1027. Moses: A Servant Chosen and Equipped

Welcome to The Daily Platform from Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. Today on The Daily Platform, we're continuing a study series from Seminary Chapel called Old Testament Servants.

Today's speaker is Dr. Mark Minick, pastor of Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Greenville, South Carolina. I'd like to invite you to open your Bibles this morning to the 33rd chapter of the book of Exodus. There's a portion here that has a little bit of length to it, it's 11 verses, but I would like for us to carefully read it together this morning. Exodus chapter 33, and this is following the terrible event at the foot of Sinai when the people so defiled themselves in Moses' absence. Verse 1, Then the Lord spoke to Moses, Depart, go up from here you and the people whom you have brought up from the land of Egypt, to the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob saying, To your descendants I will give it. I will send an angel before you, and I will drive out the Canaanite, the Amorite, the Hittite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite. Go up to a land flowing with milk and honey, for I will not go up in your midst, because you are an obstinate people, and I might destroy you on the way. When the people heard this sad word, they went into mourning, and none of them put on his ornaments. For the Lord had said to Moses, Say to the sons of Israel, You are an obstinate people, should I go up in your midst for one moment I would destroy you.

Now therefore put off your ornaments from you, that I may know what I shall do with you. So the sons of Israel stripped themselves of their ornaments from Mount Horeb onward. Now Moses used to take the tent and pitch it outside the camp, a good distance from the camp, and he called it the tent of meeting. And everyone who sought the Lord would go out to the tent of meeting, which was outside the camp. And it came about whenever Moses went out to the tent, all the people would arise and stand, each at the entrance of his tent, and gaze after Moses until he entered the tent. Whenever Moses entered the tent, the pillar of cloud would descend and stand at the entrance of the tent. And the Lord would speak with Moses. All the people saw the pillar of cloud standing at the entrance of the tent. All the people would arise and worship, each at the entrance of his tent. Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, just as a man speaks to his friend.

When Moses returned to the camp, his servant Joshua the son of Nun, a young man, would not depart from the tent. I'd like to raise the question for our really earnest consideration this morning if we have anything like this in our lives at this time. You could put it in the words of the text and it's a little quaint to do it in this way, but do we have a tent of meeting?

Do you have a tent of meeting? I would like for us this morning to explore that, not in a fully expositional way, but using what we have here by way of context as well as example of Moses. What this is referring to is most certainly not the ark that later was constructed.

That's still to come. It will be a little bit confusing when you read Exodus because the tabernacle later on was also called the tent of meeting. But this was something that Moses set up that was not his residence tent. He wrecks this outside the camp and it's clearly some set apart designated small definable space to which he evidently frequently retired for no other purpose than to seek the face of God. Now that, when you stop for a moment and contemplate it, is surprising because if there was anyone on the earth at the time that you would assume did not need such a place or habit, it would be Moses.

Of all people on the earth, he is the individual whom God initiates fellowship and verbal revelation with regularly. It really does put in perspective the whole issue of whether or not it is critical for people to have such a place to which to retreat or whether the busyness of our schedules, the immensity of our responsibilities, the magnitude of what's been entrusted to us, if all of that really would argue for our being people who just learned to do our praying on the run. And in the midst, of course, of sermon preparation and for all of you who are in seminary right now, all that you do in getting ready for your classes and so much of it is right in the biblical text itself, it does raise that critical question as to the necessity of this kind of thing. What is it that Moses is thinking that would cause him to feel that he had to resort to a place like this regularly? Alexander White, the Scotch Presbyterian of more than 100 years ago, was dealing with our Lord's words in the Sermon on the Mount that you go into your closet and shut the door. And White said that of course you don't do that to try to shut God in.

It isn't that God isn't everywhere present, He is. But the point of that is that you do that in order to shut everything else out. Moses is living in the middle of a vast city of people, something like two million of them.

Just think of the noise of that. Think of the distraction of all of those individuals. What really Moses is doing here is what men and women through the centuries have really found to be a very necessary thing. It actually is the very busyness and the compression of all of that that argues for the squeezing out of your life into some place that has some distance to it from all that you are regularly required to do and give attention to. And you read the biographies and the journals of many of these people of the past who were very, very busy in ministry.

It's easy for us to argue from the busyness of our ministry, there's just no possibility of this, but some of those people who were the very busiest in church history saw the tremendous necessity of this. Spurgeon, in their last home up on a hill above London, south side of the Thames River, had a little place, I suppose we'd call it a gazebo, and it was back out on the lawn behind his home. And it was referred to by Spurgeon as out of this world. You may know something of the works of A.W. Tozer.

I'd like to highly recommend those to you. Tozer, as you may know, was pastor of the South Side Alliance Church in Chicago. He lived at a distance from the church, and he would get on the train in the morning and ride into the church, go to his study, which was behind the platform of the church, and then he would take off his very carefully pressed trousers with the sharp crease and put on a decrepit pair of old pants, he called his praying pants, and he would get down, literally prostrate, on the floor of his study and take out a little handkerchief and bury his nose in it so he didn't breathe in particles from the carpet, and he would just stretch out, and Tozer would refer to it sometimes as just gazing on God. I never read that account in his biography without having just a little bit of a smile. For the first time I ever read it, I think I probably just sort of chuckled at that.

But I think I really understand that, and you probably do too. Tozer was an extremely busy man. For his day, he was pastoring a large church in an immense city. He was editor of what was called the Alliance Weekly, wrote a weekly column for that. There were a lot of people in the Christian Missionary Alliance and other denominations as well who subscribed to the Alliance Weekly for no other reason than to be able to read Tozer's editorials every week. He was constantly in demand as a conference speaker.

And when Tozer began his first column in the Alliance Weekly, he entitled it Quantity or Quality. And he wrote, it will cost something to walk slow in the parade of the ages while excited men of time rush about confusing motion with progress. But it will pay in the long run, and the true Christian is not much interested in anything short of that. I think you'll find those kinds of testimonies right throughout the literature of the past that to this day is classic and still really moves with inspiration upon the hearts of Christian people. And it raises this question again, do we have such a tent of meeting? Whether it be a small room, a broom closet, you read of preachers and church planting, they're just so surrounded, they live in such a, maybe just a little single trailer of 500 square feet, three children, nowhere to get alone, they're getting in their car, they're driving to a park or a parking lot where they can face the side of a brick building just to have a space alone with the Lord.

Do we have such a tent of meeting in our lives? And that brings me to this, verses 1 through 5. The thing that's really remarkable in this instance is that this was a place whose very location testified to a very grievous situation. And you have it recorded here for us, and that is that the Lord was saying emphatically that He would no longer accompany these people.

Now folks, here is the real danger. There was a great possibility that the average Israelite would have never even known that. And the reason is because the Lord said, I'll send my angel and I will drive out all your adversaries. The Lord was telling Moses, this is going to be a completely successful conquest. It's all going to happen.

I just am not going to be with you anymore. I think there's a very great possibility that the average Israelite would have mistaken the outward success as an indication of God's pleasure and presence. But Moses considered this to be a truly terrible prospect. That the nation would experience success, but that its gross misbehavior before God had so offended him that in the very midst of all their material blessings and the advance of their conquest, they would be without His manifest presence and might never realize it. Folks, how do you measure the presence of the Lord? One of the surest ways is whether there is such a supernatural power being exerted in the midst of God's people that they leave off their sinning.

Apart from that, how would you know that the Holy One of Israel is present? What do we say of churches and individual lives when there is the appearance of a great deal going forward? But people are not being empowered to forsake sin and to grow in personal sanctification. And when their love of the world is at such a level that they are increasingly comfortable with the things of the culture, isn't the real sign of the Lord's power that there's a change in their appetites?

James is so emphatic about this. He who would be a friend of the world, he's talking about the worst part of any culture in any particular age, he who would be a friend of the world is the enemy of God. We cannot ever allow ourselves to become cozy with and comfortable with the culture if we want the presence of God. Moses erecting this tabernacle was really a visible display that something catastrophic is about to happen. Do we have a tent of meeting? People who are really hungry in their hearts for God and cannot be satisfied with anything else.

Do we have such a place that we're erecting and nourishing in our lives? When Moses did this, we're told in verses 7, 8, 9, there's a tremendous effect upon the people and I'd like to take us to that thirdly. Here's a place deliberately set aside for meeting with the Lord.

It's very location signified to a great disaster about to happen. But it's a place where Moses' practice was influential. The seventh verse tells us that the tent was also for the people. Last sentence of that verse, everyone who sought the Lord would go out to that tent.

Verses 8 and 9 inform us that Moses' own practice was observed by the people and it created a response in many of them of worshiping. They were moved toward the Lord in that way. And folks, this is for us when we go into the ministry, certainly one of the most critical and eternal effects. And that is that our own example over the years, and it takes years truly, it takes years for most people to develop a really rich, satisfying, devotional life. And I'm not talking about just the morning time or whatever time of day it is that we set aside for reading the Bible and praying and we're literally in a location. I'm talking about that just being basically the moment of recalibration that we carry with us right through the day. It takes years to develop that and don't be discouraged at this point in your life if you just find yourself struggling with consistency, getting difficult, really getting something from the Scripture when you read.

That is just the, that is the common experience of all of the Lord's even best people. But if you'll work at it, if you'll keep going at it, if you'll develop the habit, if you'll cry out to the Lord about it, if you'll complain to the Lord, if you'll tell the Lord, Lord I got up and I'm getting nothing, help me, please feed my soul, I've got to have something nourishing today, the Lord will hear your cry. And you will find that more and more there will be a consistency. And you'll get to the place really where having this in your life won't be something that you have to drive yourself to do. And it won't be a matter of feeling guilty because you don't. You'll get to the place where you can't live without it. You really will feel, like Job said, this is more than my necessary food. And those won't be just words to you, it'll be like, there's no question about this.

If I don't have this, I can't exist today. And when we take a ministry, and many of you will be doing that in the relatively near future, when we first take a ministry, even if it's just a little church plant with a few families, you will discover that there will be some, they won't be probably the majority, but there will be some who have a deep heart hunger for an enlarged and consistent experience of the Lord himself. They will be the people who are not just satisfied with having a church that's friendly, that welcomes visitors, that has activity going, that is aggressive evangelistically. There's something down in their own heart that is foremost of all, that all of those other things are basically the means to the end of. The end is knowing the Lord.

And when you find those people, one of your greatest ministries in that church, be it large or small, will be the nourishing and the fanning of that flame in the spirits of those God hungry people. And that kind of thing is infectious. And when you have, it doesn't take many, when you have just a few people, and they began to burn with that inside. And it typically is a very quiet thing.

It's not a big external explosion. It often is combined with a little bit of grief or melancholy. There's a humility to it. There's an awe and a reverence that these people carry with them. You see it often even in the way they handle a Bible, the way they hold a Bible, the respectfulness that they have about anything that is sacred in nature. And younger people in your congregation who really know the Lord and have God's hand on their life come to sense that, and they hunger for it themselves, and God develops it in them. This is a great calling that we have to be men and women of God and to stir that sacred ambition in the hearts of those to whom we minister. So that brings me to this last. What was Moses' own experience in this place?

The people are observing him going, what is happening there? Well, it's very apparent that one of the things taking place is what we have in the verses that we didn't read, verses 12 and following, and that is that Moses is interceding for these people, just like Daniel did and Ezra did and our Lord did in his high priestly prayer. But I want to call your attention just simply to this in the last verse that we read.

That's the eleventh verse. And that is that Moses experience was that the Lord spoke to him face to face. And yet if you continue on in this chapter, you have the account of Moses pleading with the Lord to show him his glory. And it's a remarkable thing that Moses is experiencing this kind of communion with God, a face to face fellowship, and it is not enough for Moses. Moses in the verses that follow is demonstrating that when you receive the Lord it makes you hungry for more of the Lord. And his plea is that God would do this for him.

It's a remarkable thing. Now folks, that's our need. That's my need. That's our need. We need the academic knowledge. We need to know how to exposit scripture. We need familiarity with all the good sources.

We need to keep up with good things that are being written today. But our great need is what we sing sometimes beyond the sacred page, I what? I seek the Lord. That's what Moses is wanting here. It isn't just a matter of him interceding for the people, and Lord give us your presence. Moses wants something personal that's unparalleled in history.

And he's bold enough to plead for it. And God does give him a recitation of his attributes. God proclaims.

He can't display visually, but he proclaims all those perfections that Moses is so hungry to know. That's the great need. George Whitefield had a little saying, first a saint, and then a scholar. It's a good one to put on a card. Put the card in your Bible, your Greek testament. Remind yourself of that often.

First a saint, and then a scholar. There's a subtle trap that we all face, and that is of thinking that because we're listening to lots of preaching, to the podcasts of people teaching, because we're blogging over theological issues, because we're preparing Sunday School lessons or sermons ourselves, the subtle trap is to think that we're really fellowshipping with the Lord and growing in grace when actually there may be very little of that going on. And again, we will know, you will know whether it's going on because you will start to think God's thoughts after him involuntarily. You will develop a distinctive recoiling from the things of this world. And there will be a homing instinct in you that grows stronger and stronger where the only place you feel safe truly, as a saint of old said, the only place I ever feel safe is at the mercy seat. And all day long, that's your refuge. That's to what you're fleeing to. That's what you're carrying with you. This is what caused Moses' face to shine when he came down from that mount. And to whatever extent it continued to, this was how it happened. So I want to leave you this morning with the greatest example of all.

I don't know whether you've ever noticed this. This first came to my attention in a little pastor's fellowship that we have here in the state. Way back about probably over 20 years ago, one of the men came. There were just five or six of us.

We have a little reading fellowship we meet every other month. And he opened up his Bible to the 50th chapter of Isaiah. And he said, men, who is this talking about? And we looked at the passage and it says this, the Lord God has given me the tongue of the learned, that I might know how to speak a word in season, a timely word to him who is weary. He wakeneth morning by morning. He wakeneth mine ear to hear as a disciple.

And his brother said, who is this talking about? And I don't know that any of us, though we'd all been in the ministry for some time, had ever really considered the passage. It's Isaiah chapter 50 verse 4. And you look at the next verse, the passage goes on and says, I was not disobedient. I didn't turn away.

I gave my back to the smiter. It's a messianic passage. Think of what's recorded in the gospels about the Lord wending his way up the side of the Galilean hills above the Sea of Gennesaret, Lake of Gennesaret, early in the morning before the crowds thronged him. And that's what he's doing. Listening to the Lord God as a disciple. That's what I want. That's what you want.

That's what we need. And that is what will make a real difference in our ministries in the future. Let's bow for prayer. Heavenly Father, thank you so much for the examples you record for our learning. Gracious Lord, take what we have considered briefly this morning and we ask that your Spirit would bring it back to our minds and that you would help us to probe it and meditatively to think on our ways. Lord, we ask that we might be able to turn our feet to these things in a way that truly changes our dispositions, our hungers, all of our affinities so that we truly are more and more changed into the image of your blessed Son. We ask in his precious name, Amen. You've been listening to a sermon preached in Seminary Chapel at Bob Jones University by Dr. Mark Minick, pastor of Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Greenville, South Carolina. Thanks again for listening. We look forward to the next time as we study God's Word together on The Daily Platform.