As we wrap up our study of the Book of the Covenant, God continues to give His people guidance on how represent Him rightly to each other and the surrounding nations. This final study touches on issues like priority, enemies, and worship.
Transcription (automatically-generated):
Today, we're going to be wrapping up our study of the Book of the Covenant, a collection of civil laws that God gave to his people, the Israelites, to instruct them in how he wanted them to relate to him and each other.
These laws expanded upon the Ten Commandments by helping Israel apply the Ten Commandments to everyday life so that Israel would represent God accurately to each other and the surrounding nations of nonbelievers.
And as we rejoin our text in the back half of Exodus, chapter 23, verse two, God is addressing how his people are to conduct themselves in court cases and legal hearings.
So let's jump in God's says, nor shall you testify in a dispute so as to turn aside after many to pervert justice.
Speaking of legal situations, specifically after telling his people not to follow the crowd when the crowd is doing evil, the Lord tells his people that they need to tell the truth in court.
No matter what the crowd is doing. Don't help the crowd frame an innocent man.
Don't lie so that you can help convict a man even if you believe he's guilty.
Don't refuse to testify because you fear the crowd or crave their approval. Tell the truth in court no matter what. As we found again and again, God expects his people to be truth tellers, and we all still experience the type of circumstances that caused God to create this law.
We all find ourselves in situations where the social group that were a part of being at work, at school, at the moms group, wherever, is engaging in conversation that we know is not fully true. It could be gossip, it could be unproven accusations. It could be a viewpoint that goes against God and the Bible.
And we feel that temptation to participate and join with the crowd because we feel that social pressure.
We're tempted to join in laughing at a person, gossiping about them or agreeing with those unproven accusations, we're tempted to act as though we agree with a viewpoint that we know Jesus does not.
But the Lord says, don't follow the crowd. Follow me, follow me. Verse 8 three.
You shall not show partiality to a poor man in his dispute. Now, this is interesting because God says, listen, just because the guy bringing the lawsuit against the giant corporation happens to be poor does not mean that you should favor him. Don't give people legal sympathy because they're poor and don't deny people a fair trial simply because they're wealthy. Let there be justice for everybody.
Justice in God's society is not to be swayed in either direction due to the socioeconomic status of a person. Justice is to be blind when it comes to socioeconomic status. This is the concept famously depicted in the late Middle Ages statue, commonly known as Lady Justice, blindfolded, holding scales in one hand and a sword in the other. The Lord is even clearer about this idea in Leviticus 1915, where Israel is instructed You shall do no injustice in judgment. You shall not be partial to the poor nor honor the person of the mighty.
In righteousness, you shall judge your neighbor this verse is on your outlines, and I want you to underline that word.
Righteousness in righteousness. God says you shall judge your neighbor and I want you to notice something in that verse.
God directly links justice with righteousness. In fact, God says that justice is righteousness.
I point that out to make sure that we all understand that part of God's character, part of God's goodness, his perfection, and indeed his love is his justice.
God's justice is intrinsic to his ontology. It's an unsupportable part of who he is.
Why does sin have to be paid for? Why can't it just be forgiven and forgotten without consequences? Why does hell exist? Why does God have to judge people? Why will God pour out his wrath on the Earth in the coming tribulation time period? The answers to all of these questions are tied up in understanding this concept that justice is righteousness and God is righteous. We want justice for everyone who fails to meet our level of righteousness, don't we? But we want Grace for ourselves, we want the murderer and the abuser and the exploiter to experience justice because they failed to meet our standard of righteousness.
And we feel that way because we're made in the image of God. God feels the same way. We have that desire for justice that God has to. We just have a different level of righteousness. So we have a different standard of justice. Now, think about God's level of righteousness, its perfection, and you know, who fails to meet God's standard of righteousness then. Everyone, everyone and God has just as much right to demand justice for those who fail to meet his level of righteousness as we do for those in our society who fail to meet our collective level of righteousness.
When God is the standard and he is the standard, the Bible states the obvious.
There's none righteous. No, not one. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. But the gospel declares that God found a way, a glorious, incredible, miraculous way to do justice. But still save us. Justice was done, but it was done to Jesus in our place so that righteousness and justice could be satisfied and met, but we would experience grace, praise God for that. Would you make a note of this?
God's justice is part of God's righteousness. God's justice is part of God's righteousness.
We can apply this principle of not showing favoritism to the church today. In fact, our brother James wrote this.
He said, My brethren do not hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of Glory, with partiality for if there should come into your assembly, into your church, a man with gold rings in fine apparel.
And there should also come in a poor man in filthy clothes. And you pay attention to the one wearing the fine clothes and say to him, Oh, you sit here in a good place and say to the poor man, you stand there or sit here at my footstool.
Have you not shown partiality among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? In the church. Everyone is equal, everyone is a sinner saved by grace, everyone is a son or daughter of the king. We're not to treat people differently in the church because of their socioeconomic status.
Paul talked about the reason for equality in the church when he wrote to the Galatians believers and said, For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There's neither Jew nor Greek.
There is neither slave nor free.
There is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham seed and heirs according to the promise. So write this down.
The Gospel demands. The Gospel demands genuine equality in the Church. The Gospel demands genuine equality in the Church.
The Gospel removes anything that we might think we have to boast about.
And the gospel reveals that we all need Jesus, we're all saved by Jesus, we're all adopted into the family of God through Jesus.
Now God gets into a challenging subject verse 8 for, oh, man, if you meet your enemies xox or his donkey going astray, you shall surely bring it back to him again. If you see the donkey of one who hates you lying under its burden and you would refrain from helping it, you shall surely help him with it.
So if you stumble upon your enemies lost property, you're to return it to him. If you come across your enemies property and see that it's in danger of being damaged or destroyed, you're to help protect it.
Yikes, remember, again, that that this is talking about Israeli society, everyone's a believer, but you might still have enemies. You can understand this. Perhaps it's a man who was willing to lie in court and you were required to take him at his word.
Perhaps he falsely swore an oath in front of the judges and took advantage of you. Perhaps you had a business arrangement that went south. There are a million ways that a person could have made an enemy, even in the family of Israel. And yet here once again, we see that in God's design for society, you don't get to say, well, that's not my problem. This is karma just working itself out. And there are two reasons that in God society, you don't get to say that's not my problem when it comes to another person.
Firstly, everyone's an image bearer of God. Everyone is an image bearer of God and is therefore worthy of honor. They're valuable. Secondly, practically, society works best.
It just does when we model the famous golden rule revealed by Jesus, whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them. And some of you may know that this rule existed up to this point in philosophy, but it was always in the in the active tense. So the rule was always don't do to anyone what you don't want them to do to you.
Jesus was the first person in history to say, no, you need to actively do to other people what you would want them to do for you. It's the principle revealed again in the parable of the Good Samaritan that doing good is not just refraining from doing evil to people. Doing good is about doing actively for others what you would want them to do to you if you were in the same situation and it's obvious what you would want someone to do if they found your lost property.
It's obvious what you would want someone else to do if they saw your property in danger of destruction. God's laws for society are so wonderful and wise because they provide individual freedom. But not at the expense of neglecting your neighbor or your community. A wonderful practical reality of these laws that I don't think is coincidental is that they would have created opportunities for broken relationships to be restored.
Think about this. Two people might might hate each other, but when one of them protects the other's property or brings back their lost property. There's an opportunity to serve, there's an opportunity to express gratitude, there's an opportunity to interact and for for some of these walls to come down, there's an opportunity for a restored relationship sometimes when words are not enough to repair a broken relationship.
All you can do is serve them when the opportunity presents itself and wait for the Lord to do a work in their heart to repair that relationship. In the church, this command gets even more extreme because not only are we commanded to love and serve and honor each other, we're commanded to forgive each other. But we're not commanded to do this only in the church, we're commanded to forgive anybody who wrongs us. In fact, Jesus got so radical in his teaching on this issue that he said, love your enemies, bless those who curse.
You do good to those who hate you and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you that you may be sons of your father in heaven.
That's heavy. It really is, and the reason Jesus says this. Is because praying for your enemies and serving them changes your heart, it changes your heart, it may change their heart more, it may not.
But that's not the point for believers.
Jesus gave this command because he wants the hearts of his followers to remain free from bitterness because we cannot rightly represent our heavenly father. If we're walking around with a heart that's full of bitterness, we can't do it.
We represent our Heavenly Father rightly when we do the things that he does.
And what if God do? Well, he loved us. When we were his enemies. The Bible says while we were still sinners, Christ died for us, what did God do while we were still cursing him? He blessed us with Jesus. When we hated him. He did good to us when we spitefully used and persecuted Jesus, he prayed for us. And Jesus did all that as a man, and that's why he has the credibility to call us to represent our heavenly father by doing good to those who have not done good to us.
Verse 8 six, the Lord says, you shall not pervert the judgment of your poor in his disp, so Verse 8 three told us not to favor the poor in court. Verse 8 six tells us the other side don't mistreat the poor in court. Do justice, be fair, be equitable. Deal in the truth. Verse 8 seven. Underlying this, keep yourself far from a false smatter. Keep yourself far from a false matter.
The believer is to have nothing to do with any situation that involves defrauding a person in any way.
We are to literally say I can't have anything to do with this. Someone says to you. Hey, have you heard there's this new government program that's giving payouts because of covid-19 and if you answer the questions in the online forum like this, because these are the answers, they want to send you free money. You get checks in the mail. If it involves any type of deception, big or small. If it involves misrepresenting the truth in any way.
You're to have nothing to do with it. It doesn't matter if everybody else is doing it, it doesn't matter.
You're not everybody else. You're a child of God and you represent him. And now God speaks a word to those in legal authority, those who are involved in the society's justice system, judges in Israel's day in Verse 8 and he says you shall take no bribe for a bribe, blinds the discerning and perverts the words of the righteous.
Satan tries to bribe us all the time, doesn't he, with the pleasures of sin? We know the truth. We know what God's word says, but when we take that bribe, listen to what happens. The discerning become blind and the righteous speak perverse words.
These are sobering concepts because they're so true when I give in to sin over and over again and and when I reject the spirits conviction and I reject the spirit's invitation to repent, I begin to tune out the spirit and inevitably I begin to lose my discernment.
My judgment suffers and it becomes easier and easier to believe the lies of the enemy.
It becomes easier to sin in other areas of my life as I lose my my grip on the truth because I rejected it so many times.
Never forget sin affects us deeply, deeply, and Satan's temptation of the pleasures of sin is a bribe that damages our discernment and causes us to say things that we never normally would if we were thinking clearly. Verse 8 nine, also, you shall not oppress a stranger, a sojourner for, you know, the heart of a stranger because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
This is a favorite verse of Christians who are passionate about social justice, and they will quote this verse, among others, to back up their advocacy for immigrants, legal or otherwise. And that's really a separate discussion. And I need to be clear that it is not the context that this law is speaking to at this time. In Israel, generally, the only way a stranger would end up permanently among the people of Israel was if that person had made the choice to join the nation of Israel.
That would mean committing to worship and serve your way and your way, only it would mean taking the mark of circumcision for men, and it would mean committing to live by these laws that God had given to the nation of Israel.
You could not simply move into the nation of Israel and do your own thing.
If you wanted to live among the Hebrews, you had to become a Hebrew. That's the context of this verse.
The only way to join Israel was total assimilation.
There was no concept in the nation of Israel of I want to join Israel, but I want to keep practicing my own culture, my own religion, my own values. That wasn't an option.
That's why the present day parallel for this command is once again, it's not our society, it's the church. Similarly to the nation of Israel, the only way to really join the church is to become a Christian, a disciple of Jesus. You cannot join the church, you cannot follow Jesus. You cannot become a Christian and say, but I want to continue practicing my cultural beliefs even when they're contrary to scripture.
I want to hold on to some personal spiritual views I have that aren't biblical.
And I want to keep some values that I hold personally that don't line up with the teachings of scripture. That's not an option if you want to join the church.
If Jesus is to be our God, it means he calls the shots on all of those things.
He gets all of us. He becomes our master.
He becomes our lord.
When you join the Church of Jesus Christ, the church is to welcome you as a brother or sister, no matter what. You're past your socioeconomic status, your ethnicity, none of that stuff is to matter in the church. It's to be Galatians three 28. Again, there is neither Jew nor Greek. There's neither slave nor free.
There is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
We've given up our old identities and we've embraced a new identity as a child of God.
We're part of the church now. That's the context for us as the church, where to welcome anyone and everyone who wants to join us in following Jesus.
And the Lord says that when we find that hard to do, when we find the the gaps so big that we don't know how to relate to a person we are to remember that we too were once on the outside.
We, too, were once slaves to sin. And we know how hard that is. We know how precious it is to to be welcomed into a family of the faith. We know what it's like to be a new believer. We know how difficult those early stages can be. You know, the heart of a stranger because you were strangers in the land of Egypt. So would you write this down the churches to care for new believers with empathy? By remembering that we were all once new believers, the church has to care for new believers with empathy by remembering that we were all once new believers.
And to be real practical, make sure that you're being one who is welcoming to people who join our fellowship when God Rock and New Hope are able to get together in person again for church services, make sure that you're doing this, that you're welcoming people in the way that you would want to be welcomed in.
When you were first joining the church and the family of faith, remember how you felt when you first started going to church and you were wondering, how do I get to know people?
What's this worship business? Why are we doing karaoke suddenly?
How how come people are just yelling out Bible references and everybody knows where to go in their Bible and I don't know where to go or what to do.
Remember what that was like and be welcoming. Invite people to your home group. Ask them how they found out about the church. Ask them about their lives, what they do, how they ended up here. And when we're allowed to grab coffee and meals together again, do that, go out for lunch with a person, grab coffee with them, invite them to join you after church for dinner, buy them dinner.
Welcome that person in. Let's move on to Verse 8 10, the lord says, six years you shall so your land and gather in its produce, but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow that the poor of your people may eat. Now, it was it's unknown to historians whether the seventh year was a fixed rotation of years or whether that seven year cycle began whenever you started working a field.
There's a similar debate regarding the seven year tenure of slaves in Israel.
There's some good evidence that regarding agricultural fields, what farmers would do because of this law is they would divide their land into seven sections and then they would rest one section on a rotating basis every seven years.
So this would mean that every year one seventh of a farmer's land would be left to fallow and that field would provide enough for the poor of Israel, as well as allowing allowing the biological system in the area to replenish the soil, the animals, the insects, all those good things. So so one seventh of all agricultural land would be available to the poor because it would still produce a crop. The farmer was just to leave it alone, but the poor could go in and pick it and harvest that.
And so they would always be this availability of food for the poor to those who own the fields. God was saying there are more important things than getting another one seventh of yield from your fields.
God was saying, I will take care of you, I will bless you.
I will provide for you as you honor me and my desire to care for the poor among you. There are so many lessons in that for for you career driven folks, God says what's best for you and your family is not always trying to get a little bit further ahead in your career or in your business, earn a little bit more money.
Sometimes what's best is slowing down. Even when those in the surrounding culture don't. Does God want your career in business to prosper? Absolutely. But listen. Not at the expense of your health. Not at the expense of your marriage or your children or your relationship with him. God wants what's best for you. He goes on and he says, and what they the poor leave, the beasts of the field may eat. And so, as we said, this is just good biology.
This would allow the ecosystem to thrive and replenish in that area every seven years. And it's been scientifically proven that this is the best system for sustainable farming is to let the land rest every seven years.
Then God says in like manner, you shall do with your vineyard and your olive grove. Six days you shall do your work. And on the seventh day you shall rest that your ox and your donkey may rest and the sun of your female servant in the stranger may be refreshed.
Well, I don't need to take a Sabbath, Jeff, I don't need the rest. Listen, God has put people in your sphere of influence, and if you don't take a Sabbath, they won't get one either. That if you won't take a Sabbath, mom probably won't get one either. It's not just about you.
It's about the community that God has placed around you and listen, people in general need rest to be healthy. Your employees need to rest, your employees, children need to rest with their family, the person who just joined your community needs to rest, your spouse needs to rest. It's not just about you and what you think you need. You're part of a community. Make a note of this. God designed rest to be part of the rhythm of his creation.
God designed rest to be part of the rhythm of his creation.
We covered the Sabbath in much greater detail when we were going through the Ten Commandments earlier in our Exodus study. And so I'm not going to rehash all of that information in this message. So if you missed it, go back and listen to it or watch it on our website. The link is on your outline, Verse 8 13.
And in all that I've said to you, be circumspect. So take these laws seriously, be diligent to follow them and make no mention of the name of other gods, nor let it be heard from your mouth. That's the first of the Ten Commandments being referenced again, no other gods. And as we've said already, this is still at the heart of what it means to follow Jesus. It's a commitment to have him as your God and him alone.
And if you have other gods in your life right now, get rid of them.
Get rid of them. Were to follow Jesus alone.
Now, God Institute's three annual feasts for Israel, verse 14.
He says three times you shall keep a feast to me.
In the year you shall keep the feast of unleavened bread. You shall eat unleavened bread seven days as I command you at the time appointed in the month of Abebe four in it you came out of Egypt. Then underline this. None shall appear before me empty.
None shall appear before me. Empty will come back to that and the feast of harvest.
The first fruits of your labors which you have sown in the field, and the feast of ingathering at the end of the year, when you have gathered in the fruit of your labors from the field.
Celebrating these three feasts would be compulsory if you were part of the nation of Israel.
The Feast of unleavened bread is is better known as the Feast of Passover.
It took place in March April, around the time of the barley harvest and the commemorated the night of the Passover, the final plague in Egypt, which led to Israel's freedom from captivity and slavery.
The Feast of Harvest is better known as the Feast of Pentecost. It took place in the spring at the beginning of the wheat harvest and would come to commemorate the giving of the law, including the Ten Commandments in the Book of the Covenant at Mount Sinai. And then finally, the Feast of Ingathering is better known as the Feast of Tabernacles, or the Feast of Booths. It took place in early autumn September October, and it marked the end of the agricultural year.
We're not going to get super deep into this in this message, but I do want to just make you aware of something about the feasts.
They have an incredible prophetic parallel in them with Bible prophecy.
And let me explain this to you. All of Israel's feasts point ahead prophetically to some future event. And this holds true even when the feasts are later expanded to seven in Leviticus. Twenty three for now, though, we'll just focus on these main three, the feast of unleavened bread.
Passover pointed ahead to our Passover lamb Jesus who was crucified as the sacrifice in our place on a Passover. You see, Jesus was the greater fulfillment of Passover.
Passover pointed ahead to Jesus, the feast of Harvest. Pentecost pointed ahead to the day when the Holy Spirit was given in Acts Chapter two on a Pentecost.
The giving of the Holy Spirit to the church was the fulfillment of the Feast of Pentecost. And then in the Jewish calendar we have we have a long summer before we reach that third feast, the feast of ingathering.
And that feast has not yet been fulfilled prophetically, but I believe it will be. Students of Bible prophecy believe that that long summer break between Pentecost represents the church age because Pentecost is when the church age begins in Acts Chapter two, and we're still living in the church age.
Now the church age will end at the Rapture.
So what then might that final feast be pointing ahead to? Well, let's take a quick look at just some of the evidence, firstly and most simply, what does God call the feast in Exodus 23?
He calls it the feast of ingathering, literally being gathered together. And when does this take place, when you have gathered in the fruit of your labors from the field, says the Lord, now what term do the New Testament writers use to describe the good works that we do for the Lord in the power of his spirit?
The New Testament writers refer to that as fruit.
And speaking of those who did not yet know him but would welcome the gospel message, Jesus told his disciples the harvest is truly plentiful, but the labourers are few.
You see, Jesus use the imagery that presented his followers as workers in a field, joining him in the task of bringing in a harvest of souls.
Our brother Paul tells us that there's a time coming when every person who's going to be part of the church will be part of the church, and that window of opportunity is going to close.
Paul calls that number, whatever it is, that number, when the church will be complete, the fullness of the gentiles. And so I want to suggest to you that this third prophetically unfulfilled feast points ahead to the future event known as the Rapture, when the church will be complete and the workers in the field will be gathered together by Jesus to feast with him in his father's house. And there's so much more that I could say about that.
We have to keep moving for us today.
These three feasts also show us the journey of the Christian life. The first thing that happens to us is our salvation, our deliverance from slavery to sin, our Passover experience.
And then we're to have our Pentecost experience when when the Holy Spirit comes upon us to empower us to live for Jesus as his witnesses and join him in the work of bringing in that harvest of souls.
And then we have that long summer, the rest of our earthly lives as a worker in the field, laboring for the Lord, working on that mission with him, of bringing in that harvest of souls into the church.
And then finally, one way or another, we are gathered to be with the Lord to celebrate and feast with him, to literally tabernacle with him. And so I had you underline the phrase in verse 15 that reads, None shall appear before me. Empty some of your thinking.
I know where this is going. Jeff is going to link this to tithing, but I'm not even though I could. The principle was this when God's people showed up to worship him and thank him for his provision for them, it required some planning. It required some preparation. God wanted his people to show up, ready to worship him, ready to bless him. It wasn't to be haphazard or lackadaisical. It was to be intentional.
May the Lord help us to remember that just because we're normally able to gather together as God's people with great ease today.
God is not less worthy of reverence and all than he was back then, he's the same God, and I believe this principle still applies today. We should be showing up, ready for church, ready to worship God, ready to bless the Lord, ready to bless his people with a focused heart. We should be showing up, ready. When we gather for a service or for a home group, we should be showing up.
Hungry for the word, hungry for the presence of God. Even if we're tired, we should bring a determination to seek the Lord's presence that we might be refreshed and filled up once again with his spirit.
And let me challenge you as we're forced to do church online during covid-19 to have that same attitude and approach, don't turn on the TV 10 minutes into the service. Don't spend half the service browsing on your phone. Don't spend the whole first song in worship making snacks. Just because we can't meet in person right now. Don't appear before the Lord empty. Bring focus, bring expectation, bring a determination to worship Jesus, many of you will know what I'm talking about when I say how wonderful it is on those special nights when the church gathers and you can just feel that the people around you showed up hungry for the Lord.
They're not playing games. They're they're not bringing God. They're leftovers. They came with purpose. And they said, I'm going to meet with God tonight. You know how special those times can be, you can just feel it in the room and in reality, those times are how church should be all the time.
All the time.
And so as we prepare to wrap up this minute, this message in a minute and move into a time of worship, even now, I want to ask you to bring that attitude and that focus and that determination to the time of worship we're about to have determined in your heart now that you're going to bless God, that you're going to meet with the Lord, that you're not going to appear before a mighty.
Verse 8 17, three times in the year, all your mail shall appear before the Lord, so all able bodied Jewish men were required to celebrate these three feasts at the Tabernacle when they would build that and then later at the temple in Jerusalem.
Hence the modern day identity of these feasts as the three pilgrimage feasts.
Speaking of Passover, again, the Lord reiterates Exodus 12 eight to 10 when he says in verse 18, you shall not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leavened bread. Now in the Bible, what is leaven? Always a picture of sin.
It's always a picture of sin, and that's by God's design.
So what God is saying here, he was just saying, I don't want you to mix, leaven a picture of sin with the blood of the lamb, which is a picture of my son, Jesus, because Jesus was sinless. And that's what qualified him to be the perfect sacrifice that was acceptable as a substitute for all mankind. That's why the Passover lambs had to be without blemish. So to keep that picture clear, God says, listen, don't mix leaven, which is a picture of sin with the blood of the lamb, who is a picture of spotless perfection and holiness that pointed ahead to Jesus.
Then he says, Nor shall the fat of my sacrifice remain until morning. We've talked about this before the Passover lamb was to be eaten and one sitting to paint a picture of how Jesus is to be received. It's an all or nothing deal. It's not. I'll take a little bit of Jesus right now enough to alleviate my guilt, enough to help me get over this breakup. It's not that. It's not. I'll come back for more of Jesus later if I need him.
It's all of Jesus for all of you. That's the deal.
Verse 8 19, the first of the first fruits of your land you shall bring into the house of the Lord your God.
So the first crops, the first fruits or vegetables, the first offspring of your cattle, or to be offered to the Lord at his temple.
It was an acknowledgment of the reality that God was the one who would bless them with these things. They were not able to celebrate. They were not to celebrate the harvest itself. They were to celebrate the God who gave the harvest.
It was also an acknowledgment that in all things, honoring God is the most important thing. It's the most important thing. He deserves to be the priority. He's not to be honored last. He's to be honored first. He gets the best, not the leftovers.
And again, we see this principle that honoring God is more important than trying to get ahead in life a little bit. This feast and these commands reminded people that God could easily make up for their offerings by blessing their harvests with even more, but if God didn't do that, honoring him was still the most important thing.
And this is the heart of tithing. This is the heart of tithing. The purpose is still the same and the challenges are still the same today. But the heart is that God comes first. He's the priority.
He gets the first, he gets the best. So write this down. Following Jesus means he becomes the first priority in all things, the first priority in all things. Honoring him is what matters most. And then finally, thankfully, we get to end the Book of the Covenant on a really practical note that I think we can all apply to our lives.
You shall not boil a young goat in its mother's milk. Did you know that there are no cheeseburgers on the menu if you go to a McDonald's in Israel?
It's true. And it's because of this law culturally to this day, religious Jews do not mix dairy and meat, that's what they think this verse 8 means don't mix dairy and meat ever.
No cheeseburgers. That's not what this law is about, though. No, not even close. I'm going to spare you all of the academic backstory. I'm just going to give you the punchline.
The best scholarship available today tells us that this command was akin to saying you should not commit premature sacrifice of the contents of the womb. Even if we're talking about animals, God told Israel, there's a principle here, you're not supposed to kill a pregnant animal, you are not supposed to kill something in the womb. That's what the best scholarship tells us today.
This verse means and now you know the deal and so on that strange note, we conclude the Book of the Covenant.
We're going to get back into the gospel of Matthew next week. We're looking forward to that. Would you buy your head and close your eyes?
Let's pray together.
Father, thank you so much for your word and thank you for the wisdom of your laws and your commands.
And we've seen throughout the Book of the Covenant over and over again the truth that your ways are better.
So help us to live by them, Lord, that we might experience the blessings that you desire for us to have the blessings of relationship with you in relationship with others.
Father, help us to honor you rightly by making you the priority in all things.
And Father, we long for your son Jesus to come and to come quickly, to come soon. But until then. Help us to work faithfully in the field where you've placed us to join your son, Jesus, in the work of bringing in the harvest of souls that will make up the church, the bride of Christ help us to be faithful to that mission, Lord. And Lord, help us not to appear before you empty when we worship you.
Help us to bring a determination to bless you and father. I pray you would keep us focused while we're apart watching this online while we're not able to be together. Thank you for saving us. Thank you for putting your spirit in us and upon us. Thank you for giving us a hope and a future.
And we can't wait for that day when we are celebrating the feast of all feasts, the marriage supper of the lamb with your son Jesus and his church in your house. Father, we can't wait. We love you so much. It's in your precious name. We pray. Amen.