sermon - small foxes & idolatry

I had an awesome opportunity to share my ‘Small Foxes’ sermon with Long Bay Baptist Church in January 2018, and I’ve meated up my notes a bit so that it’s a coherent piece of writing. If you’re not a Christian, then this entire post isn’t going to make much sense – it’s all about idolatry and lordship and all that fun stuff. But you’re still totally welcome to read. Anyway.

Near the beginning of Exodus, God speaks to Moses and asks him to deliver his people - that is Israel - from the land of Egypt where they have been held as slaves. God gets the Israelites out of Egypt, but it’s a much harder task to get Egypt out of the Israelites. We are called to GO into the world, but to remain in Christ’s love. John 15:4 says: Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. So we are called for a higher purpose - to abide in Christ.

Galatians 4:4-7 says: 4 But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, 5 to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. 6 And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” 7 So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God. So if we are God’s children, who abide in CHRIST, then we are HEIRS. The question is what are we heirs to? Whatever we WORSHIP is our INHERITANCE.

Psalm 115:4-8 says: 4 Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands. 5 They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see. 6 They have ears, but do not hear; noses, but do not smell. 7 They have hands, but do not feel; feet, but do not walk; and they do not make a sound in their throat. 8 Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them. We start to act and look and think like the people who we are around all the time and those we look up to; the people who we let influence our lives and the way we look at things. We are either HEIRS to the KINGDOM, or heirs to the idols that we place above the Kingdom. Whatever we idolise, whatever we worship - becomes our INHERITANCE.

So the Israelites are given this command to love the Lord their God and no other, and they are issued with all these other instructions and decrees that are going to help them keep that command. In Deuteronomy 4:15-20, Moses gives the Israelites a warning from the Lord. 15 “Therefore watch yourselves very carefully. Since you saw no form on the day that the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire,16 beware lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves, in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female,17 the likeness of any animal that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the air, 18 the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth.19 And beware lest you raise your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them, things that the Lord your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven. 20 But the Lord has taken you and brought you out of the iron furnace, out of Egypt, to be a people of his own inheritance, as you are this day.

God gives the Israelites this warning about prostituting themselves to other Gods; other idols and other lovers than the Father their Creator. He even creates this entire sub-covenant with the tribe of Levi that we read about in Leviticus. The good news is that this covenant has been fulfilled when we look at it through the lens of Jesus Christ and the new covenant, so you don’t have to slaughter your goat today! The gist of the entire book without any of the gory details can be summed up in Leviticus 18:1-5. And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 2 “Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, I am the Lord your God. 3 You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you. You shall not walk in their statutes. 4 You shall follow my rules and keep my statutes and walk in them. I am the Lord your God. 5 You shall therefore keep my statutes and my rules; if a person does them, he shall live by them: I am the Lord. (Check out my Leviticus post for more). Leviticus has this overarching focus on ceremonial cleanliness and purity in the eyes of the Lord. The Israelites are instructed not to act like the Egyptians or the Canaanites, for they are not of this world - they are SET APART. The entire book is written like a mirror to just how high the standards of God’s holiness are. God has called them higher than the standards of this world.

If we skip forward to Judges 1, Moses is long gone and his assistant Joshua has just died. The Israelites are delivered out of the hands of the Egyptians and are now conquering the land of the Canaanites. As the Israelites begin to take possession of the land God has given to them, they begin to make small compromises. They start to let the little foxes escape. The Israelites are instructed to completely drive the Canaanites out of the land and let no one remain. It’s too hard for the tribe of Zebulun to completely drive the Canaanites out - it’s easier for them to just keep them on as slaves. It’s too hard for the tribe of Ephraim to drive out the Canaanites in Gezer, so they decided to just live among them. For the tribes of Asher and Naphtali it is easier just to reside among the Canaanites and let them continue to have control of the land. And so on and so forth. Because they let these little foxes escape, the influences of these ways of life are a “constant temptation” and a “thorn in their side.” And so eventually, little by little, Israel begins to cave to the pressure of this thorn in their side. They begin to serve the images of the idol Baal and let the Canaanites influence the way they live their lives. Israel escapes Egypt only to let Canaan in. Judges 2:16-17: 16 Then the Lord raised up judges, who saved them out of the hand of those who plundered them. 17 Yet they did not listen to their judges, for they whored after other gods and bowed down to them. They soon turned aside from the way in which their fathers had walked, who had obeyed the commandments of the Lord, and they did not do so.

Thus begins the cyclical pattern that we read about in Judges. The Israelites abandon God and end up in a sticky situation, God raises up a hero to save them and there is peace, but before long the Israelites turn to their old ways again. They always fall short of God’s standards - that’s why we need Jesus so much, why we need GRACE. But Jesus didn’t die for us to throw away God’s deepest desires for us; his longing for us to be set apart and holy; in full communion with him. The mistake the Israelites continuously make is trying to half-arse it, letting little things go and compromising their OBEDIENCE to God. If you want to follow Jesus then this year I encourage and challenge you not to half-arse it - don’t have one foot in Israel and one foot still back in Egypt. We live in this world. But we ABIDE in Christ. All He wants is for nothing to be holding us back from full relationship with him. God still loves the Israelites unconditionally - that’s not a promise he can take back. And the truth is that He will not love us any more for doing good works, for trying to be a “good Christian.” That’s not our ticket to heaven, not how we earn our salvation.

We’re not talking about being saved. What we’re talking about is being in RELATIONSHIP with our FATHER; our CREATOR; and the LOVER OF OUR SOULS. We’re talking about following Jesus and being discipled and making him the Lord of our lives, not just a little part of our Sundays. All he wants is our hearts. As one Isaac Farrow would say, you can’t expect to see God working in your life during the weekdays when you only give him your Sunday. He’s a JEALOUS God and he doesn’t desire for us to give parts of ourselves away to these small foxes that turn into idols before the Lord. He wants ALL OF US, ALL IN, EVERY DAY.