4. To Know God and His Word is Eternal Life
In the book of Exodus, God reveals that it is absolutely necessary for us to know Him as He really is, in order to receive His redemption and salvation. Our Master, Yeshua, said this:
“This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. I glorified You on the earth, having accomplished the work which You have given Me to do.” (John 17:2-4 Emphasis added.)
To know God leads to eternal life…IF…our knowledge of Him is authentic and precise and complete. When we meet those criteria, our response to God aligns with the entire revelation He first gave to us. We must respond to Him according to what He has actually revealed of Himself. If we do, then God’s Word truly is our Head, and we are His obedient, believing disciples:
“At that time Jesus said, ‘I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth; that You have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants. Yes, Father, for this way was well-pleasing in Your sight. All things have been handed over to Me by My Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him. (Matthew 11:25-27 Emphasis added.)
Precise, accurate, comprehensive knowledge of God’s Word will lead us unerringly back into God’s eternal Perfection. So the quality and accuracy of the ‘road map’ we follow through our lifetime is terribly important. It must be true, precise and completely accurate. It must actually correspond to all of the spiritual territory through which God’s Word will have to lead us. God’s true living Word aligns perfectly with God’s written Word, and vice versa. The written Word reveals Our Master, Yeshua the living Word, who told us to follow Him. And as He abides within us, by the Holy Spirit’s power, He will perfectly fulfill every detail recorded and promised concerning Him and His true disciples. This perfect, mirror image alignment between God’s Word and His disciples is an obvious characteristic of authentic discipleship. The transcendent Divine Being who is absolutely perfect in every way and who has been revealed as being God’s own living Word, must be reflected back to God, exactly as God first gave Him to us, on every level.
So Genesis and Exodus are God’s awesome fundamental revelation of His perfect changeless nature and His ways. They tell us how God will redeem and restore His disfigured, Sin-corrupted Creation. They reveal that in God’s eternity and in His perfect mind and will, everything is already accomplished and completed to perfection (Genesis 2:1-3). So God abides in total satisfaction that engenders eternal Sabbath Rest. He is totally satisfied and at peace with everything His living Word has done. The perfect finished Work of His creative Word provides everything every creature will ever need. On that basis, through His perfect Word and Holy Spirit, God connects with us, to continually transmit what He is in eternity, to those on Earth who will accept, obey and become one with His Word here in space and time. So you can see why we have to know what God revealed with such accuracy. That prepares us in advance to navigate safely, effectively and with complete eternal success as we move into our eternal future.
The Foundation for True Life
This accurate, authentic knowledge is the essential granite-solid foundation for a redeemed, fulfilled, Spirit-empowered, Word-embodying life. Knowing God as He really is equips us to transform into His Word’s true image and likeness. And if we know Him as He really is we know for sure that He is the one and only God and perfect Source. We know that any other god is a superfluous consideration and that it is ridiculous to even consider the need for such a thing. To know God as He is, fills us with outrageous confidence and perfect rest, joy and peace! We no longer have to depend upon our own, terribly wounded, highly limited, Serpent deceived intellects or temporal human devices. We can rest securely on God’s Perfect, Changeless Nature Airtight Reliability and His Eternal, Blood Covenant Faithfulness.
“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice! Let your gentle spirit be known to all men. The Lord is near. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:4-7 Emphasis added.)
When you know God as He is, you know you can rely on Him with airtight confidence. Your entire existence is rooted in the One who is the solid, unshakable Rock Fortress, the inexhaustible eternal Provider who will always be whatever you need Him to be.
“For I proclaim the name of the Lord; ascribe greatness to our God! The Rock! His work is perfect, for all His ways are just; a God of faithfulness and without injustice, righteous and upright is He.” (Deuteronomy 32:3-4)
Knowing God as He really is causes an endless wellspring of Peace to well up from deep within our hearts. We no longer have to be victims of created beings or circumstances. Nothing created can oppose God or steal our security and joy. God Himself, when we really know Him, becomes airtight Peace and Rest to us:
“Who is like You among the gods, O Lord? Who is like You, majestic in holiness, awesome in praises, working wonders? You stretched out Your right hand, the earth swallowed them. In Your lovingkindness You have led the people whom You have redeemed; in Your strength You have guided them to Your holy habitation.
“The peoples have heard; they tremble; anguish has gripped the inhabitants of Philistia. Then the chiefs of Edom were dismayed; the leaders of Moab, trembling grips them; all the inhabitants of Canaan have melted away. Terror and dread fall upon them; by the greatness of Your arm they are motionless as stone; until Your people pass over, O Lord, until the people pass over whom You have purchased. You will bring them and plant them in the mountain of Your inheritance, the place, O Lord, which You have made for Your dwelling, the sanctuary, O Lord, which Your hands have established. The Lord shall reign forever and ever.” (Exodus 15:11-18)
Although Sin greatly disfigured our nature and mortally wounded our bodies, when we know the living Word that God sends to us we know the perfection of His eternal Covenant and His Holy Spirit and His finished Redemption and Salvation. We know that in His Perfection, we are totally cleansed, regenerated and utterly forgiven and accepted. We know we’re perfectly safe and always provided for. We know God is continually restoring and transforming us into His Son’s perfect image and likeness. We know that God accepts us as His own children and eternal Covenant friends. And we know we are His eternal heirs and are being prepared to share fully in the Perfection of the Heavenly Inheritance that God’s Eternal Word is here to be to us.
“Therefore let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” (Hebrews 4:16)
Airtight Assurance is Ours!
With such awesome, airtight assurance, how could we not approach our living God totally free of shame, guilt, fear and dread? How could we not be filled with a perpetual sense of ‘Shabbat Shalom’ (Sabbath Peace)? Ponder what God’s living Word said to His Father about His beloved disciples after He became flesh and appeared among us as Messiah Yeshua:
“The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me. Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I am, so that they may see My glory which You have given Me, for You loved Me before the foundation of the world.
“O righteous Father, although the world has not known You, yet I have known You; and these have known that You sent Me; and I have made Your name known to them, and will make it known, so that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.” (John 17:22-26 Emphasis added.)
So when we know the Eternal Perfection of our Creator and Sustainer as He reveals Himself in Genesis and Exodus, we realize that He is eternally All-Sufficient and Able and Ready always to abide with us and sustain us and meet our every need on every level. And God reinforces this knowledge through His inspired prophets:
“‘You are My witnesses,” declares the Lord, and My servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe Me and understand that I am He. Before Me there was no God formed, and there will be none after Me. I, even I, am the Lord, and there is no savior besides Me. It is I who have declared and saved and proclaimed, and there was no strange god among you; so you are My witnesses,’ declares the Lord, ‘And I am God. Even from eternity I am He, and there is none who can deliver out of My hand; I act and who can reverse it?’” (Isaiah 43:10-13)
“For thus says the Lord God, ‘Behold, I Myself will search for My sheep and seek them out. As a shepherd cares for his herd in the day when he is among his scattered sheep, so I will care for My sheep and will deliver them from all the places to which they were scattered on a cloudy and gloomy day.” (Ezekiel 24:11-12)
We have no true reason to doubt or disobey our God, no need to imagine that we must seek elsewhere, looking to alternate sources created by our imaginations, to insure our well being. Our God is perfect! We need no other source. There is no other source! So Exodus amplifies what Genesis already revealed. The issue of God’s Reality and Perfection is the major issue between Him and His Sin-corrupted, radically independent human creation that rejects God’s Word and abides with the Serpent and his death-dealing delusional lies instead. This is why God revealed Himself and His Perfection to Abraham and His family and why He commands them to walk before Him blamelessly, on the basis of His revelation. If Abraham’s family does this, the rest of the human race will have the Truth demonstrated and proved to them. And they too will be able to abide with God in the same eternal assurance that the chosen people have demonstrated and taught to them. That was God’s intent when He commanded Israel with these words:
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before Me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.” (Exodus 20:2-6)
Knowing Our God – for Real
The ongoing relationship between God and the human race rests or falls on whether or not the people that God chose to be His Word’s disciples will really accept, believe and obey what He reveals. That’s why it is so important that we know God’s Word with the same accuracy, precision and authenticity with which God revealed Him. We must know and accept our Master as He really is. So we dare not add to or subtract from what He told us about Himself and about the plight the human race is in, in God’s sight. We must not edit God’s Word in any way; or try to change or ‘morph’ or reject any part of what He reveals of Himself. And if we faithfully receive and obey God’s Word exactly as He has been given to us, God’s Word becomes our ‘Head,’ and we become His image and likeness once more, proving to the world around us that God is real and we really do believe and serve Him. Our obedience to the Word is the proof that is capable of convincing doubters and skeptics that we actually live out what we claim to believe about our God, and that we actually do regard Him as our one and only God.
But to the degree that we do not believe and obey God’s Word, to that degree we begin chasing after all kinds of substitute gods and alternate sources that we put in God’s place. Such unbelief and rebellion appear continually in Genesis, and even more graphically in Exodus and the rest of Scripture. So it is always the issue of idolatry over which God must deal with us.
What happened between God and the first Exodus generation of Israelites now serves as the pattern God uses to instruct, warn and train the rest of humanity. In Exodus He demonstrated that He alone is God…and we are not! And He commanded all men to crucify their deeply embedded self-life addictions and forsake all of their imaginary false gods. He has done everything necessary to snap us out of our Serpent-induced hypnotic trance and draw us back to Himself and to His Eternal Reality and Truth.
“Therefore, let us fear if, while a promise remains of entering His rest, any one of you may seem to have come short of it. For indeed we have had good news preached to us, just as they also; but the word they heard did not profit them, because it was not united by faith in those who heard. For we who have believed enter that rest, just as He has said, ‘As I swore in My wrath, They shall not enter My rest,’ although His works were finished from the foundation of the world. For He has said somewhere concerning the seventh day: “And God rested on the seventh day from all His works”; and again in this passage, “They shall not enter My rest.” Therefore, since it remains for some to enter it, and those who formerly had good news preached to them failed to enter because of disobedience, He again fixes a certain day, ‘Today,’ saying through David after so long a time just as has been said before, ‘Today if you hear His voice,
Do not harden your hearts!” (Hebrews 4:1-7)
Our Eternally Perfect God
God’s nature, being, character, will and plan for Creation pre-existed the actual universe that He later created. That tells us that by nature and essence, God is totally independent of His Creation. He does not depend on, nor is He affected or changed by, any of His creatures in any way. He is what He is…eternally…regardless of our temporal circumstances, experiences, or situations. No angelic or human intellectual insight, opinion, conclusion, idea, viewpoint or action can affect or change God’s nature and state of being. He is eternally what He is, regardless of any other consideration. Regardless of how we see or think or interpret anything, regardless of how we see things or what we do or fail to do and regardless of how we may be feeling at any given time…God is God. He is eternally Perfect, Righteous, Truthful and Holy. And we temporal, flaky, ever-changing creatures can rely upon Him entirely. Nothing can mar or halt or stop His plan from being fulfilled. Nothing can be compared to Him; so nothing else can take His place in our eyes.
So, against the background of everything that is temporal and ever-changing, our God abides forever. He and His Word and Truth are the eternal granite-solid, foundational Rock upon whom all created Reality rests. God is ever stable, secure, credible and dependable. What He was in the past, He will always be in the future. We can always rely on Him to be God. And so, to know Him, truly is – Eternal Life!
Fallen flesh is so self-centered and arrogant that it assumes it is the center of the universe. But the truth is, nothing we are or do or fail to do, not even fallen angels or Satan himself can change God or thwart His purposes in any way. No created being can affect or control or manipulate or get God to do or not do, anything, simply by willing it. We can only interact with Him on His terms…according to the ways of His perfect, eternal, changeless nature, character and plan of Salvation as provided for in His Eternal Blood Covenant. When we align and agree with God’s immutable nature and laws of Creation, we can know for sure that He will fulfill His Covenant promises and give us our daily bread (See Deuteronomy 28, 29; Isaiah 66:1-2; Matthew 6:5-14; John 15:7-11).
So in this sense, our well being is conditional: IF we receive, embrace and walk with God as He really is…THEN…we are in position to receive what He yearns to give us. But we must operate with Him according to His Truth because He will never, ever change. He will never follow us into an unreal, delusional world made up by fallen created imaginations. We must follow Him into His Eternal Truth and Reality! We will never be able to connect with the infinite, perfect, eternal ‘Spirit of Truth’ if we follow an unreal map whose layout is incomplete, or twisted or perverted by the fallen, Sin-corrupted cultures, traditions, soul power and opinions of men. We can only connect properly when we receive, embrace, obey and reflect back to God what He first gave to us, just as He gave it to us. In other words we must be true accurate mirrors, rather than crazily warped and distorted, amusement park ‘fun house’ type mirrors.
Sin-corrupted Souls Are Predisposed to Resent and Doubt God
Despite what God has revealed about Himself, our Sin-corrupted self-centered flesh makes us assume that God somehow revolves around us and reacts to what is going on in us. So when we are personally blessed with comfort, safety and well being, we assume that God is, for the time being, ‘behaving Himself.’ When we’re blessed, we believe He is being ‘good,’ ‘gracious’ and ‘merciful.’ But when we suffer and experience turbulent, painful circumstances, we assume God has become distant, forgetful, or weak, or unkind and uncaring and perhaps even treacherous!
But when we think that way, we’re trying to make God into our image and likeness, instead of allowing Him to make us into His Word’s image and likeness. Nevertheless, God is God and He does not change according to what is going on in us. What we go through and how accurately we see, feel and interpret our experiences will depend on whether or not something is blocking our knowledge of and union with the Perfect, Changeless One. We are either in or out of position to receive what He always is. So nothing we do or fail to do can in any way alter or affect His eternal nature. But it can affect our true connection with Him. When our ideas and feelings about God fluctuate and change depending on how Sin-twisted and erroneous and ignorant we are concerning Him, we change. But He doesn’t. We change because we idolize creatures and reflect our passing circumstances. But we must remember that: our dim, vague, inaccurate ideas about God…are not God! God, in Himself will never be encircled or comprehended by our puny intellects or theologies or religious or pagan traditions; He is independent of whatever we are or think or do. He is always the same and always ‘totally Other’.
Because we’re born self-centered, we are prone to be victims of our limited perceptions, circumstances, feelings and habits. So our relationship with God goes ‘up and down’ ‘in and out’ and ‘back and forth.’ And the more we doubt and mistrust God, the more religious and controlling we become. We feel compelled to try to manipulate God’s behavior and coax Him into becoming and remaining more positive and benevolent toward us and our interests. But that too is a delusional pagan viewpoint. The real God is not about what or how we are and do. We are all about Him and His perfect nature and the eternal laws of His Creation. He does not depend on us; we depend entirely on Him…for every breath, heartbeat and brain wave, crumb of food and well being we will ever have (Cf. Isaiah 66:1-2; Psalm 136). No matter what happens to us or how we see things or feel or think; God never changes. He is always Perfect, always Good and Faithful, always operating out of His Love Nature’s everlasting Lovingkindness on behalf of His Creation. He even lovingly sustains humans who reject and despise His Word and choose to live as His enemies! He remains faithful…still imparting as much of His living Word and Holy Spirit as they are willing to accept. And as long as time still remains, He keeps trying to woo them and reconcile with them.
We Must Know God as He Really Is
We must know this about God. If we know Him deeply and accurately, we won’t feel a need to create and worship false gods. If we know Him, we have deep understanding of the issues that the books of Genesis and Exodus reveal and describe. We understand why God has a ‘chosen people’ and why He must wean them of their original self-life, and fit and equip them for a life that centers around His living Word. We understand why He must teach, train, discipline and equip them to do their vitally important job on behalf of the rest of the world that remains caught in the Serpent’s coils. We understand where most of that first Exodus generation went wrong and why only a few ‘got it right.’
Against the backdrop of what happened to the chosen people in Exodus, we can understand what God has to do with the rest of us to whom His Word says, ‘Follow Me!’ The Israelites in Genesis and Exodus serve as God’s disciple template for the rest of humanity. What He intended to do to and with them first is exactly what He has to do with all the rest of us.
Knowing this enables you to see the significance and great need for God’s Chosen People. They must be the first to forsake and come out of the fallen world system. They must first undergo the rigor and excruciating disciple training discipline and drill and practice that lie in store for all disciples. God has the same kind of ‘boot camp’ regimen waiting for us as the one He provided for the Israelites in the book of Exodus. Somehow, He must train and drill and condition us all just like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua and Caleb. Then we too can be trained to maintain a laser-like focus on His Perfection and abide in His ever-present indwelling Presence on His terms, according to the Reality of His Eternal, unassailable Perfection and never-ending Faithfulness.
Regardless of what is currently happening or how we tend to judge it, regardless of what the world is doing or not doing, regardless of what we or anyone else may think, feel, anticipate or assume – no earthly temporal thing has any actual bearing or impact on the eternal, Heavenly nature of God. Nothing will change His faithfulness to His eternal Covenant promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He is always with us and always for us, always the same, regardless of what we may naturally and instinctively see, think, assume or feel. It doesn’t matter what century we inhabit, or what current generation of experts, professors, gurus, religions or ‘gold medal winners’ may be around us. The Truth revealed in Genesis and Exodus concerning God and His Eternal Perfect Nature remains the same. The issues is always about God and all that He is. And this affects every person, rich or poor, black or white, male or female, Jew or Gentile accordingly. We will all have to deal with the living God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob over these same issues…on God’s terms!
His Perfect Love and Faithfulness
We must know, with unshakable assurance, how perfectly loving and faithful and true to us God has perpetually been in the past. And when we know that, we will know that He is going to be just as loving and faithful and true to us in the future. His dependability, like everything else about Him, is eternal. We can always count on Him, no matter what. If we build our lives on the Reality of His Eternal Perfection and ever-gracious Presence, we do not build our ‘houses’ on shifting sand; we build them on ‘THE ROCK!’ (See what God’s living Word tells the world in Matthew 5:17-20; 7:13-27; 10:16-42)
This is what God tried to get across to the former slaves He led out of Egypt in the book of Exodus. And this is what the rebellious, humanistic, Serpent-deceived world of every generation is going to have to come to grips with…today, tomorrow and in the weeks, months and years that remain to us. We will all have to deal with God’s living Word. And God’s heartfelt desire is that we deal with Him in the same living, interactive, intimate and familiar ways that the fathers of the Faith responded to Him. Just as He saw them through their ordeals and situations, as they followed Him, so will He do for us…if we know and follow Him with circumcised hearts…as they did:
“‘For behold, the day is coming, burning like a furnace; and all the arrogant and every evildoer will be chaff; and the day that is coming will set them ablaze,’ says the Lord of hosts, ‘so that it will leave them neither root nor branch.’
“‘But for you who fear My name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings; and you will go forth and skip about like calves from the stall. You will tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet on the day which I am preparing,’ says the Lord of hosts.
“‘Remember (align yourself with) the law (Torah) of Moses My servant, even the statutes and ordinances which I commanded him in Horeb for all Israel. Behold, I am going to send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord. He will restore the hearts (for God) of the Fathers (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) to their children and the hearts of the children to (the same living relationship with God as) their Fathers, so that I will not come and smite the land with a curse!” (Malachi 4 Amplification and emphasis added. See also Romans 2)
The God of the Impossible
When we know God as He actually is, we know He can do anything He wishes with ease. He only has to speak His living Word, and His Word goes forth to create whatever His Father says – out of nothingness!
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light!’ And there was light!” Genesis 1:1-3 Emphasis added.)
Our Perfect God speaks and His Word obeys and performs – with exact, precise, perfection… every time. So whenever God’s Word appears in Genesis or Exodus, He is carrying out a mission given to Him by His Father. In the process, Father is progressively revealing His Word. And at the same time, the Word is progressively revealing His Father – for the Speaker and His Word are one. God revealed His living Word to Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Joseph also knew and interacted with Him. And now Moses will have his turn. The Word will reveal Himself to and through this man. And through his life and mission, God continues to reveal the awesome Perfection and Significance of His Son, the real Eternal Moses…the living Word of the living God:
“God, after He spoke long ago to the Fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son (Yeshua), whom He appointed Heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the Radiance of His Glory and the exact Representation of His Nature, and upholds all things by the Word of His Power. When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much better than the angels, as He has inherited a more excellent Name than they.” (Hebrews 1:1-4)
Ever Increasing Revelation of The Son
We have the privilege of knowing God’s Word AFTER He became flesh and appeared on Earth as Rabbi Yeshua of Nazareth. And now that He has been raised from the dead, and abides within us by the Holy Spirit, we can know Him even more deeply and accurately. So now that God has revealed His Son in this way, as Yeshua the Messiah, we dare not reject Him and try to go back to some other pre-Yeshua level of revelation. We must not add to what God reveals, nor are we allowed to take away from what He has chosen to reveal to us about Himself. In Yeshua, God has given us an even deeper understanding of Himself and how much more we can afford to rest and trust in Him. We know even more that nothing is impossible to our God. And we know more clearly that we have been reborn into the Perfection of His finished work of Creation. Now, thanks to the gift of the indwelling Spirit of God, it’s easier to abide always with God’s Word in His perfect Sabbath Rest as His image and likeness. We weren’t created to be toiling victimized slaves of the Serpent. We are not condemned to be abandoned, hyper-controlling victims of the Sin-induced destruction caused by the Serpent’s rebellion against God. We are made to be the image and likeness of God’s Word, to live and operate in perfect union with His perfect Humanity and in full accord with Him at all times and in all things.
We are made to be the Word’s co-heirs. And the Word is commissioned to be our perfect, eternal Blessing from God, in whom is contained the Fullness of everything we will ever need Him to be throughout eternity!
When we know God as He reveals Himself today, we know that every command He gives to us is not an impossible, burdensome task being laid on our shoulders. We know it is a revelation of what God’s Word is sent to be and do as He abides in us and obeys His Father through our yielded flesh. This is why it is so important to know all the levels of God’s Self-Revelation to us…especially the Supreme Revelation He has given us in Yeshua:
“God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power. When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much better than the angels, as He has inherited a more excellent name than they.” (Hebrews 1:1-4)
Any command God gives to us is actually a command given by God’s Word – to God’s Word! The Word is here to fulfill Father’s will and commandments to perfection…from within us…in our name! He does it by the Holy Spirit’s Power through us, and, as us. And our job is to struggle to learn to rest in His Perfection and to receive everything from the eternal Work that He has already completed to Perfection. Now we know that there is no other way to please God except by faith…not faith in our own religious striving…but only by faith in Yeshua and His Perfect Finished Work of Redemption, Reconciliation, Regeneration and Restoration.
“The Lord says to my Lord: ‘Sit at My right hand until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet.’ The Lord will stretch forth Your strong scepter from Zion, saying, ‘Rule in the midst of Your enemies.’” (Psalm 110:1-2 Emphasis added.)
Because of our Sin-corrupted nature and mortally wounded flesh, we are all born ‘decapitated.’ Our state of ‘living death’ is caused by the fact that our Creator and sole Source of life and well being is not our Head and Source of Eternal Life when we’re first born. Sin cut us off from Him before our birth. And Sin residue continually drives us to live apart from Him. So that’s why God’s Word comes after us. And when we first become aware of Him, we view Him from that skewed, highly-distorted, radically independent, self-centered perspective we inherited. It forces us to see Him as a threat, as something negative and invasive. Our fallen nature makes us assume that we are ‘as God,’ that we must be the center of the universe and that everything must be about us, everything must depend on us and everything must be done by us.
So God’s commands appear offensive and extremely harsh to our self-absorbed understanding. They seem overbearing and unreasonably demanding and we know it is absolutely impossible for us to fulfill them. So we recoil from Him in hostility…hissing and writhing like a ‘brood of vipers’ whenever our Redeemer is sent by His Father to draw near to us. But when we reject our Redeemer, as God has revealed Him to us, we ensure our own damnation. So it is vital that we know God exactly as He has revealed Himself to us. It’s not enough to have 20 or 50 or 90% of what God has revealed to us. We must know 100% of that Life-giving Revelation. And we have that, when we know Yeshua and abide with God on Yeshua’s revealed terms.
The Word Invades the Serpent’s Domain
Our living death separation from God and our radically independent viewpoints limit and force us to depend on and try to succeed in the selfish, God-less dog-eat-dog world system that emerged after the fall. That fallen perspective and God-less system is graphically revealed in Genesis in the days before God sent His Word to Abram:
“They said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly.’ And they used brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar. They said, ‘Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.’
“The Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. The Lord said, ‘Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they began to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them. Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.’ So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of the whole earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of the whole earth.” (Genesis 11:3-9 Emphasis added.)
Notice what the agenda of the Head-less world is: ‘Let us make for our own glory a community system and a name…’ Notice also that God will never permit that image and likeness of the Serpent agenda to succeed. It is a dead, decapitated system that is already dead and contains the seeds of its own total disintegration. It is the spawn of the death Adam and Eve died as soon as they joined the Serpent’s war against God’s living Word. That self-centered, radically independent system and all that it stands for is the exact opposite of what God intended true humanity to be:
“Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” (Genesis 1:26-27 Emphasis added.)
When Adam fell into the Serpent’s trap and rejected and disobeyed God’s living Word, God’s Word lost His image and likeness! The humans became the Serpent’s image and likeness instead of being His image. So God sent His Word, who is our Eternal Blood Covenant Representative to recover and restore what was His. The Word looked for the humans who were now hiding from Him in order to ‘reconnect’ with them and to restore their now ‘Head-less’ spirits and souls. He came to re-establish His Authority over them and over the earthly Creation they were made to co-administrate with Him. But as long as any of us remain apart from our one and only Life Source, God’s living Word, we remain trapped in the Serpent’s realm of ‘living death.’
So as the book of Exodus opens, the God-less, radically independent, anti-Word of God system we saw operating at Babel in Genesis 11, has not stopped trying to achieve its ends. In fact, men had greatly enhanced, developed and established that system throughout the region that was now controlled by Egypt. Egypt was a mighty power in that ‘Fertile Crescent’ region at that time, and the Pharaoh, its supreme lord. In fact, Pharaoh was considered to be a god in his own right, presiding over all the other false gods that the imaginations of the decapitated men of those days had concocted. This representation of the world system to which Abraham’s family was enslaved became the Biblical symbol of the whole world system, originated by men like Cain and Ham and Japheth and Canaan and Nimrod. The Bible also uses terms like ‘Babylon’ and ‘Greece’ with its Hellenism and ‘Mammon’ with its greedy, dog-eat-dog tactics, to describe the God-less world system and the Head-less people who depend on it and keep it going. But the many ‘world religions’ that exist in the world are also run by Serpent-dominated ‘Head-less’ living dead people. So what is missing in all of that? God’s final Revelation is missing – Yeshua, the Messiah of Israel and the Lord and Master of all Creation:
“In all wisdom and insight He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth. In Him also we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to His purpose who works all things after the counsel of His will, to the end that we who were the first to hope in Christ would be to the praise of His glory.” (Ephesians 1:8b-12 Emphasis added.)
“Of this church I was made a minister according to the stewardship from God bestowed on me for your benefit, so that I might fully carry out the preaching of the word of God, that is, the mystery which has been hidden from the past ages and generations, but has now been manifested to His saints, to whom God willed to make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ (Messiah)in you, the hope of glory. We proclaim Him, admonishing every man and teaching every man with all wisdom, so that we may present every man complete in Christ. For this purpose also I labor, striving according to His power, which mightily works within me.” (Colossians 1:25-29 Emphasis added.)
Moses and the Israelites of his day knew much about the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They were raised hearing their enslaved tribal elders and family members speak of Him. But throughout those centuries of captivity and enslavement, Jacob’s descendants had no opportunity to know the God of their fathers in the same Covenant intimacy and favor with which Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph had known Him. So, compared to how the fathers had known God, to this generation of enslaved Israelites, He was a distant, uninvolved stranger. The reality that drove them was the lashes of their Egyptian overlords and taskmasters. That was their ‘reality.’ And so the hearsay about the lovingkindness of Abraham’s God paled before the overbearing power and authority of the pharaoh and the other false gods of Egypt.
So God had to give them a tremendous amount of training, teaching, correction, discipline and ongoing, progressive revelation. He started with Moses, and later, with those who would follow Moses out of Egypt. They all needed a fresh, new, electrifying revelation of God and His Word so that they would be equipped to fulfill the world-changing commission God was about to entrust to them. Again, as was the case with Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, God was going to ask them to do the impossible. The task of all disciples of God’s living Word is unbelievably impossible. And that’s the whole point. It is in the impossible situations of His people that the living God of Abraham reveals Himself and His eternal Glory.
God’s Blood Covenant Ways
To begin, God had to wean the Israelites of their Egyptian ways and break the power that Egypt’s false gods wielded over their hearts, minds, wills and lives. He had to separate them completely from the demonic, decapitated system into which they had been born. So Exodus documents God’s Blood Covenant ways and how He made Himself real to Israel. It documents God’s awesome revelation of Himself to His chosen people. It reveals their true, God-given identity and purpose and what God must do to purge the minds of such people from the satanic delusions that are embedded within us all, from birth. God’s living Word (whom we now know as Messiah Yeshua) had to lead them into the wilderness to reveal Himself in a way that would be powerful enough to reconfigure, retrain and equip them to transform into the image and likeness of His living Word. To the degree that God’s Word succeeds in transforming any of them, to that degree will the chosen people be able to serve as God’s ‘template’ by which the rest of the non-Israelite world can be delivered from the lies of the Serpent and taught to follow God’s Word instead.
Israel had to leave the Egyptian version of the world system first, in order to be saved. Then all the Egyptians and the rest of the world could learn from them and leave that system also. So Israel’s job is always to go first…to lead the way in following God’s Word out of the God-less ways of this fallen world. And the God-less people of the fallen world, if they’re going to be restored and saved by God’s Word, must follow the Israelites’ lead. That is the template for training each disciple of God’s living Word. All that was formerly part of ‘Egypt’ is required by God to die. He severs the connection with what went before, so that His people can be grafted into and transformed by His Spirit-led, Word-obeying Kingdom. And that is what Scripture calls God’s true ‘Israel.’
So Exodus chronicles the counterattack that the Word of God came to wage against the rebellion and deceptive works of the Serpent. The Word is invading the Serpent’s dark realm. Light is invading Darkness, Life is coming against Death, Freedom is dissolving Slavery, and Good is overcoming Evil. This is the war that always rages between God’s living Word and the powers of Darkness. It involves the highest stakes imaginable…eternal Life, or eternal Death. And this involves and must include every human being of every generation.
“I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants…” (Deuteronomy 30:19)
That is why the books of Genesis, Exodus and Revelation go together. The exodus begins in Genesis. It continues throughout Exodus. And that Exodus pattern becomes the template for the entire human race. We must all make…and complete…this Exodus in order to become free of the death grip of the Serpent’s coils. This is what it will take for God’s living Word to free us completely, perfectly and eternally and restore His image and likeness to Himself.
The significance of Genesis and Exodus is further unpacked and explained by the rest of the books of the Bible. God progressively reveals more and more of His living Word throughout the pages of the written Word. And that progressive revelation ultimately led to the final, mind-boggling revelation in all of its fullness. The living Word of God that revealed Himself to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob…was then revealed to Israel in the person of Yeshua. And true to God’s changeless pattern…Yeshua’s chosen disciples…each one a Torah observant Jewish descendant of Jacob…did what God’s obedient Chosen People are always supposed to do. They went first. They were the first Israelites to believe, embrace and serve the living Word of God now that He had been revealed to them as Yeshua the Messiah. And those that made up the faithful first century Remnant of Israel, were the ‘children’ Malachi the prophet had written about in his fourth chapter. They were reconciled to the ways of the fathers of Israel, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Just as they believed, responded and obeyed the living Word of God as He was revealed to them, so too did the Israelite apostles and disciples of Yeshua believe, respond and obey the living Word of God as He was revealed to them. And the warning of Malachi remains:
“Behold, I am going to send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord. He will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, so that I will not come and smite the land with a curse.” (Mal. 4:5-6)
It is very important to see the connection between Genesis, Exodus and all the other books of the Bible…especially the book in which they are perfectly fulfilled through Yeshua, the risen Messiah in Revelation. And that is why disciples-in-training must devote sufficient time and attention to what God reveals about His living Word in the first two books. They are the Foundation for all that follows. If we know our Master as He is revealed by God in the beginning, we will understand what He must do with us afterward. And we’ll know what to expect from the Master we are following, as He works from within us to leads us into the final climax and conclusion of this war with the powers of Darkness. The Book of Revelation has already revealed in advance the conclusive fulfillment of our Exodus. It is contained in the actual events that are yet to take place in the days that lie ahead of us all.
“It happened that while Apollos was at Corinth, Paul passed through the upper country and came to Ephesus, and found some disciples. He said to them, ‘Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?’ And they said to him, ‘No, we have not even heard whether there is a Holy Spirit.’ And he said, ‘Into what then were you baptized?’ And they said, ‘Into John’s baptism.’ Paul said, ‘John baptized with the baptism of repentance, telling the people to believe in Him who was coming after him, that is, in Jesus.’ When they heard this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. And when Paul had laid his hands upon them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they began speaking with tongues and prophesying.” (Acts 19:1-6)