Open your Bibles to the book
of Exodus chapter 3. Aside from that mildly humorous
reference to my birthday before we opened the service, I had
not had any intention of bringing it up, but our brother mentioned
it and I appreciate his remarks. We have been together, well actually
it's been 29 years already since the first time I preached to
this group of people in December of 1986. And this June will mean 29 years
since I moved here. But some of you now I have known
for a little over 29 years. And it was just at this time,
actually the middle of February, that you had extended to me a
call to come here to pastor this congregation. And so some of
us have been walking together now for 29 years. And those words there, how beautiful
upon the mountains are the feet of Him who brings good news,
that's true. And I've heard good news from
a lot of God's servants in this world, and I've always appreciated
the news they brought to me, the gospel of the Lord Jesus
Christ. And while those who listen may say, how beautiful upon the
mountains are the feet of him that brings good news, we who
have been charged to deliver that good news say, how beautiful
upon the walls of the city are those who are looking for good
news. You may think it a blessing that
I was sent here to preach the gospel to you. I count it a blessing that you are here to listen and
that week by week you all come. And you listen to this guy who
can't claim anything but his feet to be beautiful. And yet
you listen week by week because the Lord has given us a common
love for that one who truly had beautiful feet, nailed to a cross, for this good
news. Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned
it. That you all are precious to
me. Exodus chapter 3. Now Moses, was tending the flock
of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian. And he
led the flock to the far side of the desert and came to Horeb,
the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared
to him, the angel of Jehovah, and whenever you See that reference,
the angel of Jehovah, as opposed to just an angel of Jehovah. When it says the angel of Jehovah,
it's talking about the Son of God, who would later come in
the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. There the angel, the messenger
of the Lord, appeared to him in flames of fire from within
a bush. Moses saw that though the bush
was on fire, It did not burn up. So Moses thought, I will
go over and see this strange sight, why the bush does not
burn up. When the Lord saw that he had
gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush,
Moses, Moses. And Moses said, here I am. Do
not come any closer, God said. Take off your sandals, for the
place where you are standing is holy ground. Then he said,
I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of
Isaac, and the God of Jacob. At this, Moses hid his face because
he was afraid to look at God. The Lord said, I have indeed
seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard and I
am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue
them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that
land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk
and honey, the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites,
Hivites, and Jebusites. And now the cry of the Israelites
has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing
them. So now go, I am sending you to
Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt. In our Sunday school class today,
we began looking at the doctrine of the holiness of God. And in
studying for that lesson, I was reminded of this scripture. In verse 5, when God said to
Moses, do not come any closer, take off your sandals, for the
place where you stand is holy ground. Now, ground, dirt, is
just dirt. And it can never be anything
other than that. And therefore, the holiness of
that ground had nothing to do with what the ground was made
of. It wasn't holy because there
was something special about those cubic yards of soil that were
under Moses' feet. It was not holy because there
was some special gateway to heaven in that spot. that could not
just as well have been any other spot in all the universe. That
ground was holy for two reasons. God chose that ground as a place
where he would do something special. You say, why that spot? I don't
know. God does what He wills, when
He wills, where He wills, with what He wills and who He wills.
And He doesn't explain to us why there and not somewhere else. You might say, well, that's because
Moses was there. Well, Moses was there because God put him
there and God could have put him anywhere else. So there's
nothing special about the dirt, nothing special about the place.
It's holy because God chose it, and it's holy because God was
there in a way that He was not in other places. Now God is everywhere
at all times, and He's even in that non-where, of His own existence. Remember, He exists outside of
time and space. So you say, where is God? You
could say, well, God's everywhere, and you could just as well say,
God is nowhere. Because He exists in that reality where where doesn't
exist. Where time doesn't exist. So
He is in all places, at all times, at all moments, yet He was here
in a special way, that he was not in other places and his presence
there made that place a holy place. You and I are gathered
together in a building this morning that as buildings go, it's a
fine building but there's nothing particularly special about it.
I realize it has a distinctive architecture about it that people
would associate with a church building, with a place for religious
gathering. Nonetheless, this building is
made up of common materials. And the opposite of holy, actually,
is not unholy, it's common. The opposite of holy means common. And it's just a common building
made of common materials. There's nothing special about
the stuff that this building is made out of. But in some sense,
it is a holy place. Because of what God has chosen
to do here. He has chosen to do things here
that He does not do everywhere. Now you think on that a minute,
and how blessed we are that that is true. You say, well, you mean God's
not working anywhere in any other church in this town? I'm not
saying anything about any other church in this town at all. I'm
just saying I know that the gospel is not preached everywhere, but
it is preached here. I know that Christ is not set
forth everywhere, but He is set forth here. And that's something
wonderful. That's a remarkable work of God. And He does this in a special
way when God's Saints, which by the way means holy ones, those
He has chosen, redeemed and called, when they come together like
this, the Lord Jesus Christ says where two or three are gathered
or twenty or thirty or whatever the group, When they're gathered,
he says, there I am. So this place is holy because
God does special things here that he hasn't done in other
places. And it's holy, a holy place when we gather like this,
because God is here in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ through
his spirit in a way that he is not in other places. People say I can worship in nature
as well as I can down at the church. And people who say that
are probably right. Because I doubt they worship
in church or in nature. But the point I want to make
is this, while there certainly is a kind of communion you can
have with God anywhere, it is not for nothing that our Lord
said, where two or three are gathered in my name, there I
am. It is not for nothing that the
apostle wrote in the book of Hebrews, do not forsake the assembling
of yourselves together as the manner of some is. Wow, there's
something special about that. There's something holy about
the gatherings of God's people. When we meet like this, in a
very real sense of the word, we are standing on holy ground. Now, we don't see anything on
fire that's not burning up. The bushes we have in here aren't
even real. However, by the grace of God, God is revealed
among us and to us in the white, hot purity of his holiness. And we see it and are not consumed. Someone once said that they drove
by a building. It was called Burning Bush Baptist
Church. That's a good name for a church.
Burning Bush Church. Where God dwells in His absolute
holiness. And yet the people are not consumed. Moses saw this. He saw this bush
on fire. And it was a strange sight to
him. And well, it should be. When you see something on fire,
you know that that fire can last only so long as the fuel lasts. Because the fire consumes the
fuel. You put some logs on the fire,
they're going to last a certain amount of time, but they're going
to burn up and the fire will go out. And you know, such it
is with much of religion. The fire that exists in a lot
of religion does not come from the God who dwells in that fuel,
so to speak. It is the fuel producing a God. And therefore, they're burnt
up in the process. And their God disappears once
they are burnt out. They become the fuel of their
religion. And their religion eventually
burns them out. And when their fuel is spent, when their fleshly
energies are gone, the God they worshipped disappears as well. But God appears among His people
and it's a strange thing indeed. It's a fire like no other fire.
It's a fire that burns hotter than any other fire would. A
fire that burns with more light and more intense heat than any
other fire. would do, and yet the wood in which it dwells is
not consumed by His presence. And you and I sit here and week
by week, as much as we can, we preach and we hear and we declare
the holiness of God as it's exhibited in all the things He does. And we're not burnt up. In one respect, this bush is
a picture of the church of the Lord Jesus Christ in which God
dwells, and yet she is not burnt up, but is also a picture of
eternal judgment. At least as it's described in
the scriptures, and I assume it's a symbolic description,
but nonetheless, it is a place where the white hot fire of God's
vengeful wrath forever burns and the people there are never
consumed. Moses saw this strange sight,
a fire. in a bush, in the wilderness,
and the bush doesn't burn. Now, Moses, where is he in this
story? That is, what does he represent?
I'm glad our brother read what he did because it kind of gave
me an angle on this. I really had not come to my mind until
he pointed this out. First of all, there are four
things actually that Moses represents. First of all, in some of the
things, he is an illustration and picture of the Lord Jesus
Christ who is sent to deliver God's people from their bondage. Also, Moses, and this is what
came to my mind as our brother read the scripture from from
Romans, Moses is a picture of everyone sent to preach the gospel. Because Moses was sent to Egypt
with good news for God's people. He was not sent with an offer
to the general population of Egypt. He was sent with a message
which was designed specifically for a people chosen before the
foundation of the world And they were in bondage and God says,
I've seen their bondage, I've heard their cry, and I'm sending
you with this message that I'm going to deliver them from their
bondage. And you know, everybody that's
ever been called to preach has been sent into this world, which
Egypt is a picture of the world. He's been sent with a message.
And while he preaches that message indiscriminately to the world,
because he doesn't know who the people of God in the world are.
While he is sent to preach indiscriminately, he has been sent for the people
of God. The message he preaches, though
it may fall on the ear of thousands, might enter the hearts of only
a dozen or so. Or he may be privileged to preach
to hundreds of thousands or millions now that mass communication is
available to us. He may preach to millions and
only a few hundred ever really receive the message he was sent
with. Why? Because message wasn't for
anyone else but those few hundred. I've got to admit that as a preacher
of the gospel, sometimes I get frustrated because I think, well,
if I was doing this right, more people would believe. That's
something, I guess it's just part of my nature. I'm always
tending to find fault with the way I'm doing things, and it
must be my fault that folks are not believing this gospel. Well,
friends, there's a lot of fault in what I do. I freely confess
to that. I do not claim to be any kind of faultless preacher
or conducting any kind of ministry with which you could not easily
find much fault. But I know this, if I tell the
truth and people do not believe, it's not my fault. The apostle said to Timothy, It is required of stewards that
they be found faithful. The man, the person called to
preach the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, whether it be to
a congregation like this, to the world at large, to children
at the knee, or whatever, whoever has been called upon and been
given an opportunity to declare the message of Christ, this is
the one thing required of them, that they be faithful Faithful
to the message that was delivered to them. The scripture read there from
the book of Romans, which is also found in the book of Isaiah,
is picturing those people that were sent with news of battle. And you know, they didn't have
telegraph, didn't have telephones, certainly didn't have cell phones
or anything like that. The only way to get messages back and
forth was to send a runner. And so there were men specifically
suited to that, that could run, could run fast and run long.
And they would be at the field of battle, and they would take
news back to the capital city of how the battle was going.
And you can imagine there at the city, after all, their soldiers
are out there fighting for their lives. When I say their lives,
I mean the lives of the people in the city. Because if the enemy
gets past the army, they're heading for the city. And it may take
them a while, but they'll eventually breach the walls. and butcher
and slaughter their way into possession of the city. And so
it's important to them. They have a vested interest in
what's going on out there on the battlefield. And they want
to know. And I mentioned those standing
on the wall. There'd be people out there, watchmen standing
on the walls. And they would be looking. Looking
on the horizon. And they'd see them. Here comes
one. A little bit of dust coming up. And you can see there's somebody
running. Somebody running. There's news. Will it be good? Will it be bad? Does he bring
news of victory or news of defeat? Has the enemy been turned back
or is he on the way? What is it? And with anticipation,
they watch for him and he comes and they open the gates to him
and shut the gates right behind him and they say, how goes it?
And he says, the king has won. The king is victorious. The enemy
has fled before the armies. We are safe. And his feet, though covered
with dirt, though calloused from the many runs he has made, look
beautiful to those people, for those feet brought good news.
Good news. We are to be faithful. Such a
man running with the message He was given a message on the
battlefield and it was not his right, as he ran to the city,
to think about the message, ponder upon it, and decide whether it
was suitably expressed. It is not up to him to determine
what the truth is, only up to him to take the truth handed
to him and faithfully deliver it to those who waited for it.
And such it is with everyone to whom the gospel has been committed.
So Moses stands here on this holy ground as a picture of everyone
called of God to preach. And you know what that means?
That means that Moses stands as a picture of every believer
in the Lord Jesus Christ. If you are a believer in the
Lord Jesus Christ, in some sense of the word, you've been called
to declare the good news of Jesus Christ. You've been given a message.
And you've been given an audience. You say, who is that audience?
Well, that audience might be the children in your home. To whom you have the privilege
to tell the unsearchable riches of Christ. Now you can't make
them believe. All you can do is make them listen.
Or at least make them sit there while you tell them. or bring
them to church and make them sit there while it's being preached
to them. But what you can do, you should
do. You should be faithful to the
God who saved you and who has committed the message of His
Son into your hands, and you should be faithful to those under
your care to deliver to them the unvarnished, unpolluted,
unchanged message of God. And then Moses also stands not
only as a picture of individual believers, he is a picture of
the church. The whole believing assembly
in the world at any given time. Because what is the job of the
church of the Lord Jesus Christ? The church is described as the
pillar and ground of truth. The foundation and the columns
that hold up. the truth. We don't make the
truth, we just set it forth to the world. And we set it forth
to the world at large knowing that so long as the world turns,
it must be that there are some sheep of the Lord who are still
out there in the wilderness, ungathered, still outside the
fold, and it is our privilege, and brethren we need to look
at it as that, it is our privilege to be used of God to declare
the gospel that our as of yet uncalled brethren might be brought
in. Now I know this, they're going
to be brought in. Whether or not we personally
participate, they will be brought in. In the book of Isaiah, the Lord
said, whom shall I send and who will go for us? And Isaiah said, here am I, send
me. But do not think for a minute
that if Isaiah would have turned from the call, that the message
would have gone undelivered. The Lord can call and compel
anybody he wants to, to declare his message. And we should count
it a blessed privilege of ours to have any part in that glorious
work which God is doing in the declaration of His gospel to
the world at large that it may find His sheep and bring them
home. I know we've got natural lives
to live. And we're not supposed to quit
doing that. We're supposed to go to our jobs. We're supposed
to take care of our homes and take care of our children. We're
supposed to do all the normal things of life. But in doing
all those things, we are to declare the gospel, the good news of
the Lord Jesus Christ. I've entitled this message, Standing
on Holy Ground. It might also be called the message
heard on holy ground. Either way, it comes out the
same, I'm just going to tell you what God told Moses. No matter
what the title of the message is, I'm going to show you what
God says to His people. Moses saw this strange sight,
and he was curious about what he saw, and he approached it,
and God called out to him and said, don't come any closer.
Take off your sandals for the place where you're standing,
it's holy ground. Now, the first thing I want to notice is this,
that we should never, ever, under any circumstance, approach God
and His truth as a mere curiosity to investigate. Now, Moses didn't
know that that was God. All he saw at that point was
something that was strange, and who wouldn't go investigate something
like that? After all, you saw a bush on
fire, but it wasn't being burned up. You'd go check that out. But how many people, when they
hear the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, when they behold the
glory of God, as it were, burning in the bush, and the bush is
not consumed, they just look at it as another religious idea. Or if they profess to be Christians,
they like to investigate all the different forms of it. As
though truth were something that they could master. As though
truth, it were up to them to investigate it and pass judgment
on it. I remember talking to Harold
Artema. Bygone days, he had the Dune
Press. And I, when I first got here, we remember we had an article
that appeared in the Dune Press each week. And so I'd go take
in that article. And as you can imagine, he and
I'd sit there and talk. And what I discovered after I
talked to him a few times and he made it clear eventually,
I mean, with his own mouth, I'm not, I'm not passing judgment.
I'm telling you what he said. He said, I like to investigate
what other people believe. I like to look into things, and
I saw the books, you know, that he was on his shelf, and he said
he's reading. He liked to investigate. It was
a curiosity to him. Now, what the state of his heart
was, I do not know. God knows, but I know this. It is a danger to us to approach
God and His truth as a matter of mere curiosity, something
to be investigated, a strange thing. You just kind of want
to check that out. But that's how many people come to God. That's the method God uses. There
is something curious and strange about the gospel. If a man ever
really gets a chance to hear it, even just with the hearing
of the ears, he is going to understand that's not like other stuff I've
heard. And it ought to be that our preaching
and our teaching and our witnessing and testifying, whatever word
you want to use, it ought to be so clear and so plain that
people immediately understand. I've never heard that before. I've never heard anything like
that. Sometimes in a religious environment such as we live in,
it takes quite a while before they understand there's something
unusual in the preaching of the gospel, because they've been
brought up in religions that use the very same words the gospel
uses, but they've got different meanings for them. And it takes
a while before they realize what it is we mean by the things we
say. Again, back in 87, when I first
got here and we started meeting, of course, we were a curiosity. Who is this crowd meeting over
top of the city offices? It was a library at that time.
And there were people who came to investigate this curious and
strange group. I say strange, I mean, just we
weren't, we were new, and so they come to check it out. And
here's something I noticed, it held pretty good for a while.
If someone came for three weeks, it took about three weeks before
they caught on to what it was we were saying. And generally
speaking, if they stayed past three weeks, they stayed. If after three weeks of hearing
the gospel being preached as clearly as we knew how to set
it forth, they would pick up on what was being said. And if
that didn't drive them away, they never were driven away. Strange thing, they come because
it was unusual, come to check it out, come maybe simply because
they were just kind of tired of what they'd had and just thought
they'd give it one more try somewhere else, come out to check out this
guy from West Virginia, this fellow that didn't act like everybody
else and see what he's got to say. And you know something?
While that never ought to be the motivation, God has often
used that fleshly motivation to get people close enough that
He might speak to them. Because while some came to check
out the curiosity of this group meeting over top of the library, when they got there, God spoke
to them from that burning bush and said, take off your shoes,
you're standing on holy ground and don't get any closer. Not
yet anyway. And they found out this was no
curiosity. And you're still here. You heard. I spoke. I preached. And yet God spoke. Spoke to you. Out of that burning bush. And you
heard. And you stayed. Do not come any closer. Take
off your sandals for the place where you are standing is holy
ground. I look at this as the preparation of preachers, the
preparation of everyone whom he will call to himself. What
is this business about God saying, take off your sandals? Why in
the world would he tell Moses that? What's that got to do with
holy ground? Why is it that God says to Moses,
it's not appropriate that you stand before me with your shoes
on. Well, what are shoes? And I'm not going to tell this
like I think this is exactly why it was, but it's the only
thing I could come up with. Shoes are protection. Shoes are
what protects you from the ground you're standing on. Because quite
often the ground we're standing on is pretty tough on feet. I
remember as a kid, every spring, Of course, you'd worn shoes all
winter long because it was cold, but spring would come, be warm
out, and I was ready to go barefoot. But every spring it was tough
because your feet got tender over the winter, wrapped up in
those shoes all the time, so we'd go running outside and then
it was, you know, you'd be trying to hold up both feet at once,
but of course that won't work. If you walk across gravel, oh
my. But we'd do it, because we wanted to be out there playing,
and we'd do it. And it wouldn't be long, our feet would get real
tough, and then we could spend the rest of the summer out running
around barefoot, and it'd be okay. Shoes are designed, though,
to protect your feet from the ground. And God will not have
us put anything of our own between us and Him as protection. If we are going to do business
with God, we're going to do it barefoot. If we're going to stand
on His holy ground, it's going to be barefoot with nothing of
our own making between Him and us. Now brethren, something's
got to come between Him and us. But it can't be anything of our
own. And that which does come between
Him and us to protect us on this holy ground is unseen. And so it looks like It looks
like we're walking barefoot. We're standing barefoot on holy
ground. But you know what? In reality,
our shoes, our feet, have been shod, as the apostle says, with
the gospel of peace. The gospel of that holy God,
who while in the midst of us burns with a fiery hot holiness
and yet we're not consumed, And our feet have been protected
by the truth of Christ. But so far as anything we made,
we're barefoot. So far as anything we can see,
we're barefoot. We're barefoot on the holy ground. Now what does God say once He
establishes, shall we say, the rules? You might even call them
the ground rules. This is holy ground rules. You
stand here barefoot. Now what's his message? From
holy ground, we hear this message from God, I am the God of your
father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of
Jacob. First of all, God declares who
he is. The first words from God are
I am. Later on in the chapter, Moses
is talking with God and he says, well, okay, you sent me to these
people to give them a message. Who am I going to say sent me?
Because they're not going to listen to me. And he says, I am that I am,
or I am who I am, or I am what I am. You tell them I am sent you. He is the self-existing God,
uncreated. Independent existence. If God
quit existing, what would happen to you? You would cease to exist
too, wouldn't you? Your existence is utterly dependent
on God. But what if we cease to exist? Would that affect God? Not at
all. He is utterly independent of everything. He is. And that's it. He is. But he
says, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham. Abraham is set forth to us as
the faithful one. So he's saying, I'm the God of
believers. I'm the God of those who have forsaken their own help,
forsaken their own efforts, and have simply trusted me. And I'm
glad. Yeah, I'm a believer. So I'd
fall in that category. But you know something? I don't feel I believe very well. I don't do a good job of it.
You probably, if you all could get inside my mind, you'd be
shocked. You'd be shocked of all the pollution
that's in there. But more than that, you would
be shocked at how much doubt and unbelief and outright atheism
rattles around in this brain of mine. On the one hand, I say, I believe.
And I say that because I can't not say it. And yet on the other
hand, I'm ashamed to say I believe when I recognize how weak and
faulty my faith appears to be. And so he says, I'm the God of
Abraham, the father of all the faithful. And yeah, I can get
some comfort out of that. But then he goes and says, I'm
the God of Isaac, whose name means laughter. And yes, once
in a while, I experience that joy of the Lord, which is our
strength. Once in a while, I, as it were, laugh with joy at
the gospel. Bonnie and I well remember a
man at 13th Street Baptist Church. He sat behind us. To this day,
I don't know what his face looked like because I was never facing
him when it went on. But you know, lots of people, in that area down the southeast,
you know, their way of expression, agreement, and what's being said
is they'd say amen. And so once in a while you'd
hear, amen. It was generally kind of under the breath because
it was a conservative group of people, you know, they didn't
shout and all that, but you just might hear some, amen, amen,
like that. Not this guy. Henry would be
preaching away and he'd be talking about the glories of God's grace
and he'd be setting forth Christ and this man would laugh. Oh, it filled his heart with
joy. And amen was not enough. And brethren, once in a while,
I experienced that. But I would hate to try to get
to heaven on my laughter. The gospel does not inspire that
in me often enough that I think I could make it to heaven there.
But I love this. He says, I am the God of Jacob. There's a name I can identify
with. He didn't even say the God of Israel, which was the
name given to Jacob by grace. He says, I'm the God of Jacob,
Jacob the cheat, Jacob the ne'er-do-well. That's what his name means, the
deceitful one. Everything that the name of Jacob
implies, I can say, that's me. That's me. Oh, from the holy ground, God
speaks and declares himself to be the God of those who are by
nature anything but holy, anything but acceptable, anything
but faithful. Yes, there was a time when Jacob
laughed, but he was laughing over the fact that he was able
to get one over on Esau and take his birthright and steal his
blessing. That was Jacob's laughter, not a laughter that will, you
know, inspire any confidence of good things to come in the
sight of God. This is Jacob, who after he had
laughed a little over his being able to get one over on his brother,
he had to run from his brother. And then he went up and found
that he had an uncle who was even craftier than him and cheated
him out of things. And the cheater got cheated. But God had said before Jacob
was ever born, the elder will serve the younger. Yea, Jacob
have I loved, Esau have I hated. And this God who speaks in holiness
from the burning bush on the holy ground said, I am the God
of scoundrels. I am the God of the sinful and
the wicked. Oh, my heart rejoices with that
message. My heart rejoices to know that
from holy ground, the holy God owns the unholy. He did not say to Moses, you
go down there and you find you some good people
there in Egypt. and I'm going to take them to
a land flowing with milk and honey." He says, you go down
there and find those sons of Jacob. Those sons of Jacob who
sold the only decent one among them into slavery. And you find
those ones who went down to Egypt later to buy corn. You find those
ones whom I blessed even while they were in Egypt, but what
did they do? They turned from the worship of me and started
worshiping the gods of Egypt. You find those vacillating, flexible,
ungodly sons of Jacob. And you tell them, I am their
God. Later on, God says through a
prophet, Fear not, thou worm, Jacob. I love how God talks to
us. He talks to us in the name we
know belongs to us. He's the God of worms. The God of those who have every
reason to be afraid of Him, and He says to them, fear not. Moses
heard this, and it says he hid his face because he's afraid
to look at God. I must confess when I first felt
called to ministry, I thought I'd be good at it.
I thought I knew something, thought I understood something. I was
a senior in high school. At 18 years old, I thought I
had something to tell the world and was fit to lead a group of
people and all I needed to do was go get the proper education
and I'd be able to carry out this job. Isn't it funny? I was
18, Moses was 80. God was just now calling him
into the ministry. I was talking to some folks before
the service started, and pointed out I was only 32 when I came
here. And I said, you know, the older you get, the older you
think it is that a man ought to be before he ever enters the
ministry. I cannot believe God ever sent me out. As foolish
as I was at 32, and you say, well, what do you think of yourself
now? Well, I'm not quite the fool I was then. I don't profess
to be terribly wise, but I look back, it just amazes me. Amazes
me. When Moses heard from God, he
hid. He hid. If you've never heard
from a God that scares you, you've never stood on holy ground and
heard from a holy God. And so far, all that God's done
is declare who he is. He said, I'm the God of Abraham
and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, your father. And
Moses, he said, I don't want to look at God. I hear people
say, oh, I'd just like to see God. No, you don't. No man can
see His face and live. God is not your pal. He's not
your buddy. He's God. And I don't know how to say any
more than that. He's God. But notice this, verse 7. The
Lord said, I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I've heard them crying out because
of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. Oh, what a God He is. That from
the unapproachableness of His holiness, He declares this message, I've
seen the misery of my people and I've heard their cry. Now, you may have some miseries
in this life. You who believe, I say to this,
no matter what struggle you're going through, God knows about
it. It's more than that, God sent it. But He sees you and
He understands your misery and your trouble and your affliction.
And when you cry out to Him, you may cry out with a very quiet
voice, you may cry out with hardly anything of faith at all, you
may cry out simply because you don't know what else to do, but
I'll tell you this, I'll assure you of this, if you are an Abraham,
an Isaac, or a Jacob, or all three kind of jumbled up together
in one person, know this, that God knows, God hears. Isn't that amazing? The God who
spoke the worlds into existence hears when you speak. Isn't it frustrating that we
keep telling our political leaders what we want and they keep saying
yes and then don't do it? And you say, weren't you listening?
And brethren, while our political leaders who are just a bunch
of nothings like us, while they won't stoop to listen to us,
God knows, God hears. But there's something even more
wonderful than this, because he's speaking of something much
worse than the troubles that we experience in this life. Because
what he was talking about was the bondage of the Jews in Egypt,
and that's always used as an example, an illustration of our
bondage to the law of sin and death. And brethren, when God
sees His people in that bondage, you know what He says? He sees and He knows their misery. And when we cry out, He hears. I cannot help but think of someone
crying out, and I don't remember, blind Bartimaeus. And imagine
the Lord, He's going through Jericho, and He's surrounded
by people reaching out. A clamor, you can imagine how
noisy a group like that would be. You had people saying, Jesus,
you should do this for my mother because, you know, she's gone
to synagogue all her life and you ought to do this. Another
one claiming this and claiming that. And in all that cacophony,
and that word means bad noise, and that's just what it is when
people are trying to bargain with God. In all of that, God
hears one man, a beggar by the side of the road who said, Jesus,
thou Son of David, have mercy on me. And he stopped. He saw his misery and he heard
his voice. Are you in the misery of bondage
to the law of sin and death? Are you under a burden you cannot
bear of the knowledge of who you are and what you've done?
If you are under that burden, thank God, because not many people
are. If you struggle and labor under that, I tell you this,
the Lord sees. The Lord sees. He knows about
it. Do you cry out from that bondage? The Lord hears. He hears the holy God from holy
ground, hears the cry of the unholy crying out for mercy. And this, he goes on and he said, Verse 8, so I have come down
to rescue them. He didn't say Moses. I heard
him. So you go get him. You tell him
to come over here to this mountain, the mountain of the Lord and
meet with me. He said, I've come down. They
don't have to come up to me. I've come down. And I've come
down with this in mind, with this plan, with this purpose,
to rescue them. To bring them out with a mighty
hand and an outstretched arm, to overthrow all their enemies
who hold them in bondage, to deliver them from their captivity,
to take the burden off their back, and to deliver them to
a land flowing with milk and honey, where everything is just
right there for them. I have come down to rescue them. For some years now, I've been
standing on holy ground as a preacher. You've been standing on holy
ground as those to whom the words of God have been committed. And
this has been our joyful message to declare, me to you, you sometimes
to me, and to others. The Lord says to his people,
I've seen your bondage. I've seen your misery. I've heard
your cry. and I've come down to rescue you." How did he do
that? He to whom it was not robbery
to be equal with God. Instead of laying claim to all
those rights and privileges of deity, took on the form of a
servant. He came down, way down. Made
himself of no reputation. Oh, he's getting farther down. And became obedient. What? The
God who rules all? He's going to make himself obedient.
That's where we are. We're supposed to be obedient.
What's more, he came all the way down to this. He became obedient
even to the death of the cross. How much farther down can a person
go? No farther than that. And he came down to rescue. He came all the way down there,
friends, because that's where we were. lost in sin. And he came and he took our place,
and with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, he overthrew
the king that held us in bondage, paid the debt to the king who
rightfully had a claim against us, and brought us out, and redeemed
us, opening up the sea before us like he did the Israelites,
taking us across the wilderness, across the Jordan and into the
land of promise, the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, where
we now dwell in a land flowing with milk and honey, where everything
is provided for us. Us, Jacob's. Oh, I know he gave us a name
Israel, but Jacob's the one we know better. Have you ever heard this gospel
with your heart? If you have, then you're standing on holy
ground. Take off your shoes. Take off everything that you
put between you and the holy God, thinking it would protect
you. And stand there on the holy ground
of His promise in Christ Jesus. And know this, the fire will
burn, but you'll not be consumed.