Clear Vision

DEVOTION

EXODUS

CLEAR VISION

Ex 24:1-4

24:1 Then he 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, 2 but Moses alone is to approach the LORD; the others must not come near. And the people may not come up with him."  When Moses went and told the people all the LORD's words and laws, they responded with one voice, "Everything the LORD has said we will do." 4 Moses then wrote down everything the LORD had said.

NIV

Several issues are here before us. First we notice the LORD called Moses along with the elders to come up to him and worship. Although the others were to worship at a distance and only Moses was to come near. How times have changed, or is it God that has changed, or is it that we have changed? We consider that God dwells within us. How much closer to God can that be? We have come nearer God then even Moses was allowed to. God has told us that if we come near to him, he will come near to us.

James 4:7-10

7 Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8 Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. 9 Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. 10 Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.

NIV

We have been told that we are the temple of God, in which the Holy Spirit dwells.

2 Cor 6:15-16

 16 What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said: "I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people."  

NIV

We just cannot get any closer than that. Moses was not that close and he was called to lead the people. Then we come to the people who responded to the words of Moses by saying they would do all that the LORD had said. Isn’t that just peachy? What a pack of liars. They may have had good intentions, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Although they said they would do everything the LORD had said to them, they did not, in fact they even made Aaron make them a golden calf to worship because God was taking too long talking to Moses up on that mountain. Are we much different? Do we propose that we will obey God, that we will do what the scriptures tell us? Certainly we do not say, at least openly, that we intend to be disobedient, that we purpose in our heart to ignore certain scriptures because they would hamper what we want to do, or what we believe. Yet at the core of most issues in life, do we get so impatience with God that we go do something else to achieve our prayer request, or accomplished the wants of our life? Again, this is our being self-centered rather than God centered. That is what the Israelites were doing when they said they would do everything God said, but then decided he was taking too long and they, being self-centered, needed a god to worship and made their own god of gold. Maybe because we do not think God is providing enough for us, we need to intervene and do it ourselves. Sure we have to be employed, we have to toil the ground, so to speak, all the days of our lives. But there again we fail to uphold our end of the covenant with God. If we are going to do all that he says, then why do so many stop toiling the ground when they turn 65? It is because that is what we want to do, self-centered, rather than what God has told us to do, work all the days of our life? And that is just the tip of the iceberg. God has instructed us to love him with all our being, and love our neighbor as ourselves.

Matt 22:37-40

37 Jesus replied: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.'   38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'   40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." 

NIV

This includes all our relatives, all our church family and all the people we come in contact with throughout our days. That is our fellow workers as well. We remember a book that Joyce Landorf wrote entitled, IRREGULAR PEOPLE. The point she was making is there are certain people that are irregular in our lives. When we are in their presence we get wired, our heart rate increases, we get sweaty palms, our breathing gets quicker, in general they just push all our wrong buttons. So either we learn to love them, or we simply avoid them. If we avoid them, then we are being self-centered and not doing what God has said we are to do, love them. Love is an active word. We cannot love God from a distance, nor can we love our neighbor from a distance, or just in the solitude of our own minds. We have to engage in the act of love. Jesus said something about that.

John 15:11-14

 12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.

NIV

Although Jesus actually did lay down his physical life for all of us, in that sense we do not actually die for others, but we lay down our self-centeredness, our life, our wants and desires for the sake of God, and other people. Do we actually do that? We could go through many of the commands of God and examine if we truly are doing all that the LORD has told us to do. But the point is about seeing who we really are. We should not think more highly of ourselves then we should, thinking we are doing everything God has instructed us to do, that we are “Good Christians”. The Israelites surely must have thought they were going to be “Good followers” “God fearing believers”, but they were not. Neither are we, we fail miserablely at times. We fail so short of being a “Good Christian”. We have no righteousness within us, so that is why we need Jesus. He is our righteousness, he is the fullness of God. Without Jesus we are eternally lost, hopelessly doomed to destruction. Let us see ourselves for who we truly are, sinners saved by grace. Let us have a clear vision of our self.