Divine Portrait: Pt. 2 | Pastor Jake Sweetman

 Okay, so we began a long series last Sunday called Divine Portrait.

Everybody say Divine Portrait.

Yeah, and the goal of this series is very simple.

We want to get to know God more deeply, specifically by directing our attention to the cross of Jesus.

That's our goal.

We want to get to know the Lord more deeply by directing our attention to the cross of Jesus.

 And it's not just about knowledge, but as we grow in the knowledge of the Lord, we will simultaneously grow in our passion to worship him and in our desire to become more like him.

The cross of Jesus is the most powerful place for this kind of life transformation to happen because the cross is where God has most fully revealed himself to humanity.

 It's kind of like how people are most accurately known through their actions, right?

Like people can tell you what they're like, but ultimately how they act is going to reveal who they are.

And it's the same with God.

God has revealed himself to humanity through his most ultimate action, and that action is the cross.

And that's why Jesus said in John chapter 12, we looked at this verse last week.

It's an amazing statement from Jesus where he says, when I am lifted up, when I'm raised up on the cross...

 I will draw all people to myself.

What Jesus is saying is that through his exaltation, his ironic exaltation, his ironic enthronement and triumph on the crucifix, the nations are actually going to come to the revelation, wow, that's God.

The Lord of the world is God on the cross.

The nations will stream and see that Yahweh is the one true God who rules the entire cosmos.

That's what we see through the cross.

 Now God's revelation of himself through the cross does not just come out of nowhere in the biblical story.

It has a lot of Old Testament background.

And so to begin this series, we're looking at a handful of biblical texts in the Old Testament because they're like the backdrop that causes the cross to like pop off the canvas.

Like we see the cross more clearly when we see the Old Testament background.

 And so it's valuable for us to look at them.

And the first text that we started with last week and that we'll finish up with today is in the book of Exodus, chapters 32 to 34.

You can turn there now specifically to Exodus chapter 34.

And these three chapters in the book of Exodus, they tell the story of Israel making a huge error of worshiping this idol, this statue, this golden calf.

 at the base of the mountain, while Moses is on the top of the mountain, and he's receiving the tablets of stone with the Ten Commandments from the Lord, and he's receiving the blueprints for the tabernacle, for God's house.

Because this is supposed to be the last time Moses goes up the mountain.

God's intention is he wants to come down the mountain and dwell in the midst of his people, but all the while Israel are down there sinning.

And so we're introduced to this tension, this stark reality of human sin,

 and God's holiness, and how God's holiness requires Him to respond to our sin.

As the story reveals, God is both merciful and just.

And sin cries out for both.

The sinner cries out for mercy.

The victim of sin cries out for justice.

And so the question is, how will God ultimately deal with the sin of humanity?

How will God ultimately deal with your sin and with my sin?

 Will he judge us at the end of the age as he justly could?

Or will he show us mercy?

That's the tension that Moses and Israel are living in as we come back to this story.

Just to briefly summarize a couple of things from last week.

The story of Exodus is not just a story of liberation.

Everybody knows the book of Exodus by God's liberation of Israel out of Egypt.

But it's not just a story about liberation.

And it's not just a story about law, about the Ten Commandments, about the covenant.

 Ultimately, the story of Exodus is a story of God's presence coming close to his people.

And with the nearness of God's presence, the redemption of Israel back into humanity's original purpose to know God and to make him known.

And of course, that's a really huge deal in the larger biblical story, right?

Because you reach back to the beginning in the book of Genesis, and Adam and Eve, as a result of their sin, are removed from the presence of God.

They're removed from their purpose of knowing God and making him known.

And now...

 here in Exodus the whole thing it's like new creation is happening a new covenant partnership is taking place because the presence of God is going to come into the midst of Israel so that they can shine God's presence shine God's glory to the nations of the world God is saying hey I'm done with distance I want to come close and that was the point of last Sunday's message God is a God who wants to come close

 And everything in the story of Exodus is going, I guess you could say, reasonably well with a few bumps along the way because Israel is a grumbly bunch.

But then in Exodus 32, things go horribly wrong.

Prior to this, Israel had already agreed to the covenant.

The covenant basically stipulates on God's end, I'm going to bless you like crazy.

I'm going to take really good care of you.

And on Israel's end, it's, we're going to be faithful to you.

We're going to serve and worship you, Yahweh, exclusively.

 They've agreed to that covenant already.

And now Moses is up on the mountain.

He's receiving the blueprints for the tabernacle.

God's like, cool, it's a done deal.

I'm coming close.

And meanwhile, Israel is building a statue out of gold at the base of the mountain, bowing down to it and worshiping it.

In fact, the scripture says that they're indulging in revelry, which is Bible code for they were having a giant sexy party.

Things were getting out of hand, friends and family, at the base of the mountain.

It's wild.

They're breaking the covenant that they just agreed to.

 The first two commandments, worship no other gods, make no idols.

Well, those are out the window, and the whole thing's barely gotten started.

One scholar said it's akin to committing adultery on the night of your wedding.

And so naturally, God is angry.

Moses goes down the mountain, and essentially the rest of the story in these three chapters demonstrates and explores the tension between God's righteous judgment and God's mercy.

 Because Israel suffers the punishment for their sin.

And God agrees to renew the covenant with them.

He still has them build the tabernacle.

He still comes to dwell in their midst.

That's how the story of Exodus ends.

So there's judgment, but there's also tremendous mercy.

And so the tension is that the reality of Israel's sin somehow, get this, your sin, my sin, somehow elicits both God's wrath and his mercy.

 And towards the end of the story, once God has decided that he's going to renew the covenant, he calls Moses up the mountain again.

And it's there that he describes his character to him.

God gives Moses his resume.

He says, this is who I am.

 And it's the same beauty and the same tension that's in the story.

Here in this character description, we see God's mercy, but we also see that God is just.

And so today, we're going to walk through this resume of God's, this description of his character, and we're going to look at each quality, and we're going to study them.

And that's worth our while because this is God saying, here's what I'm like.

 And if this is what God is like, then we should expect that these same qualities will carry over to the cross.

That the God we meet in Exodus 34 should be the God we meet at the cross because God does not change.

And so he says, this is what I'm like here.

And this is the God that we should expect to meet at the cross.

Exodus 34 beginning in verse 5.

Moses has climbed the mountain.

Then the Lord came down in the cloud.

 And he stood there with Moses and he proclaimed his name, the Lord.

That is literally Yahweh, the personal name of God.

And he passed in front of Moses proclaiming, Yahweh, Yahweh.

And the reason God says his name twice there is because in ancient cultures, names and character, names and reputation go hand in hand.

So God wants Moses to know, hey, this is the character of Yahweh, of me.

The compassionate and gracious God.

Slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.

 That verse right there is quoted over 20 times throughout the rest of the Bible.

Because whenever the biblical writers want to say what God is like, they can do nothing better than to reach back at God's own words.

So you're going to see these words come up a lot in the scriptures.

God says, that's what I'm like.

Now here's how that plays out in my interaction with sinful humanity.

Verse 7.

Sounds amazing.

 Yet, he does not leave the guilty unpunished.

He punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and the fourth generation.

I promised you I explained that last week, and today I'll give you some clarity on what God is saying in that verse there.

And then Moses' response in verse 8.

Moses bowed to the ground at once, and he worshiped.

 Okay, there's going to be a lot coming at you in the next 30 minutes, okay?

Because we're going to unpack all these words.

But this is God we're talking about here, so you don't have permission to get bored.

And if you do, that's on you.

So God begins and he says, I'm compassionate.

This word has to do with God's tender care for his people.

 And the primary way that God shows his compassion throughout the scriptures is in his response to the cry of his people.

That God has ears, so to speak, that are especially tuned to the cry of someone in pain and in hardship.

 God listens, and the reason God listens is because he cares, he has compassion.

And we actually see an example of this right at the beginning of the story of Exodus, where God first introduces himself to Moses, and he wants Moses to go back to Egypt to set Israel free.

Why?

Because their cry has risen up to God.

God is concerned about their suffering, and that's God's compassion.

He is concerned because he hears the cry of his people.

Now, the word in Hebrew for compassion is actually linked to the word for womb, like the womb of a mother.

 So God has tender care for his people like a mother has tender care for her children.

Like a mother has ears for the cry of her kids, so God has ears for the cry of his kids.

It's like if you've ever been in a playground and a little kid falls down and gets hurt and they cry.

Well, it's like everybody looks, but the mother immediately runs to the child because a mother knows what the sound of their child's cry is like.

God is compassionate like that.

He hears when you cry.

 And even if He does not immediately change your situation, or even, hear me, if He does not ever change your situation, it does not change that He is compassionate towards you.

In fact, the Bible says that when there is no change taking place in your situation, God is still active.

The Scripture says that in those circumstances, He's actually storing up your tears, the psalmist says.

So He hears your cry.

He stores up your tears when you are in pain.

So even if, for reasons that are not obvious to us, He doesn't act, He is still moved.

 And in the end, He will act, and His compassion will triumph over your pain as He makes all things new.

That's why the Bible ends in the book of Revelation by saying that God will wipe away every tear from your eyes.

That's not just a nice sentiment to describe the end of the age.

That's God's compassion, God's tender care, triumphing over our pain.

You see, He stores your tears in the meantime, but He will wipe them away at the end.

Because God is a compassionate God.

 And you might ask, well, what about the pain that I've caused myself?

Is God still compassionate towards me when my suffering is self-inflicted?

It turns out that He is.

Even when the cry of His people is as a result of their own sin, their own rebellion, God hears.

 In the Exodus story, it's easy to see why God is compassionate towards Israel.

They are oppressed by an external power.

We would all hopefully feel compassionate in that kind of circumstance.

But if you fast forward in Israel's history after generations of repeatedly breaking their covenant with God, worshiping idols, committing all kinds of grotesque sin, abandoning their relationship with the Lord, Israel...

 winds up experiencing the consequences of their sin.

They're attacked.

They're exiled.

Some of them are destroyed by the very nations that they were so concerned with trying to be like.

 And in that context, in that destruction, in that helplessness, the prophet Isaiah speaks in Isaiah 49 verse 13.

He says, In other words, all of creation pay attention to this fact that the Lord has comforted his people.

 Isaiah is speaking before this has even taken place, by the way, but he's so confident in the compassion of the Lord that he can speak of something future in past tense, that the Lord has comforted his people and will have compassion on them in their suffering.

Yet Jerusalem says, the Lord has deserted us.

The Lord has forgotten us.

Never can a mother forget her nursing child.

Can she feel no love in the Hebrew, literally compassion for the child she's born?

But even if that were possible, I would not forget you.

 You see, I have written your name on the palms of my hands.

Always in my mind is a picture of Jerusalem's walls and ruins.

That is so stunning that God says to a people oppressed as a result of their own sin, their own rebellion, I still hear your cry.

And the picture of pain that you can't get out of your mind, I can't get out of my mind either.

Your walls of ruins are constantly on my mind.

Because God is compassionate.

 And so you must understand today that when you cry out to God, He hears.

Whatever ruins you may be facing, even if they're the result of your own sin, God hears the cry of the person who genuinely calls out to Him and wants to change.

And God will meet you there.

It's not because He condones your sin.

Don't mistake God's arrival for God's approval.

 Some of you mistake every time you feel the Holy Spirit tingles with God being pleased with you.

It's not automatic.

Just because God shows up doesn't mean he condones everything you got going on in your life.

No, he meets you in that place of suffering, hardship, because he cares enough to meet you there and to bring you up from out of there, to rescue you, because God is compassionate.

Don't you want to draw near to a God like that?

God goes on, he says, I'm also gracious.

 That word gracious is much the same idea as grace in the New Testament.

It's about God's generosity.

God goes beyond what is expected.

He gives beyond what is deserved.

And implicit in this word gracious is the idea that God actually takes delight in being generous in this kind of way.

God is not a begrudging giver.

He loves to show people generosity that they don't deserve.

That's fundamentally part of God's character.

 I found that God does not keep a very tidy spreadsheet when it comes to allocating how much goodness each of us deserves.

God is sovereignly out of balance when it comes to showering His goodness upon people.

He doesn't give just enough.

He gives abundantly to those who don't deserve it.

We see an example of that right here in Exodus chapters 32 to 34.

Israel had been worshiping a statue when they just vowed to only serve God.

 And God does not destroy them.

In fact, He says, I'm still going to take you in the promised land of milk and honey.

And I'm going with you, even though you hate me.

So not only does God withhold the punishment they do deserve, He gives them the blessing that they don't deserve.

Because God is gracious.

 It's all throughout the Bible.

God doesn't give according to what we deserve, not even according to what we need.

God gives according to His grace.

You could say it like this, that God is always giving out of surplus because surplus is all that God has.

Consider an example from the beginning of the Bible that God puts Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden along with, the Bible says, all kinds, not just a few, but all kinds of trees that were good for food and pleasing to the sight.

 I read that, I go, really God?

I'd expect you to be a little bit more utilitarian than that.

Maybe a bit more economical when it comes to the distribution of your resources.

You really need to give Adam and Eve trees that are good for food and that are pretty?

Like if it were up to me, I would just make them productive.

But God's like, no, they've got to look good too.

God doesn't give according to need.

 He's not interested in just satisfying hunger.

He wants beauty as well.

He's not Yahweh, Yahweh, compassionate and bare minimum meeting God.

He's gracious God.

He makes giraffes for crying out loud.

Already had a horse.

Went over and above with a zebra.

Now he's like, I'm going to make a spotted one and make its neck five times as long.

Why?

Why?

 Yahweh, Yahweh, compassionate and gracious, generous God.

That's the God that we worship.

And His generosity is not frivolous.

There's nothing frivolous about your joy.

He gives all things, the Apostle Paul says to Timothy, his protege, all things richly for us to enjoy.

And not just your joy, but His glory.

Because God's intention was to hang out in the garden.

 So evidently God thinks, if I'm going to be there, it might as well be pretty.

He expects them to steward this creation for His glory to actually dwell within.

And He expects the same of you and I as well.

Through all that we create and produce, that it would be a habitation of His holy presence.

The other purpose of God's gracious generosity that the Bible talks about is that He wants to draw people into relationship with Himself.

 So he's generous because he wants you to see that he's the source.

He wants you to know him.

Acts 17, verse 25, the Apostle Paul says to some unbelievers in the ancient city of Athens, he says that this God, Yahweh, is not served by human hands as if he needed anything.

Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and just everything else.

 From one man he made all the nations.

They should inhabit the whole earth.

He gave you the world.

And he marked out their appointed times.

He gave you life and history and the boundaries of their lands.

He gave them property.

And God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him.

Though he is not far from any one of us.

So God is gracious and he gives more than is deserved even to people who don't know to give him the credit.

Who don't even know he exists.

 So that somehow, through their experience of His generosity, they would feel their way towards Him.

God's not like a boyfriend who pulls out all the stops during the dating stage, but then takes you to Taco Bell after you say, I do.

God's not like that.

Because the generosity doesn't even, it doesn't stop once, like, oh, that's where the generosity comes from.

Okay, cool, now I bait you, now I've got to switch you.

No, God doesn't do that.

God stays generous even after you enter into a relationship with Him.

He doesn't do Taco Bell.

 No, he continues to be outlandishly generous.

Now, if you want to talk about it, you can, but don't take your date there, guys.

God continues to be ridiculously generous.

From the moment of your salvation...

 Onward.

I find people often mistakenly think about salvation as just like the removal of all the icky stuff in your heart.

It's like God gets you back to square one, he cleans your slate, and now it's up to you not to screw it up again.

 But the grace of God is actually quite a bit better than that.

Look at Ephesians 2, verses 6 and 7, that God raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus.

So we're reigning with Jesus in order that in the coming ages, that's both the now and the not yet, God might show the incomparable riches of His grace expressed in His kindness to us in Christ Jesus.

That word incomparable is the Greek word hupabala.

It's where we get hyperbole.

It literally means excess.

 It means to throw beyond the mark.

That's the kind of riches of grace that God has shown to you and I. So we've fallen short of God's righteousness.

 But God does more than just bring us back to square one.

God does more than just get us out of the red on the ledger of our sin.

He gets us into the black on the ledger of our righteousness and credits all the righteousness of Christ to us.

That's the incomparable riches of His grace.

Hey, come back to the story of Exodus and that's exactly the picture, isn't it?

It's not just a story about liberation.

God didn't just get Israel out of Egypt and be like, cool, up to you guys now.

Don't screw it up.

No, God's like, I have a land for you.

 I'm going to bless you.

And I'm going to hang out with you.

I'm going to be your God.

You're going to be my people.

I want to bless you in such a way that makes you a light to the world that would cause the nations of the world to go, what God do they worship?

We want to know that God.

This is part of what we were trying to get across to you last month with that series on God's will, good works.

 That God has a purpose for you to walk in.

That he's called you to.

I'm trying to get you to stop thinking about your salvation as merely the removal of anything keeping you out of heaven.

And to start thinking about your salvation as the overflowing cup you've been given so that you can start bringing heaven to earth.

Of course you don't deserve that.

 Of course you're not qualified for that.

That's the point.

Yahweh, Yahweh, compassionate and gracious God.

Don't you want to draw near to a God like me?

God goes on.

He says, I'm slow to anger.

I want to come back to that one at the end.

He says, I'm abounding in love.

This love that God is talking about is loyal love, as the Hebrew word has said.

 It's not just about emotion.

It's about covenant keeping.

Which means that God's love is not based upon the worthiness of the recipient.

God's love for you is not based upon some prior qualification.

Rather, God's love is an expression of his unchanging character and his commitment to people.

Listen to what God says to Israel in the book of Deuteronomy chapter 7.

This is God telling him, here's why I chose you.

This ought to humble you.

Put yourself in the shoes of Israel here.

 The Lord did not set his affection on you and choose you because you are more numerous than other peoples.

In fact, you were kind of lame.

I surveyed the world and you were the fewest of all peoples.

 But it was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath that he swore to your ancestors that he brought you out with a mighty hand.

He redeemed you from slavery.

So God wasn't drawn to Israel because they were impressive.

God's not like us.

God's not like a Hollywood agent.

He doesn't beeline for the person in the room who's going to do the most for his reputation.

He doesn't give priority to people who will benefit him the most.

 No, he actually seems to pick the people who add nothing to his reputation.

He chooses an enslaved people of meager population, no wealth, no notoriety, simply because he loved them.

That love, by the way, is native to God.

He never learned it.

He's not figuring it out as he goes.

He's not gradually improving along the way.

 Because this loyal love is the love that he shares amongst himself as Trinity, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

As long as there has been God, and there has always been God, there has always been love.

Because God is this loyal, covenant-keeping love.

And that same love that he shares with himself is the love that he has poured out upon the disciple of Jesus.

God loves you with the same love that he knows within his own being.

 And so when King David reflected upon this loyal love of God, the best way that he could think to describe it was just to say that God has said God's love is forever.

 That's how loyal God's love is.

And then he put it in a song called Psalm 136.

And he repeated the same line over and over again.

Bring up the first five verses of Psalm 136.

Give thanks to the Lord for he's good.

His love endures forever.

Give thanks to the God of gods.

His love endures forever.

Give thanks to the Lord of lords.

His love endures forever.

To him who alone does great wonders.

His love endures forever.

And on it goes for 26 verses.

 Just like that, it's like someone scratched the record of Psalm 136 and it can't move past this idea that the loyal love of God is forever.

And the only way you could possibly measure God's love is if you had forever to do it.

That's what God's love is like.

That's how immeasurable it is.

And of course, the thing that makes His love so unfathomable is that He loves when we don't.

 Ephesians 2, 4, and 5, but because of his great love for us.

God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ.

Even when we were dead in transgressions, when we were like the walking dead because we rebelled against God, God made us alive through Christ.

The only reason you're alive and not dead is because of God's great love.

 The only reason you're free instead of a slave to sin is because of God's great love.

The only reason you have a future instead of being defined by your past is because of God's great love.

And you can count on all that being true because not only is God abounding in love, he's also abounding in faithfulness.

The Hebrew word for faithfulness here is the word emet.

And it's where we get the word that we say at the end of our prayers, which is amen.

 Amen is just an untranslated word that means that's truth.

And when amet is used to describe people, it's talking about trustworthiness.

It's not just...

 that these people tell the truth, it's that they themselves are steady.

They are rock solid and reliable.

So when God says He's abounding in faithfulness, He means you can count on every single word I say and every single promise I make.

No matter how impossible the circumstances look, if God has promised something, then you can count on it.

If you couldn't count on it, then God wouldn't be faithful.

But God is faithful, and because God does not change, that means that you can count on every single promise that He makes.

 The prophet Isaiah, when he reflected upon this quality of God, he wrote in Isaiah 55 that as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return to the sky without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater.

In other words, as reliable as the rain and the harvest is, so is my word that goes out from my mouth.

Right.

 It will not return to me empty.

It will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

Now that was about believing God's promise in the midst of suffering, of turmoil, of a situation that looked impossible, of Israel's exile.

Yet Isaiah believed that God's promise is more powerful than the enemy's opposition.

And it has to be.

Because if it's not, then God is not faithful.

 When Paul reflected upon this quality of God, he wrote in Romans 11, 29, for God's gifts and his call are irrevocable.

Don't you want to draw near to a God like that?

So how should we respond to the faithfulness of God?

Well, it's really beautifully simple.

We believe.

Consider the example of Abraham in Genesis 15, verses 5 and 6.

God took him out of his tent

 He said, Abraham, look up at the sky and count the stars if you even can.

And then God said to Abraham, this is the promise, so shall your offspring be.

Abraham doesn't even have a kid.

And he's old.

And his wife's old.

And yet God says, I'm going to give you a lineage that's like as numerous as the stars in the sky.

And here's Abraham's response.

He believed the Lord and God credited it to him as righteousness.

 God says, Abraham, you're right with me because you believe my character.

Literally, Abraham considered God faithful.

He believed that God is who he says he is and does what he says he will do.

And that's faith, by the way.

Faith is not a blind step on the basis of wishful thinking.

Faith is not stupidity.

Faith is a response to the rock-solid faithfulness of God.

 And a lack of faith was exactly Israel's failure when they refused to go into the promised land.

God says, I'm going to take you in there.

Milk and honey the whole bit.

I'm going to bless you.

And Israel's like, yeah, but giants.

We're not going.

God made a promise.

They had no faith.

Because they did not know God, His character of being faithful.

They disbelieved God every step of the way.

Because they let their circumstance dictate what was possible.

 instead of letting God's faithfulness dictate what's possible.

And in their disbelief, they call the God who is truth a liar.

I love Paul's reflections on Abraham's faith in Romans 4.20.

Abraham did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith, and he gave glory to God.

Here's what that looked like.

Being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised.

 That's what faith is.

Faith is being fully persuaded that God has power to perform his promises.

So when God tells Israel he's abounding in faithfulness, all he's looking for is trust.

Not gymnastics.

Not an impressive resume.

Not for you to bring anything to the table.

All he's looking for is trust.

And it's the same in the New Testament as it is in the Old.

 This is God, Yahweh, Yahweh, compassionate and gracious, abounding in love and faithfulness.

But of course, there is one additional quality that we have to return to that holds a key to knowing him.

And that brings us back to the tension in the biblical narrative that will not be resolved until we get to the cross.

God says, I'm the God who is slow to anger.

 Now, of course, that phrase is both inviting and also a bit clarifying.

On the inviting side, we might emphasize the slowness of God's anger.

This obviously carries a sense of benevolence, conveys that God is patient, God is not hot-tempered, He doesn't fly off the handle.

The actualization of His anger is never disproportionate to the reason for being angry.

 John Stott, great Bible scholar, wrote this about God's anger.

He says, human anger is usually arbitrary and uninhibited.

That sounds quite a bit like my anger.

Divine anger is always principled and controlled.

The idea here is that God gives people lots of time to change.

When they're acting in evil ways that do harm to themselves and harm to others,

 And the reason God is slow to anger is because He wants people to turn to Him and to be saved.

If one of the reasons that you are resistant to coming to God is because you think that you are getting along just fine in your sin and that God's going to leave you alone, please understand today that God is patient, but He is not inexhaustible in His patience.

 And eventually sin has to be judged.

So you must turn from your sins.

And you must cry out to Him for mercy.

And He will be compassionate to you.

And so on the other side of the coin, we might emphasize that although it's slow, God does in fact get angry.

And that's consistent with His character.

For if God did not get angry over sin, then He could not be the loving God that He claims to be.

He loves...

 And therefore he gets angry over sin.

He disciplines those that he loves to shake them free from the stupor of the sin that enslaves and destroys.

God loves and therefore he gets angry and punishes people for their sin because that is a manifestation of his justice.

And if God is not just, then God cannot be loved.

 This reality of God's anger brings us back to the tension of God's mercy and God's justice.

Why is God slow to anger?

Why can't he just be infinitely patient and never get angry?

We'd certainly like that.

My six-year-old daughter, Mabel, would love that.

Anytime she misbehaves, if I even speak slightly stern to her, she instantly melts.

Why are you talking so mean to me?

She's living in the tension of mercy and justice.

 of holiness and love, of wrath and forgiveness.

And that's the tension that these three chapters explore.

The sinner may cry out for mercy, but the victim of sin is often desperate for justice.

 And that's the tension that the cross is going to resolve for us.

But until then, the tension carries on.

God says, here's what it looks like.

I'm the God who's maintaining love to thousands.

Verse 7.

That is thousands of generations.

And forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin.

Well, so far, that sounds exactly like what we'd expect based upon verse 6.

That lines up pretty well with the God who was compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.

We'd expect him to be like that.

Forgiving.

Really loving.

One key is to note here that the term forgiving...

 It doesn't mean that God pretends like wickedness, rebellion, and sin haven't happened.

It's not that he turns a blind eye to our wickedness.

In fact, that Hebrew word is nesah.

It literally means to bear, to carry.

God is saying, because I love you, I bear with your sin.

In fact, I carry the burden of your sin upon myself.

The burden's gotta go somewhere.

God says, it might as well be me who takes it

 What wonderful foreshadowing.

But even before you get to the cross, God has to deal appropriately with sin.

Some punishment does take place throughout the Old Testament.

Otherwise, God's people would devolve into injustice and the utter chaos out of which they came in Egypt.

So God goes on in verse 70, He says, "...and He does not leave the guilty unpunished."

 He punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and the fourth generation.

Now, there's a couple of ideas that are at play here.

First, God punishes sin in every single generation that it persists.

He holds each generation morally responsible for their own sin.

This is not the idea of God actively punishing kids for the mistakes of their parents.

This is the idea that you can't keep up the same sinful pattern as your dad...

 and then have the excuse of, well, I learned this from my father, so I'm not responsible.

No, God says, you are responsible.

What's more than that, I think it'd be right to see in that statement there, that there is some consequence to sin that does not end with us.

It carries over to the next generation.

Israel experiences that multiple times, even here in Exodus, right?

They don't go into the promised land.

They disbelieve God.

So God says, you're going to wander the wilderness for 40 years.

They have kids born in the wilderness.

 Because of the sin of their parents.

Generations later, they're violating God's covenant with them left and right.

They get sent into exile in Babylon.

They have kids born in Babylon because their parents couldn't get their act together.

Sometimes the consequences of your sin go beyond your life.

And that ought to be pretty good motivation.

In fact, some of you have experienced that downstream from your parents.

 And that ought to make us think carefully about how we live.

Because again, if sin is not punished, then God is not just.

And God just leaves it there.

That's the end.

It's not like a feedback sandwich.

Where God starts with something positive, inserts the painful truth, and then brings it back around to something positive.

God doesn't do that.

 It's a tension.

How's this story going to play out with Israel?

It's already evident that they're going to break God's covenant left and right.

Because God is both slow to anger and He doesn't let the guilty go unpunished.

He has to somehow reconcile both His mercy and His justice.

And so the question is, what will win out in the end?

If Israel, if all humanity, if you and I don't stop sinning, what is God to do?

He can't put off justice forever.

 To do so in perpetuity would ultimately amount to the world being essentially unjust.

In fact, it would mean that God is essentially unjust.

Evil and chaos would triumph.

But also, God can't wrap the whole thing up with pure, unadulterated justice.

If that were the case, nobody could stand before God and those that He deeply loves would be destroyed.

So what's the solution?

Well, there's a hint in the text as to what we should expect is going to happen.

 I want you to notice that in verse 7, it both opens and closes with God's treatment of generations.

On the side of loyal, forgiving love, you have thousands of generations.

On the side of punishing guilt, you have to the third and the fourth.

There's a pretty big disparity there, isn't there?

An intentional, the writer of Exodus did not forget how to count.

 There's an intentional unevenness there in the text.

In fact, when God says that He's loving to the thousandth generation, He's basically saying what David says in Psalm 136, that His love is forever.

Now, it's not to say that God is more merciful than He is just.

God is what really smart people like to call ontologically simple.

It means that God is not a complex being who can be broken down into parts.

Everything God is, He is all the way through.

 That was just a little nerd moment for all you nerds out there.

So it's not that he's more merciful than he is just, but it is somehow that his mercy will triumph over his judgment without negating his justice.

Somehow his justice will be satisfied through the triumph of his love.

And I think that this is what the Apostle James was talking about when he wrote that God's mercy triumphs over judgment.

The question, of course, is how, and that's what the rest of the series is about today.

 But the immediate question for us today is how do we respond to the revelation of this kind of God?

This God who is both forgiving and wrathful, merciful and just.

And I think the answer is this, that God's self-revelation as merciful and just is an invitation to draw near.

In other words, God is not just the God who wants to come close.

God is the God who wants you to come close to him.

 And this is exactly what we see in the life of Moses.

Go back to the beginning of Exodus.

God first introduces himself to Moses.

In Exodus chapter 3, God says this, I'm the God of your father, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

And at this, Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look at God.

The only thing Moses knew about God at this point is that God knew his grandparents.

And Moses was like, I'm terrified to even look at you.

 Fast forward to the story where we are today in Exodus chapter 33.

This is after Moses has already experienced God's righteous anger poured out upon Israel.

And yet in that experience, Moses said, now show me your glory.

Literally, show me your face.

Somehow, in the experience of God's justice...

 Moses still feels safe and comfortable enough to go, God, I want to know you.

In fact, the more Moses gets to know God, the more Moses wants to know God.

Some people think that a God with anger is a God to run from.

Not Moses.

God knows that God's anger is his justice, and a just God is a reliable God, is a safe God, is a God that you can walk with all your life long.

 And so we ought to do like what Moses does in Exodus 34 in verse 8.

Moses bowed to the ground at once and worshiped.

Let's all stand to our feet.

 God, we thank you that you are compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.

We're grateful for the revelation of who you are, and we're grateful that your intention in letting us know who you are is to draw us near to you.

You're the God who exalts himself on a cross so that all the nations would draw near.

 And that's what we want to do right now in this moment.

We incline our hearts to you.

We draw near to you, Lord.

We confess that we love you, that we need you, that we desire you.

In Jesus' name.