Today’s reading: Exodus 24; Galatians 2
Normally when I have thoughts on both passages, they are separate thoughts/posts, they just get put together because it’s one day’s reading, but today, Galatians 2 kind of finished my thoughts on Exodus 24.
What I couldn’t stop thinking about when I was reading Exodus 24 is how much I used to beg God to give me some kind of spiritual experience.
I don’t know if that sounds weird or not, but I thought it would help me spiritually. I knew that I wasn’t good enough to get to Heaven, but I really wanted to not end up condemned, but no matter how hard I tried to be better, I just kept sinning in worse and worse ways. I heard or read these stories though of people who supposedly had an angel appear to them, or who saw a vision of Heaven, or who had Jesus Himself show up, and then they went on to live great lives for God, and I thought maybe that was the missing piece. I just wasn’t convinced enough or something, but if an angel showed up and I saw something tangible, that would do it, a switch would be flipped somewhere, and I could live a good enough life to go to Heaven.
Spoiler alert: I never got my experience…
But, looking back, I can say with confidence that the experience I was looking for wouldn’t have helped. Sure maybe it would have left me riding a spiritual high for a week or two, but that would fade and my heart would be no different than it was before, and Exodus gives us such an incredibly damning picture of that.
There is no group of people in history who can claim a more significant or powerful spiritual experience than Israel at the moment we are encountering them in Exodus 24. They just had Yahweh rescue them by 10 miraculous plagues out of slavery in Egypt, then passed through the sea while the water stood as walls on either side of them, then saw God destroy Pharaoh’s entire pursuing army without them having to lift a single finger. So they have seen God work powerfully for them, but that’s not all! They need food, and every morning they come out of their tents and collect delicious and miraculously healthy manna off the ground, and they drink water that God has miraculously supplied for them. All this while they are following a giant pillar of cloud and fire, that is the presence of Yahweh in their midst, as it leads them to Mount Sinai. At the mountain they see the presence of God descend as a consuming fire atop the mountain, and the entire congregation hears God’s voice as He speaks to them out of the fire. Then Moses, Joshua, Aaron, his sons, and 70 others go up the mountain and share a covenant meal with the incarnate Yahweh Himself!!!
All of this is honestly just a ridiculously high bar in terms of direct spiritual experience. And yet, in a few chapters (sorry if this is a spoiler for you), the Israelites are going to turn away from Yahweh and have Aaron make a new god for them to worship because Moses is taking too long to come down the mountain.
Despite all that they have experienced, while they wake up each morning and eat the manna Yahweh gives them and drink the water He’s actively providing, even as they look up at the very presence of Yahweh Himself covering the mountain they are camped around, they have the audacity to ask Aaron to make them a new god. And despite all that, and despite himself have sat in the physical presence of Yahweh not 40 days prior, Aaron agrees and leads the people to worship a golden calf instead of the God literally present as a gigantic pillar of fire consuming the entire mountain next to him…
It’s so bad as to honestly seem comical if it wasn’t so serious.
How can they be in the position they are in, able even to just look at the mountain and see the presence of Yahweh manifested there, and still turn so easily away? It’s because their hearts have not been changed by the things they have seen, and this is why I can say with confidence that no such experience would have changed me either. We don’t need a spiritual high from a cool experience, we need a new heart, and that only comes through Christ.
At the end of Galatians 2 Paul says:
For if I rebuild what I tore down, I prove myself to be a transgressor. For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.
This is the root of it. I was trying to keep the Law. I was trying to live a life good enough to get to Heaven on my own, and that is frankly impossible. “If righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.”
God’s law, His moral standards, are not given to us to keep, but to show us just how far short of His standards we fall, and just how much we need Him to rescue us. And just as He stepped into history to redeem Israel from their captivity to Egypt through no power or effort of their own, so too has He stepped into history to redeem us from our captivity to sin through no power or effort of our own.
In Jesus, we are not just forgiven and told to go and be righteous from now on as we keep the law going forward. In Jesus, we are forgiven, brought into God’s family, and given an entirely new life. This is why Paul can say, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the son of God…”
A spiritual experience never would have empowered me to start living for God because I was spiritually dead. I didn’t need a visitation, I needed a new heart, and this is what God offers us in Christ by faith.
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