Thursday, June 29th 2006
Read: Exodus 6
Now watch this. Things haven’t started off that well for Moses in his big deliverance campaign against Pharaoh. Things are actually worse off now than when Moses got there! There has got to be some encouragement for the budding revolutionary that is reading this (meaning: you). I mean, if the book ended after chapter 5, we’d conclude that Moses is a wimp, that God is weak, and that it sucks to be Hebrew.
Thank God for chapter 6. When you actually take the plunge into this Revolution thing and write off your life as you once knew it, things will quite possibly go down hill for awhile. You might lose support networks (eventually you’ll get new ones). You might not be able to kick out every demon you confront, at the beginning. You might lose stability and your job. You might be misunderstood.
But if you hang in there, if you position yourself downstream in the river of God’s grace, if you posture yourself in radical humility in your relations with God and humans, things will change. They did for Moses in chapter 6. Watch how God intervenes.
He identifies Himself. First, He is Yahweh—the self-existent one. This makes Him absolutely unique in the history of the universe. He doesn’t need anyone to keep Him alive. Yet, He is also the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So, even though He doesn’t need anyone, He greatly desires relationship. This is the basis of the covenant God: relationship. He is the God of… And then, finally He is God Almighty—El Shaddai. He’s the kind of friend you don’t let down, don’t cheat on, and don’t deceive behind His back. But on the flipside, He is the friend who always backs you up and the one who protects you in every situation.
This chapter is filled with a bunch of names. Why is this significant? Two reasons:
1. God is a covenant God, a God of relationship. He doesn’t just save plots of land or companies or armies. He saves people.
2. Many people think that our revolution will be a nameless, faceless Revolution, without a list of names. Now, don’t get me wrong, it is the same relationship-loving, covenant-keeping God who saves people. But the chronicle of the Revolution in millennium three will likely lack a list of names like chapter 6. Why? There will be heaps of people; from little children to very old; from every nation, tongue and tribe; from northern hemisphere down through the southern tip of Chile. Every country of the world can participate in this Revolution. Much more importantly, in a faceless Revolution God gets all the glory, all the credit, and all the honor.
Q: What specifically should you do when you face persecution?
What aspect of God—that He revealed in this chapter—is going to help you fight this week?
Youth Department