Dear Friends,

I would like to share with you this month an aspect of God's revelation in the Bible which seems to me to be very much left to one side these days, but which I believe to be essential to our relationship with God, and crucial to our appreciation of the Gospel, and our receiving the benefits of the Gospel.

It was brought to my notice again when reading in Exodus chapter 24, which was the chapter being studied by the Thursday Midday Bible Study Group.

The people of Israel were on their journey through the Sinai peninsula on their way to the promised land of Palestine. They had reached Mount Sinai and were camped around it. It was at this time God gave them the ten commandments and all the instruction for their worship. He gave them to Moses when he called Moses up onto the mountain for forty days.

At the beginning of Exodus chapter 24, verse 1 and 2 we read the following, "Then God said to Moses, "Come up to the Lord, you and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel. You are to worship at a distance, but Moses alone is to approach the Lord; the others must not come near. And the people must not come up with him."

This is a revelation of God we do not consider too much at the moment. It reveals an awesome and holy God, so pure that people who fall short of that holiness can't come near him; indeed dare not come near him; for our failure to reach his standard of purity and holiness is offensive to him.

In fact God is being kind and merciful in warning the people not to come near him, because such is the nature of God, that he can't overlook sinfulness. His character and law demand that sin must be cleansed away, and the debt to God's broken standard be paid. God is a just God, and his justice can't be overlooked or forgotten, and so where there is failure to reach his holy standard, and because God's law has to be satisfied, and so that God's character of justice may be upheld, sin must be punished. If this happened, then we would be judged and suffer death, and would be cast out of God's presence forever.

For the people, with all their falling short of the glory of God's holiness, to come near to God on the mountain, would mean that God would have to judge them, and they would die.

The whole nature of God's dealings with Israel in this chapter is to prevent that happening and provide a way the He, God, could forgive them, be reconciled to them, be a friend to them, and yet in no way diminish his holiness and justice. Moses is told to come near so that he could be told by God what was needed, and so the people could then know how they could approach God safely, and know God's love and friendship.

The result of God's instruction was that Moses built a large altar of sacrifice. The people then sacrificed young bulls upon this altar, and the blood of the sacrificed animals was sprinkled on the people. This may seem to us a horrid blood-thirsty business. The innocent animals being sacrificed, and blood messily being put upon the people may feel very distasteful to us, but, as a result, when we read on we find in Exodus 24 and verse 9, 10 and 11, we see that God came near the people and they saw him, but they were not consumed and did not die. God did not raise his hand of judgement against them.

What was happening here? It was this, that God appointed that the bulls should give their lives in the place of the people, and that they would be consumed because of the sins of the people. Then, because the sins of the people had been justly punished in the sacrifice, God forgave the people, and saw no sin in them for the sake of the bulls that had died in their place and for their sin.

These sacrifices in the Old Testament had something wrong with them, however, for they never seemed to be complete and had to be frequently repeated. They did not actually meet the demands of God's justice completely and forever, and could not finally take away sin. This is why God himself had to provide a perfect sacrifice, which when offered would be a complete satisfaction to God for the sins of the world. This sacrifice was the only begotten Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who became a human being for this very purpose, that he may give his life a ransom for many.

The Old Testament sacrifices tell us that our failure to reach God's holy standard has to be sorted out, and a satisfactory way found for God to justly forgive our sin, so that we come to him and know him as Father and Friend, and have fellowship with him and be loved by him. It is God's amazing grace, mercy and love, that he did not shrink from giving the love of his heart to do this, and that in his love he had planned it for all time.

What I am trying to bring to the forefront of our minds in this letter is that the prime consideration of the Gospel is to find a solution to this overwhelmingly important need we have to be reconciled to God and be saved from his necessary and just judgement. We need to recognize that intimacy with God is no automatic thing. Nor was it a cheap thing, rather the mostly costly thing in all the world. We need to realize further that unless we are reconciled to God we cannot know any blessing from God, or his love and power in our lives.

The reason our Lord Jesus Christ is such a wonderful and perfect Saviour is that he achieves this impossible task of satisfying God's justice completely on our behalf, and so opening the way for God to say that our sins he will remember no more, and that he will account us as having never sinned for ever. Thus through our Lord Jesus we are given a place in God's family and a place in heaven, and God is our God to love and protect us, for time and eternity.

It is because of this act of supreme sacrifice and love on the part of Jesus, that we can have this wonderful intimacy with God, and call him 'Dear Father', and know he will always give time to us, and will always keep us safe. This intimacy is not our right. It has been purchased for us by our Lord Jesus Christ. The chief blessing of it is that we know and experience that we are beloved of God for Christ's sake.

It does not mean to say that we are delivered from then on from all troubles, problems or difficulties in life. In fact belonging to God we find we have a fight on our hands which we never knew before, because the devil becomes our implacable enemy. We begin to know something of the suffering of Christ. But we have in Christ's love something very precious, and we have a sure and certain hope for the future, which ends in heaven beyond this earthly life.

God is awesome and holy. We sinners can't come near him ourselves. We can know no blessing or intimacy with God unless our sins have been atoned for. Our greatest need is to appreciate this; see the offence our lives are to God; see we have nothing in ourselves to take this offence away; understand that no blessing can really come to us from God while our sins are unforgiven. Then in our helplessness look only to the Lord Jesus to be our Saviour. In trusting ourselves to him, all that he did in dying for us on the cross, becomes ours. We are friends with God through him. Because he has saved us by his dying, we can never lose that friendship with God, and God never sees any sin in us again for Christ's sake. We become the righteousness of God in Christ.

Unless we have come to Christ to save us from our falling short of God's glory, we have no blessing from Christ, and no benefit from his love. This is the heart of Christianity and the Gospel. Nothing else will do. You can't come to God for any other deliverance until you have come to him to deliver you from your sin and God's just punishment of that sin. But what is also true that when we do come to Jesus to be cleansed from our sin, that moment we have an interest in the Saviour's death for us, and we are reconciled to God forever.

Your servant for Christ's sake,