger than the Amalekites, it’s bigger than Jethro, and it’s bigger than Moses’s seven ascents up Sinai. It’s richer and bigger, and I want to show that to you. So, before we dive into the text, let me catch you up on where we are in the story. God has delivered the people of Israel out of slavery and out of bondage to the Egyptians, the Egyptians being the greatest superpower the world had known at this point in human history. No one was as mighty, no one was as wealthy, and no one was as powerful, both in military might and wealth. God destroys Egypt and brings the people of Israel out of slavery. Israel doesn’t rise up and conquer Egypt; God conquers Egypt and calls His people out. When they get into the wilderness, they, like us, have a tendency to grumble and complain, and God meets their grumbling and complaining with grace and blessing. He puts bread on the ground called manna—sweet-tasting bread—and water flows from rocks as He cares for His people. I thought Trevor Joy did an incredible job last week of preaching and teaching here at the village. Near the end of that, we start getting into this really strange story where Israel, just camped out in the wilderness, is attacked with an unprovoked attack from the Amalekites. They just attack Israel and seek to destroy them. If we go back in our story, we remember that when Moses shows up to Pharaoh and demands that Pharaoh let the people of Israel go, Pharaoh asks this question: «Who is the Lord that I should obey His voice?» God answers that question for him in the form of a series of plagues that reveal that the gods that Egypt worshipped—some sixty of them—were no gods at all, but He, the Lord, was the only God. After each plague, or at the pronouncement of each plague, God answers Pharaoh’s question: He sends the plague and says that you may know that I am the Lord. Then it turns, in the last parts of the plagues, to that the nations may know that I am the Lord. The judgment on Egypt and the deliverance of the people of God, the mercy shown to the people of God, is, in a sense, a banner for the world to know that God is the Lord; He is Yahweh; He is the only God that is. Now that this has happened, that God has displayed His might to the world via the conquering of Egypt and the deliverance of Israel, the world is beginning to respond. The first sign of that response is the Amalekites, who attack the people of Israel unprovoked. This is what sin makes you do—it makes you stupid. If you’ve got a kid, I apologize for saying this, but sin makes you dumb. Here’s what I mean by that: It’s been clear that without a man raising a sword, the most powerful nation that has ever existed on Earth at this point in human history vanished. And then this little tribe out in the desert was like, «Yeah, I like our chances.» Someone on that war council should have been like, «Hey man, I know they don’t look like much, but remember that time that all the water turned to blood? What weapon do we have that’s going to combat that? Remember the time that the firstborn son of everybody died? Are you sure about this?» But apparently, nobody on the war council thinks like that, and there’s just kind of affirmation: «We can take them.» So they ride out to make war against Israel. If you’ve got a background in church, and maybe you grew up in a…