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I am Sending an Angel Ahead of You
I am Sending an Angel Ahead of You Exodus 23:1-33 Key Verse: 23:20 “See I am sending an angel ahead of you to guard you along the way and to bring you to the place I have prepared.” Last week we continued looking into the details of God’s law. We thought about the laws that God established for the protection of private property and those laws that governed social responsibility. We saw that God expects his people to be responsible with other people’s property – they were not to steal it and if it was in their care they were to take good care of it. We also saw that God cares deeply for the weakest members of the society, the unmarried virgins, foreigners, widows and orphans. God looks with love on all his children and if they are mistreated and call out to Him, He will hear them and come to their aid, because He is a God of compassion. Today we are going to study the last of the details of God’s law concerning life in the community. We are going to focus three major themes in this law: 1) Laws on justice and neighborliness 2) Sabbath laws 3) And the establishment of three major feasts or festivals that the Israelites are to keep. Finally, we are going to think about how God sums up the law with a great promise. God promises to send an angel to go ahead of the Israelites to protect them and lead them to the land that He has already prepared for the them. Through this promise that God gives the Israelites we learn that His promise for us is always great, but in order to take hold of it we have to carefully listen to what God tells us. We have to live our lives as He says and not as we choose. God is our creator and He knows us better than we know ourselves. May God open our hearts and our ears and help us to carefully listen to His word today. First, Laws concerning justice and neighborliness (1-9) Look at verses 1-9. Verses 1-4 and 6-9 seem to go well together, but right in between these verses there are two that don’t quite seem to fit with the others. God begins and ends this section talking about laws concerning the justice system, but in the middle he throws in two verses about the donkey of one’s enemy or someone who hates you. I found this very interesting. Why would God do this? Let’s begin by looking at verses 1-4 and verses 6-9. These verses deal primarily with the ninth commandment; “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.” When I first looked at verse 4 I instinctively thought that this verse was just dealing with testimony that was given in a court of law, but when I looked carefully at the verse, I realized that nowhere in the verse is a court of law mentioned. This verse simply says don’t spread false reports about someone or take the side of a guilty person by lying for them. Later on God tells us more about this particular law. In Leviticus 19:6 God says “Do not go about spreading slander among your people. Do not do anything that endangers your neighbor’s life. I am the LORD.” In this verse it is clear that God is not just talking about giving a false statement about someone in a court of law; He says not to go around in the community slandering other people. In Deuteronomy 22:13-19 God gets very specific about this prohibition. In those verses God talks about a man who takes a woman home to be his wife, but then he becomes unhappy with her, so he goes around spreading false information about her virginity when he took her to be his wife. When his lie is proven to be a lie, such a man is to be punished by the elders and made to a fine of 100 shekels of silver to the woman’s parents and he is forbidden to ever divorce that woman. Verse 2 warns about giving in to peer pressure and simply following a crowd into doing wrong. This is actually a very big problem in societies especially among the younger members. It is very easy just to go along with everyone else even if we know what they are doing is not right. On the other hand, it is very difficult to stand up and tell others that what they are doing is not right. This could lead you to be isolated and left all alone and yet God says that we should always stand on the side of righteousness no matter what others may think of us. This is especially true in a court of law where justice can easily be twisted or perverted. Jesus trial before the Sanhedrin is a perfect example of this. Jesus had done nothing wrong but Matthew and Mark tell us that the Sanhedrin brought in many false witnesses to testify against him. The false witnesses were simply going along with the crowd of Pharisees and Chief priests. They didn’t want to cause trouble by siding with a poor innocent man who apparently had no power so they sided with those who did have power even though they knew that what they were doing was wrong and a perversion of justice. Finally, verse 3 says that we shouldn’t show favoritism to a poor person in a lawsuit. This is very interesting because in verse 6 God goes on to say not to deny justice to a poor person in a lawsuit. In other words, even in the case a poor powerless person they were to be absolutely impartial in their judgments. Impartiality in the courts is very important to God. We should have nothing to do with a false statement because our God is truth and there is nothing false in Him. God will not hold the guilty innocent or the innocent guilty and neither should we. This goes for the rich and powerful and the poor and the weak alike. Verse 9 tells us that this principle should also extend to the foreigner that is living among them. God is an impartial judge and we should be also because as Jesus says we should be perfect even as God is perfect. Now let’s look for a moment at verses 4 and 5. Right in the middle of these 7 verses concerning giving false witness and twisting justice we find two very curious verses about how we should treat the donkey of our enemy or someone who hates us. God simply says that if we see such a donkey in trouble or fallen under the weight of its load, we should help it out. To God it does not matter if the owner of that donkey is our enemy or our friend because God is the God of everyone. God makes the sun shine on everyone and the rain fall on everyone. God treats everyone the same and so should we. Jesus addresses this same issue sermon on the mount. He says that we should love our enemies and do good for those who hurt us. Even Solomon understood this principle so he said in Proverbs 25:21-22 “If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head, and the LORD will reward you.” Verse 10-13 deal with laws concerning the Sabbath. The Israelites were to let the land enjoy a Sabbath year of rest every seventh year. God said they were to do this so that the poor among the community and even the wild animals in the land could get food from the land. I find it very interesting that God was even concerned with the wellbeing of the wild animals. God is a God of great detail – nothing is left out. Look at verse 12 “Six days do your work, but on the seventh day do not work, so that your ox and your donkey may rest, and so that the slave born in your household and the foreigner living among you may be refreshed.” In this verse, God goes back to the fourth commandment to set apart one day a week as holy. What I find interesting here is why He tells them to do this? In the commandment God said they should do this because in six days God had created the heavens and the earth and rested on the seventh day and blessed it and made it holy. However, in this verse God says that they should observe this Sabbath day of rest so that the ox and donkey, slave and foreigner living among them may have a day of rest. Again, God is looking out for the helpless among the people, even the work animals. Once again we see that God is a God of details and a God of compassion. He is also the God of everything, both man and beast, and He cares for them all. We also must care for all of God’s creatures. In verses 14-19 God establishes three main festivals that the Israelites are to celebrate every year. The Old Testament Jewish calendar actually celebrated 9 festivals every year, but these three are to be special to them. According to verse 17 “all the men are to appear before the Sovereign LORD.” In effect this meant that everyone was required to participate in these three festivals and according to verse 15 no one was to appear before God empty handed. These words have often troubled me because it seems like so many times I have appeared before God empty handed. God has blessed me in so many ways, yet year after year I seem to show up before Him with nothing to offer. This bothers me because I always remember this few words from this seemingly insignificant verse in the Bible. God says that we must not show up before Him empty handed and Jesus tells us that we are to be fruitful. Apart from Jesus, we can do nothing, but Jesus promises us that if we remain in Him, He will make us fruitful and we will never show up before Him with nothing to offer. Verses 18 and 19 are a little strange to me. In verse 18 God gives the requirements for blood sacrifice made to him. They are not to be presented before Him with anything containing yeast. God gives no explanation for this prohibition, but in the New Testament Jesus makes the comparison between yeast and sin or bad influence among the people. This may also have something to do with the fact that immediately following the Passover, the first major feast the Israelites were to celebrate was the feast of unleavened bread which commemorated their escape from Egypt. During this feast, nothing with leaven in it was to be in the Israelite community. Other than the fact that this commemorates the speed with which they had to leave Egypt, it is unclear exactly why leaving was so distasteful to God. God also goes into detail about the fat of the sacrifice which was not to be left over until the morning. Again we can see the detail that God requires – this is especially true in our worship of Him as we shall see in the upcoming weeks. Look at verse 19. “Bring the best of the first fruits of your soil to the house of the LORD your God. “Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk.” Of course always we should always bring our best as our offering to God, but the end of verse 19 seems to come completely ‘out of left field.’ What is God trying to say here? The best guess here comes from a passage from a text that was found in 1933. That text was from a 13th century Ugaritic text which described a fertility rite where the people were to boil a young goat in milk. According to this theory, God was forbidding his people boil a young goat in its mother’s milk so that they would avoid even the appearance of participating in a pagan ritual. Verses 20-33 form the epilogue closing statement of this portion of God’s law. Let’s read verse 20 together. “See, I am sending an angel ahead of you to guard you along the way and to bring you to the place I have prepared.” This is God’s great promise and I believe it is as true today for us as it was for the Israelites back then. Before Jesus left His disciples He promised them two things. First, He promised to send them a helper or a counselor who would protect them and lead them into all truth and He promised to personally be with them until the end of the age. As Christians we believe that these promises are for everyone who believes – that is they are for us. Jesus’ promises to us seem to be even better than the promise God has given here because according to His promise we always have God himself among us. However, the same could be said of the Israelites because God was among them giving them His law and He say specifically in verse 21, “since my name is in him.” I think many people take this great promise of God far too lightly. I also think that this was not just the problem of the Israelites of Moses time and the Old and New Testament times, but it is also true of Christians today. God’s promise is His one sided grace of course, but it requires something on our part as we well. Look at verse 21. “Pay attention to him and listen to what he says. Do not rebel against him; he will not forgive your rebellion, since my Name is in him.” We need to pay attention to what God is saying to us and we should never rebel against Him. All too often, it seems like we are just too busy to pay close attention to what God is saying to us and to where God is leading us. God speaks to us every day, but if we don’t pay careful attention to what He is saying we will not hear Him and do what he wants us to do. This, in essence, is rebellion against God. We need to pay careful attention to what God is telling us. This means we need to set aside time every day to listen carefully to God and do everything He says. Sometimes what God says might seem very harsh to us. Look at what God says to the Israelites. He says that if they listen carefully and do what He says, He will completely wipe out six groups of people, the Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hivites and Jebusites. On top of that the Israelites were required to basically destroy what would be left of their culture. They were to completely destroy all of their gods and alters and have nothing to do with them at all. This sounds very harsh from a human point of view, but this is God’s way of protecting His people. There is a very fine line between treating the foreigner among us as our friend and equal and being influenced by their evil ways. We need to listen to God in order to know the difference. This is not always easy, but according to His promise which can never fail, if we do this He will protect us and lead us to the land that He has prepared for us. When I think about God’s promise to bring us to the land that He has prepared for us I am reminded of Jesus words when He told his disciples that He was going to His Father’s house, which has many rooms, to prepare a place for them so that they could be with Him forever. I believe Jesus has prepared each one of us a room, and if we listen to Him carefully and do what He says He will protect us and lead us all the way there. |
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