Open your Bibles, if you would, to Exodus, Chapter 5. Exodus, Chapter 5. Moses has left the burning bush. He's returned to Egypt. He's announced God's purpose of redemption to the people, and they have bowed their heads and worshipped in the previous verse. And here in Chapter 5, Verse 1, it all falls apart. all of chapter five, but we'll look specifically at just verse one. Afterward, Moses and Aaron went in and told Pharaoh, thus says the Lord God of Israel, let my people go that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness. And Pharaoh said, who is the Lord that I should obey his voice to let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, Nor will I let Israel go. So they said, The God of the Hebrews has met with us. Please let us go three days journey into the desert and sacrifice to the Lord our God, lest he fall upon us with the pestilence or with the sword. Then the king of Egypt said to them, Moses and Aaron, why do you take the people from their work? Get back to your labor. Pharaoh said, look, the people of the land are many now, and you make them rest from their labor. So the same day, Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters of the people and their officers, saying, you shall no longer give the people straw to make brick as before. Let them go and gather straw for themselves. And you shall lay on them a quota of bricks which they made before. You shall not diminish it. For they are idle, therefore they cry out, saying, let us go and sacrifice to our God. Let more work be laid on the men that they may labor in it, and let them not regard false words. And the taskmasters of the people and their officers went out and spoke to the people, saying, Thus says Pharaoh, I will not give you straw. Go get yourself straw where you can find it. Yet none of your work will be diminished. So the people were scattered abroad throughout all the land of Egypt to gather stubble instead of straw. And the taskmasters forced them to hurry, saying, Fulfill your work, your daily quota, as when there was straw. Also, the officers of the Children of Israel, whom Pharaoh's taskmasters had set over them, were beaten and were asked, Why have you not fulfilled your task in making brick both yesterday and today as before? Then the officers of the Children of Israel came and cried out to Pharaoh, saying, Why are you dealing thus with your servants? There is no straw given to your servants. And they say to us, Make brick. And indeed, your servants are beaten, but the fault is in your own people. But he said, You are idle, therefore you say, Let us go and sacrifice to the Lord. Therefore go now and work, for no straw shall be given you, yet you shall deliver the quota of bricks. The officers of the children of Israel saw that they were in trouble after it was said, You shall not diminish any bricks from your daily quota. Then as they came from Pharaoh, they met Moses and Aaron who stood there to meet them. And they said to them, let the Lord look on you and judge because you have made a stink in the sight of Pharaoh and in the sight of his servants and put a sword in their hand to kill us. So Moses returned to the Lord and said, Lord, why have you brought trouble on this people? Why is it you have sent me? Since I came to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has done evil to this people. Neither of you delivered your people at all. We'll stop there. Let's pray. Father, keep us from a self-righteous attitude as we read this text. Help us to understand the lessons that You have for Your servants in this account. We pray especially, Father, that you would teach us to heed your word, to do what you tell us to do, rather than taking matters into our own hands and going on moral crusades in your name that were never authorized by you. Father, help us pay attention to the word of the Lord. We ask that you would help us right now to listen. In Jesus name, amen. Last week we looked at why we worship. This week we look at why we don't worship. One reason that we don't worship is that we fail to pay attention to what God said. We confuse our goals and methods with God's goals and methods. And then when our goals and methods fail, we get really upset. God, you let me down again. You haven't delivered this people at all. You didn't come through with your promise when Moses didn't do it the way God said to do it. What we'll see tonight is that God approaches Pharaoh with respect, but Moses doesn't. which teaches us to heed God's word and to esteem others better than ourselves. Chapter five, verse one, Moses and Aaron went in and told Pharaoh, and this is a beautiful setup. If you know nothing about Exodus, you know this. Thus says the Lord, let my people go. Moses broaches a controversial subject in the most controversial way possible. He doesn't beat around the bush. He doesn't enter dialogue. He doesn't say, please. He comes in right into Pharaoh's presence with a full-blown imperative. Pharaoh, God says, let him go. Moses stakes out the issues and his bargaining position right in the very first moment. And we say, wow, Moses, you have some guts, man. This is pretty amazing. Except if you turn back the page to chapter three, verse 18, and realize that God had scripted this particular show. God had told Moses exactly what to say and how to say it. Chapter three, verse 18. They will heed your voice, God tells Moses about the elders of Israel, and you shall come, you and the elders of Israel, to the king of Egypt. And you shall say to him, Yahweh God of the Hebrews has met with us and now please let us go three days journey into the wilderness that we may sacrifice to Yahweh our God. So God says, Moses here's how to do it. Gather the elders. Go to Pharaoh. Tell him what's happened that Yahweh has met with you and then say now please let us go three days journey and sacrifice. So what does Moses say? Well, there are several deviations from this script in chapter five, verse one. The first is that Moses and Aaron go in alone. They don't bring the elders. God said, bring the elders. But verse five, verse one says afterward, Moses and Aaron went in and told Pharaoh. No hint of the elders coming along with them. The second deviation, God said, say, the Lord God of the Hebrews has met with us. Moses doesn't say that, and he speaks instead of the Lord God of Israel. Now, we don't know whether to this Pharaoh, Hebrews and Israel were interchangeable, or if Israel was perhaps a name he didn't know, he uses the name Israel later on, so probably This is a minor deviation, but it's a deviation nonetheless. But then thirdly, and the major deviation, is that God said, ask with a please. Please let us go three days journey into the wilderness that we may sacrifice. Moses and Aaron in chapter five, verse one, are not asking. They are demanding. There is no please. There's no let us. There is a full-blown imperative. Let my people go. Now I guarantee you that every one of you in here is nervous about using the imperative mood of the verb on a peer. It's not polite. It's not done. If you do it, You probably feel your heart pound a little bit. Just walk up to somebody and say, stop, or let that go. Except in cases of extreme duress, if you see somebody reaching for a charged electrical wire or something. But in ordinary conversation, the imperative is verboten. You don't go there. Moses and Aaron are using the imperative not on a peer, but on a superior, on the king of Egypt. And yet they march in there and do this. God said, ask with a please. God said, don't be rude or demanding. Come in humbly and ask. Now we have some records of how the Egyptians handled their slaves on these big work gangs. And some of the records contain, well, the slaves came and asked for time off to go worship their God. So he gave them three days off and they went off and did that. Now this is an established custom in Egypt. Slaves have the right to go out in the desert and sacrifice to their God. Moses and Aaron were instructed then to bring the leaders of the community, the elders of Israel, with them to come in as a large delegation and to present a humble petition to Pharaoh for some of this time off. They don't do that in the slightest. And so, of course, what happens is that Pharaoh rejects that petition, and then in verse three, they try again, and a slightly more chastened tone of voice, the pleas appears, the request for a three days journey comes out, along with this really weird statement about, God will kill us if we don't do this. Not sure how that's supposed to motivate Pharaoh. or why that deviation from the script is there. But I wanna focus just a little bit longer on this deviation in verse one. What do we learn from Moses going completely off the script and demanding from Pharaoh? Well, the first thing we learn when we look at the script is that God is not rude or demanding even to Pharaoh. God said, be respectful. God said, go in and ask for a known right of slaves in a way that fits with where you're at and with where Pharaoh was at. This is a basic standard for Christians. Treat everyone with respect regardless of their moral character. We know that Pharaoh is a rotten person. that presumably he has no objection to the baby murdering policies of his predecessor that are recorded in chapter one. Certainly he has no problem with slavery, with hunting down and killing fugitives, with unreasonable and exacting work policies, as chapter five goes on to recount. You will continue to make bricks without straw. But God doesn't take it upon himself to abuse Pharaoh to open the conversation with vitriol or to cast harsh and intemperate language at him. All right, a lesson here for us. Follow God's script. So even if Pharaoh had said, okay, I'll let him go, Moses should not have approached him like this. Because the issue is not the results. The issue is whether Moses followed the word of the Lord. Yes, the results are bad in the rest of the chapter. But the point is not Moses went off script and bad results followed, therefore stay on the script. Point is bigger than that. Moses didn't follow the word of the Lord. And that in and of itself is a problem, even if good results had followed. You see, sometimes you will follow the script and bad results follow. We already looked at Philippians 2. Jesus came and he followed the script to the letter. He was the script, as I mentioned, and they crucified him. The point is not, then, stick to the script to avoid pain and suffering. Do exactly what God says. Treat everyone with respect. and your life will be a lot more pleasant. Maybe. Maybe not. The point is rather that if you stick to the script, you will please your Heavenly Father and you will look like His Son. What would Christlikeness have looked like here in Exodus 5.1? Well, the first thing I want to say is don't attach God's name to moral crusades God did not authorize. Christlikeness does not look like going on a moral crusade and attaching God's name to that crusade. Was God against Hebrew slavery? Of course he was, right? The rest of Exodus bears that out. But when Moses comes in and says, in the name of God, I demand immediate abolition of Hebrew slavery. That's not what God told him to say. That's not how God told him to approach this issue. We live in an era of moral crusades. We live in a time when all kinds of people, individuals, organizations feel compelled to release statements distancing themselves from or supporting their favorite moral crusades and crusaders. Now, we could talk about why we got there, but the fact is we're there. Moses did not live in a morally crusading culture. He went on one kind of because that was his personality, as we already saw back in chapter two when he killed the Egyptian. But in our culture, whether your personality is to go on moral crusades or not, you will feel the urge to do it because that's what everybody's doing. It's in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the commercials we see. You might be going along with our culture's moral crusades. You might be resolutely crusading against their moral crusades. Either way, the means are just as important as the end. We can say, well, hey, chapter five, verse one of Exodus, Moses' goal is the same as God's. God said, I'm gonna bring the people out of slavery. So Moses just cut to the chase and told Pharaoh, Pharaoh, go ahead and submit right now. Look, I'm here as God's spokesman and this will go a lot easier if you just give up immediately. Let my people go. But that was not how God said to do it. Even if your ultimate goal is the same as God's, how you get there actually matters. The means you use have to meet with God's approval, right? And what's our culture's favorite means of moral crusading? Well, it's self-righteous grandstanding. Well, I have the spotlight. Let me take a moment to tell you how much I disapprove of the hideous actions of these people over here. And how much I want all of you to laud and applaud these wonderful victims over here. Self-righteous grandstanding, you can certainly watch as much as you want of it on television, on C-SPAN, on the evening news. You can see it in the denominational assembly. of our own denomination. I watched a good bit of it at both of the last two General Assemblies I went to as our denominational officers stood up. We apologize to everyone for how our female missionaries have been treated. That's not a representation of our denomination. It's been hard to be a woman missionary in the PCA and that's going to change. And other self-righteous grandstanding from people who never mistreated sister missionaries. but who just want to take the opportunity to let you know that they're distancing themselves from that. Self-righteous grandstanding is the name of the game in moral crusading, and too much Christian engagement consists of that at home, at school, at church, and in the public arena. I will make an exception to some extent for the workplace. I think that much Christian engagement in the workplace does not look like that. that most of us, as we go off to work on a daily basis, don't lord it over our co-workers or announce to them that we are doing this better than they are. Praise God for that. But in these other areas, as we talk to our children, as we talk to our students, as we talk to our politicians, self-righteous grandstanding is not the way to achieve God's goals in this world. That's not the means he's given us. Our means is not to announce how much better we are than the so-and-sos. Paul completely rules that out, and Philippians 2, with esteem others better than yourselves. If you think that other people are better than you, then you can't stand up in public and say, I'm better than other people. You just can't do that. Moses goes on a crusade against Hebrew slavery, demands immediate abolition, and he does it wrong, he goes off script. And you and I can do that too by attaching God's name to moral crusades he didn't authorize, by engaging in self-righteous grandstanding, as we denounce sins that we didn't participate in, in the name of making ourselves look better than whoever it is we're trying to crusade against. Secondly, don't call your own words God's words. Moses says, thus saith the Lord, let my people go that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness. Well, actually, God said, Moses should have said, if he was actually going to quote God, he would have said, thus saith the Lord. The Lord God of the Hebrews has met with us. Please let us go three days into the wilderness that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God. There's some overlap there, sure. But at best, Moses' announcement is a very distant paraphrase of what he was actually instructed to say to Pharaoh. And again, all too easy to take our own ideas, our own version that's distantly related, that's several iterations down the line from what God originally said, paste a thus saith the Lord on it, and hit somebody with it. God says this. God says the economic system of the United States of America as presently constituted is the only right way to do it. He does. Where does he say that? Well, he says thou shalt not steal and we're a capitalist country and other systems believe in stealing. Well. Sure. Except. Have you seen all the things the federal government pays for? Have you seen all the things that we should? We are not. a country that carries through thou shalt not steal systematically in every area of our economic life. We're just not. So it goes, don't attach God's name to your own words in your personal life, in your political life, in your place and calling, whatever it is, learn the lesson of Moses. Do it God's way, follow his script, or don't do it at all. So where will God's script take us? Well, against the therapeutic affirming face of our culture, oh, you poor thing, you're a victim, everything's gonna be all right, right? We insist that God's moral standards are absolute. There is no exception to the fifth commandment for those who have terrible parents. We don't call our own words God's words, we stick to what God said, and God's words require us to stand against that therapeutic affirming face of our culture. But also, our culture has another face, the crusading self-righteous face, and against that face, we insist that God actually nourishes and sustains those who fight against him. that Jesus preserved not only the life, but even the health of the very men who were crucifying him. And that from the doctrine of creation comes the right to be wrong. In order to speak God's words, we stand against the therapeutic affirming face, but we also stand against the crusading self-righteous face. Neither of those faces maps correctly onto God's script. God is kind to the evil and the ungrateful. And therefore, we don't say, oh, he's evil and ungrateful. He shouldn't have food. He shouldn't have a job. He shouldn't have a legitimate place in this society. No, God is kind to the evil and the ungrateful. That doesn't mean God endorses evil and ingratitude. God is against that, but God is equally against the crusading self-righteousness that puts those people out at the curb for the trash truck to take away. So therefore, from Moses and his butchering of the script, we learn the lesson of honoring all men, even really Evil ones. Pharaoh was really evil. No doubt about it. Pharaoh is a nasty human being. But God's script said to honor him. And the New Testament, of course, puts it even more bluntly, esteem others better than yourselves. Think of that person whose dumb habits annoy you every day. and say to yourself, the Bible says that person is better than I am, even though I would never do that. How do we get to the place where we actually can honor someone we think of, maybe with good reason, as really evil? How do you do that? We have to trust that God will save. and that his methods of confronting and vanquishing evil are superior to our half-baked crusades. God, my way of conquering evil is faster. It's better. It would really work. No, actually God knows more about this than you do. I've had my own moment of this, hearing about domestic violence from our friend Jane Gale, many years a dispatcher at Sheridan County Sheriff's Office. Finally, I said to her, why don't these battered women just shoot the guy and be done with it? And she said, oh, I've seen that too. That's even worse. Well, you know a lot more about it than I do, Jane. God knows more about every facet of evil than you or I ever will. We can say, aha, I found the solution. This is it. My crusade is gonna put a stop to this evil. God says, you don't understand. You don't know what the outcome of your crusade will be. You need to follow my script. And my script says, esteem others better than yourself. The moment our Christianity becomes about asserting, no, we're actually better than others, we've forgotten the whole reason Jesus came. Just as soon as I get there, I'm a Christian, therefore I'm superior to you in, name it. I've forgotten that Jesus came because I was inferior to God's standards. I didn't measure up. And I actually believe in him because he came to call sinners to repentance. If I were better, I wouldn't be a Christian. If I didn't need Jesus to save me, then I could do a little moral grandstanding. The whole point of the story of Jesus is that no flesh can boast. No one can stand up over against somebody else and say, you're so evil, I'm not gonna honor you. God's script says honor, fear God, honor all men, 1 Peter. But I disagree with that. You don't deserve honor. You're too far gone. But we have to trust that God will save. and that that's why we can honor all men. We have to trust that God saves through suffering. He saves through the painful and shameful death of the cross. But he saves. And delivering moral ultimatums never saves. The thunders of the law don't save. They feel good. They don't save. Jesus saves. And that, I'm afraid, is what Moses forgot when he waltzed into Pharaoh's presence with an imperative on his lips and said, thus says the Lord, and proceeds to misquote the Lord, let my people go. The way of salvation lies along the path of listening to and enacting, performing the words of Jesus. Not substituting your own. We have to wash off that self-anointing, take the deep breath, say, I am not the Messiah. I'm not here to take away the sin of the world by telling the world to stop it, and start being better immediately on my terms. Does the world need to stop at it and start being better? Of course it does. But my moral crusading is not how God has chosen to save the world. He sent a better Savior with a better method of salvation. Right, I am not the Messiah. but I know someone who is." It's a lesson Moses had to learn as he took the people out of Egypt. We'll talk about that when we get to chapter 32. He sees them doing the golden calf and realizes, uh-oh, I'm not enough to deal with this people. I mean, he already comes to that moment at the end of chapter 5. God, you haven't delivered your people. To which God says, chapter six, verse one, now you will see. Now you'll see. And that's God's word to us when we go on crusades. So you think I haven't delivered? Well, just wait, you'll see. Moses needed to learn to follow God's word. When he did, he brought the people out of Egypt. And when you follow God's word, you'll know how poorly you follow it, how little righteousness to brag about you actually have, and how much you need a savior whose name is Jesus. So how do you enact trust in God? You follow the script. You keep all the commands at once, the commands to stand against evil and the commands to be respectful. The commands to provide for your family and the commands to prioritize the worship of God, even when the state says you won't be able to feed your family if you worship that God. Keeping all God's commands at once, it's not easy. In fact, it's impossible for everyone except Jesus. But he did it. He kept the commands. He performed the whole script. He is God. the script. And if we trust Him, if we build our life on His words, we won't just hold a feast to God in the wilderness, we'll actually hold a feast to God in the banqueting hall of the New Jerusalem. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, help us to reject, to walk away from this culture of moral crusading that might select a good outcome. An outcome that you desire, an outcome that you command, but that in the process forgets about the means you've given us to get there. Lord, the means by which you'll save the world is your Son. Help us then to be all about Him. Worshipping Him. Talking about Him. delighting in Him, proclaiming Him, trusting Him to save, and knowing that though moral ultimatums don't save, Jesus does. Lord, we don't naturally esteem others better than ourselves. Far from it. Help us to have the mind that was in Christ Jesus. Give us that fear of the Lord that leads to life. We thank you that you did let your people go, but that you had to show Moses it wasn't his power that was going to deliver. It wasn't his misquoting of you. It was your power that would save. Father, we believe that. Help our unbelief tonight, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.