A Basic Recap of Sunday’s Sermon: “Going to War with God” Exodus 17:8-16

This post begins a change in the sermon blog. I like writing sermon recaps and summaries, but they do take up a lot of time. And they’re a bit long! All of this adds up to me getting way behind on posting blogs connected to the sermons. So, I’m starting fresh this week. I’m going to try to post what I’m calling The Basic Recap every week, preferably on Mondays. These posts will be short pieces that bring attention to key ideas and thoughts from the last sermon I preached, along with some applicational questions or thoughts. I hope to do a few other posts each week besides this, but that’s all I’m promising for now!

So without further ado, here’s the basic recap of last Sunday:

Following God will mean struggle. The Christian life is not easy. There is regular spiritual threat. It’s a battle for your very soul. And far too many souls today are being slowly devoured. They are sinking into a dark pit as they become consumed by unresolved conflict, bitterness, addictive habits, and selfish motives. Fortunately, we don’t need to face such threat alone. To follow God means having God with us, fighting with us and for us. Our fight and struggle becomes God’s fight and struggle. And because it’s God’s fight, we can have the sure and certain hope that we will know God’s victory over all spiritual assaults.

The short account of Israel’s fight against the Amalekites illustrates this well. God’s people were viciously attacked (cf Deut 25:17-18). Up to this point God had given them immediate successes, with them only having to sit and watch as God defeated their enemies through various plagues and acts of power. Now they needed to fight. But they would not fight alone. As always, God would would be them, and this was physically symbolized by Moses standing on a hill and raising the staff that God had given him over the people as they fought (Exodus 18:9). This is made even more clear in Exodus 18:15, which describes the building of an altar called “The Lord is My Banner.” Israel’s fight and success in their fight was really the Lord’s fight and the Lord’s success. The Lord was the “banner” under which they rallied, fought, and won. The staff raised high, and kept high, over the battlefield symbolized the people’s active, ongoing dependence on the Lord. Their victory was not immediate victory. But it was a eventual victory. Eventually, they would (and did) win. As long as they fought and kept trusting in their God, they would eventually win.

This is the norm for every person who wants to get serious about their faith in God. Things will not be nice and easy. God will not become your personal genie if you decide to take him seriously as your God. The reality is that the fight to save and protect your soul will require great effort. The great comfort we have in this however is that God will rally us and lead us in our fight. The staff we fight under however is different today. Today God has given us the much better and greater staff that is the cross, and a much greater and better Moses to hold it up, his own Son Jesus Christ. Colossians 2:13-15 is especially helpful in showing us how this was done. We were dead, defeated already in the battle of our souls, devoured by our own sins against God. But at the cross, in the death of Jesus Christ God forgave us of our sins and ultimately triumphed over every enemy that stood against us. Thus the cross, and specifically Jesus, serves now as the perfect rallying point for all who want to save their soul (cf Isaiah 11:10).

Final victory will depend on several things:

1. We must recognize that there is a threat.
What would a snapshot of your soul look like? Too few people will admit or even recognize that there is a real battle going on for their soul, and that they are losing it through their regular choices and habits. Like a smoker who continues to smoke, ignoring the steady killing of his lungs, so also do we continue to live blissfully in our sin, ignoring the slow erosion and descent of our soul into eternal darkness.

2. We must rally under the right banner.
There are many good causes to follow and many good self help books to motivate and inspire you. But they aren’t in any way good enough for what’s at stake here. Remember the threat! It’s a battle for your soul! This is why we need divine help. We need Jesus, the only one who can fight and win against the soul destroying power of sin and death.

3. We must be prepared and willing to fight.
There is no such thing as a passive Christianity. The battle imagery we read about in Ephesians 6 is deliberate. It’s not there in order to give kids something to dress up in during Vacation Bible School. It’s there because we need all the pieces – things like truth, righteousness, faith, the gospel of piece, the word of God – if we are to fight successfully. Just going to church to sit and passively participate is not going to cut it. Having a pathetic prayer life will just get you trampled. Having a weak understanding of the Scriptures will mean you mostly running and hiding in the battle rather than standing and fighting for your soul and the souls of those around you.

Always remember what’s at stake. And know that God has given us everything we need – all the courage, strength, and hope we could possibly want. He gives it to us in Jesus Christ. There is no surer banner to fight under than him.