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This past Sunday, I finished a thirty-five-part sermon series covering the Book of Exodus. This venture, which began in August 2025 and concluded in August 2026, almost a year later to the day, was embarked upon to see what the Old Testament and, more specifically, what the most formative book in the lives of God’s covenant people might have to say to the church of today. Far from being a book of Sunday school highlights and flannel graph favorites, Exodus is a book that reveals who we are and, more so, who God is. It gives all God’s people, both then and now, an incandescent glimpse of the One who calls them to himself to enjoy him, serve him, worship him, and become preoccupied by him.
This is why, among many other reasons that are too numerous to count, the Old Testament broadly and Exodus specifically can’t just be “unhitched” from the life of the church. (Let the reader understand.) John Cumming, a Scottish clergyman who ministered in the nineteenth century, once wrote of Exodus, “If this Book were expunged from the annals of the history of the world, we should have lost the most striking and impressive proofs of the providential, the gracious, and the merciful government of God.”1 Despite not being taken up by the same sense or even the same obligation for all the rites and ceremonies and the burning of incense and the slaughtering of lambs that appear throughout, what undergirds the pages of the narrative of God’s people being released from bondage and brought to the mountain of God is a narrative that defines us as well.
There are, perhaps, some, or more than some, that are daunted by books like Exodus, what with its history and antiquity so apparent. What’s helpful to remember, though, is that there is an interpretive framework that is able to cut through what might otherwise be forever opaque — namely, that all of this concerns the Christ of God. Jesus’s statement in Luke 24 works forwards and backwards, opening the minds of his followers, from the wilderness wanderings to Jerusalem to the small-town church along Route 66, to discern God’s Word through the prism of God’s self-disclosure, which always culminates in Jesus. That’s what he has been up to the whole time. From Genesis onward, ours is a God who delights to show his people who he is.
Reading Exodus, therefore, is another entry in that program of God to unfurl his purposes for this world and this life, all of which hold together in the person of Christ. We, of course, living in the New Testament age, are benefited even further from the fact that we have further revelation of how that revealing has taken place. “When you read Exodus,” to cite Cumming again, “read it especially with the inspired commentary of the Epistle to the Hebrews lying beside it.”2 Armed with the Word and filled with the Spirit (cf. 1 Cor. 2:6–16), Christ’s disciples are able to read the history of the formation of the people of Israel and detect ways in which Christ is doing the same in them. He is calling them to himself and shaping them into a kingdom of priests, whose beings are preoccupied with their King.
It’s apt that Cumming recommends reading Hebrews in conjunction with Exodus, precisely because the author of that New Testament epistle goes to great lengths to demonstrate the superiority of Christ over his Old Testament prototypes, chief of which is the Tabernacle. When God the Father conveys his intention to dwell in the midst of his people (Exod. 25:8), he is not only proclaiming his desire for a place for his people to worship and commune with him, but he is also foretelling what will become true when God’s Son comes in the “true tent” of his flesh to minister to sinners and sufferers through his death and resurrection (Heb. 8:1–2). All those copies and shadows fade once the substance, who is Christ, arrives on the scene (Heb. 8:5; Col. 2:17).
Cumming, though, takes this thread a step further in his devotional reading on Exodus 40, asserting the fallacy of Christian churches that are beholden to the types and customs of the Old Testament now that the antitype has come. Here’s how he puts it:
You will see from that Epistle that a Christian church after the model of the ancient tabernacle would be in the letter most scriptural, but in fact most unscriptural and antichristian; because all these things have here had their fulfilment; and when the antitype comes, the type disappears; when the sun rises, the stars retreat; when the fruit is ripe, the blossom withers and falls away. The end and the object of this institute is come, and to keep it up still is to try to expunge two thousand years or three thousand years from the world’s history, and to try to make ourselves Jews in the Christian and New Testament dispensation . . .
For instance, the altar of brass on which sacrifices were offered is now lost in what is called by the apostle, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, the true altar — Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever. Then propitiatory sacrifices are now done away, for the simple reason that a perfect sacrifice has been offered — a sacrifice whose merits fill all time, and consecrate all space; and so perfect that it needs not to be offered year by year in order to do what the Levitical sacrifices could not do; so perfect that it is as available eighteen hundred years after it has been offered, as if it had been offered this very day. We do not want these sacrifices; the end of them is come; the perfection of them is arrived; they lose their place, they cease to be appropriate, because that which they were meant to foreshadow is come; and now Aaron, and Moses, and Levi, disappear, and lose their function, their mission, and their office, in the splendor of the appearance of that Great High Priest, who, by one sacrifice, offered once for all, has redeemed the souls, and forgiven the sins of all that believe in his blessed name.3
Far from a relic in a biblical museum of ancient writ, Exodus is living and active, lurching forward until the Christ of God — the true priest, the true lamb, the true tent where sinners meet the Father — arrived to bring all this to bear for us. Instead of a book regurgitating stories about Moses and Aaron and lambs laid on altars and seas being split open, we’re made to see that all of it points us to Jesus, the one who’s been there all along (Jude 1:5).
Grace and peace to you.
John Cumming, Sabbath Morning Readings on the Old Testament: Book of Exodus (Boston: John P. Jewett & Co., 1854), 322.
Cumming, 323.
Cumming, 323–24.