Ray Vander Laan - Fire on the Mountain Discovery Guide: Displaying God to a Broken World

That the World May Know with Ray Vander Laan

Volume 1: Promised Land

Volume 2: Prophets and Kings

Volume 3: Life and Ministry of the Messiah

Volume 4: Death and Resurrection of the Messiah

Volume 5: Early Church

Volume 6: In the Dust of the Rabbi

Volume 7: Walk as Jesus Walked

Volume 8: God Heard Their Cry

Volume 9: Fire on the Mountain

Volume 10: With All Your Heart

Volume 11: The Path to the Cross

Volume 12: Walking with God in the Desert

Volume 13: Israels Mission

ZONDERVAN

Fire on the Mountain Discovery Guide

Copyright 2009 by Ray Vander Laan

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ePub Edition September 2015: ISBN 978-0-310-87979-4

All maps are created by International Mapping.

All artwork is courtesy of Ray Vander Laan and Mark Tanis.

All illustrations are courtesy of Rob Perry.

All Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV.

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Cover design: DoMoreGood

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Interior design: Ben Fetterley, Denise Froehlich

CONTENTS

Ebook Instructions

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Let my people go!

With these simple words, spoken more than 3,200 years ago (Exodus 5:1), God sent Moses to confront the most powerful ruler on earth. By these words, the God of the universe revealed that he had heard the cry of his suffering people. Deeply moved, he revealed himself as the God of love and mercy. He acted with awesome power to deliver the Hebrews and establish them as his chosen instrument to reveal himself to the world.

Few words recorded in the Hebrew Bible, or anywhere for that matter, are more familiar to people today than the words, Let my people go! And few events are more central to the stories of both the Hebrew text (Old Testament) and the Christian text (New Testament) than the great redemptive acts of God and the people of the exodus. The Hebrew text refers to the exodus theme more than 120 times, plus there are multiple references to related concepts such as manna, water from the rock, Mount Sinai, and the Ten Commandments. The Christian text mentions Moses eighty-five times and Egypt twenty-nine times.

Yet there is more to the exodus than first meets the eye. The historical account is most useful in understanding God and his desire for the Hebrews to become his witnesses to the world. It is central to understanding why many followers of Jesus considered him to be the prophet like Moses the Messiah whom the Lord had promised to send (Deuteronomy 18:17 19; Luke 7:16; 24:19 20; John 6:14). Jesus often used ideas found in the exodus story, and many of his teachings interpret Moses words in the Torah. Jesus also positioned his redemptive acts against the background of festivals Passover, Unleavened Bread, and First Fruits that are associated with the Hebrews deliverance from Egypt. And at the deepest level, the exodus story not only provides a background for Gods plan to bring Jesus into the world as Messiah, it is one of the first chapters in Gods great redemptive story to restore shalom unity, harmony, order to his broken creation.

Genesis, the first book of the Torah, provides the necessary background for the exodus. Genesis describes God creating a perfect, harmonious universe out of chaos and then describes how sin destroyed that universe, resulting in the loss of harmony in Gods creation and the return of chaos. In the stories of the exodus we find the very foundations of the restoration of shalom to Gods world. Future characters in the Scriptures, including Jesus, build on that foundation. To study these amazing events is to discover that there is really one story the story of Gods redemption. Despite the many failures of Gods people in fulfilling their role in that story, Gods power has and continues to flow through his flawed human instruments (Jesus excepted, of course) to bring to fruition his plan of redemption.

Let my people go was the cry of the Hebrews in Egypt. In a sense, it is also the cry of anyone who has recognized the bondage of sin and the destruction it produces. Thus the exodus is a paradigm for our own experience, and we Christians describe our deliverance in similar language because God delivers us by his mercy and the protecting blood of the Lamb Jesus Christ. Without the exodus, we would not be who we are redeemed people delivered by the God of Israel. In that sense, the victory of the ancient Hebrews must become our victory. We, like the ancient Hebrews whom God delivered from the hand of Pharaoh, must stand in awe and declare that our God is King.

Clarifying Our Terminology

In this study, the record of Gods reclaiming and restoring his broken world is called the Bible, Scripture, or the text. Having studied in the Jewish world, I believe it is important to communicate clearly how the nature of that inspired book is understood. Although it can be helpful to speak of Scripture in terms of Old and New Testaments, these descriptions also can be misleading if they are interpreted to mean old and outdated in contrast to a new replacement. Nothing, in my opinion, is further from the truth. Whereas the New Testament describes the great advance of Gods plan with the arrival of the Messiah and the promise of his completed and continuing work, the Old Testament describes the foundational events and people through whom God began that work. The Bible is not complete without both testaments; it comprises Gods one revelation, his one plan to reclaim his world and restore harmony between himself and humankind. To emphasize that unity, I prefer to refer to the Hebrew text (Old Testament) and the Christian text (New Testament) that together are the inspired, infallible Word of God.

The language of the Bible is bound by culture and time. The geography of the lands of the Bible Egypt, the desert, the Promised Land shaped the people who lived there, and biblical writers assumed that their readers were familiar with the culture of that world. Many Christians today, however, lack even a basic geographical knowledge of the region and know even less of the ancient cultures that flourished there. So understanding the Scriptures involves more than knowing what the words mean. It also means becoming familiar with the everyday experiences and images the text employs to reveal Gods message so that we can begin to understand it from the perspective of the people to whom it originally was given.

For example, the ancient Hebrew people to whom God revealed himself described their world in concrete terms. Their language was one of pictures, metaphors, and examples rather than ideas, definitions, and abstractions. Whereas we might describe God as omniscient or omnipresent (knowing everything and present everywhere), they would describe him as my Shepherd. Thus the Bible is filled with concrete images from Hebrew culture: God is our Father and we are his children, God is the Potter and we are the clay, Jesus is the Lamb killed on Passover, heaven is an oasis in the desert, and hell is the city sewage dump.