Chapter 1: What personal struggles does Bryce share about hearing God?
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Chapter 2: How does Covenant Eyes assist in spiritual transformation?
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I'm Bryce, and today's episode by the title, we're gonna be talking about when God goes silent. What does that mean? You're gonna find out when we open up Scripture together. I pray that you guys are having a great day watching or listening. We're gonna be in Exodus 32. If you got your Bibles, open up.
If not, we're gonna read the Word of God if you're listening and you don't got it or you're watching. But let me just give some context about what's going on here, okay? So if you flip back just a few, okay, A covenant gets confirmed with Moses in Exodus 24, okay? And God tells Moses to come meet him on this mountain called Mount Sinai.
Now, right before this moment, what happens is in Egypt, you had Israel. The Israelites, they were enslaved. God sets them free. Moses comes in, does some crazy plagues through the Lord, sets them free. They escape. Moses parts the Red Sea. They get in. I mean, can you just imagine the stuff? Moses does plagues that mock all of the Egyptian gods. Then he parts the Red Sea. They walk across it.
It splits in half and then it goes back and kills Pharaoh's army. Okay. A lot went down. The Israelites, if you saw that, if I was an Israelite, I'd be like, oh, shoot, I am never forgetting this. I am becoming a Christian. And that's that, right? And that's what we tend to say. Let's walk with Jesus. Go, God, if you do this thing for me, then I'll follow you for the rest of my life.
But that's always, most of the time, not always, but most of the time, never the case. So now we're in verse, in chapter 32. Moses is still on Mount Sinai alone with God. He's been up there. He's up there for 40 days. So that's how long he goes up there. But he says, hey, I'm going to go up there and I'll come back and blah, blah, blah. Great. Exodus 32, verse 1.
When people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together up to Aaron and said to him, keep in mind, Moses is right-hand guy. Aaron, they go up to Aaron. They say, up, 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 don't know what has become of him.
So Aaron said to them, take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me. So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron, and he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf.
And they said, these are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it, and then Aaron continues talking. We need to pause right here. So the Israelites got impatient. Moses said he was going to go up there to communicate with God. That's what his role was to do, to communicate to God and then deliver the messages to the people.
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Chapter 3: What biblical context does Bryce provide for God's silence?
Well, he was delayed, according to the Israelites, so they get impatient. When they got impatient, they decided to take all of their gold jewelry, give it to Aaron, and Aaron built them a golden calf to worship. A small detail that we need to recognize is where this gold jewelry came from.
When they were leaving Egypt, when Moses was leading the Israelites out, God allowed the Israelites essentially to loot the land and take gold with them as they left. This gold was a gift from God.
And in chapter 32, we watch the Israelites take a gift that God graciously gave them, turn it into an idol, and then they say, this golden image that we just built right here, this is the thing that led us out of Egypt. Not Moses, not Yahweh, this thing right here.
I want to pause for a minute and reflect on that. When God goes silent,
In today's society especially, we do similar things that Israel did. One of the main purposes of looking at how stupid the Israelites were in the Old Testament was for us as believers to go, yeah, I'm never going to do that. Whatever they did, I'm not going to do that. It's like, oh, Adam and Eve were tempted by a serpent in the garden to eat fruit? Yeah, I'd never do that.
Oh, I'd never turn on God after he pulled through for me. Well, I just mentioned at the beginning, how many times have you told God yourself? You say, oh, I would never do what Israel did. I would never take a gift that God given me of gold and then turn it into an idol and worship it and abandon God.
Yeah, but every time you say, God, if you just do this thing for me, if you heal my heart from my breakup, I'll serve you. God, if you just help me pass this quiz or test, I'll serve you. God, if you get me a job, I'll serve you. God, if you get me a girlfriend or a boyfriend, I'll serve you. Then God pulls through and then you abandon God. You say, all right, see, I got what I wanted.
You never loved God in the first place in that moment. In fact, we do it all the time. So we can't say, oh, I'd never do that. I mean, the Israelites did it. I've done it in my own life, especially before I became a Christian. Maybe you're doing it right now. Maybe you have done it in the past. And we think, oh, God's gone silent. He's forgotten about me. He's not answering his prayers.
Or how many times have you prayed and asked God to do something in your life and you say, oh God, would you just give me this thing? And then you don't get it. And then you say, oh God, never answer my prayer. I remember when I was younger, I wanted an Xbox. God, would you give me an Xbox? I didn't get an Xbox when I prayed for it. So I thought God didn't answer my prayer. That was not the case.
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Chapter 4: Why do the Israelites turn to idolatry in Exodus 32?
Wow. Man, you changed my life. You're the only reason why I'm alive today. Man, I believe this isn't that. And then you realize that they're a finite human being and you can't put God-sized expectations on a limited human being and then they fail you once and then you go, wow, I'm back into this place.
What did I do? God is always on time. So when it comes to going when God goes silent, God doesn't just go silent for no reason.
There's a couple of reasons that you might not be able to hear God. The first reason is maybe because God's voice is described as a still, calm voice, just like the waters. And you can't hear because you've got a lot going on in your brain. It's crowded. It's noisy up there. You can't focus. Maybe you're distracted. If the devil can't make you sin, he'll make you busy.
Maybe that's why you can't hear the Lord. But maybe you just can't hear him. Maybe because God's up to something. God's always up to something. God's the God of the universe. He's got it in his hand. But he cares about you. That's why he desires to work in your life.
That's why he has desired from the beginning of time when sin separated man from him, he said, I want to do everything to draw people back to me because I am jealous for relationship with him. Let us not grow in patience. Impatience in our life breeds rebellion against God. Because when we become impatient, it allows us to get this work perception that God doesn't care about us.
He's neglected us. God isn't listening to me. God has gone silent. God has abandoned me. And that can allow sin to creep in the crack of the door. Breed this life of rebellion. Don't use the things that God has given you, your gifts, your talents, things that he has given you for rebellion against him. Use them for his glory.
As a matter of fact, even though Israel in Old Testament would be idiots a lot of the time, when they would get in exile or they would wander the desert for 40 years or something like that, you know what they would do? They would use circular thinking, not linear. See, we in America, we do linear thinking. The past is in the past. The moment's now. The future's to come. We only look ahead.
Israel, on the other hand, when they would get in a bind, they would go, well, Yahweh pulled through for us before.
So if we're in a rut, we're in a sticky situation, God's going to pull through for us again, if not with more power than last time. That's how we should view life.
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Chapter 5: What lessons can we learn from the Israelites' impatience?
My power is made perfect in your weakness. What's the parallel I'm making here? The point I'm making is if you ask God to take something away and you think he's gone silent, maybe the reason he hasn't taken it away is because if he did take it away, you'd be your own God and you wouldn't need him. Maybe you're praying for something and God has said no.
And you think God hasn't answered your prayer. You don't think God cares about you. But the reason he said no is because if he said yes, that thing would crush you, hurt you, create this gap between you and him where you wouldn't need him. This thing that he's been trying to from the beginning of time to have no gap. That's why he sent Jesus Christ to be the bridge to him.
We have to have a right perspective. And so I want to pray for us that God would give us peace, that we can remain content with who he is, what he has in store for us, and that we don't grow cold and impatient. Lord Jesus, we thank you for everything that you've given us. We thank you for your son Jesus, the ultimate gift.
God, we thank you that you've given us gifts, that you've given us friends. You've given us family, whether blood-related or not. Lord Jesus, would you allow us to not grow impatient? Strengthen us, be with us, give us peace and joy. Lord, we love you, we thank you, we praise you, and it's in your name we pray.