Four Oaks Midtown Podcast

We rightly celebrate the birth of Christ at Christmas and the death and resurrection of Christ on Good Friday and Easter. But if that’s all we celebrate we’re missing half the story. The gospel is not complete until Jesus ascends and the Spirit descends. The ascension of Christ and the pouring out of the Holy Spirit are not add-ons to the gospel. They are essential to it. More than that, they are essential to understanding our identity as the church, the body of Christ. In this episode of Understanding Acts we look at the two pivotal moments of the ascension and Pentecost and how they set the stage for the rest of Acts. 

 

The second commandment reminds us that God alone has the authority to define who He is and how He is to be worshiped, guarding us from reshaping Him into something more convenient or familiar. When we attempt to reduce God to an image or understanding of our own making, we diminish His glory and settle for something far smaller than the God revealed in His Word. Rather than fashioning God according to our desires, we are called to receive Him as He is and be transformed by Him into the image of His Son, from one degree of glory to another.

The book of Acts is filled with strange and awe-inspiring events. Tongues of fire. Miraculous healings. Dramatic exorcisms. Jesus ascending into the clouds. If this is your first pass through the book of Acts, the spectacle is hard to miss. But the greater miracle in Acts isn't the pyrotechnics. It's how God builds his church through ordinary, flawed, suffering people, and uses his church change the world and proclaim victory over death, sin, and Satan. Acts is about how the story of Jesus is the story of the church. As the head goes, so also the body. Just as Christ suffered on his path to glory, so also we as the church find victory through picking up our cross and following our Lord.

God’s commandments reveal who He is and invite His people into deeper relationship with Him, showing us what a flourishing life with God looks like. Because God moves toward us first in grace and mercy, our obedience is not a means of earning His love but a response to remembering the love of our Father. The first commandment calls us to put God at the center of our lives, asking us to consider what captures our worship, shapes our obedience, and consumes our minds.

The Israelites arrives at Mount Sinai and encounters the weightiness and glory of a holy God inviting His people into covenant relationship with Him. God gives them a covenant and commands and He provides Moses as a mediator. The covenant points us to Jesus, the greater Mediator who brings us into the very presence of God, allowing us to draw near to the Holy One with a privilege Israel could only dream of.

In this chapter, we see Moses pause, remember, and declare the ways God has been faithful as he recounts to Jethro God’s deliverance. In response, Jethro rejoices. Our declaration of God’s faithfulness allows others to see and savor His goodness. Jethro sees all that Moses is doing and encourages him to allow others to shoulder his burdens, as God intended. As we pray for one another and carry each other’s burdens to the feet of Jesus, God strengthens His people to faithfully walk together through the wilderness.

 Even as Israel doubted and tested God, He responded with grace, providing water from the rock and victory over Amalek. These events point forward to Christ, the true Rock who was pierced to give life and the greater Deliverer who defeats the serpent and will bring perfect justice. Rather than testing God as Israel did, we are called to walk by faith, trusting Him in every circumstance.

In the wilderness, God tested Israel through healing, provision, and rest to expose their hearts and teach them to trust Him. Though they repeatedly grumbled, God graciously revealed Himself as their Healer, Provider, and the source of true rest. Every test in the wilderness ultimately points us to Christ, who is our daily bread and the One in whom we find true and lasting rest.

Israel sings not because life is easy, but because God's victory has become their victory. The Song of Moses celebrates the mighty power of God that defeats every enemy and assures us that, through our union with Christ, death itself has been conquered and God's strength is always for His people. God's calls us to make His victory known, so as we await the day when all creation joins the new song before His throne, we begin singing His praises and proclaiming His gospel today.

Pharaoh’s “shock and awe” strategy in going after the Israelites was an attempt to overwhelm them with fear, but Moses calls God’s people to respond differently: “Fear not, stand firm,” trusting that the Lord Himself will fight for them. As God parts the Red Sea and defeats Egypt, He reveals His holiness, power, and glory, inviting all people to stand in awe of Him, for His steadfast love endures forever. Like Israel and Moses, our journey of faith moves us from fear and doubt to awe and worship as we come to know God more deeply and stand in wonder at Jesus, asking with the psalmist, “What is man that You are mindful of him?”