God isn’t just the God of the universe, he also is the God who wants us to know Him. Pastor Tim helps us think about this by turning to Exodus this week.
You’ve said it in the middle of the pain: there has to be more to this life than this. Israel lived that distance in Egypt—promised milk and honey yet making bricks from dawn to night, their cries seemingly unheard. Exodus 1–15 traces that groan toward a sea no one can part alone, and asks who can carry a captive people across it.
When you’re in a wilderness season—the kind that doesn’t feel like a season at all—the doubt that creeps in isn’t usually about theology; it’s simpler and sharper than that: Is God really with me? That’s precisely the question hanging over Exodus 3, where God meets Moses in the wilderness and answers it not with reassurance alone, but with His name.
We forget so quickly—and when we forget what God has done, we start to feel alone. That’s exactly why, in Numbers 9, God tells Israel it’s time to keep the Passover: not because the Exodus needs to happen again, but because his people need to taste his faithfulness again.
Could you have heaven with no sickness, every friend you ever loved, every pleasure you ever tasted—and still be satisfied if God were not there? At Sinai in Exodus 19, Israel, just out of slavery, receives the law and a portable tent meant to keep God at the center of camp. The question that will follow them through the wilderness is the one that follows everyone: the garden, or its God?
What happens when the life you planned collapses and your worst failure seems to have settled what you can ever become? Exodus 3–4 brings that question to Moses, a fugitive tending sheep in the wilderness, when the holy God calls him from a burning bush and sends him toward the people and place he fled.
Easter is God’s profound statement that He not only listens, but He also saves.
Most of us haven’t murdered anyone this week, so we figure we’re keeping the sixth commandment just fine—but Jesus suggests the problem runs deeper, into the anger we harbor and the contempt we broadcast, long before any blade is drawn.
When God’s holiness draws near, our first instinct is often to back away—to put some distance between ourselves and the One whose law shows us how unholy we are. That’s exactly what Israel does in Exodus 20 after hearing the Ten Commandments: they tremble at the mountain and tell Moses, R20;You speak to us… but do not let God speak to us, lest we die.”
When fear and uncertainty close in, we don’t just want comfort—we want control, something solid we can hold onto. In Exodus 32, Israel melts down the very gold God gave them in Egypt to cast a god they can see, and the impulse driving that golden calf is closer to our own hearts than we’d like to admit.