If you would open your Bibles to the book of Exodus, chapter 34. We're gonna be focusing on one verse, but we will be moving around quite a bit. Hope your fingers are nimble this morning. And I find it very interesting. I've had this verse set aside for almost exactly two years. It was, I looked back, I had started this back in February of 2024 and I had just the verse down and I could not make anything out of it until yesterday when Drew asked me to preach for him, and suddenly it just came pouring out. I went downstairs and focused on this and was done.

So, the way God works is never something you can predict. We'll be in Exodus 34, just verse nine. This is Moses speaking here. It says, then he said, if now I have found grace in your sight, oh Lord, let my Lord, I pray, go among us. Even though we are a stiff necked people and pardon our iniquity and our sin and take us as your inheritance. One thing to remember when reading the Bible because we do read about many amazing things in it. Some of them that we would term as supernatural. But the thing to remember is the people in it are just like us. They're just like us.

For example, if Moses lived in this generation, he would, have some job, he would have a wife, just like before, and children, and he would have a home. It would just be, you know, made out of wood, made out of more modern technology, things like that. The job that he has, the buildings that are around, they all change, but Moses is just a person. He's just a person.

The only thing that separates us from Him and from the people He was leading in Exodus is just time, just time. Otherwise, we have all the same doubts, we have all the same feelings, and we have the same sin, and therefore the same reliance on God for all things.

And like us, unless God reveals the future to someone, they only know the present and the past. They don't know the future. And unless God gives them faith, they'll build up faith in something or someone else, not God. And unless God goes to them, they will not go near him. They won't go near Him. Similarly, they need a Savior, a Redeemer, just like we do. And therefore, they needed to go to God in prayer and ask for promises to be fulfilled.

One thing God likes is when we ask for what He has already promised to give. What He's already promised. to give. Jesus said in Matthew chapter 7 and verse 8, for everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. In Exodus, this is what Moses has just done. He has asked. He has knocked.

In fact, turn back just a page or two to chapter 33. This, what's happening in chapter 33, is after the people don't know what to do about God, Because Moses went up on the mountain, and they're just confused, and they say to Aaron, make us a golden calf, and they worshiped that calf. And God has declared that he would not go with them. He says this, lest I consume you on the way, for you are stiff-necked people. So in chapter 33, let's read verses 12 and 13.

Then Moses said to the Lord, see, you say to me, bring up this people, but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. Yet you have said, I know you by name and you have also found grace in my sight. Now, therefore I pray, I ask, I beg. If I have found grace in your sight, Show me now your way, that I may know you and that I may find grace in your sight and consider that this nation is your people." Moses is worried.

We would be too. He does not dare go one more step without God, not until God reaffirms his promises. The Lord then promises, my presence will go with you. and I will give you rest. Then skip down to verse 16. Moses asks God, for now then, or for how then, will it be known that your people and I have found grace in your sight, except you go with us? Verse 17, the Lord replies, I will also do this thing that you have spoken. For you have found grace in my sight, and I know you by name." Twice asked and God twice promises.

Be careful not to think that God changed his mind in just a few verses. When God saw the Israelites as stiff-necked people, his response was to stay away from them, lest he consume them in his wrath. That is God's only response to an offense against him. Sin is an offense against God and he will destroy it. But see how much his response differs for the one he favors.

When Moses asked, he said, if I have found grace in your sight, For the ones God favors, he will level armies and entire nations. He'll rain food from the sky and he will go among them and not consume them. Allow me to read back Our first verse, Exodus 34 verse nine, but in a more spiritual context, because that is where I want to focus this morning. Then he, Moses said, Lord, if your favor is on me, please go with us. Even though we, and not just the people, but I as well, even though we are stubborn, and forgive our willfully evil hearts and our sin, and take us away from the sin that owns us now, and claim us as your inheritance. All these things God has promised to forgive.

He's promised that. To go among them. He's promised to lead them. And he's promised to proclaim them as his favored people. I want to focus on the words go among us or go with us, depending on your translation. And I have five points. The first is this. We need him to go among us because we will not go to him. Turn to Isaiah chapter 65. Right toward the end. Isaiah 65 and just verse two. It says, I have stretched out my hands. God, I have stretched out my hands all day long to a rebellious people who walk in a way that is not good according to their own thoughts or imaginations. Man's will is the first thing that God must overcome.

We use the term man's nature a lot to describe that part of us that does not desire to have anything to do with God or His righteousness or His grace. Our natures are fallen. It's a mortal condition. It's not an ever, we're gonna die. And that condition has cut us off from God who was among us at the beginning.

Ever since that fall in the garden, the heart of each man and woman was without any love for its creator. Instead of seeking mercy and grace from the only source of it in heaven and earth, it imagined instead a lowly God who had changed his mind about sin and would rather save everyone from the very eternal punishment he had created for it in the first place. The heart imagined that mercy and grace are just not necessary because people have their own righteousness.

It's a sliding scale, but they got it. And they can decide and demand that the God of their imagination can save them. I don't know what they think will happen if God exercises his free will and does not give them what they want. But I do think many people are in for a surprise. That is our fallen nature and God must come to us. He must be among us. Second, God must go among us because men loved darkness rather than light.

That's John 3.19.

And if John 3.16 is true, so is John 3.19. This is the fruit or the result of what comes out of the fallen will of man. or they loved darkness more, sorry, not more rather than light.

And Jesus Christ declared that he is the light. And it is true whether he is in bodily form or seated in heaven. And furthermore, it is evident to mankind. It is evident to mankind that he is the light. It is so evident that they have declared their utmost hatred of it. They know what they saw. Now it's not that we love the light less than the darkness, that's not what it said. It's not that. Or that our fallen nature loves the light and the darkness equally and sometimes one wins out over the other.

Turn to John 3.19, let's read it in full. And this is Christ speaking here. It says, and this is the condemnation, and you can Stick a colon right here. He's laying it out. That the light has come into the world and men loved darkness rather than light.

Why? Because their deeds were evil. You tell me if there should be any doubt as to the condition of the heart after you read this. Is there any doubt? Their deeds were evil, not good. Those are opposites. Not decent. Their deeds were not decent. It doesn't say that the deeds were not okay. It doesn't say not rascally. It says evil. They were evil.

Before Jesus was in the world, every person looked the same to one another. They all looked like sinners. People in certain trades can spot others who share the same trade. It might be how they walk, what they do, what they're looking at, but you can spot it. And I thought of it this way, if we were pottery on display in a shop and someone came in and examined us, he would find blemishes all over each one of us. The glazing's not right, the color's off, something's wrong. We can see those blemishes in one another.

All right, every one of us, we can do that. because we already know what they look like in ourselves. That's why sinners can recognize the sin in others. It's already in their own hearts. And it's easier to believe someone stole or lied or committed adultery or killed. It's easier because it's in our hearts and we've done it. But then Jesus came along and there stood a man who had no blemishes. They couldn't see any sin in him.

They looked, they made up a few, nothing stuck. He was perfect from head to toe and mankind saw something he didn't like. This was light. Therefore they must be darkness. There was no sin in him and that was what they hated about him. No longer could man hide his evil deeds because the light wouldn't let them be hidden. Man's heart was exposed in the light and he hated it. And instead of embracing that light, man tried to snuff it out. but they did not defeat it. Instead of defeating the light, they became participants in God's plan of salvation.

And that perfect light now goes with everyone that believes and calls on the name of Christ. He must go among us because we love darkness rather than light. And this ties into the third point. We have another name for Jesus. It's Emmanuel, which means God with us.

I'll read out of Isaiah. If you would turn to Matthew, first chapter of Matthew, I'll read to you out of Isaiah. In Isaiah 7, verse 13 and 14, then he said, here now, O house of David, it is a small thing for you to weary men, but will you weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel, Emmanuel.

Now, if you go in the first chapter of the book of Matthew, Verse 23, Isaiah, in the book of Isaiah, it tells of this prophesied one of God. It's not Isaiah though. So who is it? And when does this one, this Emmanuel appear? Well, it says there in verse 23, behold, the virgin shall be with child and bear a son And here it is. And they shall call his name Immanuel, which is translated God with us.

God with us. What have God's people needed from the very beginning? We need the light. We need God with us. None of us were born believing that we needed that light. But God changes the heart, He changes the will. And what was once something we despised becomes the only thing we desire forevermore. Now in that change, will your evil deeds be exposed? Most certainly they will.

Perhaps not to others, but to your heart. You'll abhor yourself. You'll abhor yourself. Will others not of his kingdom despise you for declaring the light? They will. Can't sugarcoat that. many testimonies saying the same thing. But will you walk in darkness any longer as you once did? No. Because now you have the light of life, as it says in John 8.

Fourth, after we desire to go to God, He has given us that desire. We realize that we cannot get to Him by ourselves. We want to go. We need Him to go among us because we can't get to where He is. Where is He? Well, His throne's in heaven. And that is as far from us as the East is from the West. farther. The gulf between us and God that was caused by our sin is too great for us to overcome. We want to go but we're unable because God is holy and righteous and we are not. We must be reconciled to God.

One of the illustrations we have in the Old Testament depicting this separation that I just talked about is the inner or second veil of the tabernacle, which is the meeting place. It's where God and man meet. This veil separated everything from the holiest of all, or the holy of holies. It was used for one ceremony in a year, and it was called the Day of Atonement.

Now what is atonement in the context of God or you could say Christianity? Atonement is the reconciliation for the offense that our sins caused God. We offended him and the offense of our sin is a stench in his nostrils. Our small minds don't always understand concepts like this. When we sin, we just think it hurts the person that we did something to or it hurts us. They get the brunt of whatever the effects are. And if that's all it is, why would God be offended with my sin in the first place?

I'm not hurting him. And I think I heard this illustration from my dad once before. When we punch a stranger in the nose, the policeman who arrests us is not offended. And the judge who sentences us is not offended either. The only person who's offended is the one whose nose we punched.

But our sin, this is the difference, our sin isn't against other people, even though they might suffer the consequences of that. And when we sin, we do not punch them in the nose or ourselves in the nose. When we sin, we punch God in the nose and we must atone for that.

If no atonement is made, no reconciliation between God and man is made either. We cannot pass beyond the veil. If we try to pass into that place, which, like I said, represents a meeting place with God most high, If we try to meet or pass, and without the blood of atonement, we die.

And that veil stood as a symbol of our separation from God for over a thousand years. I don't know how many. Long enough. But as soon as Jesus died on the cross, to make reconciliation for us, Mark wrote, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.

Just as the pathway to the holiest of all in the tabernacle was opened, so was the pathway to God through Christ. No longer were we separated from God. Our Emmanuel went among us and ahead of us. And as it says in Ephesians 2, he has broken down that middle wall of separation. In Christ, we may enter in without fear anymore.

And fifth, and as brother Rupert once said, if you're keeping track on your fingers, we're near the end. Fifth, he must go among us because we are weak in faith, weak in faith. We have no strength in ourselves. If God does not go with us or among us in whatever we do, It's as if we march with no banner, with no leader, we march with no hope. When Devin was much younger, I don't recall what activity we were doing, but I asked him to go down into the basement to get something for me. And he'd been in the basement before, so I thought this would be an easy request.

And I was wrong. He left and then came back a few moments later empty-handed. And I said, did you get it? Where is it? And he said, I'm too scared. I said, well, turn on the light. And he didn't budge. He said, I'm still too scared. And no matter what I said to him, I could not convince him to go to the basement until I asked, want me to go with you? And that did it. That did it. So I got up and I went to the basement and he followed.

And friends, Are we like little children not willing to venture where our Heavenly Father does not accompany us as well we should be? That is exactly how we should be. Whenever and wherever we go, our prayer should be, Lord, be with me, else I dare not go. Moses asked, go with us. Go with us because we dare not enter the promised land without the Lord, without the atonement, and without his righteousness on us. Moses would not go.

He planted his feet. And he said, and I'll read it again back in Exodus, if I have found grace in your sight, O Lord, let my Lord, I pray, go among us. And this is the fantastic, incredible thing. God was ready to not go among them, if you recall. He said, if I go among you, I will destroy everyone in the camp.

But then Moses asked, and when even one person has found grace in God's sight and asks that God perform his promise, what God does next is for that person. And what he does next is for all who have found favor in his sight. And when God goes with us, we should leave our fears behind too. Because where he goes, we are safe.

And one last little thought, what was Moses praying for? Or maybe better worded, who was he praying for? Even though Moses didn't know his name, He was praying for Jesus. Every attribute fits. He was praying for Jesus to go among them, the one who made them right with God, and the one who could put away their sins, and the one who would lead them with strength into the promised land. We all, when we pray, need to pray for Jesus to come among us. Praise be to his name. Bruce, would you close us please?