An Altar of Earth: Exodus 20:22-26
As the Israelites built these simple altars of earth or uncut stones and made offerings to atone for their sins and in thankful fellowship to Yahweh, His name would be remembered by the people, and He would come to them and bless them. Remember that the explicit purpose behind God doing everything that He has done for Israel in the book of Exodus was so that they may know that He is Yahweh. Through the plagues, the parting of the sea, the provision and protection in the wilderness, and now through His covenant with them at Sinai, God was revealing His holy name to them and, therefore, also revealing His holy nature and character.
It is a tragedy that worship is one of the most divisive and conflict-filled areas within the church. Of course, it is also understandable. We tend to fight most fiercely over the things that are most important to us. If the chief end of man truly is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever, worship ought to be highest priority of all of God’s people, so it is not to be taken lightly.
I begin with the topic of worship because that is the overall theme of the second half of Exodus. In chapters 1-14, Yahweh rescued Israel from their slavery in Egypt and slew their oppressor, Pharaoh. Then in chapters 15-19, God led Israel through the wilderness to Sinai protecting and providing for them along the way like a shepherd over his flock. The remainder of Exodus takes place at Sinai, where God is outlining His covenant with Israel, detailing how they are to live as His treasured possess, a holy nation, and a kingdom of priests. We properly call that life of response to God’s salvation, worship.
However, let us make two important notes on worship that will serve us going forward. First, while the entire life of God’s people is to be lived in worship to God, there is a distinction to be made between daily, personal worship and the corporate, gathered worship of God’s people. Yes, we are called to offer ourselves to God as living sacrifices and to do all things to the glory of God, and yes, that is the all-encompassing daily and personal worship that God requires. Amen! However, we should note that Paul told the Corinthians that some of their personal habits of worship would not transfer to the gathered worship of God’s people. We can think of this example. A professional dancer ought to dance with excellence to the glory of God, which then becomes an act of worship; however, the Lord’s Day gathering would not be the time or place to do so.
We should also note that worship is not Burger King, that is, the ultimate goal of worship is not to have it your way. Because we are worshiping the Almighty Creator, who has spoken to us from heaven, we ought to be supremely concerned with how He desires and commands to be worshiped, not with how we would best like to worship Him. It is this principle that we see most clearly in the laws before us, which particularly dictate what kind of altars God would permit the Israelites to build for Him.
The God of Heaven: Verses 22–23
Having taken two weeks to properly introduce us to the laws that God gave in the Old Testament, we now begin to move through the portion of Exodus that is called the Book of the Covenant. As I noted last week, this section of Exodus both begins and ends with a discussion of Israel’s proper worship of Yahweh, their God and Redeemer, while the other laws in the middle focus upon laws of justice in dealing with one another. Our text begins with these words:
And the LORD said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the people of Israel: ‘You have seen for yourselves that I have talked with you from heaven.
Here the LORD is referring back to His speaking of the Ten Commandments. Remember that God had the people consecrate themselves for three days in chapter 19 before He descended upon Sinai in thick clouds of darkness, with fire, thunder, lightning, and the blast of trumpets. He then spoke the Ten Commandments audibly for the entire nation of Israel to hear. But even though God did descend to speak directly to His people, notice that He still says that He spoke to them from heaven. They could not endure His complete presence but could only bear Him speaking from afar. Of course, truly they could not even endure that. Indeed, no one could, which is why God ultimately had to become flesh and dwell among us.
Recall that after God finished speaking, the people begged for Moses to be their mediator, speaking to God on their behalf and delivering to them the words of God. Moses embraced that role. While the rest of Israel shrank back in fear, Moses drew near to God. And now we have Yahweh speaking, not to all of Israel, but to Moses, telling the prophet His words for the people of Israel. Philip Ryken notes:
From this point on, Moses would do the talking. He was the mediator—the man who spoke for God. So whenever God had something to say to Israel, he would do it through his prophet Moses. In the chapters that follow, Moses applies God’s law to various life situations. But the first thing God wanted his prophet to do was to remind the people about who spoke to them on the mountain: It was the great God of the covenant. From this point on, everything Moses said was based upon this great fact, that God had spoken to his people. The Law did not come from earth; it came from Heaven, and for this reason the Israelites were obligated to obey.
EXODUS, 648.
You shall not make gods of silver to be with me, not shall you make for yourselves gods of gold. This ought to sound quite similar to the first two of the Ten Commandments. The First Commandment forbid the worship of any gods other than Yahweh Himself, while the Second Commandment forbid the making of images for worship. This commandment appears to be mixture between the two, and that should not surprise us. Recall that the Ten Commandments are summary of the God’s law, so that every other law is essentially a more detailed explanation of the principle of one of the Ten.
Of course, the Second Commandment described the likeness of the images being made, but here the emphasis is upon the material with which they are made. Idols were often made simply of wood, which Isaiah ruthlessly mocks, saying of a cut down tree: “Then it becomes fuel for a man. He takes a part of it and warms himself; he kindles a fire and bakes bread. Also he makes a god and worships it; he makes it an idol and falls down before it” (44:15). Yet precious metals like gold and silver were certainly preferable whenever they could be obtained. Douglas Stuart writes about this command:
Mentioning “gods of silver or gods of gold” represents a synecdoche and does not imply that these metals were the only materials from which idols were made. But since they the most common, they stood for all materials and helped the Israelites remember that no idol—no matter how lovely in appearance or expensive in composition—could be worshiped as representing a god. Beautiful, expensive things cannot be excluded from the command against idolatry by the argument that they are “appropriate to God” or that they “call him to mind because their excellence suggests his excellence.” That such a prohibition would need to be repeated virtually immediately after the Ten Commandments has been given is evidenced by Aaron’s construction of the golden calf days or weeks later (chap. 32).
EXODUS, 471.
Indeed, that is a point worth repeating. Just because items like gold and silver are precious and valuable to us, that did not inherently make them fit for worship. After the king disobeyed God’s command, Samuel gave this famous rebuke to King Saul:
Has the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams. For rebellion is as the sin of divination, and presumption is as iniquity and idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the LORD, he has also rejected you from being king.
If that is true about the sacrifices and burnt offerings, which God Himself did command, how much more does the principle apply to things like gold and silver? I make this point because it seems to be rather common in evangelicalism today to apply the “it’s the thought that counts” principle to worship.
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3 Core Beliefs of the Transgender Movement
Written by Samuel D. Ferguson |
Monday, October 23, 2023
People have long recognized their need for inner healing and change. Humans suffer from bad thinking, broken hearts, and any number of internal psychological disorders. But the transgender revolution’s path toward healing and wholeness assumes that the deep change a person with gender dysphoria needs must happen mainly on the outside. Those who suffer are told they need to change their external appearance, not their perspective. Increasingly, gender dysphoria is treated not through counseling but through transitioning, a process that involves puberty blockers, hormone treatments, and surgeries.A Sweeping Revolution
The transgender revolution is sweeping. Deeper understanding of it requires us to consider three core beliefs that underly it and make it possible. Though often unarticulated, these beliefs are like the framing of a house, giving the transgender movement its present shape and stability.
Belief 1: My Identity Is Self-Determined
We can’t understand the transgender movement if we don’t grasp how it relates to our culture’s obsession over the question Who am I? Traditionally, our identity was something we received, and it was therefore relatively stable. Who we are was understood as determined by family of origin, nationality, biological sex, religion, and perhaps occupation. These matters were largely “givens,” arising not from feelings or decisions but from realities outside a person’s control. Things have changed. Today, identity is a do-it-yourself project based on self-discovery and self-expression.1 This gives personal feelings and decisions pride of place, and it resists external constraint. “[Here is] a view of personhood,” Carl Truman explains, “that has almost completely dispensed with the idea of any authority beyond that of personal, psychological conviction, an oddly Cartesian notion: I think I’m a woman, therefore I am a woman.”2
Belief 2: My Feelings, Not My Body, Determine My Gender
When I was in graduate school, a classmate named Taylor shared with me about his experience of gender dysphoria. Taylor was a biological male but, since early childhood, felt like a girl. Taylor was on a hormone treatment, experimenting with cross-dressing, and hoped to undergo transition surgery. One day Taylor asked me, “Do you feel like a man?” I answered, “Yes.” Taylor fired back: “What does that mean? And don’t tell me it means you like girls and sports. What does it mean to feel like a man?”
For years, that exchange troubled me. How do you describe the feeling of being a man—or a woman—and do so without reaching for cultural stereotypes about gender? In a culture obsessed with gender identity, I was shocked at how hard it was simply to describe what being a man feels like.
Finally, it dawned on me. Taylor’s question contained a significant assumption. Taylor didn’t ask me if I was a man. He asked me if I felt like a man. Subtle but seismic, this shift in verbiage reflects a core belief of the transgender movement: your feelings, not your biology, determine your identity. It’s a mind-over-matter view of people, and we may be tempted to think there’s nothing wrong with this way of thinking. But try applying this logic to age or race. What if a sixteen-year-old trying to buy a six-pack of beer blurts out to the vigilant clerk, “But I feel twentyone”? What if a fifty-year-old man pursuing a sixteenyear-old girl says to her father, “But I feel sixteen”? What if a White male applying for a scholarship designated for African Americans responds to the university examiner, “But I feel Black”?
Our society agrees—at least for now—that age and ethnic identity are determined by cold, hard facts, not feelings. You may have feelings about your age or ethnicity, but those feelings don’t determine your age or ethnic background. Why the difference in the case of gender?
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Life is Beautiful
Humans are the only part of the physical world that can know love or truth or beauty. Humans are the only creatures that can use words and deeds to truly praise and worship their Creator—or reject and rebel against Him. Humans are the only creatures on earth that can sin, and they are the only creatures that God loved enough to redeem by the blood of His Son, so that our lives could go on forever with Him.
My children are amazing.
I don’t just mean that in the “proud papa” way—that they are the most intelligent, most athletic, most adorable children on the planet. All that is true, of course, but what I am thinking of is how amazing it is that they exist. That they have bodies and brains and breath. That each of them has a unique consciousness, a unique personality, and a unique set of likes and dislikes. Each of them is totally distinct from each other and from their parents.
Or maybe not totally distinct. If I look closely, I see my daughter smile in a way that looks just like her mother. Or my son makes an expression that floods me with memories of his great-grandfather.
Yet just a few years ago, none of these little ones existed. Then, in one instant, a part of me merged with a part of my wife, and our child was there. It happens in a flash (perhaps even literally). What was merely a couple of insignificant cells just moments before becomes something precious, something priceless, something of infinite worth.
That embryonic baby was too small to see or feel, but already distinct. Just a few weeks later, his heart would start beating, arms and legs would emerge, eyes and ears would begin to form. All of that was happening inside of my wife. And though her body was working very hard, the process was completely beyond her control.
It really is unspeakably profound. A woman’s body contains everything needed to produce another human being—everything except for one microscopic, essential component that can only come from a man. And it can only come in the most personal and intimate way possible.
Don’t let the fact that babies are born all the time dull your awareness of the glory and beauty of it. If it is a wonder and marvel that fruit can grow from a seed that came from a fruit (and it is), then how much more significant it is that a living creature can generate another just like it.
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Facing Weariness
Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. (Heb. 12:3–4)
Every year in the Atlanta area, thousands gather to participate in the 10K Peachtree Road Race. For the novice runner all goes well until “Cardiac Hill.” It’s a steep incline in front of Piedmont Hospital where an unprepared participant will grow tired because of the difficulty. They may also become distracted by the hotdogs and doughnuts that are available throughout the race. It’s easy to allow faintheartedness to set in when the distance is long and there are diversions along the way.
The writer of the book of Hebrews warned against this in the Christian life. Some of the professing believers who received the letter were being pressured to abandon Christianity and withdraw to a respectable Jewish religion. They were about to stop short of the finish line. They were spiritually sapped, given what was going on around them. And so often, as Christians, that can happen to us. We can become fatigued and disillusioned on our journey from this life to the next. That can be true for the person dealing with declining health, parents raising children, or as we wrestle with sin. Weariness is something we all face.
What are we to do when it occurs? Our tendency is to focus on our problems or to let our eyes be directed to worldly comforts. Doing these things only makes matters worse, however. But in Hebrews 12:3–4, we are told how the remedy to weariness is affectionately meditating on Jesus, particularly in two ways.
Consider Christ Who Endured Hostility
First, as we encounter many dangers, toils, and snares, we must remember that Jesus also went through them. Specifically, He endured opposition. His life from beginning to end was filled with conflict. Not long after Jesus was born, Herod tried to kill Him (Matt. 2:15–16). Religious leaders sought His demise (Mark 3:6). The Romans crucified Him (John 19:16–23). He felt the animosity of many. Yet Jesus kept going. He didn’t let the enmity of enemies deter Him from His course.
