The 3-Day Journey: How Exodus Foreshadows the Resurrection of Christ

Hello, and welcome to Through the Bible with Les Feldick. An Oklahoma rancher and farmer, Les Feldick has been teaching homestyle Bible classes for 20 years in Iowa, Oklahoma, and Texas. Les Feldick's unique style of Bible teaching has made the books of the Bible come to life. When Les is teaching, it's so interesting that people say time just seems to fly by. And now, here is Les Feldick. And again, it's good to have everybody back with us. And for those of you on the television audience, we just trust you'll get your Bible again and sit down and be part of this class with us. We'd like to always remind you, we appreciate your correspondence, and we just can't express our thanks in words, because they certainly are an encouragement to us. Now again, we ask that you will turn with us to Exodus, just for a little bit. And in chapter 4, once again, we'll come down to verse 29, where we now know that Moses and Aaron have been joined together, because when Moses cried about the fact that he didn't have a tongue and he couldn't speak, God, in His anger, said, Well, I'll let Aaron be your mouthpiece. And so consequently, this is what brought the two gentlemen together. Remember, they're brothers. And Aaron now becomes the spokesman, but Moses is the one through whom God does the speaking and gives the direction. So now then, Moses and Aaron, they approached the children of Israel there in Goshen, and if you'll come all the way down to verse 29, where Moses and Aaron went and gathered together all the elders of the children of Israel, and Aaron spake all the words which the Lord had spoken unto Moses. Now do you see the order? And Aaron spake all the words which the Lord had spoken unto Moses, and did the... What's the next word? ...signs in the sight of the people, that is, the children of Israel, and the people... What? ...believed. Why? Because they saw the signs. See how simple that is? And they heard that the Lord had visited the children of Israel, and that He had looked upon their affliction, and they bowed their heads and worshiped. All right, now we go on into chapter 5, and afterward, after they've approached the children of Israel, have given them the signs, and now have got them supposedly convinced that God is about to do something, Moses and Aaron went in to Pharaoh, and they said, Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Let my people go, that they may hold a feast unto me in the wilderness. And Pharaoh said, Who is the Lord? Or we would have to say Jehovah, because the word Lord is always indicative of the term Jehovah. Now, as I pointed out in our programs a few weeks ago, everything in Egypt was a god. The frogs were gods, the moon was a god, the sun was a god, and every animal you could think of was a god, and they all had a name. So when Moses and Aaron came and say, The God of Israel, Jehovah, is going to lead the children out, Pharaoh's natural response was, Well, who's Jehovah? He's just another one of your gods, but he doesn't mean anything to me. And so he says, Who is Jehovah, that I should obey his voice to let Israel go? Well, he's not going to learn, but it's going to take a while. And he says, I know not Jehovah, neither will I let Israel go. Now I think we've got to stop here a moment. In everything there's a reason. I mean, these people were just as human as we are. Their governments functioned even as governments do for the most part today. Now, how many people realize that when Pharaoh was confronted with losing the Israelis, what was he really going to lose? The backbone of his economy. They were the workers. They were the ones that were getting all the daily work done. And the Egyptians had just become an upper -class elite who did nothing but make sure that those Jews got the work done. And I always like to compare this even to America, especially the South, before the Civil War. Why were our plantation owners so uptight about losing slavery? It was the backbone of their economy. How would an American farmer do today if the government would just simply say, We're going to take all of your farm equipment away from you. We aren't going to let you use tractors or combines anymore. What would they do? Oh, they'd go bananas. Because after all, how could they get their crops in the ground and get them out if they don't have their machinery? Well, this is what was confronting Egypt. You take those Jews away from me, Pharaoh says, and I've got nothing. And it was economics as much as anything. And so he says, I'll not let them go. And of course, God has got more involved in the big picture. But I'm just saying that from the human element, they were faced with something that they couldn't cope with. How are they going to get their work done? All right. He says, I will not let Israel go. Now verse 3, And they, that is Moses and Aaron, said, The God of the Hebrews has met with us. Let us go, we pray thee. Now underline the next two words. Let us go three days' journey into the desert and sacrifice unto the Lord our God, lest he fall upon us with pestilence or with sword. Now why the three days' journey? Well, you see, three is a significant number again in Scripture, isn't it? We've got the triune God. That's where everything begins, the Trinity. And everything in creation rests upon trinities of sorts. You take creation itself, rests upon a basic trinity of time, space, and matter. You take any one of those three away and you haven't got a universe. Because that's what the whole function is. It's matter, whether it's the planet or whether it's the moons or whether it's you and I as people, we are matter moving through space in a given period of time. And that's what makes the whole universe function. I always like to even use water as a good example. What is water? It's a liquid, it's a solid, it's a gas. And so it is in all of creation, you've got so many of these things that rest upon a trinity of sorts. Now I don't like to use the word trinity for water because normally we think of the Godhead, so forgive me for that. But everything rests upon a three. Now, way back here, what do you suppose God has on His mind when He tells Moses and Aaron that He wants Israel to go three days' journey out of Egypt? All right, there's only one thing that can separate a person from slavery. And remember, this whole book of Exodus is a picture of redemption, first of Israel being redeemed out of Egypt, but it's the perfect picture of you and I being redeemed out of the shackles of sin and brought to a life of freedom. All right, so the three days are indicative, I'm quite sure, of the resurrection. Now if you'll turn with me to the New Testament, go to Matthew chapter 12, Matthew chapter 12, and come down to verse 38, Matthew chapter 12, verse 38, I'd like to give you time to find it so that you can read all these things with your own eyes. Matthew 12, verse 38, now of course this is during Christ's earthly ministry. And then certain of the scribes and the Pharisees answered, saying, Master, we would see a ... what's that word again? We would see a sign from thee. But he answered unto them, An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign, and there shall no sign be given to it but the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was ... here it comes ... three days and three nights in the whale's belly, so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. So way back here in Exodus, God is already giving us now then a picture of some basic premises, and that there is no setting us free from the shackles of sin any more than there was any reason for expecting Israel to be set free of Egypt unless they could have three days separating them from their place of captivity. And it's the same way in our salvation. If we try to ignore the basic premise of the gospel again, and that is that Christ died, was in the grave three days and three nights, and rose from the dead, we have no gospel. But when we put our faith in that gospel, that three days and three nights in the tomb separates us from that old life of sin and bondage. And this is what we want to keep so clear in our thinking, that Israel had to be separated, but it took the three days' journey to do it, even as it took the three days of Christ's time in the tomb to separate us. Now I'd like to, if you will, come on over to ... I think I want to go back to Corinthians once again, and maybe I want to go back to Exodus. Maybe let's go back to Exodus for just a moment. Yeah, let's go back to Exodus for just a second, and then we're going to flip back once more into the New Testament. Back to chapter 5, verse 3, repeating now, "...and they said, The God of the Hebrews hath met with us. Let us go, we pray, the three days' journey into the desert, and sacrifice unto the Lord our God, lest he fall upon us with pestilence over the sword." And now verse 4, "...and the king of Egypt said unto them, Wherefore do you, Moses and Aaron, let the people from their works get you to your burdens? And Pharaoh said, Behold, the people of the land now are many, and you make them rest from their burdens." Now, what Pharaoh is going to make sure, as much as he can, is that he does not lose these captives. Now, when we come into the spiritual realm, who also is going to do everything he can to keep from losing his captives? Satan. All right, now I want you to keep that uppermost in your mind. Satan will do anything to keep from losing one of his captives. You know, whenever I read this, and while I describe this a moment, I guess we can go to, let's go to 2 Corinthians chapter 5, where I was going to go a moment ago, but I wanted to come back here first. Go to 2 Corinthians chapter 5. A year or two ago, I was getting a piece of equipment ready to go to the field, and as we see here in Oklahoma, a big, beautiful spider web. And that big old spider was just sitting up there in the corner, waiting for his victim. And while I was working on it, I think it was on a brush hog, a big old locust flew into that big spider web. Now, I would have thought he'd go right through it, but he didn't. He hit that spider web, and it just came back, and as fast as a stroke of lightning, that spider came down, and as a rule, I always thought they stung them and killed their prey, but he didn't even bother with that. He just wrapped that thing up in webbing. And I mean, it was so fast, it was mind-boggling, but that old spider had that big old locust completely wrapped with web. And when he had him completely immobilized, he went right back up to his corner, waiting for the next one. But, you know, I don't like to even see a locust die, so I took out my pocket knife, and I cut that web off that old locust. He dropped to the ground, and he laid there for a minute. I guess he didn't know what hit him, and then he took off. Now, I have to think that had to be the happiest locust that ever lived. But you see, you know what I had in my mind, even as I watched all that? Isn't that exactly where you and I were? You see, every person born into the human race is dead spiritually. And as we move on up through those little innocent years, Satan begins to wrap his web. And by the time we reach the age of accountability, eight, nine, ten, whatever you want to call it, he has got us completely wrapped in his web as that old spider did with that locust. Now listen, there was no way that spider would have ever gotten out of that web. There wasn't a thing he could do. He was immobilized, he was helpless. But an outside power, my pocket knife, set him free. Now it's the same way in the spiritual realm. The lost person, even though he doesn't realize it, is totally bound up in Satan's web. And nobody can cut that web but the power of God himself. And this is what we have to see. Now you've got 2 Corinthians chapter 5, 2 Corinthians chapter 5. And let's just start with verse 14, because it just does injustice not to use all of these verses, where again Paul is writing to the Gentiles at Corinth, and he says, For the love of Christ constraineth us, or drives us on, because we thus judge that if one died for all, then were, how many? All. See? Not just the worst, but all. Not just the Gentiles, but all. Not just the Jews, all. Every human being is dead spiritually. Now verse 15, And that he died for all, that they who live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him who died for them, and rose again. Now what do you see in that last statement? Well that's the gospel, see? See how Paul always brings it? Now he may not say the whole thing, but he'll either say that you have to believe in the one who rose from the dead, which indicates his death, or he may speak of his burial and his resurrection, but he's always showing us the complete picture of death, burial, and resurrection as our gospel. Now then verse 16, Wherefore, since Christ has accomplished everything that needs to be accomplished, wherefore, henceforth, henceforth from when? From when he gave us that gospel, when the death, burial, and resurrection was completed. All right? Henceforth, we know no man, not even Jesus, after the flesh. Now you say, well how do you know he's talking about Jesus? Read on. Yea, though Paul says we, and I'm sure he's speaking of himself, though he says we have known Christ after the flesh. Now as near as chronologists that I study can tell, Paul was about the same age as Christ. So when Jesus began his earthly ministry at the age of 30, Saul of Tarsus was about the same age, and he was a young up-and-comer in the religion of the Jew, in Judaism. And so even though I'm quite sure that Saul and Jesus never crossed paths, yet Saul knew who Jesus was. He knew what he was doing, and he knew where he'd come from, and he knew all about him. But of course he didn't know him, and so Paul can rightly say, yes, we knew Christ in the flesh. Yet, now, henceforth, from this point on, we know him no more. Now you know what he's saying? He is flying in the face of what too much of us hear too much of today. And what is it? They preach Jesus in his earthly ministry, and that's all well and good as far as it goes, but, beloved, there is no salvation in simply understanding his earthly ministry. We have to go to where? The cross. We have to go to the resurrection. Otherwise, as Paul says here, we know him for nothing, and we have to go beyond that. Now then, as we know him as the Christ after the resurrection, now verse 17, creature or creation, now what has happened? We've had that web cut off. We have been set free, and we are no longer under the shackles of Satan. We are now, as Israel was, brought out of Egypt, set apart for God. Now, of course, we're going to see in coming chapters in Exodus, when things got a little rough, where did the Jew always hanker to go back to? Oh, the old life in Egypt. And you see, isn't that the problem with so many believers? Oh, as soon as things get a little tough, well, then the tempter comes and says, see, you were probably better off back where you were before, but don't you believe it? Don't you believe it? That's the working of Satan, who is always appealing, you see, to the flesh. But now I don't want to stop here, since we're in this chapter. We want to go on to verse 18. All things are of God, who hath ... Now, what's that next word? Reconcile. Now, when we started the study on Exodus, I said Exodus is a book of redemption. You remember that? It's a picture of being bought back. But see, reconciliation is a next of kin to redemption, because when two people are estranged, and they can get their act together and come back together, what do we call it? Reconciliation. It's the same thing, practically, as being redeemed and brought back with a price. Now then, Paul uses this word here in regard to you and I, that God has reconciled us to Himself by, again, Jesus the Christ, and you know that Paul is in reference to his work of the cross. But he didn't stop there. When he reconciled us, when he gave us salvation, what else did he give us? A ministry. What kind of a ministry? Reconciliation. In other words, you know what God expects every one of us to do as He gives opportunity? Now, I've never been one to advocate that we go and just simply knock on doors or grab people by the shirt collar and say, hey, listen to me. I just don't believe the Lord wants to work that way. But as He gives opportunity, and He will, now what do we got to be ready for? Oh, we got to be ready to jump on it. And now look what Paul says. He has given us the ministry of reconciliation. In other words, when we get the opportunity, we have to tell that person wrapped in Satan's web that, listen, God has done everything that needed to be done to set you free, to reconcile you to Himself. And so He's given us the ministry of reconciliation. Verse 19, and here it is, to wit, that is to say that God, the whole triune God, with all of His power, was where? In Christ. See? In Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them, and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation. Now then, why has God left us here? To be what? Ambassadors. Ambassadors. Now, what's an ambassador? If you know anything about government, if you know anything about current events, an ambassador is a representative of a government, not in his own homeland, but in a strange land. See? You remember many years ago, I think about 20 years ago now, there was a best -selling book called The Ugly American? Some of you older ones remember it. And it was an exposé of the horrible lifestyle of our foreign service people, who were giving foreigners the totally wrong picture of what America really was. They were being drunkards, they were immoral, and they were just simply not representing so-called Christian America, and consequently the title was The Ugly Americans. But nevertheless, we all understand that ambassadors are to represent the home government in a foreign environment. Now, let's read on. You and I, then, have been left as ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us. We pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God, for he, God, hath made him, Christ, to be sin for us, he who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. All right, now getting back to the ambassador part of it. As soon as we become a child of God by faith in the gospel, we become citizens of what? Heaven. Paul teaches clearly that every believer is already, even though we're left here on the earth, our citizenship is in heaven. See, this is what got the early Christians in trouble with the Roman government, when they would give their allegiance to nobody but their God. Their citizenship was in heaven, and their Roman citizenship was now secondary. So we always have to remember that we're left here as ambassadors of heaven, where our home really is, where our citizenship is, and we are to represent that citizenship as we walk on this earth. Now, as Israel, now come back with me, I think to, uh, I think I want 2 Corinthians chapter 6. No, 1 Corinthians chapter 6. 1 Corinthians chapter 6. Now, this also was involved in bringing Israel out of Egypt. Because as soon as God brings the nation of Israel out of Egypt, they are to be a separated people. And we'll see that in the next half hour. The instructions were clear cut. They were to have nothing to do with the people around them. They were to be a separated, holy nation of people. Again, the lesson comes right in for you and I today. You see, this is what's happened to Christianity. Christianity has gotten to the place there's no difference. Most people can't tell the difference from a Christian from an unbeliever by looking at his behavior, his lifestyle, and everything. But see, that's not what God intended. We're to be different. Now, not oddballs. Now, I don't ascribe to the fact that just because we're Christians that we got to be complete oddballs, and we got to walk with a long face. Hey, if anybody's got reason to be joyful in this perplexing world, I think it's you and I as believers. But come back here to 1 Corinthians chapter 6. And oh, let's see. I suppose I should go back even to chapter 3. But let's stay here in chapter 6 where Paul, again, is writing to the Corinthians. And he says, verse 9, Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived, neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abuser themselves of mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, and so forth. Now, verse 11, And such, what's the verb, were, see, past tense, not anymore, but such were some of you. But you are, what's the next word, washed, oh, not in water, but, oh, by an act of the sovereign holy God. We're washed. You're sanctified. You're justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God. Now, that reminds me another verse. Come back to John's Gospel again, if you will. John's Gospel. This one just came to mind, so you have to give me a second. I think it's in chapter 13, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, in John's Gospel chapter 13. Oh, time has gone. Quickly, John's Gospel chapter 13, and here we have Jesus washing the feet of the apostles. Now, the reason I just came across this thought was because Paul says we're washed. And, of course, when you think of washing, you think of water. But in the spiritual realm, we are not cleansed by water. We're cleansed by an act of God. Now, you got John's Gospel chapter 13. Jesus is coming down the line, washing the feet of the apostles. And now, in verse 7, he comes to Peter. Verse 6, And then cometh Simon Peter, and Peter said unto him, Lord, dost thou wash my feet? And Jesus answered and said unto him, What I do, thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter. And Peter said, Thou shalt never wash my feet. You can see Peter, can't you? You can just about hear him. And Jesus answered, If I wash thee not, that is, his feet, thou hast no part with me. Now, Peter was notorious, you know, for putting his foot in his mouth. And boy, he really does it in the next verse. And now what does he say? Simon Peter said, Lord, then not my feet only, but what? Wash me all over. Give me a bath. Hands and feet, the whole bit. And then in verse 10, Jesus said, He that is, what's the word? Wash. He's been cleansed, not by water, but by the blood of the Lamb. He that has been washed needeth not anything more except to wash his feet. And of course, what's the lesson? Though they were cleansed at the central bath, but as they would walk home through those dusty streets, their feet would become dirty and consequently they needed washing. Box 760, Quinta, Oklahoma, 74552. Through the Bible with Les Feldick, is viewer supported. And your gift is appreciated. Thank you and be sure to tune in next time.