We Can Do All Things Through Christ Who Strengthens Us
May 1, 2022
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
Exodus 31:1-11
1 The Lord said to Moses, 2 “See, I have called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, 3 and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship,4 to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, 5 in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, to work in every craft. 6 And behold, I have appointed with him Oholiab, the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan. And I have given to all able men ability, that they may make all that I have commanded you: 7 the tent of meeting, and the ark of the testimony, and the mercy seat that is on it, and all the furnishings of the tent, 8 the table and its utensils, and the pure lampstand with all its utensils, and the altar of incense, 9 and the altar of burnt offering with all its utensils, and the basin and its stand, 10 and the finely worked garments, the holy garments for Aaron the priest and the garments of his sons, for their service as priests,11 and the anointing oil and the fragrant incense for the Holy Place. According to all that I have commanded you, they shall do.”
The version of the Bible we most often preach from, the English Standard Version, has over one thousand chapters, over thirty thousand verses, and over seven hundred and fifty thousand words. Speaking of all of these, God tells us through the apostle Paul, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16, 17). I believe that. I’ve tasted and seen it. Our church has too. And we want you to believe that every word is for your every good.
But to say that every word is for our every good, is not to say that it will be immediately clear the way in which every word is for our every good (cf., 2 Pet. 3:16). For example, Pastor Ben preached last week from six chapters in Exodus, chapters that might be in your Bible—as they are in many Bibles, even in the Bibles of committed Christians—what we could call the “crispy” pages, that is, those pages that get little attention and thus remain crispy. This is especially true in an epic book like Exodus, a book where a young sister floats her baby brother in a basket down a river, where a bush does not burn, where God, some eighty years later, uses that same baby now grown up to turn that same river into blood. Exodus is a book where then nine more plagues free slaves from the most powerful man in the world and where the parting of a sea and the closing of a sea saves some people and kills others. In a book like that, it’s not a surprise that these six chapters, indeed most of the back half of Exodus, remain, shall we say, crispy. But God put every word there for our good, even the passages that give instructions about how to build stuff we no longer need to build. It just might take a minute to see how every word is there for our every good. Let’s pray as we begin, asking God to show us how. “Dear heavenly Father. . .”
Introduction: “syllabus week”
Without a doubt my least favorite week of graduate school was not the week of final exams, but the week we could call “syllabus week,” the week more commonly known as the first week of classes. You show up in one class, and the professor hands you the sheet of paper that tells you everything you must do that semester in that class: the papers you must write, the books you must read, the tests you must take, the group projects you must construct, and, sometimes, the passages you must translate. Then, you’d go to your second class, and the same drama would traumatize you all over again: the papers, the books, the tests, and the projects. This happens in three or four, sometimes five, classes over a few days. With the engineering job I had during seminary, the hours I tried to volunteer at my church during seminary, and the seminary work I had to do during seminary, I suffered through “syllabus week” ten times. Each time, without exception, I felt utterly undone and overwhelmed at the commands upon me.
This morning we will eventually get to our text of Scripture. Ordinarily we do that very near the beginning of a sermon because if you’re going to preach a passage you have to, well, preach the passage. But this morning, instead, we will meander toward the passage that was read a few moments ago. To appreciate the provision of God in Exodus 31 we need to better experience syllabus week, as it were, for a bit. Surely the people who first received these commands from God would have felt, as perhaps you often feel, utterly undone and overwhelmed at the commands the Lord puts upon us. But if we’ll linger here for a bit, in the end, we’ll also see that God more than provides to us what he commands from us.
God commands us to worship him rightly
Turn with me to the beginning of Exodus 25, which is part of the passage from last week (pg. 61). You’ll want to have an open Bible as we look at a number of verses.
The LORD said to Moses, “Speak to the people of Israel, that they take for me a contribution. From every man whose heart moves him you shall receive the contribution for me. And this is the contribution that you shall receive from them: gold, silver, and bronze, blue and purple and scarlet yarns and fine twined linen, goats’ hair, tanned rams’ skins, goatskins, acacia wood, oil for the lamps, spices for the anointing oil and for the fragrant incense, onyx stones, and stones for setting, for the ephod and for the breastpiece. (25:1–7)
And so begins the six chapters we could summarize as “all the stuff God commands them to build.” This chapter begins with collecting the raw materials for all the stuff. If you let your eyes fall down to the headings sprinkled throughout the chapters, you’ll see headings such as, “The Ark of the Covenant,” “The Table for Bread,” “The Golden Lampstand,” “The Tabernacle,” “The Bronze Altar,” “The Court of the Tabernacle,” “Oil for the Lamp,” “The Priests’ Garments,” “The Altar of Incense,” “The Bronze Basin,” and “The Anointing Oil and Incense.” Again, we could summarize chapters 25 through 30 as “all the stuff God commands the people to build for the proper worship of the God who is who he is.” And it’s a big syllabus. This group project ain’t gonna get done with an all-nighter right before the end of the semester.
I’ll read more, starting with the ark of the covenant because it might be familiar. Note how specific are the instructions.
They shall make an ark of acacia wood. Two cubits and a half shall be its length, a cubit and a half its breadth, and a cubit and a half its height. You shall overlay it with pure gold, inside and outside shall you overlay it, and you shall make on it a molding of gold around it. You shall cast four rings of gold for it and put them on its four feet . . . (25:10–12)
So specific. Not balsa wood, pine, maple, or cherry, but acacia wood. A cubit was about eighteen inches. And the length is not two cubits or three cubits, but two and half. Measure twice, cut once. And it’s overlaid with pure gold, not imperfect gold. There are not three rings or five rings, but four. So specific, right? So it is throughout these chapters. Let’s skip ahead to the end of chapter 26, which is a whole chapter about the tabernacle, which was the portable tent-temple. Let me read just one verse, Exodus 26:36, “You shall make a screen for the entrance of the tent, of blue and purple and scarlet yarns and fine twined linen, embroidered with needlework.” Use “blue and purple and scarlet yarns,” God commands. Then take the yarn and make it “fine twined linen, embroidered with needlework.” Just consider for a moment the enormity of what God commands in this one verse. You don’t get yarn from Hobby Lobby. You must raise sheep and goats, shear the sheep and goats, and then make yarn. Then you get, I don’t know, I suppose berries that are blue and purple and scarlet, and you squash the berries and dye the yarn, at which point you only have the raw materials. You haven’t made anything yet. And so God commands chapter after chapter.
One pastor likened these descriptions to a “divine open house.”[1] I guess that could be true. Perhaps we could even say it’s almost like an episode of a show where a celebrity walks you through her $18 million mansion. I make the comparison because everything described here seems so lavish and so beautiful. And it was supposed to be that way. In Exodus 28, in the chapter about the uniforms for the priests, we read, “And you shall make holy garments for Aaron your brother, for glory and for beauty” (Ex. 28:2). The purpose was not merely function, like a Gore-tex robe to keep one warm in the cold or a Dri-FIT robe to keep one cool in the warmth. Not just function but beauty, glory—the best materials arranged in the most beautiful ways. Why? So people would know when they see the people of God that God is not just functional, but beautiful. As we sang, he’s an artist and a potter. Awesome, right? But it was also very serious, too.
Last week Pastor Ben showed us a picture of a priest’s robe. It had little bells at the bottom of the robe. We read that the bells were to make sounds as a priest goes in and out of the inner part of the tabernacle, the Holy Place, so that “he does not die” (Ex. 28:35). It’s not said directly, but the implication seems to be that if you make lousy bells, priests might die. That’s serious. So is this: the incense for the altar described in Exodus 30 was so special that if you made it for yourself, you were to be cut off from the people of God (Ex. 30:32–33). Super serious, right?
Imagine it’s your first day as an electrician, and on your first day a journeyman walks you over to an electrical panel, showing you how to connect and disconnect wires. You watch as he makes quick work of it all. Then he looks at you and says, “Oh, make sure that you always check the flux capacitor before you connect these wires because if you don’t check it, you’ll die.” You nod your head that you understand, but you don’t understand. Then, over the next seven hours, he commands something similar a dozen times. Don’t do this or you’ll die. Serious and scary, right?
And not only might it be serious, scary work, this building of the stuff God commands, but what if you don’t know how to do embroidery with needlework or how to overlay acacia wood with gold? Like what if you’re not able? This spring I’ve helped coach a local track team. Often, I describe the workout for the distance runners while the sprinters and throwers are within earshot, and I’ll see this terrified expression come over all the sprinters as they begin to clutch their hearts and dry heave, wondering if I’m commanding them to do workouts they could never do. To change the genre, what if I command us to tune a piano? A few of us could perhaps do that, but many would not even be able to tell when the piano is out of tune. The joke often gets made around here that even though I am Pastor Ben’s boss, he’s never gonna let me in the choir. I don’t know what to do with sheet music; it has so many squiggly lines.
I could belabor this longer, but you see where I’m going. Surely the people who first received these commands from God would have felt, as perhaps you often feel, utterly undone and overwhelmed at the commands the Lord puts upon us. And this is my larger point in the first half of the sermon. While you and I are not the people of God who God commanded to build stuff in the book of Exodus, we are the people of God who are commanded to do stuff. God commands Christians, those he has redeemed from slavery to sin, to walk with him in obedience, representing his truth and beauty.
In the New Testament, we could group some of these commands under the title of “one to anothers.” These are the commands Christians are to do with and for each other. And there are many, many such verses. Let me read a few of them. Jesus told his disciples, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12). Commandment, not suggestion. But it’s not hard? You know, just love people in the same way Jesus loves you, forgiving all their trespasses.
Consider some of the commands given throughout Romans. From 12:16, “Live in harmony with one another.” From 15:7, “welcome one another.” And from 16:16, “Greet one another with a holy kiss.” Now, after church please don’t come up and greet me with a kiss. I’m good. And not just because of Covid. Culturally, we don’t do kiss greetings. But what God is commanding us to gather regularly with the people of God in a local gathering and to do so with such joy in our hearts that we can sincerely and naturally show signs of affection to our brothers and sisters in the Lord—maybe not with kisses but with very affectionate handshakes and affectionate head nods.
In Galatians, God commands that we “bear one another’s burdens” (Gal. 6:2). In Ephesians we’re commanded, “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you” (Eph. 4:32). In Philippians, we’re commanded to “do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves” (Phil. 2:3). In 1 Thessalonians we’re commanded to “encourage one another and build one another up” (1 Thes. 5:11). That’s a command, not a suggestion. James writes, “Do not grumble against one another . . . so that you may not be judged; behold, the Judge is standing at the door” (Jam. 5:9). So serious, right? Peter writes, “Show hospitality to one another without grumbling” (1 Pet. 4:9). And on and on come the commands for serving others and worshiping the God who is who he is.
It’s possible that because of the way all these commands stack up, they could feel bad, but we need to remember they are for our every good. You want to live in a world where people obey the one to anothers. I want to pastor a church where people treat me and each other like this. These commands are not bad and burdensome. And yet, surely the people who first received these commands from God would have felt, as perhaps you feel, utterly undone and overwhelmed at the commands the Lord puts upon us.
That is, unless God also provides what he commands. Which he does.
God’s provision for us to worship him rightly
I said at the start that we ordinarily get to our passage of Scripture very near the beginning of a sermon because that’s what you have to do to preach a passage. Otherwise, what are you talking about for thirty minutes? This morning, however, I wanted to meander toward Exodus 31 because I felt we would better appreciate the Lord’s provision in Exodus 31 if we first experienced syllabus week, as it were. Now, with all this context, look again at Exodus 31:1–11.
The LORD said to Moses, “See, I have called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, to work in every craft. And behold, I have appointed with him Oholiab, the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan. And I have given to all able men ability, that they may make all that I have commanded you: the tent of meeting, and the ark of the testimony, and the mercy seat that is on it, and all the furnishings of the tent, the table and its utensils, and the pure lampstand with all its utensils, and the altar of incense, and the altar of burnt offering with all its utensils, and the basin and its stand, and the finely worked garments, the holy garments for Aaron the priest and the garments of his sons, for their service as priests, and the anointing oil and the fragrant incense for the Holy Place. According to all that I have commanded you, they shall do. (Ex. 31:1–11)
These two men seem to have the spiritual gift, we might say, of arts and crafts: “artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, to work in every craft.” The church should excel at training artisans. When our children come home from church with colored macaroni that’s been glued to construction paper, we’re training artisans. The people of God should excel at decorating, filmmaking, novel writing, graphic design, music playing, and more, because the God who is true, is also beautiful. Being good at a craft takes time. And time requires patience we often don’t have. The author G.K. Chesterton once said, “You can’t grow a beard in a moment of passion.” You have to be willing to be bad at sculpting for a while before being good at sculpting. You might have to be bad at preaching for a while before being good at preaching. Now, I’d love to do a long rant about the arts and their value to God and their unfortunate undervaluing among the people of God, but that rant would take me away from the main thing you need to see in this passage.
Here’s another direction we could go. This passage curbs our lust for human hero leaders. When you think of the book of Exodus, you think, of course, of Moses, and perhaps also Aaron and then Miriam, and then maybe the young Joshua and Jethro, Moses’s father-in-law. But we should also be thinking of how awesome Bezalel is. But note Bezalel can’t do anything unless God’s Spirit comes upon him. And this insight actually helps us read Moses better. Yes, Moses holds the staff, Moses rebukes Pharaoh, Moses leads the people out, Moses goes up on Mt. Sinai, and so on. But for as great as Moses is, he can’t make a single thing commanded in chapters 25–31.
And if we give Exodus a better reading, we actually see Moses is not really The Man. Moses, as a baby, needs to be saved by women: his mom, his sister, Pharaoh’s daughter. And when Moses grows up and acts violently, he flees away—scared. When God commands Moses to speak to Pharaoh, Moses says he can’t. When Moses goes back to Egypt, he almost dies, and his wife has to save him from the Lord’s wrath, which is a short story we didn’t cover at the end of chapter 4. When in Egypt, Aaron often speaks for Moses. Later, in a certain battle, Moses needs others to hold his hands up in prayer. During that same season, Moses’s father-in-law rebukes his son-in-law for trying to be a hero leader. Church, the best pastors, the best leaders, best parents, and professors—the best Christians—are not the those who believe they can do it all but the ones who know they can’t. The only one who can do it all is Jesus. And in this way, I’d love to go on an even longer rant about our love of human hero leaders, but that rant would take me away from the main thing you need to see in this passage, namely God.
Notice the repetition of “I” in vv. 2, 3, and 6. Four times: I, I, I, I. “I have called by name. . . I have filled with the Spirit of God . . . I have appointed . . . I have given . . .” I, I, I, I. God himself provides the people of God what he commands of the people of God. And praise God for that! Were this not the case, we would be utterly undone. And he doesn’t just provide barely enough. God provides more than enough.
In Exodus 35 we read of how God provided several skilled women to help build everything God commanded to be built. And then in chapter 36 we read of these two men again. Which is great that God provided people to make stuff. But what if these men and women didn’t have the raw materials for building the stuff, the stuff couldn’t have been made. But the people brought more than enough because God changed hearts. In Exodus 36:7, Moses has to restrain people from bringing stuff. The people are too generous. Look at 36:7, which says, “So the people were restrained from bringing, for the material they had was sufficient to do all the work, and more.”
Can you imagine a fundraising campaign that goes so well, the fundraisers just say, “Ahh, just quit giving us money”? Our church annual budget is around $650k. Our church is very generous, but I wish on May 1, just a few months into the year I could say, “Just give money to other places.” I wish I could say the nursey has enough volunteers. In fact, we’ve printed a sheet in the bulletin the last few weeks with all the places we need people to serve. If this were a commercial, I might read them to you now. It’s not a commercial. But this theme in Exodus does make me think of Paul’s words in Philippians 4:13, “I can do all things through [Christ] who strengthens me.” Steph Curry writes those words on his shoes to remind him of the God who provides. I paraphrased that line for the title of this sermon to be instead, “We can do all things through Christ who strengthens us.”
Church, perhaps right now, what God commands of you feels overwhelming. I can tell you that very often being a husband and a dad and a pastor and honoring God in all those things, as well as in all the other things in my life can feel overwhelming. Perhaps for you, a friend or pastor has betrayed you, and you wonder how to carry on in the faith when those who lead the church and profess faith seem so fickle. Perhaps you find it difficult to come to church with a warm heart toward certain brothers or sisters. Perhaps you wonder if your sins, which seem so wayward will keep you from God?
I read of that command to “encourage one another and build one another up” (1 Thes. 5:11) and I think of one of our longtime members who can’t come to church because she’s dying. You would think I’d tell you about how I, as a pastor, must build her up. And I do feel like that. But when I visit Jim and Shelby, she builds me up—they build me up. Even though she can no longer speak and can only write words on a dry erase board, she builds me up. And when I see that, I see Exodus 31, I see Jesus, I see the God who provides what he commands. And seeing Jesus in her is the way Jesus puts more of himself in me.
This is why even the crispy parts of Exodus are so good. This is why every Word of God is breathed out for our every good. We are commanded in Exodus to have no other gods before the real God. We talked about that in our time in the ten commandments. Here, buried in Exodus 31, we see the way we are so much better for having the real Jesus as our master than any other Pharaoh. Pharaoh commands brick making without providing straw. But what Jesus commands, he gives. To paraphrase a line from a famous African Christian named Augustine: “[God,—he prayed—C]ommand what you will; give what you command” (Confessions, Book 10, Chapter 29).
And so here, at this point in the sermon, we must go to the gospel to where we’ve been going all along. If this passage in Exodus is about God providing what he commands—and if, in a greater and fully consistent way the Bible is about how God provides what he commands—then how can Christians not revel in the cross of Jesus Christ? How can we not see the cross of Jesus as the place where we are most clearly confronted with our inability to meet the commands of God and yet simultaneously most gladly met with God’s provision: our need for forgiveness met with God’s provision of forgiveness.
And anyone can get in on this. There’s more forgiveness and provision in the heart of Jesus for you than you’ve yet experienced. When we talk of the cross of Christ, we can do so in the words of Exodus 36, we can talk of Christ’s death as the provision that is as far more than sufficient for your need.
If you don’t know God’s provision in Jesus yet, which is some of you, and if you don’t yet know the provision of Jesus as fully as you should, which is all of us, we can ask God for it. Jesus loves to draw near to those who want him near. Let’s pray . . .
[1] Bobby Jamieson, “Rescued to Dwell with God,” Exodus 25:1–31:18, Capitol Hill Baptist Church, September 2, 2018.
Family Discussion Questions:
1. Have you ever had to build something really difficult?
2. Would you consider yourself an artist? What do you appreciate about art? What do beautiful things (both human paintings and divine sunsets) tell us about God?
3. Answer the question Benjamin asked at the end: How does the cross of Jesus become the place where we are most clearly confronted with our inability to meet the commands of God and yet simultaneously most gladly met with God’s provision?
4. What areas do you need God’s provision? Spend time asking him for this provision.
