Don’t get in the way of God’s Salvation!
Last week we were reflecting on the importance of memory – and of remembering specifically what God has done for us. God told His people to remember what He had done for them in the Passover - saving those who believed that He would do what He said He would do. Those who believed and chose to do what He told them to do were ‘passed over’ when God destroyed all the first born in Egypt. And the Jews still keep the celebration of the Passover as the supreme evidence of God’s mercy.
Sometimes we forget that God is God, and what that means. As well as being merciful, He always tells the truth. The problem is, we don’t always hear it. I wonder how you feel when you tell the truth and someone doesn’t believe you? I had a friend once – or rather, someone I believed to be a friend. She believed something about me that wasn’t true. One day she asked me about it, and I told her the truth. She seemed to take it in, but the next time I saw her, she repeated what she still obviously believed to be true about me that wasn’t. I corrected her again. This time I could tell that she did not believe me. And yet, I was telling the truth! What do you suppose that did to our relationship? We were not in agreement. I could not get through to her. If she could not believe me when I was telling the truth, we had no basis for relationship. Sadly, we have been unable to get beyond the superficial level in our relationship. I feel betrayed because she is unable to believe the truth about who I really am. I feel that it is unjust of her. And after trying to set her right twice, I have given up!
That is how God must have felt when He sent Moses to tell Pharaoh what would happen if Pharaoh did not let the Israelites go. After 400 years, God’s patience with the treatment that His chosen people were receiving was running short, and he was going to do something about it. But Pharaoh did not believe Him. Over and over he did not believe Him. There wasn’t a shred of relationship between God and Pharaoh, because God was telling the truth but Pharaoh could not get it through his head. I suspect there was a self-serving reason why He did not want to believe God. God certainly has more patience than I do! Ten times He warned Pharaoh of what would happen if he did not release the Israelites from slavery. And ten times it happened just as God said it would – blood, frogs, gnats, flies, death of Egypt’s livestock, boils, hail, locusts, darkness and death of the firstborn - and still Pharaoh chose not to listen, hear the truth, believe it and act upon it. And he and his men paid for that mistake with their lives.
The moral is – Don’t get in the way of God’s salvation – or else…!! God wants all people to be saved. If not, He would not have worn His patience thin warning Pharaoh, and begging him to ‘let His people go’. When He has decided to free people, to work in justice on their behalf, those who do not believe will get run over. It’s like a train that is following a track. God has a plan to save people. If we get in the way when the train gets going – i.e. if we try to stop God fulfilling His plan - we are going to get run over! So it’s either get on or stay out of the way, but whatever you do don’t try to prevent God doing what He says He will do, because we will find ourselves fighting the creator Himself.
God is taking all of us to a place where we can worship Him freely. In the Old Testament, it’s put most clearly in Exodus 6.6. God says:
I am the Lord – That legitimates His claim on our lives
I will bring you out – He will lead us
I will free you – He will release us from whatever holds us captive
I will redeem you – This is the biggy! Whatever payment we should make for our release from slavery (that is whatever we are bound by), God will pay it Himself. He describes HOW He will do it
· With an outstretched arm – with all His power
· With might acts of judgement – with all His justice
And He is not just taking us out of one life! He is releasing us ‘to’ another, much better, life. The end of the verse says, ‘And I will bring you to the land.’ That was His promise to those who believed Him then. The land was a place where the Israelites would be able to worship God freely. When God releases people today, it is still with the same purpose – so that they will be able to worship the only living God freely, and in that way to live life in all its abundance (John 10.10).
God is amazingly inclusive. The term ‘apiru’ that is translated ‘Hebrew’ is a general name in the Old Testament for people who were working for the Egyptians. So it is possible that there were many different peoples united in the Exodus. They would have been a motley crowd as they left Egypt. But what they had in common was:
· common experience of and consequent worship of God
· common background in slavery to Egyptians
· common leader in Moses
· division into clans – for some of them, by adoption, which was always as binding in the Old Testament as blood relationship
Pharaoh and his army realised too late that God was God. Just before the sea flooded over the Egyptians and drowned them, we are told that ‘the wheels of their chariots came off’, and too late, they exclaimed, ‘Let’s get away from the Israelites! The Lord is fighting for them against Egypt!’ I hope none of us ever have that experience – of not listening to God, and suddenly realising – too late – that God is not on our side.
The result, among the Israelites, was that the people:
· Feared God – because they finally had an inkling of who He really was
· Put their trust in Him – because they realised that He always spoke the truth
· And put their trust in Moses His servant – because Moses listened to God and did as he was told (most of the time!)
TODAY, we can be thankful that:
· God speaks to us
· God does nothing without letting it be known to us
BUT He is to be feared! HE IS GOD!!! We need to listen and go along with Him – for our own good!
History would have been different if Egypt had listened…
Canticles, or songs in scripture, are always responses to God’s wonderful saving acts. The most famous is the Magnificat in Luke’s Gospel, which is Mary’s response at ‘believing that what the Lord had said to her would be accomplished' (Luke 1.45) when the birth of Jesus was foretold. I want to do the canticle associated with Exodus 14 antiphonally now. It can be found in Exodus 15:1-13 and v.21.
The Gospel reading for today has a warning that matches the warning in Exodus, in that it also has to do with God’s salvation, which again is based on his merciful and just character. The warning is, ‘Forgive, or else…!!
In v.35 of Matthew 18, we are told, ‘This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive one another from your heart.’ Last week I mentioned the prayer that never fails – ‘Thy will be done’ – which we pray every time we say the Lord’s prayer. We also pray ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ By doing that, we are playing our part in God’s salvation – we are releasing others from their debt to us, and in so doing releasing ourselves from the debt that we have inevitably incurred with God. And the warning still stands – ‘Do not get in the way of God’s salvation!’
A merciful God will judge the unmerciful in the same way that the master in the parable treated the unmerciful servant. We are created in God’s image to be like Him in every way, and by being like Him, to stay in close and intimate relationship with Him. God is always merciful – as we say in the Eucharistic prayer, ‘His nature is always to have mercy’. If we are not merciful we make a travesty of what it means to be made in His image. And in the scripture it says, ‘When we see Him, we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is.’ In the meantime, let’s remember the reading from Romans 14 and not judge others. The time for judgement is coming, - after the time for choosing salvation in Jesus Christ is complete - and then ‘Every knee will bow…[and] every tongue will confess to God.’ In the meantime, let’s be kind to one another! That way we will NOT get in the way of God’s salvation. AMEN.