In our series on ‘Questions’, we looked at Exodus 3 & 4, Moses being commissioned by God. This encounter with God radically changed Moses and we see raw, honest communication (so necessary for all relationships) as Moses questions God and God asks Moses ‘What is in your hand?’ (Ex 4:2) We can learn much from this exchange.

Moses clearly felt inadequate to the task of going to Pharaoh and leading the Israelites out of Egyptian slavery. His ‘Who am I?’ question to God reflects how we often feel too. God’s answer is that it’s not really about who Moses is, but who God is; it’s not about who Moses is but whose He is. In other words, it’s not about Moses’s identity, but God’s. ‘I will be with you.’ (Ex 3:12)

Moses’s next question looks deeper into this question of God’s identity and who He is. It’s one thing to go to the Israelites and say, ‘God is with me’, but he anticipates their questions and assumes they will want to know more about this ‘God of their fathers.’ They will ask for more details and Moses is unsure about his relationship to God. He hasn’t got all the answers. He doesn’t know how to answer the questions that will surely come. We can often feel like this too. We don’t have all the answers to the many questions people ask us about God and we feel uncertain and often lacking confidence because of this. God’s answers take us ever further and deeper into His heart: ‘“I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’” (Ex 3:14)

Moses’s next question presupposes that these answers aren’t going to be enough to convince the Israelites, let alone Pharaoh! (Ex 4:1) He was struggling to believe that he, this outcast for forty years, this man who had been in Midian being a shepherd – a shepherd, of all things! – could be used by God to lead God’s people out of slavery. It seemed impossible. Yet God asked him, ‘What is in your hand?’ (Ex 4:2), and used the ordinary shepherd’s staff to convince Moses, turning it into a snake! God was going to take the ordinary things of Moses’s life and use these to demonstrate His miraculous, totally supernatural power to the Israelites and to Pharaoh. He would give the people the signs they needed to believe it was God. God would sort it out.

Ultimately, what God is looking for is not our ability and skill, but our obedience and faith. The ordinary things of life, when surrendered to God, can become something amazing. God is the One who steps into our ordinariness to equip us for the extraordinary. He is the One who qualifies us, as Paul reminded the Corinthians. (2 Cor 3:5-6)

The past eighteen months, especially lockdowns, have changed so many things for people, including (at times) how we gather together as the church. Some may ask why we need to meet together in person, given that we can do so on Zoom or other Internet platforms, but Heb 10:25 reminds us of the importance of gathering together to encourage and instruct each other. There is something about meeting together in person which cannot be replicated online!

Gathering together involves worshipping God together and also hearing from the word of God (see Luke 2:13-14). Jesus, the Word of God, is God’s way of communicating to the world, and the written word of God in the form of the Bible is important to our spiritual growth (see 2 Tim 3:16). God has inspired the word and brings things to life by His word (see Heb 11:3, Ps 1:3, Heb 4:12). His word is important because it challenges us and sanctifies us; we can hear the word in spoken form and can also sing the word of God in our songs, all of which helps to build faith as we gather together.

God’s word needs to be read, understood and applied for it to take effect in our lives. It’s good to gather together to hear this word and to allow God to speak through it.

The prophetic voice makes up a significant part of Scripture. There are 16 books in the Old Testament named after prophets (including the major prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel and the twelve minor prophets) and prophets feature in many of the historical books (Elijah and Elisha probably being the most well-known of these) as well as Moses being a prophet in the first five books of the Bible. In the New Testament we see prophets and read about the gift of prophecy. It’s clearly an important aspect of a life of faith, yet most of us struggle to engage with prophets and prophecy.

The prophetic voice is often uncomfortable, bringing us face to face with God, a God who does not bow to our wishes but who is passionate about holiness and justice, and uncompromising in His demands for people to be wholly devoted to Him. The prophetic voice is insistent about the majesty and power of God, relentless in calling us to repentance and whole-hearted service and uncompromising in waking us from complacency, ignorance and indifference to a life spent dedicated to God.

Prophets see life from God’s point of view. They live in a God-centred world. Most of us lack this ability, believing ourselves to be the centre of the universe and God to be a Father Christmas-like figure benevolently doling out sweeties (aka blessings) to us when we are good. The prophetic voice challenges this viewpoint, confronting us consistently and persistently with the God who IS.

Idolatry is the chief sin the prophets spoke out against. Idolatry means to put something or someone, some philosophy or ideology, before God. It means to rely on someone or something more than God. This is no irrelevant topic, though many feel because they do not worship statues that they have no idols.

In recent months when faced with ‘unprecedented’ situations, people have looked to governments and scientists to provide solutions to illness. They want human ingenuity and talent to provide answers. There is nothing wrong with using our skills to help people, but if we are trusting in people and their solutions (e.g. vaccines), we are not necessarily trusting in God. There is a danger when we put our full trust in anything other than God.

The prophetic voice was never popular. Even the religious authorities refused to listen. I believe we need the prophetic voice more than ever today, but it’s unlikely ever to ‘sync’ with the popular voice or the ‘mainstream’ view. The prophetic voice will always cut down the roots of sin (and self-reliance or reliance on others are at the heart of sin) and call us back to simple trust in God. That will always be a radical, unpopular solution, but this is at the heart of the prophetic voice.

We finished our Bible study on Joel tonight, looking at Joel 2:12-3:21. Joel issues a call to repentance – and a repentance that is heartfelt, not simply following the outward rituals of tearing garments. As we said last time, if we repent, there is the hope that God will relent (Joel 2:13-14). It appears from the later verses in Joel 2 that a period of time may have elapsed and Israel saw God’s healing and help. Certainly, one of the things that makes prophecy hard to understand is how there are various layers, referring to things at the present time of the prophet and also to things far off in the future. In Joel 2, God promises restoration (Joel 2:25-27) and the latter part of this chapter, quoted in Acts 2, shows a fulfilment far off in the future. It might have seemed incredible to think that God would pour out His Spirit on all people, rather than simply on prophets, priests and kings, but Peter was aware that the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost was the fulfilment of this prophecy, and we see in the various references to the ‘day of the Lord’ that there is a future judgment to come – a judgment that will be welcomed by those in right relationship with God who long to see justice restored but which will be dreadful for all who have spurned God.

We see how Joel brings warning and a call to repentance along with a sure knowledge of God’s nature and the hope of future restoration. The book ends with the words, ‘The Lord dwells in Zion’, a reminder that our long-term future is blessed by God’s presence. Joel 3:17-21 gives us imagery of abundance and blessing and hope. The Day of the Lord, when God intervenes in human history, can be seen to be a marvellous thing for those who live according to His righteousness. We can have hope ultimately because of the faithfulness and loving kindness of God.

At our ‘Little Big Church‘ service tonight, Garry explored the sensitivity of touch with the children, getting them to feel objects such as an apple, onion and lemon and then placing these objects into a pillowcase and finding out if they could guess which was which through touch alone. To make it harder, they then had to do the same thing with oven gloves on, and not surprisingly found it much harder to discern which was which when hampered in that way!

The sensitivity of touch is dulled when we wear gloves, and this reminds us of the fact that God has promised to give us a new heart and put a new spirit in us, to remove from us our heart of stone and give us a heart of flesh. (Ezek 36:26) A heart of stone refers to a stone like marble; the word is also used to describe a bone callus that forms at a break. There is a loss of feeling when such a callus forms, similar to the loss of vision associated with grief (Job 17:7). Jesus is often described as being distressed by the hardness of people’s hearts (see Mark 6:52, Mark 8:14-21). What is even worse than having this kind of hardness is when we stubbornly refuse to believe or care. (Mark 3:1-5)

Hardened hearts refuse to acknowledge what God has done (Heb 3:7-9), but God has promised to transform our hardened hearts into hearts of flesh. We need to have softened hearts, to be humble and teachable, tender and open to change. We need to feel the way God feels and not to become insensitive, dulled and dimmed.

In our series looking at questions God asks us, we looked at Mark 8:34-38 where Jesus asked His disciples two challenging questions:

• What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? 

• What can anyone give in exchange for their soul?

In these verses, Jesus addressed those who wanted to be His disciple and spelled out for them the challenges of discipleship, which involved self-denial and living life on God’s terms, with God in the driving seat. We cannot expect following Jesus to be all miracles and ‘wow’ moments; we must be prepared for the suffering, opposition and persecution. The gospel way is one of paradox where to find life, we must be prepared to lose it; we have to understand that God’s foolishness is wiser than our wisdom and His weakness stronger than our strength. (1 Cor 1:18-25) Jesus forced His disciples to consider the soul, to understand that there is so much more to life than the physical, material world which dominates our thinking.

We may have everything the world offers – money, houses, cars, possessions, fame, celebrity and so on – but if we have not attended to our souls, to the part of us that money can’t buy, then we have failed to understand the meaning of life. If we forfeit something, we lose it. We can’t live in the here and now as if the here and now is all there is, without subsequently suffering loss. Moreover, His second question (‘what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?’ Mark 8:37) underlines this point. You can’t buy salvation. You can’t pay for the gift of eternal life. You can’t barter for the gift of the Holy Spirit. You can’t earn spiritual gifts with physical goods. No amount of financial giving to God’s work or hard work for God can ‘buy’ God’s favour.

To be a disciple of Jesus means that we put God first in everything. We don’t compartmentalise our lives; we don’t relegate God to the times we attend church services, but let Him into every area of our lives. When we understand the radical nature of discipleship, the consequences are amazing – those timid disciples who struggled to understand the teaching of Jesus before His death and resurrection became fearless witnesses to Him afterwards through the power of the Holy Spirit. We are called to be the same: radical, fervent, full of zeal, full of the Holy Spirit, full of faith and putting God’s will above our own. Nothing less will do in our discipleship.