The Forty Days: 3. Days turn to Years

Forty days Moses was on the mountain.  Forty days figure in another turning point of the Exodus - the forty days the 12 spies spent in reconnaissance in Canaan.  They returned, ten expressing fears of a formidable enemy, two trusting in the power of God to help them.  The people sided with the fearful - and God was not pleased to not be trusted.  He had, after all, rescued them miraculously from Egypt.

NUMBERS 14:30 Not one of you will enter the land I swore with uplifted hand to make your home, except Caleb son of Jephunneh and Joshua son of Nun. 31 As for your children that you said would be taken as plunder, I will bring them in to enjoy the land you have rejected. 32 But you – your bodies will fall in this wilderness. 33 Your children will be shepherds here for forty years, suffering for your unfaithfulness, until the last of your bodies lies in the wilderness. 34 For forty years – one year for each of the forty days you explored the land – you will suffer for your sins and know what it is like to have me against you.”

The forty days is turned by God into forty years.  If such an extended time as forty days couldn't draw out a trusting faith from his people, then maybe a generation passing will do so.

Forty days is a long time for us, but nothing to God.  For all of us in some areas of our life, and for some of us in every area of our life, God will teach us long lessons if we refuse to learn them in medium time.

The Forty Days: 2. Cloud

In the desert of Sinai the Israelites watch Moses leave them to climb the mountain where he will meet with God.

Exodus 24:15-18  When Moses went up on the mountain, the cloud covered it, and the glory of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai. For six days the cloud covered the mountain, and on the seventh day the Lord called to Moses from within the cloud.  To the Israelites the glory of the Lord looked like a consuming fire on top of the mountain. Then Moses entered the cloud as he went on up the mountain. And he stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights

It is not a small thing to meet God.  For six days Moses waits to enter the cloud atop the mountain.  How casually we assume the ear of God.  It is promised.  But we should never take it lightly.

Moses remains in the cloud for forty days.  He is, after all, going to be a key conveyor of God's truth not only to his generation but to us all.

For most people the idea of spending 40 days in a mountain cloud with God - after waiting a week to be called in - seems to lack practicality.  This is certainly what the Israelites (at the foot of the mountain) thought:

When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered round Aaron and said, ‘Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’

'May they be forgiven', we sigh in disgust, (oh, and by the way, I'm too busy to come to the prayer meetings . . .)

40 Days: Shattered

Years after the event, Moses tells the Israelites of his agony when he came down Sinai's mountain after receiving the instructions from God - including the Ten Commandments.:

 16 And  I looked, and behold, you had sinned against the Lord your God. You had made yourselves a golden1 calf.  You had turned aside quickly from the way that the Lord had commanded you. 17 So I took hold of the two tablets and threw them out of my two hands and broke them before your eyes. 18 Then I  lay prostrate before the Lord  as before, forty days and forty nights. I neither ate bread nor drank water, because of all the sin that you had committed,  in doing what was evil in the sight of the Lord to provoke him to anger. 

This is a truly astonishing intercession: God tells Moses that He's had enough of the Israelites (and what a grumbling, ungrateful, rebellious bunch they were).  God proposes getting rid of them and starting again, as He had previously done with humanity in the days of Noah and The Flood.

It is relatively difficult to understand 40 days and nights of prayer on any account.  People have done it in a repentant penitence for their poor, cold souls: leaders have done it for spiritual revival in their congregations and communities.  But here Moses does it just to save a people that God indicates he will rightly give up on.

Doing Lent for myself is a big ask; doing Lent for the Israelites would definitely be beyond my spirituality.  Yet there in heaven in a constant intercession, my Saviour makes the case - more eloquently and sacrificially than Moses of old - for those called in his name to be saved.

He deserves better.

And I don't.

My Dad's Last Sermon Part 6: I will uphold thee

Even that isn’t all!  He goes on to say, “I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness”.  We come to that place where we are not as steady as we once were.  We have to resort to walking sticks, walking aids, all sorts of things to make sure we don’t fall – something to hold us up.

We need that physically but, you see, spiritually we will not fall if our trust is in our God. He is able to keep us from falling.  “I will uphold thee,” he says, “with the right hand of my righteousness”.  We remember that Old Testament story about Moses.  Strong as he was he found he needed to be upheld.  When the Amalekites attacked the Children of Israel (we read the account in Exodus chapter 17) we read how Moses lifted up his hands.  When he lifted up his hands Israel prevailed.  When he dropped his hands then the Amalekites prevailed. So something had to be done.  We read in verse 12 that they took a stone and sat Moses on a stone.  Then Aaron and Hur came and held up his hands to ensure that the Amalekites were defeated and Israel triumphed.

But there’s someone greater than Aaron and Hur in this verse.  It’s the almighty God with his all-powerful hand and he says, “I will uphold thee”.  What a blessed thing it is, as we step out into 2013, that the almighty God, the creator of the ends of the earth, he says to us, “There’s no need to be fearful.  If you think you’re going to stumble, if you feel perhaps the pressure spiritually, you know that I won’t forsake you.  I will be with you and I will uphold you with the right hand of my righteousness.”

William Williams, that well-known Welsh hymn writer, in our closing hymn that we are about to sing, wrote,

I am weak but Thou art mighty;

Hold me with Thy powerful hand.

I know if we can make that our prayer as we enter 2013 then we shan’t go far wrong.  We shall know that, by God’s grace, we shall be upheld.  So may the Lord hold us with his all-powerful hand.

But is it true?

But in Church last night we reflected that Hebrews tells us that By faith the people passed through the Red Sea as on dry land; but when the Egyptians tried to do so, they were drowned.

By faith.

Before God blew with his wind the LORD said to Moses, “Why are you crying out to me? Tell the people to get moving! (Exodus 14:15 NLT) And with that step of faith, God (who it is impossible to please without faith) blew.