READING – Exodus 19:1-20
MEDITATION – Moses acted as a mediator between God and His people. He had the opportunity to relay powerful and precious truths from God to Israelites. These include His care (verse 4), His covenant (verses 5-8) , and His commands (verses 19-20 and chapter 20 and following).
Our mediator today is Christ. God uses pastors and others in ministry, however, to provide leadership to His people and to communicate His Word to them.
God uses beautiful imagery, a mother eagle bearing a young eagle on her back as it leaves the nest and learns to fly (verse 4), to remind the people of His care for them as they escaped Egypt. As ministry leaders we remind our people of God’s caring involvement in their lives. He delivers them from sin’s bondage and carries them along as they learn to live for Him.
God reiterates His covenant, calling the Jewish people His “treasured possession” and promising to make them “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (5-6). But the Israelites could not uphold their part of the covenant. Jesus Christ came to fulfill the terms that sinful humans cannot. Today we preach the promises of the New Covenant, conditioned only on faith in Jesus.
Through Moses, God delivered a long list of commands for His set apart people to follow. Today we teach God’s instructions, guiding people how to live a life transformed by Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.
No new mediator is needed today. But Christian leaders are the messengers of the grace and truth found only in Jesus Christ. “For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:17).
Paul’s testimony is our model: “For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time. For this I was appointed a preacher and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth” (1 Timothy 2:5-7). We are messengers of the blessings mediated by Jesus Christ.
PRAYER
Thank you that the one perfect mediator has come. Help me faithfully proclaim the grace and truth found in Him.
Dean H. Taylor 