Exodus 23

God has put His thumbprint on The Promised Land. In that place that He gave to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, He expects that His Law will be followed. That means that it will not be a place of religious pluralism, though sojourners will be cared for. It will not be a land where they will be able to sacrifice to other gods, but it is a place where they can expect to receive help in their various situations of distress.

The Lord's directives for His people in The Land are not just about spiritual practices that are prohibited. There is a public morality, a way of justice and mercy, that God demands. In that land it will never be right to spread a false report in order to defraud a weak individual or a despised minority group of their possessions. The Promised Land is a place of truth.

The Promised Land is also a place where the lost are found. In that land you do what is right even for a man who hates you. You look out for his property, not to secretly steal it, but to return it to him intact.

In Israel, the poor receive a just verdict. You don't have to be able to pay in order get a judge to do the right thing. The God of Israel hates injustice. It is a land where even a foreigner must not be oppressed.

In Israel, time is marked by God's calendar. Living by His time requires faith. You need to enter into His blessing, and let your fields rest in the seventh year.

In God's time, there are also seven days in every week. Six are for work, and the seventh is a day of rest for you and for all who are in your charge, even your animals.

In God's time, there is never a special day for calling upon the name of other gods. There are festivals where all gather in the Name of the Lord. There is a week of Unleavened Bread at the time of the Passover when the Lord brought His people out of Egypt. There is a Feast of Harvest, when you bring forth some of the fruits of your labor to the Lord of the Harvest. At the end of the harvest time there is a great feast of Ingathering where you celebrate before the Lord the great fruitfulness of His provision. These are great feasts for the people of the Land. All the men need to appear before the Lord God on these special days.

There will be other feasts in the nations all around Israel, but the children of God are not to bring the ways of those nations into The Promised Land. They use leaven. That is not for Israel. They let the fat of their offerings remain until the next morning. That is not in accord with the Lord's Law. They keep the first and best of their produce for themselves. Israel must not do this. Israel must have faith in God. Other people undertake all kinds of ceremonies that they imagine to be their safety and help. Israel has a God who has established a different way of worship and life for His people.

God will send an angel, a Messenger from heaven, to protect Israel on their way to The Promised Land. They need to hear His voice. They need to follow Him. Who is this great Messenger of the Lord? Certainly the Lord would send prophets, and the Commander of the Lord's Army would appear to Joshua. But who is the Angel of the Lord, so closely associated with God Himself? We do know that when Jesus came, a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” He is the final Messenger of the Lord. Any earlier messenger prepared the way for Him. Any later messengers are His ambassadors.

Israel was to hear the voice of the Messiah in any of those earlier messengers that the Lord granted to them. They needed to carefully obey Him. That was the only way of safety and life in the Lord's covenant community. It was the way of faith; believing in the voice of the Son of God.

When Israel considered what it would be like to be led by the Lord's Messenger into The Promised Land, they needed to resist two powerful temptations. They needed to reject the religion and morality of the people who were in the land before them, and they needed to forget about their own former practices that came from their contact with others, whether the Egyptians to the south, or the Syrians that were their distant ancestors.

There could be no continued presence of Canaanite religion or ethics in Israel. Their holy places needed to be destroyed. The Lord Himself was casting them out of this land. He would not tolerate His people following the practices of foreign worship or imitating their ways of life. Israel was to be different. If they would follow Him in the Land, He committed Himself to great blessings for the nation; blessings of bread and water, future generations and healing, long life and security.

The true Messenger of the Lord has won all of these blessings for us. He has the best and most secure Promised Land reserved for us in the heavens. There we will have food and friendship beyond anything that we experience in our lives now. Our healing of body and soul will be complete, and we will live forever with the Lord and His people in the safety of God's eternal kingdom.

Jesus has placed more than His thumbprint upon His kingdom in heaven. The indelible mark of His wounds have claimed for us the new heavens and earth. All of what Israel could have been here below was only a shadow of what God has now for His chosen people in Christ.