A Lot Has Changed, A Lot Hasn’t Changed
Several interesting things happened in the year 1890. The Sleeping Beauty premiered as a ballet in St. Petersburg, Russia. The National American Woman Suffrage Association was founded by Elizabeth Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh moved to France and produced around seventy paintings in as many days before dying at the age of 37 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The University of North Texas and Yosemite National Park were founded. Charles Spurgeon began the last two years of his life and Winston Churchill was a precocious sixteen-year-old boy in boarding school outside of London. But, of more importance to us than all these things, our church was founded that year.
Our church, originally called Renner Baptist Church, was established 134 years ago in 1890. You may’ve noticed that our new church sign was installed this week, and that underneath our church’s name is “Est. 1890.”
You may wonder why that’s on the sign, and part of our church logo? Because it communicates that we’ve been here a while and plan to be here a while. In a culture that’s looking for permanence, we want to communicate, however subtly, that our church has deep roots in this community.
A lot has changed in the world and in our church since 1890. But a lot hasn’t changed either. The God that the people of Renner Baptist Church gathered to worship is the same God that we gather to worship this morning. Their God is our God.
What Kind of God is God?
But what’s he like? Who is the God of Renner Baptist Church and Preston Highlands Baptist Church? What kind of God is God?
How do you think of God? How would you describe him? Maybe you think God is the “Guy up there” or “Man upstairs,” or some vague spiritual power who looks out for you? Maybe you think God is the totality of all that exists, or the life-force that animates everything? Maybe you think there are many gods?
What kind of God is God? Is God personal or impersonal, knowable or unknowable, relational or distant? Is God like a grumpy old man or permissive parent? Is he all love with no justice or all justice with no love? Is he, like the Quran teaches, the great God above all but at a distance from us? What kind of God is God?
Is God Only Love in the New Testament?
The Bible says, “God is love” (1 Jn. 4:8, 16). But is that just a New Testament idea, after the coming of Jesus Christ, God’s Son? What about the Old Testament?
In one of the most important passages in the Old Testament, we learn that the New Testament agrees with the Old Testament. In Exodus 34:1-9, we learn that God is love. In this passage, we see God’s love revealed in three ways: in his new tablets (vv. 1-4), his teaching (vv. 5-7), and his treasure (vv. 8-9). The main point of this passage is that God’s deepest heart overflows with love for people who don’t deserve it.
Tablets
In verses 1-4, we see that God is love in the new tablets he tells Moses to make. Back in chapter 32, when Moses came down the mountain and saw the people dancing around the golden calf, he threw the two original tablets down and broke them (v. 19).
At the end of verse 1, the Lord reminds Moses that he broke the first tablets so that he understands that the covenant hadn’t just been violated in some way but broken. Israel hadn’t damaged the covenant; they’d smashed it.
This means that what the Lord is asking Moses to do here is a surprising display of love. By telling Moses to make new tablets, he’s saying, “What Israel broke, I’m ready to repair.” The Lord loves his people so much that he’s ready to restore them and reinstate his covenant with them.
These new tablets are the “concrete sign” that the Lord had forgiven Israel and was ready to restore the relationship.1 It’s like an employer saying to a previously dismissed employee, “Welcome back to the company. Let me show you to your work station.” Or a judge saying to a person who’s served their time, “You’re free to go and resume your former life.”2
The Lord is saying to Moses, “I’m ready to put the covenant back together so bring some new tablets so I can write out the terms again.”
Our Responsibility to Change
The Lord made the tablets and wrote on them the first time (32:16), while the second time around he asks Moses to make the tablets for him to write on. The lesson here is likely that when the covenant needs to be renewed, and it’ll need to be renewed many times throughout Israel’s history, the people have a responsibility to act. They can’t just sit back and wait for God to forgive and restore – they have a responsibility to do what must be done to move back into right relationship with the Lord. They’re the ones who moved, not the Lord, so they need to be the ones who come back to him. If they want to be in covenant relationship with God, they have to show their commitment to him. It’s like a coach saying to one of his players, “You can be on the team this year but you have to buy your own uniform this time.”
A lot of times, when we’re struggling with sin, we sit back and just want God to change us and don’t want to do the hard work of changing ourselves. We know we belong to the Lord, so we assume he’ll change us if he wants to, and if we don’t change, then it must be the Lord’s fault. This text illustrates that covenant renewal and the hard-work of life-change go together.
What kind of God is God? He’s the kind of God who loves his people so much that he wants to restore his relationship with them even though they’ve rebelled against him. But he’s not the kind of God who does everything for us. He loves us so much that he invites us into the glorious and messy process of transformation.
Teaching
In verses 5-7, we see that God is love in what he says about himself to Moses, or in his teaching.
What the Lord teaches Moses, and us, about himself here isn’t ancillary to the Bible, but it’s very heart. We know this because of how often this text is repeated or echoed elsewhere in the Old Testament (eg. Num. 14:18; Neh. 9:17, 13:22; Ps. 86:5, 15, 103:8, 145:8; Isa. 63:7; Joel 2:13; Jonah 4:2; Nahum 1:3).
What the Lord says here isn’t a passing comment but becomes the way Israel describes their God for generations to come. The essence of what he says is that his glory is most clearly seen in his goodness.
Five Aspects of God’s Goodness
In verses 6-7, the Lord defines his goodness in five ways.3 First, he says that he’s “merciful and gracious.” “Merciful” meaning that he genuinely cares about us and has an attitude of concern toward us. “Gracious” meaning he does things for us that we don’t deserve, that he goes beyond what’s expected.
In his chapter on this passage in Gentle and Lowly, Dane Ortlund points out that these are the first two words out of God’s mouth after proclaiming his name, “the Lord.” He says, “God does not reveal his glory as, ‘The Lord, the Lord, exacting and precise,’ or, ‘The Lord, the Lord, tolerant and overlooking,’ or, ‘The Lord, the Lord, disappointed and frustrated.’ His highest priority and deepest delight and first reaction – his heart – is merciful and gracious.”4
The second thing the Lord teaches us about himself is that he’s “slow to anger.” The Lord is patient with people who don’t deserve patience. He doesn’t have his finger on the trigger. Unlike us, he can put up with a lot.
The Bible elsewhere says that God is “provoked to anger” but it never says he’s “provoked to love.” Unlike his anger, his love needs no provoking. It’s always ready to wash over us. We tend to think of God as the opposite, as ready to pounce in anger and yet stingy with his love.
The Bible is trying to deconstruct our natural vision of God and show us that God is “slow to anger” and, as the third phrase in verse 6 says, “abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” This is covenant language. “Steadfast love” is the Hebrew word “hesed” and refers to God’s special love and commitment to the people he’s bonded himself to in an unbreakable covenant. A better word might be “loyalty” rather than “love,” as the phrase describes the long-term commitment that exists in a covenant relationship.
He’s “loyal” and “faithful” to people who aren’t, never entertaining the idea of forsaking us or withdrawing from us the way we withdraw from people who hurt us. And he’s not just like this in some static way. He says that he “abounds” in this love and loyalty. His commitment to us never runs dry.
The fourth thing he teaches us about his goodness is at the beginning of verse 7, “keeping steadfast love for thousands” (or “to the thousandth generation”). The Lord maintains his covenant loyalty to us indefinitely. This means there’s no expiration date on the Lord’s commitment to you, that you can’t outrun his goodness or get rid of his grace. His heart is set on you forever.
The fifth thing the Lord teaches us is that he “forgives iniquity and transgression and sin” (v. 7). The Lord forgives evils of all sorts, or as one commentator puts it, “The whole range of human disregard of the Lord may be met with forgiveness.”5
These five aspects of God’s goodness were given to Israel when they needed them the most. They’d just rebelled by making the golden calf and the Lord’s anger burned against them (32:10). But, as Switchfoot said in their song “Dare You to Move, “Forgiveness is right where they fell.”
What kind of God is God? “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.” Is this how you picture God?
Mercy and Justice
The last part of verse 7 seems to contradict all that we’ve just seen. How do the Lord’s goodness and his justice relate?
Because God is infinitely wise, he knows that when sinful people like us hear about his mercy, our tendency can be to assume that our sins don’t have any consequences. So the end of verse 7 is the Lord’s way of saying, “I am merciful, but sin has consequences.”
This verse is hard to interpret, but it at least means that our sin effects people beyond ourselves. It also shows us that God isn’t a softie. His grace must not be understood as leniency. God is the only perfectly fair person in the universe. He’s not mocked, we reap what we sow (Gal. 6:7). Around the world and in our families we see how sin is passed down from generation to generation.
But even in this promise there’s the comfort of God’s love for his people. Sin is passed down three or four generations, but God’s love is passed down for a thousand generations. We pass our sins down to our children and grandchildren, but God passes down his love in a way that overwhelms our sins. His mercy travels further than our mistakes.
Dark Thoughts of God Need to Die
This is who God is. He is just, but his deepest heart overflows with mercy and love. As the Lord says in Isaiah 54:7-8, “For a brief moment I deserted you, but with great compassion I will gather you. In overflowing anger for a moment I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you.”
What kind of God is God? He’s angry for a moment but merciful forever. Is this how you see him? Dane Ortlund talks about how hard it is for us to believe this. He says,
“The Christian life, from one angle, is the long journey of letting our natural assumption about who God is, over many decades, fall away, being slowly replaced with God’s own insistence on who he is. This is hard work. It takes a lot of sermons and a lot of suffering to believe that God’s deepest heart is ‘merciful and gracious, slow to anger.’ The fall in Genesis 3 not only sent us into condemnation and exile. The fall also entrenched in our minds dark thoughts of God, thoughts that are only dug out over multiple exposures to the gospel over many years. Perhaps Satan’s greatest victory in your life today is not the sin in which you regularly indulge but the dark thoughts of God’s heart that cause you to go there in the first place and keep you cool toward him in the wake of it.”6
How do you think about God? Is he austere and standoffish? Is he mostly annoyed with you and waiting for you to get your act together? Does he have low-level frustration with you most of the time?
Is he like the father who shakes his head in disgust when his kids mess up again or like the father who runs to them when they fall, gently scooping them up in his arms and telling them he’s not going anywhere and loves them no matter what? Does God delight in you or put up with you?
Dark thoughts of God will die when we understand who God actually is. He’s “slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” God’s deepest heart overflows with love for people who don’t deserve it.
Treasure
In verses 8-9, we see one more way that God’s love is revealed. The very end of his prayer in verse 9 is Moses asking that God would “take us for your inheritance.”
Usually Moses talks about the land as Israel’s inheritance, but here he’s asking that Israel would be the Lord’s inheritance. He’s not asking the Lord to give Israel their inheritance but that Israel would be his inheritance, or as Ed Clowney says, “the treasure of his love.”7
This was the goal of the exodus, as we learned back in chapter 19, where the Lord says that he brought Israel out of Egypt to be his “treasured possession among all peoples” (19:5). The whole earth is like a ring on the Lord’s finger, but Israel is like a jewel in that ring. As King, he owns the whole earth, but he made Israel his personal stash of treasure.
This idea informs Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians, when he prays that God would help us see “the riches of (God’s) glorious inheritance in the saints” (1:18). This isn’t referring to our inheritance (as in 1:11), but God’s. What is “God’s glorious inheritance”? It’s “in the saints.” It’s his people! In Christ, God makes us his treasured possession.
Do you think God feels that way about you? What do you think God calls you? What name tag do you think he puts on you? All of us wear name tags, labels on our souls that define us. These name tags are deep beliefs that others projected on us or we project on ourselves and that we’re usually not consciously aware of. What’s your go-to name tag? Failure, stupid, not good enough, incompetent, weak, too sensitive, rejected, alone? What’s on your name tag?
God’s Grace in Flesh and Blood
This passage says that our name tag says, “The Lord’s inheritance, his treasure.” It shows us that God’s deepest heart overflows with love for people who don’t deserve it. We see his love in his new tablets, his teaching, and his treasure.
But the final proof that God is love isn’t found in Exodus, but in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Moses couldn’t see the face of God and live. But one day God would make it so that anyone could see his face and live.
It says at the beginning of John’s Gospel, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory…full of grace and truth” (1:14). In Jesus, we can see what Moses couldn’t. Moses was told of God’s mercy and grace; Jesus came to show us God’s mercy and grace in flesh and blood.
A lot has changed since 1890. But not the deepest heart of God. His deepest heart is still love for his people. Jesus proved this once and for all by going to a Roman cross, where God visited all his justice on him who deserved none of it.
And he did that to prove how much you’re worth to him. As the song says, “Two wonders here that I confess, my worth and my unworthiness. My value fixed, my ransom paid, at the cross.” God cherishes you so much that he gave up himself to have you. Is this the God you believe in?