The God Who Does Not Change

[0:00] Maybe you had a time where you had to stop and say, and you're like, I know that life is hard, but this is just insane. This is crazy. Show of hands. How many of you have had that? Just keep those up for a second. So there's a few people without your hands up, and one of three things I think is true.

[0:11] Either your memory is poor and you've forgotten, or you're lying to me, or it's coming. You know, that time is coming for you. And you know, I'm in one of those places right now.

[0:23] I'm free to come up here to Squamish the next three weeks because I'm currently otherwise unemployed. I was pastoring in Vancouver, but we went through a lot of deep hurt there, and we had to step away from our church.

[0:39] We were lied to, we were lied about, and much of it by people that we were very close to. And there's been a lot of emotional hurt, a lot of relational hurt, a lot of vocational uncertainty.

[0:50] Our church had provided housing, so for the last two months we've been without a permanent place to live until just this week when we moved into a place.

[1:01] And as you can imagine, with four kids, it gets a little bit unsettling after a time. But perhaps the hardest part has been the spiritual destabilization that that kind of event brings.

[1:12] You know, we thought we were serving God how he wanted us to serve. We thought we were serving God where he wanted us to serve. And yet, things didn't happen like we thought they should.

[1:23] Now, why do I share this? I didn't really want to get into it. I didn't really want to talk about it. But I thought that we should, that I should share, because I know that some of you have gone through times like those.

[1:34] Or you are in the middle of a time like that, or you will be going through a time like that. And I want you to know that I understand. I know what it's like when you look at how life is going.

[1:46] You say, this is not the way it was supposed to go. And I don't know what it was for you guys. Maybe it's job hunting. Maybe it's a time of loneliness. Maybe it's a broken relationship. Maybe it's persecution or difficulty in sharing the gospel with a neighbor.

[2:01] Maybe it's losing someone who was close to you. Maybe it's a job you just couldn't handle. I don't know what that time of your life is for you. But I know that most of us in those times will turn to God and will ask Him, what in the world are you doing?

[2:20] I mean, God's supposed to be in control, right? And when our life starts spinning out of control, we look to Him, possibly in anger, more than likely in confusion.

[2:32] And we might think that God has left, that He's just abandoned His post and He's gone. He's checked out and now we're to defend for ourselves. Or maybe we think that God has changed, that His power has somehow diminished, or that He stopped caring about us.

[2:47] And some of us, some of us start to think that we had God wrong altogether, that all this time He was just this aloof being that didn't care, and we had convinced ourselves that He loved us and that He was in control.

[3:00] But all the time that wasn't true and now we know it. And it's exactly this type of experience, this type of thinking, that we're going to look at this morning.

[3:12] So if you haven't been here the last couple of weeks, we've been going through the book of Exodus, and we've been focusing on how God reveals Himself in the narrative of bringing the nation of Israel out of Egypt.

[3:26] And one of the major themes that you guys have seen and will continue to see is that God is sovereign, God is in control. But this week we look at what if it seems like He isn't?

[3:39] What if we are being faithful and life doesn't go the way that we think that it should? So that's what we'll talk about this morning. Let's pray and then we'll look at Exodus chapter 5.

[3:50] Father, thank You that regardless of how we feel, that You are always in control. Regardless of how it seems to us, You do not change.

[4:05] And we pray that You give us the grace and the strength to see that. Thank You for the ways that You have proved it to Your people over and over. And as we look at people who struggle with that truth in the midst of life's difficulties, Jesus, I pray You speak to us in the midst of our life's difficulties.

[4:23] We pray this in Your name. Amen. So like I said, you've been walking through the book of Exodus, and if you look at the sermon titles that Dave has been using, you'll notice an emphasis on God's self-revelation of who He is.

[4:39] And that's because Exodus, at its core, is a book about identity. Now what do I mean by that? At the beginning of the book of Exodus, you have the nation of Israel, and they're just sort of a collection of slaves.

[4:51] They have a history somewhat, but they don't have a home. They don't have any sort of corporate identity other than that they're slaves. And then as you go through the book, you see God giving the nation of Israel an identity, and He does that by rooting that identity in Himself.

[5:09] So God builds up the nation's identity by showing them who He is, and then saying, your identity comes from who I am, because I'm going to adopt you as my people, and I'm going to bring you out of slavery, out of Egypt.

[5:26] So this adoption by God, and this redemption from Egypt, is the formative event in the history of the nation of Israel, the history of the life of God's people.

[5:37] It's their foundation as a community. As you read through the rest of the Old Testament, you constantly hear the Israelites claiming two things about themselves.

[5:49] They always go back and see this, they always talk about God who brought them out of Egypt. And that's the formative event that they always look on when they understand who it means to be, what it means to be an Israelite.

[6:01] It means to be a person who was part of this nation, that was redeemed by God and was adopted by God. So this Exodus narrative is the demonstration of God's gracious action on behalf of the nation of Israel, and it's the bedrock of their identity as a people who are loved by God, not because of their great action, but because of God's redemption and adoption of them.

[6:25] But in our passage today, in Exodus chapter 5, that identity is very much in doubt. So if you were here the last two weeks, you've been looking at God's call of Moses to go back to Egypt and to be God's spokesperson to Pharaoh and request, that's probably putting it a little bit lightly, a demand from Pharaoh that Pharaoh release the nation of Israel to go out into the desert and to worship God.

[6:55] And not only does Pharaoh refuse Moses in this passage, but he actually increases the injustice done to the nation of Israel by making their work, which was already pretty difficult, that much harder.

[7:09] So he continues to subjugate God's people even further. And in this narrative, we're going to look at three main people, three main groups of people. So if you're looking with me, you'll see the three main groups of people.

[7:21] First of all, you have Pharaoh. And then you have the Hebrew foreman, the Hebrew people who are in charge of making sure the rest of the people did their work.

[7:32] And then there's Moses. And we're going to look at how each of these three have a challenge that's brought to them and each respond in a different way. Okay, so Pharaoh is asked to release this massive group of free laborers that he has.

[7:48] The Hebrew foreman are asked to follow someone who has made their lives more difficult. They're asked to follow Moses, and all Moses has done is made their lives more difficult.

[7:59] And then Moses is told that wherever these voices he's heard are coming from, they certainly aren't from God. And now let's be honest. At first blush, these three experiences that these different groups have, they don't seem to have a lot that we can relate to.

[8:13] But I want to argue that when we're placed in these types of situations all the time, that we're asked to do hard things. We face opposition even when we think that we're serving God.

[8:26] And often we respond the same way that Pharaoh did. Often we respond the same way that the Hebrew elders did. And often we respond the same way that Moses did. So let's just jump into things.

[8:38] How did Pharaoh respond? Well, just like Pharaoh did, we fight against God's place. Like Pharaoh, we fight against God's place. So look how Pharaoh responds to Moses when Moses comes to him.

[8:50] Look at chapter 5, verse 2. Pharaoh said, Who is the Lord that I should obey him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, and I will not let Israel go. I don't know the Lord.

[9:03] I don't know who this God is that you're talking about, and I'm not going to listen to him and let Israel go. Now, that's going to become an important question that Pharaoh asks in a few weeks when God begins to demonstrate who he is.

[9:15] But at this point, we need to understand what Pharaoh is saying. And in order to understand what Pharaoh is saying, we need to understand his worldview. So it wasn't that Pharaoh didn't know about gods in general or that he didn't believe in gods.

[9:27] He did, but he believed in gods in a much different way. See, Pharaoh would have been a polytheist. It means he believed in a lot of different gods. And each of those gods would have a different jurisdiction, a different area they were in charge of.

[9:39] So, for instance, there was Ra, who was the sun god and in charge of the sun coming at the proper time, and he was also in charge of all the other gods. He was sort of the king god, and he was responsible for the whole spectrum of the Egyptian gods.

[9:53] And then the people had a pagan relationship with these gods. So it meant that these gods that they served, they were capricious and they were fickle, and they would change their minds often.

[10:04] And if you wanted them to use their power to benefit you, then you had to do things for them. It was sort of a bartering system with these gods. So if Pharaoh wanted Egypt to remain prosperous, they were dependent on the Nile River flooding to create fertile land and receding when they needed to so it didn't flood the crops.

[10:22] And in order to continue to have the Nile River flood predictably, it would be important for Pharaoh to seek the favor of the river god, Hopi. Now, that doesn't sound a lot like our worldview.

[10:35] We don't say, well, we don't want rocks to fall down from the chief, so we'll make a deal with the god of the chief. We want the sound to, you know, remain how it's supposed to be, so we make a deal with the god of the sound.

[10:48] We don't do that. But here's the thing, is that people are people. Regardless of how far back in time you go, people are people. And our worldview might be radically different, but at the core, things are still the same.

[11:00] See, why did Pharaoh seek the favor of these gods? Why did he even go through this? It was because he wanted to benefit from them. He wanted to gain something from them.

[11:10] See, Pharaoh, just like everyone else in human history, wanted to succeed. He wanted success. And each of us does the same thing.

[11:22] We look at life, and we want to succeed in life. We want to have success. And we each define that differently. So maybe success is finding that one person who truly loves you as you are.

[11:36] Or maybe success is being well taken care of, or being comfortable, or being respected. And we never call these things gods. But we go to whatever we think can give us success, and we sacrifice to it.

[11:51] We barter with it. We say, I will give you what you want if you give me what I want. And it's not a, we don't call that a religious relationship, like maybe Pharaoh would.

[12:02] But at its core, it's very much the same. And in the middle of that, God comes to Pharaoh, and he says, no, don't, don't, don't do this.

[12:14] Instead, I want you to let these people go. And over and over again, we fight against God's place, his ability to do that. We say, I don't know you, Lord.

[12:25] I know how to work with and manipulate all these other things in my life, but I don't know how to work with you and manipulate you. I know that these other things can give me what I want, but I don't know you, Lord.

[12:41] I don't know the Lord. And I was thinking about this as I prepared this week, and like everyone else, I was thinking how this applies to everyone but me, right?

[12:51] I'm a pastor, so I know the Lord. And whenever God says anything, I say, yes, sir, right? That's how it works. And then I realized that in my life, I'm constantly saying who is Lord.

[13:05] I'm constantly saying, God, you don't have authority in this part of my life. I'm constantly pushing against God's place. I say, yes, Lord. I understand that you're in charge of the spiritual aspect of my life.

[13:18] And unlike a lot of other people, you have a lot to do with my vocational aspect as well, but where I find my security, where I find my happiness, my pursuit of pleasure, my raising up of my children, you don't belong there.

[13:31] I don't know the Lord in these areas of my life. But here's the thing. Pharaoh had an excuse. Look back in verse 2 again and Pharaoh's response.

[13:43] He says, who is the Lord? And you notice it's in that all caps. And if you remember, it was a couple weeks ago that Dave was talking about when God revealed his name.

[13:55] And any time in the Old Testament where we see Lord written in those small caps, we know that it is his covenant name, Yahweh, I am. The name that God gave to Moses is a sign of who he was and of his special relationship with Israel.

[14:14] It's showing who God is and his relationship with Israel. So Pharaoh didn't know this name, but we know it now.

[14:27] We know this relationship that we have with God. But do we act like we know it? Or do we run around like those seagulls in Finding Nemo, yelling, mine, mine, mine, mine, instead of his?

[14:41] Are we looking at how we can bring glory to the I am with every aspect of our life? Or are we just fighting against God's place in our life? So just like Pharaoh, we push against God's place.

[15:01] I want to apologize to our PowerPoint guy, having skipped a couple of slides that may show up. But we'll jump into the second point. That's Pharaoh.

[15:12] What about the Hebrew foreman? The Hebrew foreman are faced with something quite a bit different than Pharaoh was faced with. Pharaoh's response to Moses' request is simply that the people are lazy, so he's going to give them more work to do.

[15:25] And his response is to take a key component of their work away from them, of what they needed to, the materials that they needed to accomplish their work. So they were building bricks, and Pharaoh had fields that were dedicated to growing straw that was particularly designed and grown and cut to the right lengths to build these bricks.

[15:46] And now he's saying there isn't going to be any straw at all. So it's not just, and this is how I thought it was when I started looking. I thought Pharaoh was saying, you have to go to the field and cut your own straw.

[15:57] I was like, oh, that's inconvenient, but it's possible. But really what Pharaoh was saying is, the fields that are used to grow your straw, I'm going to go and grow something else. And now you have to go, and from all the fields of Egypt, you have to cut and collect all the, just the stubble left from the other plants, the things that it's too hard for my laborers to harvest for whatever they're doing.

[16:16] And so you have to go and collect it. It's sort of the equivalent of saying that you need to go and build a house solely from sticks that blew over in a windstorm. You have to go into the field and collect them.

[16:26] So not only do you have to go and collect it yourself, but it's not convenient. It's not something that is even designed to be put into these bricks. So it's not just a difficult request that Pharaoh was saying.

[16:37] It's an impossible request. A number of years ago, I was working for a framing company. Is anybody involved in the construction industry? A few of you. So you might know kind of what's going on.

[16:48] So our crew had a contract to build a number of houses in a new neighborhood. And like a lot of those spec houses, we're just building one of three houses over and over again. And like a lot of those places, we were on a really tight timeline.

[17:01] And the superintendent of the whole neighborhood there, he wanted to make sure we kept to our timeline. So he would constantly be ordering our lumber a day earlier than we needed it.

[17:12] And the way it works if you're working construction is usually you put up your first floor walls, and then they come and they bring your floor package, the beams and the plywood that you need to build the floor, and they lift it up on top so that it's right there and convenient.

[17:27] You just have to move it over and install it. But because all the lumber orders were coming early, we didn't have the walls up for him to land the lumber on. So we'd have to drop it in the mud in the front of the house that we were building.

[17:41] And so then when we were ready for the lumber, we'd have to go down and we'd have to lift it all up. So even though we were perfectly on time, we quickly fell behind because we had to do all this extra work.

[17:52] And I remember one day, the floor package for the second floor came before we even had the walls of the first floor done. So it was two steps ahead of us.

[18:04] And I remember looking over it at our crew chief who just took one look at the truck, and he dropped his tool belt, and he just went on the war path for the superintendent to tell him there is no way that my guys can keep up on this pace and you're making it more difficult for us.

[18:22] So obviously it's not the same extent of what's happening with the Hebrew slaves, but it's the same type of idea, and the reaction is the same. The slave drivers put this impossible burden on the Hebrew people, and the Hebrew foremen have to try and get the people to fulfill it, to go not only to build all these bricks, which I'm sure they were slaves, so it was probably a high enough quota to begin with.

[18:42] But not only do they have to do that, but then they had to go and get the straw for it, and when they didn't meet their quotas, they were beaten. So the foremen go to Pharaoh, and they say, in effect, why are you doing this?

[18:53] It's impossible. You're beating our people, but it's not our fault. It's your fault, because you're not giving us the stuff that we need. And Pharaoh essentially blame shifts, and he says, I had to do it.

[19:05] Moses came to me, and based on what he said, I think that you people are lazy, and so I'm just giving you more work to do so you're not so lazy anymore. And the response of the Hebrew foreman is really interesting.

[19:16] They don't argue with Pharaoh. Instead, they go to Moses. Look at verse 21. And they said, this is the Hebrew people, the Hebrew foreman, they went to Moses, and they said, may the Lord look upon you and judge you.

[19:32] You have made us a stench to Pharaoh and his officials, and have put a sword in their hands to kill us. So Pharaoh pushed against God's place, but that isn't what the Hebrew foreman do.

[19:45] Instead, what they do is they actually appeal to God. What are they saying? They're going to Moses and saying, God is going to judge you, Moses. You're doing it wrong, Moses.

[19:56] But are they right? Of course not. Moses is doing exactly what God told him to do. So why don't the foreman realize this? It's because their results don't match up with their expectations of something that God is involved in.

[20:13] The results that they see don't match up with their expectations of something that God's involved in. They've bought into a mantra that's very popular today, and it goes like this. It says, if God is for me, nothing bad can happen to me.

[20:26] When you see the logic in this, this is what happens when we believe that one, God wants to bless us. Two, you say you are acting for God. Three, your actions are just making things worse.

[20:39] So I put all those together, and therefore, you are crazy, and God will judge you for pretending to represent him. So like I said, this is a common view today. It's so common that theologians have come up with a name for it.

[20:53] They call it moralistic, therapeutic, deism. Moralistic meaning be good, you'll get good stuff. Therapeutic, it makes you feel better. And deism is a belief in a God, but a God who's far off and doesn't really interact with our daily lives.

[21:07] And I think that there's a little bit of MTD, moralistic, therapeutic deism, in every Christian. The late Elizabeth Elliot wrote a book called No Graven Image.

[21:20] Now, it was fiction, but it was based a lot on sort of autobiographical aspects of her life. And in the book, Elliot writes about a female missionary, a linguist, who moves to Ecuador to translate the Bible in the language of a particular jungle tribe.

[21:40] And it isn't until she arrives that she realizes the difficulty of this task. So to translate the Bible into that language, it requires people who have the knowledge of English, Spanish, and this particular jungle language that she is trying to translate the Bible into.

[21:58] But she discovers there aren't people like that. There's one guy. One guy that understands English, Spanish, and this jungle language. Probably the only guy in the world who understands all of them.

[22:10] So she moves out to the remote village where this guy lives and begins to work with him to learn the language, to write it down, because it's just an oral language. And this is before computers, and everything's written down by hand as she tries to understand the language enough to translate the Bible into it.

[22:27] And she begins her very first attempts of translating different portions of scripture into this language so that people can read it in their native language.

[22:39] But towards the end of the book, things start to go bad. The man gets sick. So the missionary gives him penicillin, but it turns out that he's allergic to penicillin, so he convulses and he dies.

[22:52] And the whole tribe turns against her because they think that she has killed him. And so they abuse her and they break into her hut and they take all of her language cards, basically her whole life's work, and they throw them into the river and they're destroyed and they reject everything that she's taught them about God.

[23:13] And everything that she's worked for, everything she's dedicated to her life for, has been destroyed. And the reader is reading this and they're getting more and more excited to see how in the last few chapters God's going to turn this around and make it a great miracle.

[23:28] How is God going to reverse this terrible tragedy? And then you get to the last page and this is what it says. This is the missionary talking. Now in the clear light of day, I see that God, if he were merely my accomplice, he has betrayed me.

[23:44] If on the other hand, he was God, he had freed me. I find that I can no longer arrange my life in an orderly succession of projects with realizable goals and demonstrable effects.

[23:55] I cannot designate this activity as useful and that one as useless. For often, the categories are reversed and even more often, I am at a loss to apply either label for work in the end as well as the labeling is God's.

[24:12] That's it. That's the big finish. No resolution. The missionary's life's work has still been destroyed. The tribe still doesn't know Jesus. God doesn't, in the last chapter, work a miracle and pull it together in some glorious finish.

[24:29] Now this book is quite old now. But when it came out, there was a big reaction from Christians. There were people saying things like, I could never believe in a God like the one in that book.

[24:41] God would never, ever do anything like that to a dedicated missionary. But of course, like I said, this book was somewhat autobiographical of Elizabeth Elliot's own life. See, these people responding to the book, they were responding a lot like the Hebrew foreman were, weren't they?

[24:58] Moses, you can't be speaking for God because God would never make this happen. We'd never be punished for obeying God. Elizabeth, I can't believe in the God that you wrote about in your novel.

[25:09] I can't believe in a God who would do anything like the God did in your book. Well, remember the title of the book? No Graven Image? That was on purpose. Talking about the book and the title, Elizabeth Elliot said this, I realized as these people were writing these letters saying I couldn't believe in a God who would let that kind of thing happen, they were not worshipping the real God.

[25:33] They had created an image of him. They were worshipping an idol. And the idol was a God who had to work things out according to my plans. This was not a God I served.

[25:44] This was a God who was essentially my accomplice. Here's the thing. If God is God, we are not going to understand everything he is doing.

[25:59] If we only worship based on results, then we aren't worshipping the God of the Bible. We're worshipping the God of moralistic therapeutic deism. The God of the Bible is not our accomplice who helps us do things.

[26:13] He is God. The Hebrew foreman and us, if we're honest, we push against God when things don't go as we think that they should. But he's God and if we confess that, we confess that he sees things much different than us.

[26:31] So Pharaoh pushes against God's place. The Hebrew foremen push against God's nature, who God is. And Moses, Moses is a little bit different.

[26:43] Like Moses, we fight against God's plan. So Moses' complaint to God is a little bit similar to the Hebrew foreman. They look at their increased suffering and they doubt whether Moses is actually talking to God.

[26:58] But Moses looks at what has happened and he doubts that God actually knows what he's doing. So Moses knows he's hearing from God, but now he's having serious doubts that God has any idea what he's doing.

[27:09] So look at the exasperation and the sarcasm of Moses in verse 22 and 23. Moses returned to the Lord and said, Oh Lord, why have you brought trouble upon this people?

[27:20] Is this why you sent me? Ever since I went to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has brought trouble upon this people and you have not rescued your people at all. So unlike the Hebrew foreman, Moses knew that it was God who was active.

[27:36] He just doubted that God had any idea what he was doing. Here's the problem. God has proven to Moses that he's in control. He's proven his power.

[27:48] He's given Moses his name, that I am name. And throughout the whole formation of the Hebrew people, God has proved his plan. He proved his plan with Abraham.

[28:00] You remember Abraham? Abraham was old and his wife was old and barren and had no children. And God said, I'm going to give you a child, a son. And not only that, I'm going to make that son into a great nation.

[28:12] And through him, I'm going to bless the whole world. And they laughed. And lo and behold, a little while later, they had a little baby that they named Laughter, Isaac.

[28:23] And then later, God said, take Isaac and give him to me. So Abraham went up the mountain and he prepared to sacrifice Isaac, who was not only his only son, but also the only conceivable way that God would actually fulfill this promise that he made to him.

[28:39] the only plausible way that God could fulfill the word that he had spoken. And then God provided a substitute sacrifice. And God proved his plan to Joseph.

[28:50] Remember Joseph? God showed Joseph a vision of his family bowing down to him. And Joseph, being a little bit of an immature brat, blabbed that around and made his brothers hate him.

[29:02] So he got thrown into a hole and then sold into slavery in Egypt. And then he was put into prison and then finally thrown into the prison of Pharaoh and then brought out to meet Pharaoh.

[29:19] And through those misadventures and what appeared to be a series of unfortunate events, Joseph was transformed in his character. His brothers were repentant for their hate for him.

[29:30] His father learned an important lesson about playing favorites. And thousands of people, including Joseph's own family, were saved from death by starvation because of Joseph's interpretation of Pharaoh's dreams and his organizational skill.

[29:48] And Moses has seen God's patience and his plan and his interaction in the wilderness. So what I'm saying is when we are saying that Moses shouldn't be questioning God, we aren't saying that he should just shut off his mind and blindly trust.

[30:03] We are saying that he should actually start thinking and realize that trust is the most intelligent thing to do because over and over again God has proved that he is in control, that he has not changed, and that he does care about his people and he will fulfill his word.

[30:22] And that's what we need to do. When we find ourselves in a situation where we're trying to be faithful to what God has called us to and things are not working out as we think they should, we need to think more.

[30:35] We need to look at what God has called us to and how he has proved faithful to his people over the centuries. As we minister to others, we are going to face times when we want to challenge God's place.

[30:49] We're going to look at calls to sacrifice, to give of our time, of our energy, and we're going to want to shout, mine! Instead of recognizing that all those things are rightfully God's.

[31:02] We're going to face opposition and have people turn against us and we're going to fight against God's nature and say, well, if God, you're not how I think you should be.

[31:14] Or people that we love and have invested in are going to move and we're going to wonder if God even has a plan. And in all these circumstances, we're going to have to think.

[31:28] Just like God told Moses to think of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph. But when we think, I want us all to think not only of how God worked in those people's lives, but to think particularly of Christ.

[31:43] You see, Moses had God's faithfulness to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Joseph to look to, but we have so much more. We have Jesus. We have Jesus who knelt in the Garden of Gethsemane and he prayed, not my will, but yours be done.

[31:56] Jesus, who as Philippians says, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant and became obedient to death, even death on the cross.

[32:09] You see, Jesus didn't fight against God's place. Like Pharaoh, we fight against God's place, but Jesus was in God's place. Jesus was God, and yet he still said, not my will, but yours be done.

[32:22] We have Jesus who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. So we can consider him who endured such opposition from sinners so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.

[32:38] That's Hebrews. So like the Hebrew foreman, we are going to fight against God's nature, but Jesus didn't. Instead, Jesus demonstrated God's nature. And we look to Jesus who is mocked for not saving himself when he hung on the cross.

[32:56] He didn't fight God's plan, even though he wanted to. Even though in Gethsemane, he asked if there was another way. He wanted to back out of the plan, but he didn't. He put his trust in his Father.

[33:07] So like Moses, we fight against God's plan, but Jesus fulfilled it. Now, we talk a lot about the gospel, and when we talk about the gospel, we talk about how through the gospel we've been united with Christ.

[33:20] We've been brought to Christ. What that means is that Christ took upon himself all of our sin, all of our shame, and everything that separates us from God, and he gave us everything that belongs to him, his identity, his righteousness, his acceptance by God, and now everything that happens to Christ, like his resurrection, happens to us.

[33:41] But that unity with Christ also means something else. It means that we're united to him in death, as much as we are united to him with his life. This is what we symbolize in baptism, right?

[33:53] We're baptized, we go under the water in unity with Christ and his death, and we're raised again to new life in him. But it also means something else. It means that we give up our rights to ourselves. And we can do this because God has not only proved his power, he's proved his love to us through the cross.

[34:12] And ultimately, God is not our accomplice. He is our God. And if we remember that, we will be free. If we're truly going to serve Jesus, we are going to face trouble, we're going to face difficulty, we're going to face times when it seems like God has no idea what he's doing.

[34:29] But God never promised us ease. In fact, he promised us trouble. He didn't promise to always deliver us from it, but he did promise to bring us through it. And he has proved, he has proved to his people over and over again and through the cross, he has proved that he has both the power and the love to bring to us what he has promised.

[34:54] Let's pray. Let's pray.