In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Imagine that you have a friend who has invited you to go on a hike in the mountains with him. You are not a particularly adept outdoors person and have some reservations about going on this hike. But your friend is an expert hiker and woodsman, and you love being outside, even if you do not particularly like hiking in it. And so you agree to go, albeit a bit reluctantly.

Halfway through your hike you stop to rest. Your friend and guide tells you to stay put while he goes and checks out the trail ahead to make sure it is safe and navigable. He tells you he will be back shortly and that you should take this opportunity to rest, relax, and enjoy the beauty around you while he is gone. An hour goes by and your friend does not return. Two hours pass, then three. No sign of your friend. You are deep in the woods and have no idea where you are. To make matters worse, your cell phone doesn’t work so you cannot call to check on your friend or call for help. How would you feel? Would you feel afraid? Abandoned? Alone? Would you start to lose hope? What would you do?

However you answer, I hope this little imaginary scenario will help you better understand how the Israelites likely felt in today’s OT lesson. I’ve painted the story in this way to help us get a better feel for what God’s people may have been thinking and feeling. Too often when we hear stories like today’s OT lesson, we tend to get all uppity and say something like, “There go those crazy Israelites again, falling off the deep end and showing what rotten people they are.”

But I don’t think it was like that. Yes, the writer tells us that the people acted corruptly in making an idol, but I am not convinced they did this because they were totally rotten. The writer tells us Moses had been away from his people for 40 days, a biblical phrase which means a long time, and I think they genuinely believed that their leader had abandoned them or had been killed. So there they were, stuck in the middle of the desert with no one to lead them, and that made them very afraid, just like our novice hiker in the scenario above. And because they had come from an idol-worshiping country, they reverted back to doing what they knew best to seek help and calm their fears. So they made themselves an idol in violation of the second commandment.

And we do not have to be lost in the desert or mountains to understand this dynamic of being afraid that we have lost our leader and our way. We remember times when the events of life have conspired to make us feel lost or abandoned. Perhaps some of you are going through those times right now. We look around and wonder where God is or who will lead us out of our mess. Sadly we too often turn to other, lesser idols to try and calm our fears and soon discover they inevitably fail to deliver because they are not the one true and Living God.

But we miss the point of the story if we stop here or don’t pay careful attention to the interaction between God and Moses that follows because in that interaction we find the very heart of God and what he keeps inviting us to do when we think we are lost. So it is worth our time to look carefully at what this story tells us.

First, we must understand that God is making rhetorical statements to Moses about destroying his people. Make no mistake. God does not countenance evil of any sort. He did not countenance Israel’s idolatry nor does he countenance ours. But the way God phrases his intentions to Moses suggests that God was not interested in destroying his people. If that were the case, then why didn’t God just go ahead and do it? Instead, God was giving Moses a chance to change God’s mind and Moses responded brilliantly.

The issue, at which we are looking, of course, is why bother to pray to a sovereign God in the first place? After all, if God is sovereign, God will do what God will do. Moses had no power to make God do anything so why did he bother to intercede on behalf of God’s people? As today’s story (and many others) make clear, we pray to our sovereign God because God wants us to pray to him, both for ourselves and on behalf of others.

There is a mystery here that we cannot penetrate, but Scripture consistently encourages us to pray to this sovereign God of ours with the confidence that he will listen, just the way he did for Moses. It is almost like God is testing us to measure the state of our faith and trust in him. Because God is all-knowing, God certainly doesn’t need to see how we will behave. He knows that before we ever act. But Scripture seems to insist that we must always act on our faith and that God’s tests are more for our benefit than his. We will never know the state of our faith and love for God until we are required to demonstrate it, just as Moses did when he interceded for his people.

Turning now to Moses’ actual prayer to God, we see a desire for God’s will to be done and for God’s glory to be made known to the nations. Moses demonstrated this by reminding God that destroying God’s chosen people would bring dishonor to God in the Egyptians’ eyes. It would effectively negate God’s powerful deliverance of his people from Egypt and cause the Egyptians to question God’s faithfulness and sovereignty. In effect, the Egyptians would say, “See? God brought his people out of our land only to destroy them. God didn’t deliver on his promises to bring them to the promised land. What kind of God is that?”

Moses also appealed to God’s faithfulness. He resisted the idea of God creating a new people from Moses’ seed. This showed tremendous humility on Moses’ part. Think about it. It would be pretty heady stuff to think that God found you worthy enough to be the father of a new race of called out people! But Moses did not want that. Instead, he appealed to God’s faithfulness by asking God to remember his covenant promises made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Consequently, Moses was successful in getting God to change his mind precisely because God is faithful to those whom he calls. Moses simply reminded God to be the God that Moses knew, a God who is faithful, merciful, and kind. Moses could not have prayed like this or known God to possess these attributes (and a whole lot more) had Moses not had a real and living relationship with God. It was not Moses’ eloquence that changed God’s mind. It was Moses’ appeal to God to be the God Moses knew so intimately so that others could see and come to know his God in the way Moses did. By definition this is what God calls his people to do and God will always answer prayers like that!

Surely this is the kind of praying that Paul had in mind when he told the Philippians not to worry about anything but to bring everything to God in prayer so that they could enjoy God’s peace. We enjoy God’s peace when we pray to him and ask that his will be done and that his Name be glorified, not ours. This, of course, takes great faith, humility, and maturity on our part.

So what can we learn from this story? First, like Moses and Paul, we need to be doing the things necessary for us to get to know the character and heart of God so that we can learn to trust and depend on him in any circumstance. We do this best by learning the story of God’s rescue plan for sinful humanity that is contained in the Bible so that we can better understand how God deals with his people and what he wants from us. Too often we make our relationship with God about us rather than God and think that having an intimate relationship with God will make us immune from the hurts and heartaches of this life. But when we learn the overall story of God’s rescue plan, we immediately realize that being God’s people does not make us immune from suffering. We have to look no further than the cross of Jesus to understand that.

Rather, as we study God’s word, we learn what humility and faith look like and what we are called to do and be as God’s people so that we can bring God honor and glory, just like Moses did. As we do, we also learn that we can and should bring our prayers to God, that nothing is too small or unimportant for God. If it is important to us, it is important to God and we had best be talking to God about that in prayer (and listening to what he has to say to us).

As with any habit, as we learn to bring our cares, concerns, praise, and thanksgiving to God, our prayer life gets easier because we discover that God delivers. And aided by our Bible study we learn to better recognize and understand the mind of God, at least as best we can as mere humans. This, in turn, makes it easier for us to see God’s hand in our lives and the lives of others. And as we grow in grace and knowledge of God, we also discover that it is easier to give thanks to God in all circumstances because we have learned to trust God’s good and perfect will for us. When that happens, we discover that we’ve learned real humility and in the process gained true peace.

This, in turn, will help further reduce our fears and anxiety. It will also help us make sense of troubling stories like we find in Jesus’ parable today because we realize that while God loves each of us as we are and will meet us where we are, he cannot leave us that way, precisely because he does love us and wants us to grow in the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love in ways like we have just been talking about. The person in Jesus’ parable who was thrown into the outer darkness apparently did not want to play by those rules. He apparently was content to wallow in his sin and we could expect that his prayers (or lack of them) reflected that fact.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. God shows us how to not only survive in the wilderness but how to overcome it. It starts with developing a real relationship with God in Christ so that we can learn to trust God’s character and his ability to be there for us when our lives blow up. This means we have to work at developing a robust prayer life that accompanies our ongoing study of God’s word in Scripture. This, in turn, allows us to be open to his Spirit and guidance in our lives so that God can use us to be the people he calls us to be. None of this is easy but it is the only way that we will ever find true meaning and peace in our lives. And when, by God’s grace, we experience this truth, we know that we really do have Good News, now and for all eternity.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.