Exodus, chapter eight, starting at verse 20. And this is in the middle of Moses' struggle with the king of Egypt, the pharaoh, to allow the people of Israel to be free from slavery and from the suffering, terrible suffering that he had imposed upon them. Today I suppose we'd call it almost semi-genocide, slaughtering of tens of thousands of babies and infants just because they were Hebrews. So page 98, bottom, verse 20. Then the Lord said to Moses, get up early in the morning and confront Pharaoh as he goes to the water and say to him, this is what the Lord says. Let my people go so that they may worship me. If you do not let my people go, I will send swarms of flies on you and your officials on your people and into your houses. The houses of the Egyptians will be full of flies and even the ground where they are. But on that day, I will deal differently with the land of Goshen where my people live. No swarms of flies will be there. so that you will know that I, the Lord, am in this land. I'll make a distinction between my people and your people. This miraculous sign will occur tomorrow." And the Lord did this. Dense swarms of flies poured into Pharaoh's palace and into the houses of his officials. And throughout Egypt, the land was ruined by flies. Then Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron and said, go sacrifice to your God here in the land. But Moses said, that would not be right. Sacrifices we offer the Lord our God will be detestable to the Egyptians. And if we offer sacrifices that are detestable in their eyes, will they not stone us? We must take a three-day journey into the desert to offer sacrifices to the Lord our God as he commands us. Pharaoh said, I will let you go to offer sacrifices to the Lord your God in the desert, but you must not go very far. Now pray for me. Okay, let's now pray as we look into the Word of God. Father, we thank you that these words were written for us upon whom the end of the ages has come. We thank you, Lord, that since Christ rose from the dead and ascended to heaven, we are in the very last period in the history of the universe. And we know, Lord, that all that's happened in the history of the Hebrew people was written for our encouragement, correction, rebuking, and training. And we pray, Lord, that each one tonight will hear something from you. And we pray, Lord, that you will lead some to turn to you, and, Lord, others of us to be encouraged and strengthened in our walk with you. In Jesus's name, amen. Now, I've called this sermon, Before Brexit, The Original Exit, because, of course, The great exit for Israel was their delivery from slavery. Now, in fact, I started working on this sermon long before I made any connection at all with Brexit, actually. That was a thing that came later. Sometimes preachers strain to make some kind of contemporary reference, and I'm not actually making any references to politics in this sermon. In fact, we're told in our 1 Corinthians chapter 10, I can read the verses, you can look it up if you want to, but I've already referred to it in praying to the Lord. Paul says, I don't want you to be unaware brethren that our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea and all ate the same spiritual food and all drank the same spiritual drink for they were drinking from a spiritual rock which followed them and the rock was Christ. Now these things happened to them as an example and they are written for our instruction upon whom the end of the ages have come. And so we see that these Old Testament events do overshadow us in our contemporary times, do tell us something about Christian life. The infinitely wise God whom we serve saw fit to not only supervise the deliverance of Israel, but also to do it in a way which would instruct us in the basics of the Christian life. And in fact, the story of the Exodus is a great picture of the Christian life. It's a great picture of the fact that God loves those who are suffering. God doesn't wish anybody to perish. He doesn't wish anybody to go to hell. He doesn't wish anybody to go through mental torments and afflictions that unfortunately So many of us, so many billions of people have gone through in this world and unfortunately will go through forever unless they turn to Jesus. But we're told in the story of Exodus God hears the suffering and he comes down to do something and of course that foreshadows the wonderful intervention of history of when God sent Jesus into this world and has transformed the whole spiritual situation so that we could be saved. Exodus also of course shows us the deliverance, the actual deliverance of the people from Pharaoh and then it shows us the ups and downs of their life with God and indeed not only during their wilderness wanderings but as They're in the promised land after Moses had died. We see the great struggle for a thousand years really. A thousand years of struggle of the to and fro of the forces of evil and the forces of the Holy Spirit within the people. Just as we might say, as Henry has been preaching about for the last five or six weeks, Romans chapter six, we see the the great issues of the human heart and its tendency towards evil and its tendency towards being mastered by evil in the history of the people of Israel. So basically, the Exodus story is part of that great salvation story that's in the Old Testament, is relevant to us today. Now let's remind ourselves just of the background to this again. The people of Israel had to come to Egypt during a famine 400 or so years before this. They'd settled in Egypt. They were immigrants and had settled there and were very happy at first, I think, in their settlement, because the original kings of Egypt that had invited them in were themselves immigrants. They were conquerors. They were called the Hyksos kings, who had invaded Egypt not even a century before Moses, before Joseph, I mean. And basically, these Hyksos kings were very friendly to the Hebrews and Joseph became equivalent of the Prime Minister of Egypt and when the rest of the Hebrew brethren came down during a time of famine to Egypt, they prospered and were given great success. However, the Hyksos kings were eventually kicked out and we know that the ancient Egyptians, the actual native Egyptian population rose up against Hyksos, kicked them out, massacred them, tore down all of their memories of them, effaced all the monuments that made reference to them, and then enslaved the Hebrew people. And the Hebrews' slavery was harsh, but it was made worse and worse until it reached the point where there was really, I mean, almost genocide against them. a well-known story, which we tell to children. It becomes quite a thing in the Sunday school curriculum, doesn't it? The story of Moses in the reeds and all this kind of stuff. But actually, it's really horrific. It takes its place alongside Auschwitz and the concentration camps, the mass murders of Genghis Khan, and the tremendous horrors of this world, where little children are picked out to be drowned and killed by the thousand. The harshness, the evil of the oppression of the people of Israel was terrible. And so we have then the story of the exodus where Moses who as a young man had been brought up as an Egyptian noble, nobleman, was forced to flee from Egypt in trying to defend one of his countrymen who was a slave. He was, of course, a rich, educated noble man. He defended a slave and killed an Egyptian slave driver. He escapes outside the borders of Egypt and then later returns in the direction of God to lead the people to safety. Now, we can't go into all these tremendous events of the Exodus. And what I'm concentrating on actually is simply the words of an arch politician, the Pharaoh, who used these weasel words to try to get his own way as God was sending judgment upon judgment upon Egypt for its terrible sins. When Moses says to the king, you know, God wants these people to go and sacrifice in the desert. And Pharaoh says, verse 28, I will let you go to offer sacrifices to the Lord your God in the desert, but you must not go very far. Now pray for me. Now, these are the words, as I've said, of an arch politician who wants everything possible to get a compromise so that the people will not leave his control. Yes, you can go, but don't go very far. Now, I don't think these words are here by accident, or these events are here by accident. I think this is giving us an understanding of the way Satan, the world, and the flesh works in the hearts of individuals before they become Christians and after they become Christians, in seeking to prevent people leaving the land of sin and getting into the land of promise. In other words, the world, the flesh and the devil will always try to say to a person, don't go too far, don't get too extreme, don't be too committed, don't, you know, just far enough so that you can be with the Lord, but don't actually go too far away from me. Now, I want to apply this directly to anybody here who hasn't yet become a Christian. Well, maybe you think you're a Christian, but actually you're still in the hands of Satan. You must not go very far, Pharaoh said. The devil says. Likewise, to the non-Christian, don't go very far from me. You see, if you aren't a Christian yet, if you haven't believed in Jesus Christ and trusted him, you're not a neutral, you are in the hands of a slave driver and you may not realize it. Jesus said, if you're not for me, you're against me. If you haven't got Jesus in your life, then the devil controls your life. Jesus gave an example of people not going too far with the Lord. He talks about the four kinds of soil and the response of people to the four kinds of soil. He says that there was hard ground and the seed couldn't get into the hard ground because the hard ground was such that people would forget even what was said to them. Now, there's a superficiality, isn't there, amongst many people when they hear the Bible and the Word of God. And the result is that people will not hear, actually I'm not sure that's going to help because I think it's a bit of asthma actually. Thank you. Someone's got an asthma pump with them. Yeah, if you could give me one because it's a spot of asthma rather than something caught in my throat. Now the thing is this, is that the devil can take away even what people hear. I mean, maybe even as I was speaking that you were thinking about what I was saying and then you, you know, your attention is caught by the fact the preacher's just, you know, had a puff of an asthma puff. And the devil can even use something minor like that to prevent people actually taking on board what God is saying to them. Are you hard ground? There's an expression that I think Caribbean people use because Arlene uses it all the time. She says, he's got hard ears. He's got hard ears. You've heard that too, have you Nigel? Yeah. And you know the Bible tells us that often there are people that are stubborn with hard ears and in fact in the case of Pharaoh we're told that he constantly hardened his heart. He would begin with be convinced by Moses' arguments because Moses was trying to prevent suffering for the Egyptian people. Moses didn't rejoice in the destruction that came upon Egypt And after each play, he came to Pharaoh imploring him to accept the message. And yet, all of the same, there was this superficiality. There was this hardness in Pharaoh that he would firstly be moved one way, he would get close to letting the people go, and then he'd harden his heart. And that could be true of some of us here. Maybe you got close to becoming a Christian at certain periods in your life. but you've hardened your heart the day after, and then you've forgotten completely all those experiences that you've gone through, all the things that God had told you, all of those convictions of the truth of it, it's just gone. Well that's the devil working in your life. Now we also see in that story the superficiality, the parable that is, the superficiality of response that some people have. Because Jesus says that some people receive the word with joy, but as soon as things get hard, they give up. Persecutions, difficulties, trials come. Just like the sun comes and burns the seed that has no root. And so, of course, it's true. You'll find, you know, over the years in churches, you'll find a load of people, I can certainly look back on it, that when they were young, they were full of joy and really seemed to be committed and really wanted to go out to witness to Jesus Christ and live their lives for Jesus. Would stand up in meetings and say, yes, I want to serve the Lord. And yet, actually, it was a superficial response. Because they never really moved out. They never really moved far away from the sin that was in their life. They were in rocky ground when they stood up and said, I want to be a Christian. And they never moved away from the rocks. They stayed there. And the devil, because they just never really moved far, the devil was able to drag them down and back into the world. And of course, Jesus also talked about the seed that fell into thorny ground. And here I suppose it's an idea of the person that's only commits part of his life, maybe to the Lord, I'm not sure, Jesus talks about as he's getting older, the worries of this world, anxieties, desire for money, desire for possessions, comes in and chokes the word. There's a superficiality about this man's living that day by day he doesn't clear away the sin in his life but allows those sins to accumulate until gradually he's destroyed because he's never moved away from those things. He's compromised. He's been half holy. Yeah, you can worship God in the wilderness but not too far. Oh yes, you can come to church on the Sunday But Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, well, doesn't matter too much if I do what the devil wants me to do, if I don't think about the Lord, I don't pray, I don't try to be holy. Now, I would challenge you, if you're that kind of person, to realize that it is the devil that is keeping you away from living the Christian life. And the Lord is full of love for you. The Lord is full of love. Now, I don't think, it's very difficult, isn't it, when we say to imagine the Lord, because we don't even actually know what the Lord Jesus looked like as a human being. And it's wrong to even, you know, try to paint portraits and so on, apart from the fact that they're always inaccurate, these portraits you see of the Lord Jesus. They're generally European white males that you see in statues or in pictures. But the one thing that we know is unmistakable, everybody has eyes, and we know that Jesus' eyes were not hard eyes. They were loving, caring eyes that looked upon people with compassion. We actually sang in that song, coincidentally, because I didn't have that in mind when I chose the song earlier. And the thing is this. that the Lord Jesus Christ looks upon us with compassion, looks upon you with compassion, and he sees your sins. He sees your rebellion, but he doesn't say, I want to cast you off. He actually says, come to me, all you who labor and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. So you've been superficial, so you've been, so you've been staying close to the devil. Well, Jesus now says, I have the power. to rescue you from his hands. Come, come with me." And I say to you, you know, if you're in that situation, hear the voice of Jesus and follow him. I think this also, though, has a message for us in our ongoing life as Christians. Because I think those of us who are Christians, as we've been studying on Sunday mornings, we see that there is a constant battle with the flesh, with the evil, with sin. One of the things that evil does is always tries to make believers compromise. The Old Testament gives us many examples. Lot decided, because he rather fancied the location of a nice plot of land near Sodom, he decided that's where he wanted to live, near the cities of the plain. Even though these cities were notorious places of evil, He decided, this is good for pasture. And since we're having arguments about, you know, between our herdsmen, Abraham and Lot, you know, there were territorial arguments about where they should pasture. Abraham gives Lot the choice of wherever he wants to go, and he says, I will choose that area, the choice area. But the choice area was an area of compromise. That's something that we've got to look at constantly, got to be aware of. At every stage of our Christian life, the devil will want us to compromise. Our flesh will often choose to compromise, to seek the easy way out, to see the better way out, to see the more prosperous, from a human point of view, way out. At every stage of our life. Solomon, who was such a great man, likewise compromised himself as an old man, an old man. David is a middle-aged man, compromised, didn't go out to war, didn't fight the devil, didn't fight the battles against the other kings that were invading the country, and he compromised and was involved in adultery and murder. Hezekiah was also in his prime, compromised by seeking to show off in vanity to the Babylonians and thus brought calamity to his country in the long term. And so throughout the Bible we have these examples of the fact that the devil, the world, and the flesh seeks to engage us in, don't go too far, don't be too extreme. Demas, a close friend of Paul, friend of Paul, was involved with him in struggles and trials, no doubt risked his life along with Paul on many occasions. But after a few years, Demas, Paul says, in love with this present world has deserted me. John had said in 1 John 2.14, don't love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. How that should get to the root of a Christian's being. Don't love the world. Don't compromise with the world. If you love the world, then you don't love the Father. All that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life is not from the Father, but is from the world. The world is passing away and its lust, but the one who does the will of God lives forever. Now the Christian has to say to himself, now I need to get away from the worldly approach, get away from the love of the world. I need to go far away from these things and not fiddle around with a compromise with the world. The devil always, whether it be Adam or even our Lord Jesus Christ himself, presents temptations of compromise. You may remember the three temptations that Jesus was recorded as having in the wilderness before he started his ministry was the temptation to turn stones into bread. Jesus fasted for 40 days. He was in the middle of a 40-day fast. We don't know exactly when that temptation came but it was when he was famished and the devil says, don't go too far. And Jesus said, no, man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. The devil tempted him to throw himself off the temple and prove that he was the Son of God. And Jesus said, no, I will not compromise. I will not break God's law. I will not put God to the test. I will not compromise for all of my followers throughout time the rule that we shall live by faith, not by sight. I will not seek to test God. And of course, finally, the devil gave Jesus the big if. He said, look, here's all the kingdoms of this world. You can have this all if you will just bow down and worship me. The result is we can see that whether it be the world, whether it be our human desires, whether it be Satan himself, there was always the attempt to make us compromise. Now, let's just now kind of look at, as I finish, with actually a number of qualifications. Now firstly, we're here talking about, when it says, you must not go very far, We're not talking here about confusing bigotry, pride, and stubbornness with not compromising with the devil. Now, there have been Christians that have made uncompromising stands on the most silly things. Christians who've refused to share fellowship with other Christians because there's something on a minor point that they disagree with. Now, mere prejudice is not the same as standing on the revealed word of God. When Paul tells us that we need to rightly divide the word of truth, he's indicating that we've got to see what's fundamental and what are just differences that we can and should try to look over. So for instance, when Paul was seeking to stand for the gospel when he was writing to the Galatians, He said that because Peter had compromised the gospel, he was prepared to stand up and say, this isn't right what you're doing, Peter. He was prepared to be involved in a head-on-head confrontation with the big Christian leader and say, Peter, you're compromising the gospel because you're refusing to eat with believers just because they're Gentiles. But at the same time, that same Paul that was prepared to stand up and be uncompromising in his stance on what Peter was doing, at the same time, Paul wasn't looking for a fight with either the Jews or Jewish Christians. So that when he came to Jerusalem, he had as one of his assistants, Timothy, and he had a choice, didn't he? He could have said, no, Timothy's not gonna be circumcised, he doesn't need to be circumcised. Timothy had a Jewish mother and a Gentile father. But because Paul wasn't looking for a fight, he said, no, let him be circumcised. It's perfectly in order with a Jewish mother because Jewishness was defined by the mother he had rather than the father. And Paul said, no, it's perfectly in order for Timothy to be circumcised. He wasn't looking for a fight. And so when we're saying, look, we've got to prepare to not compromise, it doesn't mean that we're looking for a fight with fellow Christians over matters that aren't of fundamental importance. But it does mean that we're prepared to stand, we are prepared to stand for Christ and get as far away from what the devil, the world, and the flesh wants us to do in the area of our lifestyle of our doctrine and the attitudes of our heart. Now, each one of us has got to work this out in our own lives. I know, I look back on my life and I see compromise after compromise with the world in my lifestyle over the years. Where things that aren't necessarily wrong in themselves, sometimes we get involved with and the result is we make compromises with the Lord's holiness. Spurgeon foresaw a great downgrade from the gospel in the 20th century. He was in the 19th, he foresaw the 20th century at the time a great downgrade. And firstly in the area of theology, which of course came about and in fact he was involved