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Good morning. First and foremost, happy one extra hour of sleep day, right? Yeah, I know. Teenagers and moms, I think, are the best. They're like, yeah! I don't know about you. I was up at the exact same time as normal, like, bing, you know, man. I wish I could enjoy that, but not so much. Um, I don't know about each of you. I have uh been overwhelmed uh with this story of the tree just trees journey that we've been on the last several weeks. Um it's absolutely been one of the most most uh awe-inspiring and faith-strengthening studies that I've ever been a part of. Um if if you haven't had a chance to be here or or get the full scope of what we're in the middle of, we're basically taking the entire Bible, right, and breaking it into eight large sections. Ben Sykes, um, who's a great guy, he was given this awesome um perspective on the of the entirety of the Bible and what it looks like from this really big picture point of view, almost this 10,000-foot point of view. Um and the first week uh we had a huge summary of the whole model. Um, and that that's actually available to watch on video, which is unique for us. And you can actually see that on our website, it's right there on the front page or on YouTube. Um and I really, if you haven't seen it or if you weren't here three weeks ago, I encourage everybody to take the 40 minutes. It is so worth it to watch. Um, it really gives an amazing um picture uh literally of what God does through the entirety of the Bible. And you'll see it kind of popping up here. I'm gonna summarize it really quickly. Um, two weeks ago, Justin took the first section, and that was on the tree of life, which focused on the promise of eternity and the hope that eternity through God uh and through Jesus gives to our finite lives here on earth. Um then the next week, uh last week, actually, Ben shared again, and he uh shared with us Abraham's meeting at God at the Oaks of Mamreh, which focused on the promise of blessings when we have faith in God's plans. Um this week we have a new tree kind of. Um I was asked by Ben, Justin, and Steve to share about Moses and his encounter uh starting at the burning bush. Um and then what we'll see is we'll let the uh video here kind of continue on, and we see it paint a picture, and we'll go through these the next several weeks as it goes through, and you can see it paints this huge picture, which ends up looking like a tree. And the tree of life is such a big part of what we do here, and it it parallels with one of Marlon's paintings there, and you can just see the tree of life in the whole picture of the Bible, and the tree of life is really a picture of Jesus. But today we're gonna rewind and we're gonna we're gonna go back to uh to Moses and his encounter at what we're we're calling the burning bush, I guess. I'm not really sure how this whole assignment process of the trees went down. Um I know Justin got the tree of life. That's pretty that's a pretty big deal, right? Um it's it's big here. I think I'm off center. I'm gonna I'm gonna scoot over just a little bit. Um Ben had the oaks of Mamrah. I mean, that just sounds manly, doesn't it? Next week Steve's gonna uh share again, and he's gonna be back and uh talk about the tree by the water. I mean that just that's a majestic image, right? I got the shrubbery. I got I got the bush. All right. Oh, no, but in seriousness, um I I was overcome with praise from being able to bless and study on this uh this week. Um this particular short story is really amazing. And uh throughout the last couple weeks while I've been preparing, my my my walk with God has been really intimate and intense. And and just to kind of get aside from me my notes, this morning's been weird. I've cried this morning. Uh we've had technology just break out of nowhere this morning. It's it's been a weird morning, and I hope that's a good thing because I think it's it's just God's way of saying, you know, um something's really strong here, and there's something fighting against that. There's something rebelling against what God's trying to share today, and we're not gonna let it, right? We're not gonna let it. So um my prayers today have really focused on a hope that each of you can can uh get to experience the same kind of passion that I felt this week, the same connection with God, and that today's uh what we're gonna go through today, it's really big and it might help in that process. Um this morning's chapter in our story of the trees journey spans between the books. We're gonna bite off just a little section Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, and Ruth. Yeah, no big deal, right? We're only gonna cover about 400 years of uh history of Israel, so we're just gonna fly through it. Um, everybody, they don't mind not eating lunch, right? No, I'm just kidding. Uh I wanted to begin this morning account and go ahead and give away the ending, too. It's always good when the ending of the story is at the beginning, right? Um, we're gonna have a nation, the nation of Israel, that God has blessed and he's protected in this tremendous and miraculous fashion, and they're gonna struggle to have their act together. They're gonna be directionless, they're gonna be misguided, floundering at this point of desperation. Yay! Right? That's where we're gonna end today, so sorry about that. Um, but the truth is last week and even the week before kind of all ended. All these chapters kind of end that way. Last week we had this nation of Israel who who was brought to Egypt to to you know stave off this famine that was having in the land and to protect them. And you had Joseph, the the dream coat guy, right? And he brings his family in, and they're protected from this famine. But Joseph passes away, and the the nation of Israel is still there in Egypt, and they've been enslaved and oppressed now. You know, the the rulers that remember Joseph are gone, and now there's new leadership in place, and that's kind of where we left them last year. It's like again, one of those, wow, this is this is hard. You know, and they're trapped in a foreign land, away from the promised land that God had given to Abraham, Jacob, or Isaac, and Jacob. But in spite of this oppression and enslavement, the nation, the nation of Israel is still blessed. And they grow in size and in strength, so much so that the new Pharaoh has all of the newborn males murdered. But God allows one special Hebrew boy to escape that that horrific fate. And his name is Moses. Uh Moses was put in a basket down the uh the Nile and was picked up by the daughter of Pharaoh. And he was raised in that same house, cloaked under the guise of Egyptian royalty. And he ends up, though, at some point, killing an Egyptian for beating a Hebrew. And he has to run away. He runs away and he flees because he doesn't want to have to deal with the punishment from that. And he resettles in a land known as Midian. And today, the area of Egypt that we're talking about is near Cairo. It was an area called Goshen, and that's even where the pyramids and stuff are, kind of around that today. So this is in northeastern Egypt. And this area of Midian is in the western part of Saudi Arabia, and there's about 700 miles that spans the two, just to give it some perspective. Those areas have been in the news the last several years. And so it kind of gives us, these are real places and real, real, you know, tangible lands and stuff that we can understand. And this is where we find Moses in Exodus chapter three. It says, One day Moses was tending the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, priest of Midian. He led the flock far into the wilderness and came to Sinai, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire from the middle of a bush. Moses stared in amazement. Though the bush was engulfed in flames, it didn't burn up. This is amazing, Moses said to himself. Why isn't that bush burning up? I must go see it. That's what I do. Um, when the Lord saw Moses coming to take a closer look, God called to him from the middle of the bush. Moses, Moses, I don't do a very good God voice. Here I am, Moses replied. Do not come any closer, the Lord warned. Take off your sandals, for you are standing on holy ground. I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. When Moses heard this, he covered his face because he was afraid to look at God. And then the Lord told him, I have certainly seen the oppression from my people in Egypt. I have heard their cries of distress because they're li because of their harsh slave drivers. Yes, I am aware of their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the power of the Egyptians and lead them out of Egypt into their own fertile and spacious land. It is a land flowing with milk and honey, where the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Havitites, and Jebusites now live. Look, the cry of the people of Israel has reached me, and I have seen how hard harshly the Egyptians abuse them. Now go, for I am sending you Pharaoh, you to Pharaoh, you must lead my people out of Egypt. So Moses initially says, Whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm not the right guy. But ultimately he does walk in faith and and and and follows through, and that God will help him lead his nation to this new promised land. And that's exactly what happens. You've probably heard the account, and we've talked about it here a couple times, of Moses in Egypt, and how with God's power, Moses calls for ten plagues to come upon Pharaoh in Egypt, and ultimately set Israel free. In the final plague, God calls for the people of Israel to take the blood of a spotless lamb or goat, place it on their doors, so that death will pass over their homes. We call it the Passover. It's a really amazing picture of Jesus. And the truth is we could spend weeks looking in to all the parallels of Jesus in the Passover. In fact, I was honored to speak, I believe, on Palm Sunday this past year, and you can find it online if you want to listen to it, about that very thing. And we also, I lead a group in the spring a lot of times that spends eight weeks, eight weeks covering the Passover and the parallels of Jesus. And they're just innumerable and unimaginable. But for today, I want to focus on something that I saw that's new regarding this, something that's brand new to even me. During the week, I actually did a fairly informal study. I asked several friends and some family, when in the Bible did the first law for Israel come? When was the first law for Israel given to Moses? And most people stared at me blankly. Like, what I don't understand. And then they kind of contemplated it, and you know, they really didn't have a good answer. And maybe around the Ten Commandments, right? Those are the laws of Moses, right? That's not it. In fact, the first mention of law in the Bible is when God is giving instructions regarding the Passover. We find it in Exodus 12, verse 14, regarding the Passover, it says, This is a day to remember. Each year, from generation to generation, you must celebrate it as a special festival to the Lord. This is a law for all time. God's first directive, his first rule for this chosen nation was to remember, to celebrate, to throw a party on the Passover. The Passover, which is a complete picture of Jesus as our sacrifice, his blood poured out so that death can no longer harbor as a threat to any of us. That's amazing. The first law, the first law is like, wait a second, before you get into all the do's and don'ts, party because of Jesus. That's the law. That's the first law. Now God does go on. He goes on to honor his promise of the law, providing the full law to God, to Moses and his people. And he gives them the commandments to obey and follow that will honor him. The law is laid out through the books of Exodus, a lot in Leviticus, and very well, a lot of them in Numbers as well, the books of Numbers. It has rules that we know well and relate to in our society. The Ten Commandments is still something that many of our laws today are wrapped around, right? Most people would argue that in context, they're good no matter what. It has some other parts that are difficult for us to understand in today's world. I mean, it talks about some slavery and what you can and can't eat and what you can and can't wear, cutting your hair and some other things. I don't worry about that. It really all circles back, though, to Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve were in the garden. They chose to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Simply put, they just wanted the rules. You know, just give us what we can do that will be us, that will make us like God. But here, generations later, God is actually laying out what that takes from his perspective. He says, here's the law. Here it is, follow it. But it's not given without purpose. There's a lot of purpose, in fact, behind this law. The first, I got three kind of key points here. The first is it provides structure, it provided protection, and it provides blessings to those who keep it. In Deuteronomy, Moses actually is addressing this exact thing. It says, In the future, your children will ask you, what is the meaning of these laws, decrees, and regulations that our Lord, the Lord our God has commanded us to obey? Then you must tell them, when we were Pharaoh's slaves living in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with his strong hand. The Lord did miraculous signs and wonders before our eyes, dealing terrifying blows against Egypt and Pharaoh and all his people. He brought us out of Egypt so he could give us this land he had sworn to give our ancestors. And the Lord our God commanded us to obey all these decrees to fear him so he can continue to bless us and preserve us, preserve our lives, as he has done to this day. It provides blessing and protection when we live under the law of God. But that also kind of leads to a second point. And it shows that no one, not one of us, there's not one person who can match the righteousness of God. Paul talks about this in Romans. He says, obviously the law applies to those to whom it was given. For the purpose is to keep people from having excuses and to show that the entire world is guilty before God. No one can ever be made right with God by doing what the law commands. The law simply shows how sinful we are. It goes on to say that all have sinned, for all have sinned and failed to meet God's glorious standard. What a cool way of saying that, right? It goes so far as to say, and this is one, I'm just gonna lay on the line, I'm gonna throw one of my guilt out there. You can't eat bacon. That's how strict the law is. Look at you up here. It says, you know, the pig is in the least bit hoos, but don't you cut it and unclean. You can't eat bacon or barbecue or all the stuff I love. It's really good. The truth is, all of us, all I mean, it that's how, I mean, it gets that's intense. Now, Jesus actually, just a quick aside, comes back and says, it's okay to eat bacon. It's not what you bring in that makes you unclean, it's what lives in your heart that makes you clean or unclean. So it's okay to eat bacon. But but that's how strict the rules are. Nobody could keep the law of Moses. Nobody normal except Jesus. The last thing the law does, though, if if it protects us and blesses us, but we can't meet God's righteousness, where does that leave us? The truth is that the main point of the law, the number one point, is to point us to Jesus. In fact, Jesus says it in Matthew chapter 5, 17. He says, Don't misunderstand why I have come. I did not come to abolish the law of Moses or the writings of the prophets. No, I came to accomplish their purpose. John, Jesus quoted again, says it this way, again, you search the scriptures because you think they give you eternal life, but the scriptures point to me. I mean, the law can't give you eternal life. Jesus can. That's why the law was given. It was set as a guide to get us safely to Jesus and show that we can't have eternal hope without a relationship with him. Let me say that one more time. It was set to guide us safely to Jesus and show that we cannot have eternal hope without a relationship in him. That's awesome. And that relationship's available to every one of us. All we gotta do is say, Jesus, I want, I want to follow you. Now, getting back to Israel, despite freeing these people, providing for every need, right? Promising them a land flowing with milk and honey, this ragtag nation cannot help but to complain, rebel, and disobey God's laws. And they end up wandering for 40 years. And Moses, God's best friend, I mean his best bud, it says God and Moses knew each other face to face. He's not even allowed to enter the promised land because he could not perfectly deliver this nation. We'll find out that no one, you look through the Bible, there's no one outside of Jesus that can fully measure up to God's holiness. The book of Deuteronomy, so we're we're already four books in, um, is basically Moses' farewell address. And he's kind of reiterating the the points of the law. And he it ends with God personally burying Moses. I mean, that's the kind of personal relationship they had. And yet even then, Moses wasn't good enough. And despite all this angst and all the struggles he's had with Israel, God honors his covenant and gives the promised land to Israel through a new guy named Joshua. Joshua's been around, he's kind of like the military leader. And God and Moses appoint him, and that's the book of Joshua. And God brings him into this promised land with these resounding victories. But Israel's ownership of this new land is again not quite completed as it was directed. God specifically directed it to do certain things, and they they just fell short. And it kind of blends over into the next book of Judges. So we've gone through Joshua, Judges, and in Judges near the beginning it says this, and the angel of the Lord went up from Gigal to Bochum and said to the Israelites, I brought you out of Egypt into this land that I swore to give to your ancestors, and I said, I would never break my covenant with you. For your part, you were to not make any covenants with the people living in this land. Instead, you were to destroy their altars, but you disobeyed my command. Why did you do this? So now I declare that I will no longer drive out the people living in your land, they will be thorns in your side, and their gods will be a constant temptation to you. And that's exactly what happens. Now I'm gonna go on and lay it out there. The book of Judges, it's crazy. It is absolutely nuts. I I had never really, truthfully, I've read all sorts of parts of it, but I just never read it start to finish until last week. And I'm like, whoa, that was that was weird. Um, it's basically the comic book section of the Bible. I mean, truthfully. I mean, if if you get it to you, you want to read it's the comic book section of the Bible. It has the accounts of Gideon and Deborah and Samson. And and at the very beginning, Joshua, he passes away, and then chaos kind of ensues for Israel. They forget who their God is and what he had done for them. And God raises up these individuals called judges, which are basically like Bible superheroes. All right? And they're raised up to rescue God's people from their attackers. My son Will and I, he's 10. We were right in the car last week, right? And I'm trying to explain my thoughts about this whole thing we're talking about this morning, from all the way back to the Garden of Eden, and then and then specifically with Moses and the burning bush, and you know, judges and these guys, and you know, how the nation of Israel and God's people, they just couldn't stay on course. And God's promises were true, and and he backed them up, and his law was explicitly clear. Like, I wrote this down for you, clear. Yet time and time again, the people just get derailed, you know, by their own rebelliousness or lack of focus on God. And every time this kind of happens, God steps back in and he says, I'm gonna recalculate it for you, I'm gonna reroute you. And my son goes, like, Siri. I'm like, that's brilliant. You know, but it's a fairly accurate comparison. You know, God is dealing with this motley, cantankerous, rebellious nation, and every time they screw up, every time they make a wrong turn, he's like, all right, reroute, get you back on direction, get you back on path toward this bigger purpose I have for you. And the the book of Judges is filled with kind of this nation, and he just can't get them rerouted correctly. It has these amazing feats of strength and honor and glory. Yet, no matter which one of these judges is raised up, not one can seemingly unify the nation for any significant period of time. And that's where we're at. That's the ending that I prefaced. It's kind of depressing. But then we have Ruth. So we have Judges and their final book of Ruth. And Ruth is a parallel account in terms of time. All right? It's the same period of time, this disorganized and chaotic period of time. And we have this weird small personal account. Judges is a big, broad account, but now we have a small personal account of a Moabite widow named Ruth and her mother-in-law, Naomi. And Ruth stays with Naomi, even though she's been freed, and decides to stay with her and worship the God of Israel. And through a servant's heart, she's repeatedly blessed. And Zen ends up remarrying a man named Boaz. Now I want to pause right there. I want to stop. And everybody remember where we're at because I want to screw everything up. And I'm going to go all the way back to the I started with the end, now I'm going to go back to the beginning at the end. Everybody with me? Yeah. All right. So this morning we started down a path focusing on Moses and the law. It's led us to Ruth. And we started with this story of the trees chapter, the burning bush. But the truth is it's a really inaccurate title. You recall, we even read it. The bush was on fire, but it was not burned up. That's what it said. It's on fire, but it's not burned up. It wasn't consumed, you might say. In fact, we probably should say the unburning bush. You know, to burn something, you have to have air and fuel and the heat, and they engage in this process which consumes the matter and makes energy. That's burning. But here we have a plant on fire, but not consumed. It's not burnt up. And the label bush that I laughed about earlier, I looked it up. I looked a Hebrew word up, and the Hebrew word is actually sinna. And it means to prick or stick. Many of us probably think of a blackberry bush or a rose, maybe a rose bush. But I want to switch to a little image here. In the region of Saudi Arabia, where Moses is at Sinai, the most well-known thorn plant is the acacia thorn tree. It's beautiful from a distance, but it is brutal lurking up close. Marlin did a painting this week, and I kind of gave him a heads up on the acacia thorn tree. Take a look at this. You see the angel of God in it? A tree on fire. But not consumed. You know, on a quick aside, most of the time you might do this in the biblical way. I did it a complete wrong way. I knew that the region was Saudi Arabia. I knew it was thorns, so what I did is I went to the old trusty Google, right? And I Googled Thorns, Saudi Arabia, and the first four or five hits were for the Acacia thorn tree. It wasn't until a couple of days later that I found out that Acacia is actually in the Bible, too. Just a couple chapters down from the Ten Commandments. The Acacia wood is actually mentioned as part of the law. It's the wood commanded for Israel to make the Ark of the Covenant, the Tabernacle, and the altar of burnt offering. So rather than this section being titled The Burning Bush, what we really could call it or should call it is the tree of thorns that is not consumed by fire. If we were called from two weeks ago, Justin, he talked about the curses that Adam and Eve had laid up at them, right? When they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In Genesis 3, we find that. It says, to reiterate, it says, to the man he said, Since you listened to your wife and ate from the tree whose fruit I commanded you not to eat, the ground is cursed because of you. All your life you will struggle to scratch a living from it. It will grow thorns and thistles for you, though you will eat of its grains. By the sweat of your brow you will have food to eat until you return from the ground from which you were made, for you were made from dust, and to dust you will return. You Adam had to endure the curses of thorns and death. And all mankind is subjected to this curse in a regard. You know, throughout the Bible, the the idea of spiritual death is described by highlighting this image of burning and fire. We call it hell. And it all then we circle it back to Jesus. Jesus referred to himself not as the Son of God, but he called himself the Son of Man. We might even say the Son of Adam. The word Adam actually means man. Jesus was fully human, and thus he had to endure death. And at his crucifixion, he was given a crown of thorns. The crown of humanity's curse. He was subjected to death on a tree. Here's a cool thing, though, that death couldn't hold him in. Jesus also was fully God. The only person born ever capable of completing the true purposes of the law. The fire of death could not consume him. Three days later, he defeated hell. You see, this tree of thorns that is not consumed by fire, it's not just another Bible story we tell our kids. It's a big giant arrow, a big prophetic arrow to Jesus, just another one. It points us straight to him. You know, Jesus is our King, He wore our crown, He was your sacrifice that gives you hope beyond death. And he wants a relationship with you. He really does. All you have to do is say, I want to walk with you. There's no formula. And the Holy Spirit comes in your heart and he consumes you in a different way. And all of a sudden you start to act and walk and talk in a different way. It's not an instant process, it takes time. But he promises, just like he promises to fulfill the laws and the covenants he had with Israel, he promises to change us. If the worship team wants to kind of start heading back up, it says, you know, this guy, it's Jesus. He is the Son of God, right? He was asked about the greatest of Moses' commandments. It says this in Matthew Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses? Jesus replied, You must love the Lord God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important. Love your neighbor as yourself. The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commands. You see, love. Love is the purpose of the law. And Jesus is love. When we have a relationship with Jesus, we learn to become love. You know, it's just one of those cool things. When we we uh we left our chapter, if you don't recall, our little story. And um I want to go back. Because we have this Moabite widow, her name's Ruth. She's marrying this guy named Boaz, and this is this time of chaos, right? It's it's the dail note of our story. But we see a glimpse of hope. Right at the very end, the very final verses of the chapter of Ruth, we have this glimpse of what becomes another redirection, another recalculation in God's plan. It says in Ruth, So Boaz took Ruth into his home, she became his wife, and when he slept with her, the Lord enabled her to become pregnant, and she gave birth to a son. When the women of Town said to Naomi, Braise the Lord, who has now provided a redeemer for your family. May this child be famous in Israel, may he restore your youth and care for you in your old age, for he is the son of your daughter-in-law who loves you and has been better to you than seven sons. Naomi took the baby and cuddled him to her breast, and she cared for him as if he were her own. The neighbor women said, Now, at last, Naomi has a son again, and they named him Obed. He became the father of Jesse and the grandfather of David. This grandchild David, he will become king, and he will change the path of Israel, and pave yet one more new road on a path for Jesus and this future kingdom that you can be a part of. All you gotta do is ask. All right? Why don't we pray? Heavenly Father, thank you for this morning. I I thank you for the amazing message that you gave through this image of this tree of thorns on fire that cannot be consumed. God, I I thank you so much for this law that you gave us that just points to Jesus and tells us we can live a life of love. And that you will transform us into love, God. I pray that uh every person here is blessed today, and as they walk out and they can just reflect on today, and that Holy Spirit, you just work in the minds and the hearts of everyone here, and uh just draw them closer to you. We love you and lift your name up, and it's in your son's precious and holy name we pray. Amen. Thank you.