Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the Erickson Covenant Podcast. We are so glad that you've joined us today.
We confess that we don't have all the answers, but as a community, we seek to find and follow Jesus and to discover daily the life he has always wanted for us.
We hope this message will be encouraging and will inspire you to take the next steps on your spiritual journey.
If we can help you in any way, please connect with us. The easiest way is through our website at Erickson Covenant ca.
Let's get started.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: So John Hyde was born in 1865 in Illinois.
And when he was 27 years old, he went as a missionary to the Punjab.
His mission at first gained few converts and endured persecution. So, so he began to pray very intensely and he developed the habit of praying while spending whole nights in prayer.
He started the Punjab Prayer Union and each of the members of the Punjab Prayer Union would pray for half an hour sometime, every lunchtime and prayer for revival.
He adopted a well known phrase as a kind of thing for his life is oh God, give me souls or I die.
He became known as Praying hyde.
And in 1908, it was quite a while ago, in 1908, he told the prayer group of his dream that there would be one convert per day.
And within a year there were 400 converts.
Something new.
So he died three years later.
But from this start, there were eventually millions of converts. And when Cheryl and I were in Pakistan in the 1980s and 90s, we worked with many spiritual descendants of this great intercessor who pleaded for the salvation of so many people.
The Bible. There's an interesting verse in the psalms in Psalm 99, 6, and it says Moses and Aaron were among his priests. Among his priests, Samuel was among those who called on his name.
They called on the Lord and he answered them.
So three special intercessors. The first one of those, Samuel, the first sermon in this series was based on.
Do you remember what his prayer was?
Right.
Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening. Yep, that was the first of the ones we looked at. But today we're going to consider another of those three people mentioned in that psalm. That's Moses.
We're going to look at the prayer, prayer of Moses.
A very different kind of prayer than Samuel's prayer, because it's a prayer of intercession. In other words, a prayer for other people, prayer for someone else. And in this case, that was the whole Israelite people.
And it shows us something very important about God.
But before we do, it might be worth considering what we expect God to be like in Our daily experience, in our prayers, you know, do we unconsciously think of God as something like a massive rock? Big, massive rock, okay, to build our lives on.
Reliable and unmoving and unchanging, but not really responsive except for the occasional faint echo when we cry out to God really hard.
Or do you think unconsciously think of God more like a living person who actually shows love and sometimes responds meaningfully?
So in Exodus 19 and 21, that part of the of the book talks about the great covenant that was made between Yahweh and the Israelites who just escaped from Egypt immediately after this. So it's immediately after that escape.
Moses then goes up on Mount Sinai with Joshua to receive the law from God, the covenant law.
And he stays there on the mountain for 40 days and 40 nights.
And that's when we come to Exodus 32 in the passage that Vicki read to us a few minutes ago.
Such a sad story, isn't it?
The Israelites have just been led out of Egypt by Moses.
They've been rescued from the Egyptian army by that miraculous passing through the Red Sea.
They've experienced the making of the covenant with Yahweh at Mount Sinai.
Then Moses goes up to the mountain to talk with God and he stays there longer than they expected.
What happens? They go rogue.
How could that happen?
How is that possible so quickly? It's hard to understand.
And if you're familiar with that whole story, you know why it seems so incredible they did that because so many incredible things happened that they really did see the power and help of God.
But you know, it's hard for me too to explain many of the sins that I fall into.
Often to my surprise and dismay, or perhaps usually to my surprise and dismay. We are all prone to unfaithfulness to God.
Anyway, let's look at this in more detail at this passage about the prayer of Moses.
It starts with God speaking to Moses. Then the Lord said to Moses, go down, because your people whom you brought up out of Egypt have become corrupt.
They've been quick to turn away from what I commanded them and have made themselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf.
They have bowed down to it and sacrificed to it and have said, this is your God, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.
So God informs Moses as to what is happening, in which it must have been quite a shock to Moses. He was up on the mountain in the middle of a wonderful six week retreat in the mountains with God, God himself. Right, but, and then comes this news. I mean, it's a shock to us just really about it.
So it doesn't take much though to get us humans off balance.
But then we read that for God it's judgment time.
And God says to Moses, I have seen these people and they are stiff necked people.
Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation.
You know, if I'd been Moses, I think I would have been happy with that offer from God.
God deals with the sin and the unreliability of this wild crowd of people down there that he just brought out of Egypt.
And there's a fresh start with Moses and his descendants becoming a great nation.
But notice how God predicates his judgments on Moses, leaving him alone.
Do you remember that God said, now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against his people.
How would you have understood that instruction from God?
Moses decides not to leave God alone, but rather to challenge God's decision.
And so as a result, we have this incredible example of a prayer that changes things and not just the future, but that actually changes the mind of God.
Let's take a look.
11 But Moses sought the favour of the Lord his God. Lord, he said, why should your anger burn against your people whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand?
Why should the Egyptians say it was with evil intent that he brought them out to kill them on the mountains and to wipe them from the face of the earth? Turn from your fierce anger. Relent and do not bring this disaster on your people.
Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Israel, to whom you swore by your own self.
I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky. And I will give your descendants all this land I promised them and it will be their inheritance forever.
And then the people relent. Sorry. Then the Lord relented and did not bring on his people disaster he had threatened.
So first right in this prayer, Moses questions responsibility or ownership of the people.
Because God had just told Moses to go down to his own people.
Go down to. And Moses had been leading them. But Moses argues no, no, he says, they're not my people. They. They're your people who you brought up out of Egypt. And after all, it was God who told Moses to do just that. Right.
I couldn't have done it.
I couldn't have brought them out. He said, they're your responsibility.
Lord, why are you going to destroy your own people?
So second after that, Moses expresses concern for what comes God's proposed actions would do for God's reputation with the surrounding nations.
And he says it would be seen as God extracting his people from Israel simply to then throw them aside and kill them.
Said, what a reputation.
And third, Moses reminds God of his oath to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. And to each of those, God, God gave a promise that they would be his people, his descendants would be his people. He would give their descendants the land of Canaan.
And that was in process at the time of this prayer. We're talking about 400 years it's been going on.
And from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob you now have a huge crowd of hundreds of thousands of people.
What point in starting over with Moses alone?
And then comes the next verse, verse 14, which is simple and dramatic.
It says God repented. That's King James, or depending on your translation, God relented.
Or God changed his mind. It's all saying the same thing.
Let's talk about that a bit.
And as I thought about that response of God, three things came to my mind. And the first one, three questions, shall I say?
The first question is, does God really change?
Can he?
Because you may be aware there are several places in the Bible that says that he doesn't change.
And here's an example.
It's numbers 2319.
It's the story of Balaam and Balak. I don't know if you remember the story. You will after a while. It's Balak, he was king of Moab and he hired a well known seer called Balaam to curse Israel. It's a fascinating story and if you're not familiar with it, take a look at numbers chapters 22 to 24.
But instead the seer Baalim, he blessed Israel. He said he was unable to curse.
And Balak tried to get king, Balak tried to get him to curse three times, but Balaam couldn't. And God gave this to Balaam to say to the king, say God is not human, that he should lie, he's not a human being, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?
So that's one place where God says, sorry, the scriptures say God doesn't change. There are some other examples too. It's not alone that passage.
There are several passages in the Bible though where God is described as changing his mind. And perhaps the first one in the Bible is in Genesis chapter six.
It's before the flood.
So God had made mankind that spread out on the earth, they'd become wicked.
And then this is what Genesis 6:6 to 8 says.
The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth.
You can understand it, can't you, sometimes? And his heart was deeply troubled.
So the Lord said, I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created, and with them the animals, the birds, and the creatures that move along the ground, for I regret that I have made them.
But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.
Another example where God changes his mind. It's a message from God given through the prophet Jeremiah, and it sets the stage for quite a bit of the prophecy of Jeremiah.
But this is what it says, Jeremiah 18:7.
If, says God at any time, I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed. And if that nation I warned repents of the evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned.
And there's an example of that teaching in Jonah. Do you remember the story of Jonah? He was sent to the inhabitants of the city of Nineveh. They were known for their cruelty throughout the world. In their. In war, they just devastated the nations that they attacked. And Israel had been a recipient of some of that.
Anyway, Noah goes and tells them that God would destroy the city in three days. He had a tortuous journey getting to that point, but he did it.
And he was apparently a very persuasive preacher because he says the whole city was kind of the largest empire of the time. The whole city repented before the deadline, right from the king, all the way down.
And we read in the accounts that when God. Jonah 3:10. When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and he did not. That's the same word there. And did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.
So how are we supposed to make sense of this apparent contradiction?
God, we are told, is not like a human who changes his mind all the time. But then we have examples of him just doing that.
How many of you know the old hymn, look around at the age here. Okay. Immortal, invisible, right?
Immortal, invisible.
God only wise, right? Yeah, I know a lot of you know it probably.
It's a list of really, of what God is like. And verse two says, part of it is, we humans, we wither and perish, but naught changeth thee.
[00:17:24] Speaker A: Right?
[00:17:25] Speaker B: There it is.
Lists of the attributes of God often include that God is immutable.
Immutable means unchanging.
Now, on one level, that may be true, but the reality is that when we try to talk about an eternal God, an infinite Eternal God outside the time that rules this universe that we live in.
And when he interacts with our universe, it's going to be impossible for us to describe how that happens.
[00:18:05] Speaker A: Right?
[00:18:06] Speaker B: There'll be contradictions for our time bound brains.
It just can't do it.
I once heard someone asking James Packer, who was teaching a course I was at in Vancouver, they asked, how can prayer be meaningful if God already knows the future?
And his answer, kind of wise answer, he said, Oh, right, Says, you know, prayer is included in God's knowledge of the future.
So that's part of it, right? And that kind of satisfied me for a while.
But you know, it messes with our ideas of free will when you start coming up with a comment like that.
It's just, I think we have to accept that we cannot put God in a box and say God is here and that's it.
So.
So I would say that we can say with certainty that in our experience of interacting with God within this universe, within time, God does sometimes change his mind.
Second question, why did God change his mind in this chapter in Exodus 32, when Moses prayed to him, I think the stage is set by the nature of God. And Moses had another experience, which is recorded in the following chapter of Exodus, Exodus 33.
Because Moses then prayed another bold prayer. And he says, please God, let me see your glory.
And God agreed. But he said, I'll do that, but I can't let you see my face because no one can see my face and live.
So what happened next is that somehow God passed in front of Moses proclaiming the Lord, the Lord or Yahweh. Yahweh.
That is who I am. Who I am. I am who I am.
The compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness. And that is the core of who God is.
So in most of the instrument incidents recorded where God is described as relenting or changing his mind, as with Jonah's mission in Nineveh, it was a compassionate and gracious response of God to people repenting.
But in the incident of Mount Sinai, the Israelites didn't repent and God still spared them.
So then what is it that's making God change his mind here?
It was intercessory prayer.
It was the prayer of Moses for the people of Israel, pleading for God to spare his fellow Israelites rather than. Was that. Rather than the repentance of the guilty themselves.
But that changed God's mind, we're told, and changed human history.
Okay, third question.
Can we, you or I persuade God to change his mind.
You know, that depends on parts on what you want to change.
For our prayers to be successful, they're going to have to be in line with God's purpose.
And the main thing that God communicated to Moses, right, as I mentioned earlier, is that he is a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in faithful love and truth.
He repeatedly responds to a human's repentance, both as recorded in the Bible and as we see today.
And then in the prayer of Moses, we see God responding also to a compassionate prayer for a bunch of unrepentant sinners who were in his charge.
Interesting, eh?
So, yes, I believe it's possible that I can and that you can persuade God to change his mind and exercise compassion when it comes to those around us who are not yet repentant.
Now, if you're not convinced because you think, yeah, Moses was a rather, you know, unique case, right? He was a very unique man.
He was the founder of a nation.
He was someone who talked to God as a man talks to his friend. He's a person who would, you know, well, so many incredible things.
You read the life of Moses and you think, wow, he was someone who delved deep into God regularly and regularly.
So he was unusual. But if you think that's too extraordinary, doesn't apply to you, you need to look at the book of James and the end of the Book of James, chapter five, where James has a very interesting passage on intercessory prayer and a strong encouragement for us to pray, which includes several memorable statements such as the intense prayer of the righteous is powerful.
So fourth question this brings us culminates in this question, really, will you pray as Moses did, for those in your circle of life who are not repentant?
You know, God doesn't want to destroy those people, but he can't overlook sin. And whether those people are people who are, say they're believers or whether they're not.
Let's look briefly at a well known passage in chapter three of the gospel of John, starting at verse 16.
You know it well, most of you, but maybe not so much as it goes on, because it's not so nice as it goes on.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him.
Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they've not believed in the name of God's one and only Son.
So that being true, we should all be praying like Moses, shouldn't we?
I believe we all have in our circle of contacts, many who, as we've just read, stand condemned, even though we really don't think about that most of the time.
By contrast, the example of Moses we have in today's passages of someone who was brought to full awareness of coming judgments on the people and became, as a result, very bold before God.
No God, he pleaded, don't do what you've told me you're going to do to these people.
He must have been very upset with these people, don't you think?
Angry even. But he still chose to argue with God on their behalf.
He understood that the people were God's responsibility, but he still managed to take responsibility for them in prayer.
And he wasn't just bold, he was persuasive.
He threw at God every reason he could think of, that they were essentially God's responsibility, that God's reputation was at stake and that God had made a promise.
Moses was praying from his heart, and he tried to be praying to the heart of God.
Most of my prayers are wishy washy compared to that, right?
My heart isn't in it.
I doubt if God would ever want to answer a prayer like please bless my sister or whatever, right?
Search for what your heart wants to say and see where the Spirit leads you in prayer.
So will you pray as Moses did, for those in your circle of life who are not repentant?
Can you up your intercession a notch or two?
I know there's a group in this church that's been trying to do that for a few months now, reading a book together and then praying regularly.
Can you pray in lines in line with God's compassion, but at the same time in line with his hatred of evil?
Be real.
You can be emotional before God because God is a compassionate person.
He's not just a rock.
And argue with God if appropriate, always seeking the glory of God.
So then, is there a real need for us to pray for others? Yes, a huge need.
We're surrounded by people who refuse to believe, either absolutely or practically.
So now, in response to the challenge of Moses example, and irrespective of any change in your prayer habits in the future, it seems to me appropriate for us now to take a few minutes for silent prayer and to pray for someone.
So I'm going to suggest now that you pray on your own silent prayer and sit while you're doing it, or kneel or stand, whatever feels most easiest for you. Most appropriate, close your eyes so you can be less distracted and lay before God. I'm going to suggest you lay before God one person you know who needs his mercy.
So let's do that. Let's pray now for a minute or two and maybe a start of something special.
Let's pray.
Sam,
[00:30:30] Speaker A: Thanks for listening in today.
We hope you feel encouraged and challenged.
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