May 6, 2024, Day 2 of Week 6

Daily Dose of Hope

May 6, 2024

Day 2 of Week 6

Scripture – Exodus 19-21; Psalm 33; Ephesians 5

Welcome back!  This is the Daily Dose of Hope, the devotional that complements New Hope Church’s Bible Reading Plan.  Let’s get right into our Scripture for today.

We have come to the passage in which God covenants with his people.  Moses has led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, through the Red Sea, and into the desert.  They have finally made their way to Mt. Sinai, located on the Sinai Peninsula in northeastern Egypt, very close to Israel.  It's here that God's covenant is offered to his people through Moses. 

What is a covenant?  God makes binding agreements with people, promising to do certain things and asking his people to do the same.  Covenant agreements were quite common in the ancient near east so basically God uses a concept that was already meaningful to the people.  He uses what already makes sense to them. 

God made a covenant with Abraham and with Noah.  Now, he is making one with Moses, on behalf of the Hebrew people.  God uses covenants to begin to reconcile human beings to himself, to begin to fix what went wrong in the Garden of Eden.  Through each covenant that God makes, we see how God attempts to be in relationship with stubborn human beings, demonstrating his deep love for creation, and wanting them to understand that, and so badly wanting them to reciprocate. Through these covenants, God is beginning to reveal his plan of salvation. 

Today’s covenant with Moses and the Israelite people is what’s known as the Old Covenant.  We read in Exodus 19 how God calls these people to be a holy nation and a kingdom of priests.  If they keep up their end of the agreement, the covenant, then they will be God's treasured possession.  They agree to do so.  Today’s reading is only the beginning of the Scripture describing the Old Covenant.  It starts in Exodus 19 and basically runs through the remainder of the book of Exodus. 

What does life under God's Old Covenant look like?  Well, there are some very specific boundaries and guidelines which God provides his people and it's what we call the law. This includes the Ten Commandments, which we read about in Exodus 20, but also so much more.  God's law in total contained 613 commands, and they were both blessings and curses.  This points to how this was a conditional covenant.  If the people obeyed, they would be blessed by God; if they didn't obey, then they would be cursed.  We have a tendency to want to separate the law into pieces (the ceremonial laws, worship laws, the food laws, the moral laws, and so forth) but the law was a unit.  If you broke one piece of it, you broke it all.

The covenant was with the whole nation of Israel.  It wasn't with one person--it was for Israel as a whole.  This is important-it wasn't for Gentiles and Gentile nations.  It wasn't for the church.  It was for Israel.  If someone wanted to be a Jew, then they had to agree to live under the covenant, which included becoming circumcised for men.  A couple more things about the law: Sometimes, especially in Christian circles, we think of the law as bad.  We read about the legalistic Pharisees in the Gospels and we read through Paul's letters and we think about how horrible the law was.  But that is really the opposite from the truth.  The law, this Old Covenant, was good.  When God's people came out of Egypt after generations of living in a pagan world, having adopted pagan ways, they didn't know who God was.  They didn't understand at all who they were as God's people. 

After redeeming them the Israelites from bondage, God gave them guardrails in the form of the law.   Have you ever driven on a mountain road with no guardrails?  It can be really scary!  I had this happen when we were in Rocky Mountain National Park.  It felt like an eternity I was driving on these incredibly steep mountain roads with no guardrails.  When we finally got to the place with a little guardrail, I could breathe.  As human beings, we need boundaries.  We think that freedom means no rules at all, being able to do what you want when you want and how you want.  But if you have lived that way, and some of you probably have, you realize that isn't freedom.  You end up in bondage to your own brokenness, your own sin, your own desires, your own depravities.  Having been delivered from bondage, God's people needed to know what living a free life looked like.  Thus, God gave them guardrails which allowed them to be in relationship with God and relationship with each other in a healthy way.

As we read through the law over the next few days, some of it isn’t going to make any sense to us.  Remember, we are reading through twenty-first century eyes.  There is so much about the history and context we just don’t understand.  And remember this – God was forming a people, shaping a people really, who he had called to be separate and set apart.  He wanted them to look drastically different from the cultures around them.  He wanted to protect them but he also wanted to teach them.  We will talk about this in more depth as we begin to address more confusing passages.

Please read through Psalm 33.  It speaks of God’s sovereignty but also how he is the provider and sustainer of his people.  Most likely written by David, this is a song that praises God and eagerly awaits God’s goodness.  There is an expectancy here.  Do we praise God with expectancy for what he will do in our lives?

Okay, let’s move on to Ephesians 5.  Paul is imploring the Ephesians to live as God’s holy people.  This is kind of ironic.  In our Exodus passages, God is trying to create a holy people through the law, by instituting the Mosaic Covenant (what we call the Old Covenant).  But Paul is speaking as a follower of Jesus Christ living under the New Covenant.  Jesus has fulfilled the Old Covenant.  The law is no longer what makes people holy.  Those to whom Paul is writing would be Christians, with the Spirit of the Living God within them.  They are being sanctified by God’s grace.  It’s only through the Holy Spirit in them that this is possible and they can even seek holiness.  This standard is actually harder – it’s a circumcision of the heart.  Paul is asking the Ephesians to seek this high standard because of who they represent.  I love verses 8-10, For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth)  and find out what pleases the Lord.

But I don’t want to neglect the second half of this chapter because I think it’s incredibly important.  It’s here that Paul speaks of mutual submission, Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Mutual submission - it's what marriage is all about.  Of course, if you grew up in Christian circles, you know how badly the whole of Ephesians 5 has been distorted. The focus has been on wives submitting to husbands.  But before Paul talks specifics, he says this: submit to one another out of reverence to Christ.  Then, he talks about wives submitting and husbands loving.  

We should note that this discussion would have been revolutionary at the time.  To say women had a low social and legal status in the Roman Empire is quite the understatement.  And here is the Apostle Paul telling the Ephesians that marriage is a covenant and that there needs to be mutual submission between the parties.  That means women submitting to men (which would have been the norm at the time in that culture) but also that men should submit to their wives.   Husbands submitting to wives?  That would have been unheard of! 

To make it even more earth-shattering, Paul says that husbands should love their wives in the same way that Christ loved the church.  How much did Christ love the church?  He died for the church!  He is telling these guys to love their wives sacrificially.  Wow!  Once again, we read these words through our twenty-first century eyes and we may think something like, "How outdated and sexist."  But the truth was anything but the sort.  Paul's words elevated the status of wives in significant ways. They were to be loved and valued.  There should also be unity and fidelity in the marriage relationship, which means only one wife and no affairs.  Paul wants Christian men to understand that holiness within their marriage is also important.  It demonstrates that those who are "in Christ" do life differently.  They are new people in Jesus and the church, as the body of Christ, is drastically different than the culture at large. 

We could probably stop there and that would be enough.  But wait, there's more.  Paul is using the marriage relationship as an analogy.  The relationship of the husband and wife in marriage points to the beautiful relationship between Christ and the church.  Just as there needs to be unity between husband and wife, there needs to be unity between Christ and the church.  So let's be real, the universal church has messed this up a bit.  Sometimes, the church demonstrates unity with Jesus and sometimes it doesn't.  I'll stop here today but I ask you to reflect on this question: Does New Hope demonstrate unity between Christ and his church?  What do we do well?  How do we struggle with this? And how do we do better?

We’ll chat again tomorrow. 

Blessings,

Pastor Vicki