Okay, well this morning we want to start off by taking a little survey. So this is one of these raise your hand surveys.
And the question is, who is your favorite animal star on TV or in the movies? So I've got some candidates. Just raise your hand. Here we go. Number one, Bugs Bunny.
Okay. Number two, Mr. Ed. Number three, Miss Piggy. Number four, Tigger. There you go. Number five, Flipper. Flipper, flipper, any flipper fans? Number six, we're almost done, Snoopy.
Really? Alright, there you go. Number seven, Simba. And finally, number eight, Shrek. Alright, well now I have to tell you who my favorite is.
It's none of these. My favorite is Lassie. Yeah, I love Lassie. And I'll tell you why I love Lassie.
You know why? Because you can always count on Lassie. I mean, no matter how lost you are, Lassie will get you home. No matter how badly you've messed up, Lassie will stick by you. Lassie will die before she'll let you down.
And you know folks, it seems to me that everybody needs a Lassie in their life. Everybody needs someone who will be faithful to us through thick and through thin. And that's what we want to talk about today. We want to talk about the faithfulness of God to those of us who are believers in the Lord Jesus Christ. And what we want to do is go back in time, 3,500 years, and see how God was faithful to the Israelites living in Egypt. And then we're going to bring all of that forward and we're going to talk about God's faithfulness to you and me today in the 21st century. So, if you brought a Bible, let's open it together to Exodus chapter 12. And if you didn't bring a Bible here in the main auditorium, you can reach under the armrest next to you and you'll find a copy of the Bible. We're going to be on page 48. Page 48 in our copy, Exodus chapter 12 in your copy.
Now while you're turning, let me give us a little bit of background, okay? Remember that Moses and Aaron went in to see Pharaoh and they gave him God's demand to let the Israelites go. In response, Pharaoh said, get lost. He said, I don't know your God and I'm not letting the Israelites go free. And so God sent nine horrific plagues onto Egypt.
Let me tell you what they were. He turned the Nile to blood. He flooded the land with frogs, gnats, flies, cattle disease. He sent boils on all the people. Then he sent hail and locust plagues and finally enshrouded the land in darkness. For three days and after all nine of these, Pharaoh was still as stubborn in his refusal to let the Israelites go as when they started. So God said to Moses, I'm going to make Pharaoh an offer he can't refuse. And we know that offer today is the tenth plague. Where God moved through the land of Egypt and killed every first born son of every Egyptian.
Now before we go into the passage today, you might have a question. And that question is, Lon, now that we've looked at the ten plagues, is there any historical confirmation anywhere in Egyptian records of the ten plagues? I mean do we find them mentioned or anything close anywhere in the historical records of Egypt? Well the answer is that we need to understand that in the ancient Near East, all rulers, not just the Egyptians, all rulers sanitized their historical records.
To eliminate every defeat and every setback. And therefore we shouldn't expect to find any straight up mention, any straight up statements about the ten plagues in the historical records of Egypt. And in fact, we don't. However, there is a very interesting piece of anecdotal evidence relating to the ten plagues in Egypt that I want to tell you about. We find it on the dream stela of Thutmose. Thutmose the fourth.
That you might say, yeah you're gonna need to explain that to me. I know a little bit about King Tut but I never heard of this. Well first let me tell you this is not King Tut. King Tut is King Tut Ankh Amun, Pharaoh Tut Ankh Amun who lived ninety years later. This is a different Tut.
But that's a different thing. Anyway let me tell you about the dream stela of Thutmose the fourth. We all know the name, right, of the Pharaoh that got schwacked with the ten plagues, right? You say of course we do. Yo Brenner.
No. No, his real name was Amenhotep the second. And the next ruler on the throne of Egypt was Thutmose the fourth. Now there's a very interesting stela. A stela is a stone monument that's engraved with an inscription. There's a very interesting stela that Thutmose the fourth set up and engraved and it's found even to this day right between the front paws of the sphinx. If you go back if you go to Egypt you can see it right there. And on this inscription Thutmose records that he was out hunting one day when he fell down and when he sat down and fell asleep between the front legs of the sphinx and he had a dream. And in his dream the sphinx appeared to him and said that if he would uncover the sphinx from all, get all the sand off of it and restore it, the sphinx would make him the next Pharaoh of Egypt.
Now it's clear from the inscription on the stela that Thutmose the fourth was not planning to be the next Pharaoh. He was one of the sons of Yo Brenner but he was not the oldest son and therefore he had no intention of being the next Pharaoh. But the sphinx said uncover me and restore me and I will make you the next Pharaoh anyway. Well we all know he became the next Pharaoh of Egypt unexpectedly.
So the question is what happened to his older brother? Well if you say his older brother died in the tenth plague the way the Bible says, you would be absolutely right. And this is why this young man not planning to be Pharaoh, not expecting to be Pharaoh suddenly became Pharaoh. He attributed it to the sphinx.
We know it wasn't the sphinx. We know it was Almighty God who took his older brother's life. Now if you're here today and you've never trusted Jesus Christ as your personal savior, because one of the things hanging you up is whether the Bible is really trustworthy, whether the Bible is really reliable. You know one of the ways that we prove that the Bible is spiritually reliable is by proving that it is historically reliable. If the writers of the Bible went to that much trouble to be historically accurate, then we can assume that they certainly went to that much trouble to be spiritually accurate. And friends, the dream story is that Jesus of Thutmose the fourth is one more example of what I love to say, the more we dig out of the ground, the more the Bible proves to be right. So if you're here today I want to say to you that the Bible is historically reliable, which means that we can trust it to be spiritually reliable, which means if you put your trust in Christ the way the Bible tells you to when all the dust settles and you're standing on the shore of heaven, you're going to say thank you God. That I took the Bible seriously and rested my full weight on what it told me to do.
Something to think about and I hope you will. Well, it's time for us to dig in now and see what happened after the ten plagues. So, Exodus chapter 12 verse 31. After the tenth plague was over and his son was dead, Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron and said, up, leave Egypt, you and your people. And the Egyptians urged the Israelites to hurry and leave the country. For otherwise they said, we will all die.
Our first born sons won't just die, we'll all be dead. So, verse 34, the Israelites took their dough before any yeast was added. What do we call that?
Matzah. That's exactly right. And they carried it on their shoulders. They also did as Moses had instructed them and they asked the Egyptians for articles of silver and gold. Chapter 13, look over verse 19. Moses took the bones of Joseph with them because Joseph had made the sons of Israel swear an oath about this. Joseph had said, God will surely rescue you from Egypt and when he does, swear that you will carry my bones with you from this place up to the promised land. Now, folks, after the tenth plague, Pharaoh rushes the Israelites out of Egypt, so much so that they didn't even have time to put yeast in their dough to bake overnight. And so here they are being rushed out of the country, carrying with them lots of matzah and lots of gold and silver that they got from the Egyptians and their animals. But isn't it interesting that they also take with them one other very curious item, the bones of a man who's been dead for over 400 years, a man named Joseph. You say, yeah, Lon, what's that all about?
Well, let me explain it to you. Four hundred and thirty years before Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, Joseph was the man who was responsible for bringing the Israelites into Egypt. You remember the story. Joseph was sold into slavery, the book of Genesis tells us, by his brothers. He was carried to Egypt where he ended up in jail, falsely accused by his master's wife of sexual assault. After a few years in jail, Pharaoh had this dream about a famine that was coming and by God's grace, Joseph was the only person who could interpret it. So Pharaoh took him out of jail and made Joseph the prime minister of the whole country. And when the famine struck and his father, Jacob, and his brothers were starving to death up in Canaan, up in the promised land, he invited them to come join him in Egypt where there was plenty of food. Now when his father died, Jacob died, Jacob asked to be buried in the promised land next to his grandparents, Abraham and Sarah, next to his parents, Isaac and Rebekah, and Joseph took a whole big caravan up there and buried his father in the promised land.
But when Joseph died a few years later, he did something very interesting. Instead of having them go to the promised land and bury him with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, here's what happened, Genesis 50. I'm about to die, Joseph said, but God will surely come to your aid and take you up from Egypt to the land he promised by an oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, verse 25, Genesis 50. So Joseph made the Israelites swear an oath and say, God will surely come to your aid, and when he does, you must carry my bones up from this place with you, verse 26.
So Joseph died, and they embalmed him, and they placed him in a coffin, and they left him in Egypt. Now, where did Joseph get this kind of utter certainty about God returning the Israelites to the promised land? Well friends, he got it by believing the promises that God had made.
You say, what promises? Well, back in Genesis 15, God made a promise to Abraham. He said, Genesis 15, 13, know for a certainty.
Stop for a second. Folks, when God says to us, know for a certainty, dude, you can take that to the bank. Know for a certainty, God said, that your descendants, Abraham, will be strangers in a land not their own where they will be enslaved and mistreated for 430 years.
Where was that? It was Egypt, of course. But afterwards, look, they will come out with great riches, and I will bring them back to this land, the land of Canaan, the promised land. And God appeared to Jacob, Joseph's dad, when Jacob was hesitant to accept Joseph's offer and move to Egypt during the famine. He appeared to his dad and said to Jacob, Genesis 46, 3, I am God, the God of your fathers Abraham and Isaac.
I will not be afraid to move to Egypt, for I will make you into a great nation there, and I will go down to Egypt with you, and I will surely bring you back to this land again. And Jacob passed that on to his son Joseph, Genesis 48. Then Jacob said to Joseph, I'm about to die, but God will be with you, and he will bring you back to the land of your fathers. Now listen, my friends, Joseph certainly wanted his bones to be buried with his father, his grandfather, and his great grandfather in the promised land. But when he died, he left his bones instead in Egypt.
Why? Because he was utterly convinced that the Israelites would be leaving Egypt one day, and would be going back to inherit the promised land. And why was he so sure of this? He was so sure of it because God had promised it. And God, he knew, keeps his promises. And so, Joseph left his bones in Egypt as an ongoing testimony to the Israelites of his day, and to the Israelites for the next 400 years, as a testimony of the fact that God was going to be faithful to his word. That God was going to keep his promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That God was going to redeem the Israelites from Egypt, and that God was going to return them to the promised land, just like he had sworn to do. To put it another way, Joseph's bones were like a big neon sign flashing on and off for 400 years in Egypt, saying to the Israelites, hey fellas, we're leaving here one day.
Hey fellas, we're not staying here forever. God is faithful. God keeps his promises. God promised we're going back to the promised land, so keep your Samsonite handy, because we're leaving here one day.
Now you say, Lon, wait a minute. 400 years? Do you really think that the Israelites, after that much time, even knew where the bones of Joseph were? That they even understood what the bones of Joseph meant?
Absolutely I do. I believe that the bones of Joseph had become a national monument of sorts among the Israelites, and I'll tell you why I'm so sure of this. It's because when they were run out of Egypt on a moment's notice, they may have forgotten to take a lot of other things, but they didn't forget to take the bones of Joseph. Hey, have you ever had this experience? Suddenly the alarm clock goes off or you roll over in bed one morning and you look and you say, oh my gosh, what happened? Did the electricity go off? Did I hit the snooze button too many times?
Did I set it wrong? I got a plane to catch in less than two hours. And you leap out of bed and you run to take a shower and you throw some last minute things in the suitcase and you run out the door and you speed all the way to the airport. Have you ever had that happen to you?
I have. And friends, I'll tell you what, I've forgotten all kinds of stuff when I've been in a hurry like that. I mean, I have forgotten my toothbrush, I've forgotten my deodorant, I've forgotten my belt. I forgot my trip, I forgot all my socks. I forget books that I swear I want to read. But there's one thing, no matter how much of a hurry I've been in, there's one thing I have never, ever forgotten and let me tell you what it is. What is it?
My wallet. You say, why is that? And you say, well, Lon, I know why that is. It's because of your upbringing. No. No, that's not why.
That's not why. The reason I've never forgotten my wallet is because no wallet, no trip. Right? No wallet, no trip. And what does that point out? It points out, folks, when you're in a big hurry, you may forget all kinds of stuff, but if something is really all that important to you, you don't forget it. Now, these Israelites were being run out of Egypt in a hurry and they may have forgotten a lot of other things, but the fact that they did not forget to go get the bones of Joseph tells me that the bones of Joseph were a national monument and memorial. And can you imagine, can you imagine what it must have felt like for these Israelites to put the bones of Joseph on their shoulders and walk out after 400 years of slavery as a living, in living celebration of God's utter faithfulness to them to walk out with his bones? Saying, he left them here because he knew God was going to do this and here we are walking out in time and space and look, God's doing it. Let me summarize.
For four centuries, Joseph's bones had been the source of spiritual strength and spiritual hope for these Israelites in Egypt because every time they looked at his bones, every time they thought about his bones, those bones pointed them to and reminded them of the fact that they had a faithful God whom they could trust even in the most difficult of circumstances to be true to what he had promised. Do you understand that? All right, now it's time for us to stop. We'll pick up next week and for us to ask the most important question of the morning.
So do we all know what this is? Yes, yes, yes. All right, now let's do it right. Here we go.
One, two, three. So what? Ah, how sweet it is.
Yes, yes. You say, Lon, so what? I mean, Joseph's bones, schmoans, what do I care about Joseph's bones when I walk out of my house tomorrow morning and by the problems I'm dealing with? What does that have to do with me?
Let me see if we can make that connection. You know, it's interesting, and I'm sure you know this, that the Israelites did not go directly from Egypt to the promised land. They went out into the wilderness where they wandered for 40 years, and all those years, you know what?
They carried the bones of Joseph with them. And every time things got dicey out there in the wilderness, every time things looked bleak, every time the promised land looked a million miles away, there were the bones of Joseph, reassuring the Israelites that God never leads people halfway. Reassuring them that God didn't bring them out of Egypt to let them die in the wilderness.
Reassuring them that God finishes what he starts, and when God makes a promise, he keeps it all the way. And I wonder, I can't prove it, but I really do suspect that this is what lay behind the confidence that Joshua and Caleb had, the two spies, when they stood up and said these words. And I quote, Numbers 14, they said, The land we spied out is exceedingly good. The Lord will lead us into that land, and he will give it to us. But do not be afraid of the people of the land, for we will swallow them up. Their protection is gone, for the Lord is with us. I believe that in their mind they were thinking, hey, if God was faithful enough to let us walk out of Egypt after 430 years, carrying the bones of Joseph with us, then why in the world should we doubt God now? Let's go ahead and let God finish the job.
That's what he's going to do. But here's the point I want you to get today. The point is, what did God give these Israelites to sustain them as they suffered slavery in Egypt for 400 years? What did God give these Israelites to sustain them as they wandered in the wilderness for 40 years before they got to the promised land? Well, in both cases, God gave them the same thing. He gave them himself and his promises and his unchanging, unfailing, eternal faithfulness.
And that's what God gave them to hold on to. Friends, what I want us in the 21st century to understand as followers of Christ, is that when we are facing tough and confusing circumstances in our lives, when we feel like we're wandering out in the wilderness, when we feel like we're suffering under the thumb of some Pharaoh who won't turn us loose against whom we're powerless, I want us to understand that God offers us the exact same thing that he offered those Israelites. As a source of comfort and strength and hope and security, he offers us himself to hold on to, and his promises to hold on to, and his unfailing and eternal faithfulness.
This is what God says we need to hold on to. Now let's close today by making sure that we understand what we mean when we say God is faithful. To be faithful means to be true to one's word at all costs. To be faithful means that you promise something to somebody and nothing is going to stop you from keeping that promise. And when God in the Bible is declared to us over and over again to be faithful, what the Bible is saying is that we can count on God. The Bible is saying that everything God has promised us, we can count on him that he will do it. The Bible is telling us that when everyone else in the world lets us down, God will still be there for us, unfailing as ever.
The Bible is trying to tell us that God is like Lassie, or rather, Lassie is like God. And the coolest part of this whole thing, for me, is when I stop and realize where the faithfulness of God comes from. Friends, the faithfulness of God comes directly from the character of God as Almighty God.
You say, I don't understand, what's the big point? Well the big point is, if the faithfulness of God was based in something God did, then God could always decide that he was not going to do that. But if the faithfulness of God is based in who God is, then it can never change, because God's not going to change.
Do you understand the difference? And listen, sometimes people are unfaithful to us because they just have no moral fabric. They just lie.
Well, the great thing about God is that in his character, God is holy, he can never ever lie or deceive. So if he promises us something, we can take that to the bank. Some people, secondly, are unfaithful to us because they make commitments quickly. A knee-jerk commitment. And then later they change their mind, you know, and they wish they hadn't done it.
And so they withdraw. But friends, the Bible says that in his character, God is immutable, which means God is not subject to change. God never makes knee-jerk decisions. God never changes his mind about what he's said or done. And that's wonderful, because that means God never reneges on a promise. And finally, some people are unfaithful to us on occasion because even though they're sincere as they can be in what they promise, their power is limited.
I mean, they just can't do what they promised you they were going to do, you know? But God is omnipotent, my friends, which means his power knows no limits. And so, think about this. Because in his character, God is holy. Because in his character, God is immutable. Because in his character, God is omnipotent. Therefore, God in his character must be faithful.
He can never be any other way. And we as human beings, we may blow hot and cold, we may be faithless as times, but God's faithfulness is from everlasting to everlasting. I love what 2 Timothy 2 says. It says, even if we are faithless, God remains faithful.
Why? Because God cannot deny who he is. And folks, the more deeply we understand, as followers of Christ, who God is, the more certain we can be that God must and always will be faithful to everything he said. He cannot deny the very character of what he is. And faithful is part of the character of what he is.
Now, I don't know about you, but I'm sure glad I got a... I need a God like this. I'm glad I got a God like this. A God whose faithfulness doesn't depend on my performance. Because I'll tell you, I go out of my house every morning and I say, Now Lord, to the best of my ability today, and with the help of your spirit today, I'm going to be 100% faithful to you today.
That's how I leave the home. When I come back, at the end of the day, I got to sit down before God and say, Well, you know, honestly, Lord, I wasn't all... I was kind of a little bit faithless to you in what I said over here today. And I was kind of faithless to you in what I did over here today. And I was faithless to you in what I thought over there today. And, you know, Lord, when it really comes to my faithfulness today, I'd give myself maybe a C+.
Some days I have better days and some days I have worse days. I'm so glad that no matter what I come back in the house having to tell God I was faithless about, God doesn't change. He's just as faithful as when I walked out the house in the morning. Because His faithfulness does not go up and down based on my performance.
His faithfulness is settled forever in Heaven because it's part of His character. And that's good news for me. I hope that's good news for you. You know, many of you know that I have a disabled little girl, severely so, named Jill. And in the years when things were the worst with Jill, in the darkest days that Brenda and I faced with her, days when she was having seizures constantly, days when she was in and out of the hospital and we would take turns spending the night there sleeping in a chair, going home and relieving each other to go get a shower, in the days when we were getting no sleep, literally for years, because Jill was up every night having seizures, back then when we felt like we were failing our three boys because we were so engrossed in taking care of Jill.
I mean, we just didn't have enough time for them as they were growing up. You know, it got to the place during those days, my friends, where every source of human security, every source of human comfort, every source of human hope and strength became inadequate. And I remember one time, exhausted, totally exhausted, I collapsed on my knees in my study, and I said, Lord, in despair, I said, Lord, I have nothing left to hold on to but you.
Nothing. And you know, it was really interesting in that moment what the Lord said back to me. He said, well, Lon, that's all you need.
That's all you need. He said, I'm going to be faithful to you, just like I was faithful to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, the Israelites in Egypt. I'm not going to explain to you ahead of time what I'm going to do, but I am going to promise you that I will be faithful to you through this entire ordeal, faithful to sustain you in it, faithful to see you through it.
And folks, I am here 14 years later. I stand before you today, and I declare to you with every fiber of my being that God kept his word to us. God was faithful to me. He was faithful to my wife. He's been faithful to my daughter. He was faithful to all three of my boys growing up in the middle of this. God did everything he said he would do in the Word of God. But why should that surprise us? That should come as no surprise. Friends, as God, God cannot be any other way.
He has to be this way. And maybe some of you here today are going through some really, really tough times. Maybe with your children, or with your marriage, or with your health, or with your job, or with your relatives, or with your boss, or with your friends, and maybe you feel like God is all you've got left to hold on to.
Well, I'm here to tell you that that's okay. Because God will be faithful to you just like he was to Brendan, me, and my family. God will be faithful to you just like he was to the Israelites in Egypt. God will be faithful to you like he's been for tens of thousands of followers of Christ down through the ages. Friends, do not be afraid to throw yourself 100% on God.
Do not be afraid to do that. Let him be the total source of your hope, and your comfort, and your strength, and your hope, because he can handle it. He can handle it. And he invites you to do this. He says, 1 Peter 5-7, Cast all of your cares on me. Come on, I can handle it. Bring them all and throw them on me, because I care about you.
I really do. And I'm omnipotent, and I'm unchanging, and I'm holy, and I'm faithful, so you can count on me. I love what Charles Stanley said. Charles Stanley said, and I quote, Jesus is all we need, but we never learn that Jesus is all we need until Jesus is all we got.
Interesting, huh? And you know, if God's taking you to a place where Jesus is all you got, hey, don't let that bother you. Jesus wants to teach you something. He wants to teach you that Jesus is all you need, because that's all Joseph needed. Friends, I want to tell you, Joseph had no hesitation in leaving his bones in Egypt.
You know why? Because he knew his bones were going to the Promised Land someday. He knew that it had to be that way, because God had to be true to his promises, because otherwise he'd stop being God. And I want you to know that God is going to do that for you. I want you to know God so deeply in your life that you can walk by faith like Joseph did, with utter and absolute certainty that God will be faithful to you.
He may not explain to you ahead of time what he's going to do, but he will keep every promise he made you. And if you know God deeply enough, and sometimes God's got to take us to where he's all we've got to teach us this, if we know God deeply enough, we can leave our bones wherever God asks us to leave them, because we know God's going to keep his promise. My friends, don't be afraid to make God everything you got, because I'm here to tell you, our faithful God is everything you need.
Let's pray. Lord Jesus, you know we live in a tough world. I mean, life's hard. And there are times in life where we reach the end of what this world and its things can do for us. We get to the place where we have nothing but you, Lord, as followers of Christ, and honestly, that's a great place to be, because we learn something when we get there. We learn Jesus is all we needed anyway. So Father, for the many people here, like me, who are facing difficult times every day in their life, trials that stretch us, Father, I pray that you would remind us today that you are faithful. You cannot be any other way, and that you can handle the full weight of our problems, our difficulties, and our tragedies. Lord, help us to lean on you with everything we've got, to cast our cares on you as our faithful God, because you care for us. And we pray these things in Jesus' name. As God's people said, amen. Amen.
