Ceremonial Law and Generous Love

Ephesians 2:15

Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill

Will you take a Bible please and turn to Exodus 32:1, “When the people saw that Moses delayed to
come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron, and said to him, ‘Up
make us gods, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land
of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’ And Aaron said to them, ‘Take off the rings of
gold which are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.’ So
all the people took off the rings of gold which were in their ears, and brought them to Aaron. And
he received the gold at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, and made a molten calf;
and they said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’

When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation and said, ‘Tomorrow
shall be a feast to the Lord.’ And they rose up early on the morrow, and offered burnt offerings
and brought peace offerings; and the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play. And the
Lord said to Moses, ‘Go down; for your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have
corrupted themselves; they have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them; they
have made for themselves a molten calf, and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it, and said, ‘These
are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’ And the Lord said to Moses,
‘I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people; now therefore let me alone, that
my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; but of you I will make a great nation.’
But Moses besought the Lord his God, and said, ‘O Lord, why does thy wrath burn hot against thy
people, whom thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty
hand?

Why should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent did he bring them forth, to slay them in the
mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent
of this evil against thy people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, thy servants, to whom thou
didst swear by thine own self, and didst say to them, ‘I will multiply your descendants as the stars
of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants, and they shall
inherit it for ever.’ And the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do to his people. And
Moses turned, and went down from the mountain with the two tables of the testimony in his hands,
tables that were written on both sides; on one side and on the other were they written. And the
tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables.

When Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted, he said to Moses, ‘There is a noise of
war in the camp.’ But he said, ‘It is not the sound of shouting for victory, or the sound of the
cry of defeat, but the sound of singing that I hear.’ And as soon as he came near the camp and saw
the calf and the dancing, Moses’ anger burned hot, and he threw the tables out of his hands and
broke them at the foot of the mountain. And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it with
fire, and ground it to powder, and scattered it upon the water, and made the people of Israel drink
it. And Moses said to Aaron, ‘What did this people do to you that you have brought a great sin upon
them?’ And Aaron said, ‘Let not the anger of my Lord burn hot; you know the people, that they are
set on evil.

For they said to me, ‘Make us gods, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought

us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’ And I said to them, ‘Let
any who have gold take it off; so they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and there came
out this calf.’ And when Moses saw that the people had broken loose (for Aaron had let them break
loose, to their shame among their enemies), then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, ‘Who
is on the Lord’s side? Come to me.’ And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together to him.
And he said to them, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD of Israel, ‘Put every man his sword on his side, and go
to and fro from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his
companion, and every man his neighbor.’’ And the sons of Levi did according to the word of Moses;
and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men. And Moses said, ‘Today you have
ordained yourselves for the service of the Lord, each one at the cost of his son and of his brother,
that he may bestow a blessing upon you this day.’

On the morrow Moses said to the people, ‘You have sinned a great sin. And now I will go up to the
Lord; perhaps I can make atonement for your sin.’ So Moses returned to the Lord and said, ‘Alas,
this people have sinned a great sin; they have made for themselves gods of gold. But now, if thou
will forgive their sin—and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.’
But the Lord said to Moses, Whoever has sinned against me, him I will blot out of my book. But now
go, lead the people to the place of which I have spoken to you; behold, my angel shall go before
you. Nevertheless, in the day when I visit, I will visit their sin upon them.’ And the Lord sent a
plaque upon the people, because they made the calf which Aaron made.” And that is just one of the
chapters that constantly presents to us that contradiction between God obviously condemning the
people and then God forgiving the people. And it presents very clearly to us the heart of God from
the very beginning of creation as a heart that always seemed to have forgiveness in its center and
yet had the sense of responsibility that the people that he had made had to obey and live the way he
had planned and the way he had envisioned.

Of course, you and I know that Moses was moved by a certain spirit that is what moves us in our best
moments. It was obviously, Christ himself that spoke through Moses and was expressing to God, not a
little human being’s desire but the very opinion and desire of God himself when he pleaded with God,
as it were to forgive the sin. Obviously, it was in God’s heart from the very beginning to forgive
the sin but always the difficulty was to make it clear to human beings that this was not the way
they were to go. And so from the very beginning you can see that it wasn’t God being caught out by
them suddenly making the calf and, “Oh, they made a calf, surprise, surprise.” Obviously, God knew
from the very beginning what would be the heart of us human beings and that’s why, from the very
start, he did make us inside his Son. And it’s why when we talk about God’s forgiveness and his
mercy, we need to just be sensible and intelligent, and see that that started from the very
beginning. Indeed, from before the beginning. And so what we’re seeing here is the outworking of
God’s own commitment to us, and that’s why for instance, Barth will say, “God is for us.” And in a
way, it’s a good way to say it, you know, God is for us.

That’s the big thing we have to remember, God is for us and he has always been for us, and he has
been for us when we were at our worst. He is always for us. And it’s why we’ve used the phrase
that in a way God has put himself at risk for us. He has said, “I’m with you whatever you do. I’m
with you whatever you do. Whatever you do to me, whatever you do to my Son, I’m with you.” And so
when this incident comes up of course, our Father knew that this would take place and from the very
beginning his desire always was to love us with his everlasting love.

In a way, you can say for him the pain was already past. In a way, our parents, when we do
something that hurts them, or disappoints them, or lets them down, in a way the first time they feel

that pain is when we do it, they’ve never touched it before that moment. But it’s not so with our
Father, in a sense, the pain for him is already past. That’s why I suppose in truth both
Protestantism and Catholicism is saying the right thing when Protestantism says, “It is finished.
It is finished. The pain is done. The death has been died.” And in another way when Catholicism
emphasis, “But it’s eternal in the heart of God.” In a sense the mass is a continual sacrifice of
the death of Jesus because in a sense that is something that spreads throughout eternity.

So in a real way, the pain is passed and yet in a real sense in that God is eternal and exists at
this moment, exactly as he did a billion years ago. In a sense the pain is there all the time or as
we say when you want to find the age of a tree, you cut through the trunk and you count the rings,
and the rings of course go right up through the tree, right from the root from where it started to
the very top of the tree. So it is with God, the pain is eternal in his heart in that sense,
something that he feels all the time. But it’s something that’s expressed very clearly here.

We know that in a way this is just the beginning. We could say to each other, “Yeah and this is
bad, and this is dreadful, this business of the golden calf, but it’s only the beginning. These
people then turned around and again, at the waters of Meribah, they again turned against Moses.
Again, and again they turned against him, and they turned against God continually after that and
even hundreds of years after that in Palestine they turned against him and they worshiped idols.”
And in a sense, they’re still turning against him. And so continually you see our Father expressing
this constant love for us and this constant yearning, and mercy towards us, and at the same time
bringing home to us again, and again, that this is not – cannot exist together with him himself.

And of course, the heart of the expression of that is his very own Son, so that in a real way even
though I have told you at times we would of course, be rather startled in our little Belfast homes,
if we went to a Catholic home and there was Jesus with his breast open and the bleeding heart, and
of course, that was terrible. Us and our silly self-righteousness, because of course, it was
glorious, it was exactly the truth, the sacred heart of Jesus has borne the pain of our Father all
through the years. And it’s there that we see most plainly that living our own way, doing what we
want, for our own sake, and our own benefit, and our own advantage, brings constantly pain to the
heart of our dear Father who has made us. And so there’s a way in which the crucified Son is always
and forever expressing to us clearly the worst thing about our sin. Not that it disobey the 10
commandments, not that it disobeys this set of principles or that set of morals, not even that it
hurts this person or that person, but that it is against thee and thee only have I sinned and done
this wrong. It is against Jesus that we have done the wrong and so that is always what is expressed
here.

Now, in order to bring home to men and women of course that his heart was still merciful, God then
instituted the kinds of things that we get in Leviticus 23:15. Leviticus 23:15, “And you shall
count from the morrow after the sabbath, from the day that you brought the sheaf of the wave
offering; seven full weeks shall they be, counting fifty days to the morrow after the seventh
sabbath; then you shall present a cereal offering of new grain to the Lord. You shall bring from
your dwellings two loaves of bread to be waved, made of two tenths of an ephah; they shall be of
fine flour, they shall be baked with leaven, as first fruits to the Lord. And you shall present
with the bread seven lambs a year old without blemish, and one young bull, and two rams; they shall
be a burnt offering to the Lord, with their cereal offering and their drink offerings, an offering
by fire, a pleasing odor to the Lord. And you shall offer one male goat for a sin offering, and two
male lambs a year old as a sacrifice of peace offerings. And the priest shall wave them with the
bread of the first fruits as a wave offering before the Lord, with the two lambs; they shall be holy

to the Lord for the priest.” And of course, all these offerings were not a continuation of the old
pagan perversion of offering.

There was no way in which the people believed that their God was salivating for the blood of a goat,
or the blood of a lamb. They knew that this stood for a deep pain, and a deep agony, and a deep
readiness to bear their disobedience in the heart of their God and that ran through all the
offerings that were made. The offering stood simply for God’s own blood, the blood that was shed by
his own son bearing all of us inside himself as we did what we wanted to do. And so that runs
through all that is called ceremonial laws. Those are called the ceremonial laws. And the laws
were given to the Israelites actually as a sign of hope. All the other people in the world
experienced only a desolation and a devastation in life.

The best of the pagan religions leaves you very cold, and very abandoned, and very lonely. Only the
Israelites had this glimpse of hope, they had these ceremonial laws that brought them some sense of
peace in their conscience not because God was satisfied with the blood of a lamb, but because he
manifested to them his own merciful heart and his forgiveness. And so the Israelites, as they
observed these ceremonial laws, were able in some sense, to experience a cleaning of conscience and
the assurance that that brings that God loved them and cared for them so that they could, from the
very beginning, you remember in Deuteronomy 6:5, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and
with all your soul, and with all your might.”

They were able in some sense to partake of that. Never knowing exactly what the heart of it was,
but always sensing that these offerings set forth the heart of their Creator and the heart of their
Father towards them. And so the ceremonial laws, in a way, were a blessing to the Israelites. They
brought them some awareness that they were not alone in this universe and that though there were
many signs, and disease, and earthquakes, and other horrors of war, that all was not well, yet in
some sense there was something right at the heart of their Maker, something that reconciled them to
him so that they could say, “Even if your sins are scarlet, they shall be as white as snow though
they be like crimson they shall be as wool.” So that they could believe that their sins were
forgiven.

So the ceremonial laws brought that to them and that’s the importance of it, but you can see that
all through the history of the Israelites they had these many, many expressions of the dreadful
tragedy that had taken place because of man’s attitude to God, so that even the Levites themselves
were accepted in place of the first-born. So there was an understanding among the Israelites, “We
really owe our first-born to God. We really all deserve death and on behalf of our own death we
deserve to give the death of our first-born.” But Moses was guided by God to appoint the Levites to
take the place of the first-born so that the first-born didn’t have to die.

But all through the Israelites’ history there are indications that God gives, “Look, you really
deserve death, my heart is merciful towards you.” But never did they know why that was. The
closest they came was with Isaiah, that he gave his life, a ransom for many. The closest was he was
despised and we rejected him. The closest was that he died for our sins. He was crucified for our
iniquities. That was as close as they came. There Isaiah seemed to be given a glimpse into the
heart of God’s great sacrifice but that’s what the ceremonial law was all about.

Man being man, he took that and he prided himself about it and that’s what the dear Jewish people
did. They took that and they said, “We have this. You Gentiles don’t have it at all. We have
this.” And in that sense they always regarded themselves as different from the Gentiles, as better

than the Gentiles, as accepted by the Gentiles whereas the Gentiles were rejected. And so they made
all these ceremonial laws in the temple worship and the whole set up in their own nation and their
own state, they made that as the basis for their feeling of superiority to the Gentiles. And when
Jesus died on Calvary the verse that we’ve been studying these weeks says, “He is our peace. He
broke down that middle wall of partition, that hostility that existed between Jew and Gentile by
abolishing the ceremonial laws.” And, well you should look at what it says because it is
significant.

It’s Ephesians 2:15. Ephesians 2:15, “By abolishing in his flesh the law of commandments and
ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace.” That
he might create in himself one new man in place of the two. The two were the Jews on one side and
the Gentiles on the other and Jesus died and allowed both of them to die with him, and to be
crucified, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two. I think there’s no way
in which we can take that to literally. That that’s what actually happened, God put Gentiles and
Jews into his Son, destroyed the enmity that existed between them on the basis of the attitude to
the ceremonial laws, and he created in place of the two of them, one new man.

We were joking this morning before breakfast, Irene was joking me about John Wesley and how all the
Methodists always want to talk about John Wesley or always want to go see Wesley’s grave, or
Wesley’s church and that sort of thing. And I was kind of – well, accepting it but not too happy
with it and the bit of it of course, that I’m not too happy with is this. It is so easy for us to
say to ourselves, “Well, we aren’t involved in that Jew and Gentile thing.” And yet we have our
little tiny feelings inside that separate us from the non-Wesleyans, or the non-Methodist, or the
non-Catholics, or the non-Protestants, or the non-Evangelicals, or the non-Biblical believers, or
the non-crucified.

You never think of it, it’s almost just – well, it’s second nature but it’s almost something that we
think is more like, “Well, they don’t belong to our club. We belong to the chess club but they
don’t belong to the chess club.” And yet, the truth probably is that we’re losing the glorious
freedom that God has given us by taking all of us, because Christ died for all, and crucifying us
all in him, and creating in himself one new man. And it’s going back to what we’ve shared over the
past few Sundays, it’s so easy to look at that store owner and maybe have heard him even use a swear
word, but certainly not heard him talking enthusiastically about Andrew Murray, or about Smith
Wigglesworth. And it’s so easy for us to feel them and us rather than God has taken two men and of
the two he has made one man inside his Son. And that the store owner we meet every day is part of
Jesus.

He doesn’t know it, missing all the joy of it and the delight of it, but God has made of two men one
man inside his Son, and that man is part of our Savior. And that inside that attitude in us lies
the love that breaks all barriers down. Inside us is the love that embraces our neighbors, and
embraces the store owner, and embraces the swearer that has just taken our place in the queue for
gas, and that inside that is the love that redeems, and that lifts up, and that elevates. And that
our own attitude, little parochial Wesley or non-Wesleyan, Methodist or non-Methodist, Catholic or
non-Catholic, Protestant or non-Protestant, our little miserable, petty, dividing separates us from
that dear brother or sister that is part of our Savior.

It seems to me that’s part of what God is saying to us in this verse. He’s saying to us, “I really
did this. I created inside myself one new man in place of the two. I have made you one with every
other human being that you meet day-by-day. I have made you one with him inside myself. Live that

way. Live that way and you’ll see reality beginning to breakthrough. So I’d ask you just to think
about it. I know I’ve thrown the organist off by preaching the sermon at this point, but I’d ask
you to think about it and then of course, tomorrow to start doing something about it.

Coming from America we have somewhat of an advantage. The American is a big generous guy who wants
to hug everybody to himself. We have a natural kind of openness, or the Irish too, we have a
natural – but you know it’s deeper than that because that is just a national thing, an outward
thing, a human thing, but what we’re saying is it’s actually deeper than this. This dear man
standing beside me waiting to pay for his petrol, this man was made one with me inside Jesus.
That’s reality. That’s the way I’m going to behave.

In that way, we put ourselves in the center of truth and on truth’s side. And in that way we put
ourselves against Satan and against the deception that that dear man is under. Again, I’d push you
if you say, “They’ll take advantage of me.” And, they probably will. Yes, they probably will.
However, you probably won’t get a sword in your side or a spear through your body. Sure, I think
they’ll take advantage. Sure, we’ll need to listen to the Holy Spirit to know when obviously, Jesus
– there comes a time when he clears out the moneylenders from the temple. There comes a time when
he says, “You generation of vipers.” So there are obviously moments when he doesn’t just lie down
and let them walk over the top of him, but the Holy Spirit will tell us that if we will live the
truth, that God has made us one with each of our brothers and sisters. Let us pray.

Lord, now as we think of Joe’s mum and dad, and as we don’t know them the way he knows them, we
can’t imagine how they are feeling at the moment. We don’t even know if we can imagine what
attitudes they have to life. But Lord, we receive from you your word this morning that you have
made us one with them inside yourself, and that you regard them as you regard us, with an open and
loving generous heart, and that you stand in their shoes as you stand in ours, and therefore that we
ourselves stand in their place, and pray from inside their hearts, and rejoice in you in them so
that in a wonderful and miraculous way the network of your dear body Lord Jesus, fills them with
life and lifts them up inside us and together with us, and makes them sit at your right hand. And
Lord, we do see how different it is to think of them like this.

Not even just as close as children think of their parents, but somehow closer than that, deeper than
that, to see them as part of ourselves borne by you in your generous love on Calvary, and raised up
by you and with you, and made new with you through the power of your Holy Spirit. And then Lord, we
think of the other people that we will meet tomorrow and we see how the world has tried to teach us
a way of distance, a respect that has no commitment to it, a readiness to help that does not put
ourselves out, a willingness to express kindness and a gentleness that does not hold any risk of
pain for ourselves.

Lord, we see how we have learned these ways of human love that do nothing but build up the
loneliness of the other person. And Lord, we would come to you this morning to ask you by your Holy
Spirit to shed abroad in our hearts your love, and to enable us to look at our business associates
in a totally different way, to see them as part of ourselves. Lord, we would present ourselves to
you this morning and ask you to make us new men and women, men and women of love, of universal love
so that your Spirit may begin to bring to earth the kingdom of God.