HIStory: the story of a God who ... frees his people to worship him
Exodus 7.1-13.16; 25-31; 35.1-40.33
Milford Baptist Church, 30 June 2002

Let's play a word association game. What is the first word that springs to mind when you hear the word, "freedom"? Do you think of William Wallace, who catalysed the battle for Scottish independence from English oppression, and died with the cry of "freedom!" on his lips? Do you think of William Wilberforce, the young British politician who devoted his life to dismantling the slave trade and liberating slaves throughout the British commonwealth? Or Martin Luther King, the black civil rights leader who was assassinated for his dream that one day in the USA little black girls and little white boys might be able to play together on the same beaches and ride together on the same buses?

If you've read the story of Exodus, or seen Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, you'll know that one of the greatest battles for freedom in all history occurred in Egypt about 1500 years before the time of Christ. The people of Israel in Egypt are an oppressed people, the victims of forced labour and ethnic cleansing. God, who has compassion on his people, sends Moses to Pharaoh with the demand: "Let my people go, so that they may worship me." But Pharaoh and his officials harden their hearts and refuse to listen. And so, like ten bruising rounds with Lennox Lewis, the Egyptians do ten rounds with God. God inflicts ten terrible plagues on Egypt:

1. The river Nile turns to blood (7.14-23).

2. Frogs swarm out of control (8.1-15).

3. Gnats infest the entire land of Egypt (8.16-19).

4. Flies plague the countryside (8.20-32).

5. Deadly diseases - maybe foot and mouth or mad cows disease - decimate Egyptian livestock (9.1-7).

6. Terrible boils afflict people and animals (9.8-12).

7. A storm of hail destroys everything until a white blanket of death covers all of Egypt, except for the region of Goshen, where the Israelites live (9.13-35).

8. An unprecedented plague of locusts devours what remains of the country (10.1-20).

9. A deep terrifying darkness descends on the ruined land, except for Goshen (10.21-29).

10. And at midnight, on the night called Passover, God strikes down every single firstborn Egyptian male, from the firstborn son of the Pharaoh who sits on the throne, to the firstborn son of the prisoner who sits in the deepest dungeon (11.1-42).

At the end of this contest, no longer is it the Israelites crying out for deliverance. It's their oppressors, the Egyptians, crying out in anguish. And just as God had promised, he brings his people out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery, by means of his mighty hand (7.3-5; 13.16). He frees his people, so that they can worship him.

We are God's people. He has freed us to worship him. Not just to sing to him on Sunday morning, but to serve him in everything we do; not just to pray to him, but to present our lives to him as living sacrifices. That's worship. How would you rate our worship? Someone once said to me: "If our worship of God is weak, it's because our knowledge of God is shallow." But the only way to really get to know someone is through his or her actions. So what do these events, God's actions on behalf of his people, reveal about the God who we worship?

Greater than our worst enemies

First, they reveal that God is greater than our worst enemies.

These ten plagues were more than a contest between Moses and Pharaoh. They were a contest between the gods who Moses and Pharaoh represented: the one God of Israel and the many gods of Egypt. Most of these "miraculous signs and wonders" have a distinctly religious flavour. For example, the Nile was worshipped as a god by the Egyptians. To turn it into blood was an insult to that god. The Egyptian fertility goddess was depicted in Egyptian art with the head of a frog. A plague of frogs was an attack against that god. The Egyptian sky goddess was depicted as a cow. The plague against cattle was an attack on her power. The Egyptian sun god, Ra, was discredited by the plague of darkness. And according to Egyptian religion, the Pharaoh was considered divine. So the tenth plague and the death of his heir apparent was again evidence that the God of Israel was superior to the entire pantheon of Egyptian gods. Ultimately Pharaoh and his people have to acknowledge that the God of Israel is the Lord, and that there is no one like him in all the earth (7.5, 8.10, 9.14, 12.32). In one sense Pharaoh and Egypt stand for all the forces that enslave and oppress God's people. What's oppressing us this morning: anxiety, doubt, fear, sin, death? The exodus proves that God is greater than our worst enemies. He can free us.

But what are the implications for our worship? How are we to worship God? With a God this great, we should entrust ourselves to him in faithful obedience.

There was an advert in the paper this week about the Weber Brothers' circus, and a picture of a trapeze artist. Have you ever seen trapeze artists in action? I love that moment when one of them lets go of her bar and sails through the air? As a matter of technique, apparently, it's critical that she does not reach for the other's hands but waits for him to take hold of hers. Letting go like that, and trusting God, can be difficult. Especially if we don't understand our circumstances, or we don't understand God. There must have been times during the plagues when the Israelites would have wondered what on earth was going on, what God in heaven was up to, hardening Pharaoh's heart, cooking up plagues. But in faith they obeyed God's commands, splashed the blood of a sacrificial lamb on the doorframes of their house, and so experienced God's deliverance. God has provided our sacrificial lamb to take away the sin of the world. He gave his own much beloved firstborn son to die for us. But we have to respond in faithful obedience. We are saved by grace, through faith.

Kathleen Norris, a writer, tells of how she fought a long intellectual battle against the faith of her childhood. Later, when she experienced problems in her personal life, she felt drawn to a Benedictine abbey where, to her surprise, the monks seemed quite unconcerned about her doubts. In fact, an old monk whispered to her that doubt is merely the seed of faith, a sign that faith is alive and ready to grow. Rather than address her doubts one by one, he just told her to worship God, to give her heart to God. Gradually it dawned on her that to have a relationship with God she did not need to understand the relationship, she simply needed to live it. Like a trapeze artist, she just needed to let go.

Have you seen the BMW ad on television? It goes like this: "You don't need to see everything to believe that it's there." God says to us: "You don't need to understand everything to give your heart to me. Let go; give yourself to me, because I am greater than your worst enemies."

Closer than our wildest dreams

But in this story God reveals another side to himself. He is not just greater than our worst enemies, he is closer than our wildest dreams.

As God leads his people out of Egypt and through the desert towards the promised land, he gives them careful instructions on how they are to worship him. For thirteen chapters (25-31, 35-40), nearly a third of the book, God gives them a blueprint for the construction of a tabernacle, an elaborate tent around which they were to base their worship. The tent was to be a "slice of heaven" on earth, a place where heaven and earth met. It was called "the tent of meeting" (29.42) because it was there that God promised to meet with his people. It was there that he promised to dwell among his people, in a contraption made from animal skins. This God who is infinitely above his people is also intimately close to them.

Fifteen hundred years later John says that Jesus replaced the tabernacle: the Word became flesh and dwelt - or "tabernacled" - among us (John 1.14). Jesus was "God with us," Immanuel (Matt 1.23). He revealed God to the world. But with Jesus in heaven, guess who reveals God to the world now? Paul, in his letter to the Corinthian Church, said: "Don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple and that God's Spirit lives in you?" (1 Cor 3.16). Together, as followers of Jesus, we are to be God's tabernacle, God's presence in the world, a slice of heaven on earth.

What are the implications for our worship? First, we need to give priority to meeting together.

On Thursday night, drained and discouraged, I dragged myself off to an Elders' meeting. The five of us there shared our burdens and blessings, prayed for each other, and dreamed about God's future for the church. I drove home from that small group revitalised. I had met with God in the midst of his people. It's in small groups like that, home groups, where we often best experience God's presence. If you want be part of a small group, fill out the questionnaire inside your newsletter or talk to me about signing up for the next Alpha course.

But there's a second implication. We need to take seriously our responsibility to express God's love in the world.

In the early 1960s a tiny six-year-old black girl, Ruby Bridges, was the first black child to attend a recently desegregated white school in New Orleans. All the other students boycotted the school in protest. Escorted by federal marshals, she had to walk through mobs of white people shouting obscenities, yelling threats and waving their fists at her. She ran this gauntlet every day, to attend a vacant school and sit alone in her classroom all day. Watching the brave young girl was Dr Robert Coles, a paediatrician and child psychiatrist. It occurred to him that she would make an ideal subject for studying the effects of stress on young children. As he interviewed her over the following weeks, you know what he discovered? You know how she responded to those daunting circumstances? She prayed. She prayed for herself, that she would be strong and unafraid. And she prayed for her enemies: that God would forgive them. "That's what Jesus prayed on the cross," she said to Dr Coles. That little girl entrusted herself to God and expressed in her actions love for those who didn't deserve it. She reflected God's presence, God's character, into that troubled world of racial unrest. And through the witness of that uneducated, disadvantaged black child from the slums of New Orleans, Dr Robert Coles, the expert from Harvard, was drawn to faith in Jesus. In our struggles, at our work, in our homes, let's reflect God's presence, express God's love, to the world around us.

Let me close with one more story of liberation. It's January, fifteen hundred years after the exodus. And it's time once again for the Passover festival in Jerusalem. Imagine arriving in Jerusalem, having walked miles with your little lamb dragging behind you on a piece of rope. Jerusalem is convulsing with visitors for the festival. You clamber up to the temple, the redeveloped tabernacle, recalling as you go not just how far you are from home, but how far you have fallen from God. You just want to say sorry, to be close to God in his house again.

But looking up, you realise that you're going to have to wait in the heat for quite a while. In between you and the temple there's a whole network of queues and lines. This line to have your lamb inspected and rejected on some spurious grounds. That line to buy a new lamb only to discover that your money is invalid and needs to be changed into temple coinage at some exorbitant exchange rate. The whole system of rip off and exploitation at the hands of temple inspectors and moneychangers is right up there with the Enron and WorldCom debacles. It's not right. You just want to worship God, meet with him, confess your sin and receive his love. But there are all these barriers in the way.

You're just beginning to buckle with despair, when a commotion erupts in the corner. Some guy is knocking over the stalls of the people selling animals and the counters of the moneychangers, scattering their coins everywhere. Then he leans over and picks up the ropes that fence you off from the temple, and using them as a whip, he starts driving all the animals outside. In a flash it's all over. When the dust settles, you see that there's nothing standing in the way of you worshipping God. All the barriers have gone. There's just Jesus and the sick, the oppressed, the desperate. And he calls you to him. No sacrifice is needed now. No rituals. Just a chance to be with the One who still today goes on breaking down barriers between himself and his people. The One who is greater than our worst enemies. And closer than our wildest dreams.