These words that we read a few
minutes ago were spoken by Moses just before he passed away. It was near the time of his departure
from this life. He has had a most eventful life. The first 40 years of his life
were spent living as the son of Pharaoh's daughter, enjoying
all the benefits of being raised in Pharaoh's household. Good education, riches, prestige,
authority. But then he spent the next 40
years living, as someone said, or it has been explained, he
lived on the backside of the desert, the wilderness, tending
sheep. Now imagine that. One day, you
are the adopted son of the king. And then just a little bit later,
at the time when you should be at the height of your life. There you are, out in the middle
of nowhere, tending sheep for your father-in-law. And he spent 40 years doing that. Now, he couldn't know it at the
time. He didn't know it during the
first 80 years of his life. But those two 40-year periods
were designed by God to train him to do the work laid out for
him in the third 40 years of his life. First 40 years of his life taught
him life in Pharaoh's court. God was going to send him to
Pharaoh, so he knew all about what it was. to face Pharaoh. And then he was going to spend
40 years shepherding the people of God, the national people of
God, across the wilderness. And just like sheep, those people
would prove to be stupid, wandering, troublesome, And so the Lord gave him 40 years
of raising literal sheep that he might understand how he must
operate as a leader of the people of God as they go from their
bondage in Egypt to the promised land. They are on the cusp of entering
that promised land. but he will not be allowed to
lead them in. Now, the immediate cause of that
was Moses' own sinfulness, in which God told him to speak to
the rock to make water come out of it. And instead, he took his
rod and he struck the rock. And this was the second time,
because earlier, the people had been without water, and so God
told him to take his staff and strike that rock, and water would
come out. Well, the next time, the Lord
told him, don't strike it this time, speak, and the water will
come out. But he struck it. Now, it wasn't
just for an act of disobedience. that Moses was prohibited from
entering the land. There was a purpose in striking
it only once, for as Paul says, that rock was Christ. And Christ was stricken once
for all, and since that time, We call on Him. We speak. It would be a horrible disgrace
to the Lord Jesus Christ for Him to be stricken, smitten again. And unfortunately, the Gospels,
Gospels in the air quotes that are most often preached, consist
of what Moses did. for they count the sacrifice
of the Lord Jesus Christ, that one sacrifice, to be insufficient
in saving God's elect. And so Moses wasn't allowed to
go in, but he also couldn't be the one to lead them in because
they were going into the land of promise. Moses is a representative
of the law. The law makes no promises. I mean, simply as God made promise
to Abraham, and as he promises in the new covenant, things he
will do, and they're not based on anything that we do. Moses,
as representative of that old covenant, which is do this and
live, But if you don't do that, you'll die. He can never lead
a people into promise. Now he comes to the end of his
life and his ministry among these people. And as he looks over this multitude,
His love for them flows to the full. I can imagine what he must
have felt. You know, when we come to the
end of something, and of course you can see with him, it would
be the end of his life and the end of his work among these people.
As you're doing the work, it's so very easy to see all the difficulties
of it. all the things you've messed
up, all the things such as in his job, the aggravations that
the people had created in his life. And you wonder, is this going
to work out? But now he's done. And for all the wondering and
complaining and rebelling that this people had done, There they
were. And right across that river was
a promised land. And Moses is done. His work is
finished. And he looked at that group. And instead of dwelling on all
the difficulties of the way and all the faults in himself and
in them, instead of all that, His love overflows for them and
he says, in verse 29, blessed are you, O Israel. I'm thinking some of what must
have filled his heart at that time was this recognition that
even as he looked over the promised land there across the river,
He wasn't going to be able to go in. And in the light of that truth,
the light of his understanding that he would never enter that
land, he looked at them and he said, blessed are you. And I think he said it because
he understood something of the blessedness that awaited them. think many of them did not, but he knew. And so he says, blessed are you,
O Israel, who is like you. He didn't say them, say that
of them, because he saw anything in them. that exalted them in
his eyes. He didn't say, blessed are you
because you're wealthier than the nations which you will dispossess
of the land. He didn't say, blessed are you. Look at how big a multitude we've
become. He didn't reference their righteousness
because he knew full well they didn't have any. As he looked
on that group of people and said, blessed are you, there was nothing
about them that the natural eye could detect that would make
anyone think that they were a blessed people. After all, they'd spent
the last 40 years, people call it wandering in the desert, they
weren't wandering, God was leading them, but it was still a life
in the wilderness. They'd go here and camp a while,
then go there and camp a while, and every time they had to go
somewhere else, they had to pack it all up and move it all. It
was not an enjoyable life. They didn't look like a glorious
people. They still harbored tribal animosities. Probably because people get so
much of their information, even about the Bible, from TV shows
about it, things like that, we get the idea that the Jews were
this group of 12 tribes, all of one
heart and mind. They weren't. They were much
like the 13 original colonies that made up the United States. And while they saw some practical
advantages of uniting, nearly all of them were against that
idea because there was so much difference between them. And so it was with these descendants
of the House of Jacob, these 12 tribes, they may be able to
look back to a single ancestor they all shared in common, but
that didn't mean they liked one another. They had these tribal animosities,
and over these 40 years, they'd proved to be about as disobedient
and hard-hearted as their parents had been. Those ones who dropped
dead in the desert because God swore to them they would never
enter his rest. So Moses did not say, who is
like you, because he perceived any intrinsic value in them. Rather he said, who, read it
here, verse 29, who is like you, A people saved by the Lord. Not a persevering people who
made it across the wilderness. Not a frighteningly large group
of people striking terror into the hearts of those they would
confront. A people who have been saved
by the Lord. We can understand why the people
of this world puff themselves up with visions of grandeur,
hoping to prove themselves to be better than others, and thus
heap glory to themselves. But it's entirely out of order
when individual Christians, churches, and denominations try to exalt
themselves one above the other, or even over the unbelieving
world. as though there is something
intrinsically different about them that has given them their
state of blessedness. Now, I'm sure people think that we are exclusive. Now, they misunderstand the fact
that we don't join hands with other churches in common religious
endeavors. It's not because we think we're
any better than them. We're certainly not. Probably
worse than a lot of the people. I mean, I've lived here now 36
years, and as people go, find people in this area. The reason we don't join with
them is because we believe that the God we worship, that the
gospel we believe, is better. Now, over the years, I've learned
a little bit of moderation in my opinions of others, I hope
that's an indication of growth in grace and not just a matter
of no longer having the strength to perpetuate this thing of so-and-so's
wrong, you know, and they're going to perish and that kind
of thing. I gave up on it because really I'm not in a position
to judge the hearts of other people. I decided I'm just going
to preach the gospel. So I know that there are honest
believers. in other churches, even though
they hold to some practices or some doctrines with which we
do not agree. But I remember when I came here, I had to take it that what we
were preaching was distinctly different from what was commonly
preached in this area, because of the very fact that there was
a group of people trying to form another church where they could
worship in good conscience. Like I said, we did not form
this church just so we could dump believers instead of sprinkle
infants. That wouldn't have been worth
the effort. But when I came here, I just
assumed, okay, these people have gathered They have joined themselves
together in a common cause because they don't believe they have
common cause with the religions they were raised in. Now, I've
not heard much of the preaching from this area. About anything
that I know about what's generally preached in this area, I've learned
it from you telling me what you were raised in. But I just have to figure upon
the judgment of the people that started this congregation, there's
something distinctive, something different about what we preach
or how we preach it or whatever that made it worthwhile to form
a distinct congregation. And so for that reason, we exist,
and we don't join with those who were the groups from which
we left. Nonetheless, even though we consider
ourselves as different, we do not consider ourselves as essentially
better people, nor do we think that our congregation has less
problems than other congregations have. that there aren't fleshly
differences among us. We don't believe that our church is in any way responsible
for the advancement of better cultural values or anything like
that. And such it was here. with the Jews. They stand as
an illustration of God's church, and if you look at them in their
natural selves, there's nothing there to distinguish them from
the rest of the world. Nothing to distinguish them from
the Egypt they had escaped, and nothing to distinguish them from
the cities and nations that they were going to dispossess. We're
going through the book of Joshua, which, of course, follows right
on Deuteronomy. We're going through that in our
adult Bible class. And didn't get to it in this particular
class. Took longer to get through one
point than I thought it would. Surprise. But one of the points is that
after they crossed the Jordan, God said, circumcise the nation. Of course, that would have been
only the males. And the reason he told Joshua to circumcise
the nation, the whole time they went through that wilderness,
even though it was commanded in the law, they did not circumcise
the boys born out there in the wilderness. And the question comes, why didn't
they? And I'll deal with that in the adult Bible class next
week. But one of the reasons was this.
When they crossed the Jordan to possess the land of promise,
there was not one mark upon them that would distinguish them from
anybody else in the world. They didn't get to cross the
Jordan. because by that act of circumcision they had aligned
themselves with a covenant, or had proven themselves to be obedient.
They crossed the Jordan in a state of uncircumcision, just like
the Egyptians they left and the Canaanites they would dispossess. So Moses didn't look at them
and say, blessed are you, O Israel, Blessed are you a people that has earned the
promised land. He said blessed are you a people
saved by the Lord. They would go into the land under
a different leader and it's interesting he said a people saved by the
Lord. Now the Lord And you'll notice
that's all in capitals there, so it's indicative that that's
a translation of the four-letter Hebrew word that they won't pronounce. We pronounce it as Jehovah, but
in Hebrew it sounds more like Yehovah, or Yehovah. So you take Yehovah. And then you add that word for
saved, and that word is Yahshua. And you cram those two together,
and you get something like Yahshua, Joshua, which in the New Testament
becomes Jesus, whose name is, means the Lord is salvation. And so you can see right there,
you know, Moses is going to put their minds on the God they worship,
the God who has saved them. That's where their blessedness
lies. But we must not think of that God as some nebulous, out
there God we don't know. The God that Moses is talking
about is our Lord Jesus. That's who he's talking about.
Remember how our Lord Jesus said to the Pharisees, you claim to
follow Moses. Moses wrote of me. Moses saw God in the burning
bush, the I am, and it's from the Hebrew word I am that the
name Yehoveh came, the self-existing one. And we find out that that I Am
is none other than our Lord Jesus Christ, the God who visited Egypt,
visited Pharaoh and Egypt under him with ten plagues, with ten
signs of his sovereign power. Who is that? That's our Lord
Jesus, that's who it is. that God who went through Egypt
on Passover, intent to destroy the firstborn of every household
in Egypt. But when he came to those houses
whereon the blood had been painted, he passed over them. For in that blood, he saw a token
of his own blood which would be shed some 1,500 years later. He saw the token of justice fulfilled. That God who led them through
the wilderness in the cloudy pillar or the fiery pillar at
night, that God is our Lord Jesus Christ. And so what is he saying?
Blessed are you, O Israel, who is like you, a people of Joshua, Jesus, a people saved
by the Lord. You know, we claim that we preach
Christ and preach only Christ, but it's not because we don't
know anything else, and it's not because we don't think there's
anything else that's of any value in terms of, you know, our day-to-day
lives or anything. Do you know why we preach only
Christ? First of all, when it comes to spiritual things, that's
all there is. But secondly, if you've ever been given eyes to
see Him, to behold His glory, if you've ever experienced the
wonderful grace that flows through Him, the love of God demonstrated
in Him, you don't want anything else.
What's going to compare with that? And he's saying, in a roundabout
way, who is like you, O people of Jesus? Those people saved
by the Lord. Now, if you ask everybody, I
mean, you could go from person to person in this world, and
nearly every one of them would claim to be saved by some means
or another. Either that or they claim they
don't need salvation, one or the other. But everybody has
this hope in their hearts. They know death's coming. So
they have devised something they can cling to that they believe
in the end will make it all work out OK. I don't know anyone. Seriously, I have never met anyone
who said, yeah, when I die, I'm going to hell, and I deserve
it, and there's just no way to get out. I've never heard anybody
say that. Everybody thinks it's going to work out in the end.
But it's not, not for everybody. Who is like you? A people saved,
okay, that includes a lot of people that claim it, saved by
the Lord. Now, one benefit of being saved
by the Lord is that our problem is the Lord Himself. You say,
well, we need to be saved from the devil. I'm not saying he's not troublesome,
I'm saying he's not the problem. One preacher put it this way, God saved us by himself, from
himself. Who do we need saving from? The
Lord. He is the God of justice. He
is the God of wrath. He says, vengeance is mine, I
will repay. That's what we need saved from.
Well, if the Lord is the problem, so to speak, you understand how
I'm saying this, if the Lord's the problem, what better solution
can there be than one that comes from that very same Lord Himself? If I am to be saved from the
Lord, how wonderful it is that the Lord Himself has designed
the means by which I shall be saved. And you can be sure of
this, any means He designs has met His approval. Blessed are you, O Israel, who
is like you, a people saved by the Lord. Why is it so wondrous
to be saved by the Lord? He goes on to say, He is your
shield. and helper, and your glorious
sword. Everything associated with battle,
he is that to us. Your enemies will cower before
you, and you will trample down their high places. Why? Because
they're so good at military endeavors. The first battle they had was
Jericho. You know what they went to battle
with? Trumpets. Now, can you imagine
the President of the United States saying, we've developed a new
weapon for our military? They've been working on it, got
our top scientists on it, we've got it worked out now, and nobody
will be able to withstand us. And they give us a graphic, and
there's a trumpet. You go, what? Well, they were not a great military
force. Rather, their God was the one that was
going to do all the work. Back up to verse 26. There is
no one like the God of Jeshurun. Later he asked Israel, who's
like you? Well, the reason he could say
who is like you to the Israelites is because they worshiped a God
of whom he said there's no one like him. What distinguishes
us as believers in our Lord Jesus Christ? What makes us different? Not us. What makes us different? What makes it so that we can
say, oh, who is like us, a people saved by the Lord? It's because
there is no God like our God. And look how He's described,
there's no one like the God of Jeshurun who rides on the heavens
to help you and on the clouds in His majesty. Now, these are
symbolic things. The heavens were up there, and
in the minds of those people, you know, that represents, you
know, it's a help that comes from beyond our normal reality,
and a help that's above it all. And clouds were always a symbol
in the minds of people of majesty. That's why our Lord, when He
ascended to heaven, He ascended in a cloud, and it says when
He comes back, He'll come back in a cloud, not because clouds
are necessary to the Lord. They are symbolic of his majesty,
of his glory. And he said, there's no one like
your God. You know, you look at the gods
other than our God, they're all the same. You can go from culture to culture,
and essentially, they have the same gods with different names. That's all it is. They give them
different names. The most classic example of that is you've got
all the gods of Greece, starting with Zeus at the top. You've
got gods and demigods and all of that. Rome comes on the scene. They just renamed all of them.
Top of them is Jupiter. You got Jupiter, Mars, Venus,
and then, you know, because the Greeks had Zeus, Ares, and Aphrodite. All the same gods. none of them
are like this God. None of them rides on the heavens
that is above it all, above it all because he made it all, and
above it all because he controls it all. All the gods of the pagans can
be touched by men. All the gods of the pagans can
be affected by men. Not this God. This is the God of whom Nebuchadnezzar
said after his encounter with God, he says, he does what he
wills in the armies of heaven and among the inhabitants of
the earth. And no one can stay his hand or say unto him, what
do you think you're doing? Now that's a real God. People
don't like that God. They want a God they can control.
They want a God that's waiting on some response from them to
decide what He's going to do. But this is not that kind of
God. And that's why Israel is so blessed. Who is a people like
you? Your salvation comes from Him
who does anything He wants to do. No one can stop Him. He's
so high above it all and so majestic in His person. No one even has
the right to question anything He does. Now friends, if I'm
going to be saved by a God, I want to be saved by that kind of God. I don't want to be saved by the
free will God. I don't want to be saved by the
God whose will can be thwarted by my will. I want to be saved by a God whose
will rules my will. Because I know this, if in this life I can frustrate
His will, but nonetheless I decide to let
God save me, That's the way it is. Who's to say some millions
of years down the road, someone else doesn't arise who can thwart
the will of God and my salvation is lost by that person's will. God does what he wants. Oh, what
a glorious God. And Moses goes on to say to them
in verse 27, the eternal God is your refuge. And underneath
are the everlasting arms. That's just plain wonderful. The eternal God, that God whose
essential existence is outside our space-time existence. that God, who's the one that
made our existence, controls it all, and yet is utterly unaffected
by it. He is our refuge. When the enemy pursues, we run
to him, we hide in him, and there is no enemy that can penetrate
that refuge. Because none of our enemies,
now you think on this, none of our enemies can escape space
and time. And we're hidden, and we have
found refuge in that eternal God. He says to Jacob, or to the Israelites,
He says, I am Jehovah. I do not change. And He doesn't
change, because change is over time, and He doesn't exist there.
He says, I am Jehovah, I do not change. Therefore, you sons of
Jacob are not consumed. If God is your refuge, no one
can get to you. And then this, and I tell you,
these are wonderful words for believers in this world as they
grow weary under the difficulties of this life, but most of all,
as their hearts grow faint under a sense of the burden of their
sin and of the wrestlings of unbelief.
And they think, am I going to make it? Will I be able to stand, or will I fail? Now, let me tell you something.
I know the answer to that question. No, you won't be able to stand.
Yes, you will fail. And that's sad. But this is more glad than that
is sad underneath. How can I fall? I might not be standing. But I'm not falling. Excuse me. As I came here this
morning, just as I was entering town, the remembrance of my sin hit me. Hit me like those You
know, scenes you see in a movie where someone turns around and
right then somebody hits them in the face like that. Stuns
you. Knocks you half senseless. Came
out of the blue, so to speak. And I'm not saying this to make
you impressed with my sense of sin as though I'm thinking of
what the world would consider minor faults in some way in the
distant past. I'm thinking about things that
are horrible, that are inexcusable, and not that far back. And here I am, you know, I'm
coming to preach the gospel, and here I am a pastor, and I'm
supposed to lead these people, and that gets me right there.
And you think, what am I going to do? Well, that's happened to me so
many times, I kind of have a pattern that I do. I just confess my
sins again. You say, well, why confess sins that you've already
confessed before? Because the guilt of them is
on my conscience again. And that's all I know to do with
them. When I feel the guilt, own up to it. That's what I am.
But I came over here, and I'd already made significant preparation
for this morning's message. But as I was doing some more,
I got this. I read that. The eternal God
is your refuge. And underneath are the everlasting
arms. And they cannot and they will
not drop you. Who is like you? people saved by the Lord. We don't dismiss our sin as though
it's insignificant or as though we don't care. We don't treat
it as though God doesn't care, but we know it will not destroy
us. In the end, these sins which
are our enemies, in the end, they will cower before us because
we're covered in the blood. And sin cannot stand in the presence
of the blood. You will trample down their high
places. So you who believe, you may have
a lot of troubles in this world. And you probably more than those
that don't believe, you feel your weaknesses. You know them. You hate them. And they sometimes make you wonder,
am I going to make it? Well, you will. You will, but not because you're
strong. not because you're faithful. You will make it because underneath
you are the everlasting arms of your
God and Savior. And you who do not yet believe, you may be struggling with religious
thoughts that say, I'm unworthy. I mean, you know, I can't do what God demands of
me or I haven't had any kind of experience that would make
me think that I'm one of God's chosen and therefore I'm free
to enter the promised land. Quit looking at you and begin looking at Christ.
There's the answer. There's nothing in you. You'll
never find any, at least I hope you never find anything in you
to make you believe that God will have you and bless you. But oh, may God give you eyes
to see Christ. Christ in him crucified. The
victorious reigning king riding upon the heavens upon the clouds
in his majesty. And may your heart be able to
say, though I'm a wretched, wicked sinner, that's enough Savior
for me.