Old Testament Reading
Our Old Testament reading is Exodus chapter 32, verses 15 through 35. 32, 15, to 35, and this is God’s infallible, his inspired, his inerrant word. Let’s hear the word of God.
Then Moses turned and went down from the mountain with the two tablets of the testimony in his hand, tablets that were written on both sides, on the front and on the back, they were written. The tablets were the work of God and the writing was the writing of God engraved on the tablets.
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 tablets out of his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain. He took the calf that they had made and burned it with fire and ground it to powder and scattered it on 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 such 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. So 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 out came this calf.
And when Moses saw that the people had broken loose, for Aaron had let them break loose to the derision of 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 around him. And he said to them, thus says the Lord God of Israel, put your sword on your side, each of you, and go to and fro from gate to gate throughout the camp, and each of you kill his brother and his companion and his neighbor.
And the sons of Levi did according to the word of Moses. And that day about 3,000 men of the people fell. And Moses said, today you have been ordained for the service of the Lord, each one at the cost of his son and of his brother, so that he might bestow a blessing upon you this day.
The next day, 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 has sinned a great sin. They have made for themselves gods of gold. But now, if you will forgive their sin, but if not, please blot me out of your book that you have written.
But the Lord said to Moses, whoever has sinned against me, I will blot out of my book. But now go, lead the people to the place about 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.
Then the Lord sent a plague on the people, because they made the calf, the one that Aaron made.
New Testament Reading
And now turn to Matthew chapter 10 for our New Testament reading, and then we’ll turn back to Exodus. Matthew chapter 10, verses 34 to 39. Matthew 10, 34 through 39.
Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household.
Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.
The Reality of the Christian Life
When you read a fairy tale to children, what are the final words that are written on the last page? They live happily ever after. And we might be tempted to think of salvation in that way, that once a person comes to faith in Christ and his sins are forgiven, that is the end of the story and he lives happily ever after.
But of course, you know that that idea of the Christian life is not true. The Christian life is often filled with sorrow, with struggle, with suffering. And although in the Christian life we do enjoy the peace of God, the life of God, the joy that God gives us, nevertheless, the happily ever after part does not truly begin until we are brought into glory, to be in the presence of God forever. That’s when the real happily ever after begins.
And one of the ways in which we as Christians struggle in this life is that we must deal with the consequences of our sin, of our foolishness, the ways in which we have transgressed God’s commandments. We know as Christians that we are forgiven, we are justified, we will never be more forgiven than we are at this moment, trusting in Christ. Nevertheless, in this world, we still must face the consequences of our sin. And sometimes those consequences can be very severe and very difficult.
And that is the hard lesson that the Israelites learned after their sin of making and worshiping the golden calf. The Israelites were spared from complete and utter destruction. However, the story of the golden calf episode does not end with the words, and they lived happily ever after. Instead, the Israelites suffered the dire consequences that their sin and their idolatry brought upon them. And today we’ll consider those consequences as they are described for us here in our passage, and we’ll draw some lessons along the way for us as Christians today.
Review of the Golden Calf Episode
But first, since it’s been a while since we’ve been in the book of Exodus, let’s review a little bit what happened to this point in the story of Exodus. The Israelites, they are at Mount Sinai in the wilderness. Their leader, Moses, he has been on the top of the mountain in the presence of the Lord, and he has been receiving from the Lord the various laws and statutes and commandments that would govern the life and the worship of the people of God.
And God has just given to Moses the two tablets of stone upon which God himself inscribed the words of the Ten Commandments. And so Moses is ready to come down the mountain to bring the law of God to the Israelites. But before he does, he learns from the Lord what has been taking place at the foot of the mountain among the people of Israel. And what he hears is simply appalling.
The people of Israel, they went to Aaron, Moses’ brother, who was left in charge of the people. They went to him and they demanded that he make for them a God to quote, go before them, that is to lead them on their way to the promised land. And so the people of Israel have given up on Moses, they have given up on the Lord, and they are ready to make their own God to lead them to the promised land.
And so, this is in the first part of chapter 32, we read that some time ago, but Aaron collected all the gold jewelry of the people, and we read that he made from it a golden calf that is an idol. And the Israelites proclaimed in verse 4, these are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. Then Aaron doesn’t stop there, but he makes an altar to the golden calf, and the people make offerings to it. They sat down to eat and drink, and then they rose up to play. It was a great festival of idolatry and hedonism in the desert. We might say it was the original burning man taking place there in Egypt, or not in Egypt, but at the foot of Mount Sinai.
And this sin of the Israelites was so great that the Lord threatened to annihilate the entire nation of Israel, except for Moses. He would save Moses and he would start with Moses and make a new people of God with Moses as their progenitor. But because Moses interceded for the Israelites in prayer, we read in verse 14, the Lord relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people. And so Moses, the faithful leader and mediator of the people of Israel, through his intercession, he saved the people from utter destruction.
And as I said, if the story of the golden calf ended right there, if there was nothing after verse 15, or verse 14 rather, we might think that the end of the story was they lived happily ever after. But that was not the end of the story. The Lord did spare the Israelites from complete destruction, but He did not spare them, He did not save them from suffering the consequences of their sin. And as we’ll see, those consequences were very severe.
First Consequence: Moses’ Righteous Anger and Destroying the Idol
The first consequence of Israel’s sin was that they had to endure the righteous anger of Moses against them. As Moses came down the mountain with the two tablets in his hand, he meets his assistant, Joshua. Joshua was waiting for him partway down the mountain. And as the two leaders come closer to the foot of the mountain, they hear in the distance down below a faint noise of shouting.
And Joshua being the military man, he assumes that it is the sound of war. But Moses knows better because he has already heard from the Lord what is really happening down there. And he says to Joshua that these are not the shouts of war, but the shouting and singing of a people reveling in their idolatry and in their immorality. It’s a great party that they’re having down at the foot of the mountain, an idolatrous and debauched party.
And we read this in verse 19, verse 19: And as soon as he came near the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, Moses’ anger burned hot and he threw the tablets out of his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain. At first glance, when we first hear what happens, what Moses does there, we assume that what happened was that he just became so enraged that he blew a gasket and in his uncontrollable anger, he hurled the tablets on the ground and they shattered on the rocks. Now Moses was certainly angry, there’s no question about that. He was very angry.
And we know that Moses, he was a man, he was a sinner, he was capable of an unrighteous, sinful kind of anger that we are all very familiar with. We know that that was true at least one other time in the Old Testament. But not here. This was a godly anger. This was righteous indignation on the part of Moses. He was righteously appalled and angry at the sin of the Israelites because they had dishonored God, because they had debased themselves in their idolatry and revelry.
And his throwing down the tablets to break them was not because Moses just lost his anger and threw his tablets to the ground like we might do if we get angry at something, we want to throw something. But rather, Moses deliberately broke the tablets in order to show the Israelites the truth of what they had done. Moses was kind of acting out the truth of what the Israelites had done by their sin. And that is because of their idolatry, they had broken their covenant with God. They had shattered that covenant that God had made with them just as completely as the tablets were shattered into pieces on the ground when Moses threw them down.
And then after that, Moses in his holy indignation and zeal, he dealt with the idol that the people had made. He burned it with fire. He ground the remains of it into powder. He scattered the powder into water. And then he made the people of Israel drink the water.
It’s not clear why Moses made the people drink the water. One suggestion is that since this idol-infused water would come out as human waste, Moses was demonstrating to the Israelites the utter worthlessness of their idol, as if to say, this is the true worth of your cherished golden calf. It is garbage, it is waste.
Destroying Heart Idols
Now, there is a lesson for us as we see how Moses took care of this idol that was the occasion for such sin. And that is, the only way for you to deal with an idol in your heart is to completely destroy it, to get rid of it. We may not make actual golden calves today. We may not make idols out of wood or metal or gold, but we are capable of making an idol out of many things.
And anything that becomes for you the chief desire of your hearts, anything that you look to in this life and creation to give you a sense of happiness or contentment or significance or worth or fulfillment, anything that is not Jesus Christ becomes an idol. Money, comfort, pleasure, power, these are some of the golden calves that we can make with our hearts and in our hearts. And our idols that we make, they demand nothing less than our wholehearted devotion, just as the Israelites gave themselves over to worshiping this calf.
So the idols that we set up in our hearts demand our full devotion, our loyalty. We cannot serve an idol and serve Jesus Christ at the same time. We cannot serve both. Only one can be our master, either Christ or the idol that we have made. And that is the power of an idol over our hearts and our lives.
And Moses understood that. He knew that he couldn’t just take this golden calf and take it away and put it in storage somewhere. He knew that it had to be completely destroyed or else it would be a temptation at some other time for the Israelites to take it out and to worship it. And in the same way, the only way for you to overcome idolatry is to destroy the idols of your heart.
And the chief way that you do that is by making Christ the desire, the delight of your hearts. As you, by the grace of God, as you seek that life, that blessing, that peace, the joy that only Christ can give you, that Christ can give you in abundance, as you seek that, as you make that your heart’s treasure, the thing that you long for, the thing that you want more of, as you fill your heart with Christ, then the idols have no more room in your heart. And it’s in that way that you can destroy the idols that otherwise tempt us instead of Christ. And you destroy the power of idols by doing so.
Confronting Aaron and Lame Excuses
Well, after destroying this golden calf, Moses confronted his brother Aaron. And Aaron was guilty not only for caving in to the evil demands of the Israelite people. He should have stood his ground and said, no, we will not worship an idol. He not only caved in to their demands, but he also went the extra mile. He actually helped them to make the idol. He made it himself, in fact.
Now, presumably, we have to believe that at some point Aaron repented of this great sin that he had committed. But what we see here is not that repentance. In fact, what we see here is a classic example of how not to deal with your sin and how not to deal with when we have done things that we know are wrong, that are against God’s will.
First of all, you don’t blame others for the wrong you have done. In verse 21, when Moses asks Aaron what the people did to him that he brought such a great sin upon them, Aaron starts off by reminding Moses of what a bunch of good for nothings the Israelites were. He says in verse 22, you know the people, that they are set on evil. Moses, you know the kind of troublemakers that I’m dealing with here. Obviously, they’re the problem, not me.
And when we are confronted with our own sin, it’s instinctive, virtually. It’s such an automatic reflex on our parts. We point our fingers at others. We say things like, it’s not my fault, it’s my parents’ fault. It’s my wife’s fault. It’s my husband’s fault. It’s my friend’s fault. It’s society’s fault. We are ready to point the finger at anyone and everyone except for us for the sin that we ourselves are guilty of and responsible for. And that’s exactly what Aaron does. He blames the Israelites.
But when we have sinned, we must not do that. We must take full responsibility. We must say to ourselves, and when necessary, say to others, I have sinned. I am guilty. I did this particular wrong, and I make no excuses for it. It’s my fault I sinned.
Secondly, when confronted with our sin, we must confess the whole ugly truth of it, of what we have done. Again, we are experts at this, but we will minimize our sin, we will whitewash our sin, we will spin it so that it sounds like it’s something other than what it really is in truth, sin. And that’s exactly what Aaron did.
If there was a list of the top 10 lame excuses of all time, I think Aaron’s explanation to Moses of how this golden calf came to be would rank near the top of that list. Aaron says to Moses that the Israelites gave him their gold and then he tossed it into the fire. And then the weirdest thing happened. This golden calf just popped out of the flames.
I think the word that the Jewish people have for this kind of shameless excuse-making is chutzpah. And Aaron is demonstrating it in abundance here. He threw the gold in the fire, and this golden calf just came out of the flames. An honest answer would have been something like, Moses, I confess that I have sinned against God. I made this idol. I led the people to worship it. I built the altar for it. Please forgive me, and may the Lord forgive me.
But instead Aaron essentially lied. His recounting of the story of what happened is pretty accurate when he talks about what the Israelites did and said to him, but when it comes to his own parts, basically he lies. When your conscience convicts you of sin, or when you are confronted with your sin, the only right thing to do is to admit it. And sometimes, or… probably all the time, virtually all the time, that’s the hardest thing to do, simply to admit it. I did wrong, I sinned. And you ask for forgiveness for those that you have hurt by your sin.
Most of all, you ask the Lord for forgiveness. As David prayed in Psalm 51, against you and you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. And the good news is, is that there is always forgiveness with God. God is always ready to forgive us. He is always ready to hear the confession of His people of sin. When they seek forgiveness, when they acknowledge their sin, when we come to Him and say that we have sinned and confess our sins, He is more than ready to forgive.
First John 1:9 says that when we confess our sins to the Lord, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Why is it so hard for us to simply acknowledge what we have done? We want to justify ourselves, we want to make ourselves right, but when we simply confess the truth and come to the Lord and seek His mercy and His forgiveness, He does not withhold that from us, but He forgives us. And then He gives us grace that we can begin to walk in new obedience.
Second Consequence: Execution by the Levites
So the first consequence of the Israelites’ sin was the righteous anger of Moses. The second consequence was much more severe than that, and that is the destruction of 3,000 people by the hand of the Levites. Verse 25 says that Moses saw that the people had broken loose to the derision of their enemies.
There is so much in this chapter that is so tragic, but this is one of the most tragic parts of this whole chapter of the Golden Calf incident. The people of Israel, they were supposed to be a holy nation. God made them His people. He created them. And He made them a people, not only to worship Him, but to be a people to show forth to the nations of the world what true righteousness is, who the true God is, what true worship looks like, what holiness looks like. They were to be a shining light to the world, showing forth the truth of God.
But instead, because of their idolatry and sin, they became a laughingstock of the nations. They were mocked by their enemies. They were derided by the nations that they were supposed to bear witness to. And in that way, not only did they fail to bear witness to the truth, but they only confirmed the nations of the world in their own sin and unbelief.
And here is one of the terrible consequences of our own sin as Christians. It destroys our witness before the world that we are a people belonging to a holy God, that we are a holy people because of Jesus Christ. It destroys our witness before the world of the truth of the gospel. And so when there is a scandal in the church, we become an object of derision to the world. And our testimony to the truth of Christ, our preaching of the gospel, sounds hollow and false.
As for the sin of the Israelites here, it was extreme. And so it called for extreme measures. Verse 26 says that Moses stood at the gates of the camp and he called out to the people, Who is on the Lord’s side? Come to me. And we read that it was the Levites, the sons of Levi, who gathered to Moses.
And Moses gave the Levites here a command, a severe command. The Levites were to put on their swords. They were to go throughout the camp. They were to put to death those who were guilty of the evil things that Israel had done. Presumably, the Levites were to find and to kill the worst offenders, the ringleaders who led the people in this idolatry. Amazingly, they spared Aaron himself. And they were to show no mercy, even to their own brothers. They were to show no mercy to their friends, to their neighbors, but they were to strike down the guilty.
And the Levites faithfully carried out this the severe command from the Lord. With the sword they struck down, put to death 3,000 men. Now this is a difficult passage for us to read today, because not only were the Levites commanded by God to put to death their fellow Israelites, even in some cases their own brothers, but we read that they would be blessed in doing so.
Well, what are we to make of this? Well, first of all, this is certainly not a model or a pattern for the church today. Today, God prohibits any kind of physical punishment for Christians who sin. That is not a part of church discipline. It has no place in church discipline.
But God has given the church a process. Christ has given the church a way in which we address sin in the church. We call it church discipline. Begins with loving admonition, it calls for repentance. It should always be carried out in the spirit of love and prayer and desire to see the offender brought to repentance. In the most extreme case where there is not repentance, it calls for excommunication. But even with excommunication, we pray and hope that the offending person will be brought to repentance and faith, that the Lord would give him a new heart and work repentance in his heart and bring him to new obedience.
And so, this isn’t a model for how the church is to maintain the purity of the body of Christ today, but Christ has given us a new way to do that. Secondly, it’s important to understand that what’s at stake here is nothing less than the gospel. If God did not purify his people, if he did not work in this way to preserve their holiness and faithfulness to him, there would be no gospel today. There would be no salvation for the world today. There would be no salvation for us.
The hope of the world depended upon the basic moral and spiritual integrity of the people of Israel. And that’s because it was from the people of Israel that Christ would come. God would raise up the Messiah, the Savior of the world, from among his people. And if Israel had went her own way, if she had abandoned the Lord and her idolatry, if she had lost all association with God, and if she became like all the other nations in the world, then the promises of God to raise up from among his people a Savior could not have been fulfilled.
And so, although what the Lord commanded the Levites to do strikes us as extreme and shocking, nevertheless, it was really the Lord acting out of faithfulness to his own promises to raise up a savior, to bring salvation, that he carried out these very severe measures.
Third Consequence: The Plague and God’s Persistent Grace
So that was the second consequence of the Israelite sin. The third consequence of the Israelite sin was a plague from the Lord.
After Moses goes to the Lord and pleads for mercy, that he would forgive the Israelites their sin, the Lord answers his prayer by promising that the angel would lead them to the promised land. In this way, God is amazingly merciful to His people Israel. He did not deal with them as their sins deserve, not even close. Yes, 3,000 men were killed, but that was just a tiny fraction of the whole nation of Israel, and they all deserved that.
But God promises Moses that He will still lead His wayward people to the land of Canaan, He would send his angel before them to lead them on their way. He would still give them that promised land that he had promised to give to their forefathers. But even so, the sin of the Israelites was so grievous that the Lord, because he is a righteous God, a holy God, who must deal with sin, He brought a final judgment against them, and that was the plague with which he inflicted them. In verse 35, we read, Then the Lord sent a plague on the people, because they made the calf, the one that Aaron made.
Now put yourself in the shoes of an Israelite who is going through all of this, who survived this, and things would look pretty bleak at this point. Your leader Moses comes down from the mountain, and he is so filled with righteous anger and indignation, he dashes the covenant of God with you to the ground, and it shatters in pieces what will be the future of Israel. And then 3,000 men were put to death, and then the whole nation suffered from this plague. We don’t know exactly the nature of it, but it was a plague, so it was awful.
Nevertheless, as an Israelites, you could always think about the fact that God was still gracious to you. He was still merciful to your people. You could give him thanks for his mercy. He did not destroy the entire nation. And God would have been just and right to do so, but he refrained.
And so even in the midst of the terrible consequences for their sin, God was gracious to his people. And God is always gracious to us as well. Even when we have to deal with the bad consequences that our sin brings into our lives and into the lives of others, that we know that God is always merciful and gracious to us in Christ.
The Call to Salvation and Its Cost
And there’s another way that the Lord shows His grace here, and that was through this call of Moses in verse 26, when he says, who was on the Lord’s side? Despite the great sin of the Israelites, the Lord gave the people an opportunity to come over to his side, to repent, to declare their allegiance to him. And in doing so, they would find blessing.
Because this account of the golden calf tells us that the entire nation took part in this idolatry, it’s safe to assume that even the Levites, perhaps not to the same degree, but to some degree at least, they must have shared in the guilt of the people of Israel. But they came over to the Lord’s side. They answered the call of Moses. Here was an opportunity to repent, to come to the Lord.
And one lesson to take from this is that as long as you have life in this world, no matter how badly you have sinned, no matter how grievous the things that you have done are, no matter how much you may have messed up and made a mess of things, the Lord continues to call out to you. He calls out to you in the gospel invitation. Who is on the Lord’s side? Repent of your sin. Come to Christ. Come to my son. You will be forgiven and restored.
And by the grace of God, you can still answer that call. It is God’s gracious call to receive the gift of salvation. It is His call to come to Jesus, to entrust yourself wholly to the Lord Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.
And if this call to come to the Lord’s side is a call to salvation, then there’s another lesson here for us, and that is this salvation is costly. This salvation to which the Lord calls us and offers us, it is costly. It costed the Levites. It demanded that the Levites show total devotion and allegiance to the Lord and to His word, even to the point of putting to death their own brothers. The Lord demanded that they would be faithful to Him, even more than their loyalty to their own blood, to their brothers.
And that’s… The Lord Jesus Christ demands nothing less of you as well. He calls you to total devotion to Him, complete consecration to Him, to make Him Lord of your life and to put Him above even loyalty to friend, to neighbor, even to family. Jesus put it this way, whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. Whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
Christ demands nothing less than your absolute devotion to him, even above your own life. And so there is a cost in answering the call of God to receive that gift of salvation.
The Ultimate Cost and Our Ultimate Mediator
But the greatest cost of our salvation is not that, our devotion to Christ that he calls us to, but the greatest cost of our salvation is the sacrifice that Jesus made for us when he laid down his life for us upon the cross. And in our passage here this morning, you see a picture of what Jesus has done for us. You see a picture of that in Moses as he serves as the leader, the mediator, between the people of Israel and the Lord.
Moses himself, of course, he did not share in the sin of the people of Israel. Perhaps he was the one Israelite who was free of guilt from this golden calf sin, but he suffered. He suffered the anguish of knowing that they were condemned. And he was willing to suffer even eternally for the sake of his people Israel.
He says in verse 32, He’s praying to the Lord, he says, but now, if you will, forgive their sin, but if not, please blot me out of your book that you have written. The book there is the book of life. What he says is a little, a little obscure. We can’t read too much into the words, but it’s hard not to think that Moses was grasping at an idea that perhaps he himself didn’t even fully comprehend, and that is if somehow, if his name could be blotted out of the book of life, perhaps that would mean salvation for the people of Israel.
But Moses could not do that. He was a sinner like the rest of the people. He may not have been guilty of this idolatry of the golden calf, but he certainly could not be a substitute for his people. He could only do so much. He couldn’t die in their place that they may live. The Lord simply says in response to Moses, whoever has sinned against me, I will blot out of my book.
But in Jesus Christ, you have a greater mediator than Moses. Moses said he was willing to have his name blotted out of the book of life, but Jesus for a time, he truly did have his name blotted out of God’s book of life. As he hung on the cursed cross, the father turned his face away from him. And Jesus suffered the unspeakable judgment of those who are cursed to die an eternal death for their sins.
And speaking of the consequences of our sin, if you want to see the true nature, the true consequences of our sin, look to the cross. It’s there you see what our Lord suffered because of your sin, because of my sin. He was the sinless son of God. He was righteous, he was holy, and yet he suffered the agony of one under the wrath of God. Condemnation, shame, and death. It’s there we see the full extent of the consequences of our sin.
But the good news is this, that if you believe in Jesus Christ, if you have put your hope in him as your savior, the death that he died, he died for you. That curse that He took upon Himself, He took it for you. He suffered that condemnation, that wrath, the shame, the reproach that was for you and for me because of our sin. And if you trust in Christ, He took it for you. So you are free from condemnation.
It is true, you may need to endure the painful consequences of your sin. God does not save us from that. Our actions have consequences, good or bad. And God does not always deliver us from that. But he does promise that he will use those consequences for your good, as chastisement, as discipline, to form in you a more Christ-like character, to grow you in holiness and righteousness.
And the gospel declares that even now, by faith in Jesus Christ, by trusting in him, even if you are dealing with the consequences of your own sin and foolishness, you know that your sins are forgiven by God. You have been adopted as a child of your heavenly father. You have the promise that your name is not only written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, but that it will never, ever be blotted out of it because of what Jesus has done for you.
Let’s pray.