Well turn with me if you will to Numbers are not numbers Joshua chapter 13 And I want to continue with you on this study that we've been doing in Joshua 13 Judges 13 research Judges 13 on on the birth of Samuel and particularly, I'll just remind you, this isn't really about the birth of Samuel. It's really about the revelation of the second person of the Trinity. And once again, the revelation of the second person of the Trinity is the revelation of redemption and it is the revelation of the Trinity. It is the revelation of God. This is God's way of breaking through the sinful human heart and revealing Himself. The dilemma, if you will, of God's revelation to man is his immensity as opposed to our creatureliness and our finiteness. That's the first dilemma. The second dilemma, as if he has tied the other hand behind his back, is human sin. human sin, atavistic human sin, that is, human sin that is passed on from generation to generation. The federal headship of sin, the imputation of sin, the guilt of sin that we're born with throws another veil between us and God. In many ways, this is the picture that you see of the tabernacle, the construction of the tabernacle. where in the tabernacle you have various stages in the tabernacle. But in the tabernacle proper, the internal part of the tabernacle, there is a place where men may go, the right men. They have to be made holy in order to go there. And then there is a place where men may not go except for one man, a representative of Christ, one time a year, that most holy place, the Holy of Holies. But between those two places, the place that shuts God out from man, you have a veil. And this veil is made of many curtains. These curtains are layered, one on top of the other. It's said that the curtain in the temple was so heavy that a couple of priests had to actually hoist it up while the high priest crawled underneath it. And so it gives you an idea of the separation between God and man here. And the separation is multifarious. It's multifarious. And so the picture of the The veil tearing from the top down is a picture of the revelation of God through all of this. In other words, he has torn through. He has revealed himself and shoved aside all of those inhibitions or as it were all of those barriers that seem to be unable to be overcome and so forth. And we have pictures of some of these barriers throughout the Old Testament. I love the story of Daniel in the lion's den because Daniel in the lion's den is a picture of the greatest of all of these veils, which is basically the dilemma of God's mercy working with His justice. and the inability of man to be able to have mercy because of his justice. His justice is irreversible. Therefore, he is unable to have mercy when he wants to. God, His laws are also irreversible. And because they are irreversible, He will by no means clear the wicked, as He says. Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin. Therefore, how does he have mercy on men? How does he show grace to men? And he does that by transferring the sin or imputing the sin, as it were, of the sinners to a worthy and a qualified substitute. which is Jesus, a mediator. And we've talked about that to some degree. Well, maybe I didn't talk about that here. I talked about it at a Wednesday night prayer meeting, about the mediation of God. You know, whenever you run into this term in the Old Testament, and God repented or relented, it may be in a translation, it doesn't mean that God changes His mind. God cannot change His mind. And in the sense that we repent, God cannot repent. And the Bible makes that very clear in another place, I believe it's in 2 Samuel, that God by no means can repent. He cannot change his mind. His mind is fixed. Just like the Persian law, actually even more surely than the Persian law, because the Persian law was irreversible based upon the existence of the Persian empire, which stopped existing after a while, which meant that all of their laws were no longer irreversible. That would be the only way they could get out of the dilemma of throwing Daniel to the lions, would be basically to dissolve the Persian Empire. Or there was one other way that didn't occur to Darius, and that was for him to throw himself into the lions. And that just didn't cross his mind. Darius just didn't think about that. Hey, I can throw myself to the lions instead of Daniel. He'd be free. That's a great idea. I think I'll do that. But as much as he loved Daniel, he didn't love him that much. And so God has, as we say, found a way, not that he ever had a problem with this. This was something that he always knew. Redemption was always fixed and known all the way from the beginning of the world because the thing that he's going to do is he's going to blast open the glory of this grace to man when he tears that veil from the top to the bottom. And the picture there is of him grabbing the veil from his place, which is up, and tearing it down. And we're told in Scripture, very plainly, it tore from the top to the bottom. So, therefore, God is taking that veil and he's tearing it aside and he's saying, now this is the revelation, the full revelation of the glory. And so, this is the program that God is involved in, in revealing grace and redemption to us. And to do that, he reveals the person, the person that is going to take the sin of his people. And the person must also be unfolded in Scripture. Let me just pause for a minute to say this before we get into the angel of the Lord. It is necessary for this to take place. Way too much hermeneutic, and I put the clause on that one because it's not true hermeneutic. There's way too much hermeneutic today that basically starts with the New Testament or begins to deal with certain vignettes of Scripture within the New Testament. The verse, it was a great program the verse, you know, putting verses in the Bible, putting numbers by them. It helps you find things, okay? That's what the verses are there for. The verses are there so that you can have reference, so that you can say things like John 3, 16, okay? That's why we have verses in the Bible. That's the only reason why we have verses in the Bible. We don't have verses in the Bible because they are complete thoughts that say everything about a doctrine. That's not what they're there for. The Bible is written as a book in a context, and we are to interpret it as a book in a context. Not just where we are, you know, in a certain place. John 3.16 doesn't stand on its own. John 3.16 is tied first of all into a paragraph, and that paragraph is tied into the book itself. And the book is divided in many ways into thematic paragraphs and so forth as you go along. It's really helpful to have a Bible that divides up Scripture in this way so that you don't go, you know, through life versing and building your beliefs on verses and on little vignettes of Scripture. If you don't divide the Word of God properly, then you're going to go through life with this little spotlight of understanding in the scripture with these long, dark passages between that are inexplicable. So you'll be reading the book of Genesis, Genesis to Revelation, and as you're reading, things will come on and then they'll go off and then they'll come on and they'll go off and they'll come on and they'll go off and you'll be in and out and in and out and in and out. The way you need to be able to read the Bible or need to be developing the way to read the Bible is to be able to read it as a continuum all the way through with a certain degree of understanding because you do know what the theme is. You know where it's going. And that's a lot of what we're talking about here. A lot of what we're talking about here is the unfolding of redemption, which is the theme. That's the theme, okay? The unfolding and the revelation of redemption. It is a fascinating thing. It's something that you can spend your entire life working on and never exhaust it, I promise you. It is food for life. Why do I say these things? Because the revelation is in the book. It's in the book. And this is the way it's revealed and that's in the book. And it must be unfolded to us bit by bit. It must be unfolded for us over a period of time. In a sense, we have to go back as we're reading the Old Testament and walk through the history of Israel and the history of the world basically through the Old Testament with these people who did so that the Holy Spirit can like as if we were in a museum be our tour guide and show us these things that have taken place in the past and how they've been unfolded in order that we may know the roots behind the things that we believe in, right? We believe that today is the Sabbath day and that this is the Lord's day and that it has been consecrated and made holy by God. Well, how do we know that? We believe that this church and all churches You know, are the New Jerusalem, they are the place where God has put His name? How do we know that? Is there a verse in the New Testament that says it? And sometimes there sort of is, and sometimes there sort of isn't. But God doesn't teach us by giving us a verse. He teaches us by unfolding these things to us in Christ throughout the Scripture. So, it's very important for us to understand Scripture, that is to be in a progress of understanding Scripture. The roots of our Lord's day goes all the way back to the beginning of the Revelation. And we don't look at it as a, you know, we don't look at it as a propositional proof text in some kind of scientific method. We look at it as a plant that's been growing for 6,000 years and whose branches and leaves and fruit are obvious to us. Okay? You don't have to see the tap roots of a tree in order to know whether it's alive. And we know these things that we know, the things that we confess. We know these things to be true because of the unfolding revelation that's been going on throughout Scripture. Even Jesus must be unfolded to us. It would be a handy thing, I suppose, to some people's understanding if Jesus had been born two generations after Adam. You know, like Adam has a daughter and she gives a virgin birth to Jesus. Okay, boom, right off the bat. Redemption, salvation is there and everything. Would it be a factual? Of course it would be a factual. But would it be known and revealed? No. It would be a total mystery. Nobody would have any idea what was going on. You can see that when you look at how the men thought and how they spoke and so forth in the Old Testament, you can see this struggling with understanding that they had. It is because of our finiteness and it is because of our sin that we are unable to understand these things unless God in His great wisdom and by the power of the Holy Spirit unfolds them to us from the seed to the plant, to the leaves, to the fruit, and to its full culmination. And so that's what's going on here. The angel of the Lord is revealed early in Scripture, very early in Scripture, actually in the book of Genesis, and in a very unusual place. The first reference to the angel of the Lord is made when Hagar is in the desert And she is with child, Ishmael, and she's probably just going to wander off or maybe die out there in the desert or something. We don't know, but the angel of the Lord comes to her and talks to her. Now, that's kind of odd because we don't see the angel of the Lord revealed at any time before that. He comes to Hagar and says to Hagar that you're going to have a child. And the child's going to be named Ishmael. So, the first revelation of the angel of the Lord is in the announcement of a child and the naming of the child, which means he's basically claiming the child. The child is there for his purposes. You have to ask the question, why Hagar? Why Ishmael? What's so important about Hagar and Ishmael? Well, what's important about Hagar and Ishmael, there are a lot of things important about Hagar and Ishmael, and Paul brings some of those out in Galatians, but I'm not going to go into that. But the main thing here is that the angel of the Lord, who is the second person of the Trinity, shows up to give announcement of a child who's going to be born. That's it. That's what's important about it. The important thing is that he ties himself to the announcement of a child, a child to be born. Now, this isn't even a huge miracle because the child is already in the womb at the time. It's not a child that hasn't even been conceived yet. The child's already in the womb. He just simply says, you're going to have a boy. Now, that may be pretty good, right? They didn't have sonograms back in those days. So, you know, at least he got that much right there. It's going to be a boy named Ishmael. And then he goes on and he says, and these things are going to happen with him. He's going to grow up and he's going to be an archer and he's going to wander around in the desert and every man's hand is going to be against him and all these kinds of things. He's just simply giving, telling him about this child. Now, the child is important to a certain degree because he is the son of Abraham. And as the son of Abraham, he is one of those many nations that are going to come out of Abraham. And so that's how he opens up. That's how the angel of the Lord opens up. Almost like he's in Bethlehem in a manger. He's acting as an angel. Any angel could have done that. It didn't take the second person of the Trinity coming down. Some people say this isn't the second person. I believe it is because the Bible doesn't really make distinctions in that name. And from that time on, there's a continuum of the angel of the Lord going on. So, you know, angels show up here and there, but the angel of the Lord is the second person. And just because he doesn't receive worship or just because he doesn't do fantastic things or make his own decrees or any of those kind of things doesn't mean he's not the angel of the Lord. No, he shows up humbly doing the work of an angel, simply a messenger. And from that point on, he's going to be more identifiable. Now, when Hagar goes back, you know, I'm sure she probably sat down and had a conversation with Abraham somewhere down the line and said, an angel of the Lord, or whatever she called him, came and told me this, that, and the other thing. And Abraham thinks about it. He's going to mull that over for a while. I wonder who this person was and what association this person had with her. And that may have been the point, too. Abraham may very well have gone, now why would he go and tell her about, you know, these things? Why wouldn't he wait and tell me? What's the association with him and this woman? What's the association with him and this child? And all of these kind of things. And he may not have ever come to an answer to that thing. It needed more revelation. And so he had to wait. He had to wait for more He had to wait for more revelation to take place. That's a hard thing for us to do. Wait. To wait. Especially in the age that we live in. Heresies come about because men feel like they have to tie up all the loose ends. They just cannot stand to have an inexplicable proposition. It has to be understandable. And so when they tie up the loose ends, they form a heresy because they have subjected revelation to reason instead of the reverse. And, you know, we see throughout the Old Testament, we see, you know, men who just have to suspend judgment. God has showed them some things. They meditate on these things day and night, as David says in Psalm chapter 1, and they don't get the answer. And maybe they don't get it in their entire lifetime. And maybe they just have to be resigned that it's going to have to be opened up further to another generation to come. Can we do that? Can you do that? We've got full revelation. We have no idea what that's like. Okay? I mean, it's right there. If you want it, you can have it by the power of the Holy Spirit right there in front of you. Motels all over the country have got the full revelation in them, stamped Gideon, okay? It's everywhere, but these people had to wait. You look at the life of Abraham and one of the amazing things about him is not, it's always amazing that God shows up and shows himself to him. What's really amazing is how much time goes by between those times that God shows up. Can you imagine having to live on the reading and expounding of the Word of God once every 25 years. That means you're going to have to be spending a lot of time meditating on what you've got. You're going to have to chew and chew and chew and chew and chew on those little bits that you've been given and get every bit of juice out of them. And I believe that there were men back in those days that were doing just exactly that, which is how God was preparing them in their generations to be able to pin the next generation of Revelation in His preparation of them with what they had. And it's pretty amazing how profound they could be with what God had given them. The Holy Spirit was able to open up a huge amount of things to them in these little seeds. These little seeds that He gave them and these little saplings that we see throughout the Old Testament. From the time of Hagar on, the angel of the Lord begins to make further appearances. He appears to Abraham. And then we've already seen where he appears to Moses. He appears time and time again. And each one of these times that he appears, he reveals something a little bit more about himself. And each time he makes these appearances, men begin to, that is, his elect, those who are being taught by the Holy Spirit, begin to have more material for growth, more material for wisdom, more material for walking holy before the Lord and serving Him. Because this works for them sanctifyingly in the same way that it does for us. More and more he begins to reveal himself as the angel of the Lord to them. And as he does, he begins to focus in to a certain theme. And he wants them to put their finger on this theme, to bookmark it, and to chew on it for a long, long time. And that theme is what he really reveals to Moses. We talked about a couple of weeks ago is what he really reveals to Moses in the burning bush. And that is him in the fire. God in the fire. there's a voice that's coming out of this fire. In other words, you know, men were mythopoeic back in these days, so everything was kind of symbolic to them. Persons, events, words, symbols, this was very important in their thinking. God knew that and he understood that. Israelites were no different. Moses was that way. He had come up in the Egyptian courts, highly symbolic Egyptian religion. He had been exposed to for a long time. These things had effects on them. This is one of the things that God does when he reveals to us or when he reveals, this is one of the things he did to them when he inspired them, is that he prepared these people who were going to write as if they were pens, his pens. Now, you know, you take a pen. Well, let's say you're 200 years ago. You take a pen or you take a feather or something like that and you carve on that thing until it's just right for the kind of writing that you're going to do and prepare your ink and everything like that. Well, in making a man to write scripture, he does just that. He prepares the man as if he's a pen and then writes with him. And he uses everything that's in that man. He uses that man's mind. He uses his body. He uses the cultural background that he's familiar with. The local color that he knows. His linguistic skills. All of these kind of things. He takes all of these and puts them together. And then the Holy Spirit comes upon him and he writes Scripture. It isn't dictation. It's an organic progress. But God is totally in control of it. He's completely in control of it. You know, God could have just dropped books on us like, you know, the angel Moroni. given us leaves of gold or something like that so that we can try to translate them out and do that kind of thing. No, he uses men to do this. He uses men to do it. And he uses them in this way. He has them situated in history. He has them situated in time and space. And that's very important to understanding how we come to understand this because in this sense, God has condescended and come down to us so that he can speak to us with our own language. But is he under our language? Is he under our culture? Is he under all of our understanding and reason? No. He's using it. And if necessary, he even transforms it. to be a matrix for His revelation. We've seen this in history time and time again, where God actually changes a language to make that language fit for His Word. This is the way missionaries need to be doing missions, by the way. Instead of bringing the missions underneath the native culture where it has no ability to really express God's Word, Those on the mission field need to be lifted up to the place to where they can begin to get the full impact of His Word. Otherwise, you're going to corrupt His Word by doing it. And this has been a bad switch in missions over the last hundred years is becoming cross-cultural rather than lifting up the missions to God in former times. The German language? The Latin language, the English language, the Greek language were transformed. And they were transformed by His Word. By His Word. Human thought in the medieval ages was transformed by His Word. The culture was completely transformed in order to make it fit for His revelation. The whole culture. God's Word, His revelation is incredibly powerful. It just knocks out all the nonsense, expands the mind so that men can take these things in. You know, if you've got a language that only has six consonantal characters and 50 words that you have to inflect by doing various gestures and things, your thinking is going to be about that narrow. And human thinking has a tendency to just narrow in and narrow in and narrow in until it becomes almost animal. But what God's Word does is it begins to expand the barriers. It gives you more vocabulary words and more letters in your alphabet. And then it begins to add those into your mind and begins to push the barriers of the mind further and further out. until you begin to comprehend more and more of the glories of His Word. And it doesn't just do that in the individual mind. See, this is the neat thing about it. If it just did that in the individual mind, there would be a limit and it would stop. But it doesn't do that. It spreads on into other minds and begins to bond those minds together and expand out the tent pegs even further and further and further. There is no limit to the transforming power of the Revelation. That's why He shows it to us in an unfolding manner. He shows it to us in an unfolding manner to show us that it is a progress that goes on and on and on and on. People talk about God being trapped in this box called the book. Nowadays, you know, you can't limit God to a book. Well, God can limit Himself to the book, as it were, But you open that book and you begin to read with humility and the Holy Spirit comes upon you and you'll find out He's not trapped. He's not trapped in this book. He's not a genie in a lamp. Once you begin to get into the Word, then He begins to break barriers all over the place. I mean, what's your alternative? To trap Him in the human mind? How about the human heart? Oh, those are really good boxes to put God in. If God's going to put Himself in a box, as it were, this is the best kind of box for Him to put Himself in. Because when you open this box, you let Him loose, as it were, by the power of the Holy Spirit. And when that happens, the world changes. The whole world changes. You put Him in this box right here, and nothing changes. Nothing changes at all. For one thing, He's not there. What you've done is you've made up a god and put him in the box. So he is not subject in any way to human understanding. He is not subject in any way to human culture. But he uses these things in order to make these revelations to us. We could go back and talk about Gideon. I've skipped over Gideon and I'm not going to go back to Gideon either because Gideon is the angel of the Lord showing himself in a very similar way to the way he shows himself in Judges 13 to Manoah and his wife, and that is he shows himself in the fire or in the sacrifice. In the revelation to Moses, he basically is showing himself as fire and as a voice in the fire. the Word of God. Now, Moses looks at that and he thinks about that over time. I mean, he's 40 years in the wilderness. He's got lots of time, you know, between rebellions of the Israelites wanting to go back into the land again. He's got plenty of time to think about things and contemplate what he's seen and what he's heard so far. He must have gone back to the burning bush from time to time and thought, what did all that mean? The angel of the Lord comes to me in the burning bush and reveals himself in a burning bush in fire and as a voice. And he's maybe going to think about the Word, the angel of the Lord as the Word and in fire. And what fire means, and I'm sure that he understands fire is symbolic of God's wrath and His justice. And so what's God doing in the wrath? What's God, what's His Word doing in there? And these are things he's going to mull over for a while, and then the next generation, and the next generation is going to mull over that as well, wondering about these things. Gideon sees the angel of the Lord in the fire too, or he sees Him in relation to the sacrifice. But it really comes out more clearly here. Now we got to the revelation of where basically God has come to or the angel of the Lord has come to the wife of Manoah and we talked about how The fact that we don't know her name probably is pointing us towards the seed of the woman. We don't need to know her name here because her name is symbolic of the woman who gives birth to the seed. The seed who will crush Satan's head. And so he's given the instructions to make Samson a Nazarite and then gone on. And then Manoah wants him to come back. prays and asks that he would come back. And God listens to the voice of Manoah, and the angel of God came back to the woman, and then the woman made haste and ran and showed her husband. He came and began to talk to the man and asked for instructions, which I think was just a pretext, because he really wants to get to know the angel of the Lord. And we see he's kind of rash in some ways in the way that he deals with this, but he is curious and he wants to know. He wants to know God. He wants to know Him better. But he asked for instructions and no further instructions are given. This reminds me of Jesus, why Jesus comes into the world. Did Jesus come into the world to give further instructions? Did Jesus come into the world to change anything that had already been told before? And he makes it very clear in Matthew 5 that that's not his reason for coming into the world. He didn't come into the world to change anything. There are no new instructions as it were. The old instructions are still there on you. That is to say the law and the commandments are still there upon you. Now further revelation has to be made to clarify those things and bring them into redemption. But there aren't any new moral laws to be brought in and no moral laws to be taken away. So when the Pharisees stand before Jesus and in a sense they are asking the same question, what further instructions do you have or what comes out of the old instructions or how does this change things and all this kind of stuff, Jesus isn't going to say to them, to the Pharisees or to his disciples or to anybody in the world, you know, I've come in to bring in a whole new order and to become radical. I've come here to give the same things that were already delivered. and fill them back up to the fullness again. It's you that has emptied the law out. I've come here to fulfill it. That is to fill it full. Get it back up to the brim again. That's the purpose of my being here. Not to change anything. And so the angel of the Lord is talking to Manoah and he says, save instructions. Exactly what I told her. Nothing's changed. There isn't anything to add. I know you're the man of the house. Probably feeling a little bit slighted because I told her and didn't tell you, but sorry, that's the way it is. The instructions are the instructions. There you are. So Minoa begins to, I guess you could say, tempt him to stick around so that maybe he can pull some more information out of him. You know, who are you? What's your name? Where'd you come from? All of these kind of things. Take me to your leader. Verse 15, and Manoah said unto the angel of the Lord, I pray thee, let us detain thee. In other words, let's sort of hold on to you. Don't fly off, alright? Hang out for a little while, okay? We shall have made ready a kid for thee. I'll give you a meal. Just hang around, we'll fix you some food. And the angel of the Lord said unto Manoah, though you detain me, and he doesn't say he won't allow that, Okay, fine. I'll hang out a while. Though you detain me, I will not eat your bread. And if you will offer a burnt offering, you must offer it unto the Lord." Now notice what he does. He says to him, you can't feed me. But you can offer a burnt offering for your sin to God. In other words, he's basically saying to Manoah, you can't tempt me with a meal. And you can't tempt me with anything. You can't offer me something for me to stay. You can't offer me something that's going to move me against my purposes. In other words, detain me, fine. If you want me to stay, I'll stay. I'll stay because it's my will to stay. But there isn't anything that you're showing me or anything you're offering to me that's really doing that. Don't worry about trying to buy me off. Make an offering for your sin. You're the one who owes, not me. You're the one who will owe, not me, or not God. Now at this point, we have to say this about the angel of the Lord. What Manoah is beginning to understand, and what his wife's probably already ahead of him on, And that is that this guy may be God, okay? But if he is, he's not the same God, or he may be the same God, but he's not the same person, or he's somehow distinct, different in a way from the one up there. Because he's from him, And he's here, and he's there, and so there's a two-ness going on here. And we don't quite understand how this is working out, but this is what we're starting to see. We're starting to see that there is something about God that's not as one as we thought it was. And I'm just trying to think kind of like there's some kind of plurality about God. And by the time we get to the end of this chapter, they're going to see that fully. It comes out fully by the end of the chapter because they know by the end of the chapter that the angel of the Lord is God. They also know this. He's God, but he's from God. Therefore, He's God and then there's God. And it's going to be kind of, I don't think there's any way that they're going to work this out in their life. Obviously, this knowledge becomes corrupted because when we, you know, last week we opened up by reading what happened subsequently in the tribe of Dan. This is the tribe of Dan. We go through Samson and so on and towards the end. And we find Dan running around the countryside trying to find a place to live and they can't find one. And what's going on? This revelation of two persons shows up in the idolatry of Israel. The graven image and the molten image. And so there's this understanding that they have of the two-ness. The two-ness and the oneness. The Holy Spirit has not been properly revealed yet, but there is this plurality to the oneness of God. So you see how they're struggling with this and wrestling with this and corrupting it and making it a part of their own religion. Their minds, they're subjecting it to their minds and they're beginning to back away from this pure revelation. So when we get back together next week, what I really want to dive into in this chapter is the sacrifice itself, because the angel of the Lord is actually going to get in the sacrifice in this chapter. And that's going to reveal something even more profound to them. So, we'll take up there next week.