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Weimar University

Don Mackintosh

Are You Limiting God?

And good to see each of you today on this wonderful Sabbath day.

How many of you are thankful for the Sabbath?

Let's just pray, add a prayer before we begin today.

Father in heaven, Lord, thank you that you give us the opportunity to come and worship and to listen to your word.

As we heard last night in that wonderful mission report, We should not take these things for granted.

There are places in the world where even having a Bible can lead to death.

And so help us to treasure the times we're able to study your word.

Put your word in our hearts, in our minds to bring to our remembrance and to share with others in Christ's name we pray Amen Psalm 78 Is another 1 of the Psalms we've been studying this summer that have to do with the Exodus experience.

And some of us were privileged to travel and retrace the steps of the Exodus.

We had our trials and tribulations there, but nothing like they did.

And this particular Psalm, Psalm 78, as I read through it a number of times, Verse 41, like we just read, 40 and 41 really gripped me.

How often they provoked him in the wilderness and grieved him in the desert.

Yes, again and again they tempted God and limited the Holy 1 of Israel.

So I began to ask myself a question, am I limiting God?

Is that a good question for you as well as me?

And Psalm 78 then recounts the deeds, the wonders, the miracles God performed for His people in bringing them out of Egypt and into what was called the Holy Land.

How God limited the power or showed the limited power of every single other God.

They said, okay, you believe you're saved by the Nile?

You're really saved by the blood of the Lamb, so I'll turn the Nile into blood.

And they said, you know, we're not that interested in the Nile anymore.

When we were in Egypt, we saw, some of you remember frog gods.

With heads of frogs, all kinds of statues, people bowed down to them worshiping the frogs.

God said, okay, if you like the frogs, we'll send them everywhere God should be.

I once preached a sermon the day God jumped into bed.

And the lady goes, what is he gonna talk about today?

Over there they had beetles and all kinds of things, and they worshiped the bugs, and so God said, okay, I'm sending the bugs everywhere.

And they said, we're not interested in the bugs anymore.

So Psalm 78 goes through actually all the plagues, how God showed the limited power of all the other gods of Egypt.

You know, even in Egypt today, when you're taking a Bible tour over there, the guides we had, I didn't get the sense they were really happy with what we were saying on the bus about Egypt.

Because everything is like against Egypt, and it's gods, not against Egyptian people, but against the gods of Egypt.

We were in Memphis, which was 1 of the first capitals, you know.

The guy gets through talking and he goes, do you have anything to say?

And I said, yeah, let me show you an Isaiah.

It says that Memphis would become a desolation.

And this is a complete desolation you've showed us.

He made a presentation about how the Nile still is just the most important thing.

He goes, what do you have to say about the Nile?

I said, well, God decided that he could create a Nile in the wilderness with water from a rock.

Then I learned that Pharaoh, actually the word Pharaoh was a summary of the temples of Egypt.

When I learned that, talking about Pharaoh, I said, well, you know, I said, so the word Pharaoh actually means the temples, all the temples of Egypt?

Because God had a temple and everything in his temple represented him.

So it was a complete indictment, the deeds, the wonders, the miracles God performed for his people in bringing them out of Egypt and into the Holy Land.

Is the purpose, and he did this all with his powerful right hand.

And the point of God's deliverance was so that God was above all human authority and greatness.

Signs and wonders he wrought in behalf of his people showed his power over nature and over the greatest of those who worship nature, and that was Egypt.

God went through the proud land of Egypt as He will go through the earth in the last days.

So the story of Egypt and the turning upside down of Egyptian culture and idea is going to be repeated in the last days.

And Revelation chapter 10 through 22 actually shows the final exodus where Jesus himself is leading through a body of water, Revelation chapter 10, all the way to the culmination with his body of water, the tree of life in Revelation 22.

It was his purpose that they be a nation that would praise him for how he had led them out of bondage.

That was his purpose for his people, that they should be telling everybody, you're not gonna believe what God did.

In fact, the name Jew, according to Genesis 29 and 35, means praise.

And linguists who drill down a little bit more say they think the literal Hebrew word means to thank.

I will praise or thank the Lord, I'll thank him for what?

William Albright, the famous archaeologist, said drilling down even further that it was a verb meaning led.

So according to Albright the name actually means led by Yahweh.

Jew was someone who praised God, who thanked God because they had been led by God.

And so the Exodus, everything about the Exodus, everything about that sanctuary was to remind them of how God had led them.

The Passover was memorialized in the sanctuary by the altar of sacrifice where the lamb was slain.

The Red Sea was memorialized by that laver.

The burning bush was seen as that lamp stand.

And the table of showbread was a meal on the mountain and also the manna, showing that God had fed them all the way through the Exodus experience and sustained them.

They didn't need Goshen or the land of Zon or Tannis.

They had God who supplied all their food with manna, Which by the way was made out of complex carbohydrates and Coriander seed which has been shown to decrease anxiety And they had almonds and they had all these things I'll come back to that and then Moses interceded for them was always got going up and down the mountain God wanted them to ultimately do that, it says in Deuteronomy.

But Moses was interceding them as a type of Christ and then they received the law.

Can you see how the Exodus was actually memorialized in the sanctuary service.

And it was meant to remind them, God led them out.

Praise the Lord, enter into his courts with thanksgiving and to his gates with what?

This was the whole idea of the Exodus, wanting to move people from the false mountains of Egypt, the pyramids, to the amazing mountains of God.

Now by the way, it's a study in contrast when you go from those false pyramids.

They're impressive, but they're nowhere near as impressive as the mountains we saw near Mount Sinai.

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Are You Limiting God?

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