This sermon was preached at the end f the school holidays so when it says Bingo in the conclusion that is because the congregation had a sermon bingo card (see end of post).
I am not very good at making things with my hands. I will
often have these great ideas in my mind but by the time they’ve travelled that
short distance from my head down my arms and to my hands, they seem to have got
lost in translation. What’s up here does not come out of these. Even those
warehouse flatpack furniture kit sets that anyone can simply follow the
instructions and put together in no time at all, seem to be beyond me, they are
made not for my convenience but for hours of stress and frustration. They have
a negative impact on my sanctification and my vocabulary seems to devolve to a
few angry choice works. And I admire
people who can make things with their hands, craftspeople of great vision and
ability, artists and artisans, engineers, builders.
The Bible passage we are looking at today in Exodus mentions
two such artisans Bezalel and his assistant Oholiab who oversaw turning the
basic design that God gave to Moses of the tabernacle, the tent where God would
dwell with his people, into reality. This was no flat pack furniture kit set,
they were going to have to make it from scratch. It was going to have to be
Utilitarian enough to be assembled and put
up and then taken down, broken up and transported and beautiful and ornate enough to serve as a focal point for worship,
and be associated with God’s presence. Not an easy task.
AS we move into Pentecost this year we are looking at what
the Old Testament tells us about the Holy Spirit. Looking at the Holy Spirit at
work from hovering over the waters in the creation narrative of Genesis to the
fulfillment of the promise in Joel chapter 2 that God would pour out his Holy
Spirit on all believers, and what it means for us today. While we don’t know much
about Bezalel personally, he is the first person mentioned in the scriptures as
being filled with God’s Spirit and receiving spirit gifts because of that. He
is filled with God’s spirit, given wisdom and knowledge and all kinds of skills
to form the dwelling place of God with his people.
AS I said we don’t know that much about Bezalel. It would be
interesting to know about his spiritual life, his prayer life or how he
developed the enormous range of Gifting’s and skills and abilities he had? What
difference being filled by the Spirit of God made on his life? Did he still
have to go through that 10,000 hour rule to develop his skills, the 10,00 hours
of practise and hard work that allow Gifted people to reach their potential? Did
it come easily or was it a matter of great sweat and exertion? But we don’t know! He is only mentioned four
times in the scriptures. In the reading, we had in Exodus 31 and its parallel
in Exodus 35 and in the family tree list of Judah at the beginning of the book
of chronicles and then in second chronicles where Solomon consults God at the
place where the bronze altar made by Bezalel was kept. His assistant Oholiab is
only mentioned in Exodus 31 and 35. It may seem strange to even look at them in
a sermon on the Holy Spirit. Well two things…
The first is that it gives us insight into God’s filling of
people by the Holy Spirit. As I
mentioned before he is the first person described as being filled by the Holy
Spirit in scripture. Filled with the Spirit is the way in which the New
Testament talks of our relationship with god’s Spirit This is also the first
time there is a connection with the presence of God’s creative spirit with
giving a person gifts and abilities to achieve God’s purpose.
Now before this we do have a sense in people’s lives Of God
being with them to achieve God’s purposes and them being given gifts and
abilities. Joseph has dreams and later is given the ability to interpret
dreams, although we see him going to God and asking for God’s wisdom and
revelation in those situations. He is a gifted administrator able to look after
his master’s household and later the whole of pharaoh’s land and food
production and distribution. Administration is mentioned Romans 12 in a list of
Gifts the Holy Spirit, administration is not just paper shuffling it is the
ability to make an idea and vision become a reality. Moses encounters God at the burning bush and
God says he will be with him as he goes to Egypt, he gives him some miracles
that he is to perform to convince pharaoh to ‘let my people go.’
In the Old Testament there is a pattern of God’s Spirit
being given to specific people to achieve specific rolls and tasks. God is at
work in history and in his people by the Holy Spirit. In the case of Bezalel it
is to build the Tabernacle, later in the book of Judges, that we are looking at
next week, it is to judge Israel and to deliver them from their enemies. When
Saul is anointed King he is filled with God’s spirit and he prophecies,
likewise David was aware of God’s Holy Spirit with him, we used Psalm 51 this
morning as a call to worship where after David is confronted by the prophet
Nathan about his adultery with Bathsheba and having her husband Uriah killed,
he asks God not to take his Holy Spirit’s presence away from him, like happened
with Saul. We see in the prophets like
Nathan and the later written prophets like Isaiah and Amos and Jeremiah a sense
of God’s Spirit present with them revealing the truth about Israel’s spiritual
condition and God’s response. Because of the Spirit’s presence and revelation,
we see how that points us to Jesus Christ and his coming, his life, death and
resurrection as the ultimate way God would reveal himself to his people.
As we come into the New Testament, we see that at his
baptism Jesus is filled with the Holy Spirit, John the Baptist sees the Spirit
of God descending on him like a dove. It is because of the presence of the Holy
Spirit and Jesus relationship with the Spirit that Jesus can teach and proclaim
and demonstrate the Kingdom of God through signs and wonders. It is easy to forget that Jesus while being
God is also human, not super human, and as such is totally like us and it is
only by the presence of the Holy Spirit that he was able to do the things he
did.
Because of Jesus life death and resurrection, God’s Spirit
is now present within and want to fill each one of us with the presence and
power of God. Not just the one or two, the selected few but all the believers…
you…you and yes even me. Because we are called as a people to achieve the
purpose of witnessing to Jesus Christ and making disciples in every
nation. We are commissioned and we are
enabled by God’s spirit to do that.
The second thing, remember there were two. Is that Bezalel
is filled by the Holy Spirit to make the place in which God would dwell with
his people. The tabernacle was where God would be seen to dwell with his
people, it was the blueprint for the later temple in Jerusalem, with the holy
of holies and the various courts and places for sacrifice and worship. It
showed that the God of Israel dwelt in the very midst of his people. It was the
centre of their camp, when the pillar of fire or cloud moved they moved when it
stopped they stopped. Building this dwelling place was both the work of human
hands but also was the work of God’s Holy Spirit. God gave Moses the plan, and he gave Bezalel
his Holy Spirit to achieve the work. The wisdom and knowledge and skills with
all kinds of materials that he would need to do the job. You can imagine that
there we a lot of other things that needed doing as well, man management,
project management, budgeting, they were intrusted with all the resources that
the people of Israel had bought for the build.
For us today God still dwells with his people, not in
buildings or tents anymore but in our midst by the Holy Spirit, we are the body
of Christ in the world. Its not so much working with precious metal but
precious people. In 1 Peter chapter two
the church is talked of of being a temple made up of living stones bought
together to form the dwelling place of God. It is still the work of the Holy
Spirit and of human beings to see that dwelling place built up. The church is a
very human institution but it is also God’s at work. In our New Testament reading
from Pauls letter to the Ephesians we see the risen Jesus giving gifts to the
church, of apostles, prophets, evangelists, teachers and pastors, so that the
body of Christ may be built up to maturity and to the fulness of Christ. God
gives gifts to each of his people so that together we can build up the dwelling
place of God, the church. The people in Catalan in Spain have a tradition of
making these wonderful human pyramids and I think they are a great illustration
of the Church, the dwelling place of God, not as a hierarchy but being built as
we all play the part god has enabled us to play. We are God’s Spirited people and God is
building us together as the dwelling place of God as the body of Christ in the
world around us.
I want to bring this together and make some points about
what it means for us.
The first is that we can have the Old Testament
understanding of the Presence and purpose of the Holy Spirit. That being filled
with the Holy Spirit is for the special person or the key figure to achieve
God’s purpose. That it is not for us, we a re not special, we are not gifted we
are just ordinary people. But the reality is with Christ’s life death and
resurrection everything has changed. God choses to fill everyone with his Holy
Spirit, we are called and enabled to witness to jesus death and resurrection.
The second thing that goes along with that is we can easily
see doing the work of the Church as being for one or two gifted people rather
than all of us being the church, Christ’s body together. Instead of the pastor or minister being there
to play their role in helping to enable and equip us all to do what God has
called us to do. We think they are God’s person set aside to do all the work. From
putting out the rubbish to pulling out the weeds, preaching the word, visiting
everyone, you name it. We wonder why it does not succeed, why so many in the
ministry and in church leadership burn out, or don’t live up to our
expectations.
The answer is that God calls all of us and has
given all of us his Holy Spirit and we are given gifts and abilities to use to
achieve God’s purposes together. Even in Exodus 31 we see that Moses isn’t the
one called to build the tabernacle, we see Bezalel isn’t called to do the work
alone, he is given wisdom and knowledge and all sorts of skills to get it done,
and I would hazard chief amongst those skills is to know he is part of a
team. He is given someone to help him
Oholiab, who also has a god given skill set, he can gather together a team of
artists and artisans to work with. You are god’s spirited people together we
are called to work with and by the Holy Spirit to witness to Christ and to grow
as the body of Christ into maturity. We all have a Spirit made place to belong
and a spirit enabled part to play.
We don’t know much about Bezalel, he is only mentioned as I
said four times in the scriptures, usually just in passing. We know who his
father was and his father’s father and what tribe he belonged to apart from
that we don’t have any personal details. I think that’s a good thing, it would
be easy to see him as a spiritual giant, as an artistic prodigy, but we can’t.
perhaps its best that we don’t know about if things were easy for him or the
hours of wrestling with just getting the design of that decoration on the
bronze altar right, or the piles of porotypes strewn around the work shop, the
long production meetings trying to work out what was the right thickness of
bronze rail to hold that amount of cloth up
and did we get the mathematics
right for the pressure of the wind and how it would affect that measurement. We
simply know that Bezalel and Oholiab were called by God and filled by God’s
Spirit and they achieved the things God called them to do. Because that is our
story as well, ordinary people like you and Me… Bingo yup you’ve got it Bingo
it’s you and me… with our own set of skills and our own set of short comings,
called together in Christ, and filled with God’s holy Spirit to witness to
Christ together and gifted to be built into the dwelling place of God, to grow
into maturity and the fullness of Christ.
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