Presence Weekly 3/4/2024

The Devo: The Mission of Work (aka Worship)

3 Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Midian, and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. ² And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. ³ And Moses said, “I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.” ⁴ When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” ⁵ Then he said, “Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” ⁶ And he said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. 

⁷ Then the Lord said, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, ⁸ and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. ⁹ And now, behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. ¹⁰ Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.” ¹¹ But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?” ¹² He said, “But I will be with you, 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.” Exodus 3:1-12 ESV

A Mission in Jeopardy? 

It had been hundreds of years since God told Abraham to leave his country and go to a far away land where God would make him into a great nation, make his name great, and bless all the people of the earth. 

Since that time Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph had been the focal points of God’s mission of blessing in the world. 

However, this promised blessing of Abraham and his offspring happened despite some very disturbing and horrific actions by these mission participants. Abraham had farmed his wife out to Egyptian princes and then continued to lie about his relationship to her almost everywhere they went for fear of what might happen to him. Likewise, Sarah offered up her servant girl Hagar in an ad-lib effort to make sure God’s promise of children came to fulfillment. Jacob stole Esau’s rightful inheritance at the urging of his mother and then constantly made Leah feel inadequate and insecure by favoring Rachel. Joseph flaunted his father’s favor to his brothers to the point that they sold him into slavery. 

Yet somehow, Scripture continues to repeat the phrase that “they were fruitful and multiplied.” Chapters 13-50 of Genesis are a testimony to two things: the intended conduits of blessings constantly falling short of their missional calling and God’s steadfast love and faithfulness to maintain and fulfill his promise. 

It’s important to pause here and reflect just how often we, as Christians, whether we are serving and leading in Washington, elsewhere in the public square, or in our other vocational callings, vacillate between obedience and disobedience. It’s even more important to recognize that without God’s steadfast love and faithfulness in advance of and response to our failures we would all be without hope. Which brings us to Exodus 3. 

As the book of Exodus begins, God’s chosen people of blessing have moved from safety in the face of famine under Joseph to slavery under a Pharaoh who did not know Joseph’s name.   The culture that they lived in had shifted from a posture of accommodating pluralism to fear of different others. In fact, God’s people were seen as a political liability. As fear grew, so did the oppression of God’s chosen instruments of blessing. 

We learn that they have lived in exile and slavery for 430 years. Generation after generation have lived and died hoping for a deliverer and receiving none. They have endured brutal treatment, back-breaking labor for the men, and humiliating service for the women. They were commodities valued only for their work output. Any previous promises of restoration, land, favor, and flourishing had seemingly vanished. The mighty influence of Abraham, Issac, Jacob, and Joseph as mediators of God’s promises were a distant memory to people now on the very weak end of a power differential. 

Exchanging Futile Work for Worship

For God’s instrument of mediating his intentions, he chooses an unwilling and insecure shepherd in the person of Moses. Despite the best efforts of Moses to “take a pass” on following God’s command to “Go,” God gets his man, and gives him a singular message, 

“He said, ‘But I will be with you, 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.’” Genesis 3:12 ESV

One word in this missional restatement of God, “you shall serve God” is central to understanding the full nature of our calling as agents of flourishing. The root Hebrew word translated here as “serve” is elsewhere translated as “worship.”

And God said, “I will be with you. And this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain.” NIV

And He said, “Certainly I will be with you, and this shall be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God at this mountain.” NASB

Why the ambiguity? Because in God’s Creation, work and worship were never intended to be separated.  Genesis 2 says that, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” Here the Hebrew word used is avodah which is the same word used in Exodus 1 when we learn,

So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh. 12 But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread; so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites 13 and worked them ruthlessly. 14 They made their lives bitter with harsh labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields; in all their harsh labor the Egyptians worked them ruthlessly. Exodus 1:11–14 NIV

Although shifting from the noun to verbal form, it is also the word that Moses chooses when facing Pharaoh in declaring why God wants his people free,

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh and say to him, ‘This is what the Lord says: Let my people go, so that they may worship me. Genesis 8:1 NIV

How does this apply to the mission of God for his people? God’s stated desire is for us to experience our work as worship to him. Our work was never intended to commoditize us or our labor. It was not created to humiliate us or exalt others. It was intended as an offering of worship to the God of creation who created us to serve him. 

For all workers, and especially for those serving and leading in the public square, this is where the gospel rubber meets the road. As we saw throughout the book of Genesis, despite being given a very clear missional calling to worship God through our work as instruments of blessing, after the Fall, our default position became inextricably linked to our desire to use work to make a name for ourselves, to manipulate and exploit others, and to continually sin against the God of steadfast love and faithfulness. 

And this is why the gospel is such good news to those serving and leading in the public square. First, despite our many past, present, and future transgressions, the God of steadfast love and faithfulness continues to call us his people. Second, while it may seem that we are on the weak end of a power differential, God promises that his promises will not fail. 

Blessings to all as you serve him today. 

Last Things...

We are releasing a wonderful Presence Journal tomorrow by Dr. Daryl Charles on how Ecclesiastes can help us move from futility to joy in our work, followed Wednesday by the video and audio versions on Dr. Justin Bailey’s appearance on the Faithful Presence.