God is the Gospel
November 28, 2021
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
Exodus 19:4-6
4 ‘You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. 5 Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, 6 you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words you are to speak to the Israelites.”
As we’ve been preaching through Exodus, we’ve often preached through two full chapters, and our sermons usually last 30 or 35 minutes. This morning, I want to preach through just a few verses. In fact, I really only want to preach one phrase from one verse and do that for about fifteen minutes. As Pastor Ben said at the start of the worship service, we’ve wanted to make this service more full of what has been squeezed during Covid, namely, singing of songs of praise and gospel liturgy.
Let me read the verses at the beginning of chapter 19, and then I’ll tell you what the phrase is.
On the third new moon after the people of Israel had gone out of the land of Egypt, on that day they came into the wilderness of Sinai. They set out from Rephidim and came into the wilderness of Sinai, and they encamped in the wilderness. There Israel encamped before the mountain, while Moses went up to God. The LORD called to him out of the mountain, saying, “Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the people of Israel: You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel.” (19:1–6)
There are several wonderful phrases in this passage that call for attention—treasured possession, holy nation, kingdom of priests, for example. But the only phrase I’ll touch on this morning is the last words in v. 4. The verse says, “You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.” I want to focus on that phrase “brought you to myself.”
As many of you know, I was not at our church all summer long. It was my seventh year here, and the church gave me a sabbatical to do some writing and continuing education, but mostly time to rest and regroup. You always hear about pastors who go on sabbaticals who either decide they are no longer called to be a pastor, or they decide they are called to be a pastor somewhere else. I can tell you, the whole summer long, I felt God whisper back to me that I was to be a pastor, and I was to be a pastor here—at least for the next season. Who can know what will happen in the years and decades to come. But there was one moment when I doubted. But it’s not as heavy or serious as it sounds. I’ll tell you what happened.
We went to the Outer Banks in North Carolina for a vacation, as we’ve done for the last few years. We often make a trip to what is called Jockey’s Ridge, which are giant sand dunes. There is a hang gliding school at Jockey’s Ridge, and every year our family would watch people who don’t look very athletic get drug down the hill by the instructors. Because it was our epic “Sabbatical Summer,” my wife signed me up for hang gliding, which isn’t quite as epic as it sounds. You basically run down a hill and jump, and you glide to the bottom of the hill.
Anyway, when the class was over, it was a 15–20 minute walk back to the check-in area. I got to walk and talk with one of the young instructors. Our small talk moved toward spiritual things when I talked about the summer sabbatical and all that and how I used to be an engineer but now I work for a church. He seemed really interested in how that change would happen, from working in the sciences to working at a church. So, I started to tell him the story of how God saved me and brought me to himself. I told the guy I didn’t want to preach at him, but he said, “No, I’m really curious.” So I told him about that year in college when my life fell apart and how I knew I was a sinner and needed Jesus. I told him about how I had grown up in the church, but, at least looking back, I had thought of the death and resurrection of Jesus—the Easter story—as a cliche, something often said but lacking in power. I told him how God changed me through Jesus.
By this point, we’re only five minutes from the check-in, and the guy looks at me and says, “Woah, the same thing happened to me.” I was like, “Really, what do you mean?”
He says, “So was I way into snowboarding, and I thought I’d go all over the world to do it. I’d snowboard in the northern hemisphere in the winter and then get to Australia in their winter and just snowboard all year. And I did that for like 18 months of constant winter,” he says, “but then Covid happened, and I couldn’t go back to Australia, so I had to stay here, and that’s when I found hang gliding. And it changed my life. That’s how the same thing happened to me.”
When he told me that, I thought to myself, Perhaps I am the worst evangelist-pastor in the world and shouldn’t even be a pastor because that is not at all the same thing. But that’s not what I said, at least to him anyway.
That was a long story. Perhaps too long. But it was to bring up the point that it’s possible to hear a lot of good truth, even gospel-Jesus-good-news truth, and hear it in such a way that we take that truth but shift it to mean something it doesn’t mean.
The good news of Christianity is the story of how God takes sinners and brings them to himself, and he does that transfer in such a way that sinners are now brought to him without experiencing God’s holy wrath against them. The Bible teaches we are children of wrath (Eph. 2:3). We are, as it were, Egyptians far from God. But in the gospel, sinners are loved and cared for in such a way that they become God’s treasured possession, a holy nation, a kingdom of priests.
It’s possible, though, to hear the story of Exodus and Christianity and make it a story about how you get freedom, the freedom to do whatever you want. It’s possible to hear the story of Christianity and make it a story about how you get joy, the joy of doing all the things you ever wanted. In other words, it’s possible to hear the story of Christianity, and make it a story not about the good news of how God brings us to himself, but a story about how we become our true selves by finding a family or a job or prosperity or health or even hang gliding. And that version of the good news story of Christianity is not the real story. It’s not real Christianity. It’s not really even good news. If you get everything that life has to offer, or even Christianity has to offer, but you stop short of getting God himself, then you haven’t gotten good news.
This is my fear from all our preaching so far this fall. It’s possible, in all our preaching and teaching through Exodus—as we’ve told stories about Moses and Israel and plagues and Pharaoh and the crossing the Red Sea and Manna and so on—it’s possible to lose the plot. It’s possible that as we have pointed out the way that the book of Exodus whispers the hope of Jesus to get confused about the main thing. I don’t want the tragedy of that misunderstanding to happen.
One way to avoid this tragedy is to highlight the order of this salvation in Exodus, which is the same order throughout the Bible. The book of Exodus teaches that we get to God by grace, not by right living—we get to God by the sacrifice of another.
The next few weeks during Christmas time, we’ll break from Exodus, but when we come back, we’ll be in chapter 20, and we’ll move slowly through the Ten Commandments. When we do, we’ll say this over and over: the Ten Commandments come in chapter 20, not chapter 1. God does not come to Israel and say, if you obey these rules, I will save you and bring you to myself. No. He saves them first and leads them out of Egypt after they slaughter the Passover Lamb, who dies in their place, and then they leave. And God tells them he loves them and how he bore them on eagles’ wings and makes them a treasured possession. And only after they have been saved from the wrath of God as the angel of death passed over their houses with doors covered in blood, and he frees them from slavery, only then does God show them how to live.
God brings us to himself and then shows us how to live. Not the other way around.
To be brought on eagles’ wings is to say that in the midst of danger, God swooped in and carried us to safety. It’s a way of saying that we were medevacked from a danger we couldn’t escape another way. It’s like breaking your leg on the side of a mountain with a war and battle all around you, and there is no way to escape, but then a helicopter comes in, guys with ropes descend down, secure you to cables, pull you up, and fly you to safety. But, as I’ve been pointing out. Exodus is clear that we are not merely pulled to safety or freedom or joy or the prosperity of the promised land, a land flowing with milk and honey. The story of Exodus, and the story of Christianity, is the story of how sinners are rescued and flown to God himself.
The Bible teaches that Jesus lived the perfect life, the life we should have lived, which makes him the perfect Passover Lamb to be sacrificed in our place. What I tell my kids sometimes to make the gospel more clear, I’ll say that Jesus was the perfect kid, but he took our spankings for us. And after Jesus died for our sins and absorbed all of God’s holy wrath against sin in our place, he rose again to life. He ascended to the throne of the universe and promised to come again. And he extends not only freedom and not only joy and not only the hope of heaven but more than all those things, God gives us himself through Jesus. And that is the gospel. That’s why the “recognition formula” that we’ve talked about so much says, “Then you will know that I am the Lord.” God wants us to know him. God wants to bring you to himself.
Even though I would say we preach the gospel every week at church, and we sing the gospel every week, and our services have a gospel arc though our liturgy every week, I wanted to take one week to flash with bright, neon lights the overt gospel, the overt good news of Jesus.
If all this is new to you, I’m so glad you’re here at Community. I would love to talk with you more about it. And if not with me, dozens of others here would like to do that with you. Please reach out.
And if you’ve heard this a thousand times and believed it a thousand times, that’s great. Together, let’s pray that God would keep it fresh in our hearts, that all the struggles and distractions, all the victories and defeats, in the wilderness on our journey way to the Promised Land wouldn’t cause us to lose sight of what makes it all worth it: God.
Let’s pray . . .
