So Exodus chapter 23 and verse
20 down to the end of the chapter. Behold, I send an angel before
thee to keep thee in the way and to bring thee into the place
which I have prepared. Beware of him and obey his voice,
provoke him not for he will not pardon your transgressions, for
my name is in him. But if thou shalt indeed obey
his voice and do all that I speak, then I will be an enemy unto
thine enemies and an adversary unto thine adversaries. For mine
angel shall go before thee and bring thee in unto the Amorites,
and the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Canaanites, and the Hivites,
and the Jebusites, and I will cut them off. Thou shalt not
bow down to their gods, nor serve them, nor do after their works,
but thou shalt utterly overthrow them, and quite break down their
images. and ye shall serve the Lord your
God, and he shall bless thy bread and thy water, and I will take
sickness away from the midst of thee. There shall nothing
cast there young, nor be barren in thy land. The number of thy
days I will fulfil. I will send my fear before thee,
and will destroy all the people to whom thou shalt come, and
I will make all thine enemies turn their backs unto thee. And
I will send hornets before thee, which shall drive out the Hivite
and the Canaanite and the Hittite from before thee. I will not
drive them out from before thee in one year, lest the land become
desolate and the beast of the field multiply against thee. By little and little I will drive
them out from before thee, until thou be increased and inherit
the land. And I will set thy bounds from
the Red Sea even unto the Sea of the Philistines, and from
the desert unto the river. For I will deliver the inhabitants
of the land into your hand, and thou shalt drive them out before
thee. thou shalt make no covenant with
them, nor with their gods. They shall not dwell in thy land,
lest they make thee sin against me. For if thou serve their gods,
it will surely be a snare unto thee. Amen. May the Lord bless
this reading to us. After the Lord gave Moses the
Ten Commandments to give to the people, to the children of Israel,
he also gave many other instructions and directions as well. guidelines and additional commands
that were to show the people God's purpose for them in the
land. We must not think that God's
law was limited to just ten commandments. There were laws about the building
of altars and the worship at those altars. There were laws
about servants, laws about animals, laws about finance and borrowing,
what was to be eaten and what was not to be eaten, what was
to be worn and what was not to be worn. There were laws about
taking care of property, So that the great principles of the law
having been given in the Ten Commandments, the Lord also directed
the people in how to interpret and apply those laws in everyday
situations. The Lord was telling them, here
are rules for you to live by in the land in which I will place
you, the land that I will give you, and I will lead you into
your promised inheritance. And this was a great blessing
from God. The Lord God provided and promised
everything that these people needed. But I want us to notice
something important. God was doing these things from
grace and goodness and kindness towards the people. These blessings were because
God chose these people to bless them and gave them covenant promises. The covenant promises that had
come initially to their forefathers, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. So we remember that the people
spent time at the time of Joseph in Egypt, they were persecuted
and then the Lord brought them up out of Egypt into the wilderness
and is leading them through the wilderness now to that land that
he had promised to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. And he, God,
was delighted to be their God. And he was pleased to call them
his people. But the blessings that God gave
to these people were not reward for doing right or even some
kind of payment for their obedience. They were gifts of grace. which
the people were given, and they were called to express their
gratitude in a God-honouring way, by demonstrating their love,
their allegiance, and by honouring God with thanksgiving by obeying
his commandments. And the people understood this,
and the people agreed to this. They promised to obey the voice
of God. And what they said was, all that
the Lord hath said, we will do, and be obedient. And I'm sure
that they said that with all sincerity. and yet what we will
discover in reading and considering, thinking about the experience
of the children of Israel in the wilderness and beyond is
that they made that statement but they did not realise the
true nature of their own hearts and their inability to follow
the directions of the Lord, to trust and honour the Lord and
to live for him in their hearts and in their lives. So God, in
order to assist the people, tells Moses that he is going to send
an angel before the people to lead and protect and to safeguard
them against their enemies and to prepare the entrance of the
people into the promised land. This angel is spoken of here
in Exodus chapter 23, and the angel would keep the people in
the way. That was what the Lord said.
He will keep the people in the way by directing their path and
regulating, or we might say today, policing their conduct. The children
of Israel, in fact, were told, beware of him and obey his voice. Provoke him not, for he will
not pardon your transgressions. So that they were being told
that because the name of God was in him, that there would
be a blessing and there would be a punishment depending upon
the obedience of the people. And I think that if we were to
reflect and meditate for a little while upon the nature of this
angel and the work of this angel We would realise that this angel
was not simply a created angel, like most of the angels are that
God created, but rather this angel is a divine person. In fact, it is the Lord Jesus
Christ himself. Because we hear the reference
being made there to the name of God is in this angel. The name of God is in this messenger
and that's another word for angel, a messenger. So here the Lord
God, the triune God, was sending the Lord Jesus Christ to have
a particular role and responsibility in the leading and guiding and
safeguarding of the children of Israel in the wilderness.
And another interesting thing that is said is with respect
to the forgiveness of sins, because only a divine person can forgive
sins. The Jews knew that in the New
Testament. That was one of the reasons they
were so unhappy about the Lord Jesus Christ, because the Lord
claimed to be able to forgive sins. And the Lord is often called
an angel in scripture, so we should not be too surprised to
find his presence here being described in this manner. And
we're told that this angel shall prepare the way for the people. Fight their enemies and deliver
God's promised inheritance into their hands. They would experience
God's goodness because of the work of this angel. They were to trust and obey him
for their good, for their protection and Trust him to deliver all
God's kindnesses and promises and blessings to them. And actually,
this is really a delightful picture of what we sometimes call a type
in scripture, because it's a picture or a type of the Lord Jesus Christ's
work of redemption. and leading and deliverance and
salvation for God's elect chosen people. God has an elect people
in this world. A people whom he has chosen to
bless with his grace. And all the blessings of God
are not universal. They don't come to every single
person. But grace and goodness comes
particularly and specifically to God's elect. and just as God
chose Abraham, and blessed Abraham in the midst of all the people
that were alive at that time. And just as God chose the Old
Testament people of Israel to be the beneficiaries of his goodness,
God's purpose is also to bless with salvation his people whom
he has chosen in all the world, not just from amongst the Jews,
but in all the world including the Gentile peoples as well. And God has chosen out a people
from all around the world whom he will bless through the preaching
of the gospel and the believing of faith. God's purpose then
is to bless these people and he promises that he will give
them grace. and He will give them His goodness
and He will show His glory to them. Now these worldwide elect
are like the children of Israel going through the wilderness.
As the elect people of God travel through their life, travel through
the times of their life, and that's in every generation all
the way back to the time of Christ and all the way back before that
in the Old Testament. The Lord had his people. and
as they have travelled through their own lives, wherever that
might be, they can see pictures of the way in which God dealt
with the Old Testament people, Israel, in Egypt and in the wilderness
and when they went into the Promised Land. And what we find is that
if we see pictures and types in these portrayals, then we
are given little glimpses about the way in which the Lord still
deals with his people in their own lives. and we're not talking
about the physical living in a desert, but we see comparisons
and we see spiritual applications in the way that God deals with
his people today as he did in times past. For example, we have
needs and we have troubles and we have enemies and we will find
that the Lord will help and will bless and will provide and protect
his people. We cannot reach heaven in our
own strength and God's law has shown us that we can never earn
or deserve his favour because we are by nature are rebellious
and disobedient people. And we learn that the Lord Jesus
Christ cannot simply pardon our transgressions as if they had
not happened or as if no sin had taken place because God is
holy and the Bible tells us that the wages of sin is death. So we require Because God is
holy, because God requires justice and purity, we require a means
and a way by which the angel of God, or the messenger of the
covenant, which is another name that Malachi gives to the Lord
Jesus Christ, will purge our sins and make us righteous. We need the Lord Jesus Christ,
just as the Old Testament children of Israel needed the Lord Jesus
Christ to lead them and protect them and provide for them through
the wilderness, we need the Lord Jesus Christ to do the same for
us in our lives as well. To defeat our enemies, to secure
our inheritance, to lead us in the way of life, to provide that righteousness
and justification that we cannot provide for ourselves, to become
our substitute and die in our place, to buy our redemption
and to purge us from sin. And so it is the Lord Jesus Christ
who still today keeps his people in the way because he is the
way. He's the way, the truth, and
the life for all God's elect all over the world, wherever
they may be. He keeps us safe in himself. He keeps us in the way of truth. He keeps us in possession of
spiritual life. and this is a great work of grace
and mercy to us as sinners. He does not do this because we
are obedient or because we are better than anyone else but because
he loves us and in loving us he gave himself for us. so that
all who are his, all for whom he died, hear this good news
of salvation by the death of the Lord Jesus Christ and by
the blood of Jesus Christ and they believe it to be true and
they depend upon that work which he has accomplished. and they
trust the Lord Jesus Christ by faith. They trust the one true
saviour who has done all things that are necessary to bring us
to salvation and to heaven. And there's another interesting
lesson here that I want to just point out to you before we close
today. I've already mentioned these
types and pictures that we can see, for example, in the Old
Testament people's journey through the wilderness, we see parallels,
we see comparisons, we see pictures of our own lives in this world. But we must remember that these
types, these pictures can never show us the full picture. And
that's true with respect to the land of Canaan. Sometimes Canaan
or the promised land is a picture of heaven and is a type of heaven. And it's a type where we think
about the rest of heaven and the peace of heaven and the joy
of heaven forever. but sometimes it's also a picture
of our Christian lives and the experience of eternal life. Now we know that for a believer
eternal life begins before we get to heaven. And so Canaan
is perhaps not just having the place, but rather the experience
of our conversion and entering into a relationship with the
Lord Jesus Christ and enjoying spiritual life in him. And I
say that because I think that there's an interesting little
lesson here for us. When we hear about the children
of Israel going into Canaan, we discover that there were enemies
in that land that would cause them trouble. and we discover
in our own lives that we, even though we've been brought to
faith, even though we trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, still
have problems, still have enemies, still are tempted, still are
afflicted, still have discouragements that come into our lives. so
that God doesn't take away all our problems at once. He doesn't
take away all our problems in this world that he is going to
take away when we enter into heaven. We still have to live
with these problems in our converted state. We see that referred to in verses
29 and 30 of this passage. When the children of Israel came
to the promised land there would still be enemies possessing the
countryside and the cities and the Lord warns the children of
Israel that he is not going to rid the land of all their enemies
immediately. but that rather over time he
will do so gradually so that the land does not become desolate. If he simply swept all the nations
out of the land at once, as he could have done, then the land
would have become desolate before the children of Israel could
properly have gone in and possessed the countryside and the fields
and the vineyards and the cities. And so the Lord was preparing
the children of Israel with this knowledge. there's a lesson there
for us because the Lord does not promise to rid our lives
of all our troubles at once but he gradually teaches us about
himself and about ourselves step by step along our Christian journey. The Lord enables us to trust
him more and depend upon him more because of the troubles
that we face. We call this growing in grace. growing in grace. And actually
what the Lord tells the children of Israel and what he teaches
us is that if he did not do that then we would become desolate
like the land of Canaan. We would be barren of all affection
towards God because we would think we didn't need him. We
would be empty and bereft of all our reasons to trust the
Lord for the help that we need. We would be careless of what
we are doing and how we should live to His honour and His glory. Such is the nature of our sinful
flesh. that the Lord has to keep us
humble and reliant on himself by the troubles and the trials
and the challenges and the difficulties that we face. This is how the
Lord keeps us in the way. This is how the angel of the
presence of God keeps us in the way. This is how the Lord Jesus
Christ keeps us following in the way. So let us learn from
these Old Testament accounts to trust more and understand
more of the Lord Jesus Christ's dealings with us. and the constant
need that we have for his help and his grace and his salvation. May the Lord bless these thoughts
to us. Amen.