Exodus is all about God. Exodus is God's answer to man's need and God's supply for man's sin. It begins immediately with God's activity and throughout the whole course of the book you see God mightily at work. The book is the picture of redemption, of God's activity to redeem man in his need, in his sin, and misery. As such, it is a beautiful picture and contains tremendously instructive lessons to us of what redemption is; that is, what God has done, is doing in our lives, and what he intends to do with us -- the steps that he will be taking. Now redemption isn't complete in this book. You will never get the full story of redemption in Exodus. You must move on into Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. In Exodus when Moses became of age, God spoke to him and he realized that he was intended to be the deliverer of Israel. You can understand the story of this book if you remember four things. The whole book centers around four great events. 1) The first one is the Passover. Chapters one through fourteen lead up to it and climax in that great event. 2) The second event is the crossing of the Red Sea, which is described for us in chapter fourteen. 3) The third great event is the giving of the law at Sinai 4) The fourth is the construction of the tabernacle. These four events sum up the book of Exodus. Let me take a moment to elaborate on the crossing of the Red Sea. What does the Red Sea typify in our lifes? Here is the reason why many of our confessions of Christian faith do not materialize into near as much as it should become. Sometimes we are willing to receive Jesus Christ as our Savior, but we are not as willing to walk through the waters of the Red Sea. We are slow to take that step which burns our bridges, cuts us off from the world. In our minds and thinking, we are still back in Egypt. We will not move forward through the Red Sea. We want to maintain the option of going back to Egypt. Until we break our ties with Egypt, we are still under the bondage and control of Egypt. This pattern occurs quite frequently in lifes today. I heard of a young man having a struggle with drinking, and evidently had come to a crisis in his life. He wanted to be set free. Somehow he realized that there was strength in Christ to set him free. After much prayer he received the Lord. But about three weeks later, he was back in the same old mess. Exactly the same. When asked, What happened to you when you went home three weeks ago after you received the Lord? Did you do anything about this? He said, "No, I didn't. I just went home." When asked, What was he expecting to happen? He said, "I don't know. I just went home and I guess I just forgot about it." When asked. "If you had made a decision to enter into some business relationship, if you had decided you wanted to get into a certain job and there were certain necessary steps to take, would you then go home and forget about the whole thing?" "Oh, no," he said, "I would start moving in that direction." The point of the story is, "do you think that we can convince others or ourselves, that we have really made a decision for Jesus Christ and that our life is going to be under his control, if, after we have made it, we go home and sit down, fold your arms and forget about it. Of course not. Decision is one thing. Decision brings the power of God to bear on our lives and sets us free from the guilt of the past and we can rejoice in that. God's word is true. But there is also the experience of passing through the Red Sea, that call to move forward, and cut off your ties with the world, and take steps that will allow the river of God's judgment to flow between us and the ways of the world. When we take this step, we move out into that place where God dwells within us. As we see here in Exodus, chapter fifteen, God often uses our Red Sea experiences to draw us to him. Annie Johnson flint wrote a beautiful poem that says, Have you come to the Red Sea place in your life? Where in spite of all you can do, There is no way out, there is no way back. The only way out, is through. Have you come to that place? Well that is where many need to come, because until we do, we can never really know the dwelling of God in their life, As we read on in chapter fifteen a most interesting picture develops. We have the story of the waters of Marah, the place of bitterness. This immediately follows the crossing of the Red Sea. In order to cure these waters, Moses cut down a tree which the Lord showed him, threw it into the water and the water became sweet. In terms of the picture of our lives that this story portrays. What it is telling us is that, the cross, the great tree upon which the Lord Jesus hung, is God's answer to the bitterness of life. When we have been through the Passover, trusting in his blood, then through the Red Sea, cutting ourselves away from the things of the world, we discover then, that the cross is forever the answer to all the bitterness that sin may have brought into our life in the past. God's answer to bitterness in any person's experience is this experience of the cross -- cutting away all the unhappiness of the past and all the frustrations of the present by sweetening the waters of our life. If you went into the camp of Israel, in the mist of it you would find the tabernacle. You would come to the outter court and then an inner building with a veil across the entrance into which no one dared enter unless he were a priest. The priests alone went into the holy place. Behind another veil inside the holy place was the Holy of Holies. The only piece of furniture in it was the ark of the covenant. Into that place, we are told, only the high priest could go, and he only once a year, under the most rigid and precise conditions. Now what does all this teach? Simply that God is absolutely changeless and holy. He can dwell among people only under the most rigid conditions. The trouble with the tabernacle was that it only permitted the people to come before God representatively, but, actually, they were excluded from his presence. The common people could never come before him. Only the high priest could, and he in fear of his life, and only once a year, that's all. That is the restriction of these Old Testament rituals. You see, the trouble with the Old Testament and the saints of that time was not the law. There was nothing wrong with the law. The law is absolutely good. Paul says so. The trouble was with the tabernacle, and the system of sacrifice. It wasn't complete enough. It wasn't real enough. It was only shadows, just pictures. It could never really do anything. That is why, when we come to the book of Hebrews the whole book is dedicated to teaching us that the law of God is still unchanged, but the approach is completely different, for we come to the One who is the antitype, the reality, symbolized by all these shadows. We read in Hebrews "we have confidence to enter the sanctuary" without any fear whatsoever, for in the blood of Jesus and by means of the cross, God has set aside all that separates, and has brought us near to himself. The great message of the book of Exodus is that by means of the cross, God has made it possible for a holy, unchangeable God to dwell with us. The whole of the tabernacle is a picture of God's dwelling with his people. The great truth for us here is that God has now settled so totally the problem of sin in us, absolutely settled it, that as Paul says in Romans eight, "There is now no condemnation, none whatsoever! We have perfect access to the Father through the Son, and God's indwelling Spirit will never leave us or forsake us. He has taken up his tabernacle in our hearts and lives. There was a building which was the house of God in the Old Testament, the tabernacle, but it was a mere shadow. The temple in Jerusalem took its place. It, too, was a shadow. But when you come into the New Testament you never find a building designated as the house of God. The house of God in the New Testament is a human body. "You are the temple of God," Paul says. Therefore, you are never out of church. That is what God wants us to learn -- that we are never out of church. That Jesus Christ himself is dwelling in your body which is his temple and it is built exactly like the tabernacle. It has a three-fold structure. The outer court is this body of flesh and bones which we see. The holy place is the soul -- the realm of emotions, mind and will. That area in which we have free intercourse one with another as we talk and share experiences together. But deep at the center is the Holy of Holies, your spirit. In that place the Spirit of God dwells. So each of us is a walking tabernacle (1 Corinthians 3:16-17).