Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Can a Just God be a Merciful God? | Torah | Exodus 34:1-28

Episode Date: July 21, 2022

What's the picture you have of God in your head? Is he an angry judge? Is he the ultimate pushover? In today's episode, Patrick shares an example of the kind of love that God shows Israel in Exodus 34:1-28. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Exodus 34:1-28

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller, and right now we're going through the Book of Exodus. Recently, one of our listeners, Tommy Martin, shared a story with me that really moved me to tears because in it, I heard one of the most clear expressions of God's love and forgiveness I have ever heard in my life. Now, I want to warn you, if you're listening to this with children or teenagers, you might want to turn this off because there are some. sensitive topics touched on here. But with that said, I want to tell you a bit of Tommy's story. About 13 years ago, his mom called him and she said, hey, I just read something in the paper

and you're going to hear about it, but I want you to hear it from me first. And so, of course, he's a little bit confused and asked her what happened. She went on to tell him that his eighth grade basketball coach was just arrested in the largest child pornography bust of all time. This guy had over 200,000 child pornographic images. So as you can imagine, he was a little bit shocked and disturbed, but his mom went on to say they were pictures of teenage boys. And finally, it clicks with him what his mom is saying, that inside of those 200,000 pictures,

there were likely pictures of him and his friends when they were naked in the locker room. And as you can imagine, he feels all different kinds of emotions in this moment. On the one hand, he feels incredibly violated. What does this guy done? Who has this guy shown these things to? why did this guy do this to me? How could he violate me when I trusted him so much? On the other end, there's embarrassment. Again, wondering where have these gone? How has he used these? And of course, there was also confusion because he actually really liked this coach. And in many ways, this coach got the

best out of him. So how could a good coach do something this bad, this evil, this tremendously wrong? And then Tommy felt something maybe he didn't expect to feel. He felt compassion because he also knew that this coach had a wife and kids. And he knew that all of their lives, everybody was devastated, their entire lives, their entire future, their entire sense of self had just been ruined in this moment by this awful thing that his former coach did. And as he reflected on that compassion, it began to move his heart over time towards forgiveness, towards mercy, which of course is an incredibly unusual thing when someone has taken advantage of you in a profound, deep, and disturbing way. But he reflected on his own life and he realized, look,

If God can use the least of us, the most sinful of us, to accomplish mighty things, maybe this is a moment that he wants to turn to light. Maybe this darkness in my coach's life could be turned to good. And so he did something extraordinary. He called one of his friends, he was on the team with him and said, I know this is bizarre, but I want to go visit coach. I want to go talk to him. And his friend said, no, it's not bizarre.

I was thinking the same thing. And so they went to visit him. He was under house arrest at the time. And when they arrive, his coach opens up the door and he says, are you here to beat me up? Because if you want to beat me up, I'm not going to stop you. I deserve it. And they said, no, we're not here to beat you up. We're not here to give you what you deserve. We're here to tell you something really simple. We believe that God can forgive the worst of us. And as crazy, as wild as this might sound to you, we believe that even though you've done something awful,

even though you've done something that most people will find totally unforgivable, we believe that even though all of that is true, God still has a plan for your life. God can still reach you. God still wants to know you and love you. Their coach didn't quite know what to say. He told them that honestly, over the last few weeks, he'd been thinking about killing himself and ending his life. He didn't feel like he had much of a life or a future ahead of him. He didn't think that there was any hope for forgiveness and transformation. And Tommy and his friend went on to share the gospel with him to explain that we are all sinners, that we all fall short of God's glory and that God in his kind of. and mercy sent his son to die on our behalf, to pay the penalty for our sin so that we could be forgiven and renewed and restored into his own image. They didn't know how this message hit the coach. He was obviously distraught and lost and incredibly guilty for the terrible things that he'd done. And he was eventually put into prison. And later on, this coach wrote Tommy and his friend a letter. And he shared that in a moment of desperation in his cell, he'd remembered what Tommy and his friend said and he began to pray. And at that exact moment when he was praying, his cellmate grabbed

him. And he said, there's something I've got to share with you. And he shared the exact same gospel message that Tommy and his message had shared. And in that moment, his coach in the pits of his depression and the pits of the consequences for his own wrong and evil actions, in the midst of that, he turned his life over to God. He sought forgiveness that only God could give him. As time went on, he was. Tommy became pen pals with his coach, a guy who had taken pictures of him, a guy who had taken advantage of him, a guy who he should have had no business talking to, a guy who should have had no business forgiving, a guy who he should have probably just said, rot in jail for what you've done, but they became pen pals. They began to write. He occasionally would go up and

visit his coach. And every time he wrote to his coach, every time he visited him, every time he spoke to him, he was extending to him just a tiny little picture of God's own mercy, grace, and forgiveness to each of us. What's the picture of God that you have in your head? Is God just a judge sitting on a bench judging you for the wrong things that you've done in your life? Or is God more than that? Yes, he is just. Yes, he has to do what's right. And yet he is also forgiving and gracious and will even take the penalty upon himself for your sake. As we've gone through the book of Exodus and read through Exodus chapters 32 and 33, we impact the story of Israel's deepest, most profound failing when they worshiped the golden calf at the foot of Mount Sinai.

I mean, if you just stop and think about it, I mean, later on, prophets would compare what they did to adultery. God rescues them from slavery. He brings them to himself. He makes them into a nation. And their response is to go, in the words of the prophet, hoaring after idols, running after a golden calf, praising it, worshiping it, saying, you are our. our God. You are the one who has saved us. It's a disturbing moment. It's a deeply, profoundly

disturbing moment to turn your back on the living God who has rescued you from death in Egypt. That's exactly what the Israelites did. And when it happens, God is justly angry. He says that he'll destroy the people. He says that he'll abandon the people. He says that he'll hold them accountable for what they've done. And there's something profoundly right about that. God is just. So he has to deal with sin justly. When we look at the wrong things that people, people have done in the world. We rightly say there needs to be justice. Something needs to be done about this. And yet, on the flip side, God chooses to forgive. God chooses to extend mercy and grace. Moses intercedes for Israel and God finally hears Moses's intercessory prayers and he says, okay,

I'll forgive the people. I'll walk with them. I'll take them into the land. I will stay with them. And he brings Moses into his presence. And when Moses comes into his presence, God reveals himself to Moses. And I want you to catch in Exodus 34 what God tells Moses. This is God's own self-revelation. This is God's way of saying, this is who I really am at my most granular, fundamental level. Verse 6. And he passed in front of Moses proclaiming, the Lord, that's Yahweh, Yahweh, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin. Yet, he does not leave the guilty and punished. He punishes the children and their children for the sins of their parents to the

third and fourth generation. The problem is that for so many of us, our vision of God is just the second half of that passage. It's us seeing him as a just judge. And again, that's right, that's good. God does have to hold people accountable to their sin to be good. And yet we think that's where the story ends. But God wants Moses to understand something. more fundamental. He says, yes, I hold people accountable to the third and fourth generation, but did you catch what he said before that? He said his love and his forgiveness and his mercy extends to a thousand generations. So God's judgment has a power of three or four. God's love has a power of a thousand. It is so big, so expansive, so unending that you cannot comprehend it.

If you're like me, there are so many areas in your life where you see your shortcomings. You see your sins. You see the way you hurt people that you love. You see the secret things that you say in your heart, that you feel towards others, the secret things you do that you don't tell anybody else about, the things that you think, if people knew who I really was, they would never be able to forgive me. They would never be able to love me. And there's a truth to that. We do terrible things. We deserve justice and judgment. And yet God never wants judgment to be the end of your story. We don't have to turn to him. We don't have to look to him. We don't have to reach out to him. And if we don't, yes, we'll receive the justice that we deserve. And yet, God says, please reach out to me because I am

good and compassionate and merciful and forgiving. And my love extends to a thousand generations. Don't you understand how much I love you? Moses couldn't have possibly understand how these two pictures of a just God and a merciful God could fit together. But we who follow Jesus understand how justice and mercy met on the cross because it was on the cross that Jesus died for our sins that he paid the just penalty for what you and I have done wrong in our lives. And yet also on the cross we see his grace and his mercy because he died on our behalf. He died so that he could bring us to God. He died so that we wouldn't have to die. He died so that his death could become our death and he rose again so that his life could become our life. He extended forgiveness to the very people who

tried to kill him to the very people who rebelled against him. God loves you. God forgives you. God shows mercy to you. It's not a one-time deal. It's not a one-time thing. It's not a, if I mess up again, it's all over. His mercy extends to a thousand generations. It extends to a coach who collected child pornography. It's hard to hear. It's hard to even conceptualize that that could be true. And yet it does. And if it extends to him, it extends to you. It extends to me. He is full of mercy, full of grace, and he wants to welcome you back to himself.

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