I Am Faithful

Good morning to all of you here in the room joining us on our live stream right now. My name is Mark, one of the pastors, and I'm so glad that you are here in church with us today. Aren't you glad you're here? I mean, wow, just hearing that last song and prayer. I hope you feel the same way in about 30 minutes. But anyway, God's Guide to God is our message series, and today we're going to be in this section. It's based in Exodus 34:6 and 7, and today we reach the end of verse 6 where God says, "I am faithful."

Now, let me ask you, what do you think of when you hear the word "faithful"? Perhaps you think of a beloved grandparent, someone who you could always share whatever you needed to, or maybe you had grandparents that were married for 50, 60 years, and their faithfulness inspired you. This week, my wife, Laura, and I will celebrate our 25th anniversary, and so I am so grateful, grateful for her faithful love to me. And yet, we can experience faithfulness in other sorts of relationships. Perhaps you have, if you're blessed, a best friend who you know just has your back, or that best friend could be a coworker, a neighbor, a sibling, someone you met in grade school, and each type of faithfulness brings its own kind of gift to us.

Some of you, if the end of our services when we show the pictures is any indication, you are very grateful for the faithfulness of your pets because we see a lot of them in the pictures with you. And I get it, I have a big chocolate lab named Boone, and you could say that he is almost too faithful. This is right after I picked him up for the very first time at the breeder, and he spent the ride home just staring at me like this, as if to say, "From now on, you and I are best friends." And he has two great loves in life, food and family, and fortunately he's able to differentiate the two because he's a pretty big boy now.

But I mean, when I say faithful, I mean like when I'm taking a shower like this morning, he's on the other side of the curtain, or poking his head in, or if I'm in the bathroom for any other reason, he's there. If I'm doing yard work, he wants to be right in the thick of it, even if I could be using a chainsaw, I have to push him away sometimes, or if I'm using my leaf blower, I will shoot him in the face with a blast of air, and he just opens his mouth and goes, "Aaaargh!" Because it's just awesome as long as he's with his people.

And like I said, there's different types of faithfulness that we experience, and there are different orders of magnitude. I mean, would you agree it's more important to have a faithful spouse than a faithful dog or a faithful car, which means it is of supreme importance to know that our God is faithful. And so today I want to share with you three essential aspects of God's faithfulness, and I don't know where some of you are in terms of your faith journey. I know I look out here, I recognize some faces you've been walking with the Lord for decades, and others of you, perhaps, you're new to all of this. Maybe you're just starting your faith journey, or you're thinking about starting a faith journey, but wherever you are, I can promise you this, if you lean into God's faithfulness, it will change your life.

So let's go to the Scriptures, first of all, to our theme verse, verses I should say. And you have to understand that this is, Exodus 34:6 and 7, is this weird, amazing passage where God describes himself, and he says this in verse 6, it says, "And he," that's God, "passed in front of Moses, proclaiming the Lord the Lord," or Yahweh Yahweh in Hebrew, "the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness." Now, if you've read ahead into verse 7, you know that he also says that he does not leave the wicked unpunished. In fact, he punishes the children for the sins of their parents to the third and fourth generation. René gets to preach that sermon. He told me I could go ahead if I wanted to, but I said, "No, I think we ought to go in order." And so actually, he's excited to preach on that section of verse 7 because there's more to it than what you might recognize at first glance.

But today, our word is faithfulness. In Hebrew, it's the word emet, and emet means faithful or true. We might say that, you know, this person is, you know, a true friend, a faithful friend. And just as we saw earlier with compassionate and gracious, how they were linked together, the same is true with love and faithfulness. So you often will see in Scripture like in Psalm 25:10 where it says, "All the ways of Yahweh are loving and faithful," because the two go together. They go kind of hand in hand. And in the companion book for this series called God has a name by John Mark Comer, he says this. He says, "God's love is His faithfulness. God's faithfulness is His love." Hacid, that's the word we saw last week, that big, big word that you can't translate with any one word in English. We have kind of used a number of words, you know, covenant, faithfulness, loyal love, all of that.

His hesed and his emet, his faithfulness are about God's loyalty, how He never, ever abandons His people, but He's faithful to the bitter end no matter the cost. And that really sums up a theme that you see in Scripture often, which is there's this juxtaposition, this stark contrast between God's faithfulness and human unfaithfulness. In fact, it's the context to Exodus 34:6 and 7. These words didn't just come out of nowhere. There is a context to them, and that context is a massive spiritual blowout among God's people. So we're going to take a look at that today and we're going to roll back to Exodus 32.

And the first thing that I want you to see is that God is faithful to forgive. God is faithful to forgive. Three months after the Israelites and Moses leave Egypt, they arrive at the base of Mount Sinai, and Moses begins to trek up the mountain, meet with God, and then come back down and tell the people what God has said. And then after the first trip, he tells the children of Israel that God wants to make a covenant with them. Now we don't use that word covenant very often, but the most kind of accessible analogy for us would be marriage, because marriage is both a relational commitment, but it's also a binding contract, right? And that's the same thing with this covenant that God wants to initiate with Israel.

And so when Moses announces this, all of these rights kind of say, "We do." God has proposed. "We do. We will enter into that covenant with him." And so Moses starts again going up and down the mountain six days, which is kind of reminiscent of the six days of creation, and each time he comes down with more information, it gets more and more intense. Intense is like this dark cloud descends on Sinai, and there are peals of lightning, and there's thunder, and there's fire, and there's smoke. It's like California or something like that. And not only that, but there's also earthquakes, and so it's getting really alarming for the people at the bottom of the hill.

In fact, on the sixth trip up, Moses brings with him — oh, before I get to that, right around day four, God speaks the Ten Commandments audibly, and so the people of Israel hear his voice for the very first time. Can you imagine hearing the voice of God? Yeah, that's what they said. Wow. In fact, they said, "Wow, Moses, we beg you from now on, can you and God just talk privately? Because we can't handle it down here at the bottom of the hill. It's too — even from a distance, his power, his glory, his awe, they just can't even take it." Day six, Moses goes up. He takes 70 elders with him, and they stop part way, they have a worship service together, and then Moses goes on by himself, disappears into the dark, thick cloud at the top of Sinai, where he will spend the next 40 days and night receiving the words of the covenant that the scripture says God will write with his own finger on two stone tablets.

Picking up the story, Exodus 32:1. "When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, 'Come, make for us gods who will go before us.'" Now, hold up a second. "When the people saw that Moses was gone so long," you mean like 40 whole days? Less than six weeks? They say, "Hey, make us gods like we had in Egypt." Wow. "Less than three months ago, they saw God deliver them from Egypt. They saw him part the Red Sea. They experienced him provide water in the desert and not only that but manna and the miracle of quail. And now it's like, you know what? Moses is tardy. Time for us to move on to something else."

And you know, there's something for us here, because maybe you've experienced this in your own life. It's when God does not meet our expectations, whether it be how he answers prayer or his timing in particular, that it triggers us to be unfaithful. It's like, God, I tried to trust you, but you let me down. And so now I have to move on to other things. Can any of you relate? There is a trigger that happens for us whenever we are disappointed or disillusioned or mad at God, which is to be, if he won't be God, I will have to do the job for myself. But listen, God's faithfulness is not about him ever and always doing what we want on our terms according to our timing as if God was just a bigger version of Santa Claus. You know what I'm saying? But that's the mood among the people right now. Not only towards God, but also by extension towards Moses.

Continue with verse 1, watch what they say next. "As for this fellow Moses," now he's not just Moses, he's this fellow, you know, like that dude Moses, yeah, you know, can't trust him, "who brought us out of Egypt?" We didn't really want to go. We don't know what has happened to him, so bring on the golden calf. Moses' brother Aaron complies. He forms this golden calf and then he builds an altar and no sooner have the tablets been finished up on the top of the mountain than at least two of the commandments have already been broken. "Have no God before me and don't make idols for yourselves." And there's probably a few more that get broken along the way here in this story.

And so God says to Moses, it's not going well down there. In fact, he says, "Leave me alone, said that I might consume them in my wrath." It's a startling story. I mean, does it blow your mind just a little bit that God in a mysterious way has feelings? That God can be hurt? That God can be angry? And we make the air sometimes. The God of deism is like Aristotle's unmoved mover. He's distant. He doesn't care. But sometimes the God of our modern kind of therapeutic mentality is the God who's just like, you know, he's at the mercy of what we do and he's always, you know, just weeping over us or something like that. And that's not really the God of Scripture. He's somewhere in this mysterious middle where he's in control and he's sovereign, but at the same time he allows himself to feel and bear in mind what the people have done is a kid cheating on your honeymoon. It's that unfaithful.

And so Moses intervenes, basically says, "God, don't wipe them off the map. Remember the promise you made to Abraham and to Isaac and to Israel, that through them you would make a great nation and you would bless the entire world." Moses is basically saying, "God, I understand you are justifiably angered in this moment, but you're always faithful." And so God relents. He lays aside his anger. Moses charges down the hill with the two tablets and the first thing he sees is this weird kind of worship, idol worshiping rave party. The Bible just says they engaged in revelry and that word can have sexual connotations to it. And it's Moses' turn to be angry. And he takes the tablets and throws them on the ground and breaks them into pieces. And then he turns to Aaron and he says, "What in the world did these people do to get you to comply with what's going on here?"

And this is a classic moment because Aaron's like, "Well, first of all, you know how prone to evil these people are. And when you were late, they said to me, 'Make us gods like we had in Egypt.' And so I took a little offering, I gathered their jewelry and I threw it in the fire and he literally says, 'And out came this calf.'" Like all by itself, it was almost like a miracle, almost like I had little to nothing to do with what is going on here, Moses. I love that. Well, long story short, Moses has the instigators killed. And if that troubles you, don't be too hasty to judge Moses because I want you to see what he does next in verses 31 and 32. It says, "So Moses went back to the Lord Yahweh and said, 'Oh, what a great sin these people have committed. They have made themselves gods of gold. But now please forgive their sin. But if not, then blot me out of the book you have written.'" Wow.

Moses is offering up his own life on behalf of the people and it really foreshadows what Jesus will do, not just offer to do, but actually do for the entire world. But I want you to see something here because the word for forgive here is the Hebrew word nasa. And it means to lift or to carry or to bear. And we're going to delve into this in greater detail next weekend. But what I want you to see for today is that Moses is asking God to carry the sins of the people, not just wipe them away or forget about it like no big deal, but in some way he's asking him to bear their sin for them. It's like if you loan someone some money and then they come back to you later and they say, "You know what? I know I owe you this money, but truth is I have no way to repay you like ever." Now, if you forgive that debt, who carries the burden? You do because the debt is real.

And again, that's a foreshadowing. It's like a giant arrow pointing to the cross because that is exactly what Jesus has done for us as Peter writes. "But he himself bore our sins in his body on the cross so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness by his wounds you have been healed." Peter is quoting Isaiah 53 here, which was written over 600 years before Jesus was born, which is remarkable in itself, but it reminds us that God has been faithful to forgive all along. He didn't just invent that in the New Testament. And for some of you, I wonder some of us today have walked in here feeling like you're still carrying guilt or shame. You're haunted by something in your past. You know what this means? This means that you can walk out of here today knowing the debt has been paid, paid in full. In fact, that's exactly what Jesus said when he said it is finished. It is paid in full when he died on the cross for us because God is faithful to forgive.

And the other thing is that God is faithful to stay. You know, God has promised never to leave nor to forsake us. But you know what? There's a moment in this story. It's very interesting. There's this moment that comes where God kind of gives Israel an out, so to speak. He says to Moses, "I'm going to keep my promise. I'm going to send you to the promised land, but I'm going to have an angel lead you there." So God is saying, you know, "I'm going to keep my promise, but it might be better if I also keep my distance." Reminds me of a time when our boys were young. They were just being so rotten that they were just driving Laura to her wit's end. And so, you know what she did? She locked them out of the house. And they're knocking on the door, "Hey, Mommy, can I let us back in?" And she's like, "You don't want to come in right now." In a way, God's saying, "Maybe you want to just, you know, know me from a distance."

And it's really a question that's at the heart of faith, because I think what God is suggesting to them is, "Do you really want a relationship with me, or do you just want the things that I can do for you? Because I can have angels do that part." And again, that's the question for us. Do we really want a relationship with God, or do we just want the blessings that He can provide? And there is a tendency, again, maybe you have experienced this in your own life, we set a goal for ourselves, or there's something that we really want, it could be success, it could be a promotion, it could be money, it could be who knows what a relationship, like if I just was with that person. And have you noticed that as we get closer to that, in fact, if we actually achieve that, there is the temptation, even the tendency to leave God behind, because we're so focused on that thing.

And so, it's a good thing to ask yourself, when God gives you the desire of your heart, is God still my first love in that moment? And again, that's really, God exposes this in Israel in this moment, and when He does, it cuts them to the quick, because they get it. It's not just about keeping or breaking the rules, it's about keeping faith or breaking God's heart. And so, Moses will intervene again, but this time, he's not just kind of talking for them like what he wants them to feel, they feel it. And this is really a significant point, because this is what God says here, starting at verse 15, Exodus 33, it says, "Then Moses said to him, 'God, if your presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. God, we are, we want to be with you, and if you're not going to go there, we won't go with you either.'

And this is the turning point in this story, when the people realize that they don't just want a distant God or a genie God, they actually want a real covenant, a real relationship with them. Verse 17, "And the Lord said to Moses, 'I will,'" there's that covenant language right there. Some of you said this in your wedding, "I will. I will do the very thing you have asked, because I am pleased with you, and I know you by name.'" And in the Greek translation of this passage, where it says, "I am pleased with you," it says, "You have found grace before me." You have found grace. And you know what? There's going to be a need for a lot more grace in the days and weeks and years ahead, because there's going to be a lot more sin, a lot more rebellion, and God knows this, and yet He is faithful to stay with them, just like He is with us. That's the point.

You know, when God took on flesh and dwelled among us, who made His home among us, who and what were the kind of people that Jesus was known to hang out with? All the wrong kind, according to some, right? The tax collectors and prostitutes and ne'er-do-wells, but He was faithful to stay with them in the messiness of their lives, just like He is with you and with me. And again, maybe you're here today, and if you think about it, you have this nagging sense that God simply tolerates you. If God loves Sunday school teachers and He loves missionaries but you, well, He loves you because He has to. It's His job. It's part of being God. But you know what, my friend? Let me just remind you. If this story is about nothing else, it is about God's desire to love people who are not always very lovable, people who don't often do a very good job loving Him back.

But because of His abiding presence in our life, you can be sure of not only His faithfulness to forgive and His faithfulness to stay, but third, God is faithful to start over with each of us. And I love this part of this story because remember, the tablets are still laying on the ground, shattered into pieces. But then this is where Exodus 34 begins, right here in verse 1. "The Lord said to Moses, 'Chisel out two stone tablets like the first ones, and I will write on them the words that were on the first tablets which you broke.'" Nice little line there. It's as if He's saying to Moses, "I didn't actually tell you to break them, but I get it. You broke them because the people had broken the words." But then He says, "Let's start over." You know, it's akin to Him saying, "Let's renew these vows all over again."

And I want to be very clear about something. It's a beautiful moment, but we need to bear in mind, God does not need us. Okay, God is not lonely. God is not needy. God is not codependent. God is completely sufficient in Himself, Father, Son, and Spirit. God has all He needs in and of Himself, and that's why it is so stunning that He would want to have a relationship with us. That is why the angels are just in awe that God would deign to love us so much that He would become one of us. That's what the Christmas story was all about, with the angels just being blown away. Glory to God in the highest, whose favor is with what? Men, women. Wow. But that's Yahweh who is abounding in faithfulness.

And maybe that's why He has you here today, to remind you of that, that no matter what you have done, you can always start over with Him. Isn't that good news? It is for me. You know, that's the big idea today, and in much of Scripture, and it's this, that God is faithful even when we are not. It's like Paul wrote in 2 Timothy 2:13 when he said, "If we are faithless," and he may as well have written when we are faithless, "He will remain faithful for He cannot disown Himself." He can't disown His own body. We are the body of Christ. And God, He's that Father that Jesus taught about who runs out to welcome back the prodigal sons and daughters. He's the Good Shepherd who leaves the 99 to find the one. And if you feel like that one, remember He's faithful, willing to start over again so that together we can reach new heights in our relationship with Him.

I want you to think about that as I close with this story. I recently watched a great documentary called "The Dawn Wall." It's about two guys, Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgensen, that set out to climb the Dawn Wall in Yosemite. And I got to tell you, parents, there's some language here, so be advised, but it really is a beautiful story. The Dawn Wall is this section of the face of El Capitan that catches the first light of the day. Hence, it's called the Dawn Wall. And there are a number of routes that go up the face of El Capitan on this side, on this side, but there were no routes that went up the Dawn Wall because it was considered impossible. It's just too smooth.

And so for six years, Tommy and Kevin try to figure out how in the world can this thing be climbed. And they rappel down on ropes, and they're looking for little handholds here and there, and they eventually they chart out this route. But for Tommy in particular, this was part of a lifelong dream. And so they begin their ascent right near the end of 2014, right after Christmas. And they're climbing in the wintertime because it's the lowest humidity, and this is when the rock is stickiest, and they need that level of margin. Well, they reach what was called pitch 15, right here. A pitch is how far you can go climbing basically with your rope, about 150 feet. When you're on belay, there's someone who leads the climb, and the person behind is going to stop this rope if and when this person falls, which is going to happen again and again and again.

In fact, it's just this little vein that you can see here. The rest of this is unclimbable, but this little vein just has enough cracks for them to attempt it here at pitch 15, which has basically no holds. But after many attempts, Tommy is able to climb cleanly through pitch 15. And the way this works in sport climbing is in order to advance to the next pitch, you have to climb that pitch you're on without falling at all. If you fall, you go back to the beginning of that pitch and you start over. And so Tommy gets through, but Kevin falls and falls and falls. In fact, after so many attempts, the rock is like razor sharp and it grinds the skin off the tips of his fingertips so that he can't even climb. He just has to sit and rest for a couple of days and then try again and then rest his fingers again.

Meanwhile, the one thing he can do is that he can go and he can assist Tommy with the other pitches. And so as a result, the gap between where Kevin is stuck at pitch 15 and where Tommy is going continues to increase until it gets to the point where Tommy Caldwell is poised to reach the top. It's pretty much a done deal. The hardest climbing is all behind him. And that's when he has this realization. If I can't go to the top with Kevin, then I don't want to go. And he comes back down and he encourages Kevin and he just keeps cheering him on and spoiler alert, Kevin eventually gets through pitch 15 and he's so stoked, he just blazes up the other pitches and together with tears of joy, these two guys top out together, which is just a lovely, lovely story.

But when I was watching this, I was thinking, you know, well, that's reminiscent of what God does for us because at some point, Jesus calls us to follow him. And most of you here in this room are watching at some point, you said, "I'm in, count me and I will follow you." And yet we are reminded very soon that life is still hard, that there are still obstacles. And so we fail and we fall and we get frustrated with God and with ourselves. And some of you may be here today and you are just hanging by your fingertips. Others of you, you may have actually fallen recently. But the message of the gospel is that God is faithful and Jesus comes to us and meets us where we are and reassures us and says, "I am with you and I will finish what I started in you and together we will go on to the heights." Amen? Amen.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for your goodness and your grace to us today. We thank you that you are faithful. And Father, I pray that that truth would lodge itself deeply in our hearts, our lives, our circumstances that if anyone is here today and they feel like somehow they have been disqualified from their faith journey, that Lord, you would remind them of these truths today and that they would be encouraged to the point where they would look to you and say, "Lord Jesus, I just want to follow you knowing that you will meet me each moment of the way." And Lord, I know that there are folks right now within the sound of my voice who's, they have difficult circumstances. There are unanswered questions. There are needs that have not yet been met and they are hanging by a thread. Their hope is so fragile. Lord, would you assure them that you see them, that you are with them, and that you promise to be faithful to them even now. We pray this in the matchless name of our Lord Jesus Christ. All God's people said, amen.