You know, as you read through
the book of Exodus, sometimes it's a little difficult to construct
a timeline about Moses when he, after he led the children of
Israel to Sinai, and he went up into the mount, and he came
back down in the mount, and he went back up again, and you know,
it's a little difficult to construct that. And you know, we're given
the Ten Commandments, for example. Moses received them from the
Lord in tablets of stone, And we're given the list of those
commandments in Exodus 20. But when Moses goes back up into
the mountain, he receives the stone. And it's not till later
in the book of Exodus that he comes down the mountain with
those stones. And you remember what happens. He finds the children
of Israel worshiping a golden calf. Well, did he go back up
and come back down? And then even after, you know,
he in anger, he threw the stones down and broke them. And then
he went back up and God gave him two new stones with the same
commandments. So it's a little difficult to
do that. But here's my point is this,
when Moses went up on Mount Sinai to receive the law, he did receive
the 10 commandments, but there was more than just the 10 commandments.
And from Exodus 21 to 23, now after we see the list of the
10 commandments, from Exodus chapter 21 to 23, we see various
laws and precepts. Many of them are moral laws,
some of them have to do with their religious activity, and
many of them are civil laws that God gave to Israel, and respecting
their life, on earth, especially in the promised land, political,
civil, all those laws, dietary laws. We talk about the ceremonial
law. That's one thing that Moses received
from the Lord on Mount Sinai. I think someone at one point
in time counted over 600 and some laws, 640 some laws. that
they had, but you'll see some of them mentioned in Exodus 21,
22, and 23. And then later on, you'll see
a bunch of them, especially in the book of Leviticus. That's
the laws of the priesthood. Well, in the last part of Exodus,
you see the laws that God gave concerning building the tabernacle,
the sacrifices, the feast days, all of that. All of that put
together, a lot of times when preachers refer to the law or
even when the Bible refers to the law, it's referring specifically
to the Ten Commandments. And often you'll hear preachers
talk like this, they'll say, well, there's no gospel in the
law. Well, if you're talking about
the Ten Commandments, the bare Ten Commandments, that's correct.
There's no gospel there and we know why it was given. It was
given to show man his sinfulness, his depravity, his need of God's
grace, the impossibility of salvation and righteousness being attained
by our law keeping. And so there's no gospel in the
law. But today I wanna talk about the covenant as a whole here
from Exodus 24. And I wanna talk about Christ
in the Old Covenant. In the Old Covenant, there was
gospel in the Old Covenant, but the gospel was concealed in types
and pictures and shadows. And according to the Bible, it
was mainly the priest of the Old Covenant. You had the high
priest, who was to be a direct descendant from Aaron. There
was only one high priest in any given generation, and that person,
Aaron was the first high priest. Then when he died, then someone
else took over, and there's not many high priests, one high priest.
That high priest was a picture of Christ, the eternal high priest
of his people. We have a great high priest who
is Christ. And then you had all the other
priests who attended the services of the tabernacle and the temple.
They came from the tribe of Levi, which Aaron was of the tribe
of Levi, but the high priest was to be a direct descendant
of Aaron, but the other priests were descendants of the people
of Levi. That's where you get Leviticus
and the Levitical priest. And they attended the other services
of the tabernacle. And you remember the high priest,
he's the one who could go into the Holy of Holies one time a
year with the blood of the lamb off the burnt offering, the brazen
altar, and he'd sprinkle it on the mercy seat. I'm gonna talk
about that next week, Lord willing, the mercy seat. And that was
a picture of propitiation, a picture of how God saves sinners through
the blood of Christ, who is our high priest, who is our mercy
seat, who is our sacrifice, the Lamb of God. The other Levitical
priests are pictures of God's elect, the church, because in
Christ we are made kings and priests under God. And so we're
enabled to serve God acceptably through the blood of Christ.
But you had other things around that tabernacle. You had all
the furnishings of the tabernacle, and they each, I'm gonna talk
more about that next week. But what I wanna show you, look
at Exodus 24, verse one, it says, he said unto Moses, this is the
Lord speaking, come up unto the Lord, thou and Aaron, Nadab and
Abihu and 70 of the elders of Israel and worship ye afar off."
So God commands Moses and Aaron and these two men Nadab and Abihu
and 70 of the elders to come up and worship him afar off. Now that's a picture of the church.
This right here is symbolic. 70 being the number of completeness.
And so the number of a finished work. And so God calls them to
come up and worship afar off. There was a distance maintained,
you see. And verse two, it says, and Moses
alone, you see that? Moses alone shall come near the
Lord. Now you know what that picture
is, that picture's Christ. who went into the holiest of
all, into the very presence of God, alone as the representative,
the surety, the substitute, and the redeemer of his people. Moses
is a type of Christ here. And Moses alone. You see, sinners
cannot come near unto God on their own, or else they'll be
dead. And we've already talked about
that. How they put a boundary around it. They couldn't come
near to it, or they'd be dead. And so we need a mediator. That's what this is saying. That's
what the old covenant showed in glaring technicolor. We're
sinners. If God ever gave us what we deserve
or what we've earned, it would be death and condemnation. We need someone whom God has
appointed, someone who is able and someone who is willing to
appear before God for us. And that's what Christ is to
us. That's what Moses was for these people. God appointed him,
God made him able, and God made him willing. But in the everlasting
covenant of grace, in which Christ is the one mediator between God
and man, God appointed him before the foundation of the world to
be the surety and the representative of his people, God's elect. Christ
was able to do so, and his ability is shown forth in his person. He is God, manifest in the flesh. That's what it takes in order
to save his people from our sins, and then he's willing. He was
willing to do so. You remember he said, no man
takes my life from me, I lay it down on my own. So verse two,
Moses alone shall come near the Lord, but they shall not come
nigh, these others, Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, the Sith, neither shall
the people go up with him. Christ walked the winepress of
God's wrath for his people alone, his one offering. It was all
conditioned on him, and he alone fulfilled all those conditions
and ensured the salvation of everyone whom he represented,
all his people. We'll look at verse three, it
says, Moses came and told the people all the words of the Lord
and all the judgments. This is what God says now. Moses
is letting them know, now I'm not just giving you my ideas
and my opinions and what I think. These are the words of the Lord.
And all the people answered with one voice. Now listen to this.
And they said, all the words which the Lord hath said we will
do. Now that's human nature. Oh yeah,
we'll do everything God says. And they've said that before,
hadn't they? And they failed. Well that's
us. You probably, I mean most of
y'all, I'm pretty sure all of y'all at some point in time had
intimate dealings with false religion. false Christianity,
in which you determined in your mind that you were going to do
what God required enough that you'll make it to heaven. And
even back then, you may not have realized how much of a failure
you were. Because you had outlets. I know
in my false Christianity, my outlet was rededication. Boy,
I used to love rededication, because I could go out and do
anything I wanted to do as a teenager, as long as I came back and rededicated.
Felt sorry. You say, well, that was kind
of like being a hypocrite. Well, yeah. But here's the thing
about it. Hypocrisy is any sinner who thinks
that he can do anything. to get God to forgive him, or
to love him, or to save him, or to bless him. That's hypocrisy,
do you know that? Because if God, again, if God
ever gave us what we deserved of what we earned, it'd be death
and hell. I mean at our best, not even when we went out and
sold our wild oats. So understand this, this is what
Moses is saying. And the people said, well, we'll
do everything God says, and they failed. Why? Is it because they
were worse sinners than we are? No, it's because they are sinners
and we're sinners. We fell in Adam. We're born dead
in trespasses and sins. Well, look back here, verse four. Moses wrote all the words of
the Lord and rose up early in the morning. So now Moses is
writing these things down. Remember in 2 Corinthians 3,
Paul talks about the law written with ink. The law written on
stones. This is the writings. And these
are scriptures. Moses was the human author of
the first five books of the Bible. The Holy Spirit wrote them, but
Moses wrote all the words of the Lord, not his own words. Moses wasn't writing a novel
here. Moses wasn't trying to write a bestseller, even though
it did really become a bestseller, because they say the Bible is
the bestselling book in the world. People don't understand it. They
don't know it. Many of them don't read it. They
don't search it, but they buy it, mostly due to superstition. I was watching one of my favorite
movies is The Searchers. You ever see that with John Wayne?
And there was a guy that had gotten shot by the Indians. And
Ward Bond, he was one of John Wayne's famous actors that always
appeared in John Wayne's movies, he was a preacher. And the guy
was laying down there and he was wounded, and Ward Bond handed
him, he said, here, take my Bible. He said, it'll make you feel
better. And I think that's what, in a lot of ways, people think
of the Bible, it's just like a good luck charm, something
like that. But when God opens our eyes,
we see this is the book of life, isn't it? These are the words
of life. So Moses wrote all the words
of the Lord. He rose up early in the morning and look what
he did. Look at verse four. He built an altar under the hill
and 12 pillars, there's another picture of the completeness of
the church, 12 disciples, 12 patriarchs, all picturing the
church, according to the 12 tribes of Israel. Now this is right
after the people said, we're gonna do everything God says. Well, if you're gonna do everything
God says, that's okay, boys, we don't need an altar. Why do
you build an altar? Well, people come down and kneel
and give their hearts to Jesus. No, why was the altars built
back then? To sacrifice. That's the only
reason you needed an altar. This is not our altar. Christ
is our altar. See? You build an altar. The only one who needs an altar
are sinners who need a sacrifice that God will accept. Moses knew
that. Old Noah knew that. What was
the first thing Noah did when he got off the ark? He built
an altar. Abraham knew that. After God
made the covenant in Genesis 12, what'd he do? He built an
altar. When he took his son up on that mount to sacrifice him,
he built an altar. So what does this altar mean?
It means I'm a sinner and I need a God acceptable sacrifice. And the only sacrifice was the
blood of a lamb, a spotless lamb. So Moses knew this. It says in
verse five, look, and he sent young men of the children of
Israel, which offered burnt offerings. Satisfaction to law and justice.
Righteousness has to be established. You're not going to be able to
go to God without a righteousness that answers the demands of His
law and justice. Now this is all part of that
covenant. This whole covenant now. And you see it in detail,
for example, in the book of Leviticus, well, in a lot of the book of
Exodus and in the book of Leviticus, the sacrifices, the altars, the
offerings in the altars, there were burnt offerings, there were
sin offerings, there were thank offerings. Thank you, Lord. All based upon the burnt offerings
and the sin offerings. Guilt offerings. You see, God
is a God of holiness and he must punish sin. He cannot let the
sinner go free if sin is imputed to that sinner. And that's our
only hope, to go to God through a mediator who is our altar,
who sacrificed himself in our stead based upon our sins imputed
to him. That's what's all in this picture
here. You say, well, why didn't they
know it? Well, why don't people when they read their Bible today
know it? Because God hasn't revealed it to them. And they're reading
it with blind eyes. They're reading it with preconceived
notions. When I first opened my Bible,
the first Bible that I ever got and ever opened and tried to
read, you know what was on my mind? God loves everybody, Christ
died for everybody, so whatever I read in that book, that's what
it was gonna fit. It never even occurred to me otherwise until
I heard a preacher preach it, and when I heard it, I got angry.
Now, it was the duties of the priest, did you know this? One of the main duties of the
priest other than attending the tabernacle and its furnishings
and all the sacrifices, was to tell the people the truth about
these things. Most of them failed. Most of
them didn't see it themselves. Even many of the high priests
did not see it. Remember who was high priest
when Christ came into the world? A man named Annas and then his
son-in-law Caiaphas. Were they direct descendants
from Aaron? I don't know, I doubt it. Nobody's ever proven it. But I know this, they didn't
know Christ. Here's a high priest, think about that. Here's a high
priest who symbolizes and represents Christ, the true Christ of the
Bible, and he didn't even know Christ. And then they had the
prophets, too, who would come along and tell them the truth.
But here it is. He sent these young men, which
offered burnt offerings, sacrificed peace offerings. How is peace
made between God and sinners? How is God reconciled to sinners
and sinners reconciled to God? Based upon a righteousness that
only comes through a high priest based upon a sacrifice, a propitiation
that satisfies God's justice. Now that's what all this picture,
peace offerings of oxen unto the Lord. There's the gospel,
if you can see it. And that's part of the Old Covenant
here. This is Christ in the Old Covenant. Yeah, you can read
the Ten Commandments, and there's no gospel there. Now, the way
I preached it in the last two weeks would lead us to the gospel. Thou shalt not kill. Well, have
I ever killed? We're all guilty. Thou shalt
not commit adultery. Have I committed adultery? We're
all guilty. We're all sinners. We have no righteousness. There's
none good. No, not one. There's none righteous.
No, not one. There's none that seeketh after
the Lord. No, not one. That's us. Lord, give me some hope. Show
me the way. Well, Moses built an altar and
he sent young men to get animals. Animals that were prescribed
precisely in detail by God to offer burnt offerings and sacrifice
peace offerings unto the Lord. You mean animal blood can take
away my sins? Oh no. You see, Moses wrote about
this. Verse four, he wrote all the
words of the Lord. What did Christ say in John five
about Moses' writings? Moses wrote of me. Moses understood these things,
and I believe he taught the people. Most of them, like people today,
do not listen. I preach the gospel on television,
except this morning. They preempted me this morning,
y'all. I'm not seeing that. The French Open. Two grown men
hitting a ball back and forth. Boy, that's important, isn't
it? Makes more money than the gospel. But I preach the gospel on television,
and I have people tell me they watch that program. Debbie and
I were over at the flower shop here getting these flowers a
couple weeks ago. A lady was in there, and she
was talking about how beautiful these flowers were. And Debbie said,
well, we're putting them in our church, you know, in front of
the pulpit. And she looked at me, and she said, you're him.
I said, what do you mean? She said, I watch you on TV.
I had my glasses on. Well, I'm wearing my glasses
now on TV. And I'm glad. I really
am. I'm happy that people are seeing
it. But are they like the people of Israel who are watching all
these doings here in Exodus 24, seeing what Moses is doing? 70
elders here, Moses says, go get these young men. I built an altar. Why do I need an altar, Moses?
What's significant about that? We didn't have none down in Egypt.
We weren't building altars down there. Oh, Abraham built one years ago.
Noah built one. God built one in Genesis 3. He sacrificed animals and made
them coats of skin. That's the righteousness of God
revealed in the gospel right here in the old covenant. Well, look at verse six. Moses
took half of the blood and he put it in basins. Now that blood
is for the people. To sprinkle on the people. to
wash away our sins. Now animal blood can't do it,
the blood of bulls and goats cannot take away sin. This is
a picture, this is a type. What's happening here is merely
ceremonial. Okay? The physical blood of the
physical animals sprinkled on these physical people, that was
merely ceremonial. It sanctified, it set them apart
as to the purifying of the flesh, as it said in Hebrews 9.13. but
it didn't wash away sins. But it pictured how much more
shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal spirit offered
himself without spot to God, purge our sins, purge our consciences. So he put it in the basins, that's
for the people, and in half of the blood he sprinkled on the
altar. That means that the offering is unto God, see. This is, God must be satisfied. God is the one who must be propitiated
towards his people. And verse seven says, he took
the book of the covenant and he read in the audience of the
people. So now he already had many of these laws. I don't know
if he had all of them at this time, probably. And he read it
in the audience of the people and they said, all that the Lord
hath said we will do and be obedient. They say that several times.
And they failed every time. So would we. So have we. Well, look at verse eight. Moses
took the blood and sprinkled it on the people. And he said,
behold, the blood of the covenant, which the Lord hath made with
you concerning all these words. Now you can determine in your
mind and in your heart that you're gonna keep all these words, but
let me tell you something, you're a sinner, I'm a sinner, we need
the blood. What can wash away my sins? Nothing but the blood of Jesus. And that's our righteousness
right there. When you hear the term righteousness, that's what
we're talking about. Satisfaction to the justice of God through
the one mediator, Christ, the one altar, Christ, the one sacrifice,
Christ, our surety, our substitute, our redeemer. Well, look at verse
nine. Then went up Moses and Aaron
and Nadab and Abihu and seven of the elders of Israel. They
saw the God of Israel and there was under his feet as it were
a paved work of a sapphire stone and as it were the body of heaven
in his clearness. You know what a paved work means
in the Bible? It means a way that's already
been cleared, already smoothed out, already accomplished, already
finished. In other words, the way to God,
the way to salvation, the way to heaven, it's not by the works
of men. Somebody else has gotten there
before us and already paved it, and that's Christ. And it's clear,
there's no corruption, there's no dirt, there's no sin in it.
As it were the body of heaven in his clearness. Now the word
his there is italicized. But that's what it's talking
about, it's through the perfection of Christ. Satisfying law and
justice, purging our sins away. He paved the way to heaven, the
way to God. clear, no obstacles, no obstructions,
like the narrow way that leads to life. You see, that's what's
wrong with false religion. Their way's not paved, they're
trying to build their way. And their way is full of obstructions
that get in the way, rocks and potholes that they have to climb
into and out of and over, and it never works. Sometimes if you get a chance
go up to West Virginia and drive the roads and then come down
here to Georgia and drive them. You're going to be thankful that
the way down here has already been paved. Up there it's boom, boom, boom,
boom, boom, boom. Bam. Go get your car lined up again.
But this is a paved way, and look at verse 11, he says, and
unto the nobles of the children of Israel he laid not his hand,
also they saw God and did eat and drink. They saw God and lived. But only after Moses went up
first, only after the altar was built, only after the offerings
were given, only after the blood was sprinkled. You wanna see
God and live? Look unto Jesus, the author and
finisher. Look unto his blood. Plead his righteousness imputed. That's the only way we're gonna
see God and live. And we see him in the face of
Jesus Christ. That's what this old covenant
was about. Verse 12, and the Lord said unto Moses, come up
unto me and to the mount and be there and I will give thee
tables of stone and a law. So here's where Moses is going
up to get the tables of stone. And he says, in commandments
which I've written that thou mayest teach them. Verse 13,
Moses rose up and his minister Joshua and Moses went up into
the Mount of God. Now Moses alone goes up to receive
the law. Christ was made under the law
and he went to God having kept the law, sacrificed himself. Verse 14, he said unto the elders,
tarry you here for us until we come again unto you and behold
Aaron and Hur are with you. If any man have any matters to
do, let him come unto them. In other words, any of the people,
if they had any problems, they had to get settled by an elder,
you come to them instead of Moses. Moses went up into the mount
and a cloud covered the mount. I think about Christ going to
the cross when I see that. And how it got dark, you see. All of that. Verse 16, and the
glory of the Lord abode upon Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered
it six days. There's the days of the work,
the labor. And the seventh day he called unto Moses out of the
midst of the cloud, on the seventh day, indicating a Sabbath day. All of this is a picture of Christ
going to the cross, and the glory of the Lord descended and consumed
him for our sins, suffered unto death, And then, he finally said,
it's finished. And the veil was rent in two.
And the sight of the glory of the Lord was like devouring fire
on the top of the mountain in the eyes of the children of Israel.
Think about Christ being consumed by the fire of God's wrath as
the substitute of God's elect. And Moses went into the midst
of the cloud, just like Christ went into the midst of God's
wrath. and justice, and get him up into the mount. And Moses
was in the mount 40 days and 40 nights. The number 40 is a
picture, a symbol of a time of trouble, testing, suffering. Noah and the ark, 40 days and
40 nights. The children of Israel were in
the wilderness how many years? 40 years. They were being tested
and troubled. Christ, all of that, as far as
Christ is concerned, represents the time of his suffering, his
testing, to where he brought out the perfect righteousness
of the law that God had already imputed to all of his people.
And that is the glory of God right there. His glory in the
face of Jesus Christ, okay.