In this episode, I’m joined by pastor and theologian Tony Phelps to talk about why it’s so important for preachers to preach God’s law and God’s gospel. Together, we trace this necessary distinction from Sinai’s altars to Luther’s breakthrough, and relish in the heartbeat of gospel preaching, which tells sinners not what they must do but what Christ has done.

Tony serves as the teaching elder of Christ Our Hope Presbyterian Church in Carolina, Rhode Island, where he lives with his wife, Donna. He’s a frequent contributor to The Heidelblog. You can also follow him on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.

Resources:
“Not Man’s Gospel: An Exposition of Galatians 1:11–24 (Part 2),” Tony Phelps
“A Letter to Recovering Pharisees: An Exposition of Galatians (Part 2),” Tony Phelps
Commentary on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (1535), Martin Luther
Finding God in the Darkness: Hopeful Reflections from the Pits of Depression, Despair, and Disappointment, Bradley Gray

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Credits:
Intro music: It Just Makes Me Happy
Composer: DJ Quads, soundcloud.com/aka-dj-quads
License: Creative Commons (BY-NC 3.0), creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
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Title: Where God Meets Us
Text: Exodus 24:12—30:10
Originally delivered on 7 June 2026 at Stonington Baptist Church, Paxinos, PA
For more content like this, visit www.graceupongrace.net

Luke 24 is unquestionably my most cherished text of Scripture, since, among other reasons, it’s where Jesus tells us how to read our Bibles (Luke 24:27). If I had a time-traveling Delorean, this is the moment I’d go back in time to observe, as the risen Lord of glory unfurls and unfolds the pages of Scripture so that they trace the outline of the work he just got through finished — namely, the work of redemption and remission from sins. Consequently, Jesus’s encounter with two grieving disciples gives us a window into understanding everything from Genesis to Revelation. And although we aren’t told what places in Scripture to which the Lord pointed, I’m fairly certain Exodus 12 was among them, which means that those two disciples were among the first to hear from the lips of Jesus himself that he was their Passover Lamb.

No matter how many Passovers they had celebrated in years past, they’d never be able to celebrate that feast in the same way again. Christ had given it a new meaning, deepening its resonance from a day all devout Jews were meant to observe on an annual basis to a feast that showcased the means of their salvation. Like many other things, the cross and empty tomb reimagined that meal into something that no longer looked forward in anticipation, but backward in fulfillment (Luke 24:44–48). From then on, every Passover feast was imbued with the realization that what its participants eagerly expected had already been accomplished. What that first Passover pointed to was realized in and through Jesus’s death and resurrection.

1. The Apostolic Witness to the Lamb

This, to be sure, isn’t merely something stubborn Christ-centered preachers such as myself have made up out of thin air. The apostle Paul plainly says that “Christ [is] our Passover lamb” (1 Cor. 5:7). His contemporary, Peter, is similarly overt when he refers to Christ’s “precious blood” as “that of a lamb without blemish or spot” (1 Pet. 1:19). St. John does the same thing when he records the words of John the Baptist, gesturing to Jesus as “the Lamb of God” (John 1:29, 36). In fact, the image of Jesus as the Passover Lamb was so influential for “the disciple whom Jesus loved” that his so-called Apocalypse is peppered with it (Rev. 5:6, 8; 6:1–17; 7:9–10, 14; 12:11; 13:8; 14:1, 4–5; 15:3–4; 17:14; 19:7–9, 11–16; 21:9–10, 22–23; 22:1–4), crescendoing with his vision of the redeemed, that is, the church, singing aloud, “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” (Rev. 5:12).

The lifeblood of the Body of Christ is forever tethered to the blood of the Lamb, and it always will be. “Seeing Christ in Exodus 12,” Michael P. V. Barrett says, “is not the consequence of some exegetical sleight of hand; on the contrary, it is exegetically and theologically essential.”1 In other words, interpreting the ins and outs of that first Passover as a prophetic event that points to Jesus isn’t ancillary but remains a fundamental necessity.

2. A Meal That Preaches

Perusing God’s instructions regarding the first Passover might leave you swimming in details, especially as he offers meticulous commands regarding the method of cooking the lamb, the proper way to eat it, and even what side dishes should accompany it. What’s more, he also gives exact days and precise times when the lamb should be eaten. This wasn’t an ordinary meal; this wasn’t like going to KFC on a Sunday afternoon. Rather, this was a particular and predetermined feast that was meant to preach something to all who participated in it. The Passover “sermon” began on the tenth of Abib or, as it’d later be called, Nisan,^[Which corresponds to roughly March or April.] when the heads of every Israelite household chose a pristine, unblemished lamb to serve as the sacrificial main course (Exod. 12:1–6). Not just any old lamb would do, but one without any defects, mutations, or abnormalities.

After a careful inspection process, they were required to examine their chosen lamb for a further four days. From the tenth to the fourteenth, each lamb would be observed and scrutinized to ensure they truly were “without blemish.” Then, on the fourteenth of Nisan, that lamb would be killed “at twilight,” or between noon and sunset, which is approximately 3 p.m. This is when the Passover meal would commence, with the whole lamb roasted and eaten with “bitter herbs” and unleavened bread (Exod. 12:8–9). Of course, the fact that this lamb was to be roasted with its head, legs, and inner parts intact, with none of its bones broken (Exod. 12:46), is no minor detail. Actually, it’s the part of the Passover “sermon” that preaches substitution to everyone around the table.2

There would be no escaping the point that this meal was unlike any other. This wasn’t BBQ lamb chops on a Friday night. This was a life sacrificed for you, in your place. The whole lamb was wholly sacrificed for everyone under that roof on that specific day and time to preserve them from the angelic “destroyer” (Exod. 12:23). And this entire sequence is a beaming signpost pointing us to Jesus, down to the day.

3. The Perfect Lamb’s Perfect Timing

John tells us that “six days before the Passover,” Jesus entered Bethany, which sat on the outskirts of Jerusalem (John 12:1). The very “next day,” so five days before Passover, the Lord made his triumphal entry (John 12:12–13), where, for the next four days, he was meticulously and carefully scrutinized by scribes, Pharisees, and Sadducees, in no particular order (Luke 19—21). But amid all their questions and attempts at entrapment, Jesus was found faultless. He remained unblemished. This brings us to the day “on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed,” which we know was the fourteenth of Nisan (Luke 22:7). After all the preparations were made, Jesus’s apostles were led through a Passover meal they wouldn’t soon forget (Luke 22:14–20), followed by a flurry of events that moved at a rapid pace, from betrayals to trials to floggings.

A few hours later, with his beaten, bruised, and bloodied body nailed to a cross between two scoundrels, Jesus breathed his last breath, dying at the ninth hour, a.k.a. 3 p.m. (Luke 23:44–46). And, for the real kicker, not a bone on his body was broken (John 19:33, 36). None of this is happenstance, nor is it a matter of convenient timing. The Gospel writers are simply tracing Jesus’s sequence of events so that there would be no doubt about what he was doing. Whereas that first Passover was a shadow of things to come, Jesus was its substance. He is its fulfillment, leading his friends in the Passover ritual before dying the following afternoon as its ultimate realization. Jesus both shared that meal as its host and was crucified the next day as its sacrificial Lamb.

This whole sequence assures us that nothing was accidental. It was all unfolding “according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23). “The day of the Crucifixion,” Rev. Alexander Maclaren declares, “regarded as fixed by divine Providence, may be taken as God’s own finger pointing to the Lamb whom He has provided.”3 In other words, Jesus knew what he was getting himself into when he entered Jerusalem. He was well aware of how the rest of that week was going to unfold and how it would end for him, and he went through with it anyway. This is because Jesus is our Passover Lamb, the one who fulfills the sequence of it to accomplish our salvation.

4. When Judgment Passes Over

Part of God’s instructions to Moses regarding that first Passover included earmarking it as “the beginning of months” (Exod. 12:2). This meant a total reset of the Hebrew calendar, starting with that month. But “beginning” doesn’t just mean “first in order”; it also means “first in priority.” God is effectively telling Moses and Aaron that the month in which the Passover was celebrated was to have precedence over all other months, since what he was doing and revealing was of utmost importance. Through this meal, he was shaping his people’s identity around what he was going to do for them, which is further solidified when he insists that “this day,” that is, all the days of the Passover, would be “a memorial day” forever (Exod. 12:14). The entire ceremony was meant to remind everyone how on a night when judgment was set to rain down on every home in “the land of Egypt,” judgment passed over them (Exod. 12:26–27).

God’s priority for his people is that they realize how he “spared” them and how his mercy preserved them from the judgment they rightly deserved (cf. Ezek. 20:7–8). They, too, were confronted with the threat of “the destroyer.” When the Angel of the Lord descended as the angel of death, there was no prejudice, nor was there preference shown to one or another. There was no socio-economic status, religious demographic, or ethnicity that was excluded. As the Lord makes clear, everyone faced the same judgment, from the one sitting on the throne to the one in the gutter, and everywhere in between (Exod. 11:4–5). Accordingly, this climactic plague of death serves as a prelude to the final judgment at the end of all things, where everyone, regardless of background, race, or creed, will stand before the Judge.

Just as those with no blood on their doors wept uncontrollably, so it will be on that awful and dreadful day in eternity, where a greater, more terrible cry than in Egypt will echo through the halls of heaven, as those who refused to listen finally realize their fate. The grim reality is that there will be no relief for those who demand to stand before the Judge on their own. Indeed, standing before him by ourselves, without anything covering us or protecting us, is the stuff of nightmares. It leads only to death (Exod. 12:29–30). Those who are spared are those who are “covered,” and who have their robes washed white by “the blood of the Lamb” (Rev. 7:14). “The God of judgment, who came to impose a penalty of death justly due,” J. Alec Motyer writes, “saw the blood and ‘passed over’ in peace.”4

And faced with the same prospect of death and judgment, the Body of Christ is called to plead what the gospel beckons us to remember — namely, how our eternal security is a gift that emerges from the merciful announcement that judgment has passed over us because of Jesus. The church is a called-out assembly of people who rally around a meal of remembrance that preaches to them the means of their salvation (Luke 22:19).

5. A Real Sacrifice for Real Sinners

There is something visceral and striking about what God institutes in the first Passover. For Moses and Aaron, and the rest of the people of Israel, their hope of being spared wasn’t just some nice idea. This was no figment of their imagination, nor was it an abstract concept. Rather, their rescue and escape from judgment was as real as the roasted lamb sitting on the dinner table. Another reason why God commanded the lamb to be cooked and eaten whole was that it compelled all who partook of it to come to grips with the reality of their pardon. Instead of a plateful of diced and seasoned lamb chops, here was a whole lamb as the centerpiece of this bloody feast.

What did it cost to release them from judgment? What was the price to absolve them of guilt? To exonerate them? To secure peace with God? An innocent lamb, killed and sacrificed instead of them, with its blood running down the lintel and posts of the front door as an unmistakable reminder of the reality of what was done for them. “The blood that was smeared around the doors of the Israelite houses was a visible token that a life had been laid down in that place,” J. Alec Motyer comments. “Entering and remaining behind that door signified the personal appropriation by faith of all that the shed blood meant and had accomplished.”5 Thus, the entire scene underscores the reality and objectivity of what we confess.

To say that we believe in Jesus Christ crucified and risen again for us, and for our salvation, isn’t a figment of our imagination. This isn’t some myth or some theological tall tale. Neither is this something humanity has made up to cope with a world that’s riddled with brokenness, disease, and death. No, relief for the guilt you feel, pardon for all the wrongs you’ve committed, and hope for a remedy for all that’s fractured is as real as the blood of Jesus mixing with Jewish soil. To say with John the Baptist, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” is to confess the reality of a life given for you and blood poured out for you (John 1:29).

6. The Lamb Who Took Our Place

Your hope of forgiveness and remission from sin is as real as the blood being put on doorframes (Exod. 12:7, 21–22) and the sweat that fell from our Savior’s forehead (Luke 22:44). What transpired on the cross was a real transaction, where Jesus gave his life for yours and mine. He really suffered all the devastating, agonizing, and traumatizing effects of death on the cross. “Christ, our Passover lamb,” endured all the grief, sorrow, and affliction that our sin deserved so that we might be passed over. “Jesus clothed himself with our nature,” nineteenth-century Scottish clergyman John Cumming once wrote, “took our place of responsibility, suffered all we deserved as sinners, and did all that we owed as creatures; so that in Christ our sins have been suffered for, and we escape their consequences; and by Christ our Law has been obeyed, and we inherit all the blessed results.”6 Henry Law, a nineteenth-century Anglican bishop, concurs:

Believer, Jesus is tormented in your stead. All the wrath, which all your sins deserved, is outpoured on Him. The vengeance of God descends in all its fury. The curse of the law exacts its utmost. The flames of hell tightly grasp Him. He endures the very miseries, which all His people must have endured, if they had wailed for ever in the lake of fire. Faith sees it, and exclaims, I live, for Jesus died. I cannot suffer. Jesus has exhausted all. Wrath cannot touch me, because it has touched Him.7

Therefore, as Israelite families gathered around a table to partake in the Passover meal, so does the church. Only our meal isn’t an annual festival; it’s a weekly celebration. Every time the Word is opened, we are invited to have a seat at the table to feast on our Passover Lamb and revel in the reality of what he accomplished for us (Heb. 9:11–14, 25–26). “Christ, our Passover lamb,” offered himself and shed his own blood to release you from condemnation. The same God who passed over Egypt so long ago is the same God who made a way to pass over sinners by “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8). Only now, we live on the far side of a truer and greater Exodus, one that isn’t just marked by blood on doorframes, but by blood on our hearts. In other words, the Passover wasn’t just Israel’s story; it’s ours.

Besides — “The Gooch!” — is easily one of my favorite Substack-ers. Her incisive cultural insights are heads and shoulders above her peers. Freya has a knack for articulating Gen Z angst in ways that feel honest without becoming preachy or self-loathing. She’s able to name some of the foibles that are unique to her generation, many of which are either dismissed or ignored. Those memes that express the unending onslaught of existential crises that have seemingly become just another Tuesday for Millennials could just as easily describe Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

In other words, I’m not so sure we should be so quick to judge the “littluns” — I got such a kick out of that term while watching the most recent Lord of the Flies adaptation on Netflix! — for their apparent softness and the “ease” with which they grew up or are growing up. Just because certain tasks are easier than they were ten, twenty, or thirty years ago doesn’t mean things are easier writ large. I honestly can’t imagine growing up in the Snapchat era, let alone the constant pressure that living with the unavoidable creep of social media on the “peace, and quiet, and good tilled earth”1 of everyday life.

To say that things have changed since the “back in my day” days is self-evident. But there’s no putting the toothpaste back in the tube. Starlink is here to make sure the remotest villages in Peru can doomscroll to their heart’s content, and A.I. is here to subsume everyone’s jobs, or so I’m told. It really just depends on which news outlet you’re sourcing. We’ve barely been able to reckon with, let alone process, what it means for childhoods to be swallowed up by screens, and we’re already pushing the envelope by adding artificial intelligence into the mix, because, why not, right? What can it really hurt at this point? I suppose the only certainty in a life full of uncertainties is the fact that things change.

But that’s not entirely true, is it? At least, it shouldn’t be. There ought to be another certainty, another hand-hold jutting out on the craggy cliff-face — namely, the church. Without digressing into a nerdy diatribe about what the church is in relation to Orthodoxy, it goes without saying that among the reasons, and there are many, the church was established in the aftermath of Jesus’s resurrection and ascension to bespeak what is certain amid a world enslaved to irreversible decay. And what might that be? It’s the Word of Christ that is preached, and the bread and cup of Christ offered in the Lord’s Supper. In a world that’s fraying at the seams, what doesn’t break down or fade away are the body and blood of the Crucified One.

Be that as it may, if Freya’s latest essay, “The Commodification of Christianity,” is to be believed, even the church has changed, to the detriment of those who are genuinely searching for something solid. After briefly mentioning her curiosity about Christianity, Freya bemoans the current Christian marketplace for its commoditization of “content about God” and the ways in which the church has joined the fracas of pumping out podcasts and reels that seem to merchandise your relationship with God. “It feels as if all of Christianity can be done on a screen,” she writes. “To stay connected with God, all we need to do is subscribe, download, press play.”

Without discerning the costs, the church has assimilated modernity’s apparatus for “performing everything to each other all the time for no reason,” to borrow Bo Burnham’s phrase. But have we lost something along the way as we’ve “gamified” the “faith once delivered to the saints”? Is there a disadvantage to making the Bible bite-sized? I would agree with Freya and offer a wholehearted yes to that. This doesn’t mean churches should ditch their Instagram accounts or cut their livestreams off. There are ways to utilize modernity’s technological contrivances to the benefit of heaven’s kingdom. But I wonder if the church has put too many eggs into the algorithmic basket?

Maybe churches have busied themselves trying to reach the avatars the algorithms tell them to reach to the point where they’ve forgotten the people next door. It’s easier to evangelize or proselytize someone when you don’t have to share space with them. When you don’t have to smell them. But is the church supposed to be easy? Is it supposed to be convenient? I don’t think so. This speaks to the apparent disconnect between the unconcerned embrace of social media and the mission of the church, which isn’t typified by gaming an algorithm but by a Word of grace that shapes and settles us.

Sometimes I think I’ll just watch the Sunday live-stream in bed, maybe skip through it a bit, or actually you know what I’ll just listen to a Christian podcast instead while I get on with other things. All the Sermons are on Spotify anyway! The awful truth of it, I have to be honest, is that I put off going to church because I know that I can. I’ve got my phone . . .

I tell myself I’m watching the Sunday live-stream to get used to the idea of going to church, then I’ll actually go. But this is the trap, and trust me on this, if you are trying to reach a generation that has spent more time on screens than face-to-face with other human beings, do not make it any easier to do things inside . . .

I think if Christians want to reach my generation, really reach us, they have to promise something totally separate from that, something otherworldly, something that doesn’t abide by market logic, something different, divine. Something, for once, that isn’t cheapened or commodified. And I hope some find the conviction to say that their faith is too complicated, too sacred, to turn into TikToks. If you want to know more about it, the subscribe button won’t help. You’ll have to step into church.

At the church where I serve, I’ve received feedback in the past concerning the quality, or lack thereof, of our Facebook and YouTube livestreams. The audio is tinny or poorly mixed; the camera isn’t centered, or it cuts out entirely, mid-stream, at random. To be honest, there’s a part of me that loathes such things. The perfectionist in me wants to meticulously dial everything in and get it just right, make it more than presentable. But there’s another part of me that has learned to be okay with all flaws, because maybe, just maybe, those technological deficiencies aren’t glitches but blessings in disguise.

Despite all the ways churches have evolved to keep up with the times, what has always been true, and what always will be true, is that for the church to be “the church,” her people must gather. “A church is not a church until it comes together,” writes Jonathan Leeman.2 Sure, we can commune with God and pray to him in the comfort of our own home, even with the assistance of finely coded apps on our phones. But the Christian faith has never been a faith performed in isolation. It’s neither static nor individualistic. It’s experienced as the community of faith meets together, corporeally (Heb. 10:25), to encourage one another through Word and Sacrament, two things that can’t be commodified.

What Freya seems to be after isn’t more content, but something that you participate in by using all five senses, which is exactly what makes the gathering of the church so powerful and poignant. “The fact that you are physically there. You see. You hear. You feel.”3 Some things, it turns out, you have to be there for. Freya’s longing for “something otherworldly” or divine is precisely what is found in the gathered church when its halls echo with the words of grace that invite us to take part in a story that’s infinitely bigger than us. One where earth is invaded by heaven, and evil is trampled by the nail-scarred feet of God’s Son.

Grace and peace to you.

I love that quote that’s often attributed to St. Augustine about the cross serving as Satan’s mousetrap. I’ve used it a few times in various venues (here, here, and here, for example), and each time, I’m enthralled by the preacher of Hippo’s ability to capture the sudden cosmic surprise of the cross. Our foe, spiritual though he is, isn’t omniscient. The will and ways of the Lord are beyond his searching. Thus, as his nemeses closed in around him in an ever-thickening plot, Jesus remained undisturbed, despite the betrayal and convoluted scheme that led to his conviction, not because he was ambivalent to what was unfolding in front of him or around him, but because he was aware of the deeper purposes of the Godhead that were at that very moment converging.

In the future, though, I may opt to use the following excerpt from the late James S. Stewart, a minister of the Church of Scotland, who, in his book The Strong Name, conveys the same Augustinian imagery of the evil one being caught in his own snare. Here’s how he puts it:

It is a glorious phrase — “He led captivity captive.” The very triumphs of His foes, it means, He used for their defeat. He compelled their dark achievements to subserve His ends, not theirs. They nailed Him to the tree, not knowing that by that very act they were bringing the world to His feet. They gave Him a cross, not guessing that He would make it a throne. They flung Him outside the gates to die, not knowing that in that very moment they were lifting up all the gates of the universe, to let the King come in. They thought to root out His doctrines, not understanding that they were implanting imperishably in the hearts of men the very name they intended to destroy. They thought they had God with His back to the wall, pinned and helpless and defeated: they did not know that it was God Himself who had tracked them down. He did not conquer in spite of the dark mystery of evil. He conquered through it. He led captivity captive.1

Quoting Psalm 68:18 — “You ascended on high, leading a host of captives in your train” — which the apostle Paul later cites as well (Eph. 4:8; cf. 2 Cor. 2:14–17; Col. 2:13–15), Stewart communicates the incongruity of the cross, where what was intended to bring about death and destruction actually culminated in life and salvation. Judas’s duplicity, Pilate’s passivity, and Rome’s cruelty might’ve seemed like the worst of all defeats in history writ large. No one could fathom the shame and embarrassment of it all, especially for those who’d associated with Jesus and vouched for him all those years prior. Yet, there he was, the object of ridicule and the epitome of disgrace, pegged to a Roman torture device, with his own people spitting on his name.

But the darkness and horror of that scene didn’t really capture what was really going on. Because all the while, “the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” were unfurling, with the crucified Christ at the very center of it all (Acts 2:23). That’s where he always is. All the threads of space and time intersect on a hill called Calvary, where a Rabbi from Nazareth was executed. But what looked like failure and ruin was, in fact, the source of faith and redemption. Hell, I suppose, rejoiced too soon. Because grace always wins.

Grace and peace to you.

Title: Further Up and Further In
Text: Exodus 24:1–11
Originally delivered on 31 May 2026 at Stonington Baptist Church, Paxinos, PA
For more content like this, visit www.graceupongrace.net

One cannot exaggerate just how critical the sequence of events recorded in Chapters 11, 12, and 13 of Exodus is in the history of Israel, the church, and the world. What God does, says, and reveals to his servant Moses and his covenant people still resonates with God’s people today as the Lord not only fulfills his word of promise to them, but also foreshadows his plans for us. Integral to this section are Stephen’s words from his sermon in front of the Sanhedrin council, where he refers to the Israelites as the “church in the wilderness” (Acts 7:37). The congregation or ekklesia that has survived countless eras of division, persecution, and suffering finds some of its foremost ingredients in an ancient ritual that was first uttered to slaves. In other words, while we recognize Acts 2 and the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost as the proverbial “birthday” of the church, and rightly so, the DNA for the church stretches all the way back to the days of Egyptian servitude, when God, with “a strong hand,” brought his people out of slavery and into freedom.

1. Setting the Stage for Salvation

To set the scene, we have to look at the prologue to the tenth and final plague and some of the elements that make it unique, chief among them being God’s extended introduction and reminder to set Moses’s expectations (Exod. 11:1–10). Back in Chapter 6, it was revealed that it would be none other than Pharaoh himself who’d drive the Israelites out of Egypt (Exod. 6:1). So far, though, that hadn’t happened. As the Lord reiterates what he said previously, he also reminds Moses of the “peaceful plunder” his people were about to mount on the Egyptians (Exod. 11:2–3). As that nation of slaves exited the land, they wouldn’t be doing so empty-handed; they’d leave with all the articles necessary to worship Yahweh just as he intended (Exod. 12:36; cf. Gen. 15:14).1 And what would prompt the Egyptians to want to get rid of them is the final plague, which was the most personal and excruciating of them all, leaving every firstborn — regardless of socio-economic status — struck down and drawing a “great cry” from all those affected (Exod. 11:4–8).

A distinction is made, though, between those in Egypt and those who belong to the Lord. While the former’s hallways would rattle with the noise of their grief, not even a dog would growl in the latter’s homes — an obvious allusion to the solace, calm, and salvation the Lord would provide for them. After announcing the last plague and departing Pharaoh’s throne room in a rage (Exod. 11:8; cf. 10:28–29), Moses receives a special set of instructions that detail the means by which the people of Israel could survive the looming night of judgment, safe and sound (Exod. 12:1–13). This, of course, is the first announcement of the Lord’s Passover, that is, his offering of relief and escape from the plague of death, within which the Lord resets his people’s identity by resetting their calendar (Exod. 12:2). More than merely a new ritual or new rhythm, God was tethering who they were to what he was about to do.

In other words, they were to be a congregation of the Passover. Just as their calendars revolved around this day, so, too, were they to be absorbed by it. Each household was to take a lamb “without blemish” or defects, kill it, roast it, and then — according to a set of specific instructions (Exod. 12:8–11) — eat it. After sacrificing this lamb, they were to take some of its blood and apply it to the doorframes of their homes as a graphic emblem of God’s mercy and preservation (Exod. 12:12–13). As the rest of the land cried great cries of unfathomable grief, where no blood was found, the blood-stained doorframes were the Lord’s distinguishing ensign of who belonged to him, and who were under his gracious protection. “When they sprinkled its blood on the posts,” Rev. Alexander Maclaren once said, “they confessed that they stood in peril of the destroying angel by reason of their impurity, and they presented the blood as their expiation.”2 God’s people, you might say, have always been identified by the blood that sets them apart.

The point is that only those who listen to the Lord’s words would be safe (Exod. 12:21–28). They couldn’t get away with boiling the lamb or deep frying it, as much as that might’ve tasted better, nor could they apply the blood in any old way they liked. Judgment would pass over those who listened and believed in the words of God, which were words of grace, solace, and deliverance. Similarly, the Body of Christ is a congregation that listens to the words that offer relief and release from grief, judgment, and death, which come from Christ alone. The church isn’t set apart by the words of humans, institutions, councils, or symposiums — as important as they might be. Rather, the distinguishing mark of God’s people is and always has been that they are a people who listen to and find their identity in the Lord’s words, especially the Word who became flesh for them.

2. Exodused for Worship

Events unfold just as God said they would, as nightfall is accompanied by the angel of death, who takes the life of all the firstborn where the blood wasn’t applied (Exod. 12:29–32). This, as you might imagine, sends Egypt into bedlam, with the king himself being roused in the middle of the night to find that he, too, was a victim of this divine judgment. With the deafening cries of his people echoing in the streets, Pharaoh finally had enough. After reaching the point of giving up, he forces Moses and Aaron to get out, along with the rest of their kind, much to the delight of every Egyptian citizen (Exod. 12:33). For them, the Hebrews were living reminders of the curse that had befallen them, one that would soon put them in the grave as well.

As the Exodus develops, it becomes a hurried and anxious affair. In fact, things moved so fast that the Israelites had no time to let the yeast in their doughs of bread work its magic and make their loaves warm and fluffy (Exod. 12:34). Instead, they were forced to bake unleavened bread due to how hastily they were constrained to leave (Exod. 12:39). But leave they did, every last one of them (Exod. 12:35–41). After over four centuries of bondage and suffering, they were finally free; no longer slaves. This, of course, had nothing to do with them and everything to do with their God, the I Am, who did what he promised in and for his people. They were “brought out” by Someone much better and stronger than they — a fact that the Lord is eager for them to remember. In fact, near the beginning of Chapter 13, the Israelites are reminded some seven times in fourteen verses that they were “exodused” via the “strong hand” of the Lord (Exod. 13:3–16). This was an event made entirely possible through divine intervention.

But the point is that they weren’t just emancipated, and that was the end of it. They might’ve been thrust out by the Egyptians, but it was Yahweh who was bringing them out so that they could follow and worship him alone (Exod. 13:1–2, 11–12). He was their God, and they were to be his people. They weren’t just saved from something; they were saved to something. “The Israelites ate the Passover meal,” J. Alec Motyer notes, “as those committed to go walking with God.”3 They were rescued to become a worshiping people, that is, a community whose life and worth are found outside of them. This is the premise behind the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which called every Israelite to cast off the old leaven of sin and live in the “new” life of “sincerity and truth” (1 Cor. 5:7–8).

Just as God had “set them apart” by making a distinction between them and Egypt, they were to set themselves apart, consecrating themselves for his service. In other words, they were “brought out” so that they could follow the Lord wherever he leads or wills, a quality that endures as a defining characteristic of the church (Rom. 6:17–18). The Body of Christ is comprised of those who’ve been set free by the strong, nail-scarred hands of the Christ of God, which reconcile and embrace them, forming them into a congregation that sings endless praise to the Lamb that was slain for them (Rev. 5:9–10). The church, in other words, has been exodused for worship by the wounded Messiah whose wounds serve as the central melody of its song. We are not our own. Rather, gloriously, we belong to the one who brought us out so that we might be gathered into his presence as a worshiping assembly.

3. The Meal That Preaches

Chief among the characteristics of God’s newly formed congregation is that they are a people who remember. Right on the heels of instituting the Passover, God’s first move is to ensure that what he’s about to do won’t be forgotten (Exod. 12:14–20). The blood on the doorposts hadn’t even dried yet, nor had anyone even set foot beyond the borders of Egypt, and yet the Lord was already preparing a way for them to remember. He knows how easily his people move on, how quickly we drift, and how prone we are to take his mercy for granted. Thus, he offers tangible and repeatable means by which his provision and grace can continually be called to mind. Instead of ceremonial busywork, these God-ordained rituals were designed as divine memory aids, so that those who belong to Yahweh can recall what he did for them, generation after generation.

The Feasts of Passover and Unleavened Bread were “statutes” created by God to “memorialize” the Exodus, wherein every element told the story of their deliverance. As Allan M. Harman says, “The ritual of the Passover also served ot function as a teaching ministry, for there was a recital of the redemptive history.”4 The slain lamb spoke of the cost of deliverance and how freedom always comes at a price. The unleavened bread spoke of the urgency of their deliverance and how there’s no room for delays when God places his call on you. The blood spoke of the means of their deliverance and the redemptive judgment that made them his. The bitter herbs spoke of the pain and misery from which God delivered them. In other words, every bite they took preached something to them. The whole meal was a sermon — one that was intended to be repeated, over and over again (Exod. 12:14, 17, 24), so that even centuries later, the same testimony of God’s gracious deliverance could resonate in the hearts of the redeemed:

You shall tell your son on that day, “It is because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt.” And it shall be to you as a sign on your hand and as a memorial between your eyes, that the law of the Lord may be in your mouth. For with a strong hand the Lord has brought you out of Egypt. You shall therefore keep this statute at its appointed time from year to year. (Exod. 13:8–10)

When the soon-to-be crucified Messiah reclined around the table with his disciples mere hours before he was betrayed and given the kiss of death, he shared in one last Passover, taking each of those familiar elements and reinterpreting them around himself, and the work he was about to accomplish (Luke 22:14–20). The bread and the cup are recast as marks of the new covenant that emerges from Jesus’s death and resurrection. Thus, whenever the church partakes of the Lord’s Supper, the resonance of that first Passover meal continues to reverberate, resonating even deeper and truer in a meal that preaches the good news of deliverance from sin.

4. The Rhythm of Remembrance

The Exodus wasn’t meant to be an event quarantined to ancient history. Rather, it was to be the abiding and defining event that preached to God’s people how they became God’s people. “The Passover,” Michael P. V. Barrett asserts, “as is true for the entire exodus, is more than history; it conveys the message of the everlasting gospel.”5 Thus, the rhythm of Israel’s worship was built around this rehearsed reality, where every feast, every law, every Sabbath, and every psalm was geared towards remembering the Lord who saves, who delivers, and who keeps every single one of his promises. And the reason this is so important is because forgetfulness is the first step on the road to rebellion (Deut. 8:11–14; Ps. 78:5–8). When God’s people forget what he has done, they soon start living as though he never did it, or they begin to take credit for who they are and where they are, causing gratitude to dissipate and worship to become dull and performative.

Consequently, right from the very start, God ingrained a pattern of remembrance into the lives of his people, a pattern that is maintained whenever the church gathers to remember the work of God in Christ for them (Acts 2:42). This is the heartbeat of Christian worship — namely, a steady, deliberate rehearsal of what God has done. “Perhaps the most crucial part of our worship,” recently wrote, “is that we worship repeatedly, rhythmically, and sustainably.” When we, as the church, assemble, we engage in the same divine rhythm of hearing (again) the story of our deliverance, proclaiming it (again) to one another, and letting it shape and inform how we live. We come together, not to hear some newfangled doctrine, fresh idea, or innovative lecture. Rather, we come together to hear and remember what’s been done. This is what keeps the church steady, which is why we keep telling the same story of grace on repeat. Because when we stop remembering, we forget who we are.

In this episode, I’m joined by Bob Hiller to talk about the craft of preaching, how to navigate the pressures of pastoral ministry in 2026, and what belongs in the homiletical moment. We also discuss the danger of being a ministerial lone-wolf, why sermons aren’t TED talks, and why the preacher’s job is the same as it’s always been: deliver Christ, and get out of the way.

Bob Hiller serves as the senior pastor of Community Lutheran Church in Escondido, California, where he lives with his wife and three kids. He also serves as the content editor for The Craft of Preaching, along with co-hosting the White Horse Inn. You can follow him on Facebook and Instagram.

Resources:
“Have No Fear, Little Flock,” Bob Hiller
“The Craft of Preaching with Bob Hiller,” Outside Ourselves
Finding Christ in the Straw: A Forty-Day Devotion on the Epistle of James, Bob Hiller
Preaching, Fred B. Craddock
Finding God in the Darkness: Hopeful Reflections from the Pits of Depression, Despair, and Disappointment, Bradley Gray

Sponsor:
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Credits:
Intro music: It Just Makes Me Happy
Composer: DJ Quads, soundcloud.com/aka-dj-quads
License: Creative Commons (BY-NC 3.0), creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
Music powered by BreakingCopyright: breakingcopyright.com

Title: The God Who Goes Before Us
Text: Exodus 23:20–33
Originally delivered on 24 May 2026 at Stonington Baptist Church, Paxinos, PA
For more content like this, visit www.graceupongrace.net

As a preacher, I have a vested interest in how the preaching event, if you will, is perceived and understood, both by the preachers themselves and those to whom they are preaching. This is no “conflict of interest,” mind you — just an interest that bears itself out in an obscene amount of conversations, sometimes with myself, concerning the current state of preaching. It probably goes without saying that “preaching” is a function of the church that always seems as though it’s in a state of flux. From Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach” to Springfield’s Rev. Lovejoy to Rian Johnson’s Monsignor Wicks, preaching and preachers have achieved pop culture status, just not the kind that’s doing you any favors at popularity contests.

This, of course, isn’t meant to be a homiletical pity party, especially since most of the damage done to the preaching vocation has been self-inflicted. There are scores of preachers — too many to keep track of, honestly — that haven’t done the rest of us pulpiteers any favors. Unsurprisingly, according to the latest poll from Gallup’s Honesty and Ethics Survey, the aggregate trust in members of the clergy by the general populace recently hit historic lows. It would seem that the crisis of “peddlers of God’s word” annexing influence over the Body of Christ still persists (2 Cor. 2:17).

One could cite a cavalcade of reasons for this decline in public trust and public regard, with integrity and personal accountability being chief among them. The lack of checks and balances on pastors, especially those who serve in solo positions, is one of the many catalysts for the reckoning that has occurred within the Southern Baptist Convention, though not relegated to only that denomination. In many ways, those who disparage Christ’s name by holding the pastoral office while coddling perversion are, more often than not, culprits of other pastoral offenses, among which is the gradual withdrawal from holding fast to the divine resonance of the preaching event.

Homiletical methodology and pedagogy are a dime a dozen. And although I’m not what you would call “wet behind the ears,” I don’t presume to have preaching “figured out.” No one does. But — anecdotally, I’ll admit — there seems to be a collective diminishing of sobriety when approaching the public proclamation of God’s words. I’ve come across one too many headlines of preachers dressed up like Pixar characters or impaling themselves with props or, God forbid, pouring pancake syrup on the very Bible from which they’re preaching. We may not be short on theatrics — not by a long shot — but we are short on what makes preaching “preaching.”

And what is that? In his The Essential Nature of New Testament Preaching, the late Robert H. Mounce helps us out by bringing to bear the divine and redemptive resonance that ought to occupy every pulpit and preoccupy the heart and lips of those who stand behind them:

Preaching is that timeless link between God’s great redemptive act and man’s apprehension of it. It is the medium through which God contemporizes His historic Self-disclosure and offers man the opportunity to respond in faith. Without response, revelation is incomplete. Without preaching, God’s mighty act remains an event in the past. What man desperately needs is a redemptive encounter in the ever-present Now. Preaching answers to this need by contemporizing the past and moving the individual to respond in faith. The contemporaneity of what took place long ago is an ultimate and inescapable miracle of Christianity. It defies explanation. Yet without this miracle, preaching is not really preaching.1

Just as God the Father delighted in divulging his loving, forgiving, reconciling heart through the Word become flesh (John 1:14, 18), stunningly, he continues to do so, disclosing who he is through the Word borne on the lips of preachers (Rom. 10:17). The role of the preacher, therefore, isn’t merely to stand as a conveyor belt of hermeneutics or doctrine or biblical history. Rather, it is to be the vehicle through which God our Savior carries on his affinity for self-disclosure, for turning sinners into saints and bringing them further up and further into himself.2 And all that’s there is grace.

And this is why the sermon cannot and must not be substituted for mere spectacle or sacrificed on the altar of political urgency, however acute, pressing, or important that may seem at the time. Because without the Word filling the words that echo from pulpits, the church becomes a shell of itself. Indeed, it becomes mute. Apart from the proclamation of the mystery of grace in the person of Jesus, the church has nothing much left to say to a world that is desperate for hope.

Grace and peace.

It took me twenty sermons to get to Mount Sinai, which, for the folks in my church, might’ve felt like twenty years. But when you set out to preach through a book like Exodus, a certain measure of resolve is in order, both from the preacher and those who are listening to his preaching. Exodus is a daunting text, brimming with dense amounts of theology and history, despite the majority of it covering roughly only a two-year span. The arrival at Sinai, however, is a seminal moment, both in the story of Scripture and the world. I might add, though, that it was also incredibly paradoxical. Let me explain.

Israel’s voyage to Sinai came with no shortage of bumps and bruises along the way. As Moses recounted to his father-in-law, they had navigated serious hardship, the likes of which none could really fathom (Exod. 18:8). “Through many dangers, toils, and snares,” as the hymnwriter put it, God led his people to the craggy terrain near the southern tip of the peninsula between the two horns of the Red Sea. All along the way, though, the Israelites had a front-row view of God’s faithfulness. And what did that look like? It looked like oceans being split apart, water gushing from rocks, and bread falling from the sky.

As Israel set up camp in the wilderness of Sinai, I suspect none of them expected to be there for the next eleven or so months. In fact, I would wager many of them didn’t expect to be there at all, especially when you consider the old stories concerning Father Abraham and the heavenly promises he received from on high, with which the multitude was likely familiar. The promise in question reads like this:

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

So Abram went, as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother’s son, and all their possessions that they had gathered, and the people that they had acquired in Haran, and they set out to go to the land of Canaan. When they came to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. (Gen. 12:1–7)

Hovering over story after story and moment after moment in the lives of God’s people was the divine pledge that Abraham’s offspring would be ushered to and made to dwell in a Land of Promise, one that was teeming with life and abundance (Exod. 3:8, 17). With that in mind, and with that promise firmly situated at the heart of Israelite life, I wonder what the masses thought when Moses said, “Well, here we are; we made it,” as they arrived at Sinai.

Pitching your tent in the uninhabited wastelands of Sinai surely felt worse than anticlimactic. The letdown of embracing an age-old promise of landscapes flowing with milk and honey, only to be led into the mountainous terrain of Sinai, is disillusioning at best. I have to imagine it must’ve felt as forlorn as when a certain ring-bearer found himself in the region of Emyn Muil, which Tolkien describes as a “wide tumbled flat of scored and weathered rock, cut every now and again by trench-like gullies that sloped steeply down to deep notches in the cliff-face.”1 Needless to say, this was no oasis.

Establishing a temporary dwelling leagues away from the borders of Canaan undoubtedly inundated the Israelite host with no small amount of confusion, especially since the collective assumption was that Moses was conducting them to the Promised Land. That’s where they were supposed to go, right? That’s what God had promised. Well, yes and no. Yes, according to the Abrahamic promises, but no, according to God’s recent set of instructions to Moses.

Deep in the wilderness of Horeb, a.k.a. Sinai (Exod. 3:1), the former “Prince of Egypt” was greeted by a bush that burned but never burned up. And from within that fiery shrub boomed a voice, the voice of Yahweh, who, among other things, specified that God’s beloved people, the people of promise, would be brought to worship him there, in that precise location. “I will be with you,” the Lord told Moses, “and this shall be the sign for you, that I have sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain” (Exod. 3:12).

Thus, arriving at Sinai might not have been what anyone expected, but even then, God was keeping his promises to them. His word wasn’t returning void. It never has. “According to the divine word in 3:12,” J. Alec Motyer comments, “Sinai was no accident brought about by misunderstanding or an adaptation of the Lord’s plans to meet an unforeseen problem, nor was it a transient campsite like Elim or Rephidim. Sinai was in fact the primary destination of the journey from Egypt, the Lord’s stated target.”2

It may have felt meandering, from Israel’s point of view, but God was never lost, nor was he taking them on a detour. Rather, he was leading them right to the exact spot where he would covenant with them and make them his people, the apple of his eye (Zech. 2:8). In other words, they weren’t where they hoped to be, or even longed to be, but they were right where God wanted them to be. This is a good reminder that the oft-quoted truth that “all things work together for good, for those who are called” doesn’t also mean things working out in the way we’d anticipate (Rom. 8:28). Sometimes, the opposite happens, or at the very least, something quite different, and usually, that’s for the better.

I won’t prognosticate what that is or what that might look like for you. I’m no diviner, nor am I that presumptuous. However, what I can say is that following the Lord’s leading does lead to good ends and greener pastures, one way or another. After all, the one who shepherded his people through the wilderness has never once been thrown off course. Not even a cross could do that.

Grace and peace.

Title: The Law of Love and the People God’s Forming
Text: Exodus 20:12–17; 21:1—23:9
Originally delivered on 17 May 2026 at Stonington Baptist Church, Paxinos, PA
For more content like this, visit www.graceupongrace.net

From frogs to gnats to flies to locusts, each of the cataclysmic plagues that befall the Egyptian landscape serves to expose the frailty of the Egyptian pantheon. None of their gods and goddesses could hold a candle to Yahweh,1 a point which he makes abundantly clear through the onslaught of signs and wonders (Exod. 12:29; Num. 33:4; cf. 1 Sam. 4:8). “In a very real sense,” Michael P. V. Barrett notes, “the plague assaults against Pharaoh exposed the nothingness of the entire pantheon. Yahweh’s humbling Pharaoh put the Egyptian gods in their place.”2 God’s “great acts of judgment” were meant for both Egypt and Israel to finally recognize the devastation that those other gods bring. J. Alec Motyer puts it this way:

We are intended to see the nine acts as quite the opposite of chance or any haphazard occurrence. They were designed and planned as a whole with the aim not only of edging Pharaoh to the point of releasing the people, but also presenting proof to Pharaoh and Israel that the Lord is God (Exod. 7:17; 8:10, 22; 9:16; 10:2).3

At the same time, though, there’s a poignant message within these plagues for Pharaoh himself. “They were designed and planned,” Motyer continues, “as a whole with the aim not only of edging Pharaoh to the point of releasing the people, but also presenting proof to Pharaoh and Israel that the Lord is God.”4 In fact, plagues four through nine exhibit a tragic decline in Pharaoh’s heart and life, one that we can’t afford to miss.

1. When God Confronts the Exalted Self

When God calls Moses to warn Pharaoh about the impending plague of flies, he’s also directly addressing Pharaoh himself, motioning him to admit that there’s no higher authority in all the earth other than Yahweh (Exod. 8:20–23). “Pharaoh’s power was great,” Barrett continues, “but God’s was infinitely greater.”5 This becomes even more evident when Moses is sent to announce the seventh plague:

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Rise up early in the morning and present yourself before Pharaoh and say to him, ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of the Hebrews, “Let my people go, that they may serve me. For this time I will send all my plagues on you yourself, and on your servants and your people, so that you may know that there is none like me in all the earth. For by now I could have put out my hand and struck you and your people with pestilence, and you would have been cut off from the earth. But for this purpose I have raised you up, to show you my power, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth. You are still exalting yourself against my people and will not let them go. Behold, about this time tomorrow I will cause very heavy hail to fall, such as never has been in Egypt from the day it was founded until now.”’” (Exod. 9:13–18)

If it wasn’t clear before, the plagues leave little doubt that Pharaoh’s prideful heart is in the Lord’s crosshairs (Exod. 9:17). Even so, this narrative is no mere historical one-off, nor is it a story that we can safely observe at a distance. These scenes, like every other syllable in God’s Word, are “living and active” (Heb. 4:12), which means they’re meant to expose the hardness of our hearts as well. Indeed, the record of the plagues that befell Egypt summons us to witness the danger of resisting the Lord, to behold the wonder of his mercy, and to receive his remedy that transforms even the hardest of hearts.

2. The Enigma of a Hardened Heart

The first allusion to Pharaoh’s “hard heart” occurs in Exodus 4:21, where God warns Moses of the resistance he can expect to hear from the autocrat of Egypt. From Chapter 7 through Chapter 10, though, there are over a dozen references to the hardness of his heart (Exod. 7:3–4, 13–14, 22; 8:15, 19, 32; 9:7, 12, 35; 10:1, 20, 27), with the perennial question being, Was this something done to him or something he did to himself? Did God harden Pharaoh’s heart or did he harden his own heart? Well, the unhelpful, albeit true, answer is yes to both. Scripture attributes the Pharaoh’s steely, stubborn demeanor both to his bloated ego and self-importance and to the finger of God on his life. This, of course, has embroiled theologians in considerable debates about free will, predestination, and where human responsibility fits into all of that. And while I don’t presume to have a robust solution for that conundrum, neither do we have to explain away or avoid the tension this naturally creates.

The fact of the matter is, Pharaoh hardened his own heart through his own conscious decision-making (Exod. 8:15, 32), but it was also hardened by a work of the Lord on him and among him (Exod. 9:12; 10:1, 20). Instead of getting lost and mired in the metaphysics and mystery of it all, I think it’s helpful to understand this as Pharaoh choosing pride, and God allowing his pride to run its full course. “In hardening his heart,” says Barrett, “God simply let Pharaoh be Pharaoh.”6 It’s reminiscent of what the apostle Paul says in his letter to the Romans, where he suggests that “God gave mankind up” to its own lusts (Rom. 1:24). Since the hearts of humankind were given over to impurity and everything that’s contrary to God’s nature, he gave them over to what they had already said in their hearts and by their actions they wanted (Rom. 1:28). To be sure, heaven’s most piercing judgment is when we’re released to chase after all our “dishonorable passions,” uninhibited.

In many ways, this is what transpires with Pharaoh. His posture is one of blatant defiance. After all, he’s the pagan king of a pagan nation, whose closest advisors are occultist counselors. This is just to say that Pharaoh isn’t a neutral party, nor is his story one of sudden rebellion. Rather, it’s one of accumulated resistance and compounded refusal to listen to God and the messengers who brought God’s words to him. Despite his affinity for idols, hostility for divine authority, and enmity with the Lord, Pharaoh tragically and dreadfully declines opportunity after opportunity to open his eyes to the truth. Despite “multiple offers to comply with God’s demands,” Barrett continues, “Pharaoh refused, and each refusal hardened his heart a bit more. His heart remained insensitive because he did what he wanted to do, and God did not stop him from doing it.”7

3. Selective Repentance and the Anatomy of Decline

Accordingly, every time we come across Pharaoh’s “hard heart,” we should recognize it for the tragedy that it is, because the plagues that afflicted his nation weren’t merely judgments; they were invitations to repent. And although he appears to do just that a few times throughout this sequence, each so-called “change of heart” constitutes little more than an act of “selective repentance,” where he attempts to insert his will into the equation, plunging himself, his household, and his entire kingdom further into ruin (Exod. 8:24). For instance, after okaying Moses’s latest request for Israel’s freedom to sacrifice to their God, he insists that they do so according to his terms and stay “within the land” (Exod. 8:25). This, of course, defeats the purpose, leading Moses to refuse Pharaoh’s proposal, especially since he knows that they were to do only as the Lord told them to do (Exod. 8:27). But after some more himming-and-hawing, and empty promises, the flies are removed, as is Pharaoh’s compliance. “Pharaoh hardened his heart this time also, and did not let the people go” (Exod. 8:32).

A similar sequence occurs during the seventh plague, in which an unprecedented hail storm rains down on the land (Exod. 9:23–25), which seems to bring Pharaoh to his knees (Exod. 9:27–28). Moses doesn’t buy it, calling out the king for his supposed contrition, only to be proven right yet again, as Pharaoh’s remorse fades along with the thunderhead following Moses’s prayer. All he was after was relief from the torrential downpour of hail, and when he got that, he chose to sin (Exod. 9:34). And would you believe this same cycle happens once again? After the eighth plague blankets the Egyptian countryside with “such a dense swarm of locusts as had never been before, nor ever will be again” (Exod. 10:14), Pharaoh anxiously asks Moses to ask his God for forgiveness, only to yet again default on his word:

Then Pharaoh hastily called Moses and Aaron and said, “I have sinned against the Lord your God, and against you. Now therefore, forgive my sin, please, only this once, and plead with the Lord your God only to remove this death from me.” So he went out from Pharaoh and pleaded with the Lord. And the Lord turned the wind into a very strong west wind, which lifted the locusts and drove them into the Red Sea. Not a single locust was left in all the country of Egypt. But the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he did not let the people of Israel go. (Exod. 10:16–20)

This sequence is both tiresome and tragic, offering us a searing look at the anatomy of a hardened heart. Each “no” gets easier and easier to say. Each declaration of resistance adds yet another calloused layer of opposition to the heart, until, eventually, divine opportunities to repent go largely ignored, and all you’re after is relief from whatever troubling circumstance you find yourself in. The point is that contrition born out of convenience won’t last. True repentance comes from conviction and confession, and the recognition that what you need isn’t a change of circumstances; it’s a change of heart.

4. Mercy in the Midst of Judgment

What’s so compelling about the plagues is that not only do they show how hard Pharaoh’s heart was, but they also show how merciful God’s heart is. Even though this might not be apparent, at first, this whole ordeal could’ve been over after only one plague. Pharaoh’s initial resistance to God and his word could have, and probably should have, resulted in him being snuffed out. Indeed, this is precisely what the Lord says in the build-up to the seventh plague. “For by now,” God divulges, “I could have put out my hand and struck you and your people with pestilence, and you would have been cut off from the earth. But for this purpose I have raised you up, to show you my power, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth” (Exod. 9:15–16). The fact that God “could have” wiped Pharaoh’s name from the face of the earth, but didn’t, is irrefutable proof of his mercy and patience.

After all, what is mercy? It’s not getting what you rightly deserve, which means Pharaoh has been swimming in mercy for ten chapters at this point. His constant backpedaling, dishonesty, empty promises, and shallow remorse should’ve earned him the verdict of being “cut off,” and yet, God stays his hand. It’s mercy all the way through and all the way down, which reshapes our entire approach to this narrative. This isn’t the Lord losing his temper with Egypt ten times over; it’s the Lord revealing both the depths of human hubris and the infinitely deeper depths of his mercy. Every encounter with God’s messengers was yet another occasion for Pharaoh to humble himself before God alone. All those audiences with Moses and Aaron, all the warnings, all the plagues, and even all the pauses between the plagues are tokens of Yahweh’s merciful restraint.

Consequently, the plagues are effectively a divine display of just how long-suffering God is, which ought to leave us speechless. He’s demonstrating to Pharaoh, Israel, and us what lies in his heart of hearts. As the prophet Micah tells us, the Lord doesn’t “retain his anger forever, because he delights in steadfast love” (Micah 7:18). “I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Lord God,” through the prophet Ezekiel, “so turn, and live” (Ezek. 18:32). He is “patient toward you,” the apostle Peter echoes, “not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Pet. 3:9). Mercy isn’t lenience, though, and the fact that God is “rich in mercy” (Eph. 2:4) doesn’t mean that he overlooks sin. Humanity’s sins are dealt with in the person of Jesus on the cross, which means that, in the abundance of his kindness toward us, he gives us space to repent. Mercy, in other words, is the prolonged cessation of judgment to bring about repentance (Rom. 2:4).

And you’d think that Pharaoh would learn his lesson after one plague, let alone ten! This is, essentially, God’s question to him near the onset of plague number eight. “How long are you gonna keep this up?” the Lord inquires (Exod. 10:3). There even comes a point where Pharaoh’s own servants wonder when their king was going to admit defeat and cut his losses (Exod. 10:7). But every time it appeared Pharaoh was about to fall to his knees, and into mercy, he let those moments slip through his fingers (Exod. 10:8–11), deepening his tragic descent into pride. With all of Egypt at a standstill after being covered in a darkness so thick you could feel it (Exod. 10:21–23), and after yet another round of empty promises, Pharaoh arrives at his point of no return. “Get away from me,” he bellows at Moses, “take care never to see my face again, for on the day you see my face you shall die” (Exod. 10:28). This climactic act of resistance sees him sever all ties from the only one who could speak life into his darkness. Shutting Moses out meant shutting God and his mercy out.

5. The Only Cure for Hearts of Stone

If Pharaoh’s story shows us the tragedy of a hard heart and the mercy that meets it, it also leaves us longing for a remedy. After all, Pharaoh isn’t the only one with a heart made of granite. So, what hope is there for hard hearts like Pharaoh’s and ours? What’s the cure? There’s only one remedy for hearts of stone: Someone who can transform them. That Someone, of course, is the Christ of God, who offers something immensely better than a second chance. He gives us a new heart. “It is only as God intervenes and replaces the hard and stony heart with a new heart of flesh,” Barrett concludes, “that deliverance from self and sin is possible.”8 The gospel of God, in other words, is the announcement of divine heart surgery:

Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them. And the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Lord God, when through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes. I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. (Ezek. 36:22–26)

What Pharaoh refused to do, and what we often fail to do, Christ does for us. Where we harden ourselves, Jesus humbled himself. Where we follow Pharaoh’s example and say, “Who is the Lord that I should obey him?” Jesus says, “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me” (John 6:38). Through his obedience, even unto death, every sinner is invited to be made new and receive a new heart. The good news is that the Heavenly Father remedies hard hearts, not by striking us down, but by sending his only Son to be struck down in our place, taking on himself the wrath we deserved and giving us mercy in return. Mercy in the form of flesh. Mercy that he never tires of giving.

In this episode, I’m joined once again by Obbie Tyler Todd to talk about life, pastoral ministry, and the challenges of preaching in post-Christian contexts. We also spent some time discussing the church’s role during times of cultural upheaval, the myth of America as a “Christian nation,” and why the church’s mission has never changed, no matter what the present crisis looks like.

Obbie is the pastor of teaching at Cross Community Church in Beaufort, South Carolina, where he lives with his wife, Kelly, and their two children, Roman and Ruby. He holds a Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and serves as an Adjunct Professor of Theology at Luther Rice College & Seminary. He’s the author of several books, and his writing has been featured in The Gospel Coalition, Christianity Today, Themelios, Desiring God, WORLD, and The Baptist Courier, among others. You can also follow him on Facebook and Instagram.

Resources:
The Beechers: America’s Most Influential Family, Obbie Tyler Todd
The Moral Governmental Theory of Atonement: Re-envisioning Penal Substitution, Obbie Tyler Todd
A Baptist at the Crossroads: The Atonement in the Writings of Richard Furman (1755-1825), Obbie Tyler Todd
“When were the ‘golden years’ in America?,” Obbie Tyler Todd
Finding God in the Darkness: Hopeful Reflections from the Pits of Depression, Despair, and Disappointment, Bradley Gray

Sponsor:
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Credits:
Intro music: It Just Makes Me Happy
Composer: DJ Quads, soundcloud.com/aka-dj-quads
License: Creative Commons (BY-NC 3.0), creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
Music powered by BreakingCopyright: breakingcopyright.com

Title: Whosoever Will
Text: Acts 10:1—11:18
Originally delivered on 10 May 2026 at Stonington Baptist Church, Paxinos, PA
For more content like this, visit www.graceupongrace.net

Father Damien, born Joseph de Veuster, was a Catholic priest from Belgium who ended up taking a call to serve on the island of Molokai, Hawaii, in the late 1800s. Now, serving the Lord on the pearly sands of Hawaii as the crystal clear Pacific laps up the coastline doesn’t often garner the same inspirational sympathy as, say, any other locale in the world. But to assume this was a siesta by the sea for Father Damien would be wrong. After all, the island and tribe to which he had been called was a secluded community for those who had contracted Hansen’s disease, a.k.a. leprosy. As you might imagine, Father Damien wasn’t fighting off other potential suitors to serve the Lord in this post. Once you arrived, you never really left.

Thus, instead of spending time at some Sandals® seaside resort, this call meant ministering in a permanent quarantine zone — a place of the living dead. But Father Damien went anyway, earning a reputation as a true servant of Christ as he provided all manner of spiritual, physical, and emotional care for those who were suffering and dying all around him. As was his usual habit, he would open Sunday morning mass with the words, “My dear lepers,” as he summoned them to hear the words that contained eternal life and healing. But one Sunday, everything changed. “My fellow lepers,” his homily began, leaving the room stone cold quiet. As anyone could’ve predicted, Father Damien had contracted leprosy himself, which meant he was no longer ministering to them; he was ministering among them as one of them. The disease took his life in 1889, and he has since been canonized as a saint.

As moving as this story is, it is equally as surprising. After all, those who are clean aren’t often found fully stepping into the place of the unclean. They keep a healthy distance. Doctors, nurses, and surgeons adhere to a strict regimen to ensure they don’t contract whatever virus or affliction they are attempting to rectify. But Father Damien’s compassion seemed to compel him to go straight to where the sick were living out their last days. It’s as true a picture of grace as there ever was one. And yet, it’s eclipsed by an even truer portrait that has Christ at the very center of it.

1. The Scandal Down at the River

The scene of Jesus’s baptism has captivated and, in some senses, confounded the church for ages. It’s a stunning image — the muse of too many painters to count — as Jesus of Nazareth marches to the famed Jordan River to be baptized by his cousin, John the Baptizer. But what’s so perplexing is the question of why: Why was Jesus there? Why did he insist on being baptized that day? The “what was Jesus doing there” question is one that has spawned all kinds of solutions, for better or worse. But we are right to make this inquiry, especially since it was John’s first reaction, too. “Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John,” Matthew tells us, “to be baptized by him.” But John wasn’t really on board with this whole charade, and “would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’” (Matt. 3:13–14).

Even before the actual baptism, there’s something poignant going on within this rather awkward exchange in the middle of the Jordan. The Teacher of Nazareth has made his way to the place where the Baptizer was famous for practicing a baptism of “water for repentance” (Matt. 3:11). But when he saw Jesus that afternoon, something wasn’t quite right. Something felt off, backwards even. So, he refuses to go along with it. He “prevented him.” And at first glance, John’s resistance might seem like an admirable, reverent, or even pious response. He seems to be “saving” Jesus from the embarrassment of consorting with the wrong sort of folk. If this were a scenario pitched by a pulpit committee to a potential elder candidate, this would be the most impressive response one could offer. It’s deferential without being self-depricating; it’s earnest without being presumptuous. It’s a fitting protest from the one who understood that the Lord must increase and he must decrease (John 3:30).

The Baptizer knew his place, or at least he thought he did. “You don’t need me,” we might reckon his words, “I need you.” This is true, of course. But Matthew clues us into something subtle, albeit serious, when he records that “John would have prevented him” (Matt. 3:14). What’s going on here?

2. When Reverence Becomes Resistance

John’s ministry was one of preparation. He was the voice in the wilderness who was sent to “prepare the way of the Lord” (Isa. 40:3; Matt. 3:3). He was making waves out in the Judean wilderness by preaching and baptizing anyone who’d come to him seeking forgiveness for their sins. Gentile and Jew alike were welcome to join in this visible sermon of cleansing and forgiveness. And while John never claimed he could forgive sins, he proclaimed and pointed to the one who could, and would (Mark 1:4; Luke 3:3). Repenting, confessing, and gesturing toward the King’s coming kingdom were all hallmarks of his platform, which led streams of folks to flock to him to partake of the baptism the Baptizer was offering.

Each one was a sermon in and of itself, in which the baptizee openly declared, “I am not okay; I am desperate for the cleansing of the Coming One.” John was leading a bona fide revival out in the boonies, the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the days of Ezra. And all was well, until Jesus stepped in line.

Why was Jesus there? Jesus didn’t belong in that line. He didn’t have any sins to confess. He had nothing for which to repent, nor was he desperate for the sacramental cleansing found in the waters of the Jordan. “What are you doing here?” John protests. “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” Jesus should’ve been the one submerging him with Jordan’s watery grace, not the other way around. It was all so wrong; all so backwards, to the point where he couldn’t bring himself to do it at first, opting to act as a deterrent instead of a willing participant. “John would have prevented him.” That is, “John tried to stop him” or “John tried to make him change his mind” or “John tried to dissuade him,” as other translations of Scripture render it. However you put it, John is putting himself in the way. He’s acting as an obstacle.

In a manner of speaking, though, the Baptizer’s words sound not only “not” irreverent, but they also have a theologically logical ring to them. You can almost hear preachers urging their parishioners to emulate John’s honesty and humility. “Go and do likewise,” we might hear them say, but they’d be wrong. Dead wrong. Much like Gideon’s fleece, John’s protest isn’t one to be mimicked by Christ’s sisters and brothers. You see, John’s seeming humility is, in fact, an act of hostility.

3. Why Jesus Entered the Water

What John hadn’t quite pieced together yet was that the Rabbi from Nazareth, who is the very Christ of God, hadn’t assumed human flesh to display how morally superior he was or show everyone the way to a virtuous life. Rather, he had come to be humanity’s substitute.

I was once asked to give a one-word summation of the gospel while on a Zoom call with a dozen or so other pastors. As soon as the question was posed, and even as I listened to a chorus of other responses — some repeated, some not — I immediately knew what my answer would be: substitution. The news that makes the good news so stinking good is that it announces that none other than God Incarnate has stood and died and risen from the dead for me, in my place. He “gave himself for [my] sins to deliver [me],” to parrot Paul’s words (Gal. 1:4).

It’s this moment in the Jordan that kicks off what we know from hymns and theological textbooks as “the great exchange,” the self-giving of God, “His Robes for Mine,” and all that. Of course, Jesus’s baptism is the fulfillment of a cavalcade of other things all at the same time. He’s being consecrated as Israel’s true and better High Priest (Lev. 8:6–12). He’s assuming his role as the Messiah, as was long foretold by the prophets (Isa. 52:15; 53:11; Ezek. 36:25–27; Zech. 13:1). And he’s corroborating the ministry of the Baptizer as the forerunner (Mal. 3:1; 4:5–6). But chief among the things Jesus was doing that afternoon was demonstrating his willingness to identify with sinners as he stood in solidarity with those who needed the cleansing he came to deliver.

In other words, Jesus didn’t enter the water because he was sinful; he entered the water because John was sinful, as was everyone else, as are we all. He found his place in line with sinners, scoundrels, and thieves, not as their example, but as their substitute. “He, the Sinless One, the very Son of God,” R. C. H. Lenski comments, “chooses to put himself alongside of all the sinful ones for whom John’s sacrament was ordained.”1 If John’s baptism was symbolic or sacramental, Jesus’s is its substance and fulfillment (Matt. 3:15–17). “This was the symbolic anticipation of his full and profound baptism on the cross,” Michael Green says, “which lay in the future, when he would taste for everyone the eschatological wrath of God and would proffer to anyone the unspeakable mercy of God.”2

4. The Direction of Grace

Like Father Damien choosing to embrace a dead-end ministry among lepers, Jesus willingly chose to come to where sinners are to save them from their sins. And there he is, with clothes and hair sopping wet, the one who is for you, and with you, your Redeemer. And John, for all his religious zealotry, almost got in the way of that. “John would’ve prevented him.” He nearly hindered him from accomplishing the very thing for which he was sent. And lest you think this is a “John the Baptist problem,” there’s another disciple who seems to have been bitten by the same humblebrag impulse to prevent Jesus from doing something that’s inherently Jesus-like.

In the Gospel of John (different John, by the way), we are treated to one of the most powerful moments in all of Scripture where, one by one, the Incarnate God, who was hours away from being crucified for the sins of the world, wraps a towel around his waist and begins to wash his disciples’ feet. While most were too stunned to say anything at all, leave it to Peter the Impetuous to speak up and point out how backwards it all was. “Lord, do you wash my feet?” (John 13:6). “Hey, Teach, you shouldn’t be washing my feet, let alone anyone else’s. I should be washing yours!” “You shall never wash my feet,” he even goes on to say (John 13:8). If this moment of pious resistance sounds strangely familiar, that’s because it’s an echo of the same pseudo-religious logic of the scene in the Jordan.

This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. This was wrong. But much like John’s objection, Peter’s protest is shrewdly foiled by what Jesus says next: “If I do not wash you, you have no share with me” (John 13:8). Put another way: Apart from my substitutionary service for you, apart from me taking your place, you can’t and won’t get by. This, of course, flies in the face of all our religious instincts.

We so often reverse the direction of grace so that we are the ones with something to offer God through our service for him or devotion to him, as if there is anything we can produce or perform that could impress him or earn the favor he’s so eager to give away for free. If we are honest with ourselves, we don’t want mercy. We want something to earn. We want something we can have a hand in. We want something we can contribute to, which leads us to satisfy ourselves with messages that are loosely Christian but devoid of power.

• “Here’s what you need to do.”

• “Here’s the way to a better life right now.”

• “Just implement these six tips or put these seven practices to work.”

• “Here’s the blueprint for soaring spiritual success and getting your life together.”

5. Teacher or Substitute?

When John the Baptizer objected to doing to Jesus what got him his nickname, it actually reveals something homogeneous to all humankind — namely, Jesus the Teacher is far easier to accept than Jesus the Substitute.

There’s a certain charm to the image of a Rabbi from backwoods Galilee inspiring the world to be better and kinder to one another through his teachings. So we focus on that; we reduce the ministry of Jesus to a Teacher giving us good advice and showing us a blueprint for a better life here and now. And to be sure, Jesus does teach us things. He is an exemplary example to follow. But we mustn’t stop there. “Following the example of Jesus,” Michael Horton recently wrote for Christianity Today, “is an important part of discipleship in the Gospels, but it is not the gospel.” If you only ever see Jesus as your example, you’re missing out on what makes the good news so good.

In the early twentieth century, renowned Princeton theologian and scholar J. Gresham Machen noticed something alarming. The church had become more in love with the teachings of Jesus than Jesus himself, the effect of which was making the church’s message one of “mere information.” According to Machen, this left the church at a dire crossroads. “The Church is placed before a serious choice,” he declared, “it must decide whether it will try to trust God as Jesus trusted Him, or whether it will continue to put its trust in Jesus Himself.”3 The Christ of God is not merely our paragon of piety. He is simultaneously the world’s Priest and atoning Sacrifice, who proceeds within the veil to offer up himself for the sins of the world. Here’s how Machen put it:

The Lord Jesus, then, came into this world not primarily to say something, not even to be something, but to do something; He came not merely to lead men through His example out into a “larger life,” but to give life, through His death and resurrection, to those who were dead in trespasses and sins; we are Christians not because we have faith in God like the faith in God which Jesus Himself had, but because we have faith in Him.4

6. The Gospel of God’s Humiliation

What unnerves us and scandalizes us to no end is the notion that Jesus would put himself in our place as the scourge of God, laden with our shame, and bruised and battered for all our sins. That just won’t do. We cannot stand for that. John and Peter couldn’t either, apparently. The former wanted Jesus to stay out of the water, instead of being subsumed by it, and the latter was keen on Jesus keeping his place at the dinner table, instead of stooping to the floor with a towel. Either way, it’s the same satanic impulse seeping through that would rather see Jesus exalted sans humiliation, without all the ensuing pain, suffering, and agony of sacrificial death. But the word of the gospel tells us that redemption comes precisely through that humiliation, especially the humiliation of “death on a cross” (Phil. 2:8).

From first to last, Jesus’s ministry was marked by movements downward. Whether it was down to Earth or down the social status ladder, the Word who took on flesh was always moving toward the broken and the marginalized. He constantly embraced and fraternized with “the last, the least, the lost, the little, and the dead,” that is, those who had nothing to offer in return. It was in their place he stood. His whole life was a substitutionary sacrament, from the cradle to the cross to the empty tomb. And this is what his foremost prophet almost hindered before he even got started. And the point is that we are guilty of making the same attempt.

We are reticent to make too much of God’s word of vicarious grace and all its brilliant freeness, mostly because to do so would be to forfeit what little control we think we have in this life. Pastors are concerned with caring for the souls of those to whom they are called to serve, and rightly so. They are burdened to see their parishioners’ lives blossom, and their faith flourish, which, more often than not, sees them wanting to ensure they are on some sort of upward trajectory. But the gospel of substitution unmoors us from the illusion that there’s such a thing as an ever-ascending religious ladder, the height of which contains “the holiness without which no one will see the Lord” (Heb. 12:14) by giving the very righteousness of God to those who don’t deserve it, along with the Spirit of God who produces his fruits of holiness in us.

To those who can’t get their lives cleaned up or put together, to those who bring nothing but sin in their hands, God in Christ gives everything, even his very self. It all seems so backwards. But amid all the backwardness of this merciful scene of Jesus’s baptism, we are motioned to look upon the cross, where the whole world was turned upside down. What John tried and failed to prevent, even if he meant well by it, was eventually consummated by the one who was crucified for us. Whether it’s the Jordan, where Jesus steps into the water meant for sinners, or the cross, where Jesus steps into the death meant for sinners, the point is that the direction is always the same. What seems backwards to us is just the downward move of grace, to where we are, where Jesus stands where we should.

I am currently in the thick of a lengthy sermon series on the Book of Exodus, with the sermon from this past Sunday serving as part twenty-three of an unknown number of sermons covering the entire narrative. To be honest, this series feels more daunting than when I preached exegetically through both 1 and 2 Kings. Despite the density of historical data in those two books, the theological scope of Exodus is rivaled only by Genesis and Isaiah, as far as the Old Testament (OT) is concerned.

My approach so far has been to see the Exodus narrative as more of an ecclesiological window. As God rescues and fashions a people for himself out of a nation of former slaves, so, too, does God rescue and fashion a church for himself out of sinners. This lens is indebted to Stephen’s sermon in Acts 7, where he refers to the Israelite multitude in the wilderness as the “church” or ekklēsia “in the wilderness” (Acts 7:38). The parallels are even more robust than you can imagine, with Romans 6 serving as a sturdy New Testament (NT) counterpart.

If you haven’t listened to it yet, Sunday’s sermon examined the third and fourth of the Ten Commandments (Exod. 20:7–11). I spent the bulk of my preparation ruminating on the connective tissues between not taking the Lord’s name in vain and keeping the Sabbath holy, especially from a New Covenant perspective. What do both of these directives mean for the church? Well, in short, they mean a heck of a lot more than not cursing or not doing any kind of work on Sundays. A Christological undulation pulses through both.

One of the threads I spent a great deal of time studying was the correspondence of the OT Sabbath with the NT Lord’s Day. A very common refrain is the understanding that the Sunday gathering of the church has replaced the Sabbath, with some even referring to it as the “Christian Sabbath.”1 Despite the prevalence of this theory, there really is no biblical basis for it. In fact, to conflate the two is to misunderstand both. Insofar as the church assembles out of adherence to a Sabbath-like law, the point has been missed. The gospel has been diminished.

Twentieth-century Lutheran theologian R. C. H. Lenski is tremendously helpful here:

Since the days of the apostles, our day of worship is Sunday and no longer Saturday. This does not abolish the type which, like all other types, belongs to the Old Testament. The New Testament adds no types. It also continues none, for the antitypes begin in the New Testament. Our Sunday, the day of Christ’s resurrection and of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, is thus by no means the Jewish Sabbath which has been shifted to the first day of the week. It is far more, for by the power of Christ’s resurrection and by his Spirit (Rom. 8:11) our mortal bodies shall be raised up to enter the blessed rest of the heavenly Sabbath, which the resting of God on that first seventh day only typified.2

Following God doesn’t mean flattening Sundays and the Sabbath into some sort of hybrid day of the Lord. Rather, faith in the gospel of Christ means clinging to the one who fulfills the Sabbath. Even that day was a shadow of which Jesus is the substance (Col. 2:16–17). In other words, when the Body of Christ assembles on Sundays, it does so not out of a sense of duty, but because of the incandescent news that Christ is risen. This is the announcement that, like an electric current, pulsates through every sinner-saint, drawing them to their Redeemer.

Grace and peace.

Title: The Sabbath and the Savior
Text: Exodus 20:7–11
Originally delivered on 3 May 2026 at Stonington Baptist Church, Paxinos, PA
For more content like this, visit www.graceupongrace.net

A point that must be made at the outset of examining the narrative of the plagues is that, for the most part, they were divine lessons meant both for Egypt and Israel. Although the Egyptians, in general, and Pharaoh, in particular, found themselves in the crosshairs of God’s “great acts of judgment,” the Israelites weren’t left out. They were beckoned to come to the same conclusion — namely, that there is no other God but Yahweh, who alone rules and reigns supreme. “In the plagues,” Arthur W. Pink notes, “the presence and power of Jehovah were demonstrated, so that He stood discovered to His people as the Living God.”1 That this lesson was necessary even among God’s people is evident from what the prophet Ezekiel tells us, as the Israelites, in their captivity, began embracing the detestable “idols of Egypt” as their own (Ezek. 20:7–8). Even so, God sovereignly decides to deliver them, of his own accord, for his own name’s sake (Ezek. 20:9–10, 44). Rather than dealing with them according to what they deserved, the Exodus was evidence that he was dealing with them in pure grace.

1. The Lesson Israel Missed

This is especially pertinent since, as the centuries wore on, Israel failed to learn the lesson of the plagues. What God did for them seemed to go right over their heads (Ps. 78:41–51; 105:27–36). Despite having a front row seat to God’s signs and marvels, it didn’t prevent them from rebelling, from turning away from their Deliverer, or from looking to a myriad other avenues for what only Yahweh could give them. They grew impatient and restless, conceding to the devil’s lie that what they need the most can be found apart from God himself. And before we look down our noses at the people of God of ancient writ, we are all too often guilty of the same thing. We’re seduced by the same concocted theories that tell us God won’t come through or that he doesn’t have our best interests in mind, leading us to all too quickly embrace the propaganda of the world that ushers us to believe that someone or something else can give us all the things that we so desperately crave.

When God doesn’t appear to be coming through for us, we’re prone to look at other possible sources for what we need. Much like Israel in Egypt, we start grabbing after idols, turning to whatever will offer us the most instantaneous relief. We look to our jobs to make us feel significant, to cheap comforts to make us feel safe, and to illusions of control to make us feel secure. We lean on our relationships, bank accounts, and phone screens for all the things that only God can offer. And the problem with all those other sources of so-called success, meaning, and purpose is that they’re hollow, sort of like the strainer in your kitchen cupboard (Jer. 2:13). In other words, the lessons of the plagues are just as trenchant now as they were then.

2. When Nile Met Its Maker

Even after witnessing the staff of Aaron turn into a snake and engulf the staffs of his magicians, Pharaoh remained unmoved (Exod. 7:13). His refusal to concede power and his outright dismissal of Yahweh’s authority led to the first of the ten plagues descending upon his domain (Exod. 7:14–24). While some commentators are apt to mention that the plagues increase in intensity as they go from one to ten,2 all that does is sell the first one short. After all, the Nile being turned to blood was nothing short of an ecological and theological disaster. Water, of course, is the most basic necessity to sustain life, but the Nile River basin held even greater significance to Egyptian life than we might ever fathom. It was the very heart of everything they did and dreamed of doing, providing water for drinking, irrigation, transportation, and trade, while also remaining deeply embedded in their religious beliefs.

Just as their practical needs were sustained by the Nile, so, too, were their spiritual needs. The Egyptians revered the Nile River not just as a source of life but as the source of all life. In fact, two of the most important deities in the Egyptian pantheon — Osiris, god of the afterlife and resurrection, and Hapy, god of new life and abundance3 — are closely associated with the Nile and its annual flooding. As they made their way to the banks of the Nile, they saw both of these gods as sources of “living water,” sustaining everything their eyes could see and their hearts could long for. There’s even a myth about Osiris, who is said to have his bloodstream run along the Nile. Thus, the first plague sees God parodying this belief by turning their beloved river into an actual stream of blood. In so doing, he “struck at the heart of Egypt’s life,” J. Alec Motyer comments, “as the whole country and its people were dependent on and sustained by the river they considered to be divine, showing that there is a God greater even than the Nile, and it is his decision whether life on earth is sustainable or not.”4 The river of life was now a river of horrors, offering them only putrefaction and death (Exod. 7:21).

3. Behold, Your Creator and Sustainer

Accordingly, there is only one source of life and sustenance, and it comes from “the God of the Hebrews,” the great I Am. He is both Creator and Sustainer (Ps. 36:7–9). “In his hand is the life of every living thing,” Job confesses, “and the breath of all mankind” (Job 12:10). “He himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything,” the apostle Paul would concur centuries later. “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:25, 28). Those things to which we often resort to give us “life” can only offer death. Indeed, the more we frequent those resources for our meaning, worth, and approval, only reveal how debilitating they are. Everything from our careers to our relationships to our finances to technology eventually cracks under the pressure of being our “source of life,” precisely because they were never meant to fill that void. Seventeenth-century French physicist and mathematician Blaise Pascal articulates this well:

There was once in man a true happiness, of which there now remains to him but the mark and the empty trace, which he vainly tries to fill from all that surrounds him, seeking from things absent the succour he finds not in things present; and these are all inadequate, because this infinite void [or soul] can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God himself.5

The only infinite, immutable object that can sustain us is none other than the God who created us, the one who came to where we are to give us his life. Only the Creator of the soul can comfort and fill the soul to the brim. “I came,” Jesus later reveals, “that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). The gospel is the announcement that our God literally bleeds out so that we might live. This is the well that never runs dry. This is the river of Living Water that fills us up and quenches our thirst (John 4:13–14). Contrary to the world’s offering of phony ways to find hope, meaning, and purpose, Christ gives us those things by giving us himself.

4. The Frog Goddess and Pharaoh’s Embarrassing Plea

A week goes by before there is any relief from the curse of the bloody Nile (Exod. 7:25). Even still, Pharaoh stayed mostly unaffected by the whole ordeal (Exod. 7:22–23), which results in a second plague falling upon Egypt (Exod. 8:1–7). As you might expect, the swarms of frogs weren’t random. Frogs were sacred creatures in ancient Egypt, so much so that those who killed them, even accidentally, were liable to be punished by death. Heqet, the goddess of fertility and rebirth, was believed to be an amphibious-headed woman, revered as an emblem of vitality, especially in childbirth. According to Egyptian legend, it was Heqet who was there at the creation of the world, just as she is there at the dawn of all living things. Therefore, similar to the Nile being turned into a river of blood, God takes this sacred symbol of life and satisfaction and turns it into a nightmare.

Hordes upon hordes of frogs leap out of the Nile riverbed and into their homes and bedrooms (Exod. 8:3–4). There was no escaping them. There were frogs when they went to bed, when they woke up, when they ate breakfast, when they made lunch, when they brushed their teeth, when they went to the bathroom, or when they sat on the sofa. They were everywhere! More than just a passing nuisance or a slight inconvenience, their daily lives were being thoroughly disrupted. After Pharaoh’s magicians weren’t able to make the frogs go away (only conjuring more, Exod. 8:7), Egypt’s king was left with one embarrassing option — namely to ask Moses to “plead with the Lord” for mercy on his behalf (Exod. 8:8).

Pharaoh knew the frogs had to go, making for what must’ve been a quite awkward audience with Moses. As they exchange words, Moses ironically inquires when the high and mighty Pharaoh would like the frogs to go away, a not-so-subtle jab at his supposed supremacy (Exod. 8:9–11). If one were truly desperate, a proper response would be to demand relief from the frogs right that very instant. However, by delaying relief, Pharaoh is still trying his best to insert himself into the equation. He still thinks he can control the situation; he’s still trying to have it his way by putting Yahweh on his timetable. The Lord, mercifully, takes him at his own game, answering Moses’s prayers and offering a respite from the frogs (Exod. 8:12–14). And yet, if you were left wondering if the king of Egypt had finally learned his lesson, the next verse makes it blatantly obvious that he hadn’t: “But when Pharaoh saw that there was a respite, he hardened his heart and would not listen to them, as the Lord had said” (Exod. 8:15).

5. Drowning in the God of More

Although we don’t worship frogs today, the spirit of Heqet is very much alive. We bow before other gods that seem to promise us success and satisfaction, convincing ourselves that convenience is our chief good and that life is at its best when we are pleased, affirmed, and comfortable. We worship the “god of more”: more money, more recognition, more friends, more things, more results, etc. — with the obvious problem being that the “god of more” always leaves you wanting. There’s never enough. There’s no end in sight to the craving for more; it goes on and on until we’re overrun. We get overwhelmed by our idols because we keep trying to find something eternally satisfying among a puddle of temporary trinkets. Thus, this plague is akin to God saying, “How’s that working out for you?”

This is God’s mercy, though. He lets us see the futility and stench of all those other sources of satisfaction so that we will eventually realize that nothing will ever be enough until he is. “You have made us for Yourself,” the venerable St. Augustine once said, “and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in Thee.” There’s only one source of enough-ness, of true and abiding satisfaction, and it’s found in the God who gives us his enough-ness through the gift of his Son. The Lord’s words to the woman at the well come to mind, since it’s only with him that we will “never be thirsty again” (John 4:14). This is the gospel’s abiding invitation to you, me, and everyone: “Come to me, and give you rest. I’ll be your enough.”

6. God’s Fingers Expose Frauds

When Pharaoh double-crosses Moses, another plague ensues, this time without any warning (Exod. 8:16–17). Unlike the first two, the deity associated with this plague is a little more vague, mainly because the Hebrew term for “gnats” can also be understood as “lice” or even “mosquitoes.” Nonetheless, many believe that this judgment was a direct affront to the Egyptian god Khepri, thought to possess transformational power, who was said to have the body of a man with the head of a beetle, specifically, a scarab. Scarab beetles are a type of dung beetle that roll tightly formed balls of animal dung in which the females lay their eggs. As scarab larvae emerge from spheres of excrement, Egyptians saw evidence of Khepri’s ability to harness life from the dust and the dung. Yahweh, of course, takes this myth and turns it into an agonizing reality, as the dust of the earth is turned into swarms of biting gnats and pesky insects. The material from which Khepri supposedly brought forth life was now the source of constant torment.

To make matters worse, Pharaoh’s sorcerers have finally met their match. “The magicians,” Moses tells us, “tried by their secret arts to produce gnats, but they could not. So there were gnats on man and beast. Then the magicians said to Pharaoh, ‘This is the finger of God’” (Exod. 8:18–19). Even though they can mimic staffs turning into serpents and water turning into blood, and can conjure frogs from the Nile, they can’t produce life, let alone transform it.6 Transformation is beyond their ability to replicate, forcing them to admit that they’re woefully outmatched. It’s striking that these masters of the occult finally acknowledge their limitations, leaving Pharaoh defeated and hardened.

7. The Lie of Self-Help Religion and the Love of the Savior

Similarly, we often resort to thinking that change and transformation are things that we can muster or manufacture on our own. We hear Paul’s words telling us to be “transformed by the renewing of our minds” (Rom. 12:1–2) and determine that this is a process that demands our ingenuity — that it’s simply a matter of implementing the right techniques. Transformation, then, becomes a matter just on the other side of finding the right methods or routines, which is another way of saying it is entirely up to you. You are Khepri. You are the one who can bring about the transformation and renewal you seek, and if you haven’t, that just means you haven’t found the right tactic yet. But if you believe that, you’re believing the same lie that Pharaoh believed. It’s the same lie at the heart of every self-help “gospel” that gets airtime today. The faith you want and the transformation you crave are available; you just have to work more, try harder, and do better to experience it.

However, the plague of gnats tells a very different story, as Egypt’s magicians reluctantly acknowledge what we are often too proud to admit — namely, that all of this is owed to “the finger of God.” True transformation isn’t something we can pull off. Having your heart and life conformed and transfigured into Jesus’s image isn’t a matter of our own intuition or willpower. Maybe there’s a besetting sin you’ve been trying to kick to the curb. So you establish some new routines, new habits, which are all well and good. It’s beneficial to be self-disciplined. But don’t think for a second that you are the one responsible for your transformation, especially since those routines and habits depend on your energy and effort. In other words, even your best efforts to change and transform yourself amount to little more than rearranging the dust.

The good news is that the God who formed life from the dust is the same God who breathes new life into dead hearts through the person and work of Jesus. This is what God in Christ comes to accomplish. He doesn’t offer self-improvement programs. He didn’t enter this world as a spiritual guru offering better techniques or better methods for spiritual fulfillment. Rather, he came to resurrect you. He came to die and rise again as the one who alone transforms sinners into new creations (2 Cor. 5:17). In Jesus, who is God’s power, love, and mercy enfleshed, we see the one who sustains our souls, satisfies our hearts, and transforms our lives, not by our effort, but by his grace.

In this episode, I sit down with Marc Sims to have an honest conversation about the current crises facing young men, the reality of living with depression in the Christian life, and how the gospel of Christ is the word of hope that speaks into all of that. In our darkest moments — personally, collectively, spiritually — God in Christ finds us and frees us from sin, suffering, and the grave.

Marc serves as the teaching elder of Quinault Baptist Church in Kennewick, Washington, where he lives with his wife, Hillary, and their three sons. He has published essays in outlets such as The Gospel Coalition, Mere Orthodoxy, and 9Marks, and is currently writing a book on sex, masculinity, and virtue, soon to be published by Baker Books. You can follow him on Facebook and Substack.

Resources:
“The Depressed Christian,” Marc Sims
“On Death Threats and Book Deals,” Marc Sims
“Be A Man, Not Andrew Tate,” Marc Sims
“Caring Enough to Stay: What Pastors Can Learn from the Good Shepherd,” Marc Sims
Finding God in the Darkness: Hopeful Reflections from the Pits of Depression, Despair, and Disappointment, Bradley Gray

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