Exodus 40

Transcript

00:00:00:37 – 00:00:35:00
Clint Loveall
Hey, everybody. Thanks for being with us. Continuing through Exodus, probably probably wrapping up the text today. And if we kind of moved around a little bit. But if we jump into this last chapter, Chapter 40, the Tabernacle gets put up. God gives Moses very specific instructions. First day of the first month. So this is a new year, a new endeavor coincides with this new thing, this new reality of the tabernacle.

00:00:35:27 – 00:01:00:01
Clint Loveall
And you get the instructions. Verse 16, We get told Moses did everything the Lord had commanded him. He did did all of it to specs, did everything the way that it was supposed to be. And so at the end, they have this thing that’s set up. All is ready. And then in the end of verse 33, so Moses finished the work.

00:01:00:01 – 00:01:30:09
Clint Loveall
And I think, Michael, there’s something it’s not an irony because I think it’s on purpose in the text. But when we begin, when we begin this story, when we open the first pages of Exodus, we see a people who have a place. But they’re not a people. Mm hmm. And we end the book in almost exactly the opposite.

00:01:30:55 – 00:02:04:57
Clint Loveall
These people now have a temporary place, but it’s not. The hope is this is not their final condition. And I think the the the early part of the book, in the latter part of the book, share that hope that this is a stop on the way. But there there is an interesting reflection, I think if we look at the early status of the people and the late status of the people, there is a kind of balance beam here that I think is really interesting.

00:02:05:20 – 00:02:31:44
Clint Loveall
And we see the people now. I mean, obviously, we’re going to get the rest of the story as we go through, as you would read through the next several books. But there’s a big question mark here. The tabernacles up. Everything is as God said it should be. And now what? I mean, I think this text ends with a does a really nice job in the ending of trying to draw us toward the rest of the story.

00:02:32:18 – 00:03:00:54
Michael Gewecke
One of the questions intrinsic in this part of the text is what makes the people a people. And there are many, many places that are identified by the the fixture or the icon. I think, you know, when people think of Paris, they think of the Eiffel Tower. Right. Or when people think of Saint Louis, they think of the arch.

00:03:01:28 – 00:03:31:13
Michael Gewecke
There’s something to that particular symbol being connected with the place, the locale, the people, and in some cases, even the culture and the way of being in that place. And here in Exodus, the people of Israel left the wilderness and made their way into Egypt. And then they spent this time in Egypt where they grew, where the people flourished, where things went well until they didn’t.

00:03:31:28 – 00:04:02:29
Michael Gewecke
Right. And then there was this whole continued downward spiral of the people being oppressed to the point of being pushed out of existence in key ways. And then God chooses this reluctant leader, Moses, to bring them out and the retelling of this only exists for the purpose of just pointing out that as we’ve gone, the people left their identity in the wilderness, went to Egypt, where they were never Egyptians or were taken out and rescued from Egypt, taken through the Red Sea, miraculously.

00:04:02:29 – 00:04:25:51
Michael Gewecke
And here they are now asking, who are we? And it would be easy to identify them as the people now of the Tabernacle, as the people of the Ark of the Covenant, as the people of the tent, of meeting alter water for washing base and all all of these things. And the honest truth is people do that in church all the time.

00:04:25:53 – 00:04:48:50
Michael Gewecke
You know, you should come to my church as if that church is only a building. But I think more pressingly, the text leaves us here nearing the end, not what the question of is the most important thing that they did, what God told them and they made the stuff. Or is it a reflection of what this act of faith means in defining who they are?

00:04:49:06 – 00:05:10:30
Michael Gewecke
And that is, I think, an intentional and pressing question which the following books of the Old Testament will go to great lengths to how they we’re going to say. Answer I think they explore because the people at different times respond to that question differently. And I think it’s a master class here in seeing the people have done as God commanded.

00:05:10:44 – 00:05:22:10
Michael Gewecke
That’s a good thing. But the question hangs, have they fully accepted and become identified as God’s people? And that question, I think, is one that we shouldn’t answer too hastily.

00:05:22:22 – 00:05:39:43
Clint Loveall
Right. Let me I have some thoughts along those lines. But let me read the last four versus here of the book. Then the cloud cover the tent of meeting the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because the clouds settled upon it and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.

00:05:40:01 – 00:05:58:42
Clint Loveall
Whenever the cloud was taken up from the tabernacle, the Israelites would set out on each stage of the journey. But if the cloud was not taken up, then they did not set out until the day it was taken up for the cloud of the Lord was on the tabernacle by day and fire was in the cloud by night before the eyes of all the house of Israel.

00:05:59:04 – 00:06:26:00
Clint Loveall
At each stage of their journey and I can think of no other book, Michael, that does us the service of the journey metaphor. I mean, I think when when we talk about our life of faith as a journey, you know, we’re coming up on the season of Lent. Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday. We start and we talk about that, the journey toward Easter or Advent, the journey toward Christmas.

00:06:26:24 – 00:06:58:46
Clint Loveall
I think whenever we use Journey language, I think we pay some homage to this book. I think Exodus is the epitome of that idea, the idea of starting in a place and being called to another place, this wonderful language of journeying by stages. And I think one of the things that the people missed and one of the things that’s important from reading this through a faith perspective is that journeys are hard.

00:06:58:51 – 00:07:22:30
Clint Loveall
Yeah, I mean, you can go on a great vacation with your family and it will be exhausting. You have to get to the airport on time. You have to get over this. You have to do this. You have to do that. I mean, wherever you travel, there are some hurdles. And I think that the mistake that we see from the people of Exodus is that they thought slavery was hard and the journey would be easy.

00:07:23:00 – 00:07:52:03
Clint Loveall
And I think one of the things that Exodus offers us from a meta perspective and a narrative perspective is this reminder that staying in slavery is worse than being set free. But being set free isn’t necessarily easier. It is work to be free. It is difficult to be obedient. It is hard to journey by stages and try to follow God as you do.

00:07:52:17 – 00:08:18:28
Clint Loveall
It is scary to have God set your course in in ways that you didn’t choose. I think if we allow ourselves to kind of get into those questions of Exodus, this book, though, there are dry parts in it. It really does us a service in this this metaphor of journey and stage and movement and difficulty. I think there’s a lot in there for us.

00:08:18:45 – 00:08:54:36
Michael Gewecke
I want to just pause on that language of freedom there, because a popular way conceiving of freedom is that we’re free from something. We often think of that free from restriction, we’re free from other people meddling, we’re free from a rule. And if that’s your conception of freedom, you’re going to have a very hard time understanding the real presenting troubles of Exodus, because on its surface it would be understandable to read that Exodus story as being free from slavery in Egypt.

00:08:54:54 – 00:09:18:23
Michael Gewecke
But ultimately, if that was the point of the book, we could have stopped once they got to the other side. That’s the ultimate moment of achieving that freedom from. I think it is not accidental and in many ways it’s building a bridge to the rest of the Old Testament to instead be asking the question, what are the people free towards?

00:09:18:36 – 00:09:47:07
Michael Gewecke
What What are they free to do? And the question is, will they, in their freedom, choose the God who made them free from slavery? And that, Clint, to your point, is what makes this freedom so very, very difficult is the fact that it may be freedom, but it is also a costly, disciplined freedom. It requires choice and commitment and perseverance.

00:09:47:20 – 00:10:08:47
Michael Gewecke
And we’re going to see more in other books than what we saw in Exodus in the Old Testament. There’s that question of how do we pass on that choice? How do we pass on generation to generation, the choice to choose in our freedom to be people of the one true God. And that is a very prescient, timely, prescient kind of concern.

00:10:09:01 – 00:10:35:25
Michael Gewecke
I mean, I think if we are people of God, we too are free from sin, free from slavery. In Paul’s language, we’re free from the realities of darkness. But the ultimate question is, are we free towards something that we will choose and that we will, through discipline and perseverance, move towards? And I think that is one of the questions that Exodus invites us into.

00:10:35:29 – 00:11:00:16
Clint Loveall
Yeah, we all love the idea that God calls us to things that we want to do, that we can do that will be easy to do, that will be beneficial to us. But what the Israelites learn is, to your point, Michael, freedom is difficult. It is hard to have choices. It’s better. But in some sense it’s not easier.

00:11:00:16 – 00:11:27:52
Clint Loveall
And, you know, we we can talk about this tomorrow, but when the Israelites look back toward Egypt and say, We wish we hadn’t started, we want to go back. Right. That’s that’s the reality. And if you’ve had that kind of journey in your life, the person who’s battled addiction and gotten to the point where they confess, they have to admit to themselves, I’m a slave to something and I want to be free of it.

00:11:28:10 – 00:11:51:16
Clint Loveall
The path to freedom is hard. It’s a daily grind. It demands lots of work. It takes the contributions and the encouragement and the support of others. And we often don’t think of that. You know, we get to a verse in the New Testament where Jesus says something like, you know, count the costs before you build the tower or before you start the journey.

00:11:51:32 – 00:12:23:45
Clint Loveall
I think that’s the idea here, is it would be it would be nice to see this as a story where there were these poor slave Israelites and God set them free and they went out and they were happy about it. And but that’s that’s not how people are. That’s not how reality works. And so I, I deeply you know, we’ve just been through a section that is a kind of slog in Exodus, and there are a couple of those.

00:12:24:05 – 00:12:49:08
Clint Loveall
But when I think of this book as a whole, I love this book. I love the themes of it, I love the messages of it. I think this is such a human book and it speaks so well to our condition and to often who we are and how we are. I just I see a lot of wisdom in this book.

00:12:49:44 – 00:13:14:21
Michael Gewecke
So I don’t want to close today’s conversation without quickly noting, because I think that this is really amazing. Look, here in verse 35, Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because the clouds settled upon it and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. Note that this is a non-accidental reference saying How many times have we seen the cloud and the glory of the Lord up on the mountain?

00:13:14:22 – 00:13:35:25
Michael Gewecke
That place where even the people of Israel couldn’t go? That that that’s where Moses went up to meet God. Now, in this pivotal moment, God takes up residence in the tabernacle amongst the people at that ground level that even Moses who climb the mountain to be with God can’t enter this place. God is here. God is shown up.

00:13:35:42 – 00:14:19:13
Michael Gewecke
And that is not only is this a question, as we’ve talked at length about in this conversation today, a question about the people and how they’ll use their freedom. But now it also frames that God is now taking up residence in the myths that God is here, that that God has seen the work and seen the contribution, and God has going to go with the people God has committed that and God is showing up and God’s presence is here, and that in many ways it sets the tone for that journey metaphorically, because it’s not just that the people are dusty and in the wilderness and things are hard, then they’ve got to figure things out.

00:14:19:37 – 00:14:42:46
Michael Gewecke
It’s also that they are now going to do so with their temple going with them, their movable temple right there, their place of worship, the house that God has chosen to take out, take up residence. And in the midst of that journey, there’s a kind of us that we really haven’t had before in the text. And if you look backwards, I don’t want to spoil a conclusion.

00:14:42:46 – 00:15:03:41
Michael Gewecke
Conversation, but if we look backwards all the way back into Genesis before we are breaking new ground in the people’s relationship with God, new things are happening in this moment. There’s a kind of step forward here or advancement in that relationship, and it is notable and it’s intentional. And it’s worth pointing out.

00:15:03:41 – 00:15:37:15
Clint Loveall
Yeah, I again, I think that if you think about from a narrative perspective or from a story perspective, what is the last word? What is the parting scene? You know, when you see a movie and right before the credits roll the last image and what is the last image that Exodus gives us? But a people in the wilderness experiencing both God being with them and experience seeing God not being present as they journey by stages.

00:15:37:15 – 00:16:05:24
Clint Loveall
And I think most of us would say, Oh yeah, we’ve been there, we haven’t crossed the Red Sea and we haven’t build a golden calf and we have. But, but I get that. I get that sometimes God is observable and obvious and with me and leading me and guiding me and other times he’s taken up from me and I’m journeying in the next age, hopefully not screwing it up.

00:16:05:24 – 00:16:36:18
Clint Loveall
And I just think that’s a very human moment. That’s a very interesting place for this book to end, a very, I think, intentional place. And it invites this wonderful question mark of where do the people go next, which ultimately asks us where do we go next on our own journey with God? Where do we go in our own struggles with faithfulness and our own successes, our own failures, our own doubts, Our own fears are our tendency to complain or to trust.

00:16:36:34 – 00:16:46:08
Clint Loveall
I just think there’s a lot there, Michael, And some of this I think, will come out again tomorrow as we sort of offer some closing thoughts and maybe some wrap up on the book.

00:16:46:28 – 00:17:16:06
Michael Gewecke
That we’ve got some things to talk about, I think related to Moses and his particular role in a book like this. I think we have some talking to do about what it means to be the people of Israel as opposed to just the called nation and, you know, the promise that God had given to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob here, that that story takes this significant and substantial turn and, you know, Clint, I think you are in many ways better at this than I am.

00:17:16:06 – 00:17:35:09
Michael Gewecke
I think that language of journey and that metaphor it presents is not just for the people of Israel. I think you’re right to point out that that we’re invited into that. And so to leave it for today, suffice it to say, I think it’s worth noting that as people of faith, we don’t always pick up camp and move.

00:17:35:09 – 00:18:02:58
Michael Gewecke
Life is not always an adventure of faith. It’s not always being in swept up in the current of all good things. Sometimes, as we especially look here towards the Lenten season as we record this, sometimes it looks like pausing and waiting for God to tell us the next step. And if that’s where you’re at, may there be some encouragement in this conversation that so the same for the people who built the tabernacle.

00:18:03:09 – 00:18:17:02
Michael Gewecke
God didn’t always have a place for them to move right now. And sometimes being grateful and content where we are is the act of humility and faith that is expected. And, you know, hopefully there’s some encouragement for all of us in that.

00:18:18:00 – 00:18:37:06
Clint Loveall
Yeah, we’re grateful that you’d be with us as we kind of wrap up our own journey through Exodus. Hope that there’s something today that’s thought provoking. If you can try to join us tomorrow, because I do think as we go through the summary, there might be some themes that are important that maybe will be of interest or might be helpful, we hope.

00:18:37:06 – 00:18:44:16
Clint Loveall
But if you can join us tomorrow, we’ll offer some closing thoughts as we finish this trip and finish this book.

00:18:44:38 – 00:19:05:51
Michael Gewecke
Once again, we do have another study in the works and we’re excited to share information about that. So if you’re new here, definitely give us a like let us know in the comments and also subscribe because there will be more to come. We’re glad to spend this time with you today and we will see you tomorrow.