God According to God

compassionate gracious slow to anger abounding in love and faithfulness maintaining love to thousands forgiving wickedness rebellion and sin does not leave the guilty unpunished

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A Study of Exodus 34:6-7

Numbers 14:1-25

• Israelites are out of Egypt and on their way to Canaan
• They have sent scouts into this new land to see what it is like.
• Ten of the scouts came back with a report that essentially warned Israel not to try to take the land.
• Joshua and Caleb, however, came back and told the Israelites to press forward.
• The people of Israel are more convinced by the negative report

Numbers 14:1-12

• The people are upset and even wish to go back to Egypt!
• Moses and Aaron, their leaders, fall face down in front of the people. Joshua and Caleb, the scouts with the positive report, tear their clothes and make a speech to the people (5-7).
• The people don’t listen and instead want to stone their leaders (10).
• God is not pleased. He (or precisely, his glory) shows up, and he tells Moses that he is going to kill all the people, except for Moses and the other leaders (presumably Aaron, Joshua, and Caleb). God will make those leaders into a greater nation (11-12).

Thoughts

• What’s your response to God’s decree?
• Which qualities that God mentioned in Exodus 34 (last week’s lesson) does he seem to be embodying here? Which qualities seem to be less prominent?

Numbers 14:13-19 – Moses’ Response

• Moses’ first rebuttal is that the Egyptians would hear about it (13).
• So far, the Egyptians have a picture of a powerful God who controls nature and who looks out for his people (14).
• If God follows through with his threat, he will look weak to the Egyptians. He will have failed in the plan to get the Israelites safely out of Egypt (16).

Numbers 14:13-19 – Moses’ Response

• Moses’ second rebuttal is to quote God’s self-introduction (18).
• Moses views this as an act of strength, not weakness (17).
• Moses especially calls upon God’s “great love” to “forgive the sin of these people,” just as God has been doing since they left Egypt (19).
• What is Moses explicating requesting from God?
• Compare what Moses retells in Numbers 14:18 with what God reveals in Exodus 34:6-7. What do you notice? Is anything missing?

Thoughts

• How might Moses’ words here be an act of faithful worship? How might they be manipulative? Which one seems more likely to you?
• Do you think Moses was hoping for God to exercise certain qualities and not exercise others?
• Did Moses change God’s mind?

Numbers 14:20-25 God’ Response

• Look at God’s response: “I have forgiven them, as you asked” (20).
• Moses asks God to be a forgiving God, as he (God) revealed in Exodus 34. God agrees to be that.
• But God is also a God who does not leave evil unpunished.
• The ones who were alive in Egypt and saw God bring them out will not make it to the promised land (22-23).
• Does God’s response seem consistent with how he characterized himself in Exodus 34?
• Does God’s response match how Moses has characterized God in Num14:18?

Application

• What do you think about sweet and sour candy?
• Sometimes we just want sweet and sometimes we just want sour
• How does this track with God and his attributes from Exodus 34?
• Often we want one side of God.
• Sometimes we want one side of us and another side for others

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

• German church leader during the time of Hitler
• The Cost of Discipleship (1937)
• “cheap grace”

Cheap grace

• Bonhoeffer defines “cheap grace” in the following way: “…cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.”

Costly grace

• Bonhoeffer defines “costly grace”: “…costly grace confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: ‘My yoke is easy and my burden is light.’”

Cheap / Costly Grace

• How might Bonhoeffer’s concept of “cheap grace” apply to Moses’ request for God to forgive all the guilty Israelites?
• In what ways do we tend to seek out “cheap grace” as Bonhoeffer defines it?
• Has “cheap grace” become a sort of marketing tool to get more people to accept Christianity? How?
• How would you explain “costly grace” to someone who is seeking God?
• Is a God who punishes wickedness (sometimes harshly) hopelessly unappealing in contrast to a God who only gives out love and forgiveness?

Homework

• In your Bible (or app), highlight
• Exodus 34:6-7
• Numbers 14:18
• Read Nehemiah 9:1-38 for next week