A Covenant Christmas: Covenant with Moses

You may not have noticed because it's been a subtle shift, but we have changed sermon series. We were doing the book of Genesis, kind of the beginning portion of the book of Genesis. That was our plan—to just do the first part, right? And then last week, we shifted into a new sermon series that talks about the biblical covenants throughout the Bible.

The first one that we talked about, Dax Palmer did a great job preaching last week. I hope you heard that sermon. If you didn't, go listen to that—it was really good. On the Abrahamic covenant, which of course takes place in Genesis. So you might have thought last week we're just still in Genesis, but we really kind of shifted gears and we've moved into talking about the covenants.

We did kind of jump some of Genesis. You might have noticed that. We were going very slowly through Genesis, and we actually did hit a couple of covenants in the early part of Genesis. Did you notice that? Remember, we talked about the covenant with Abraham last week. But before that, we talked about the covenant with Noah, and before that, we talked about the covenant with Adam, right?

And I need you to know that there are kind of two approaches to reading the Old Testament that compete within the Christian world often times. Sometimes people approach covenants—the different covenants of the Old Testament heading to the New Covenant in the New Testament, right?—as God kind of trying different ways to save people. Trying out different things, trying to save people in different ways. Like, he tried with Noah and that didn't work, and he tried with Abraham and that didn't work. Now he's going to try with Moses, right? That's kind of one of the competing ways that sometimes people read the Old Testament. Like, "Look, God showed all these different ways. He tried. He was very faithful, but because of man's unfaithfulness, we kind of thwarted his efforts until finally he gave up and said, 'Alright, look, I'm just going to go down there. I'm going to do it myself,' right?"

The other way—and this is the way that we read the Old Testament—is that there was this covenant of works that was established with Adam that did fail. It showed the failure of mankind to be faithful to God. But ever since then, there has been this covenant of grace that has been growing through these subsequent covenants made with different people that expanded the grace that God poured out on his people. That is the way that we read the Old Testament. And so essentially, we talk about that as redemptive history.

So what we've been doing is kind of like—I don't know if you—some of you may be Star Wars fans like I'm a Star Wars fan. If you watch episode four, that was the first one that came out in 1977. I was one year old. My mom took me to a drive-in theater, and it predicted the rest of my life. But when you watch that now, when they first get in the Millennium Falcon, you're just kind of like, "Man, that thing's moving slow. The CG, the effects aren't that good." It just kind of plods along. You can see that it's just a model, right?

And then all of a sudden, right, the effects that made Star Wars so famous kick in when Han Solo pushes that little whatever that thing is and they go into hyperdrive, right? Well, that's what we're about to do this morning through redemptive history. We started very slowly like the Millennium Falcon, and now we're going to punch it and we're going to go really fast.

So we're going to look at the Mosaic covenant this morning, and to inform our understanding of that, we're going to read Exodus chapter 24, verses 3 through 11. We're going to read that together. You ready? Alright. Sorry, three through 11, not three through 8.

Moses came and told the people all the words of the Lord and all the rules, and all the people answered with one voice and said, "All the words that the Lord has spoken, we will do." And Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord. He rose early in the morning and built an altar at the foot of the mountain and 12 pillars according to the 12 tribes of Israel. And he sent young men of the people of Israel who offered burnt offerings and sacrificed peace offerings of oxen to the Lord. And Moses took half of the blood and put it in basins and half of the blood he threw against the altar. Then he took the book of the covenant and read it in the hearing of the people, and they said, "All that the Lord has spoken, we will do and we will be obedient." And Moses took the blood and threw it on the people and said, "Behold the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words." — Exodus 24:3-11

Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and 70 of the elders of Israel went up and they saw that the God of Israel—there was under his feet as it were, a pavement of sapphire stone like the very heaven for clearness. And he did not lay his hands on the chief men of the people of Israel. They beheld God and ate and drank. This is the word of the Lord.

Let's pray together. Lord God, we pray that you would illumine your word to us, that we would see you clearly in this passage and that we would be encouraged and challenged by it. Lord, the result of our time together would be not only our encouragement, but that we would be made more like you. We pray that you would do this in your Son's name. Amen.

Why Study Covenants During Advent?

Covenants. Why study covenants during Advent? Here's why we're doing covenants: the people of Israel long for the wrong thing. After they were brought up out of Egypt, do you remember that story of Moses? After they get out into the wilderness, they're like, "Can we just go back and be slaves again?" As God's people operating in a world of brokenness and fallenness, we can interact with that and long in the wrong direction. So looking at the covenant promises of God is a great way to train ourselves to long in the right direction, to remember the things that God has promised, and to look at those things with great hope for those things to be fulfilled—more fulfilled than they are now—recognizing that God has been working all the way through the past.

One of my favorite books is The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis. I don't know why I waited as long as I did to read it, but it's one of the best books I've ever read. It's a story about the author C.S. Lewis getting on a bus in hell and going to heaven. In some ways, it's a literary picture of basically the entire story of the whole Bible, and that's what covenants are. We started right after the fall with Adam. God saying, "Hey, one of Eve's offspring is gonna crush the head of the serpent." He's gonna strike his heel, but his head's gonna get crushed. We're gonna fix this. And there's been this slow progression of that happening.

You know, recently a movie came out called Eight Bit Christmas. Neil Patrick Harris is in it. I read that it was this great tribute to the eighties, so I decided to watch it. It's really good. Those of you who are eighties nerds like me, you're gonna love it. It's essentially the story of this father whose daughter wants a cell phone. The way that he interacts with his daughter is he connects with her by saying, "Hey, you know, when I was a kid, I wanted this crazy thing called a Nintendo." He starts talking about his desire for this Nintendo, his longing for it, and tells the story of basically how he got one. But in the process, what he realizes is there's more to life than Nintendos.

God in his very slow dealing with us has been directing our longings towards better things than our sinful hearts gravitate towards. So this morning, we're gonna look at the Mosaic Covenant. We're gonna do three things: we're gonna look at the context of the Mosaic covenant, we're gonna look at the substance of the covenant ceremony that's in what we just read in Exodus 24, and then we're gonna look at four gifts of the Mosaic covenant, which I hope will help us along in the right direction. Context, substance, gifts. That's our outline.

The Context of the Mosaic Covenant

The context of the Mosaic covenant—there are lots of ways to come at this. The Mosaic covenant primarily takes place right in the book of Exodus. Now I'm gonna assume some biblical literacy here because there have been some movies about Exodus: The Prince of Egypt, right, or The Ten Commandments if you're older—Charlton Heston, remember that—which essentially tell the story. But real briefly, here's what happens.

God's people, the ones that kind of descend from Abraham who've been promised this land, wind up slaves in Egypt. They're slaves in Egypt, and that's a big problem because God has promised to bring them into a land, to make them into a great nation, to be a blessing to all nations. They're not in a land; they're in Egypt. So God sends a deliverer, Moses—who's a very unlikely deliverer by the way—to come and bring them out.

There's this very dramatic sequence of a showdown between the gods of Egypt, including Pharaoh, and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Our God crushes the gods of Egypt one after another.

All those plagues are tied to different Egyptian gods. One after another, he just knocks them out. And then very dramatically delivers his people by this blood that is spread on their doorpost. The angel of death comes in and passes over them. The Jewish people celebrate Passover to this day because of that incredible celebration of God's deliverance of them from death. Then they're brought up out of Egypt. Pharaoh changes his mind and sends his armies, and they're in a cul de sac backed up against the Red Sea.

So what happens? Kids, kids are in here. What happens when God's people are backed up against the Red Sea and Pharaoh's armies are bearing down? I see a hand. Go ahead. Shout it out. That's right. Excellent. He creates a wall of fire and splits the ocean. The wall of fire prevents the armies from getting to the people. The ocean splits and gives them an exit strategy. They go right through the water and then the fire goes away and then the armies come in and the water crushes them. A dramatic story of deliverance.

Then they're brought to the foot of Mount Sinai and that's where the covenant is made. After this grand worship service, the covenant is made. And what is the covenant? The Mosaic covenant.

We'll get to the substance, but that's where the covenant is made. And then really, we can't stop there if we're talking about the context because there's a lot more to it. The rest of the story of Exodus really has to do with the tabernacle and God dwelling with his people. The book of Leviticus has all these laws about the sacrificial system and how the people are going to keep that in order to emphasize God's holiness and their holiness, their separateness as a people. The book of Numbers talks about God's preservation of the people in the wilderness. And then the book of Deuteronomy ends with Moses at the end of his life giving this incredible sermon outlining all the blessings and curses of the covenant.

We can't really stop there because all of the prophets in the Old Testament hearken back to this covenant as the agreement between God's people and God. They're constantly coming to God's people and saying, "Hey, remember the covenant? Remember the promises God made? Remember the promises you made to God?" That is the context.

I just want to point something out because there's been some talk lately from the pulpit about who's getting what sermons. Remember last time when I was preaching the whole Noah episode—it was like three chapters of the Bible—and I said something to the effect of, when you're the associate pastor, you back up and clean up, right? The senior pastor picks the really choice passages and then you just do everything else. Then Jeff got up and preached a really hard passage, and I gotta say he's right. He took some challenging passages and he says, "Don't believe everything your associate pastor hears." Well, now I'm up here and I basically have the whole Old Testament assigned to me.

The truth is, I picked this. Jeff is very gracious about the passages that he has me preach. There is no war going on between us other than the prank war that began the minute I was hired at this church.

But there's this incredible context. This covenant is so important. It's the most extensively described covenant in the Old Testament. It's so extensive. There's so much to talk about. But what I want to focus us on is how it relates to redemptive history. How it essentially hits the hyperdrive and moves us towards the grand redemption that our God has planned for us. I want you to see how connected it is to the other covenants and how it is a trajectory taking us towards Christ.

The Mosaic Covenant in Context

When we think about the Mosaic covenant, you can't think about it separate from the other ones. Let's start with the Adamic covenant of grace. When they get kicked out of the garden, there's that promise of the serpent's head being crushed. He's going to strike His heel, but His head's going to be crushed. That's a promise of Satan, our ultimate enemy, being destroyed.

Well, there are some very intentional ways in which Moses—when he's telling the story of Israel's redemption out of Egypt—connects with that. Do you remember the very beginning of the story when Moses gets out into the wilderness? He's had to flee. Egypt has just kicked him out and there he is by himself with a burning bush. He takes off his sandals and God gives him His name. And He says, "Hey, I'm going to send you back in there, but don't worry. I'm going to give you some signs." Well, what are the signs?

He's got a staff and he throws it down and what does it turn into? A serpent. And do you remember when he goes and actually confronts pharaoh, pharaoh's magicians have staffs that turn into serpents too, but guess what happens? His staff is preeminent over those. Do you see how that's God saying, "Look, I'm the God who is in control even over the serpent"? Do you see? That promise that I made to Adam, I got a sign that that promise is still good.

The other sign that he gave him was the leprosy. He puts his hand in his cloak and he's all leprous, and then back, and oh, it's better. Wow. Think about that in relation to the curse of decay and suffering and death. God showing, "I am the God who is in control even of that." Do you see the connection?

Connections to the Noatic Covenant

What about the Noatic covenant? There's a lot of connections between the Noatic covenant and the Mosaic covenant. We just talked about some of them, but at the very beginning of the story, do you remember? With Noah, God preserves Noah out of all of the earth because he's the righteous one. He's the one, the child of the promise. He's gonna preserve him as a remnant, him and his family. And he's gonna destroy everything else—all of the wicked people, the people that have basically sold out and who are actually attacking the promise. They're a threat to the promise. He's gonna wipe them out.

Well, at the beginning of Exodus, we have the opposite. We have the powers of the world essentially threatening to wipe out the people of God by water. Do you remember? Cast those kids in the Nile, kill the firstborn. That's the beginning, and how does God preserve his people? The basket that Moses's mother puts him in the Nile—the word for that is ark. He preserves him with an ark. And who is it that actually cares for Moses, brings him up? It's Pharaoh's daughter. So the joke is on the world. The joke is on Pharaoh. Pharaoh is trying to kill the Israelites, God's people, and yet accidentally, he provides for the actual deliverer of God's people. Do you see? God preserves the deliverer through water—connection to the Noatic covenant.

And then the other thing that we talked about is the Red Sea. He didn't just preserve the deliverer. He preserved his people through the sea and used the water even to crush the army of Pharaoh, to basically take the teeth out of him. He's no longer a threat. So do you see the connection between the Noatic covenant? God is continuing to fulfill what he has started with Noah.

Connections to the Abrahamic Covenant

And then Abraham—Abraham was promised that his offspring would be a great nation, as numerous as the stars. And what do we see? In Exodus, the people have grown. They're no longer a small little tribe. They're essentially a nation that are being brought up out of Egypt and they're being brought to the land of Canaan. The promise that God had made to Abraham is the foundation with which he begins talking to Moses. He says, "I am the God of your fathers, and I promised these things, and I will see that promise through." And the story of all of these books is essentially the grand realization of that. We're on the verge of it, right on the verge of Jordan, about to cross into the promised land at the end of Deuteronomy. Do you see how all of these covenants are connected and that God is kind of working throughout history, bringing us up to this point?

The Substance of the Mosaic Covenant

Now, the substance of the Mosaic Covenant ceremony is this:

I will be your God and you will be my people.

That's the promise. It's a continuation of the promise to Abraham, for sure, and Noah and Adam, but it's a grander, more full, more complete promise. "I will be your God." You'll know me by name. He gives them his name. I will be your God who fights for you, who delivers you. I will be your God who dwells with you. "And you will be my people"—not people who I have kind of a occasional relationship with, but a people who know my character because I will give you my law. I will make you like me. You will be my people marked by me. Do you see how incredible that promise is? How full that is? How much bigger that is than what he's promised Abraham? It's just the same promise, just grown.

That's the substance of the promise, and that's what we see in Exodus 24 and in Exodus 19, where this whole process starts. He starts talking again and again: "I will be your God. You will be my people." In fact, in that scope of Scripture that I just shared with you—from Exodus to Deuteronomy into the prophets—the phrase "I will be your God and you will be my people" occurs something like over 80 times. If I read all of those, that would be the end of the sermon. Wouldn't have any time for anything else.

God again and again issues this promise, reminding the people, encouraging them: "I will be your God, you will be my people." That's the substance of the promise. I will be your God. You will be my people, and this is a two-way contract. It's a two-way promise.

Did you notice in the reading? Moses came and read all of the law to the people, and they said, "We'll do it. We will do it." They've seen the deliverance of God. They love this God. They want to be His people. All of these rules—this is great. This is what righteousness looks like. That's what we want to be. We want to be like God. We'll do it. Sign us up, Moses. And so that's what Moses does. He goes as a representative of the people up onto the mountain, and what happens is a covenant ceremony where they very formally agree to this.

The Marriage Covenant

Now, the Mosaic covenant is perhaps the most marriage-like of the Old Testament covenants. What you need to understand is what is essentially happening: God is marrying these people. There are vows that each have taken—promises on each side. We're going to be together. We want to be together forever. That's essentially what's being promised. We're going to marry each other. We're going to become one. God is becoming one with His people. He's moving towards that. That's essentially the picture of this ceremony.

And there are certain parts of it that are maybe a little bit foreign to us. First of all, there's a lot of blood. Did you notice? There's a lot of blood in Exodus 24. We picked up on that, right, by the way, with the Abrahamic covenant. Dax talked about that. There was a lot of blood there too. Animals were cut in half, and God walked through them and said, "If I don't keep this promise, what happened to these animals, happen to me." Well, there's a little bit of that going on here too. Only this is very clearly a two-way promise, and so blood is being sprinkled in two places. One is on the altar, representing God, and one is on the people themselves.

Now, what you need to understand is that was very common in the ancient Near East. That was a very common picture of promising essentially: "Hey, if what I am promising to do, if I don't do it, may what happen to these animals happen to me?" The closest thing I can come up with to compare this to is, remember when you were a kid and you really wanted to convince somebody you were going to do something? What did you say? "Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye."

That's the point. You're saying, "Hey, I really want something bad to happen to me if I don't fulfill this promise." That's what's happening here.

But I hope you also see that in the sacrifice too, there's a connection to Passover. There's a sense in which the people can't even begin to approach God unless there's blood involved because of their sinfulness. There's so much amazement in Exodus 24 about the fact that Moses and the people can get even this close to God. The only way they can do that is with the blood.

So I hope you see that blood connects to two things that we continue to practice to this day. Baptism, right? We sprinkle babies. That's why Presbyterians love Exodus 24, because we're like, "Look, it's sprinkling." And we say we're washed by the blood. And then there's also the sacrifice, which points to the fact that we didn't fulfill the covenant, and yet the penalty fell on someone else—on Jesus Christ.

The blood is very important. This blood of the covenant is a very key component. When you hit the light speed button, the stars start striping in one direction, and that's pointed to Christ.

The Covenant Meal

And then there's this amazing thing. At the end of this passage, after all the blood—everybody's all bloody—God invites them up onto the mountain for a meal. There's all this talk about it: under His feet is like sapphires, like super clear, like picturing the heavens essentially. What you have is a picture of God's people coming over for dinner with God.

Do you see this is the first picture of what we would call the Lord's Supper? This is Yahweh inviting His people to dine with Him. Now, I want you to think about what they were eating because that's important. What were they eating? The passage right before Exodus 24, God institutes manna. So it might have been manna. It's not uncommon for the priest to have eaten animals that were sacrificed. So it might have been that. Either way, guess who that points to? Jesus.

The stars are streaking right to Christ. There will be a time when God will dwell with his people and dine with them. They'll be that close—not only will they see Him as though His feet are on sapphire, this incredibly incredible display of His glory and power, they will see Him intimately in a room having food where He Himself will point them to the fact that what they're eating actually points to Him.

You see the beauty of the substance of this covenant ceremony and how it points to God's care and compassion for His people not only in the moment but ultimately to where they're going. It's incredible. I love Exodus 24. I think it's one of the most under-preached passages of the Old Testament. It's an incredible picture.

The Main Blessings of the Mosaic Covenant

I want to conclude by talking about the main blessings of the Mosaic covenant—the gifts, if you will. There are several things I want to call your attention to. There are lots of things we could talk about, but I'm going to focus on four.

First, notice the scope—the growing scope of the Mosaic covenant. With Noah, it's one person, one family. With Abraham, it's an extended family, offspring. It's growing. With Moses, it's a nation. What is it with us? The nations. Do you see? God is growing the scope of His redemptive work, slowly but surely.

I talked about how in Advent we train ourselves to long in the right direction. What would it look like to long in the wrong direction? Sometimes we long in the wrong direction with regard to the scope of God's work. You better believe we do. Because sometimes, like C.S. Lewis, who starts out in hell where everybody is separate and nobody's bothering them, we want to be alone with God. We want it to just be us and Jesus. We don't want other people with other differences coming into the family, messing things up.

I mean, I read the story about Exodus and all the people. Moses was pulling his hair out. Like, what am I supposed to do with all these knuckleheads? Sometimes we feel like that as the church, right? As the scope of salvation has increased and more people are coming in, we're just pulling our hair out with all of our brothers and sisters in Christ. Sometimes we want that—just us and Jesus, or at least just us and some sane people.

I'll tell you where I struggle. I went to Jordan for two months and I worshiped in an evangelical free church in Jordan. It was all in Arabic. And I gotta tell you, it's gonna take me some time to learn to appreciate Arabic music. If there's anybody here from the Middle East, I don't mean to be offensive. I want to learn to appreciate it. But I'm telling you right now, I don't.

But you know what I love? The way that those saints welcomed me and cared for me. And the beauty of where God is taking us—where all kinds of different people, every tongue, tribe, and nation is going to fall down before Him, worshiping at the throne for eternity. I want that. I want to see the beauty of all of you guys, fully redeemed and what God is doing with all of us together. I want to see a unified humanity under Christ. That's longing in the right direction, right? And that is the direction the Mosaic Covenant, compared to the others, has headed towards Christ and takes us.

This Advent, don't miss the opportunity to long for that, to dream of it, to pray for it.

Second thing: deliverance. The deliverance in Exodus—man, what an incredible picture of God powerfully delivering over other gods. But looking forward, right, into what deliverance we have, where Satan himself has been defeated, defanged, like Pharaoh on the edge of the Red Sea with his army swept away, shaking his fist. That's all Satan's got left after the cross. We have been delivered from our great enemies, right? And they're still around though. We still face brokenness, don't we?

But sometimes we get tired of all the rigmarole around celebrating this deliverance. The people in the wilderness got tired of that and they said, "Let's go back to Pharaoh." Sometimes we do that. Sometimes we long in the wrong direction. We say, "You know what? This deliverance, it's not all that. Let's give it up." You know, rather than actually being with God's people and worshiping, we'll just listen to a podcast. Rather than celebrating with others who are not believers about the work that God has done, we will just hide that. We'll go back to the world, to the practices and rhythms of life that the world has for us because they're just easier.

This Advent, don't long in the wrong direction.

Long for the future deliverance that we will have where everything will be defeated that stands against us. You know, the book of Romans, Paul talks about all of the enemies that we have.

I'm convinced that none of these things... — Romans 8

He rattles off this list of everything ranging from worldly powers and worldly suffering all the way to cosmic powers. And he says, ain't nothing gonna separate us from the love of God. He says, essentially, we are in a deliverance tank that is impenetrable by anything that our enemies have. All we have to do, brothers and sisters, is roll in that tank and God is gonna blast our enemies out of the way. And we can move into dark spaces with advent expectation and hope. Longing for all the dark places to be defeated by the great tank of our God. That's what he's gonna do. That's longing in the right direction.

The Proximity of the Lord

Thirdly, the proximity of the lord in the mosaic covenant is wow. I mean, it really moves forward. You get the sense that Abraham is kind of occasionally visited, but God's saying to his people, "Look, I'm gonna give you instructions on how to build a tent and I'm gonna live in it with you right here. And by the way, here's my name." He gives them his name. He says, "I'm gonna live with you. We're gonna go everywhere together. There's gonna be this big fiery pillar. It's gonna be great." Incredible. God dwelling with his people.

And you know what? Sometimes I think we look at that and we go, "That'd be nice. I'd really like a physical representation of God, like a tent where God dwells right next door." Well, the truth is we have something better. Believers, we are the tent. The holy spirit dwells within us. God came in physical form, Jesus Christ, but he said, "I'm gonna go and I'm gonna send you something better. I'm gonna dwell in you. I'm gonna dwell in you." We have unprecedented access to God, but sometimes we long for the days of the big miracles rather than having the miracle of having God dwell within us.

I think about that and I'm like, what does it look like to long in the right direction with that? To celebrate what we have. I think about prayer. My prayer life is the sorriest thing that exists on the earth because I'm a pastor and I should really pray. I don't pray that much. I realized that this summer when I was on sabbatical. One of the things, one of the great gifts of the sabbatical was I started painting and I decided, "You know what? I love painting. I do it all the time, every night. So I'm gonna pray through painting." Brothers and sisters, will you take advantage of the reality of where we are in redemptive history that God is in you and invite him into things? Start talking to him.

The New Testament talks about praying without ceasing. I believe that's letting God into all aspects of your life and expecting him to be interested and involved in dialogue with you. He wants to talk to you. This morning, we had a great prayer time down in the basement with the saints of Mount Pleasant, and it rocked the foundations of this church. If you ever wanna join us, Sunday morning at 8:30, great time of prayer.

Long in the right direction, expecting that God is going to build his temple with us. You think about it, the lord walked with the early fathers, right? Abraham. With Moses, he camped with the people. We're gonna talk about this next week, but with David, he built a permanent residence, or made plans to. In the new covenant now, he dwells within us. But where are we going? We're going to dwell with him. Last week, one of our dear saints, Josephine Walker, passed away. She's been a member of this church for something like fourteen years, and she has been such a blessing to this church. But now she's with Christ for eternity in heaven. Long in that direction because that is all of our future together with her and with Christ forever.

The Law as a Gift

Alright. Finally, the last gift of the mosaic covenant is the law. And this is like fruitcake, right? At Christmas, everybody's like, "Oh, the law. He's gonna talk about the law like it's a gift." Yeah. I am. But everybody always does this with the Mosaic covenant. It's like it's separated out. It's like there was redemptive history, but we took a little bit of a step back with Moses because we kind of agreed to this thing where we were gonna try and follow the law and obviously that wasn't gonna work, right? And there's some sort of expectation like God instituted this with us like he thought we would figure it out. No.

The law was a gift because it pointed us to Christ because of our failure. But more than that, the law was a gift because it talks about our destination.

Think about that. I will be your God. You will be my people. Part of the promise of the new covenant is not only that we are justified—declared righteous—but that God through sanctification will make us righteous. Brothers and sisters, don't you long for that?

I'll tell you what: I have walked through some broken, messed up stuff in my life. But at the end of the day, the thing that makes me the most sad, that makes me long for the new heavens and new earth more than anything, is the new perfected me. Because I'm tired of the sinful, terrible me. A lot of the brokenness I've walked through in this world I caused. And I'm so thankful that God gave us his law as a marker, a light stream towards where we're going to be like Christ. And I can't wait.

Here's the thing though: often we long in the wrong direction. We'll say, "We'll take the justification, thank you very much. Sanctification? Well, just whenever you work out that glorification, God, give us a call." But the truth is that we have this incredible privilege of knowing where we need to go and having the opportunity of being about the work of the kingdom. God invites us into his redemptive work. We get to do it, be a part of it. And there's all kinds of ways in which sanctification applies. And there's all kinds of ways that if we're honest, everybody in a seat in this room and everybody standing have given up on certain parts of it.

But instead, we need to long with the expectant deliverance that God gives his people—that he will work in mighty and powerful ways. These are the gifts of the Mosaic covenant that point us to Christ and give us great hope, but also challenge us to dream bigger than we dream, to stop being satisfied in a broken and fallen world with broken and fallen selves, and look to the path that it points to.

The Four Ways We Long

In conclusion, the Mosaic Covenant and the New Covenant both direct us to long in at least four ways: for the scope of the kingdom to be expanded, for our deliverance from the world to be completed, for God to be brought nearer, and for us to be made more fully like Christ.

I want to read this passage from Revelation chapter seven because it's a picture of where we're going.

After this, I looked and behold a great multitude that no one could number from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages standing before the throne and before the lamb, clothed in white robes with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, said, "Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne and to the lamb."

And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God saying, "Amen. Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever. Amen."

Then one of the elders addressed me saying, "These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb." Hear that? "Therefore, they are before the throne and serve him day and night in his temple. And he who sits on the throne will shelter them with his presence. They are his people. He is their God. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst no more. The sun shall not strike them nor any scorching heat, for the lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and he will wipe away every tear from their eyes." — Revelation 7

CDK, may the God who delivered you, who dwells within you, who is transforming you, be your source of joy. May you long to have more and more of him this advent season. He longs to give you more and more because of Christ Jesus. He will be your God. You will be his people for all eternity in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.