The Prophets and Moses' Staircase

Automated transcript, lightly edited for readability. Scripture appears as spoken; the video is the authoritative teaching.

All right. Well, Shabbat shalom everybody. And welcome to Founder of Truth Fellowship. So, we've made it to you thought last week was the ending of the year-long Homeward Bound series. But wait, there's more. So, we made it and again for I guess the better part of a year we've been working our way through a section of the Bible called the Prophets. And we tried to look at each one of them individually. About 16 of them. We included Daniel in that. And one by one, we just kind of went through what was their message about. If we knew a little bit about the prophet such as Ezekiel, he's probably one of my favorites.

He's probably the most ADHD-type of prophet. He was the prophet. So, every prophet told the same type of message, but they all told it a little bit differently. And it was filtered through their own kind of imagination, if you will. So, for example, Ezekiel, he was called to become a prophet, but the way that he spoke was through performances. Right? The street performances of eating the bread or cooking the bread or just everything that he did was kind of a spectacle. An actor's spirit, if you will. That was in protest and calling out the people of Israel. Hosea through a marriage. Isaiah, again through his visions of the coming second Exodus, and so on and so forth.

And so, we tried to look at them each individually. But today I kind of want to draw on what they said collectively. Because we'll we'll touch on it and we'll dive in here in a minute, but essentially what I'm hoping to persuade you on is that the prophets and the role of a prophet, especially in scripture, s- prophets that we've been through, they were not fortune tellers that were always looking to the future and predicting the future. They were actually reading off of a script that was written long before they were ever born. And that's something that they did collectively. Although they may have referenced future events, what they were doing was becoming covenant prosecutors toward Israel.

The Canals That Were Never There

And so we'll dive into that shortly, but before we get there, I would like to look at alleged evidence of alien life on Mars. Ah. Of course. Alleged or something that someone thought was a whole civilization on Mars at one point. So, in 1877, there was an astronomer known as Giovanni Schiaparelli, and he mapped a set of faint lines on Mars that he saw through his telescope, and he called them canali. Okay? And canali in Italian, it's a very plain word, it just means the channels, the channels, the natural formations on the planet that we can barely make out, right? Canali. The grooves and the curves and everything.

But when that word gets translated to English, it's canali, and it becomes the word canals. And a canal is a very different thing, because a canal is something that somebody digs, not that is just naturally formed. And so, one translated word or mistranslated word, if you will, ended up smuggling in the idea of a builder on Mars instead of what was built already on Mars. You see where I'm going with this? Now it goes from the assertion of, "Hey, look at the things that are formed on Mars." to "Look at the things someone formed on Mars." And once some people assumed that maybe someone had discovered that there were builders on Mars, they went looking for what on Mars?

The builders on Mars. Yeah, I'm going to get my own telescope and we're going to find the builders. And there was an astronomer named Percival Lowell who did just that. He built an entire observatory to study this planet. And he became convinced that he was looking at a planet-wide irrigation system with canals carrying water down from the ice caps on the top or if top that's a It's not really a right word for that, but on the ice caps and that they were flowing back down to feed a rather dying civilization that lived there. And he drew maps. This is a big deal in the late 1800s. Yeah, man. Here's his the map of the canals and the irrigation system on Mars.

Here's another one. Everything he mapped out. This is how this works. He even had, let's see, my favorite. He even had one where he named two of them after the rivers from Eden, Pison Euphrates, right? So, of course, we have to take things from the Bible to try to make it cooler, you know? And it's a neat idea, don't get me wrong. But again, he drew these rivers and canals straight across a dead planet. A misunderstanding about one word in language caused a man to build an entire observatory and to create a Tolkien-level civilization in his mind, make maps of how this civilization functioned, and for good measure tied in biblical connections.

I love it so much. And he had a nice telescope when he was doing this, but guess what happened as technology went on. Nicer telescopes were created. And when we looked through the nicer telescopes, we realized there is nothing on this big dry rock. There's nothing there. Yep. And the strange part is most of the things that he drew maps of, he never saw through a telescope. Because when you're that certain that you want something to be like you want it to be, then it is what you want it to be. Everybody with me? You already know where we've we've gone there. We've nothing Yeah. The lens you put on decides everything, both in life and in the Bible.

Reading the Prophets Like a Horoscope

Right? And so those astronomers put on lenses of a living world but a dying civilization, and then they couldn't take it off. And they drew lines that were never even there, maps. And I say all this to say that sometimes we do the same thing to the prophets. We put on the fortune teller lenses, and that's what we think the prophets were. A man who sees the future, God running him a private movie of what is coming and then, you know? And then when we read the prophets, we end up reading them like a crystal ball. Like a horoscope even. Scanning for predictions. That's what we're doing, right? We scan for predictions.

We're going to line up all the verses with this week's headlines because they fit. And once you're looking for the hidden coded forecasts of the future, you end up finding them everywhere, right? Helicopters in the book of Joel, barcodes in Revelation, this morning's news buried deep in Ezekiel. I found it. Lines that were never put there to connect. Canals on a planet that never had any. And so, I want to take this possible perception lens that we use sometimes for the prophets. I did growing up. This is how I was taught to read the prophets. And we're going to take it and we're just going to put it right here.

You It's very close. Don't worry. It's not going anywhere. It's not going too far away. We're just going to leave it here for now. Just don't worry. The prophets sometimes announce the future, of course. But that was not their primary job. Their primary job was reading Israel's covenant story and telling Israel where they stood inside of it. That's it. They were not staring into a crystal ball. They were reading a script. A script written again hundreds of years before any of them were ever born, by a man that every one of them knew but none had ever met. And that man was Moses. And so, we're going to first go back to the very end of the Torah, which is in the book, of course, Deuteronomy.

And, Torah is the first five books of the Bible. So, the very last one at the very end of it. And this is a time long before the prophets, before a king existed in Israel, before they even entered the land. There was no temple. And so, I want you to picture this scene. And the whole nation is standing on the bank of the Jordan River. On the far side is everything they have been promised. They have the land of milk and honey, the home that God swore to their ancestor Abraham 400 years earlier. It's right there. It's close enough they can see the water. And they're about to cross over into this dream fantasy of everything they've always imagined.

And standing there before them is Moses, the man who led them out of slavery through the whole wilderness for 40 years, and he's old now. And he's not going to cross with them. He's been told he's going to climb up a mountain, he's going to see the land, and he's going to die up there and watch everyone else walk. So, what Deuteronomy is the last speech of Moses before Israel crosses into the land. And he reads them the ending, right? That's what Deuteronomy is about. It's the last instructions Deuteronomy's known as the second telling. And if you go to chapter 28, Moses does something a bit unsettling.

Moses Lays Out Two Roads

He sits these group of people down, the generation that survived and has been told they're going to be the first generation to go into this the land and have all these great things. And he sits them down, almost ready to cross, and he not only pops their bubble, he takes their candy, too. He lays out two roads. He says, "Road one is when you go into the land and you thrive and you build a kingdom and all this stuff. You can keep the covenant with God. You can walk with him. And when that happens, here comes the blessings." And he lists all these blessings. Rain is going to come in its due season, and barns are going to be so full that it's going to be overflowing.

And children, lots of children. Yes, and safety, security, and peace. You will be so abundant that you will lend and not borrow. You read the first half of Deuteronomy 28, it's just lots of good things pouring out, right? And then Moses turns the page and his voice changes. And then he says, "But if and actually when you do break covenant," he says, "that's the other road." and he doesn't speak vague warnings like, "Oh, you're going to have lots of catastrophes and it's just not going to be great and you're going to have curses." He gets very specific, unsettlingly specific. Let's see. Let's see the first couple things.

We're going to watch these curses and pretend that they're a staircase you're stepping down on, right? The sky above you will be bronze and the land beneath you will turn to iron. The Lord will defeat you before your enemies. You will march out against them from one direction, but flee from them in seven if you do not walk with God and you when you go into the land. You will sow so much seed in the field, but you will harvest nothing because the locusts will devour it. The Lord will bring a nation from far away against you and it will besiege you with in all of your gates. The Lord will then scatter you among all people until the ends of the earth.

So, these are some of the curses if Israel does not obey. And the way he frames it is this is actually what's going to happen, sorry to pop your bubble. One step at a time. It starts with a drought. The sky over your head, Moses says it'll turn to bronze. And the ground under your feet will turn to iron. It's it's it's like the sky is going to turn into a sealed brass lid, a pressure cooker where no rain is going to come in and it's just going to be sweltering, right? Nothing able to push through the ground. Everything's fighting against you to survive. This is the first step of the curses. And then you step down and then you have the locusts.

They will carry the seed out of your field. You'll plant a bunch of it, and you'll break your back doing it, but you're never get any return because the locusts will take it all away. You step down again, disease and fever and wasting sickness in your body and in your animals and in your crops and Mo- Moses piles up all the words for it. Boils and tumors and fever and blight and all these things. Your body will begin to break down. Step down to the next curse, the enemies. You will march out against your enemies in one direction, and when they fight you, you will flee in seven different directions behind you.

Step down again, the siege. This is where Moses gets pretty detailed and graphic because he wants them to feel what the what the bottom of the staircase is going to feel like. He says that you're going to be shut up inside your own walls, the fortified walls that you trusted, and then you're going to be cut off from everything including food that comes in. And then the people inside are going to start to starve. And Moses says that the gentlest and most refined men among you will turn on his own brother and his own wife and his own children. And he says a mother, a tender and gentle mother, will become so crazed with hunger that she will hide her own children from the rest of the family just so she doesn't have to share.

He's describing a city eating itself alive from the inside. Mothers and their own babies. Hi everybody, welcome to the Bible. It's not made for kids. That's very adult book. But this is this is the gravity that Moses is sharing. He says, "This is going to be the result of when you choose not to walk with God anymore." And then we come to the bottom step. And the bottom step of the curses of Deuteronomy, everything is descending toward is exile. You will be torn The land that you're looking into right now, you will be torn off of it. You will be scattered among the nations. You will be living in a country that is not yours.

You'll be bowing to gods of wood and stone with no rest for your soul or your foot. Moses says, "Your life is just going to hang in front of you and you'll have dread in the morning and you have dread at night." The dream of everything that you thought you were about to walk into is gone. Poof. The land gets taken back. And you as the people get thrown to the wind. That's the spoiler that Moses gives as a lovely gift to his people who are not going in with him. He has to stay behind, so maybe that was part of it. I don't know, but exile. It's the worst possible curse. Now, when we take this one chapter of Deuteronomy, what if we happen to use that as the lens of what the prophets were for?

What if the role of the prophet were just the conductors through the curses that were befalling Israel, saying, "Guess where you're at now, guys. What step you're on. Guess what step you're in now. Guess what step you're in now." Without it, the prophets read more like a room full of strangers having unrelated breakdowns. One man is screaming about a swarm of bugs. Another man is wailing about a drought. Another is weeping in the ashes of a burned-down city. Another is shouting at the top of his lungs at a foreign empire you've probably never heard of. It almost feels random when you read through the prophets.

Sixteen Prophets on One Chart

You know they're connected, but 16 different men in 16 different bad moods sharing their convictions. So, covenant prosecutor. If we use this as an overlay, then things start to make sense. For example, open the book of Joel. The very first thing that happens in chapter 1 is what? It's a locust plague that breaks out. Wave after wave after wave of locust plague plagues. What one swarm leaves, the next gets to eat, and the whole land is stripped of everything. Oh, here's my awesome graphic, by the way, of the steps of curses leading down to exile. What the devouring locust have left, the swarming locust have eaten.

What the locust have left, the locust have eaten. What they left, the other locust that came and have eaten. They destroyed everything. See, if you read Joel like a horoscope, you think, "Okay, there's some ancient bug problem going on." Right? What does that have to do with me? But Joel is not a man with a bug problem. Joel is a man standing on the staircase of Moses with his finger on the locust step. Hey guys, here to warn you once again, we're here. Do you guys not see where you're at? You think the locust are just random. Now, jump almost a thousand years forward to a man named Haggai. Different century entirely.

These are people who have already been through the exile and come back and they're trying to rebuild. And listen what Haggai tells them. He's using the same language. You have planted much but harvested little. You eat but never have enough to be satisfied. You drink but never have enough to be happy. You put on clothes but never have enough to get warm. The wage earner puts his wages into a bag and it has a hole in it. That's not Haggai complaining about a rough year in the land. That's Haggai with his finger on the drought step. Saying there's a drought here. The bronze sky telling a discouraged people exactly why the harvest will not come in.

Because despite where they think they are in the timeline, their hearts are still not oriented with God and they're still repeating the same curses. And then there's Amos. And Amos does well In chapter four, he just starts reading the staircase out loud. Yeah, on the left Amos chapter four. I gave you nothing to eat in your cities. I withheld rain from you. I struck you with blight and mildew and locust devoured your gardens and vineyards and olive trees. Yet you did not return to me. And you have Deuteronomy the curses on the right with the same type of language that's going on. Do you hear what he's doing?

Amos is standing there with the list of Moses open and he's reading the steps off of it one at a time. Famine and drought, blight and locust. And after every single one, he says the same thing. And you still did not get it. You felt the exact thing more Moses warned you about and you didn't do anything about it. I guess what I'm trying to point out in Amos is Amos isn't pointing at random events that are happening. He's pointing at the chart. He's pointing at the curses. We've been here for years and not one of you has read the script and realized it. And then the bottom of the staircase arrives.

A man by the name of Jeremiah lives long enough to watch the worst part, probably the most gruesome. It's the siege. An empire called Babylon surrounds the city of Jerusalem. And what do they do? They just sit outside the gates. Month after month, they cut the people off. And the walls that the people trusted ended up becoming their prison. And after the city falls, he writes an entirely separate book about it. It's called the Book of Lamentations. And it describes the horrors of the siege in language that lines up with the words of Moses. Yeah, let's see. I think we have Moses at the top and the bottom.

Lamentations 2:20. Should women eat their own children? The infants they have nurtured? This is his recounting, trying to process the absolute trauma of what he witnessed. Jeremiah standing in the rubble of his own burned city holding the pages of Moses and he's weeping because at the very bottom of the chart is where he finds himself, his home. The fine print of the siege step. And then the very last step, exile, when Israel is kicked out of the land. A man named Ezekiel sitting by a canal, hundreds of miles from home, in the heart of Babylon. You have a man named Daniel, who is not only there, but he serves in the courts of the kings, who are not his own king, just like Deuteronomy said.

In a country that's not his country, Every one of the exile prophets is living at the bottom step of the staircase, scattered among the nations. And the spoiler that Moses gave Israel from the very beginning has come true. All of the curses. Now, not all of the prophets talk about Israel. There are some prophets that are just mad at all those foreigners. You're right. What do we do about the little books that are aimed at foreigners that really have big voices, right? There's a couple of Nahum and Obadiah, who spent their whole little short books shouting, not necessarily at Israel's, but at their Israel, but at their enemies.

Nineveh and Edom. Remember the You'll get yours. Those nations were never standing at the Jordan, though. They never signed the Mosaic contract, that covenant. So, why are they experiencing the script? Well, we keep turning cuz Moses doesn't stop writing it at chapter 28, 30, 32. So, Deuteronomy 32, Moses keeps going and he says something that's I put it in here just to make sure we mention it. He says, "Vengeance belongs to me. I will repay. In time their foot will slip, and for their day of disaster is near, and their doom is coming quickly." And God says he's he's also going to take a turn and deal with the nations as well.

The very empires he used to discipline his own people, the ones who were supposed to be a tool and instead like the enjoyed the cruelty. Who stood on the hills and gloated while their neighbors burned. Vengeance is mine is what God says. I will repay. That's the exact line out of Nahum when he faces Nineveh. It's what Obadiah uses when he faces Edom. They're not making it up. All of them are rooted I would say right here in the words of Moses at the very end of the Torah. But we have a problem. Because if we're going to take this type of hermeneutic that seems to track throughout scripture and those who have not followed God and chose to take of the fruit of determining good and evil of them for themselves apart from God's wisdom if that's their trajectory then it's not only a problem for Israel, it's a problem for all of us.

Right? And if this is where the script ended with the words of Moses or even the end of the prophets, I don't think we'd be we'd be here this morning. We wouldn't be here singing. We wouldn't be here enjoying the fellowship. The stair staircase of curses going down into the exile that's not good news. That's not a good place to be. But if we keep reading again Moses starts with blessings, goes with core curses and then in chapter 30 past the bottom step of the exile, past the bottom step of the curses his voice changes again. And in chapter 30 verse 3 in Deuteronomy he states this then it's a big word then he will restore your fortunes have compassion on you and gather you again from all the peoples where the Lord your God has scattered you even if your exiles are at the ends of the earth he will gather you and bring you back from there the Lord your God will circumcise your heart what's he going to do what Moses say like a scissors why circumcise your heart right God will circumcise your heart and the hearts of your descendants and you will love him with all of your heart and all of your soul and that you will live there's an upswing that's hopeful right after everything gets so bad the whole siege eating thing and exile there's an up there's going to be then there's going to be fortunes and you're going to get like a new heart everything here hangs on that first word though then when all of this has come upon you the blessing and the curse both of them when you are scattered at the bottom of the page as far from home as anyone can possibly get and you finally turn toward God from wherever you have been thrown then God gathers you from the farthest place under heaven even from there he reaches down and he brings you home then he circumcises your heart he reaches inside of you according to Moses and he cuts away whatever it is that has kept you from loving him from the hardness he would cut away the stone the thing that makes you run and he gives you a heart that finally beats with the love and integrity that it should.

The Step Past the Curses

There is a step past the curses and it has a name and it's called the return. The homecoming, the road back from the farthest country that you've been scattered to. And again, a gift, a brand new heart waiting for you. That's what this whole message is about. It's about what comes after the curses. The road home and the new heart. And the exact step every hopeful word and every single prophet has actually been pointing to throughout their discourse. Look at what the prophets say about these words of Moses. This is a graphic cuz after you get down to the bottom, you go back up to the top, right?

The prophets that pointed at this chapter, Deuteronomy 30, same discourse of Moses, or same speech from Moses, "Prepare the way of the Lord in the wilderness. Make a straight highway for our God in the desert." It's the highway that's going to lead people back to God, the second Exodus. Ezequiel 36, "I will put my teaching with them and write it on their hearts." That's what Moses was talking about. Hosea, "I will give you a brand new heart. I will remove your heart of stone." Ezequiel Hosea says, "Therefore, I'm going to lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her." So, you have this whole motive with the prophets scattered throughout of getting the new heart and returning home just like Moses had said.

The homecoming. Jeremiah sitting in the smoking rubble at the bottom of the staircase suddenly promises a new covenant written on the heart. And he's pointing back to the words of Moses. When Ezequiel says God will take your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. Same thing. Same step. When Hosea says, "I'm going to lead her back into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her heart." It's the same step. Because you go in the wilderness so you can go home. Out of slavery, into the wilderness, home. When Zephaniah ends with God singing over his people like a groom over a bride. And when Micah ends up ends by asking, "Who is the God like ours who pardons and brings his people back?"

This is the plan. That's the plan. They're not just 16 men and 16 different hopes that are being given. They are 16 men with their fingers all pointing to the same place in the Torah, the same script. The same covenant lawsuit, if you will. The return and the new heart and being home. And that's why this whole series has the name it does, Homeward Bound. It wasn't just the title of one of my favorite movies as a child. It was the last thing that Moses wrote on the script. Homeward Bound. The moment they were crossing the river, he knew that they were And that's the whole And I hope some of you just got excited about that.

Because when you can see how the Bible was constructed. It wasn't just a bunch of pages that were randomly thrown into like some type of modgepodge and we got a Bible after the exile, the Old Testament, and then it was built. No, there were very intelligent people geniuses who put the Bible together in a certain way so that it's not simply a library of individual books. It creates an epic story of God and his people and you. And it's supposed to read like that. All right? It's the reason why the Garden of Eden story matches up with the exile story of being at home with God in the place where all you have milk and honey and the everything feeds you and you have all this abundance and then you decide to make a decision to not follow God.

And what direction was Adam and Eve sent out of the garden? Eastward. And what direction did Israel go to Babylon? East. It's always a story. Everything is a story of homecoming. From humanity into the story of Israel into the world. All right? So, it's all connected and I find that really amazing. Homeward bound. The curses are real. They're on the page. They're in the ink. And you can't get to the homecoming in chapter 30 without going through them. Without pretending, you know, it's Yeah. There's a debt there for Israel. There's a debt to the story. And how do we deal with all of those steps and the debt?

Who Pays the Debt of the Curse

How do we deal with that? How do we deal with the real debt of these curses? Because somebody has to actually deal with the curse before anyone gets to walk home, right? The script doesn't let you just jump out of it. That's the question. If Torah ends with this homecoming, but we have to go through this pit of curses, how do we get out of the curses? And there was a man by the name of Paul who tells us. He seems to know. Writing a few decades after Yeshua. And he doesn't hint and he doesn't dance around it. He's he's pretty clear. How do we get past these curses in the law? And he makes this claim that guys Christ redeemed you from the curse of the law.

By becoming a curse for us because it is written cursed is anyone who is hung on a tree. The purpose was the blessing of Abraham would come to the Gentiles by Christ Jesus so that we could receive the promised spirit through faith. Jesus redeemed us from the curses of the law. Or the curse of the law capital C would be the climactic one at the end of chapter 28 which is exile. So you see what Paul is doing? He's reaching back. He's quoting Moses. He's quoting the curse list if you will. Cursed is everyone who hung on a tree. He's telling you that Yeshua went to the very bottom of the staircase of Moses.

He didn't find a way around it. He didn't try to climb over it. And he walked down it. All the way down to the bottom to the lowest to the darkest step on the whole chart. The curse list itself. And he stood on it in person. On a tree on a hill outside the city. And he took the absolute bottom script into his own body. And he let it land on him instead of us is the idea that Paul's trying to portray. And watch why he does it. He became the curse so the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles the nations the outsiders. There it is again. He drops to the very bottom of Israel's page so that the blessing sitting at the very top can finally run all the way down.

And off the edge of the list. And out to the people who were never on the page to begin with. The outsiders. The whole world watching and he goes to the bottom. What an amazing story. That's better than Lord of the Rings. I mean, it's we sometimes forget that the Bible was written again as a book to be read like an epic story because it's the epicest of the epics. Right? And we get lost because we turn the page and we think the books are not connected. No, this is the whole story. It's supposed to be this whole thing and you're supposed to see the measures of what the people have went through and then what God has went through.

What long-suffering actually means. And then the New Testament authors go crazy with how so many different ways. How can we portray the amazingness of Yeshua, Jesus Christ? How do we even convey that message? And each of them do it in such creative and effective ways, connecting them back to the story. We're still in the story of God and it has a new chapter and this is the chapter we were promised in the first chapter and here it is. The curse has been we've been redeemed from it. We've been The redeemer has come. The pivot has taken place that Moses said would happen. And the new heart, the one that Moses promised, the one the prophet spent 500 years pointing at, where does that get handed over?

I don't know. I The night before Yeshua walked out to the bottom of the page, he sat at a table with his friends, the last supper, and he lifted up a cup. A- and the cup he held up was from Luke 22. It says the bottom verse, "This cup is the cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you." It's It's the same new covenant Jeremiah was talking about. It's the same new covenant that Ezekiel was talking about. It's the same It's the end of the story. It's the climactic This is the part where the new heart comes in, guys. The heart surgery that Moses wrote about on the riverbank before going into the land with the people, the new covenant that Jeremiah saw beyond the smoke, the heart of flesh that Ezekiel promised out of exile, all of it is being handed across the table in a cup the night before he walked down to the very last step.

He's finishing that script. He's taking the last curse. He opened up the last step. And because Yeshua walked all the way down there, there's no step on the staircase lower than the one that he stood on. He went underneath the worst line in the book. Underneath the siege, underneath the exile. This is what the New Testament authors are trying to portray because it's accurate. This is the foundation of our faith in Yeshua, in Jesus. This is the why behind Christian hope. And so using that framework, not only with the story of Israel, but with our stories, because the same framework exists for us one way or another when we depart from God or we walk alongside God.

Whatever Step You Are On

And I guess I just want to stand here and tell you today, whatever step you're on this morning, he's not standing at the top of the stairs with his arms crossed waiting to see if you can climb back up on your own good graces. That's that was never the deal, by the way. He's below you. He's below on whatever step you're on. He's already there. He already went lower than the place you're most of ashamed of and he planted the road home from there. On the bottom. So that it would start from underneath every single step to take you home. To get you started where the new heart's going to be. To get you started where the arms of the father are.

The prophets are the story of Israel's downfall and the hope that God provides even after that. That's the message. And so I hope with this whole series, but even with just the collective efforts of what the prophets were as covenant prosecutors, if you will. I hope that you may accept and believe in the true power of God. A God who is bigger than your worst regret. A God that is not standing at the top step with his arms folded just so disappointed in you. But a God who is digging himself lower to you to make sure that you have a road home. That's the God of the Bible. That's why Yeshua is so quick to call God a father, a good father.

Good father. You don't have to stay where you're at. You don't have to deserve the grace before it's given to you. And you don't have to carry the shame with you when you choose to no longer stay in that step anymore. That stays there. So I guess I just want to give you permission as a fellow Bible reader reading the story, you can come home. Wherever you're at. However far away you are. However far away you think you are. Even if it you're on the bottom step. With Yeshua, you can come home and get in heart. And that is why we do what we do. That is the core of the mission of being a Christian.

That is the gospel message. That the arms are always open. Amen. So, please stand as we conclude services. And I want to invite you to worship together with us. We're going to sing a couple more one or two more songs here and just worship together. During this time worship, you can stay in your seat, you can pray, you can meditate. If you need prayer for anything, I will have a prayer partner on either side of the stage here and feel free to walk up and they can pray about anything that's going on in your life, a situation you're in. Maybe there's something that you want to let go of.

Maybe you're tired of being at the step and you don't know the first words to say to God to get out of it. They can help you with that. Maybe you brought something in today that you would like to symbolically leave here. I always offer this because it's a good symbolic thing to do to get started on something. Let's say you brought something in today that you've been carrying around for a long time. Maybe it's a decision that you've made. Maybe it's an identity that you've had. Maybe it is you just feel stuck in a place and you're tired of being in that place. You're tired of carrying something with you.

You're tired of being stuck in whatever that icky thing is. As we have this what we call an altar up here, it's just a place you can come up and symbolically kneel down and give that thing to God and set it here on the altar. And you can pray or you can just stand up and walk away knowing that you've made the decision to take that first step away from it. I invite you to take advantage of all that and as a I invite you to join me in prayer. Avinu Malkenu, our Father, our King, Father, we thank you for this opportunity to come before you, but we ask that the words of the prophet, the words of your word, the words of your story, we would know that they're about us as well and the Holy Spirit would do its part in giving us clarity and strength to take those steps that we would grow closer to you and become who you would want us to be.