Seeing Jesus in Exodus 17

Spencer Davis | Exodus 17:8-16 | SWO17 Friday AM

You don’t have to search hard to find Jesus in Exodus. All of Exodus (and the Old Testament) points to Jesus! Jesus is the powerful God who saves His powerless people, to the uttermost. If we had to give one theme to the Old Testament, it would be people are powerless; God is powerful.

View Transcript: Seeing Jesus In Exodus

Exodus 17 is kind of a strange place to go when you’re talking about the cross, but we’ll get to the cross for sure. This story, like so many others, points right there, point to the cross. So, I want to go to a weird spot just to look at what God’s been doing throughout Scripture, pointing towards the cross. So, let me pray for us and we’ll jump in. Jesus, please guard my mouth, my mind, I pray that you speak to us through your spirit, in your name we pray, Amen. So y’all got like 24 hours left at camp, just sad, sad, sad, but it’s also exciting because man, the Lord’s done a lot this week already. I’m hearing stories about people getting saved and people who turned their lives over to the Lord, this is an exciting time for us when you guys leave.

It’s exciting for us because y’all are going home to make a difference like you’re going home to be different and make a difference in your churches and make a difference in your schools, and that for us is super exciting to think, Man, what can 500 students do? This is going to be awesome to see.

We’re praying this week is life-changing and it’s not over yet, so Exodus 17. Okay, let me set the stage for this. Hopefully, you guys are familiar with the story of the Exodus. Y’all remember the story where Moses and the people come out of Egypt? So, to set the stage, they’ve been in Egypt for 430 years, so the guys that came out of the Exodus, their dads were slaves, and their dads were slaves, and their dads were slaves, and their dads were slaves, like generations of slaves in Egypt, they’ve been there for 430 years. So, they’re there for a long time. Y’all remember how everything goes down with all the plagues. Y’all remember this story?

Okay, most people are familiar with the story. So, all these plagues go down and finally Egypt is like… “Get the heck out of here. Get, get out!” And so, Israel is like, “Great, let’s go.” And so, they take off and you remember the story they get out into the wilderness, and then the Egyptians are like, time out, we want those guys back. So, they go back and try to get them, and then the Red Sea… Remember that part? God parts the Red Sea, they’re powerless right there on the edge of the Red Sea, and God parts the Red Sea, they get on the other side, and Egypt’s army goes in, and the waters clap back over them and they’re dead. And so, they get on the other side, so where we’re picking up the story is, they get on the other side of the Red Sea, and they’re doing good, but they start freaking out. So, where we’re picking up the story, they’ve been out of Egypt for two months. So, I always used to give the Israelites a hard time thinking, “How can you not trust God for like a drink of water when you just saw him part the ocean?”

But do you know how many people came out of Egypt? It was like 600,000 people. That’s a lot of drinks of water, that’s a lot of people to provide food for. And so just to give you a picture of that in your mind, because we hear a number like 600,000, we think, “That sounds like a lot,” but… Alright, y’all know how many people fit in a normal… Have you ever been to a college football game or something big like that, like a big sporting event? I and my dad go and watch the University of Georgia football games. We like them. So, in that stadium, there’s about almost, not quite, there are almost 100,000 people in that one stadium, so picture six football stadiums full of people moving through the wilderness. That’s a lot of people to feed. And when you picture it, it’s not like all these great warriors that came out, it’s all these slaves and their families, and so they’ve been dependent on Egypt, they’ve never done things for themselves, they’ve never had houses for themselves, they’ve never really provided for themselves.

Egypt has provided everything, so really, they’re dependent on Egypt when they come out, they’re like, “Oh man, we should be back there, they got meat for us, we should be back there, they got water for us. Did you bring us out here to die?” They’ve been dependent on Egypt, and at the point, we see this story, they’re starting to get dependent on Moses, cause when they say, “Moses, did you bring us out here to die?” Then Moses goes and talks to the Lord, and all of a sudden, they got water, so now they’re starting to see, hey, Moses got the answers, Moses might be the guy. And so, this is a good war story, a lot of the guys like war stories, a lot of the ladies are like, meh. But a lot of guys like the war stories in the Bible. Well, this is the first war story for Israel since they got out of Egypt. This is the first war story, and so… It’s a pretty crazy story. Y’all remember the story. It’s the story where when Moses raises his hands, they start winning, and when he starts lowering his hands they start losing.

And if you ever heard this story… When I was a kid, I’d hear this story a lot, and the message of the story, they’d give us is something like… So, teamwork makes dreams work because Moses’ friends came up and held his hands up, and you need a good friend, that’s what you need, good friends. That is not what this story is about, it’s not about teamwork, it’s about something way, way bigger. Alright. So, let me read the story and then we’ll go back, and we’ll walk through it alright? So… I almost said Moses 17. Exodus 17. Alright, Exodus 17 starts in verse 8. “Then Amalek came and fought with Israel at Rephidim. So, Moses said to Joshua, “Choose for us men and go out and fight with Amalek. Tomorrow, I’ll stand on top of the hill with the staff of God in my hand,” so Joshua did as Moses told him, and fought with Amalek, while Moses, Aaron, and Hurl went up to the top of the hill. Whenever Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed.

Whenever he lowered his hand, Amalek prevailed, but Moses’ hands grew weary, so they took a stone and put it under him and he sat on it, while Aaron and Hur held up his hands, one on one side and the other on the other side, so his hands were steady until the going down of the sun. And Joshua overwhelmed Amalek and his people with the sword. Then the Lord said to Moses, write this down as a memorial in a book, and recite it in the ears of Joshua that I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under Heaven. So, Moses built an altar and called the name it,” The Lord is my banner,” saying, “A hand upon the throne of the Lord, the Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.” Cool story. It’s a cool story. It’s a really weird story. But it’s cool, you know, it’s a really weird story, but it’s cool, but when you start thinking about what is going on in this story, it gets way more amazing because you think about, again, these guys have been slaves in Egypt for so long, and when they come out, they’re six football stadiums full of people and what do you have when they get attacked?

The people that get attacked are old people, babies, and ladies. This isn’t an army. They’ve never fought before. They just came out of Egypt, but what’s crazy is, they’ve got all these riches, cause you remember when they came out of Egypt, the Egyptians are like, “Get the heck… Get the heck out of here,” and they’re like, “Great,” and they start scooping up all this gold and like, they start asking the Egyptians for stuff when they leave. And so, Egyptians are like, “I don’t care, just, just get out.” And so, it’s pretty funny like the… Well, I’ll tell you that in a minute, but… So, they got all the riches of the most powerful country in the world, all the gold, they got suitcases full of gold, but no army, they’re sitting ducks, that many people moving through the desert, no army, but all the riches. Somebody’s like, “Oh, we’re going to kill them all, we’re fixing to get all… Egypt just gave all their money to ladies, Egypt just gave all their money to little kids, I can’t… We’re just… We’re going to go in there and kill them all.”

And that’s what Amalek does. And in the Bible, when it talks about this attack, apparently it was super brutal. In Deuteronomy 25, it talks about the attack, it says, “Remember what Amalek did to you on the way, when you came out of Egypt, how he attacked you on the way while you were faint and weary and cut off your tail, and those who are lagging behind you, he didn’t fear God. Okay, so the Amalekites were this group of like nomadic peoples that would attack people on… Like with swift camel back raids. Who knew camels were swift, I did not? But they would take these camels and like come in and just attack, attack, attack and get out of there and… But what they did with Israel, as they saw this huge mass of people and they said, “Where are the weak people, they’re going to be lagging, we’ll go attack those folks, we’re going to attack the sick people, we’re going to attack the really tired people, we will attack the elderly folks and the kids.”

And so, they came and just brutally slaughtered innocent people at the back of the line and just went in with camels and killed all these folks. And it made God mad. And so, it says, “Therefore, when the Lord your God had given, you rest from all your enemies around you and the land that the Lord your God has given you for an inheritance to possess, you’ll blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven, don’t forget.” It’s pretty… It’s fixing to get good, because it says you’ll blot out the memory. And so, it’s a quick attack, so they come, and they attack, and then Israel’s got a day to prepare before the next attack. Now, how in the world is Israel fixing to fight against a trained army, they have no clue how to fight with swords and things like that, they have no clue, but first off, where did they get weapons from? How are they going to fight these guys?

Have you ever thought about that? Like while I was reading the story, I thought, “But now, their slaves came out of Egypt, how did they get weapons? cause some guys, when I was reading this commentary, some guys will say, “You know what happened, you know how they got their weapons is when Pharaoh and the Egyptians were chasing Israel, and Israel… God split the sea and they went right through, and then the Egyptians came in and God closed up the ocean again, well, He killed all those Egyptians and all their weapons were at the bottom of the ocean, and so the Israelites went scuba-diving.” And I thought, “No, no, they didn’t go scuba-diving,” and so some other guys said, “You know how they got weapons, they made them?” Out of what? Quail? Manna? What are they making weapons out of, they got nothing out there? Sand. What? What? What? What they make weapon… Well, they didn’t make them at all, because you remember when they left Egypt, they asked them for anything.

Exodus 12 tells us how God provided for their journeys. Was it that they asked for stuff and the Egyptians gave it to them? It says this in Exodus 12, “The people of Israel had done as Moses told them because they asked the Egyptians for silver and gold, jewelry, and for clothes, and the Lord had given the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so they’ll… They let them have whatever they asked, so they plundered the Egyptians. So, the Egyptians are like, “Get the heck out of here,” and they’re like, “Okay, can I have that shirt?” “Yes, fine, whatever, just get out.” “Can I… Can I have that sword?” “Fine, get out of here.” “How about that shield? Can I have that armor? Can I have that food?” It says, “They took everything the Egyptians have,” and so they got weapons, right? Later on, Exodus 13, says, “And God led the people around by the way of the wilderness towards the Red Sea, and the people of Israel went out of the land of Egypt, equipped for battle.” So, they got all the weapons, they got shields, they got armor. They just have no clue how to use it. It’d be like me and you. Is anybody in here good at sword-fighting?

No, you’re not. No, last week I asked this question the same… To a group of students, I say, Anybody in here good at sword-fighting? 10 kids raised their hands. I was like, “You’re not good. How many men have your sword-fought, like is this a thing?” So yeah, nobody in here is good at sword-fighting, maybe fencing, you might do fencing. You do, alright, great. So, but… Yeah, it’d be like if somebody handed you a sword right now at your age, and me a sword and said, “Alright, these guys have been training with swords for generations, they are super good, they’re going to come in on camels and they’re going to try to kill you, go.” Can you imagine, these guys have no clue what to do, they’re like, “Hey, this thing’s shiny and pointy” What are they going to do? So, they got weapons, but they have no clue how to use them. I’m imagining they’re like, “Alright, we got a… Let’s go grab those things out of the suitcase.” And they’re grabbing swords, and shields and being like, “Alright, let’s do this.”

But what’s crazy is they obey Jesus, they obey God rather, they obey God. And so, God has this pre-conversation with Moses and gives him some instructions on what’s fixing to go down, and the battle plan is weird, it’s really strange. So, in verse 9, it says this… These guys were so set up for slaughter. Verse 9 says this. So, Moses says to Joshua, choose for us, men, and go out and fight with Amalek. Tomorrow, I will stand on top of the hill with the staff of God in my hand. So apparently, God and Moses have had this pre-conversation, which I would have loved to have been part of, where God’s giving Moses the details like, “Alright, and then I want you to go on top of this hill and stand here like this, the end.

I want you to take these untrained men and make Joshua the leader.” And this is the first time Joshua is mentioned. And Joshua is not mentioned as a great warrior, cause up until this point, he’s like a great sweeper or a shoveler or something, right? He’s a worker, he’s not a warrior. But he tells Joshua, “Hey, go out, I want you to fight with these trained warriors tomorrow, take the untrained men, fight with these trained warriors and I’m going to go up on top of the hill. So, it’s a crazy setup. What’s crazy about it is that God involves the people this time. Cause up until this point, God has delivered the people, but His method has been, to stand still and watch. Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord or stand still and see the deliverance of the Lord. So, like, when Egypt comes up and they’re at the Red Sea, God says, “Wait, stand still, watch this.” And it works. But here, He’s saying, “Join in”. Cause He could just take all of the Amalekites on their camels and say…

And be done with them. But He involves the people for a reason. And I think we need to see the reason. Why did God let these clunkers go on out there with swords they didn’t know how to use? Why did God do this? What is He trying to teach them and what is He trying to teach us? Alright, so Verse 10. It happens. So, Joshua did as Moses told him and went out and fought with Amalek. What a good… I mean, Joshua is obedient right off the bat. He doesn’t ask questions, he just says, “Yes sir”. He went out and fought with Amalek while Moses, Aaron, and Hur went up to the top of the hill. Okay. So, so far, it’s been only Moses, but here, we get the introduction to some leadership in Israel. So, Moses is kind of functioning like a king, Aaron is kind of functioning as a priest, and then, there is this other guy named Hur, who Hur is not a name, it’s a nickname. It means like, “Whitey” or “White Guy”. And [chuckle] it was pretty funny.

And so, these three guys go up. Well, Hur is Caleb’s son. So, you remember Joshua and Caleb go out and spy out the land. So, you see kind of like, these faithful men are starting to pass on faithfulness to their kids. So, Moses, Aaron, and Hur go up to the top of the hill, and here’s the plan, Moses has got to raise his hands. So, Verse 11 says this. Whenever Moses held up his hands, Israel prevailed, or they started winning. These guys had no clue what to do. These guys who had no experience started winning against the Amalekites who had camels and training. Whenever he lowered his hands, Amalek prevailed. So, picture the scene, alright? So, they say, in this region, the hills are really small, like 25-30 feet.

So, the way I picture it, it is like this hill that we’re on right now. So, picture this hill right here that we’re on, and let’s say the battle is going on down there by the 3-Man swing, right? So, we have got a 25-30 foothill going down and we can see down there into the field. And so, you have got these untrained guys, going out with swords, and you have got Moses, and when he raises his hands, the people win. And probably, they can see each other, right? They can see each other; the people down there can see Moses. They’re probably starting to put it together, like, “How are we doing this? This is awesome! I just killed like four guys! That was… Oh, that guy looks scary. He’s dead!”

“I am so good at this”. And they’re probably looking up like, “Moses, did any of you just see what I did?” And they see Moses with his hands up and they’re all like, “Heck yeah, Moses.” Yeah. But they’re starting to see this correlation, cause do you see a problem with the setup? How long can you hold your hands over your head? Has anybody ever tried this? I thought about getting somebody… Somebody raises their hand. No. It’s a normal game you play? I tried this. I thought about getting somebody up on stage and thinking like, “Alright, I’m going to get this guy to stand on stage and just raise his hand.” But I thought it would be distracting for you. So, what I did is, I went back, I took my truck to an obscure location, and I picked out a staff, something that I thought, you know, would be comfortable to walk through the wilderness with, but strong enough to where it wouldn’t break if I hit it on a rock or… For water.

And so, I picked out staff and I went to an obscure location, I was like, “Ah, we’re going to test this out.” I got the staff, and I went, “Beep”. And I stood there. Do you know how long I stood there? About three minutes, comfortably. Three minutes, I was like, “Piece of cake. Israel is winning, we’re doing good.” And then after about five minutes, I started shifting around a little bit, like my shoulders started hurting and I was like, “Ah.” So, I started changing my position, you know. At about 10 minutes, I said, “Ah! This is pointless!” And I just threw the stick down and I was like, “Man, I’m not proving anything. I could stand here all day; I’m not proving anything. Do you know?

It’s just an illustration. Alright. It hurt, man. It started hurting bad. So how long can you hold a stick up? Let’s say that somebody is killing your friends. How long can you hold a stick up? You have got extra motivation there, so 20 minutes? That’s not long. So, can you see the problem? I think this is… The crucial verse is Verse 12. Look at Verse 12. They’re fighting. Verse 12. But Moses’ hands grew weary. It’s pretty crazy. So, we think, “Oh, yeah, they grew weary. My hands would grow weary, anybody’s hands would grow weary”. But remember what Israel is looking at. They have been dependent on Egypt and now they are being like, “Yeah Moses! We need some water Moses; we need some water Moses. We are winning! Moses! Alright!” They’re looking at Moses as the hero of the story. And Verse 12, all of a sudden, the hero, Moses, falls to pieces, because they look up there and they needed to see, Moses can’t do it. His hands grew weary. They’re looking for a savior. They’re looking for a hero in the story.

And he… Moses can’t do it. His hands grew weary, so they take a stone, and they roll it up underneath him, and he sits on it. And he sat on it, while Aaron and Hur held up his hands, one on each side. And so, Israel wins, but picture them holding up his hands here, what’s crazy is before they hold up his hands, you can imagine Israel’s out there fighting and all of a sudden they’re like, “How are we winning? This is great.” And all of a sudden, the tides start turning and they’re like, “Oh shoot, these guys are winning, these guys are winning,” they start looking up and they’re getting killed, people are getting killed out there, and they look up and they’re like, “Oh no, Moses, raise your hands, raise your hands, people are dying,” and you know Moses wants to cause he sees people that he knows and loves dying, but he can’t do it. Picture the scene, people want Moses to lift his hands, Moses wants Moses to lift his hands and he can’t. He can’t do it, he’s completely powerless, and the people needed to see that, they needed to see that Moses was powerless to save.

I’m imagining them just screaming, “Moses, please, please raise your hands, please.” They needed to see that Moses was powerless to save, the people knew that they were powerless, they needed to see that Moses was. That kind of thing, how long can you do that? So, what’s crazy is the leadership there, they didn’t take the staff and try to hold it up themselves, because what they saw wasn’t… They didn’t see, “Man, we need a better leader.” What they saw was, “We need Yahweh, we need God, we need to obey God.” It wasn’t a leadership issue, it was that they were powerless to save themselves and they needed God, and so they go, they obey God, this is one of those rare success stories for Israel where they obey God and things work out for them. Something we should take note of. And so, verse 12 says, “So his hands were steady until the sun went down,” and Joshua overwhelmed Amalek with the sword or Amalek and his people with the sword.

That phrase, he overwhelmed them with the sword, it’s with the mouth of the sword, so it’s like and Joshua and his swords were brutal that they ate the people like they were just destroying these people. The untrained Joshua and these clunkers with swords, overwhelmed this trained army with the mouth of the sword, a crazy story. So, verse 14, The Lord said to Moses, write it down, write it down and remember it, write this as a memorial in a book and recite it in the ears of Joshua that I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under Heaven. Pretty crazy. So why did Moses write? Why was he supposed to write? For us. Write it down as a memorial in a book, for us, we get this story, we get to remember the people are powerless and Yahweh is powerful, God… Yahweh is the name of God. God is powerful, but I think secondly, he says, read it to Joshua, write it down in a book and then read it to Joshua. Joshua knew what happened, he was there, he was the one fighting, but he’s reading it to him so that he can remember, remember what happened.

Remember, don’t forget, so late nights, I imagine Moses would sit up and be like, Hey Joshua, God told me to read you this story, you remember when this happened last week? Remember when Amalek did this, do you remember when this happened? He’d read it over and over, cause Joshua was the next leader of Israel, Joshua was fixing to go in and fight against 31 kings in Canaan, and he needs to see, that people don’t need leadership, they need God, that people can’t be dependent on me, they need to be dependent on God. And so, I imagine late nights, Joshua wood cracks open the Bible before he goes into Jericho or Arad or these other cities, and he’s freaking out, I imagine he reads this story and he’s like, Oh yeah, oh yeah. Remember that time, our first battle, and we couldn’t do… We were powerless. We couldn’t do anything.

Remember that time, I was holding the sword backward, that’s crazy, and we were beating those people, not because we were good, but because God is powerful, and I think part of its kind of funny wordplay cause he’s saying, hey, write it down so you can remember Amalek cause no one else will. Amalek’s gone, destroyed. And then he says, Moses built an altar in verse 15, and he called the name of the altar, the Lord is my banner, which is kind of like a military term like the Lord’s my sign, the Lord’s my flag, the Lord’s my signal. And then he says, verse 16, a hand upon the throne of the Lord, the Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation. The phrase, a hand on the throne of the Lord’s kind of weird. Some people believe it’s like Amalek, the enemy, Amalek put their hand on God’s throne, put their hand on God’s people, and now they’re forgotten. I think it’s more… We have our hand on God’s throne, a hand on the throne of the Lord, meaning he’s close.

Where is Jesus in Exodus 17?

Moses, when his hands are raised, he’s close, God is near and he’s so powerful. So why don’t we go to this passage when the focus of this week is on the cross. What do we see about Jesus in this passage? Cause obviously, the passage is not about teamwork, obviously, the passage is not about great leadership, and it’s not even the kind of things like, Okay, well, God will fight all your battles for you if you go out on a hill and raise your hands and pray, it’s not like that. So where do we see Jesus in this passage? I’ll tell you where we don’t see Jesus in this passage, a lot of times when you’re trying to look in the Bible and see Jesus, it’s easy to do a superficial matching game. What I mean by this is some people will say, Alright, we see Jesus in this passage, they’ll try to say, who in this story is Jesus? And people will say, it’s got to be Moses, because… Now what I’m fixing to tell you is not right, alright. They’ll say because Moses was on a hill. Do you know who else was on a hill? Jesus on the cross.

And they’ll say, Moses had his hand stretched out, Jesus had his hand stretched out, Moses had Aaron and Hur on either side of him. Jesus had thief and thief on either side of him. Moses had the 12 tribes down there fighting, and Jesus had the 12 Apostles down there fighting. Jesus. That’s how we see Jesus. Jesus equals Moses. No, Jesus doesn’t equal Moses in this story. That’s what… The first sermon that Brodie preached this week, talked about how Jesus was better than Moses. That’s not how you see Jesus in the story cause where do you stop? Who’s Judas in the Moses story? The camel guys? Who’s Mary? Where do you stop with a game like that? You can’t play Where’s Waldo with the story and be like, Where’s Jesus in here? Maybe it’s him. Because throughout the Bible, there are stories in the Old Testament. There are two themes I want to look at really quick, there are two themes in the Old Testament that we see over and over and over that point us to the cross, point us to Jesus.

The first one is God’s people are powerless, but God is powerful. Where do you see that? Every page of the Bible, every page of the Bible, every story. You think about Israel trapped in between the army of Egypt and the Red Sea, they’re completely powerless to save themselves, but God’s power to save. You think about Israel coming up against Jericho and the 31 kings of Canaan, they can’t do anything. But God’s power to save. You think about 600,000 people out in the desert, needing food, they’re powerless, but God is powerful to save them. That’s a theme that goes throughout all biblical history. The other theme that I want to talk about is the hero theme because, since the garden, there’s been a hero promised, one’s going to come that’s going to crush the snake’s head, one’s going to come that’s going to crush the serpent’s head, and God’s people have been looking for a hero ever since. So, they thought, maybe it’s Cain.

No, he killed his brother. Maybe it’s Noah. No, he got drunk and naked in a tent. Maybe it’s David. No, David’s sleeping around, maybe it’s this guy, maybe it’s this guy, maybe it’s this guy, maybe it’s Moses. Now Moses can’t even keep his hands up, maybe it’s this guy, and all these heroes that pop up to lead Israel, they fall short, they’re powerless, they can’t save. God’s people are powerless, they can’t save themselves, and then one comes that’s powerful. A hero enters into the story here in our timeline, a hero is there, and at the cross, Jesus defeats sin and death. Which is so much bigger than Israel defeating Amalek, it’s so much bigger. All these stories we look at, Israel defeating Jericho, God parting the Red Sea, compared to defeating sin and death, beating Amalek’s easy. Compared to defeating sin and death, fortified walls are weak, and crossing the ocean is easy. What Jesus did for us at the cross, all of the old testaments point to that.

Jesus is the Coming Hero in Exodus

When we read these stories in the Old Testament, we should look ahead and think, Jesus is the hero that’s coming, and we should see ourselves… If you want to read yourself into the story, we read ourselves in as like Israel powerless needing a hero, and then Jesus comes and saves, cause at the point when we got saved… If you’re a Christian in the room, some of y’all have come from death to life this week, awesome. And you know, you were worse off than these guys who were getting attacked by Amalek, because you weren’t untrained but willing, you were dead, dead, completely powerless. And at the cross… Well, let me read this, Ephesians 1. I want to read this passage, and this will be how we close. Read this passage, Ephesians 1 starting in verse 19. And what I want to look at is at the first of this passage, think about what it’s saying, it says at the first, God is powerful, God is powerful, God is powerful, God is powerful, God is powerful. Over and over and over.

I’m going to read that section and then we’ll pause for a second. Starting in verse 19 of Ephesians 1. And what is the immeasurable greatness of His power towards us who believe, according to the working of His great might which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated him at the right hand in the heavenly places? Far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. And he put all things under His feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all. That verse is just saying God is powerful, powerful, powerful, powerful. And now look, it’s going to change themes and say… And you are powerless. Powerless. Powerless. And you were dead. You can’t get any more powerless than that. How much power does a corpse have? Less than none, right?

None, alright, so… And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desire of our body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind. Over and over and over, it says, God is powerful, God is powerful, and then it says, and you are powerless, you’re powerless, powerless, just like every story in the Old Testament, just like all of these stories about Israel, you’re powerless, God’s power. And look what he says, we’re powerless, but God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, he made us alive together with Christ.

By grace, you have been saved. And raised us with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. That’s good. There’s the power of Jesus at the cross and at the resurrection to save. So why did God put this story in the way back in Exodus about untrained guys fighting with swords? To illustrate that God is powerful to save and we’re powerless to save ourselves. That’s what it illustrates. It’s pointing forward to the cross because at the cross, we’re past powerless in our sin, we’re dead, and Jesus at the cross defeated death to make us alive. At the cross, we see the climax of all history, and the resurrection, we see the ultimate display of God’s power to save his dead enemies and make us into sons and daughters. So, it’s your last day at Snowbird, 24 hours left. And let me ask… Pause for a second.

Where are you with Jesus?

I want you to stop and think for a second. Where are you at with Jesus? Because for some of you… Some of you in the room are not Christians and think I’m good without Jesus. And I would say, no, you’re dead without Jesus, you’re no hero in the story, you’re powerless whether you realize it or not, and some of you, I think might think I’m too far gone to save. No, Jesus is the hero you need, he’s the only deliverer that can save you. There’s no sin that you’ve done, that can trump God’s grace. That’s it, he’s powerful to save you. There’s nothing that’s been done to you that makes you beyond saving, not at all, he’s the one deliverer that we need, and we see that at the cross, and so if you’ve not yet submitted to Christ, do so. You can be made alive together with Jesus, and we’re praying this is a rich week for y’all, we’re praying today is a rich day in the Lord, I’m praying that the Bible comes alive to you when you see that it’s all pointing to the cross. So let me pray for us and give you some instruction.