Dennis Tuuri

Amen. Today’s sermon text is found in Exodus. I’ll start in chapter 19 at verse 16 and read through the first verse of chapter 21. So children, if you see the coloring page on the back of the handout today, it’s a picture of what we’re going to read about today. Moses going to Sinai to receive the law of God. Please stand for the reading of God’s word beginning at Exodus 19:16.

And then it came to pass on the third day in the morning that there were thunderings and lightnings and a thick cloud on the mountain. And the sound of the trumpet was very loud so that all the people who were in the camp trembled. And Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet with God. And they stood at the foot of the mountain. Now Mount Sinai was completely in smoke because the Lord descended upon it in fire. Its smoke ascended like the smoke of a furnace and the whole mountain quaked greatly. And when the blast of the trumpet sounded long and became louder and louder, Moses spoke and God answered him by voice.

Then the Lord came down upon Mount Sinai on the top of the mountain. And the Lord called Moses to the top of the mountain. And Moses went up. And the Lord said to Moses, “Go down and warn the people, lest they break through to gaze at the Lord, and many of them perish. Also, let the priests who come near the Lord consecrate themselves, lest the Lord break out against them.” But Moses said to the Lord, “The people cannot come up to Mount Sinai, for you warned us, saying, ‘Set bounds around the mountain and consecrate it.’”

And then the Lord said to him, “Away, get down, and then come up, you and Aaron, with you. But do not let the priests and the people break through to come up to the Lord, lest he break out against them.” So Moses went down to the people and spoke to them. And God spoke all these words, saying, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me.

You shall not make for yourself a carved image, any likeness of anything that is in the heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them, nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love me and keep my commandments.

You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work, you nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates.

For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it. Honor your father and your mother that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.” Now all the people witnessed the thunderings, the lightning flashes, the sound of the trumpet and of the mountain smoking. And when the people saw it, they trembled and stood afar off. Then they said to Moses, “You speak with us, and we will hear, but let not God speak with us, lest we die.” And Moses said to the people, “Do not fear, for God has come to test you, and that his fear may be before you, so that you may not sin.”

So the people stood afar off, but Moses drew near the thick darkness where God was. And then the Lord said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘You have seen that I have talked with you from heaven. You shall not make anything to be with me. Gods of silver or gods of gold, you shall not make for yourselves. An altar of earth you shall make for me. And you shall sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and your peace offerings and your sheep and your oxen. In every place where I record my name, I will come to you and I will bless you. And if you make me an altar of stone, you shall not build it of hewn stone. But if you use your tool on it, you have profaned it. Nor shall you go up by steps to my altar that your nakedness may not be exposed on it.’ Now these are the judgments which you shall set before them.”

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the appearance of your coming upon Mount Sinai that we just read about. We thank you, Lord God, that you are indeed Adonai, our Lord, who in ancient times did indeed give the law to your people. We thank you that you are our Lord, that we are your servants. Bless us now as we consider our Lord’s word to us. Transform us by it. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated. Money is a trailing indicator. At least this is what I believe. Money is a trailing indicator. As you young people move into your adult lives, you don’t seek money. You seek a calling to express your calling from God in terms of vocation. And as you engage in that vocation and calling, money is an indicator, but a trailing indicator of your faithfulness. You work first and then you get paid.

We are in a mess. Steve Sykes had Abigail send a very excellent article from the Wall Street Journal on Mad Max and the meltdown. It was called “Mad Max and the Meltdown.” And Mad Max—you know, we sort of look around us in the financial world the last few weeks and it looks like a scene from Mad Max. How did all that happen? Look at all that carnage and wreckage. Look at all the 401k drops. Look at the markets. Look at people being laid off. You know, boom. In the last month, all this has happened.

What happened? It’s like a Mad Max scene. And the article is very interesting because it relates all of this to the holiday season and he says the meltdown in Mad Max—or he sets them in context. He begins the article by talking about how we’re entering that season where we all got to be careful to be politically correct and not let “Merry Christmas” slip out of our tongues, but rather “happy holidays.” And he relates these things together. I think in a very excellent and telling way—we are in an economic time of Mad Max, but money is a trailing indicator. The signs were clear. The signs were given long before the collapse on Wall Street.

What has happened to the American family, the Christian family for the last 30 years in this country? It has disintegrated. The kind of blessed families we see up here with all these children—I suppose visitors think we probably only have six or seven families here and each have about 15 or 20 kids. Sort of looks like that. Praise God for the daughters. Praise him for all their children. That’s a thing of the past. Nobody does that anymore. More with the wife at home, husband working, while the children are young. No, it’s all gone.

Marriage is gone. Well, not totally gone, but it’s been as devastated as the marketplace, right? And it happened long before the marketplace. Our constitution was shredded long after we shredded the scriptures and broke apart the Old and the New Testament. God’s law and God’s grace are two different dispensations of time.

Money is a trailing indicator. Now, get your attention. You like it when you get the big paycheck and when you don’t have enough money, you feel it. In the culture right now, God is getting our attention with yet another 2×4 laid up alongside the head. But what has happened in all of this? What’s happened is we’ve moved away from a consideration of the Lord God and the requirement to properly fear him as our text talked about today.

And as a result, right in the middle of that text—hope you caught it—as a result of that fear of God, we’re encouraged. It is our motivation, one of our central motivations, not to sin. So we live in difficult times. The author of this article on Mad Max talks about this relationship to Christmas. And let me read a little bit of this toward the end of the article. He first describes, using another man’s writings, what’s happened—all the devastation. And then he says this, after asking the question “like Mad Max, what happened?”:

He says, “What really went missing through the subprime mortgage years were the three Rs: responsibility, restraint, and remorse. They’re the balance that stabilizes two better-known Rs from the world of free markets: risk and reward.” So he’s saying the problem is not free market. That’s what people are saying is the problem. We can’t have free markets. No, he’s saying the people that have exercised freedom in the marketplace have gone wrong in these particular ways—risk and reward—and then in relationship to responsibility, restraint, and remorse.

So he then says: “Responsibility and restraint are moral sentiments. Remorse is a product of conscience. None of these grow on trees. Each must be learned, taught, passed down.” And so we come back to the disappearance of “Merry Christmas.” And he says at the end of the article, “The point for a healthy society of commerce and politics is not that religion saves, but that it keeps most of the players inside the chalk lines. We are erasing the chalk lines. Feel free. Banish Merry Christmas. Get ready for Mad Max.”

Yeah. You know, morality is not just a given in a culture. Things like restraint and responsibility—as he says—these don’t grow on trees. These must be cultivated. And what this culture has done for a number of decades now is to pull up the roots of all of this that produced the sort of moral fiber that made men have restraint and responsibility in the context of the marketplace. We have that no more.

Well, I shouldn’t say we have it. It’s like large families. We have some still. We’ve got a congregation of people here. But understand, you next generation of kids, this is what the culture is doing. The financial meltdown is an indication of everything else that’s gone wrong. And as this author of this Wall Street Journal editorial, I think correctly says, it’s all because we don’t say “Merry Christmas.” It’s all because the Christian base of our culture has been washed away and with it the fruits of a Christian morality. We’re not coloring within the chalk lines and in fact we’re erasing the lines.

Now we’re talking about the seven O antiphons, and today the second antiphon is O Adonai, who gives the law on Mount Sinai. So it’s about law. The first O antiphon was about wisdom. The second O antiphon is about law—the lawgiver that God is, Adonai, Lord.

You know, the choir was singing Yahweh earlier, and you know, you have these three big names for God in the Old Testament. You’ve got Elohim, strong one. You’ve got Yahweh, the covenant name of God. But you also have Lord, Adonai, in the Hebrew. And Adonai comes from the word meaning to rule. And these are the three big names.

Now, if you’re reading your King James version of the Bible and other versions, if you’ve got “LORD” in all capital letters, that’s Yahweh. And if you have “Lord” with a capital L and little “od,” that’s Adonai. And it’s used a bunch of times. So the O antiphon that we look at today is O Adonai, Lord. The central confession of the early church recorded in the book of Acts is “Jesus Christ is Lord.” So Lord—Adonai—means that he rules and has authority over us. We are his subjects. And a lord has a law. So the first two antiphons are in terms of Christ is our wisdom and Christ is our law. He’s our law giver.

Now, that’s talking about coloring lines and how to color within them. The law, the laws of God, are coloring lines. They tell us what we can do. They tell us we can’t go out here. We have to stay in here. But staying within here, we can do all kinds of stuff, right? We can color in different ways.

We sang a version of—I don’t remember which psalm it is now—”By Thy Strength.” And that’s the same psalm that we sang a different version of, I think maybe last week, which is much more solemn and sober. And I can’t remember the name of it now. What is it? Let’s see. Psalm 65. And the other version we sang is—yeah, is that what it is? “Forth from Thy Courts.” “Forth from Thy Courts. Thy sacred…” I’m not sure that’s what I was thinking of.

Well, anyway, we know different versions of psalms. The psalm is like the lines and the way we sing the psalms or set them to music is the coloring within the lines. In wisdom, we apply the specifics of the law to our existing situation. Okay? And that’s really what this author in this article is talking about—this Mad Max article.

There are men who have referred to this as “moral imagination.” The moral imagination. This is a phrase that comes from Edmund Burke. Edmund Burke wrote at the time of the Civil War, a man of letters, Christian man. And he is probably best known today because in politics you hear this quote all the time: “the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” This is Edmund Burke.

And Edmund Burke wrote about the collapse, the absence of the moral imagination, as he looked at what was going on in the French Revolution. And I talked about this a little bit last week—that what’s necessary to properly order our lives, wisdom is the proper ordering of our lives—is a cultivation of what Burke and then Christopher Dawson, and in the modern, in our particular generation Russell Kirk, who has brought back some of these ideas of Burke and Dawson, have referred to as cultivating the moral imagination.

We are imagebarers of God. We are not instinctual creatures. The world, the animals, insects, they’re instinctual. The spider doesn’t think, “I’m going to weave a really good-looking, cool web.” It does it instinctually. Now, it’s beautiful. And there’s a wisdom to the created order that is based upon them just doing what instinctually they’re supposed to do.

But God calls us to have a wisdom and an order that’s not like that, is it? You don’t get up and instinctively do everything you’re supposed to do. You have facts around you and these facts don’t just come and then line up in an instinctual response by you to what’s happening. No, all those facts and data—you, made in the image of God—process. You apply imagination to connect things up: to imagine what I might want to wear this morning, to imagine what church will be like, to imagine what I might do after church.

We make sense and order of the world around us not primarily through instinct but through the use of the God-given gift of imagination. Now, imagination is like any other God-given gift. You can’t decide, you know, whether you’re a human being or not. That’s what you are. And you can’t decide whether you’re going to have imagination or not. The point is imagination will be exercised because you are human.

And the question is: will your imagination—will your proper ordering of the world and delightfully making your own order and your own coloring marks within the context of the lines that other people color differently—is that imagination what Burke referred to as a moral imagination? Is it informed by literature, arts, the scriptures, the worship service, informed by things that build Christian morality into your imagination?

Do you imagine yourselves in this Christian sense? Do you put together the things of your world and analyze them, see them from the context of what the scriptures teach us? This is the moral imagination.

Now, maybe it’s good to talk about other kinds of imagination. In replacement of this, some have talked about the idyllic imagination. I-D-Y-L-L-I-C. In the French Revolution, at the beginning of it, there was an idyllic imagination. There was an attempt to see the world, understand it, act out on the context of it immediately, trying to achieve paradise through the throwing off of everything in the past, all the norms and mores of the past. I lived through this in the 60s.

It’s much of what our modern world has become was given to us by a rejection of my culture, my generation, of the moral imagination of the scriptures, the combination of wisdom and law. Sententia and Adonai, right? A rejection of all of that and instead wanting, you know, the hippie movement, the whole “we want paradise, we want it now,” and the way we’re going to accomplish it is by throwing off conventions of the past that we don’t understand. You see, doesn’t make sense to us. Who cares? The past—we don’t need it.

The idyllic imagination casts all that off and wants to create paradise now, not through the proper use of moral imagination. It moves away from that. It’s a different use of imagination. Probably President-elect Obama, you can look at it in this way. He’s casting an idyllic imagination before the country as opposed to the moral imagination. And the result will be that the lines that properly give civil rulers their restraints are being erased. And what’s happening is a collectivist mindset based on this idyllic imagination.

But there’s another imagination at work in our culture. And this is what T.S. Eliot referred to as the diabolic imagination. The idyllic imagination doesn’t last that long because it doesn’t work out. And men can either repent and go back to God’s moral, biblical imagination, or he embraces something even darker—the diabolic imagination. The diabolic imagination sees people, not as human beings, as imagebarers of God or fully human. They see other people simply as objects for their use.

The diabolic imagination gives rise to demonic activities. We could say to the sort of gross perversions that our culture is now awash in. When we saw two days ago the news report that a young man at college who was depressed was part of a group that you can watch things on videos—video each other webcam—and you’ve got a little community of people commenting on things that they see from each other.

And this young man announced he wanted to kill himself. “Okay, do it.” Everybody said they urged him on to go ahead. “Don’t be, you know, don’t just say you’re going to do it. Go ahead and do it.” They urged him on and he laid down in his bed with the webcam going and killed himself. That webcam was a live feed for 12 hours.

Now that’s the diabolic imagination at play. Not only has it thrown off restraints, it’s thrown off what were the vestiges of a Christian morality and a comprehending that we’re imagebarers of God, completely and to where this young man is just a matter of amusement. Why not? Because these same kids that are watching this on the internet have watched on various cathode ray tubes or liquid crystal displays all kinds of game sort of imagination images where they enter into this kind of thing—killing, raping, engaging in sexual fantasies of different sorts, making pretend that they’re a different sex than they are.

This is what our world has come to, and these are easy things to enter into for a culture. T.S. Eliot, now, in his culture all they had was books, and he said that the pleasure books you read that are easiest for you to pick up and read and get engrossed in are often times, he says based on his experience, the worst ones. They’re feeding this diabolic image of unrestrained passion and bloodlust and violence and perverted sexuality and seeing other people simply as objects to be manipulated for your pleasure. Why not? They become merely objects in a video game and you sort of see them that way.

So we are in the context of having thrown off the moral imagination and moved through a process of the idyllic imagination. The culture now in America is embracing the diabolic imagination. Why do we have Mad Max economics? That’s why. Our call as Christians is to understand and to cultivate once more in ourselves and particularly in the next generation this moral imagination—to see ourselves who God declares us to be, to see the coloring lines of God’s law, and then in wisdom color within those lines in the way that God has given us to do.

Now part of that is a concern for an appreciation of the past. Last Advent season I talked on Hoisty’s cross of life and Peter Leithart’s lectures on them at the ministerial conference in Moscow. And how remember that we have past and future and we have in and out, and what we want to do. We live in balance between the past and the future. We have to know when we lean to the past and when we lean to the future, but we never go totally to the past and we never go totally to the future.

The idyllic imagination wants all future and no past, and in fact it wants the future by cutting off the past. And God says, you know, the cross that Jesus hung on is a good imagery for us. What do we read? In our text today, God declares that he is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In the scriptures, he calls us to continuity. He calls us to remember our past. He calls us to, you know, to preference, to prejudice the past, even as we point toward the future.

Why are we looking at these dusty old songs, the seven O antiphons, that nobody’s ever heard of? What’s an antiphon? An antiphon is just response back and forth. And well, why? Well, because we understand that the church has handed down to us traditions, customs, music, song, confessions. In that great book by David Wells, he says the problem with evangelicalism is it threw off the confessions. It dumped them. “Who needs them? We’ll make up our own way of looking at things today. We don’t need the past.”

That’s why this church is tethered to historical confessions. We read events here that happened thousands of years ago. God says the way he’s going to prepare you to be a people pointed toward the future and transforming this world again—back out of this diabolic imagination to a proper moral, biblical imagination—the way he’s going to make you equipped for the future is to remind you of the past. Isn’t that interesting? It’s significant.

This Thursday we look back at the past. And some people say, “Well, who cares? Thanksgiving, you know, these traditions, we don’t know why we do them.” And they just throw them over. Don’t do that, young people. I know you’re tempted to. I know that it’s just sort of you don’t understand why we do things from the past, but believe me, it is vitally important—manners, mores, societal mores handed on through Christian culture. These things are significant, and when we cast them off, we end up with the sort of disintegration, the Mad Max effects in our families and in our culture, that now we see in the trailing indicator of money.

And now finally, you know, with money we get our attention. God gets our attention. So we’re looking at these antiphons because the church said they were important. Because from at least probably the sixth century or so, the church has been singing the seven O antiphons in the context of the days before Christmas.

Now, I’ve got a handout for you there, right? And as I said, on the back you’ve got that coloring picture for you kids that want to color. And boy, there’s lines, but lots of freedom to draw, to color within those lines. Don’t I know you don’t can’t stay within the lines, kids. Don’t worry. Stay within those big boundary lines at least. But this is the mountain that we just read about from Exodus 19 and 20.

So I’ve given you a handout there that has these seven O antiphons. What was it? O antiphon. Well, it would go like this. The leader would say, “O wisdom.” And then the people might say, “Who came from the mouth of the Most High.” And then the leader might say, “Reaching from end to end and ordering all things mightily and sweetly.” And the people would say, “Come and teach us the way of prudence.”

So it’s an antiphon. It’s responsorial, just like our responsive readings in the Psalms. It’s an antiphon. That’s all that big word means—back and forth like that. They’re the O antiphons. Why do we call them O antiphons? Because each of the seven terms begins with the exclamation “O.” O wisdom. O Adonai, right? And so it’s an exclamation. It tells us that the subject we’re going to speak of is incredibly important.

These are the characteristics. This is a picture of who Jesus is. And so this is a song. Think of it that way. Each of the seven verses talks about a different aspect of who Jesus is, right? You know, we sing that song, “Crown Him the Lord of Life.” And so each of those verses crowns him something different, another name for Jesus. This is the same kind of thing. It’s a hymn based upon the attributes of who Jesus is that we look forward to the coming of during Advent and who we now see—that we have increasing darkness in our land and we have a Mad Max reality.

And we ache for the wisdom and law of God to come to us to guide and direct us so that we may guide and direct this world. And so we sing these, or recite, talk about, think about these seven O antiphons, and we do sing them because “O Come, O Come Emanuel” has this same progression of the seven verses that recite these seven O antiphons. So it’s just a very old song, an old song that was done responsively, typically, and it’s O different names.

So for instance today we have O Lord, and so remember that’s Adonai in the Latin and ruler of the house of Israel. So see, he’s Lord and ruler. He’s Lord, and just to make sure we don’t miss the point, he rules over us. We’re part of the house of Israel—connection to the past again, right? Who appeared to Moses in the flame of the burning bush and gave him the law on Sinai.

The flame of the burning bush. So they conflate here in their description of Adonai two historical accounts: one, Moses at the burning bush, and the second, Moses at Sinai. But it’s really the same place. We don’t even know that, do we? I know that. I probably have heard that at some point in time, but until my reading through these texts, God appears to Moses in the burning bush in Horeb where Sinai was. And God tells Moses, you know, “Let you’re going to deliver my people and they’re going to come back here to this mountain”—same place. There’s a chapel of the burning bush at where they thought Mount Sinai was.

So these two events, the church wants us to think of these things together and brings us this witness through the ages. And then when we read our Bibles in the accounts of these two things, we think, “Oh, I didn’t know they were linked. I didn’t know it was the beginning of the redemption and the conclusion of the redemption that’s being talked about here. I didn’t realize that’s at the same location.”

Oh, and Jethro is in both places too. Jethro comes to him at the Sinai encampment. Moses is out there working for Jethro. You see? “Whoa. I see. Oh, yeah. I’m getting it now. There’s some continuity going on here.” And so the burning bush is somehow related to God’s appearance on Sinai. God will redeem his people from their trials and difficulties and troubles. And he will bring them out of that burning, the suffering, the tribulation they were in. And he will bring them on to Mount Sinai as a redeemed people and freed, but reminded that he is their Lord. That he gives them a law. He gives them coloring lines.

And so already a glance at this ancient text reminds us of something we don’t even know about our own Bibles. It’s this connection. Well, most of us—I don’t think know, probably some of you do—but this connection between the burning bush and Sinai. And so these are the events that are talked about: gave the law on Sinai. Come and redeem us. See who’s going to—at the burning bush he tells Moses, “I’m going to redeem them.”

I don’t know the imagery of the burning bush. It’s lots. It’s one of those things that we have that we can consider. In fact, we talked about this. In Acts it says that Moses considered this burning bush, turned aside, and after God saw that he had considered this strange thing, then God spoke to him. It wasn’t the voice that drew Moses’ attention. It was the appearance of God in the burning bush.

He’s fire. There’s a bush there and the bush is not consumed. It’s still there. This image of the burning bush, by the way, has been one that the historic church again has given us some connections to. Elements of the Scottish church use the burning bush as their symbol. The Huguenots are probably the first place in Reformed history where the burning bush becomes their symbol, and their motto was “burning but not consumed.”

And so the church has told us that, well, one thing that might be—this image is that God is telling them he’s going to bring them out of the furnace of affliction, right? Egypt is the furnace of affliction. Hard things, hard times going on in Egypt. You’re burning, but my people haven’t been consumed. God may be telling Moses in terms of his appearance in fire in the burning bush, “He’ll bring them out. He’ll redeem them.”

And so the early church sees these connections and sees that we can look around us. It’s Mad Max time. The economy is in flames. Our children struggle trying to keep order and sense in the world because the world has become a rejection of the moral imagination and the moral order of the soul that’s been overturned by the blizzard of the world, as Cohen says. Our children struggle to make meaning and purpose, and we haven’t done them a good thing by reminding them of—by failing to remind them of—these historic connections. We’ve tried, but there’s burning going on, there’s trouble, there’s trials, there’s difficulties for Christians in our world today.

People in California are saying, “How do we live as Christians? What are we going to do? These gays are attacking us. What’s happening here?” Trials and afflictions. And we need God to come to our culture to redeem us, to save us out of all of this. And to not just save us out of this, but so that we’d be his agent to transform this into the context of the world that it’s supposed to become redeemed. Redeem us with outstretched arm.

God’s outstretched arm is this arm of power. Throughout these recitations of the burning bush and the Sinai and this outstretched arm, we have this imagery that informs our moral imaginations to think of God in ways that is mighty and powerful and strong. It’s a fearful thing. You know, when you come to church, Adonai might be a useful thing to bring to your mind, because in Hebrews it says, “You haven’t come to an easier mountain. You’ve come to a harder mountain, a more terrifying mountain. When you come to church, you come into the presence of God in a further, stronger sense than they did on Sunday. That’s what it says in Hebrews 12, right? It’s more dangerous. Jesus is less dangerous now than he was when he appeared to Moses in the Old Testament. Now he’s more dangerous to us.

So this should inform us. These are elements of the power and might of God. Earthquake, the mountain quaking, the bush is on fire. The thunder and lightning starts happening and the trumpet sound. I don’t know where it comes from, but it gets louder and louder. And the people get very frightened and they don’t want to go up there. They’re so frightened of God and they say, “You speak to us, Moses.”

The Lord Jesus Christ, Adonai, mediates the presence of God to us. But never forget that it is a presence that is filled with awe, majesty. As we sing in our song “O Come, O Come Emanuel,” it’s a presence that should bring us to a holy fear, yes, a reverence and appreciation of the power that we’re looking at when we come before the presence of God, but a fearfulness of displeasing this God.

So the antiphon reminds us of the power, the might, the strength, the fearfulness of the God we serve. But then as it gets to the prayer and petition, that power and strength is talked about as the outstretched arm of God to redeem us from this. How can we see any changes in this Mad Max world? God’s power should bring us to proper humility, but it should then also bring us to a sense of power and authority within ourselves because God’s arm is not shortened, never has been, never will be. He is powerful to redeem us, to bring us out of the difficulties, to bring us out of the fiery furnace.

That’s the emphasis: Adonai is first and foremost the God who redeems us. And now in that redemption, he brings us to Sinai as he’s brought us out of Egypt. And there he gives us his law.

Now, I read a little more than just the Ten Commandments. I wanted to get the description of the power and might of God in there. I also wanted to get you to recognize that it goes right from the Ten Commandments to the description of the altar. And then I read the first verse of the next chapter because it’s the beginning of the case laws, the civil laws that tell civil governors and civil subjects what they should be like. The law binds everyone, not institutionally. We can look at it that way, but it’s talking about people.

There’s no government. There are governors. And governors sin. When they fail to govern on behalf of the Lord of all the created order, they sin. There’s—you know, elders—there’s specific elders, and if I sin, I sin. You see me—I sin. The elders didn’t sin. So the law comes to us as this guide and manifestation of what we’re to do, not just in the civil realm but in the worship realm. That’s you got the Ten Commandments, then you got the description of the altar, then you got the case laws—Exodus 21-23—then you have an extended section of laws concerning worship. More about worship than anything else. Goes about, civil law, worship, civil law, worship. And most of the law—when we talk about the law, if we think of the Ten Commandments, okay, it’s a summation—but most of the law, in terms of number of chapters and verses, is about worship.

So this law has that aspect to it. Brings us back to an understanding that the only way we can move into the future is to come together and obey God’s law in terms of worship and be reminded of what he has done and prepare us for the conquest that he calls us to as we go forth from this place.

So God comes to us in power and in might. He comes to us as the mighty one to redeem his people and to give his people a standard of conduct, a standard of conduct by which they’re to live. So on the cover of your order of worship there’s a symbol there for Adonai that is reminding of the fire, but another historic depiction of this is as the tablets of the law. You know, so all of these things are symbolic representations. But what we remember at O Adonai, O Adonai, is that Jesus Christ is Lord. And because he is Lord, he is powerful and mighty. We should fear disappointing him or sinning against him. And we should recognize that his power and might has come to redeem us.

And to a redeemed people, he brings this—he brings this law, this way of life.

I want to talk briefly here, specifically about the law. Not specifically, generally, I guess, about the law. When we were at a C team meeting a couple of weeks ago, we read through Psalm 119, eight verses at a time. There’s 22 sets of eight verses. And we’re reading verses 41 to 48. Listen to what the—about what the law—what it tells us about the law.

“Let Your mercies come also to me, O Lord, Your salvation according to Your word. So shall I have an answer to him who reproaches me, for I trust in Your word.”

Now Psalm 119 is all about the word but uses the term “law” and “commandments” as well. A knowledge of God’s law is what gives us an answer for the one who reproaches me. Verse 42, as I just read: “I’ll have an answer for him who reproaches me because I trust in Your word. Don’t trust in God’s word. Don’t know his law. Don’t have a proper answer for the one who reproaches you.”

Verse 43: “Take not the word of truth utterly out of my mouth, for I have hoped in Your…” —yes—the law is a source of hope to God’s people. David in Psalm 119 says that the law is his way of rebuking the reproaches of the enemies and his law is what brings him a sense of hope. If you need hope in your life, hope in the commandments and the ordinances of God.

Verse 44: “So shall I keep Your law continually forever and ever.”

So commandments linked directly to lawkeeping.

Verse 45: “I will walk at liberty for I seek Your precepts.”

The law isn’t opposed to liberty. The law is the law, as James calls it, the law of liberty. And no doubt he’s referring back, calls us back to remember Psalm 119:45: “I will walk at liberty because I seek Your precepts, because I love God’s law, his Torah, his Ten Commandments, his instruction unto me what to do with my life. As a result of that,” he says, “he will walk at liberty. Move away from the law of God, and you move toward bondage, not away from it.”

Verse 46: “I will speak of Your testimonies also before kings and will not be ashamed.”

Do we want to speak to civil governors and not be ashamed? Then keep God’s law. Understand God’s law. Meditate on his law. His law isn’t opposed to the conversion of men and nations. It is sinful to—it.

Verse 47: “I will delight myself in Your commandments which I love.”

You want to engender love in your life? Your commandments are to be what we love—God’s commandments.

Verse 48: “My hands also I will lift up to Your commandments which I love and I will meditate on Your statutes.”

The law of God, properly understood, increases our sense of personal piety and devotion to God. The law. The law—not some dry old, dusty thing. The law is the source of delight, the source of joy. It’s the source of answering our enemies. It’s the source of life itself, to walk in this redeemed state.

The Lord Jesus Christ, Adonai, tells us about his law: “Blessed are the undefiled in the way who walk in the law of the Lord.” That’s the way Psalm 119 opens. If you want to be blessed, walk in the law of the Lord. The Holy Spirit comes to you to bring, to cause you to walk in conformity to Jesus’s way. And Jesus’s way is the way of the law. “Blessed are the undefiled in the way who walk in the law of the Lord. Blessed are those who keep His testimonies, who seek Him with the whole heart. They also do no iniquity. They walk in His ways. You have commanded us to keep Your precepts diligently.”

I guess I’m supposed to drink. Probably not the right way.

So Psalm 119 begins by telling us to meditate on the law of God. And it closes in the same way. The last eight verses of Psalm 119: “Let my cry come before You, O Lord. Give me understanding according to Your word. Understanding of the situation around about us comes as we meditate on God’s word and law. That’s the gift of the law as well—understanding.

“Let my supplication come before You. Deliver me according to Your word.”

Again, deliverance is linked to the law or word of God.

“My lips shall utter praise for You. Teach me Your statutes.”

Again, the instruction in the law produces praise for Jesus.

“My tongue shall speak of Your word, for all Your commandments are righteousness.”

You want to speak of the word of God? Meditate on the commandments which are righteousness.

“Let Your hand become my help, for I have chosen Your precepts.”

If you don’t choose the law of God, his hand won’t become your help. In fact, it’ll be turned against you.

“I long for Your salvation, O Lord, and Your law is my delight.”

The source of delight again is not something getting away from the law. It’s the proper use of the law by the Holy Spirit.

“Let my soul live and it shall praise You. And let Your judgments help me. I have gone astray like a lost sheep. Seek Your servant for I do not forget Your commandments.”

We go away like lost sheep. And the basis for the prayers that God would get us back is because we have kept his commandments. You see? This is the same thing the beginning of the Psalter itself.

Psalm 1 says: “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, the diabolic imagination, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in what? We’re supposed to delight in Jesus, right? We’re supposed to be delighting in God. His delight is in the law of the Lord. It is the Lord. It is Jesus, but it is his law that we are delighting in. And we’re not supposed to know it. We’re not supposed to obey it. We’re to delight in the law of the Lord.

“And in His law He meditates day and night. He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water that brings forth its fruit in its season whose leaf also shall not wither and whatever he does shall prosper.”

Is that what you want to be? Whatever you’re doing prosper. Well, it tells us here how that happens. It happens when we meditate on God’s law day and night and when we find delight in this law delivered at Sinai.

So God’s law—God’s law is a standard for us. In Matthew 5:19 our Savior says: “Whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”

A standard for our participation in the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of Jesus who brings it from heaven to earth, is the law and obedience to the commandments.

Revelation 12:17 says it’s an evidence of our elect status: “And the dragon was enraged with the woman and he went to make war with the rest of her offspring, who keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.”

Now, there may be a reference there to all the New Testament saints, but they’re one body, right? So the way that we’re identified here in Revelation as elect is those who keep the testimony of Jesus, but also those who keep the commandments of God.

Revelation 14:12 says: “This is the standard of our patience: ‘Here is the patience of the saints: Here are those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus.’”

It’s the standard for patience is keeping again the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus.

The law is our confidence in approaching the throne of God in prayer. Proverbs 15:8 says: “The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord, but the prayer of the upright is his delight. The Lord is far from the wicked, but he hears the prayer of the righteous.”

You want answered prayers? Well, if you’re going to be getting answered prayers, if your prayers are to be a delight to God, it’s because you keep the law of God. He hears the prayers of the righteous.

Proverbs 28:9: “One who turns away his ear from hearing the law, even his prayer is an abomination.”

Turn away from the law and your prayer is an abomination.

John picks this up in 1 John 3:21-23: “Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence toward God and whatever we ask we receive from him because we keep his commandments and do those things that are pleasing in his sight.”

So because we keep the law, he says, then we’re going to have a clean heart and then we’re going to have answered prayers. He’s just really commenting on the text from Proverbs 28. “One who turns away his ear from hearing the law, his prayer is an abomination.”

And then he, John, goes on to say: “And this is his commandment, that we should believe on the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and love one another as he gave us commandment.”

He sees the commandments summarized in loving God, believing in God, and loving our neighbor, the same way that the Old Testament, for instance in Leviticus, summarizes all the commandments of God by talking about loving our neighbor as ourselves.

In Ezekiel 36, the law is the standard for a Spirit-filled walk. “Then I will sprinkle clean water on you.”

This is talking about ultimately about the coming of Christ, in the new covenant era.

“I shall sprinkle clean water on you. You shall be clean. I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my Spirit within you, okay, so this is a Spirit-filled life that he’s talking about. And cause you to walk in My statutes. You will keep My judgments and do them.”

Are you a Spirit-filled Christian? You don’t evidence that through ecstatic utterances. You evidence that primarily through keeping the law of God, the commandments of God, the Ten Commandments, and their application to our life today. That’s how you know if you have a Spirit-filled walk or not.

The law is related to our love. John 15:10: “If you keep My commandments, you’ll abide in My love, just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love.”

Jesus abides in the love of the Father by keeping the law. We’re to abide in the love of Jesus Christ. Our standard of love for Christ is whether or not we keep his commandments.

This is love. 2 John 6: “that we walk according to his commandments. This is love that we walk according to his law, according to his commandments.”

Horatio Bonar, in his book God’s Way of Holiness, put it this way: “Love goes to the law to learn the divine will and love delights in the law as the expression of that will.”

Love goes to the law for an expression of God’s will: “What does Jesus want me to do?” And then delights in that law. Love delights in that law as the expression of that divine will.

Romans 13:8-10, Paul says: “Your continuing obligation is to love one another.” And he defines love and he goes right through and cite several of the Ten Commandments there as the demonstration of what loving our neighbor is. It’s keeping the commandments.

Psalm 119:9-11 says: “The law is our means of sanctification. ‘How could a young man cleanse his way by taking heed according to Your word? With my whole heart I have sought You. Let me not wander from Your commandments, from Your laws. Your word I have hidden in my heart that I might not sin against You.’”

What he’s hiding in his heart is the commandments of God. So the standard, the key, the method of our sanctification is this law that Adonai brought us out of Egypt to keep, to walk in. Not that it might be our salvation, but to walk now as saved people.

Bonar again says this: “The relation of the law to him—that is to Christ—is the same as its relation to us who believe in his name. We’re united with Christ, right? So the relationship of Christ to the law, Bonar says, is the relationship that we should have to the law. His feelings toward the law ought to be our feelings toward the law. The law looks on us as it looks on Him. And we look at the law the way he looks at it, right?

We look at Jesus. What does he think? What’s his feelings toward the law? That’s what we want to be. We want to be like Jesus. What would Jesus do? Jesus, his love for his relationship to the law should be our relationship to the law. And the law’s relationship to us, completed now in Christ, is the same.

What did Jesus say? He says in Psalm 40:8—we read the heart of our Savior: “I delight to do Your will, O my God. Your law is within my heart.”

Jesus’s attitude was love and desire to keep the Father’s commandments. And that’s the way our desire and heart should be as well.

The law is to be our delight. To delight in the will of God as revealed in the commandments.

John 15:10-12: “If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love. Just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love. These things I have spoken to you that My joy may remain in you. That your joy may be full. This is My commandment that you love one another as I have loved you.”

Maintain my love. Keep your joy. May your joy increase through an appropriation of the law that reveals the will of our heavenly Father.

Psalm 119:14: “I have rejoiced in the way of Your testimonies as much as in all riches.”

Verse 16: “I will delight myself in Your statutes. I will not forget Your word.”

This is Jesus talking, first and foremost.

Verse 35: “Make me walk in the path of Your commandments, for I delight in it.”

In verse 47: “I will delight myself in Your commandments which I love. Which I love.”

Lord God says there are coloring lines, and these coloring lines—the law of God—were to apply in wisdom. And we’re to look at those coloring lines and have not a dread of them, but a love for how they bring to us delight and joy, deliverance from enemies, wisdom and counsel in the sight of the nations, effectiveness in witnessing to civil magistrates. All of these things are tied to the Spirit-filled walk, the Jesus-filled walk, which is a delight in these commandments of God that he’s delivered to us.

O Adonai. O Lord, who brought that law to us, who redeemed us out of our trials and afflictions, brought us to the holy mountain, that you might give us this blessed possession. And in Scripture word, a law found now and fleshed out in 66 books of the Bible, that we may delight in that word. And as a result, have joy, have peace of mind, have not anxiety, but a sense of order in the context of our soul.

Again, this world, its diabolic and idyllic imaginations will overturn the order of your soul. But the order of your soul will be found as you appropriate the law of Jesus Christ. Delight in it. Consider it. Read it. Memorize it. Hide it in your heart. Rejoice in it. This is the mind of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is the heart of the Savior. And this is what the Spirit comes to us to bring us to a correct relationship to the revealed will of God.

Let’s pray. Father, we love Your law. Help us, Father, to understand it. Help us to keep it in our meditation. Help us to know Your word. Help us, Father, not to be formed by the sorts of diabolic imaginations that are presented to us over the television and over the computer every day, 24/7. Lord God, help us rather to cultivate in ourselves—rather, a sense of a moral imagination that understands the need for coloring lines and to color with wisdom and beauty in the context of the lives that Your law gives us.

Thank you for these wonderful things. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.