Sermon Tone Analysis

1.

By a show of hands, who likes bumper stickers?

Yeah, I used to like bumper stickers...until they stopped being funny.

They used to be really funny.

They used to say clever things like, “WARNING: In case of rapture this vehicle will be unmanned;” or “My kid can beat up your honor student.”

One good one I did see recently in town said, “Do you follow Jesus this close?”

But for the most part I don't care for bumper stickers anymore, and not just because the number of them on a car can serve as a barometer for the degree of road-rage you can expect from its driver, but because they've just become so stinking serious.

Now they serve more as banners of anger or discontentment, or push some political agenda.

So many of them just push things on people.

I want to show you a picture of one such bumper sticker that is gaining popularity.

(Show “Coexist” bumper sticker on screen) How many have seen this?

What do you suppose is this sticker's intended message?

It's the same message as what has been recently written by the Dalai Lama.

He wrote a book last year called Toward a True Kinship of Faiths: How the World's Religions Can Come Together.

In this book he insists that accepting the validity and reality of all faiths is “critical for the sake of peace and happiness.”

The presupposition that is being operated from is that the basic human condition is good, and that the highest good to be attained is world peace, a human experience.

You see, the logic he's using is off.

The whole book is based on a logical fallacy.

It says that all people in the world do not believe the same; all religions promote a different belief; therefore an exclusive religion is unrealistic.

Yet, in the Bible we have the first commandment in which God says, “You shall not have other gods before Me,” and He goes on in the second commandment to forbid the worship of idols.

The first simple reason for this commandment is that the basic human condition is evil.

Humanity is fallen, and as such is incapable of creating peace.

Humanity has fallen into a billion-mile deep hole, and is incapable of climbing out.

The basic message of this bumper sticker, and all proponents of religious pluralism, is not tolerance, but atheism.

Religious pluralism equals atheism.

How is that?

As the saying goes, the fear of everything is essentially the fear of nothing.

If all religions are true, then none of them are right, and if none of them are right then none of them are real, because all religions in some way claim to exclusively represent reality.

2. I'm not here this morning to convince you all that Christianity exclusively represents reality.

My position is that of the Bible; it never attempts to prove, but simply assumes the existence and truth of God.

This is why I'm here: Pastor Bob asked me to contribute a message to this series we've been going through about being a disciple of Jesus, what it means to follow Him and surrender to Him in every area of life.

Where I fall in all of this is that what Jesus taught about following Him is a reflection of the first commandment: You shall not have other gods before Me.

In a world full of people seeking to rid the world of religion it is imperative that we assert and keep on asserting that there is no truth outside of God, and that what is taught in Scripture is the absolute truth to the exclusion of everything else.

But is that enough?

Is claiming Biblical Christianity as our exclusive faith following the first commandment?

Have you ever thought for yourself what all is implied by this command to not worship other gods?

You see, a simple negative command is merely a more succinct way of teaching a whole array of behaviors.

Simply not following another religion is not following the first commandment.

The ability to stand up and say, “You see?

I'm a Christian.

I'm not a Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim or devil-worshiper, but a Christian,” is not evidence of following the first commandment, much less of a life of following Christ.

Think of it this way: My relationship with my wife is signified outwardly with a ring.

This symbol says that I belong to my wife and to her alone.

But is wearing this symbol sufficient to fulfill our wedding vows?

A great piece of advice I was given when we got married is that the best way to avoid an affair is to avoid the appearance of one.

Following the first commandment means ridding oneself of all traces, or appearances of traces, of allegiance, loyalty or devotion to anyone or anything that is not God, because the devotion of the saved belongs to the God who saves.

There is no other God who saves sinners, so their devotion should never go anywhere else.

The devotion of the saved belongs to the God who saves.

If we're to understand and see how this is what the first commandment means, and what it means for us practically, we have to first understand why it was given in the first place, so I'd like us to go through this section of Exodus together this morning.

The ten commandments is found in Exodus 20.

VI.

The Hebrew people, the descendants of Abraham, had spent 430 years as slaves in Egypt.

Who were these people?

Nobodies, really.

There weren't that many of them by the world's standards, they weren't politically organized or military people.

They posed no real threat to anyone.

The Pharaoh in Egypt, the one mentioned in Exodus 1 was merely paranoid.

They were hated, despised and oppressed.

There was nothing special about them, really...except that they were the recipients of a divine promise, the promise to Abraham that his descendants would be more numerous than the stars in the sky, that they would live in a promised land, the land of the Canaanites, and that through Abraham's descendants would come an eternal blessing for all peoples of the world.

After 430 years of enslavement in Egypt, when God's people were at the end of their rope, they cried out to Him, and He remembered them.

This doesn't mean He forgot, but that He purposely remembered His promise, the same way it says in Genesis that God remembered Noah.

He didn't forget, but after the appointed time He remembered.

VII.

The first half of the book of Exodus tells the story about how God raises up Moses, a runaway Hebrew criminal, raised as Egyptian royalty, quite possibly in the running for the throne at one point.

God calls Moses, tells Him that His people have cried out to Him and He has heard them, and that he was to go to Pharaoh to tell him to let the Hebrews free.

You know the story, but this is the most important event of the entire Old Testament, and everything we're going to hear today is rooted in this story.

Pharaoh refused to let them go, so God did something drastic.

God was to go through Egypt and kill the firstborn child of every family, except those who take the blood of a perfect lamb and smear it on the doorposts of their houses.

Those covered by the lamb's blood would be spared.

In the midst of Egypt's grief over the loss of all their firstborn children, God set His people free.

He led them to the wilderness to a place called Sinai.

We pick up this event in Chapter 19.

This is the climax of the whole story.

Our author, Moses, has spent 68 chapters leading up to this event where undeserving nobody people are approached by a holy God, reformed into a nation of His own people, brought into a relationship with Him.

VIII.

I'm actually going to start us off in Exodus 19.

The people were led by God to the mountain where they set up camp.

Verse 3: /Moses went up to God, and the LORD called to Him from the mountain, saying, “Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob and the sons of Israel/: (notice the double identification: “house of Jacob,” “sons of Israel”; who they were, and who they were becoming…) /'You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagle's wings, and brought you to Myself.'”/

See, what God is doing here is making a proposition.

He is proposing a covenant to Israel.

In those days a lord or sovereign would make a treaty or covenant, which is like a legal contract, with a lower citizen or vassal.

In this agreement the sovereign would promise protection and other benefits in exchange for loyalty and work from the vassal.

There were typically four major parts to this covenant.

There was a preamble, in which the parties of the covenant were identified, a prologue in which the historical background of how the parties came into contact with one another was reviewed (what benevolent thing the sovereign had done for the vassal), stipulations in which the rules or code of behavior on the part of the vassal were presented, and finally sanctions in which specific blessings or curses for obedience or disobedience were announced.

This is precisely the type of covenant God is proposing here.

Verse 3 names the parties involved, God and Israel, and verse 4 reviews the historical basis for this covenant, in this case, the Exodus.

Now let's look at the other parts to this.

Here are the stipulations... Verse 5: /Now then, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep My covenant, those are the stipulations and here are the sanctions, then you shall be My own possession among all the peoples, for all the earth is Mine; Verse 6: and you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

These are the words you shall speak to the sons of Israel.”/

IX.

Israel is referred to in three very significant ways here: “My own possession,” “kingdom of priests” and “holy nation.”

The first, “my own possession,” or “treasured possession,” or “special treasure.”

The idea in this term is private property with particularly high value to the owner.

God obviously owned all the peoples of the earth since He was their creator, but He is naming Israel as the specially valued treasure among all of them.

If all the peoples of the world are owned by God, how much more is someone specially chosen and treasured as “God's people.”

The second identity is “kingdom of priests.”

A priest is a mediator, a servant who serves by interceding and mediating between a king, sovereign or even a god and regular people.

Israel was to be bearers of the presence of God, a kingdom of those chosen to enjoy the presence of God as He dwelt with them, representing Him to the other nations of the world.

And the third, “holy nation”: Israel was to be holy as God was holy.

Holy means set apart, utterly different in every way.

Israel was to be God's special treasure because of their work as a kingdom of priests, and they would function as a kingdom of priests only by being a holy nation.