Several months ago, a small bible study group did a study on
a called “Fire on the Mountain” which was a study on a portion of the book of
Exodus. There was a section in the book
that talked about God as an image of an eagle protecting His people under the
wings and that is where the idea for this whole evening came from. The study was so fascinating and I thought it
would be a wonderful theme for a women’s event, so here we are. I learned so much in this study and I wanted
to share a little with you this evening about the beauty of being “Under His
Wings.”
Many scholars consider the image of God as a mother eagle to
be one of the most compelling in the Bible.
We all know that a mother eagles train their eaglets to fly by pushing
them out of the nest at just the right time to try their wings. At first, because each eaglet flounders, she
flies under it, rescues it, and carries it back to safety with her strong
wings.
In a similar fashion, God did the exact same thing to the
Israelites when He led them out of Egypt.
He even described Himself as such in Exodus 19:4, our key verse, “I bore
you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Myself.” You see, the Israelites had been in slavery
to the Egyptians and were severely mistreated.
They cried out to God for help because they were in bondage.
They were completely helpless and vulnerable without His
care. Yet, God took Israel as His own,
just like an eagle nurtures an eaglet.
He provided refuge in His “wings.”
He swooped down and brought them out from under their bondage in Egypt
in a miraculous way, and slowly but surely, God taught them how to “fly” but
asking them to assume increasing responsibilities for their obedience while
remaining completely dependent on His protection.
When they floundered and faltered like an eaglet because
they had no water, no bread, and were out in the wilderness, He metaphorically
swooped down, picked them up, and guided them to safety.
God did not want them to forget this image of His protective
wings so He asked them to create the ark of the covenant in a specific way as a
reminder of God’s loving protection.
Wherever they wen, they took the image of God’s “wings” with them.
In the ark of the covenant, the place where God’s presence
would physically dwell after they left Mount Sinai, the spread wings of the
cherubim reminded God’s people that His nurturing care had brought them to
Himself.
The protective “wing of God” image shows up in other ways as
well. In Hebrew, the word “KANAF” means
both “wing” and “corner.”
In Numbers 15: 38-41, God says to Moses, “Speak to the sons of Israel, and tell them
that they shall make for themselves tassels on the corners of their garments
throughout their generations, and that they shall put on the tassel of each
corner a cord of blue. It shall be a
tassel for you to look at and remember all the commandments of the Lord, so as
to do them and not to follow after your own heart and your own eyes, so that
you may remember to do all My commandments and be holy to your God. I am the Lord your God who brought you out of
the land of Egypt to be your God; I am the Lord your God.”
By wearing this garment with tassels, God’s people wore what
appeared to be the robe of royalty that was meant to remind them that they were
God’s holy, chosen people. Through their unusual dress compared to all the other
surrounding nations, the Israelites were making a public declaration that they
belonged to the Most High God and that He chose them our of all the nations to
be a kingdom of priests who would display their God to the world.
What does this mean to us?
We don’t wear a funny looking garment with tassels like they did. I love how the Old and New completely fit
together because when we read 1 Peter 2:9, God says this to believers in Jesus
Christ,
“But you are a chosen
people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's special possession, that you
may declare the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His
wonderful light. 1 Peter 2:9
This passage has the same wording to us as He did to
Israel. We too and a chosen people, a
royal priesthood, a holy nation, and God’s special possession and are called to
declare and display our God to the world, not just by the way we dress, but by
our actions.
We are called to stand out just like the Israelites did with
the way they dressed. We, too, should
stand out as a light in a world surrounded with darkness. This is how we faithfully carry out the mission He has for
us.
We as Gentiles in the Western world can lose much of the
meaning and significance of Scripture because we don’t understand some of the
references. This has certainly been the
case for me. But that’s the beauty of
God’s Word to me. There is always
something new to learn, a treasure to uncover, and something specific for each
of us wherever we are.
Here is one example of a portion of a story that I didn’t
really understand the implication until I understood this idea of the
protective “wing” image. In the book of
Ruth, when she asks Boaz to spread the “corner” of his robe over her, I never
understood what this meant.
I thought it was a strange request, but what she was asking
him to do was to bring her under his protection. Remember the word “corner” also means
“wings.”
Another example from the Old Testament, but is fulfilled in
the New Testament is one that I find so beautiful. In Malachi 4:2, the prophet says, “But
for you who fear My name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in
its wings.”
In the
New Testament, three of the gospel writers tell of a woman who had been
bleeding for twelve years. She had tried
everything she could think of for healing.
She hears of a Man who had been performing miracles for others all
around. Do you remember what she
did? As Jesus is walking by, with crowds
all around, do you remember what she grabbed?
She reached out, hoping to go unnoticed, and grabbed the corner of
Jesus’ garment onto the fringe. She
recognized that He was truly the Messiah and she reached out for the protection
and she received “healing in His wings.”
Another
section from my study that I was just in awe of was about the Ten
Commandments. This story of God giving
the Ten Commandments is probably one of the most known accounts in the Old
Testament. I remember learning about
this even as a child, but I had never been taught it in this way! When God
came down to Mount Sinai to give these commandments, He was coming down to
establish an intimate and loving relationship with His people to live with
them!
To the
Israelites, God was like a husband looking for a deep and personal relationship
with His bride, longing for a partnership with the people He had chosen. I had never viewed the giving of the Ten
Commandments in this way. They just
appeared to be a list of rules that God wanted His people to keep.
Let’s
take a look back into this scene. In
your booklet, please follow this passage with me on page 5. Where there are words in bold, please read
them all together. As we read through
this chapter, try and picture the scene as it unfolds. Put yourself right there with His
people.
Exodus 19—
In the third month
after the sons of Israel had gone out of the land of Egypt, on that very day
they came into the wilderness of Sinai.
When they set out from Rephidim, they came to the wilderness of Sinai
and camped in the wilderness; and there Israel camped in front of the
mountain. Moses went up to God, and the
LORD called to him from the mountain, saying, "Thus you shall say to the
house of Jacob and tell the sons of Israel: 'You yourselves have seen what I
did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you
on eagles' wings, and brought you to Myself. 'Now then, if you will indeed obey My voice
and keep My covenant, then you shall be My own possession among all the
peoples, for all the earth is Mine; and you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.' These
are the words that you shall speak to the sons of Israel." So Moses came and called the elders of the
people, and set before them all these words which the LORD had commanded
him. All the people answered together
and said, "All that the LORD has
spoken we will do!" And Moses brought back the words of
the people to the LORD. The LORD said to
Moses, "Behold, I will come to you in
a thick cloud, so that the people may hear when I speak with you and may
also believe in you forever." Then Moses told the words of the people to
the LORD. The LORD also said to Moses,
"Go to the people and consecrate
them today and tomorrow, and let them wash their garments; and let them be
ready for the third day, for on the third day the LORD will come down on Mount
Sinai in the sight of all the people.
"You shall set bounds for the people all around, saying, 'Beware
that you do not go up on the mountain or touch the border of it; whoever
touches the mountain shall surely be put to death. 'No hand shall touch him, but he shall surely
be stoned or shot through; whether beast or man, he shall not live.' When the
ram's horn sounds a long blast, they shall come up to the mountain." So Moses went down from the mountain to the
people and consecrated the people, and they washed their garments. He said to the people, "Be ready for the
third day; do not go near a woman."
So it came about on the third day, when it was morning, that there were
thunder and lightning flashes and a
thick cloud upon the mountain and a very loud trumpet sound, so that all
the people who were in the camp trembled.
And Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God, and they stood
at the foot of the mountain. Now Mount
Sinai was all in smoke because the LORD descended upon it in fire; and its smoke
ascended like the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mountain quaked
violently. When the sound of the
trumpet grew louder and louder, Moses spoke and God answered him with thunder. The LORD came down on Mount Sinai, to the top
of the mountain; and the LORD called Moses to the top of the mountain, and
Moses went up. Then the LORD spoke to
Moses, "Go down, warn the people, so that they do not break through to the
LORD to gaze, and many of them perish.
"Also let the priests who come near to the LORD consecrate
themselves, or else the LORD will break out against them." Moses said to the LORD, "The people
cannot come up to Mount Sinai, for You warned us, saying, 'Set bounds about the
mountain and consecrate it.' "
Then the LORD said to him, "Go down and come up again, you and
Aaron with you; but do not let the priests and the people break through to come
up to the LORD, or He will break forth upon them." So Moses went down to the people and told
them.
Can you imagine that sight??
This is the description of what God was going to do in Exodus 20. He did every single word. In the Jewish mind, what God did on Mount
Sinai was a wedding.
In Exodus 6, God gives the Israelites four promises.
1)
He promises to bring them out from under the
burden of Egypt
2)
Deliverance from their bondage
3)
Redemption
4)
I want to focus on the fourth promise. He says, “I
will take you for My people and I will be your God, and you shall know that I
am the Lord your God who brought you out from under the burden of Egypt.”
“Take You” is a phrase for marriage. In giving the Ten Commandments, it’s not just
about the Law and obedience, it is God’s way of saying “I love you!”
The prophets make this image as a wedding even clearer. Jeremiah says,
“I
remember the devotion of your youth, how as a bride you loved Me and followed
me through the desert.”
Hosea clearly calls it a wedding as well as Isaiah. He says, “For
Your husband is your Maker, whose name is the Lord of hosts.”
In Jewish weddings, you would find a chuppah similar to this. It’s a canopy or covering that the bride and
groom stand under to illustrate God’s covering as they begin their
marriage. It’s a visual representation
of God’s protecting care.
My husband, Landon, and I started dating when I was 16 years
old. We fell in love quickly and we were
inseparable. I remember vividly a
thought that I had when I was with him in those early years. I even told him this when we hadn’t been
dating long. I told him, “You make me
feel safe.” When I was with Landon, I
felt completely protected and safe. That
is exactly the same image that God is as the role of the groom. He’s the protector.
During the wedding on Mount Sinai, God’s protective chuppah
was there covering them all literally by a cloud. The cloud covered the entire mountain and the
people were standing under it the entire time.
Other elements in a Jewish wedding include a “mikveh” where
you cleanse yourself before a wedding.
Also, there is a ketubs which was a marriage contract. There were two copies. The ketuba in this wedding were the copies of
the Ten Commandments which included two complete lists on each.
Another element in a Jewish wedding which is also found in
ours is a sign. Our sign for a marriage
is a ring, but God’s was the Sabbath. So this whole event, the wedding, the establishment of a
legal code, the covenant, and the beginning of a kingdom that would one day
extend over the entire world, but it was also God’s way of saying, “I LOVE
YOU.”
So if this was their wedding, their courtship included:
·
God giving the plagues to the Egyptians
·
God parting the Red Sea
·
God providing manna for them to eat
·
God turning the bitter waters sweet
This was all a time of God wooing His people to
Himself. This was quite a groom to a
difficult group to love. Many times they
were obstinate, complaining, and unwilling to cooperate, yet He loved them
anyway.
The Ten Commandments were wedding vows. They’re not simply a list of rules or of a
list of do’s and don’ts. They are God’s
way of saying, “I LOVE YOU!”
Here’s how He say’s I love you…
1.
You shall have no other gods before Me.
2.
Make no graven images.
3.
Don’t take My name in vain.
4.
Keep the Sabbath holy.
5.
Honor your father and mother
6.
Don’t murder
7.
Don’t commit adultery.
8.
Don’t steal.
9.
Don’t bear false witness.
10. Don’t
envy.
Let’s summarize the vows in two statements:
1)
1-4: LOVE GOD
2)
5-10: LOVE OTHERS
Now let’s put them in marriage language:
Over all the nations in the world, I love you! You are my treasured possession, but no other
lovers. Not even statues and pictures of
them. And you’re going to take My
name. I give it to you, use it
well. Find time for Me and to know
Me. We’ll call it Sabbath. And bride, get along.
Be united. Don’t kill, steal, or
lie to each other. Don’t take each
other’s husbands or wives. Honor your
parents. That’s the Ten Commandments.
What’s tragic is how far removed our culture is from these
and how far we have drifted. What is
possibly even more tragic is the fact that we have turned the Ten Commandments
into legalism, because what we may call as legalism, God calls love.
Many of you may be familiar with Gary Chapman’s Five Love
Languages he has identified. It has been
very helpful to many marriages over the years.
We each have a love language, a way that we feel loved. Sometimes you and your husband don’t have the
same one so even if you were showing your spouse that you loved him in a way
you would feel loved, he may not feel it because his is a different
language. I know for Landon, he feels
loved, respected, and appreciated through Words of Affirmation.
Do you want to know what God’s love language is? You want to show Him you love Him? We tell Him, just like we tell others we love
them, but He also wants to see our love in action just like we do with our
spouses. We don’t just simply want to
hear the words, we want the actions to follow.
God has a love language as well and there is no guessing or
confusion. It’s our obedience.
You want to show God you love Him. Obey Him.
You may say, this is Old Testament and we are free from the Law and we
are now under the New Covenant.
What did Jesus say? “If you
love Me you will obey My commands.” John 14:15. “For this
is the love of God that we obey His commandments, and His commandments are not
burdensome.” 1 John 5:3. Jesus says the exact same thing.
Here is a point I want to make clear. God chose and saved Israel by grace alone. This group of people did nothing to make God
select them. It was all grace and grace
alone. They did nothing to get out of
Egypt, through the Red Sea and to Mount Sinai.
It was all God and God alone. Coming
to this mountain wasn’t the place of their salvation. This is critical for us to understand because
we also don’t follow a list or rules to be saved either. We, too, are saved by grace through our faith
in Christ. For them, this was a place
for them to learn how to love God back for what He had done for them.
The same is true for us.
We don’t obey to be saved. We
obey because we are saved, also by grace.
We too are His chosen people who have been grafted in through
Christ.
Jesus was asked a question during His time of ministry. A
Pharisee asked Him what is the greatest command. Jesus quoted a portion of what every Jew
would have had memorized and recited every day, called the Shemah from
Deuteronomy 6.
“You
shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and
with all your might. “ He said the second was like it, “Love your neighbor as
yourself.”
Let’s summarize what Jesus said was the greatest
command:
LOVE GOD. LOVE OTHERS.
If the greatest of God’s commands are to love Him and to
love others, shouldn’t we try and keep the greatest command? How do we show that we love Him? Obedience.
What is God’s love language?
Obedience. So really by obeying
Him we are obeying the greatest command to love God and love others as well
because we show Him we love Him when by our obedience.
I love how the Old Testament and New Testament perfectly fit
together. It still never ceases to amaze
me.
The mountain in Exodus 19-20, as impressive as it was, was
just a dim shadow of a later mountain where God’s glory would be revealed—Mount
Calvary. More than 1,400 years after God
appeared on Mount Sinai, Jesus would climb another ladder to put God’s love on
display.
Just like Mount Sinai, Calvary was covered with a thick
cloud of darkness as God turned His face away. On the cross, Jesus would endure the thunder of God’s
judgment and absorb the lightning of His wrath into His body.
We sinned against God and His holiness, and Jesus was struck
dead for it. The last thing Jesus would do from the cross is yell with a
voice like a trumpet, “It is finished.”
When Jesus died, the earth shook.
In the cross, we see the enormity of God’s grace. God did MORE than carry us on eagle’s wings
from danger. He rescued us out of the jaws of death by substituting
Himself in our place.
He guides us in that protection now in a way that is also a
picture of wings through the Holy Spirit.
When Jesus was being baptized in the Jordan River by John the Baptist,
the sky opened up and God poured out His Spirit on His Son. It descended like a DOVE!
The Holy Spirit is pictured by God as a dove. It has wings.
So how this practically works in our lives as believers is
the Holy Spirit convicts us and gently nudges us in order for our protection to
get us out of being entangled in sin and to lead us to holiness instead.
Our God is holy.
Every drop of His Son’s precious blood was costly beyond human
calculation.
Our God is also wise.
He created each and every one of us to the last detail. He knows us better than we even know ourselves. He knows what sets our souls up to prosper
and we do not prosper in sin.
Sin is the opposite of obedience and the opposite of showing
God that we love Him.
He does not weight sin like we do. All sin in sin in His eyes, whether we are
lying, cheating, committing murder, gossiping, committing adultery, being
impatient or irritable, judgmental, jealous, prideful, selfish, unthankful,
addicted to pornography, alcohol, or drugs, worry or anxiety, being resentful
or bitter, unforgiving, or materialistic.
We look at some of these sins differently, but they all look the same to
Him.
At first, sin appears to befriend us, but over time, it
drops the mask to reveal a demanding bully blackmailing and betraying us.
Sin will take you farther than you want to go.
Sin will hold you longer than you want to stay.
Sin will cost you more than you want to pay.
God is not trying to cheat us out of worldly pleasure. He’s trying to keep worldly pleasures from
cheating us. The perimeters of God’s
will are not in place to limit us. They
are to keep or flesh and our unseen enemy from limiting us.
Where God’s appears to confine us we are paradoxically and
ultimately freed. God’s will is for our
good. It’s for our protection.
One of my favorite Christmas songs we sing is, “O Holy
Night.” There is a phrase in that song
that says, “His law is love and His gospel is peace.” We sing this song every year, but I pray that
we will all be able to sing it this year with a fresh understanding that the
law is not just a demanding list of rules to keep that can sometimes keep us from
what we would consider fun or fulfilling, but we would rather see them for what
they really are…LOVE.
His law is love and through Jesus Christ alone, we can have
peace when we believe the gospel…
·
that Jesus is the Son of God and left His heavenly
throne to come to earth
·
that He lived a sinless, perfect life
·
that He died on the a cruel death to pay for our
sins
·
that He rose again three days later
·
then He returned to heaven and is sitting at the
right hand of the Father
One day, He is going to come back for those who love
Him. How do we show we love Him? We obey Him.
One day, He’s going to come back for the church. We here who are believers and are in Christ
are His bride.
At that time, there will be another wedding. We learned about the wedding on Mount Sinai,
but there is still a future wedding.
Revelation 19:7-9
Let us rejoice and be glad and
give the glory to Him, for the marriage of the Lamb has come and His bride has
made herself ready.” It was given to her
to clothe herself in fine linen, bright and
clean; for the fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints. Then he said to me, “Write, ‘Blessed are
those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.’” And he said to me,
“These are true words of God.”
Those
who are invited to this marriage supper of the Lamb, we who believe and have
surrender to God’s plan are Christ’s bride.
His
children will then completely realize His protection for eternity. The true covering of our Lord will last
forever.
Many
of us have loved ones who have passed from death into eternal life
already. Even then, at that moment, God
gives protection.
Angels
will accompany believers to heaven, so even in that moment of passing from
death into eternal life for His children, we will be literally “under His
wings” through His heavenly agents.
There
in heaven, we will be protected and eternally free from sin, our flesh, and our
enemy.
Revelation
21:4
And He will wipe
away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the
first things have passed away.”
We
will be completely and eternally protected, under His wings, from all of these
things forever. Hallelujah and amen.
He will cover you with His
feathers; you will take refuge under His wings. His faithfulness will be a
protective shield. Psalm 91:4
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