The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
There was a famine in the land of Canaan right about the year 1876 B.C. The famine caused the patriarch Jacob to move his extended family, which now numbered about 70 in all, to live in Egypt in better conditions, and to be with his son Joseph, who had now risen to the second most powerful man in all of Egypt. There the 70 were fruitful and multiplied; they prospered, just as God had told them. But then they became a big nation, numbering about three million people by some estimates. And the Bible says that a pharaoh arose who did not know Joseph. So the pharaoh, looking at this large nation growing within his nation, declared the Hebrews to be slaves. They were worried that if they were ever attacked from outside by an enemy, the Hebrew people might be sympathetic to that enemy and rise up as a fifth column within Egypt.
So the pharaohs made them slaves. And not only did they make them slaves, in an effort to control the population from time to time they instituted mass slaughter of male children. Exodus 1:22: Pharaoh gave an order to all of his people, and he said, “Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live.” The Israelites entered Egypt in 1876 B.C., and they were delivered by Moses in 1446 B.C. Of that 430 years, Egypt oppressed them most of those years: forced them into hard labor, systematically murdered them when they wanted the population cut down, defiled them by false gods until they ended up worshiping them as well, and abused them in every way by their slave masters.
From a human perspective, the Israelites seemed to be the most cursed people on the face of the earth, abandoned by their Lord God, the God of their fathers, and left to the mercy, as much as Egyptians had mercy, of the Egyptian rulers. They thought that God had forgotten them. But He had not. He heard their cries and He saw their misery. He had compassion on the people, and so He sent Moses to lead them out of Egypt, after punishing the Egyptians with ten plagues and destroying Pharaoh’s army by drowning them in the Red Sea. God led them to the face of Mount Sinai, a mountain of about seven thousand feet above sea level. There He established His covenant with them, gave them His Word, and instituted the divine service for them.
On Mount Sinai, the Lord God gave the Israelites their own unique identity by doing three things for them, which our text begins to highlight this morning. First, He reminded them what He had done for them: His story, both taking them into Egypt to preserve them, but also smiting the Egyptians and freeing them from their captivity. Second, He gave them the Torah. That’s generally translated “the law,” but it means the law and the gospel; it means the rules, but also the promises of God to His people, specifically the promise of a Messiah. Third, He made a covenant with them, based on the law and gospel, that is, His words, which then made them into a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.
As for the reminders, He said to the Israelites, “You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.” The Lord God of their fathers not only saved them from Pharaoh and slavery; He brought them to Himself in every sense of the word. That is, He brought them to the base of Mount Sinai. He brought them to where His Word was going to be preached by Moses. He brought them to the place of their adoption as His children. Moses in this sense is a type of Christ. Jesus Christ has saved us from sin, death, and the power of the devil, and has brought us to Himself. We didn’t go to Him. That’s a great misconception among Christians, that somehow we decide and we go. But Jesus says to His own disciples, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.” As we confess in the Small Catechism, the Holy Spirit has called, gathered, enlightened, and sanctified me. Our conversion is done without our cooperation. That’s how God makes children out of enemies.
On Mount Sinai, God made the Israelites His very own possession, first by His action of deliverance, and second by the words that He gives to them on Mount Sinai: “Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine.” The Lord God promised the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that they would have an utterly unique relationship to Him among all people on the earth. They were the people to whom He was giving His words, His words of law and His words of gospel, His judgment and His promises. So also Christians in the New Testament have a unique relationship with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Those who are not Christians do not enjoy this same relationship. You hear this all the time: “We’re all children of God.” And then they have no clue who God is. They only know God as Creator, not much more than that. They do not know God as the deliverer, the deliverer from sin and death and the power of the devil, because in order to do that, they must be called, gathered, enlightened, and sanctified at the speaking of the Word and the work of the Holy Spirit.
Now, there are a lot of people that don’t think they have to listen to God’s words, or keep any commandments or covenants, but they still believe themselves to be people of God. We’re seeing the most grotesque displays of people who claim to be children of God, but who have nothing to do with anything that is holy or sacred, or divine service, or forgiveness of sins, or anything else that God has set down in the world through the church. That’s of course nothing new. After all, the Israelites made it through the Red Sea by God’s leading; they’re now at the base of Mount Sinai; Moses is up on Mount Sinai receiving the Ten Commandments and the Torah; and what are the people doing down below? They’re making a golden calf. They didn’t listen. They worshiped false gods and engaged in every kind of immoral evil.
Yet at this time, 1446 B.C., and in this place, on Mount Sinai, the Lord God made the Israelites His royal priesthood by way of His Word and by way of the sacrificial system of atonement. That’s how it happened: “And you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation,” He declared to the Israelite people. God delivered them from slavery in Egypt so that, out of all the people on the earth, the Hebrew people, the Israelites, were His chosen people, and through whom He would send His promised Messiah to be the Savior of both Jew and Gentile alike. They would be the partakers and the caretakers of His words. They would be the partakers and the caretakers of His sacramental system. They would be the participants and the keepers of the divine service, in which their sins were forgiven and true faith was created.
“These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel,” God commanded Moses. So Moses came and called the elders of the people and set before them all these words that the Lord had commanded him. That is, despite what anybody else thinks out in the world, the job of a minister in the church is to preserve, to partake in, and to take care of the words of God, as Timothy says, “rightly handling the word of truth.” We are to be about the words and the doctrine. The Word and this doctrine is connected to the divine service. That’s how it works. For most of the centuries of the church’s existence, in the New Testament period, people learned through the liturgy and through the hymns, through the good and right traditions of the church. That’s how it works. Absence from that, as many of our neighbors practice, is absence from the words of God.
Now, don’t be confused here. It is the Word of God and faith in the words and promises that made the people of the Old Testament holy, not their bloodline. But someone needs to be the caretaker of the words, the sacramental system, and the divine service, and thus the Hebrew people, the Israelites, are entrusted with it. That’s Romans 3:1-2. After saying in Romans 2 that the bloodline isn’t the thing, Paul asks the rhetorical question, “What advantage has the Jew?” And he replies, “Much in every way. To begin with, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God.”
God’s plan of salvation involved establishing the ancient Israel as a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, and originally that nation was to be a theocracy. The Lord didn’t give them a king, for a good reason. Over time, much later, the Israelites had an inferiority complex, because every nation they knew about on the earth had a king, and they didn’t. So they whined and pouted until finally God gave them what they wanted, and that didn’t go well for the remaining centuries of the Old Testament. They wanted to be like other nations, and they actually became just like all the other nations.
Now, the main representative of God through the entire history of Israel in the Old Testament was the high priest. The highest office in the land of Israel and Judah was the high priest. The high priest represented the Lord’s kingship by being both anointed into the office and by wearing a golden crown on his head, with a particular inscription on that crown: “Holy to the Lord.” The inscription pointed to the fact that he and they were a royal priesthood of the holy Lord God. The high priest also represented the people of God before God in the tabernacle and then in the temple. He had inscribed on his shoulder pieces and on his breastplate the names of the twelve tribes of Israel, declaring by way of illustration that the people of these tribes were in fact priests and a holy nation too.
The same is true of you in the New Testament period. You are now royalty, saying priests, because Christ Jesus is in fact the King of kings. He is the high priest of priests and the most holy of the holy ones. All of those things are attributed to Him, and all of those things are attributed to you who are baptized and believe in Christ. Christ Jesus, though, is not like the oppressive kings of the earth. He’s not like politicians in our day who seek to rule over us, micromanage us, oppress us, “rules for thee but not for me” kind of people. No, Christ suffered and underwent everything we suffer and undergo, only even more so. Jesus is the King of the kingdom of God. He is the King who came to establish righteousness and the eternal kingdom, a kingdom, as He told Pilate, that is not of this world.
In the Old Testament, the king of ancient Israel pointed forward to the kingdom of Christ and the coming King. Just as the people of Israel were God’s royal people who participated in the kingship of the high priest, we also now share in the royalty of Christ as priests in a holy nation. Revelation 1:6: He has made us members of His royal family; He has made us priests who serve His God and Father. Glory and dominion belong to Christ forever and ever. Amen. The Son of God did not merely come to rule over man; He came and He joined our human nature to His divine nature, so that in Christ we rule as priests and kings and queens. Christ is the King of kings, and we are also kings and queens. Just as the Old Testament high priest carried the people of Israel into the presence of God, so Christ bears us in His divine presence and seats us with Himself in the heavenly kingdom.
Christ does not oppress us; rather, He exalts us. He does not push us down; rather, He lifts us up. In Christ’s kingdom, He sends out royal messengers and tells them to go and gather the lost sheep of Israel, and to proclaim as you go, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. Christ is our high priest, and He is even greater than all the high priests of the Old Testament. The priests of the Old Testament were limited to a certain number of years, but Christ’s priesthood lasts forever. The Old Testament high priest offered incense and animal sacrifices for the sins of the Israelites, especially on the Day of Atonement. In the New Testament, Christ did not enter an earthly sanctuary, but He entered, the Bible says, the most holy place with His own lifeblood to make full payment for your sins and for the sins of the world.
In Holy Communion, Christ offers His divine blood to sanctify the temple of our body and of our life. In Holy Communion, He makes us one with Him, and unites us with the royal priesthood, and unites us with heavenly creatures, with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven. In the Old Testament, God instituted the offerings and the sacrifices of the divine service to effect two particular kinds of things for His people. There were the offerings that were called holy, and their function was to cleanse and to purify, that is, to wash away sin. But there was a second class of offerings; they’re called most holy. They have the power to make holy, that is, a continual holiness. The most holy sacrifices made you pure and clean and holy continually. It’s a constant state of grace.
Through the cross, Christ made His most holy blood the complete atonement and entered into, as the book of Hebrews says, the most holy place. In the New Testament, Christ instituted the sacraments, which purify us, that is, wash away our sin, and make us holy at the same time. Christ gives us most holy status in most holy Baptism, in most holy Absolution, and in the most holy body and blood of the Lord’s Supper, to cleanse us continually from our sin and to sanctify us by continually sharing His holiness with us. It’s not like a light switch that goes on and off: today you’re holy, tomorrow you’re not. No, the Christian is always holy in the sight of the heavenly Father. 1 Peter 2:9: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
In Christ, you are most holy. In Christ, you are a priest. In Christ, you are kings and queens. Your sins are forgiven; your status secured. Amen.
May the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.