Exodus 3

'The place where you are standing is holy ground' (v.5). But what is 'holy ground'? And is the assembly hall at Warden Park school any more or less 'holy' than our church building at Sussex Road?

As God's revelation progresses into the New Testament, the idea of a 'holy place' being primarily a geographical location (e.g. the Temple in Jerusalem) gives way to an emphasis on the holy fulness of God being located in the person of Jesus Christ. And, following Jesus' ascension to glory, God now dwells in his followers through the presence of the Holy Spirit.

So for many of us, the places where we have been especially aware of God's holy presence are not necessarily 'religious' sites, so much as times and places where we have gathered to make ourselves open and available to God. For example, I think that at our first meeting at Warden Park a few weeks ago, when some of our young people were leading our service, many of us had a sense of God's special presence with us.

Back to Exodus 3: God tells Moses to take off his shoes and not to come any closer. You can come near to God, but be careful about coming near. Through Jesus, we now have confidence to enter the holiest place of all (Hebrews 10:19) - and we should not take that privilege lightly, wherever we are.

Exodus 2

The Hebrew word for basket in v.3 only comes in one other place in the Bible – it is the same word as is used for Noah’s ark in Genesis 6-9.  So baby Moses had his own little ark, in which he floated in a situation of both danger and safety – a bit like all those animals, centuries earlier.

Both danger and safety.  For Noah, being on dry land would only have seemed safe until the rains got going, but being in that boat, pitching about with all those animals for company, must have felt pretty dangerous.  For Moses, being in his parents’ house was dangerous, but floating on the edge of the Nile where a random Egyptian could discover you was dangerous too.

From a spiritual perspective, ‘safety’ is a tricky thing.  ‘If you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall’, Paul says (1 Corinthians 10:12).  Feeling safe is dangerous.  In fact there is only one safe place to be, and that’s in God’s hands.  There is only one safe path, and that’s the narrow path of God’s will.  

I hereby predict that there will be times in the months ahead when things connected with the building project don’t go as smoothly as we would like, and when we will wonder whether we shouldn’t perhaps have stayed in Sussex Road after all (that smell of damp in the crèche room wasn’t so bad, was it?).  

The Israelites had those sort of feelings quite a few times during the Exodus – and God tended not to show them a lot of sympathy.  He knows that the ground which we have come to know and trust is actually not nearly as safe as the wobbly, sickness-inducing motion of the ark/basket.

Exodus 1

A phrase that struck me in this opening chapter of Exodus comes in v.17, 'The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do'.  Presumably the midwives were also afraid of the king of Egypt (at least a bit), but their fear of God was greater.

Of course, the word ‘fear’ when applied to God needs to be treated carefully.  God’s children are not supposed to cringe before him, nervous that he is some sort of despot who will behave cruelly or crazily.  No, 'fear of God' normally carries with it the sense of respect or awe, rather than terror.

Nevertheless, in the case of the midwives, this fear/respect/awe was strong and real enough that it resulted in them behaving in a way which was brave, bordering on foolhardy – they disobeyed Pharaoh’s direct command.  

As it turned out, God blessed the midwives because of their godly fear (v.21).  But they wouldn’t have know that was going to happen when they decided to defy the king – and blessing does not often flow as neatly or immediately as it did in their case.  However, God’s blessing of the midwives is recorded here to encourage us to fear God, and to leave the consequences to him.

There are things I am afraid of, and some of them (such as my fear of failure) are things which I need to keep submitting to my fear of God.

What difference might a true fear of God make at HHBC at the moment?

Wondering about wandering

Exodus, the second book in the Bible, tells part of the story of the People of Israel leaving Egypt and wandering through the desert for 40 years before finally arriving in the Promised Land. This time of being on the move was a formative (perhaps the formative) experience in their community life.

We should be a bit cautious about drawing too many parallels between the Exodus and HHBC’s period without a building – clearly they are very different situations.  But I think that God may be encouraging us to look together at the Exodus, and to learn from some of the things that happened to God’s people on that journey.

So I am planning to write some blog posts from time to time. I trust and pray that this may be a means by which God speaks to us all.

Chris