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Fall Asleep to The Complete Exodus _ Moses_ 10 Plagues_ Red Sea _ 40 Years in the Wilderness · truthunedited

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Speaker 1: The greatest escape in history did not begin with an army.
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Speaker 1: It did not begin with weapons or walls or the
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Speaker 1: carefully laid strategies of powerful men. It began with something
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Speaker 1: far smaller. A voice in a desert, a fire that
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Speaker 1: burned without consuming, and one man standing barefoot on holy ground,
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Speaker 1: an old shepherd with a stutter and a past full
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Speaker 1: of failure, being told that he was about to change
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Speaker 1: the world to night. We walk the road of Moses,
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Speaker 1: from the dark waters of the Nile, where a mother
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Speaker 1: let go of everything she loved, to the edge of
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Speaker 1: a promised land that took forty years of wilderness to reach,
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Speaker 1: through fire and water, through ten plagues that shook the
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Speaker 1: greatest empire on Earth to its foundations, through a sea
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Speaker 1: that parted and closed, and parted history forever. This is
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Speaker 1: the Exodus, and it was never just something that happened
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Speaker 1: to some one else a long time ago, in a
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Speaker 1: distant land. It is the story glory of every soul
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Speaker 1: that has ever been held in chains and wondered whether
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Speaker 1: freedom was real, every heart that has ever stood at
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Speaker 1: the edge of an impossible sea with nowhere left to go,
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Speaker 1: every person who has ever gathered just enough for to day,
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Speaker 1: and had to trust that tomorrow's portion would come with
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Speaker 1: the morning. Close your eyes, let the sounds of to
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Speaker 1: day fall away, one by one, until there is only this.
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Speaker 1: Somewhere out in the ancient desert. To night, a fire
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Speaker 1: is burning in a bush that will not turn to ash,
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Speaker 1: and the voice speaking from that fire has never stopped speaking.
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Speaker 1: It was written for you. Are you ready to listen,
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Speaker 1: then let us begin Chapter one, The Boy in the River.
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Speaker 1: Close your eyes and let yourself be carried back back
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Speaker 1: past centuries and empires and the long, slow turning of
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Speaker 1: the world, back to a river, the Nile at night,
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Speaker 1: wide and dark and slow, moving with the unhurried certainty
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Speaker 1: of something that has been flowing since before human memory began.
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Speaker 1: Along its banks, the tall papyrus reeds sway in the
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Speaker 1: warm Egyptian air. The smell of the river reaches you
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Speaker 1: before you see it, rich and muddy and green, the
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Speaker 1: smell of a land that owes everything it has to
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Speaker 1: the water moving through it. The surface of the Nile
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Speaker 1: at night catches the moonlight in long, slow ribbons that
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Speaker 1: shift and break and reform with every small current, and
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Speaker 1: the sound of it, that low, continuous movement of water
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Speaker 1: against reed and mud and stone is the oldest sound
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Speaker 1: in this part of the world. Egypt in that age
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Speaker 1: was the center of the known world, not simply a
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Speaker 1: powerful nation, but the dominant civilization on earth, a place
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Speaker 1: of enormous stone temples and vast administrative palaces, monuments that
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Speaker 1: had been standing for centuries and would stand for centuries more.
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Speaker 1: Its armies were feared from the African interior to the
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Speaker 1: Eastern mountains. Its gods were many, and its rituals were ancient.
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Speaker 1: And its pharaoh was considered not merely a king, but
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Speaker 1: a living deity, the divine son of the Sun god himself,
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Speaker 1: walking among mortals in human form. And yet on this
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Speaker 1: particular night beside the Nile, something was happening that Pharaoh
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Speaker 1: himself did not know about, Something small and fragile and
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Speaker 1: easily overlooked, something that had nothing to do with armies
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Speaker 1: or temples or divine bloodlines. A woman was weaving a basket.
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Speaker 1: Her name was Jocobed, and she was working by the
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Speaker 1: light of a small lamp because she was terrified. For
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Speaker 1: more than four hundred years, the descendants of a man
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Speaker 1: named Jacob had lived in this land. They had come
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Speaker 1: as guests welcomed during a time of famine because one
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Speaker 1: of their own, a man named Joseph, had risen to
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Speaker 1: become the second most powerful person in all of Egypt.
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Speaker 1: But that was a long time ago. The pharaoh who
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Speaker 1: remembered Joseph was gone, The gratitude had faded with the
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Speaker 1: generations that replaced him, and what had grown in its
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Speaker 1: place was something colder and more familiar, the fear that
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Speaker 1: powerful people feel when they look at a group they
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Speaker 1: do not understand and begin to count them. The Israelites
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Speaker 1: had grown. They had grown remarkably and stubbornly, and with
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Speaker 1: a vitality that no amount of hardship seemed capable of diminishing.
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Speaker 1: Generation after generation, families multiplied, and Egypt looked at this
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Speaker 1: expanding population of people living within its borders and felt
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Speaker 1: the old familiar calculation run through its halls of power.
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Speaker 1: What if they turn against us? What if they join
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Speaker 1: our enemies? And so the Israelites became slaves, not guests,
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Speaker 1: not neighbors, property. Their backs bent under the weight of
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Speaker 1: stone and mortar. Their hands shaped the great building projects
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Speaker 1: of Egyptian ambition, the storage cities rising out of the
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Speaker 1: delta on the labor of people who would never own
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Speaker 1: a single brick they laid. The work was brutal and unending,
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Speaker 1: and designed not just to extract labor, but to break
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Speaker 1: something essential in the people doing it, to press them
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Speaker 1: so flat that rising seemed impossible. But they kept multiplying,
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Speaker 1: and so Pharaoh made a decree that echoes through history
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Speaker 1: like a dark and terrible drumbeat. Every Hebrew boy born
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Speaker 1: must be thrown into the nile, not imprisoned, not enslaved,
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Speaker 1: further drowned in the Sacred river itself, the very water
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Speaker 1: that Egypt considered the source of all life. Pharaoh commanded
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Speaker 1: the death of a generation of sons before they could
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Speaker 1: become men. Hold that for a moment, not as a
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Speaker 1: historical policy, as a mother hearing it for the first
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Speaker 1: time in a small dark room, as a father, as
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Speaker 1: a family pressed together in the night, a new born
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Speaker 1: child in someone's arm, listening to the sound of soldiers
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Speaker 1: somewhere outside. This was the world Jokobed lived in, and
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Speaker 1: this was the world into which her son had just arrived.
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Speaker 1: He was a beautiful child. That is the word the
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Speaker 1: scripture uses, and it is worth pausing on. In a
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Speaker 1: world that had already decided his life had no value,
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Speaker 1: that had marked him for death before he could speak,
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Speaker 1: or walk or become anything at all. His mother looked
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Speaker 1: at him and saw beauty, saw someone worth hiding, worth
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Speaker 1: the daily terror of three months of concealment, worth fighting
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Speaker 1: for in the only way a woman with no power
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Speaker 1: in the most powerful empire on earth could fight. For
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Speaker 1: three months she hid him. Three months of holding her
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Speaker 1: breath every time footsteps passed outside. Three months of keeping
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Speaker 1: a baby quiet in a household that could be searched.
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Speaker 1: Three months of watching her daughter Miriam learn the particular
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Speaker 1: silence of a child who understands that some things must
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Speaker 1: not be spoken aloud. But a baby grows, a growing
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Speaker 1: baby makes sounds. And the day came when Jocobed understood
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Speaker 1: that four walls were no longer enough. So she did
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Speaker 1: something that must have looked to anyone watching like the
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Speaker 1: act of a woman who had lost her reason. She
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Speaker 1: took papyrus reeds and wove them into a basket. She
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Speaker 1: sealed every gap with tar and pitch, working the dark
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Speaker 1: waterproofing material into the weave with her fingers in the lamplight,
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Speaker 1: pressing it carefully into each space until she was certain
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Speaker 1: it would hold against water. She placed her son inside.
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Speaker 1: She lifted the basket and carried him down through the
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Speaker 1: reeds to the river, to the very water Pharaoh had
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Speaker 1: intended to be his grave. She waded into the shallows
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Speaker 1: and settled the basket among the tall reeds at the
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Speaker 1: edge of the bank, where the current would not take it.
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Speaker 1: And then she did the hardest thing. She let go.
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Speaker 1: She could not watch. She sent her daughter Miriam to
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Speaker 1: stand at a distance and see what would happen. This
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Speaker 1: young girl keeping watch with her heart pounding in the
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Speaker 1: reeds a little way off, and Jockobed walked away from
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Speaker 1: the river with empty arms, moving through a faith that
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Speaker 1: had no language for what it was, only hands that
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Speaker 1: had done everything they could do, and a heart releasing
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Speaker 1: what they could no longer hold. The basket floated, the
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Speaker 1: reeds steadied it. The river that was supposed to be
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Speaker 1: his executioner became his cradle. That same morning, the daughter
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Speaker 1: of Pharaoh came down to the Nile to bathe. She
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Speaker 1: walked along the bank with her attendants, and something caught
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Speaker 1: her eye in the reeds, A basket sitting in the shallows,
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Speaker 1: moving slightly with the water. She sent a servant to
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Speaker 1: bring it. When she opened it, a baby boy looked
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Speaker 1: up at her, and he cried. That sound, that small,
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Speaker 1: entirely human sound. It crossed every boundary the ancient world
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Speaker 1: had built between a prince concess of Egypt and a
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Speaker 1: Hebrew slave child. It reached something in her that no
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Speaker 1: royal education and no political loyalty had been able to touch.
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Speaker 1: She knew immediately that he was a Hebrew child. She
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Speaker 1: knew what her father's decree required, and she chose otherwise.
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Speaker 1: At exactly that moment, Miriam stepped out from her watching place,
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Speaker 1: barefoot and young, and standing before the daughter of the
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Speaker 1: most powerful man on earth. She asked a question with
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Speaker 1: a steadiness that is remarkable for someone her age in
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Speaker 1: any era. Shall I go and find a Hebrew woman
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Speaker 1: to nurse the child for you? Pharaoh's daughter said yes,
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Speaker 1: and Miriam ran and got her mother think about what
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Speaker 1: that means. Jocobed, who had placed her son in the
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Speaker 1: river and walked away because she could not bear to watch,
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Speaker 1: was brought back and the daughter of Pharaoh placed her
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Speaker 1: son back into her arms and said, take this child
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Speaker 1: and nurse him for me, and I will give you
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Speaker 1: your wages. The empire that had ordered the death of
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Speaker 1: hebrew sons was now paying a Hebrew mother to raise
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Speaker 1: her own. Inside the household of the very power trying
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Speaker 1: to destroy his people, a Hebrew child was not only alive,
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Speaker 1: but being nourished and paid for by the hand of
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Speaker 1: Pharaoh's own family. The boy was named Moses. In Hebrew,
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Speaker 1: his name carries the sound of a word meaning drawn out,
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Speaker 1: because he was drawn out of the water. In Egyptian,
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Speaker 1: it simply means son. He was the son of the river,
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Speaker 1: the son of the palace, the son of a woman
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Speaker 1: who had woven a basket by lamp light and placed
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Speaker 1: her most precious thing in the hands of a god
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Speaker 1: she could not see. He grew up in the household
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Speaker 1: of Egypt's ruling family. He received the education of Egypt,
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Speaker 1: its languages and its learning, and its ways of moving
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Speaker 1: through the world. He wore Egyptian clothing and ate at
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Speaker 1: Egyptian tables, and learned to think in Egyptian categories. By
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Speaker 1: every outward measure, Moses belonged to Egypt entirely. And yet
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Speaker 1: something persisted underneath all of that, a thread of identity
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Speaker 1: that the palace could cover, but could not cut. On
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Speaker 1: a day that the scripture records in a single devastating passage,
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Speaker 1: Moses went out to where his people were working, and
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Speaker 1: he saw their burdens. His people, not the workers, not
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Speaker 1: the slaves, his people. He saw an Egyptian overseer beating
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Speaker 1: a hebrew Man. He looked around, he saw no one watching,
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Speaker 1: and he killed the Egyptian and buried him in the sand.
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Speaker 1: The next day, he tried to intervene in a fight
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Speaker 1: between two hebrew Men, and one of them turned on
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Speaker 1: him with words that must have felt like the world
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Speaker 1: giving way beneath his feet. Who made you a ruler
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Speaker 1: and a judge over us? Are you going to kill
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Speaker 1: me the way you killed the Egyptian? The secret was out,
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Speaker 1: and when Pharaoh heard of it, he wanted Moses dead.
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Speaker 1: Moses ran, the man who had grown up inside one
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Speaker 1: of the most powerful households in the ancient world, fled
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Speaker 1: into the desert with nothing but the clothes on his
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Speaker 1: back and the weight of a life that had just
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Speaker 1: collapsed from both ends simultaneously. He was too Egyptian for
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Speaker 1: the Hebrews, and now too dangerous for Egypt. He belonged nowhere.
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Speaker 1: He ran east across the Sinai Peninsula into the land
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Speaker 1: of Midian, and sat down by a well in the desert,
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Speaker 1: exhausted and stared at the ground in front of him.
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Speaker 1: He was forty years old, and by every human measure,
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Speaker 1: his story was over. But the desert has a way
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Speaker 1: of doing things to a person that cannot be accomplished
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Speaker 1: anywhere else. It strips away what was borrowed, every identity
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Speaker 1: that was given to you rather than grown in you,
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Speaker 1: every confidence that came from position, rather than from something
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Speaker 1: real beneath the position. The desert is patient and thorough,
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Speaker 1: and it does not stop until what remains is the
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Speaker 1: issaessential thing, the actual person underneath all the layers that
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Speaker 1: circumstance put there. Moses settled in Midian. He married Zipperah,
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Speaker 1: the daughter of a priest named Jethro. He became a shepherd.
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Speaker 1: He learned the Sinai landscape the way only a shepherd
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Speaker 1: can learn it, one dry season and one wet season
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Speaker 1: at a time, one water source and one grazing slope,
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Speaker 1: and one rocky pass. Memorized through years of quiet repetition,
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Speaker 1: he became, by any outward accounting, completely unremarkable, an aging
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Speaker 1: man with sheep in a land nobody important had ever
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Speaker 1: heard of. He did not know the desert was a school.
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Speaker 1: He did not know that learning to lead a flock
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Speaker 1: of sheep through waterless terrain was preparation for leading a
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Speaker 1: nation through a longer and harder version of the same.
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Speaker 1: He did not know that the humility being built into
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Speaker 1: him year by patient year was precisely the quality that
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Speaker 1: would make him capable of carrying something no ambitious man
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Speaker 1: could carry. He only knew that the sheep needed water,
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Speaker 1: and the nights were cold, and the stars over Midian
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Speaker 1: were very bright to night. Let that be enough. Let
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Speaker 1: the thought that the seasons of disappearance are not always
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Speaker 1: disappearance be the last thing before sleep. Moses was not
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Speaker 1: forgotten in that desert. He was being made. The Burning
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Speaker 1: Bush was still ahead. Chapter two, The Burning Bush. Forty
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Speaker 1: years is a long time to become someone different. The
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Speaker 1: man who had grown up inside one of the greatest
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Speaker 1: households in the ancient world now walked on stone and sand,
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Speaker 1: following sheep through the folds and ridges of the Sinai Wilderness.
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Speaker 1: His hands, once smooth with the privileges of royalty, were
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Speaker 1: calloused and darkened from decades of sun and work. The
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Speaker 1: bearing of a prince had given way to the unhurried
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Speaker 1: gait of someone who had stopped expecting the world to
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Speaker 1: make way for him a very long time ago. Moses
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Speaker 1: was eighty years old. By every measure the ancient world
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Speaker 1: used to evaluate a life, his was essentially over. No title,
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Speaker 1: no influence, no cause, no one who remembered him as
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Speaker 1: anything other than Jethro's quiet son in law, the one
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Speaker 1: who knew the grazing patterns of this part of the
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Speaker 1: Sinai better than most, and said very little about anything else.
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Speaker 1: On a morning that began exactly like every other morning,
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Speaker 1: he led his flock to the far side of the wilderness,
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Speaker 1: to the slopes near a mountain called Horeb. He had
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Speaker 1: been to this area before. He knew the way the
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Speaker 1: shadow moved across it in the afternoon, knew which ravines
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Speaker 1: held water after the seasonal rains, knew the feel of
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Speaker 1: the path under his feet, the way you know a
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Speaker 1: road you have walked a hundred times. To him, it
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Speaker 1: was a landmark, not a destination, a feature of the
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Speaker 1: landscape he had built his quiet life around. And then
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Speaker 1: he saw the fire fire a bush was burning on
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Speaker 1: the slope ahead in the dry heat of the Sinai.
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Speaker 1: That alone was not unusual. Brush caught, sparks, things ignited,
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Speaker 1: the desert burned in small patches, and moved on. Moses
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Speaker 1: had seen it before. He would have kept walking, but
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Speaker 1: he slowed, then stopped because something was wrong in a
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Speaker 1: way he could not immediately name. The bush was burning,
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Speaker 1: but the branches beneath the flames were not blackening, the
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Speaker 1: leaves were not curling and vanishing into smoke. The fire
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Speaker 1: moved and danced and shifted, the way fire always moves,
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Speaker 1: with the same restless energy of every fire he had
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Speaker 1: ever seen. And yet the bush beneath it was completely
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Speaker 1: inexplicably unchanged, green whole, the fire consuming it and consuming nothing.
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Speaker 1: It burned and burned and did not burn up. Moses
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Speaker 1: said to himself, I will turn aside and see this
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Speaker 1: great sight. Why is the bush not burned? That small
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Speaker 1: decision to stop, to turn toward the thing that did
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Speaker 1: not make sense, rather than away from it, to refuse
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Speaker 1: the easy explanation and look more closely. It is one
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Speaker 1: of the most quietly significant moments in all of scripture,
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Speaker 1: because nothing that follows happens without it. Moses could have
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Speaker 1: kept walking. An old man with sheep to water and
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Speaker 1: no particular reason to expect extraordinary things, had every practical
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Speaker 1: justification for letting it go. But something in him turned
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Speaker 1: toward the fire, and the moment he did, a voice
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Speaker 1: spoke from within it. Moses, Moses, his name spoken twice,
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Speaker 1: the way you speak the name of someone you know
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Speaker 1: well and are genuinely glad to see. And in the
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Speaker 1: tone of that voice, something reached past every wall Moses
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Speaker 1: had spent forty years building, past the failure, past the exile,
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Speaker 1: passed the long quiet resignation of a man who had
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Speaker 1: made his peace with being no one of consequence. Here,
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Speaker 1: I am, Moses, said, remove your sandals. The voice told him,
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Speaker 1: the ground you are standing on is holy. Moses bent
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Speaker 1: and removed his sandals. He stood on the stone of
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Speaker 1: the Sinai hillside in bare feet, feeling the warmth of
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Speaker 1: the rock beneath him, the roughness of it under his souls,
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Speaker 1: and the voice spoke again, I am the God of
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Speaker 1: your Father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac,
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Speaker 1: the God of Jacob. Moses hid his face. He was
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Speaker 1: afraid to look at God, and perhaps something else was
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Speaker 1: moving in him alongside the fear because this was the
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Speaker 1: God of his ancestors, the God of the people he
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Speaker 1: had tried to save and failed to save, and then
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Speaker 1: spent forty years trying not to think about the God
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Speaker 1: who had seemed silent through every year of his exile,
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Speaker 1: the God. He may have wondered on the long dark
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Speaker 1: nights in Midian whether he had simply moved on from
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Speaker 1: Moses the way everyone else eventually had. That God was
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Speaker 1: standing in a burning bush on a hillside in the
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Speaker 1: middle of nowhere, and he knew Moses's name. I have
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Speaker 1: seen the affliction of my people in Egypt, God said,
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Speaker 1: I have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I
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Speaker 1: know their sufferings. Three statements before the commission, I have seen,
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Speaker 1: I have heard. I know not a distant power catching
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Speaker 1: up on news it had missed. A God who had
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Speaker 1: been present through every year of every generation of bondage,
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Speaker 1: counting every wound, hearing every prayer that had risen from
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Speaker 1: the brickfields of Goshen, and seemingly gone nowhere, A God
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Speaker 1: who had not looked away. And now God said, I
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Speaker 1: have come down to deliver them. I have come down,
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Speaker 1: the God of the universe coming down. Come, He said
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Speaker 1: to me, I will send you to Pharaoh that you
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Speaker 1: may bring my people out of Egypt. The silence after
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Speaker 1: those words must have been very complete. Moses barefoot on
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Speaker 1: a warm hillside, an old man the world had forgotten,
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Speaker 1: being told he was going to walk back into the
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Speaker 1: greatest empire on earth and demand the release of its
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Speaker 1: entire labor force. And then Moses spoke, And what he
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Speaker 1: said in that moment tells you everything about who the
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Speaker 1: desert had made him. Who am I? He said that
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Speaker 1: I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of
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Speaker 1: Israel out of Egypt. Not the question of a prince
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Speaker 1: who once thought he could start a revolution by himself.
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Speaker 1: Not arrogance or ambition, or the forward leaning confidence of
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Speaker 1: a young man who had not yet learned what failure
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Speaker 1: feels like from the inside. This was the genuine question
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Speaker 1: of a man who had been humbled to his foundations
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Speaker 1: and knew exactly what he was and what he was not.
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Speaker 1: Who am I? God did not answer the question direh directly.
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Speaker 1: He did not offer a list of Moses' qualifications or
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Speaker 1: a careful argument for why Moses was actually the right choice.
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Speaker 1: He said something entirely different. I will be with you.
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Speaker 1: That was the answer, not credentials presents. But Moses had
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Speaker 1: more to say, five objections in total, each one honest
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Speaker 1: and each one met. If I go to them and
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Speaker 1: they ask your name, what shall I say? God answered,
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Speaker 1: with the name that has no equal in human language.
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Speaker 1: I am who I am. Tell them, I am has
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Speaker 1: sent you, not a name describing what God does or
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Speaker 1: where he rules. Simply, absolutely, overwhelmingly, I exist, present, tense,
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Speaker 1: beyond definition, the one who simply is. They will not
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Speaker 1: believe me, Moses said. Next, God gave him signs a
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Speaker 1: staff that became a snake and returned to a staff.
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Speaker 1: When he picked it up, a hand turned leprous and
22:04
Speaker 1: restored water from the nile that would pour on the
22:08
Speaker 1: ground as blood, evidence that the one sending him was
22:12
Speaker 1: not sending him empty handed. Then came the personal objection,
22:17
Speaker 1: I am not eloquent, Moses said, I am slow of
22:20
Speaker 1: speech and of tongue. Whatever this meant exactly, whether a
22:24
Speaker 1: stutter or a long estrangement from the Egyptian language he
22:27
Speaker 1: had not spoken in decades, or simply the deep self
22:30
Speaker 1: consciousness of a man who had failed publicly and never
22:34
Speaker 1: entirely recovered, It was real to him. He was standing
22:38
Speaker 1: before God and saying, plainly, I am not the right
22:41
Speaker 1: person for this. God's response carried something that sounds almost
22:46
Speaker 1: like a gentle impatience born of love that refuses to
22:50
Speaker 1: give up on its chosen. Who made the human mouth?
22:53
Speaker 1: God said? Who makes a person mute? Or death? Seeing?
22:57
Speaker 1: Or blind? Is it not I? Now go? I will
23:02
Speaker 1: be with your mouth and teach you what to say?
23:05
Speaker 1: Is it not I? The one asking you to speak?
23:08
Speaker 1: Designed speech itself, the one sending you made your mouth?
23:13
Speaker 1: Do you truly think I have not accounted for this?
23:17
Speaker 1: But Moses made one final request, his fifth and last,
23:22
Speaker 1: and this time he offered no reason at all. He
23:25
Speaker 1: simply said, please send some one else. There is something
23:29
Speaker 1: painfully honest in that, after everything God had said and shown,
23:33
Speaker 1: after the name and the signs and the promise of presents,
23:37
Speaker 1: Moses looked at the full weight of what was being
23:39
Speaker 1: asked and said, not me, any one else. I do
23:44
Speaker 1: not want this. The Bible says God's anger burned against
23:48
Speaker 1: Moses in that moment, and yet he did not withdraw
23:51
Speaker 1: the calling. He did not say, fine, I was wrong
23:55
Speaker 1: about you. He made an accommodation. Aaron Moses older brother
24:01
Speaker 1: was already on his way to meet him in the wilderness.
24:04
Speaker 1: Aaron would speak, they would go together. The method could bend.
24:09
Speaker 1: The man God had chosen would not be replaced. Moses
24:13
Speaker 1: returned to Jethro and asked his blessing to return to Egypt.
24:17
Speaker 1: Go in peace, Jethro told him. Moses gathered his things,
24:22
Speaker 1: He took his staff, the same wooden staff that had
24:25
Speaker 1: just been a snake in his hand, and he set
24:28
Speaker 1: his face toward Egypt and began walking. God told him
24:32
Speaker 1: something before he arrived that was both warning and preparation.
24:36
Speaker 1: Even with signs and wonders and Aaron speaking beside him,
24:40
Speaker 1: Pharaoh would not yield easily. The confrontation ahead was not
24:44
Speaker 1: going to be resolved in one dramatic meeting. It was
24:48
Speaker 1: going to require something from Moses that courage alone could
24:51
Speaker 1: not provide. It was going to require endurance. Moses walked
24:56
Speaker 1: toward Egypt alone. The fire on the hillside was behind him,
25:01
Speaker 1: the weight of a calling he had not asked for
25:03
Speaker 1: was on him, and somewhere ahead, through all the miles
25:07
Speaker 1: of desert night, the most powerful empire on Earth was
25:10
Speaker 1: going about its business entirely unaware that an eighty year
25:14
Speaker 1: old shepherd with a wooden staff was walking toward it.
25:17
Speaker 1: The stars over Sinai are very bright. Let them be
25:20
Speaker 1: there above you. Now as you begin to rest, Moses
25:24
Speaker 1: is walking, the staff is in his hand, and the
25:28
Speaker 1: God who said I will be with you is already ahead,
25:32
Speaker 1: already moving, already preparing the space where the impossible is
25:36
Speaker 1: about to become the inevitable. Sleep. Now he is already there.
25:44
Speaker 1: Chapter three, Return to Egypt. There is a particular weight
25:48
Speaker 1: to going back, Not the ordinary heaviness of a long
25:52
Speaker 1: journey or a difficult task ahead. The specific particular weight
25:56
Speaker 1: of returning to the place where your life broke open,
26:00
Speaker 1: where the person you used to be still exists in
26:03
Speaker 1: the memory of the landscape, even if no one living
26:05
Speaker 1: remembers you, where failure left its mark on the geography itself.
26:10
Speaker 1: Moses crossed the Sinai alone. He had sent Zippora and
26:14
Speaker 1: his sons back to stay with Jethro, keeping them safe
26:18
Speaker 1: from what was coming, a separation. He would carry through
26:20
Speaker 1: every confrontation ahead until the day they were reunited at
26:24
Speaker 1: the Mountain of God. The road across the peninsula was long,
26:28
Speaker 1: and the sun was merciless, and the man walking It
26:31
Speaker 1: was eighty years old, and carrying something invisible that was
26:34
Speaker 1: heavier than anything a person can pack. He was carrying
26:38
Speaker 1: the memory of the last time he had been here,
26:41
Speaker 1: not as a celebrated return, but as a fugitive's exit
26:45
Speaker 1: the palace he had grown up in, the failure that
26:48
Speaker 1: had ended his Egyptian life in a single day, the
26:51
Speaker 1: forty years between then and now, and the burning bush
26:55
Speaker 1: that had interrupted the only life he had managed to build.
26:58
Speaker 1: In the aftermath, the landscape changed around him as he walked.
27:03
Speaker 1: The rocky terrain of the Sinai gave way to the flatter,
27:05
Speaker 1: more populated land of the Eastern Delta. The air changed,
27:10
Speaker 1: more moisture in it, the particular heaviness of a river civilization,
27:16
Speaker 1: the smell of the Nile reaching him like a hand
27:18
Speaker 1: placed on the shoulder from behind, the smell of the
27:22
Speaker 1: place that had made him and broken him, and that
27:24
Speaker 1: he had never entirely left, even when he was physically
27:28
Speaker 1: gone from it. And on the road Aaron came to
27:31
Speaker 1: meet him. Forty years of separation ended on a desert
27:35
Speaker 1: road between two old men. The scripture does not describe
27:39
Speaker 1: the reunion in detail, and somehow that restraint feels true
27:43
Speaker 1: to what such a moment would actually be like. There
27:46
Speaker 1: are reunions too large for description, two layered with the
27:50
Speaker 1: accumulated weight of years spent entirely differently from each other.
27:55
Speaker 1: Aaron had stayed in Egypt. He had lived the life
27:58
Speaker 1: Moses had fled, had remained among the slaves, had carried
28:02
Speaker 1: the daily reality of bondage through every year that Moses
28:06
Speaker 1: was tending sheep in Midian. They were brothers, and in
28:10
Speaker 1: every other sense they were strangers who shared a blood.
28:13
Speaker 1: Moses told Aaron everything, the burning bush, the name I Am,
28:19
Speaker 1: the signs, the instruction, all of it laid out on
28:24
Speaker 1: that desert road, with the sun going down and Egypt
28:27
Speaker 1: visible in the distance. Aaron listened to all of it
28:30
Speaker 1: without interrupting, and then he accepted it. Together they walked
28:35
Speaker 1: into Goshen. They gathered the elders of Israel, the men
28:39
Speaker 1: who held the community together from the inside, who organized
28:43
Speaker 1: the burials and settled the disputes, and tried to maintain
28:46
Speaker 1: some shape of identity and dignity in conditions specifically designed
28:51
Speaker 1: to strip both away. These were not men who could
28:54
Speaker 1: afford optimism. They had seen too many promises and too
28:58
Speaker 1: many mornings that looked identical to the morning before Aaron spoke.
29:03
Speaker 1: He told them everything God had said to Moses, and
29:07
Speaker 1: Moses performed the signs before them, the staff becoming a
29:10
Speaker 1: snake and returning to a staff, the hand turning white
29:14
Speaker 1: with disease and being restored, the water drawn from the
29:18
Speaker 1: nile poured out on the ground and turning to blood
29:20
Speaker 1: in the dust. And the elders believed that belief deserves
29:25
Speaker 1: more than a quick passage. These were people who had
29:28
Speaker 1: been slaves for four hundred years, four centuries of watching
29:32
Speaker 1: each generation borne into the same chains the generation before
29:37
Speaker 1: them had worn. Four centuries of prayers that seemed to
29:40
Speaker 1: rise from the brickfields and go somewhere that returned no answer.
29:44
Speaker 1: Four centuries of stories passed down from the very oldest
29:48
Speaker 1: ancestors about a God who had made promises to Abraham
29:51
Speaker 1: and Isaac and Jacob, promises about a land and a
29:54
Speaker 1: future and a people who would flourish, promises that must
29:58
Speaker 1: have felt in the grind ding daily reality of Egyptian
30:02
Speaker 1: bondage like beautiful dreams from another world entirely. And now
30:07
Speaker 1: two old men were standing in front of them, saying,
30:11
Speaker 1: God has seen God has heard God is moving. They believed.
30:17
Speaker 1: The lamps in the room were low, the smell of
30:20
Speaker 1: clay and straw, and the particular exhaustion of men who
30:23
Speaker 1: had been working since before sunrise was in the air.
30:27
Speaker 1: Someone's hands were still chalked with the dust of the brickfields,
30:31
Speaker 1: And in that room, in that smell, with those hands,
30:35
Speaker 1: they believed. And they bowed their heads, and they worshiped.
30:39
Speaker 1: Before a single chain had been removed, before Pharaoh had
30:43
Speaker 1: been approached, before anything in the visible world had shifted
30:46
Speaker 1: by even a degree, they bowed their heads toward the ground,
30:51
Speaker 1: in the posture of people who have decided that the
30:53
Speaker 1: promise is more real than the evidence against it. And
30:56
Speaker 1: they worshiped the God who had sent a burning bush
30:59
Speaker 1: and an eighty year old shepherd to tell them that
31:02
Speaker 1: four hundred years of silence had not been absence. It
31:06
Speaker 1: is one of the most moving moments in the entire story,
31:10
Speaker 1: the faith of people who had every reason not to
31:12
Speaker 1: have any left. Then Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh.
31:16
Speaker 1: To understand the weight of that walk, you need to
31:19
Speaker 1: understand the room they were entering. The throne room of
31:22
Speaker 1: Pharaoh was not simply a seat of political authority. It
31:25
Speaker 1: was a theological statement made in stone and gold, engineered
31:30
Speaker 1: at every scale to communicate one overwhelming truth. The man
31:35
Speaker 1: at the end of this room is divine. The height
31:38
Speaker 1: of the ceiling, the length of the approach, the guards
31:41
Speaker 1: arranged in ceremonial hierarchies, the art covering every surface, depicting
31:46
Speaker 1: Pharaoh in the company of gods as an equal among them.
31:49
Speaker 1: Every architectural choice was designed to make whoever was walking
31:54
Speaker 1: toward the throne feel the full weight of the distance
31:57
Speaker 1: between what they were and what he was. Moses and
32:01
Speaker 1: Aaron walked the length of that room, two old men
32:04
Speaker 1: in desert clothes, and they delivered their message to the
32:09
Speaker 1: most powerful person in the ancient world. Thus says the Lord,
32:13
Speaker 1: the God of Israel, let my people go, so that
32:17
Speaker 1: they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness.
32:20
Speaker 1: Pharaoh's response was immediate and carried the contempt of some
32:23
Speaker 1: one who has not yet understood that the terms of
32:26
Speaker 1: the conversation have fundamentally changed. Who is the Lord that
32:31
Speaker 1: I should obey his voice and let Israel go. I
32:34
Speaker 1: do not know the Lord, and I will not let
32:37
Speaker 1: Israel go. Who is the Lord? The question was not
32:42
Speaker 1: genuine inquiry. It was dismissal spoken in the form of
32:46
Speaker 1: a question. In the religious world, Pharaoh inhabited a god
32:50
Speaker 1: unknown to him, was a god of no consequence. He
32:53
Speaker 1: had a divine order he recognized and honored with himself
32:57
Speaker 1: near its summit as the living son of Ra, the
33:00
Speaker 1: Sun God. The deity of a slave people had no
33:03
Speaker 1: standing in that order and no claim on his obedience.
33:07
Speaker 1: Moses and Aaron pushed further three days into the wilderness.
33:11
Speaker 1: They said, a sacrifice to our God, or he may
33:15
Speaker 1: strike us with disease or war. Pharaoh looked at them
33:19
Speaker 1: with the flat patience of a man who has heard
33:21
Speaker 1: many kinds of petitions and knows which ones to refuse
33:25
Speaker 1: without further consideration. You are lazy, he said, too much
33:29
Speaker 1: time and not enough work. Get back to the brick fields.
33:34
Speaker 1: And then he did something calculated and cruel, something designed
33:38
Speaker 1: not just to punish Moses and Aaron, but to turn
33:40
Speaker 1: the entire Israelite community against them. He changed the production orders.
33:46
Speaker 1: Until that morning, the Egyptian overseers had been supplying the
33:50
Speaker 1: Hebrew slaves with straw for making bricks. Straw was not
33:55
Speaker 1: optional without it mixed into the clay the bricks fell
33:58
Speaker 1: apart during fire. Every worker knew this, and every overseer
34:03
Speaker 1: knew this, and it had been provided without discussion as
34:07
Speaker 1: a basic requirement of the work. Pharaoh removed it completely
34:11
Speaker 1: effective immediately. The Hebrews would find their own straw, gathering
34:17
Speaker 1: it from harvested fields across the land of Egypt, and
34:20
Speaker 1: they would still produce the same number of finished bricks
34:23
Speaker 1: every single day. The slave drivers spread across Egypt, and
34:27
Speaker 1: the Israelite workers scattered in desperation, moving through the stubble
34:32
Speaker 1: of harvested fields, trying to gather enough material to meet
34:35
Speaker 1: quotas that had been made mathematically impossible by design. They
34:40
Speaker 1: fell behind, and the Israelite foremen, the men responsible for
34:44
Speaker 1: managing the work crews, were beaten for the shortfall by
34:48
Speaker 1: Egyptian overseers. Pharaoh had not simply made the work harder.
34:52
Speaker 1: He had engineered a specific social outcome. He had made
34:56
Speaker 1: Moses the cause of increased suffering, turned the deliverer into
35:01
Speaker 1: the problem. The foreman went to Pharaoh to complain. Pharaoh
35:05
Speaker 1: sent them away with contempt, and leaving the palace, they
35:09
Speaker 1: found Moses and Aaron waiting in the road outside the
35:13
Speaker 1: pain of people who have been given hope and then
35:16
Speaker 1: had that hope immediately weaponized against them. Came out in
35:19
Speaker 1: a torrent. May the Lord look on you and judge.
35:22
Speaker 1: They said to Moses, you have made us a stench
35:26
Speaker 1: to Pharaoh. You have put a sword in his hand
35:29
Speaker 1: to kill us. Moses turned to God with the rawness
35:32
Speaker 1: of genuine confusion and genuine hurt. Why have you done
35:36
Speaker 1: this to your people? He prayed, Why did you send
35:40
Speaker 1: me since I came to Pharaoh to speak in your name?
35:43
Speaker 1: He has done evil to this people, and you have
35:46
Speaker 1: not delivered your people at all. This is not performed faith.
35:50
Speaker 1: This is not the polished prayer of someone conscious of
35:53
Speaker 1: being observed. This is a man in the dark saying
35:57
Speaker 1: honestly to the one he believes is there. I do
36:01
Speaker 1: not understand what is happening. I did what you asked,
36:04
Speaker 1: and it is worse. Where are you? God answered not
36:09
Speaker 1: with an explanation, but with a promise. Now you shall
36:12
Speaker 1: see what I will do to Pharaoh. Not here is
36:16
Speaker 1: my strategy. Not here is why the first step had
36:20
Speaker 1: to look like this. Just watch, stay in this, keep going.
36:27
Speaker 1: Now you shall see. There is a kind of trust
36:30
Speaker 1: this requires that is harder than the trust of someone
36:33
Speaker 1: who understands the plan. It is the trust of someone
36:36
Speaker 1: standing in the dark, holding the hand of the one
36:39
Speaker 1: who said, I will be with you, walking forward on
36:42
Speaker 1: a road they cannot see, because the one holding their
36:45
Speaker 1: hand can. Moses was in that darkness now, The people
36:50
Speaker 1: were in it. The foreman who had been beaten were
36:53
Speaker 1: in it, and God was saying, I know now you
36:57
Speaker 1: shall see the night settles. Are you now? The brick
37:01
Speaker 1: fields of Goshen are dark and quiet. The foremen are
37:05
Speaker 1: at home with their wounds. Moses is somewhere in the
37:08
Speaker 1: dark with a question that has no answer yet, and
37:12
Speaker 1: above all of it, patient and unhurried, and completely untroubled
37:16
Speaker 1: by the apparent impossibility of what he has promised. The
37:19
Speaker 1: God who parts, sees and topples empires is already moving.
37:24
Speaker 1: You shall see rest now. The morning is coming, and
37:29
Speaker 1: with it the beginning of something Egypt has never encountered before.
37:36
Speaker 1: Chapter four, The Ten Plagues, Part One. Before a storm
37:41
Speaker 1: of unusual power arrives, the air changes. Every creature in
37:46
Speaker 1: the landscape feels it before any human instrument can measure it.
37:51
Speaker 1: The birds go still, the insects stop, the surface of
37:55
Speaker 1: standing water goes glassy and flat in the windless air.
37:59
Speaker 1: It is a silencence different from ordinary quiet, heavier, more intentional,
38:04
Speaker 1: the silence of something enormous, drawing breath before it speaks.
38:08
Speaker 1: Egypt was in that silence. Now Pharaoh had refused. The
38:13
Speaker 1: slaves were suffering more than before. Moses had cried out
38:17
Speaker 1: to God in honest pain, and God had said, now
38:21
Speaker 1: you shall see. What was coming was not chaos. It
38:25
Speaker 1: was not a series of natural disasters thrown blindly at
38:28
Speaker 1: a stubborn empire in the hope that something would eventually
38:31
Speaker 1: break through. What was coming was structured and deliberate, and
38:35
Speaker 1: theologically precise in a way that rewards careful attention. Egypt
38:41
Speaker 1: in that age was not merely a political civilization. It
38:45
Speaker 1: was a profoundly religious one, constructed around a vast understanding
38:49
Speaker 1: of the divine forces governing every aspect of the natural world.
38:54
Speaker 1: Many scholars who have studied the religion of ancient Egypt
38:57
Speaker 1: have noted what they find to be striking para between
39:01
Speaker 1: the specific plagues that followed and the specific aspects of
39:04
Speaker 1: the natural world that Egyptian theology held to be under
39:08
Speaker 1: divine governance. The Nile and its flooding, the fertility of
39:14
Speaker 1: the land, the sun and its daily rising. Each of
39:18
Speaker 1: these was understood by the Egyptians to carry within it
39:21
Speaker 1: the power of a god. If those parallels are as
39:25
Speaker 1: intentional as many have argued, then what was about to
39:28
Speaker 1: happen was not simply the application of pressure to a
39:31
Speaker 1: resistant ruler. It was a systematic theological conversation conducted in
39:37
Speaker 1: the language of the natural world, in which the god
39:40
Speaker 1: of a slave people was demonstrating with increasing clarity that
39:44
Speaker 1: the forces Egypt worshiped as divine were not gods at all.
39:49
Speaker 1: They were creation, and the one standing behind their existence
39:53
Speaker 1: was the God of Israel. Not a rescue operation alone,
39:57
Speaker 1: a revelation. Moses was eighty years old when he walked
40:01
Speaker 1: back into Pharaoh's throne room for the second time. Aaron
40:04
Speaker 1: was eighty three. They delivered their demand again, and Pharaoh,
40:08
Speaker 1: perhaps curious in spite of himself, asked for a sign.
40:12
Speaker 1: Aaron threw his staff to the floor, and it became
40:15
Speaker 1: a snake. Pharaoh called his own magicians and sorcerers, men
40:20
Speaker 1: who had spent their careers in the mystical arts of Egypt,
40:23
Speaker 1: and they threw down their staffs and their staffs became
40:26
Speaker 1: snakes as well, but Aaron's snake moved toward their snakes
40:30
Speaker 1: and swallowed them one by one, until nothing remained of
40:34
Speaker 1: the magician's staffs but a single wooden staff lying on
40:38
Speaker 1: the floor of the throne room. Pharaoh's expression did not change.
40:42
Speaker 1: He turned and walked back to his throne. He had
40:46
Speaker 1: decided what to see and what not to see, and
40:49
Speaker 1: he was very practiced at the discipline of that decision.
40:52
Speaker 1: So the first plague came. God told Moses to meet
40:56
Speaker 1: Pharaoh in the morning at the Nile. The morning visit
40:59
Speaker 1: to the river was not casual for Pharaoh. It was
41:02
Speaker 1: a religious act, a daily communion between the god king
41:06
Speaker 1: and the sacred water that gave Egypt everything it had.
41:10
Speaker 1: The Nile's annual flooding deposited the rich black soil that
41:14
Speaker 1: made the fields fertile. Its water sustained every living thing
41:18
Speaker 1: in the delta. Without it, Egypt was desert. The river
41:23
Speaker 1: was not merely a resource. It was the nation's heart beat,
41:27
Speaker 1: believed to carry within it a divine power that made
41:30
Speaker 1: life possible. Moses met him at the bank, delivered the
41:34
Speaker 1: demand one final time, and when Pharaoh refused, eron stretched
41:39
Speaker 1: his staff over the water. The nile turned to blood.
41:44
Speaker 1: Not the nile alone, the streams and the canals, and
41:47
Speaker 1: the ponds and the pools, the water stored in wooden vessels,
41:52
Speaker 1: in homes across the country, all of it. The fish died.
41:56
Speaker 1: The smell rose up over the land like a wall,
41:59
Speaker 1: thick and rotten, inescapable the smell of life turning to death.
42:03
Speaker 1: In the most sacred water in Egypt, the people dug
42:07
Speaker 1: along the banks, pressing down into the soil, searching for
42:10
Speaker 1: clean water seeping through from underground. Pharaoh's magicians replicated the
42:14
Speaker 1: effect with small amounts of water. Pharaoh used that success
42:19
Speaker 1: to harden his resolve and returned to his palace without
42:22
Speaker 1: a second thought. After seven days, the river cleared. Then
42:26
Speaker 1: the frogs came. Aaron stretched his hand over the waters,
42:30
Speaker 1: and frogs emerged from the nile in numbers beyond anything
42:34
Speaker 1: the Egyptians had words for. They covered every surface. They
42:38
Speaker 1: filled the houses, and climbed into the beds, and packed
42:41
Speaker 1: themselves into the ovens and the bowls where bread was made.
42:45
Speaker 1: They were in the streets, in the fields, in the
42:48
Speaker 1: corridors of the palace, a living, croaking, relentless carpet of Amphibians,
42:54
Speaker 1: covering the most powerful civilization on earth, from its highest
42:58
Speaker 1: rooms to its lowest. The magicians produced more frogs, which
43:03
Speaker 1: was precisely the opposite of what the situation required. But
43:06
Speaker 1: they did it, and it should have hardened Pharaoh again.
43:10
Speaker 1: This time something cracked. Pharaoh sent for Moses plead with
43:15
Speaker 1: the Lord to take the frogs away. He said, and
43:18
Speaker 1: I will let the people go. Moses asked him, when
43:22
Speaker 1: do you want this to happen to morrow? Said Pharaoh,
43:26
Speaker 1: not immediately to morrow. As if one more night with
43:30
Speaker 1: the frogs in his bed was preferable to making a
43:33
Speaker 1: commitment he was not certain he could keep. As if
43:36
Speaker 1: keeping his options open for a few more hours was
43:38
Speaker 1: worth another night of what was already unbearable, Moses said,
43:42
Speaker 1: it will be as you say, so that you may
43:44
Speaker 1: know there is no one like the Lord, our God.
43:47
Speaker 1: The next day the frogs died where they stood across
43:50
Speaker 1: every surface in Egypt, and the Egyptians gathered them into
43:54
Speaker 1: great heaps. The smell of rotting frogs layered itself over
43:58
Speaker 1: the residual smell of the blooded river and settled over
44:01
Speaker 1: the land, and Pharaoh saw that there was relief, and
44:05
Speaker 1: he hardened his heart. He did not do as he
44:08
Speaker 1: had promised. This pattern was establishing itself with a terrible
44:12
Speaker 1: consistency creeses, desperate, promise, relief, the promise forgotten, as if
44:19
Speaker 1: it had never been made. It would repeat through every
44:22
Speaker 1: plague that followed, and its familiarity is part of what
44:26
Speaker 1: makes it so unsettling to read. We recognized the territory,
44:31
Speaker 1: the promises made in the hospital that evaporate on the
44:33
Speaker 1: drive home, the clarity of difficult moments that blurs when
44:37
Speaker 1: the difficulty passes. Pharaoh is not a figure from another world.
44:42
Speaker 1: He is a mirror held up to something recognizable in
44:45
Speaker 1: all of us. The third plague came without prior warning.
44:49
Speaker 1: Aaron struck the dust of the earth with his staff,
44:53
Speaker 1: and the dust became gnats, tiny biting insects that covered
44:56
Speaker 1: every person and every animal in Egypt simultaneous. They were
45:01
Speaker 1: inescapable and maddening in the eyes and the skin and
45:04
Speaker 1: the hair of every living creature in the land. The
45:07
Speaker 1: magicians tried their methods, they could not replicate it. For
45:12
Speaker 1: the first time, in this confrontation, Egypt's own mystical tradition
45:17
Speaker 1: had found its limit. They went to Pharaoh with something
45:20
Speaker 1: they had not said before. This is the finger of God,
45:24
Speaker 1: not a man doing tricks, not a natural phenomenon. They
45:28
Speaker 1: could duplicate with the right technique, the finger of God.
45:32
Speaker 1: Pharaoh did not listen. The fourth plague introduced something that
45:36
Speaker 1: had not been present in the first three. Swarms came
45:40
Speaker 1: upon Egypt, dense and overwhelming, filling every house and covering
45:45
Speaker 1: the land, devastating everything in their path. But not in Goshen,
45:50
Speaker 1: the region where the Israelites lived was untouched. Not fewer swarms, none,
45:57
Speaker 1: a visible, verifiable, geograre graphically specific line drawn between what
46:03
Speaker 1: was happening in Egypt and what was not happening among
46:06
Speaker 1: the people of Israel. Anyone could travel to Goshen and
46:09
Speaker 1: see it. Anyone could stand at the boundary and observe
46:13
Speaker 1: the difference with their own eyes. This was not indiscriminate force.
46:18
Speaker 1: This was precision. The gods sending these plagues knew exactly
46:22
Speaker 1: where his people were and exactly where the judgment should
46:26
Speaker 1: fall and exactly where it should not. The created world
46:30
Speaker 1: was not simply going wrong. It was obeying a very
46:33
Speaker 1: specific instruction about exactly where to go wrong and exactly
46:38
Speaker 1: where to stop. Pharaoh negotiated for the first time. Go
46:42
Speaker 1: sacrifice to your God, he said, but do it here
46:46
Speaker 1: in the land. Moses refused the compromise. They needed to
46:50
Speaker 1: go three days into the wilderness. This time, Pharaoh said,
46:54
Speaker 1: I will let you go, but do not go far
46:58
Speaker 1: and plead for me. Moies prayed. The swarms left, not
47:03
Speaker 1: one remained. Pharaoh hardened his heart again. The fifth plague
47:08
Speaker 1: struck at the economic foundation of Egyptian agriculture. God told
47:13
Speaker 1: Moses to announce that a severe disease would fall on
47:16
Speaker 1: the Egyptian live stock, the horses and donkeys and camels
47:20
Speaker 1: and cattle and sheep in the field. And again the
47:23
Speaker 1: distinction was made clearly and in advance. The live stock
47:27
Speaker 1: of Israel would not be touched. The next day, it
47:31
Speaker 1: happened exactly as announced. The live stock of Egypt in
47:34
Speaker 1: the fields died. Pharaoh sent investigators to Goshen. They came
47:39
Speaker 1: back and reported what he already feared. Not one Israelite
47:44
Speaker 1: animal had died, not one. Pharaoh held that report in
47:48
Speaker 1: his hands. He had sent people himself to verify it.
47:52
Speaker 1: The evidence was not ambiguous, not subject to interpretation. The
47:58
Speaker 1: difference between Egypt and Goshan were not a matter of
48:00
Speaker 1: perspective or coincidence. It was documented, reported, undeniable, and Pharaoh
48:07
Speaker 1: hardened his heart. He did not let the people go.
48:10
Speaker 1: This is the most sobering truth of the entire plague narrative.
48:15
Speaker 1: Not the scale of the destruction, not the precision of
48:19
Speaker 1: the divine targeting, but this the capacity of the human
48:24
Speaker 1: heart to receive clear evidence and choose to remain unchanged.
48:28
Speaker 1: Pharaoh was not confused. He was not operating without information.
48:34
Speaker 1: He was watching the god of a slave people dismantle
48:36
Speaker 1: his empire piece by piece, with documented, verifiable, reportable results,
48:42
Speaker 1: and each time he chose to be exactly who he
48:45
Speaker 1: had been before. The evidence did not soften him, it
48:48
Speaker 1: confirmed him. Every act of hardening made the next one
48:52
Speaker 1: slightly more natural, slightly more complete, slightly more who he
48:56
Speaker 1: was becoming with every choice. This is the quiet danger
49:00
Speaker 1: that the plague narrative is pointing to underneath everything else,
49:05
Speaker 1: Not the danger of powerful enemies, the danger of the
49:08
Speaker 1: repeated choice to remain unchanged. When the truth is clearly
49:12
Speaker 1: in front of you. The heart does not stay neutral.
49:16
Speaker 1: It moves in the direction of what it decides, again
49:18
Speaker 1: and again, and the direction Pharaoh kept choosing was away
49:22
Speaker 1: from the truth, and every choice made the next one
49:25
Speaker 1: easier to make. Five plagues had come and passed. Egypt
49:30
Speaker 1: was weakened and damaged, and beginning to carry the smell
49:33
Speaker 1: of disaster in its soil. But its walls still stood,
49:37
Speaker 1: its armies were intact, the Pharaoh was on his throne.
49:42
Speaker 1: Five more were coming, and the next five would not
49:46
Speaker 1: give Egypt time to recover. Let the quiet carry you
49:50
Speaker 1: towards sleep. Now, the night in Egypt is filled with
49:53
Speaker 1: the smell of things that have gone wrong. The residue
49:56
Speaker 1: of five catastrophes absorbed and endured, and met each time
50:00
Speaker 1: with the same immovable heart above it. All the stars
50:04
Speaker 1: are very bright and completely indifferent to the calculations of empires.
50:08
Speaker 1: Five more plagues are gathering in the dark. They are patient,
50:13
Speaker 1: they are precise, and they are not finished. Chapter five,
50:20
Speaker 1: The Ten Plagues, Part two. The thing about a breaking
50:24
Speaker 1: point is that it never announces itself in advance. You
50:28
Speaker 1: do not stand at the last stable place and receive
50:31
Speaker 1: a warning that the ground ahead will not hold you.
50:34
Speaker 1: Simply keep walking the way you have always walked. And
50:38
Speaker 1: then one morning you look down and realize that what
50:40
Speaker 1: you have been standing on for the last several steps.
50:43
Speaker 1: Is not solid ground at all. It only looked like
50:47
Speaker 1: it from a distance. Egypt had survived five plagues. It
50:51
Speaker 1: had bled and croaked and been bitten and lost its cattle,
50:55
Speaker 1: and watched its own magicians fail, and heard its own
50:58
Speaker 1: advisers begin to use wordords that had never been spoken
51:01
Speaker 1: before in that context. And each time Pharaoh had absorbed
51:05
Speaker 1: the blow, waited for the pressure to lift, and returned
51:08
Speaker 1: to exactly the position he had held before the pressure arrived.
51:13
Speaker 1: But the ground under Egypt was not as solid as
51:15
Speaker 1: it appeared. The sixth plague came without the extended warning
51:19
Speaker 1: of the earlier ones. God told Moses to take handfuls
51:23
Speaker 1: of soot from a furnace and throw it into the
51:25
Speaker 1: air in Pharaoh's sight. Moses did it, and the soot
51:29
Speaker 1: dispersed across the land of Egypt as fine dust, and
51:32
Speaker 1: wherever it settled on human skin and animal skin alike,
51:37
Speaker 1: it became boils, painful festering sores erupting across the bodies
51:42
Speaker 1: of every person in Egypt. The magicians could not even
51:45
Speaker 1: stand before Moses this time. They were covered in boils themselves.
51:51
Speaker 1: The men whose professional lives had been dedicated to demonstrating
51:54
Speaker 1: the power of Egypt's mystical tradition, were bent and suffering,
51:58
Speaker 1: unable to defend the dignity of their craft or the
52:01
Speaker 1: reputation of the divine order they served. They had gone
52:05
Speaker 1: from replicating the plagues to being destroyed by them. Their
52:09
Speaker 1: silence in this chapter spoke louder than anything they could
52:12
Speaker 1: have said. The boils were intimate in a way the
52:15
Speaker 1: earlier plagues had not been. The river turning to blood
52:19
Speaker 1: was catastrophic, but external. Frogs in the bed were maddening,
52:22
Speaker 1: but they could be removed. Gnats were everywhere, but they
52:26
Speaker 1: were not on your skin in the way that boils
52:28
Speaker 1: were on your skin. The boils were inside the last boundary,
52:32
Speaker 1: the body itself, the only territory a person cannot step
52:36
Speaker 1: away from or close a door against. Egypt could not
52:40
Speaker 1: escape this plague by moving to higher ground or staying indoors,
52:44
Speaker 1: or waiting for it to pass. It was written directly
52:47
Speaker 1: on to the flesh of every person in the land.
52:50
Speaker 1: Pharaoh's heart remained hard. Then came the seventh plague, and
52:55
Speaker 1: with it came something unexpected in the middle of judgment. Mercy,
53:00
Speaker 1: God told Moses to go to Pharaoh and warn him
53:03
Speaker 1: to morrow, I will send the worst hail storm Egypt
53:06
Speaker 1: has ever seen. Any person or animal left in the
53:10
Speaker 1: open fields will die, but any one who brings their
53:13
Speaker 1: servants and live stock inside before the storm will be protected.
53:17
Speaker 1: Read that carefully. In the middle of a sequence of
53:21
Speaker 1: escalating judgment, God offered the Egyptians a way to protect themselves,
53:26
Speaker 1: not just the Israelites, the Egyptians too. The scripture records
53:31
Speaker 1: that some of Pharaoh's officials believed the warning and brought
53:35
Speaker 1: their people and animals inside. Others dismissed it and left
53:39
Speaker 1: them in the field. Even here in the heart of judgment,
53:43
Speaker 1: a door was open for any one willing to walk
53:46
Speaker 1: through it. The storm that came the next morning was
53:49
Speaker 1: unlike anything in Egypt's recorded in memory. Hale fell with
53:53
Speaker 1: fire flashing through it, great burning stones of ice crashing
53:57
Speaker 1: down from a sky that had turned the color of
53:59
Speaker 1: something wrong, slamming into every field and tree and person
54:04
Speaker 1: caught outside with a force that left nothing intact. The
54:07
Speaker 1: sound of it against the stone buildings must have been terrifying,
54:11
Speaker 1: an unending roar like the world itself, coming apart from
54:14
Speaker 1: the top down. The flax and barley in the fields
54:17
Speaker 1: were destroyed completely. The wheat and spelt that had not
54:21
Speaker 1: yet emerged survived. Even the specificity of what was destroyed
54:26
Speaker 1: and what was spared was not random. Every detail was
54:29
Speaker 1: under a control that exceeded any natural explanation. In the
54:34
Speaker 1: middle of the storm, Pharaoh sent for Moses, and this
54:38
Speaker 1: time he said something he had not said through any
54:41
Speaker 1: of the previous nine disasters. I have sinned, he said.
54:46
Speaker 1: The Lord is in the right I and my people
54:49
Speaker 1: are in the wrong. Plead with the Lord. There has
54:53
Speaker 1: been enough thunder and hail. I will let you go.
54:57
Speaker 1: I have sinned, Three words that had never crossed his
55:01
Speaker 1: lips in the entire confrontation, an acknowledgment, spoken aloud and
55:05
Speaker 1: in front of witnesses, that he was wrong and the
55:08
Speaker 1: God he had dismissed for months was right. It was
55:12
Speaker 1: the closest Pharaoh had come to the truth in the
55:14
Speaker 1: entire story, and in the moment he said it, it
55:17
Speaker 1: was real. Moses went outside the city and stretched out
55:21
Speaker 1: his hands, and the thunder stopped, the hail ceased, the
55:25
Speaker 1: rain no longer fell. Egypt shook itself and looked up
55:29
Speaker 1: at a sky that had suddenly completely gone quiet. And
55:33
Speaker 1: then Pharaoh saw that the rain and hail and thunder
55:36
Speaker 1: had ceased, and he sinned again. He hardened his heart,
55:40
Speaker 1: he and his officials together. The confession had been genuine
55:44
Speaker 1: in the pain, it evaporated in the relief. There is
55:48
Speaker 1: something that breaks a little when you encounter this moment,
55:51
Speaker 1: not because we cannot understand it, but because we understand
55:54
Speaker 1: it too well. We know this geography, the absolute certainty
55:59
Speaker 1: of difficult moments that blurs when the difficulty passes, the
56:04
Speaker 1: promises that were real when we made them, and feel
56:07
Speaker 1: a week later like something that happened to a slightly
56:11
Speaker 1: different version of us. Pharaoh is not a distant villain
56:15
Speaker 1: in this passage. He is the human heart at its
56:18
Speaker 1: most recognizable and its most heart breaking. Then the eighth
56:23
Speaker 1: plague came on a wind. God told Moses that an
56:27
Speaker 1: east wind would blow through the night, and when morning came,
56:31
Speaker 1: the locusts rode in on that wind. They covered the
56:34
Speaker 1: face of the whole land, the scripture says, so that
56:37
Speaker 1: the land was darkened. There had never been such a
56:41
Speaker 1: plague of locusts before, it adds, and there would never
56:44
Speaker 1: be one like it again. They ate everything the hail
56:47
Speaker 1: had left, every plant still standing, every fruit still hanging
56:53
Speaker 1: on every surviving tree. Egypt did not look damaged after
56:57
Speaker 1: the locusts. It looked dead, stripped down to bare soil
57:01
Speaker 1: and stone, as if it had been empty of growing
57:04
Speaker 1: things for years before the locusts arrived. Something remarkable happened
57:09
Speaker 1: inside Pharaoh's court. His own officials came to him and
57:13
Speaker 1: spoke with the urgency of men who have run out
57:15
Speaker 1: of reasons to stay quiet. How long will this man
57:19
Speaker 1: be a snare to us? They said, Let the Israelites
57:23
Speaker 1: go and serve their God. Do you not yet understand
57:26
Speaker 1: that Egypt is ruined? Do you not yet understand? The
57:31
Speaker 1: men with the most political reason to support Pharaoh's position,
57:35
Speaker 1: the ones whose livelihoods and status depended on the stability
57:38
Speaker 1: of the empire, were telling him plainly that the empire
57:42
Speaker 1: was already gone, not struggling, not damaged, ruined. Pharaoh called
57:48
Speaker 1: Moses back and offered to let the men go, but
57:51
Speaker 1: not the women, not the children, not the flocks and herds.
57:56
Speaker 1: Moses refused, every one was going, everything was going, Not
58:02
Speaker 1: one hoof would remain. Pharaoh drove him out in fury.
58:07
Speaker 1: The east wind became a west wind and carried every
58:10
Speaker 1: locust into the Red sea. The land was completely clear,
58:14
Speaker 1: and Pharaoh hardened his heart. Then Moses stretched his hand
58:19
Speaker 1: toward the sky, and darkness came. First, Let yourself feel
58:24
Speaker 1: what that darkness was before we try to understand what
58:27
Speaker 1: it meant. It arrived without sound. One moment, the Egyptian
58:32
Speaker 1: sky was there, the familiar blue arc of a Sinai afternoon.
58:36
Speaker 1: And then it was not not storm dark, not the
58:40
Speaker 1: dramatic blackening of clouds before rain. Something else, a darkness
58:46
Speaker 1: so complete and so total that the scripture struggles to
58:49
Speaker 1: find language adequate for it. A darkness, it says, that
58:53
Speaker 1: could be felt, not the absence of light, but the
58:56
Speaker 1: presence of something, a weight, a thickness, a texture against
59:01
Speaker 1: the skin that ordinary darkness does not have. For three days,
59:05
Speaker 1: no one in Egypt could see another person. No one
59:09
Speaker 1: moved from where they were, not because they were afraid to,
59:13
Speaker 1: though they were, but because the darkness was so complete
59:17
Speaker 1: that movement was impossible. You could not see your hand
59:21
Speaker 1: in front of your face, You could not find the
59:23
Speaker 1: door of your own room. The darkness pressed against you
59:27
Speaker 1: the way deep water presses against a diver. With a
59:30
Speaker 1: physical weight that reminded every person it touched exactly how
59:34
Speaker 1: small and how dependent on the light they actually were.
59:37
Speaker 1: Three days seventy two hours of absolute, total, tangible blackness,
59:43
Speaker 1: in which the most powerful empire on earth could do
59:46
Speaker 1: nothing but sit still and wait and feel the darkness
59:49
Speaker 1: pressing on their skin. But in the houses of Israel
59:53
Speaker 1: there was light. Now, consider what three days without the
59:57
Speaker 1: sun meant to a civilization whose entire religious identity was
1:00:01
Speaker 1: built upon it. The sun god Ra was not simply
1:00:04
Speaker 1: the most important deity in the Egyptian pantheon. He was
1:00:08
Speaker 1: the theological foundation of everything else, the force whose daily
1:00:12
Speaker 1: victory over darkness guaranteed the continuation of the world, the
1:00:17
Speaker 1: divine father of Pharaoh himself, which meant that Pharaoh's claim
1:00:21
Speaker 1: to divine authority rested on the Sun's continued presence and power.
1:00:26
Speaker 1: When Ra rose each morning, it was not taken for granted.
1:00:30
Speaker 1: It was celebrated as a daily divine victory. It was
1:00:34
Speaker 1: confirmation that the cosmic order was intact, that chaos had
1:00:38
Speaker 1: been defeated again, that the world was operating under the
1:00:41
Speaker 1: governance of the divine hierarchy, with Pharaoh at its earthly summit.
1:00:46
Speaker 1: For three days, Ra did not appear. The sky that
1:00:50
Speaker 1: belonged to the god at the center of Egyptian religion
1:00:53
Speaker 1: was dark, and the houses of the slave people, the
1:00:56
Speaker 1: ones Egypt had spent four hundred years trying to crush
1:01:00
Speaker 1: below the threshold of significance, had light. This was not
1:01:04
Speaker 1: just a hardship, It was the most comprehensive theological statement yet.
1:01:10
Speaker 1: The god who underwrote the entire divine order of Egypt,
1:01:14
Speaker 1: including the divinity of Pharaoh himself, had simply failed to appear,
1:01:19
Speaker 1: and the God of Israel had not. Pharaoh called Moses
1:01:22
Speaker 1: one final time. Everyone could go, men, women, children, but
1:01:29
Speaker 1: the flocks and herds must remain. Moses refused. Every animal
1:01:35
Speaker 1: was going. They did not know yet exactly what they
1:01:38
Speaker 1: would need for the sacrifices ahead, and so everything had
1:01:41
Speaker 1: to come. Not one hoof Pharaoh broke completely. Get away
1:01:47
Speaker 1: from me. He said, never come before me again, because
1:01:52
Speaker 1: the day you see my face you will die. Moses
1:01:55
Speaker 1: looked at him steadily as you say, he answered, I
1:01:59
Speaker 1: will not see your face again. He walked out of
1:02:02
Speaker 1: the palace for the last time. Pharaoh sat alone in
1:02:05
Speaker 1: the dark of his throne room in a country that
1:02:07
Speaker 1: was barely recognizable. The river had bled, the fields had
1:02:12
Speaker 1: been stripped twice, first by hail and then by locusts.
1:02:17
Speaker 1: The animals were dead, the bodies of the people were
1:02:20
Speaker 1: covered in sores, the sky had gone dark for three days,
1:02:25
Speaker 1: and the only man who had ever been able to
1:02:27
Speaker 1: end the disasters had just left and would not be
1:02:29
Speaker 1: coming back. Nine plagues, nine times to change and nine
1:02:35
Speaker 1: times choosing not to. But the tenth plague was different
1:02:39
Speaker 1: from all the others in a way that changed everything.
1:02:42
Speaker 1: The ninth plague had taken light. The tenth would take
1:02:46
Speaker 1: something that could not be restored in the morning when
1:02:48
Speaker 1: the light came back. The tenth would reach into every
1:02:52
Speaker 1: house in Egypt, past every guard and every wall and
1:02:56
Speaker 1: every protection that wealth and power could provide, and it
1:02:59
Speaker 1: would not lift. It would not be reversed. When Pharaoh
1:03:03
Speaker 1: called for Moses in desperation, there would be no recovery
1:03:07
Speaker 1: from the tenth plague. There was only the blood on
1:03:10
Speaker 1: the door and the choice of whether to put it there.
1:03:13
Speaker 1: Moses gathered the elders of Israel. His voice was steady
1:03:17
Speaker 1: when he told them what was coming and what they
1:03:19
Speaker 1: needed to do, because what he was about to say
1:03:22
Speaker 1: was not bad news for his people. Get a lamb,
1:03:25
Speaker 1: he told them, without blemish, one for each household. Set
1:03:31
Speaker 1: it apart, and at twilight on the fourteenth day, slaughter it.
1:03:36
Speaker 1: Take the blood and paint it on the door frame
1:03:38
Speaker 1: of your house, both posts and the beam above. Then
1:03:42
Speaker 1: go inside. Stay inside. The destroyer will move through Egypt
1:03:47
Speaker 1: to night. When it sees the blood on the door,
1:03:51
Speaker 1: it will pass over that house. The people inside the
1:03:54
Speaker 1: marked door will be safe. Go in and close the
1:03:57
Speaker 1: door behind you. The night belongs to God. The sun
1:04:01
Speaker 1: went down over Egypt. In Goshan, the fires were lit,
1:04:05
Speaker 1: and the lambs were over the heat and the smell
1:04:08
Speaker 1: of roasting meat moved through the streets. The unleavened bread
1:04:12
Speaker 1: was flat and warm. The bitter herbs were sharp on
1:04:15
Speaker 1: every tongue. The sandals were on every foot, Every door
1:04:20
Speaker 1: was marked, Every family was inside. Across Egypt, the first
1:04:25
Speaker 1: born sons lay down in the dark, in palaces and
1:04:29
Speaker 1: prisons and everywhere between. They lay down as they had
1:04:33
Speaker 1: every night of their lives, with no reason to expect
1:04:36
Speaker 1: this night to be different from any other. The walls
1:04:39
Speaker 1: were solid, the guards were at their posts. At midnight,
1:04:43
Speaker 1: the lord struck the first born of Pharaoh on his throne,
1:04:48
Speaker 1: the first born of the prisoner in the dungeon, the
1:04:51
Speaker 1: first born of every Egyptian family, from the greatest house
1:04:54
Speaker 1: to the smallest, the first born of the live stock
1:04:58
Speaker 1: in the stalls. Every one, and a cry rose from
1:05:02
Speaker 1: Egypt at midnight that had never risen before, and would
1:05:06
Speaker 1: never rise in quite the same way again, from everywhere
1:05:10
Speaker 1: at once, from the palace and the prison, from the
1:05:14
Speaker 1: houses of the wealthy and the huts of the poor,
1:05:17
Speaker 1: a nation's grief arriving simultaneously, rising into the dark sky
1:05:22
Speaker 1: over the Nile Delta, like something the night was not
1:05:25
Speaker 1: built to hold. But in Goshen, behind the doors marked
1:05:29
Speaker 1: with blood, the families of Israel heard that cry from outside.
1:05:33
Speaker 1: They heard it rise and spread until it was surrounding
1:05:36
Speaker 1: them on every side, and inside their houses, in the
1:05:39
Speaker 1: warmth and the smell of the feast, and the bitter
1:05:42
Speaker 1: herbs still on their lips, every one of them was alive.
1:05:46
Speaker 1: The lamb had died so that the people inside the
1:05:49
Speaker 1: door could live. In the middle of that night, Pharaoh rose,
1:05:53
Speaker 1: his officials rose, the great machine of Egyptian power that
1:05:57
Speaker 1: had ground through generations of Hebrew life wives without hesitation,
1:06:01
Speaker 1: woke in the dark and found what was waiting in
1:06:04
Speaker 1: every room. He sent for Moses, while it was still night.
1:06:08
Speaker 1: Rise up. He said, go, you and all the people
1:06:12
Speaker 1: of Israel, take your flocks, take your herds. Go. And then,
1:06:19
Speaker 1: in the ruins of the night that had ended his
1:06:21
Speaker 1: certainty forever, the most powerful man in the ancient world
1:06:25
Speaker 1: said one more thing, bless me. Also the man who
1:06:29
Speaker 1: had said I do not know the Lord, The man
1:06:32
Speaker 1: who had hardened his heart through ten disasters rather than
1:06:35
Speaker 1: yield one degree, the man who had threatened Moses with death.
1:06:40
Speaker 1: That man was asking in the dark for the blessing
1:06:43
Speaker 1: of the god he had spent everything trying to resist.
1:06:47
Speaker 1: It was not too late for the mercy he was
1:06:50
Speaker 1: asking for. It never is, and Moses gave it. Then
1:06:55
Speaker 1: he walked out into the street. Israel was already moving,
1:06:59
Speaker 1: a vast multitude of people, freed from four centuries of bondage,
1:07:04
Speaker 1: carrying gold and silver pressed into the hands by Egyptian
1:07:07
Speaker 1: neighbors who wanted them gone, carrying their children and their animals,
1:07:12
Speaker 1: and the unleavened bread still warm from the fire, carrying
1:07:16
Speaker 1: the bones of Joseph. The man who had asked to
1:07:19
Speaker 1: go home four hundred years ago, and whose descendants had
1:07:23
Speaker 1: kept the promise across every generation of the waiting. They
1:07:26
Speaker 1: walked into the night. The sound of Egypt's grief was
1:07:30
Speaker 1: behind them, and it fell away with every step ahead.
1:07:34
Speaker 1: In the darkness of the wilderness. The pillar of fire
1:07:37
Speaker 1: was already moving, light in the darkness, a direction when
1:07:41
Speaker 1: there was no road, a presence that did not require
1:07:45
Speaker 1: them to understand where they were going, because the one
1:07:48
Speaker 1: going before them already knew. They followed it to night.
1:07:52
Speaker 1: As the silence settles around you and the weight of
1:07:55
Speaker 1: the day begins to lift, let this be the last
1:07:58
Speaker 1: thing you hold before slip. The blood on the door
1:08:02
Speaker 1: was not earned, It was applied. It was not the
1:08:05
Speaker 1: result of anything the Israelites had achieved or accumulated or proved.
1:08:10
Speaker 1: It was simply there, placed by hands that believe the promise.
1:08:14
Speaker 1: And it was enough. It was more than enough. The
1:08:17
Speaker 1: same promise that covered every marked door in Goshen is
1:08:20
Speaker 1: available to you in this darkness. Whatever the night outside
1:08:24
Speaker 1: your window is carrying, whatever moves through the world in
1:08:28
Speaker 1: the small hours. You are on the right side of
1:08:30
Speaker 1: the door. The fire is moving ahead, and the god
1:08:34
Speaker 1: who lit it has never once left the front of
1:08:36
Speaker 1: the line. Sleep now beloved. The sea is still ahead,
1:08:42
Speaker 1: and it will Part Chapter six, The Passover Night. There
1:08:49
Speaker 1: are nights that do not announce themselves. They arrive looking
1:08:53
Speaker 1: like ordinary evenings. The sun goes down the way it
1:08:57
Speaker 1: always goes down. The cooking fires are lit the way
1:09:00
Speaker 1: they are always lit. Children are called in from the
1:09:03
Speaker 1: streets with the same voices that call them every evening.
1:09:07
Speaker 1: Nothing in the sky or the air gives any indication
1:09:10
Speaker 1: that this night will be different from the ten thousand
1:09:13
Speaker 1: nights that came before it. And then, somewhere in the
1:09:16
Speaker 1: quiet middle of that unremarkable darkness, something happens that divides
1:09:21
Speaker 1: all of time into before and after, and the world
1:09:24
Speaker 1: that existed when the sun went down is not the
1:09:28
Speaker 1: world that exists when the sun comes up. This was
1:09:31
Speaker 1: one of those nights. In the region of Goshen, where
1:09:34
Speaker 1: the Israelite people had lived for four hundred and thirty years.
1:09:38
Speaker 1: The evening smelled different. The smell of roasting lamb moved
1:09:42
Speaker 1: through the narrow streets between the small clay houses, mixing
1:09:46
Speaker 1: with the smoke of cooking fires and the cool night
1:09:48
Speaker 1: air coming off the delta underneath it. Something else the
1:09:53
Speaker 1: sharp green smell of hissop, the small aromatic plant that
1:09:57
Speaker 1: grew along the walls and pathways, cut fresh and damp,
1:10:01
Speaker 1: and held in the hands of people who knew exactly
1:10:04
Speaker 1: what they were about to use it for. Every family
1:10:07
Speaker 1: in Israel knew what this night was. Moses had told
1:10:11
Speaker 1: the elders, and the elders had told the people with
1:10:14
Speaker 1: the intensity of those who understand that what they are
1:10:17
Speaker 1: passing on is not information but instruction for survival. The
1:10:21
Speaker 1: details had been specific, and the specificity was intentional. A lamb,
1:10:27
Speaker 1: one per household, selected and set apart since the tenth
1:10:31
Speaker 1: day of the month without blemish, A male in its
1:10:35
Speaker 1: first year, kept for four days, which meant it had
1:10:38
Speaker 1: been in the house, had been fed by hand, had
1:10:42
Speaker 1: been known by the children, not an anonymous animal from
1:10:45
Speaker 1: a distant field, A known one, A cared for one.
1:10:50
Speaker 1: On the fourteenth day, at twilight, every household in Israel
1:10:54
Speaker 1: was to slaughter it. At the same time. The blood
1:10:57
Speaker 1: was to be caught, and a branch of hissop dipped
1:10:59
Speaker 1: into it and drawn across the door frame of the house.
1:11:03
Speaker 1: Both side posts, the beam across the top the entire
1:11:07
Speaker 1: frame of the door, so that any one approaching from
1:11:10
Speaker 1: outside would see it clearly, a mark made in blood
1:11:13
Speaker 1: on old wood, visible and deliberate and unashamed. Then go inside,
1:11:19
Speaker 1: close the door, and stay. In the ancient world where
1:11:24
Speaker 1: survival so often demanded movement and aggression, and the willingness
1:11:28
Speaker 1: to take by force what could not be secured by
1:11:31
Speaker 1: other means, this instruction was the opposite of every instinct
1:11:35
Speaker 1: experience had developed. You will not fight your way to
1:11:39
Speaker 1: freedom to night. You will not earn it or strategize
1:11:42
Speaker 1: your way to it. You will receive it. The only
1:11:46
Speaker 1: thing required of you is to be inside the right door,
1:11:50
Speaker 1: behind the right mark, trusting that the blood on the
1:11:53
Speaker 1: frame means exactly what God said. It means not your
1:11:58
Speaker 1: history of faithfulness, not the accumulated merit of four hundred
1:12:03
Speaker 1: years of patient suffering, not your understanding of what is happening,
1:12:07
Speaker 1: or your ability to explain it to some one else,
1:12:10
Speaker 1: the blood on the door and the God who promised
1:12:13
Speaker 1: to honor it. So the families of Israel prepared. The
1:12:17
Speaker 1: lambs that had been part of the household since the
1:12:20
Speaker 1: tenth Day were brought out at the precise moment of twilight,
1:12:24
Speaker 1: and the blood was caught in basins, and the branches
1:12:27
Speaker 1: of hissop were dipped and drawn across the wood of
1:12:30
Speaker 1: the door in the fading light of evening, red on
1:12:34
Speaker 1: old wood, simple and ancient, and entirely human in its materials,
1:12:40
Speaker 1: pointing to a protection that only God could provide. Inside,
1:12:45
Speaker 1: the fire was built up and the lamb was placed
1:12:47
Speaker 1: over it to roast whole. The bread was made without yeast,
1:12:51
Speaker 1: because there was no time to let it rise, and
1:12:54
Speaker 1: the lack of yeast was not a compromise, but an instruction.
1:12:58
Speaker 1: This was not a feast of leisure and abundance. This
1:13:02
Speaker 1: was a meal eaten in haste, the scripture says, with
1:13:04
Speaker 1: unmistakable clarity, with sandals on your feet and your staff
1:13:08
Speaker 1: in your hand, a meal that said, with every element
1:13:12
Speaker 1: of its preparation, we are not staying. We have been
1:13:15
Speaker 1: waiting for this night for four hundred and thirty years,
1:13:19
Speaker 1: and we are going to be ready when it comes.
1:13:22
Speaker 1: The bitter herbs were on every table, sharp and unmistakable
1:13:26
Speaker 1: on the tongue, a deliberate required, built in honesty about
1:13:30
Speaker 1: what was being ended. You do not walk out of
1:13:33
Speaker 1: slavery and pretend the slavery was not real. You do
1:13:37
Speaker 1: not step into freedom while editing out the bitterness of
1:13:40
Speaker 1: the years that freedom is ending. The herbs were there
1:13:44
Speaker 1: so that even in the moment of rescue, the rescued
1:13:47
Speaker 1: people would taste what they were being rescued from, so
1:13:51
Speaker 1: that the relief would be honest, so that the joy
1:13:55
Speaker 1: would know exactly what it was. The joy of families
1:13:59
Speaker 1: ate together, the very old and the very young at
1:14:02
Speaker 1: the same table. Grandparents who had been born into chains
1:14:07
Speaker 1: and had watched their parents die in chains, and had believed,
1:14:11
Speaker 1: or tried to believe, or had wanted to believe the
1:14:14
Speaker 1: stories passed down from the ancestors about a God who
1:14:17
Speaker 1: had made promises that had not yet been fulfilled. Children
1:14:21
Speaker 1: who had grown up hearing those stories and were now
1:14:23
Speaker 1: old enough to be sitting at this table, with sandals
1:14:26
Speaker 1: on their feet and the smell of roasting lamb in
1:14:29
Speaker 1: their clothes, and a sense that to night the stories
1:14:32
Speaker 1: were no longer something you listened to. To night, they
1:14:35
Speaker 1: were something you were inside. God had anticipated the children.
1:14:40
Speaker 1: He had designed for their questions before the questions were asked.
1:14:44
Speaker 1: When your children ask you, in years to come, what
1:14:47
Speaker 1: does this ceremony mean, you shall say it is the
1:14:51
Speaker 1: passover sacrifice to the Lord who passed over the houses
1:14:54
Speaker 1: of the people of Israel in Egypt when he struck
1:14:57
Speaker 1: Egypt but spared our houses. This his meal, was not
1:15:00
Speaker 1: simply nourishment. It was memory made edible, history, shaped into
1:15:06
Speaker 1: something you could taste and smell and hold in your
1:15:09
Speaker 1: hands and pass to the person beside you. God was
1:15:12
Speaker 1: not merely rescuing a generation from a bad situation. He
1:15:16
Speaker 1: was building into the architecture of a people's common life,
1:15:20
Speaker 1: a practice that would carry this night forward through every
1:15:23
Speaker 1: generation that would ever come after, so that the descendants
1:15:27
Speaker 1: of these families would never be dependent only on someone
1:15:30
Speaker 1: else's account of what happened. They could eat it. They
1:15:34
Speaker 1: could smell the roasting meat and taste the bitter herbs,
1:15:38
Speaker 1: and know in their bodies what their minds believed. The
1:15:41
Speaker 1: Passover was designed to be remembered forever, because the truth
1:15:45
Speaker 1: it contained was not finished yet. Outside in the Egyptian night,
1:15:50
Speaker 1: the city was settling into what it believed was an
1:15:53
Speaker 1: ordinary evening. In the merchant's house across the district, a
1:15:57
Speaker 1: boy was helped to bed by his mother. She smoothothed
1:16:00
Speaker 1: his hair back and said the things mothers say at
1:16:02
Speaker 1: the end of a long day and walked to her
1:16:05
Speaker 1: own room. She did not know as she crossed the
1:16:08
Speaker 1: threshold that this was the last time she would do this.
1:16:12
Speaker 1: In the palace, surrounded by every protection that the wealthiest
1:16:15
Speaker 1: and most powerful empire on earth could construct, the air
1:16:19
Speaker 1: to everything Egypt had ever built, closed his eyes in
1:16:22
Speaker 1: rooms decorated with gold and lapis lazulie. Nothing could reach him. Here.
1:16:28
Speaker 1: His father's army stood between him and the world. His
1:16:31
Speaker 1: father's gods guaranteed the divine order that protected him. He
1:16:35
Speaker 1: was the most secure young man alive. He was not
1:16:39
Speaker 1: safe because what moved through Egypt at midnight did not
1:16:43
Speaker 1: require a gap in the walls, did not need to
1:16:46
Speaker 1: find a weakness in the guard rotation or a moment
1:16:49
Speaker 1: of inattention from the servants. The god who had turned
1:16:52
Speaker 1: the Nile to blood and brought the sun to darkness
1:16:55
Speaker 1: for three days, moved through Egypt the way sovereignty moves,
1:16:59
Speaker 1: without obstacles and without negotiation, into every house in the land,
1:17:03
Speaker 1: every house except the ones with blood on the door.
1:17:07
Speaker 1: At midnight, the Lord struck the first born of Pharaoh
1:17:10
Speaker 1: on his throne, the first born of the captive in
1:17:13
Speaker 1: the bottom of the dungeon, every first born son in
1:17:17
Speaker 1: every household, across every social lair of the greatest civilization
1:17:20
Speaker 1: on earth, even the first born of the live stock
1:17:23
Speaker 1: in their stalls. And there rose from Egypt a cry
1:17:27
Speaker 1: that the scripture describes with a restraint, that somehow carries
1:17:31
Speaker 1: more weight than elaboration could, A great cry from everywhere
1:17:36
Speaker 1: at once, not building gradually from one district to the next,
1:17:41
Speaker 1: but arriving simultaneously, the way a truth arrives when the
1:17:45
Speaker 1: last protection against it is removed from the palace and
1:17:49
Speaker 1: the prison, from the grand houses along the nile, and
1:17:52
Speaker 1: the workers quarters beside the brickfields, from every point on
1:17:56
Speaker 1: the map of the most powerful empire in the ancient world,
1:18:00
Speaker 1: a nation's grief, all at once. In a single night
1:18:05
Speaker 1: in goshen A, families of Israel heard it, distant, first,
1:18:09
Speaker 1: a sound too large to immediately identify, then closer, spreading
1:18:15
Speaker 1: until it surrounded them on every side, coming from every direction,
1:18:19
Speaker 1: beyond the boundaries of their own neighborhood, a sound that
1:18:22
Speaker 1: had no equivalent in ordinary experience, not the cry of
1:18:26
Speaker 1: one family's loss, but the loss of an entire civilization,
1:18:30
Speaker 1: expressed in a single, continuous sound, rising into the dark
1:18:34
Speaker 1: sky over the Nile Delta, and inside every house in Goshen,
1:18:38
Speaker 1: behind every door marked with blood, every Israelite family was alive,
1:18:43
Speaker 1: every single one. The destroyer had passed over every marked
1:18:48
Speaker 1: door without entering. Not one household in Israel had been touched.
1:18:52
Speaker 1: The lamb had died in the evening, and the people
1:18:55
Speaker 1: inside the door were alive in the midnight, and they
1:18:57
Speaker 1: could hear the difference between their world and the world
1:19:00
Speaker 1: outside being expressed in a sound that would stay in
1:19:04
Speaker 1: their memory for the rest of their lives. In this moment,
1:19:08
Speaker 1: the passover reaches past its own historical event and becomes
1:19:12
Speaker 1: something that the rest of scripture keeps returning to, recognizing
1:19:16
Speaker 1: in it a pattern that is not finished. The blood
1:19:19
Speaker 1: on the door, the death that purchased the life of
1:19:21
Speaker 1: those sheltering behind it, the destroyer that passes over rather
1:19:25
Speaker 1: than enters. These elements are not simply historical details. They
1:19:30
Speaker 1: are the shape of a truth that runs like a
1:19:32
Speaker 1: thread through the Hebrew prophets and the Psalms and forward
1:19:35
Speaker 1: across the centuries. As Christians have long understood, to a
1:19:39
Speaker 1: passover meal in an upper room in Jerusalem, where a
1:19:42
Speaker 1: man who called himself the Lamb of God broke bread
1:19:45
Speaker 1: and said this is my body, and poured wine and
1:19:48
Speaker 1: said this is my blood. And the disciples sitting around
1:19:51
Speaker 1: him had been eating Passover meals since childhood, and the
1:19:55
Speaker 1: connection between the lamb and the door and the blood
1:19:58
Speaker 1: that covers was not not a new idea presented to them.
1:20:02
Speaker 1: It was the fulfillment of the oldest one, the pattern
1:20:06
Speaker 1: completing itself in the person who was both the one
1:20:08
Speaker 1: who instituted the first passover and the one the first
1:20:11
Speaker 1: Passover had been pointing toward. This is why the Passover
1:20:16
Speaker 1: was to be remembered forever, not as a historical commemoration
1:20:20
Speaker 1: of something that happened once, but as the recognition of
1:20:23
Speaker 1: a truth that is still operating in the world. In
1:20:26
Speaker 1: the middle of that night, Pharaoh rose from whatever remained
1:20:30
Speaker 1: of his sleep. He sent for Moses and Aaron while
1:20:33
Speaker 1: the cry was still rising across Egypt. And when Moses
1:20:36
Speaker 1: came before him, the man who had sat on the
1:20:39
Speaker 1: throne of the most powerful empire on earth and said,
1:20:43
Speaker 1: I do not know the Lord and I will not
1:20:45
Speaker 1: let the people go, had nothing left that looked like
1:20:48
Speaker 1: a pharaoh, the architecture of certainty and power that had
1:20:52
Speaker 1: sustained his resistance through ten plagues, had collapsed completely. What
1:20:58
Speaker 1: was sitting in its place was a human being in
1:21:00
Speaker 1: the dark who had run out of everything he had
1:21:02
Speaker 1: been standing on. Rise up, he said, go out from
1:21:07
Speaker 1: among my people, you and all the people of Israel,
1:21:11
Speaker 1: take your flocks and your herds, and go. And then,
1:21:15
Speaker 1: in the rubble of the night that had ended his
1:21:17
Speaker 1: certainty forever, the most powerful man in the ancient world
1:21:21
Speaker 1: said one more thing, bless me also. The man who
1:21:25
Speaker 1: had said I do not know the Lord was asking
1:21:27
Speaker 1: for the blessing of the Lord's servant. The man who
1:21:30
Speaker 1: had declared he would never let the people go was
1:21:32
Speaker 1: telling them to leave immediately. The man who had threatened
1:21:36
Speaker 1: Moses with death was asking for grace from the god
1:21:40
Speaker 1: whose existence he had spent months refusing to acknowledge. It
1:21:44
Speaker 1: was not too late for the mercy he was asking for.
1:21:47
Speaker 1: It is never too late for the mercy being asked for.
1:21:51
Speaker 1: And Moses, who had stood before this man as an
1:21:53
Speaker 1: eighty year old shepherd, demanding the impossible for months, gave
1:21:57
Speaker 1: him the blessing. Then he walked out into the street.
1:22:01
Speaker 1: Israel was already moving a vast multitude of men and women,
1:22:06
Speaker 1: and children, and elderly parents, and live stock, carrying gold
1:22:10
Speaker 1: and silver pressed urgently into their hands by Egyptian neighbors
1:22:15
Speaker 1: who gave everything they had because a people desperate for
1:22:18
Speaker 1: the disaster to end will part with anything if it
1:22:22
Speaker 1: means the ones causing the disaster will leave. They carried
1:22:25
Speaker 1: their unleavened bread, still wrapped in cloth, still warm from
1:22:29
Speaker 1: the fire. They carried their animals and their children, and
1:22:33
Speaker 1: the accumulated possessions of people who had been given no
1:22:36
Speaker 1: reason to accumulate much. And they carried the bones of Joseph,
1:22:40
Speaker 1: a man who had died in Egypt four hundred years
1:22:43
Speaker 1: before and had made the people standing around his deathbed
1:22:46
Speaker 1: promise that when the day of deliverance finally came, they
1:22:49
Speaker 1: would not leave him behind. The promise had been kept
1:22:53
Speaker 1: across four centuries of bondage. It had been passed from
1:22:57
Speaker 1: parent to child, through every generation that had been born
1:23:00
Speaker 1: and died in Egypt without seeing the day Joseph had
1:23:04
Speaker 1: believed in and to night. The day had come, and
1:23:08
Speaker 1: the promise was being honored, and Joseph, after four hundred years,
1:23:12
Speaker 1: was finally going home. They walked out into the darkness
1:23:16
Speaker 1: the sound of Egypt's grief was behind them and grew
1:23:19
Speaker 1: quieter with every step. Ahead of them, the wilderness was dark,
1:23:24
Speaker 1: but not entirely dark, because ahead of them, moving out
1:23:28
Speaker 1: through the wilderness before them, lighting the road that had
1:23:31
Speaker 1: no road on it was the pillar of fire, fire
1:23:35
Speaker 1: in the night sky, a presence moving ahead, the wilderness
1:23:39
Speaker 1: becoming navigable, not because it had changed, but because the
1:23:42
Speaker 1: light was there. They followed it to night. As the
1:23:46
Speaker 1: darkness settles around you and the world outside your window
1:23:49
Speaker 1: goes quiet, and the day releases its hold on you,
1:23:53
Speaker 1: let this be what you carry into sleep. The blood
1:23:56
Speaker 1: on the door was not earned. It was applied, not
1:24:00
Speaker 1: the result of anything the Israelites had accumulated or achieved
1:24:04
Speaker 1: or proved, simply there, placed by hands that believe the promise,
1:24:09
Speaker 1: and the promise was kept. You are inside the door
1:24:13
Speaker 1: to night. Whatever the darkness outside is carrying, whatever moves
1:24:18
Speaker 1: through the world in the small hours of the night.
1:24:21
Speaker 1: The same God who passed over every marked door in
1:24:24
Speaker 1: Goshen is the god watching over you in this darkness.
1:24:28
Speaker 1: You are covered, you are held. You are on the
1:24:31
Speaker 1: right side of the door. Rest. Now, the fire is
1:24:35
Speaker 1: already moving ahead, and the sea is just over the horizon,
1:24:42
Speaker 1: Chapter seven, Crossing the Red Sea. Freedom, it turns out,
1:24:48
Speaker 1: is terrifying. This is the part the great escape stories
1:24:51
Speaker 1: almost never tell you. The moment the door opens and
1:24:55
Speaker 1: the road stretches out ahead, what you feel is not
1:24:58
Speaker 1: only joy. Joy is there, yes, real and overwhelming and
1:25:03
Speaker 1: unlike anything you have felt before. But alongside it is
1:25:07
Speaker 1: something that feels startlingly similar to the fear you felt
1:25:10
Speaker 1: when you were still in chains. Because at least the
1:25:13
Speaker 1: chains were familiar. At least you knew the shape of
1:25:17
Speaker 1: the life inside them, what to expect each day, what
1:25:20
Speaker 1: the boundaries were. The wilderness ahead makes none of those guarantees.
1:25:25
Speaker 1: It is open and unknown, and it does not remember
1:25:29
Speaker 1: your name. Israel had been walking for three days, three
1:25:33
Speaker 1: days south and east from Goshen, following the pillar of
1:25:36
Speaker 1: cloud that moved before them by day and became a
1:25:39
Speaker 1: pillar of fire by night. God had not taken them
1:25:42
Speaker 1: by the most direct route. The shortest road to Canaan
1:25:46
Speaker 1: ran along the coast, and would have brought them into
1:25:48
Speaker 1: military conflict almost immediately. They were not ready for that,
1:25:53
Speaker 1: not yet. They needed something else first, something the wilderness
1:25:57
Speaker 1: could give them. That the coast road could not, so
1:26:00
Speaker 1: he led them south deeper into the Sinai, toward the water.
1:26:05
Speaker 1: When they arrived at the sea and made camp on
1:26:07
Speaker 1: the shore, something was already happening three days behind them
1:26:11
Speaker 1: on the road they had traveled. Pharaoh had changed his mind.
1:26:15
Speaker 1: We should not be surprised. We have watched him do
1:26:18
Speaker 1: this through ten plagues, always in the same direction, always
1:26:23
Speaker 1: back toward hardness, after a brief opening under pressure. But
1:26:28
Speaker 1: this reversal was more complete than the others. He was
1:26:31
Speaker 1: not simply refusing to honor a promise. He was mobilizing.
1:26:36
Speaker 1: He took six hundred of his best chariots, the elite
1:26:40
Speaker 1: military vehicles of the ancient world, fast and heavily armed
1:26:44
Speaker 1: and crewed by soldiers who had trained their entire adult
1:26:47
Speaker 1: lives for exactly this kind of pursuit. He took all
1:26:51
Speaker 1: the other chariots of Egypt. He took his army, his cavalry,
1:26:56
Speaker 1: his officers. Everything the most powerful military force in the
1:27:00
Speaker 1: ancient world could put on a road. He put on
1:27:03
Speaker 1: the road. Six hundred elite chariots could cover in hours
1:27:07
Speaker 1: what Israel had taken three days to walk. The Israelites
1:27:11
Speaker 1: were at the water's edge when someone at the back
1:27:14
Speaker 1: of the camp raised the alarm. Think about what they
1:27:17
Speaker 1: saw when they turned around. They were standing at the
1:27:20
Speaker 1: edge of a sea, with no crossing point behind them
1:27:23
Speaker 1: on the road they had come by. The horizon was moving,
1:27:27
Speaker 1: dust clouds, first rising into the dry air in great columns.
1:27:32
Speaker 1: Then the sound, a low vibration transmitted through the ground
1:27:36
Speaker 1: before the ears could fully register it. Then the shapes
1:27:39
Speaker 1: resolving out of the distance into something unmistakable, the sun
1:27:43
Speaker 1: catching the metal fittings of military equipment. Six hundred chariots
1:27:48
Speaker 1: and all the cavalry of Egypt moving at full speed,
1:27:52
Speaker 1: the sea in front of them, the army behind them,
1:27:56
Speaker 1: the desert on either side, women and children and elderly
1:28:00
Speaker 1: parents who had been walking for three days, animals, no
1:28:05
Speaker 1: military force of their own, no fortification, no position to hold.
1:28:10
Speaker 1: The scripture says they were very afraid. Of course they were.
1:28:15
Speaker 1: This is not a failure of faith. It is an
1:28:18
Speaker 1: accurate assessment of a situation that was objectively terrifying. And then,
1:28:23
Speaker 1: because human beings under extreme pressure do not always reach
1:28:27
Speaker 1: for their best selves, they turned on Moses. Is it
1:28:31
Speaker 1: because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought
1:28:34
Speaker 1: us out here to die. Were we not better off
1:28:37
Speaker 1: serving the Egyptians than dying in this wilderness four hundred
1:28:42
Speaker 1: and thirty years of slavery? And in this moment they
1:28:45
Speaker 1: were saying they would rather go back. The sea in
1:28:48
Speaker 1: front and the army behind, and their memory of Egypt
1:28:52
Speaker 1: had become, under the pressure of terror, a memory of safety.
1:28:57
Speaker 1: We cannot judge this from outside the terror, because we
1:29:00
Speaker 1: have all stood at some version of this place, some
1:29:03
Speaker 1: sea in front of us and some army behind us,
1:29:06
Speaker 1: and the familiar suffering of the past looking in the
1:29:09
Speaker 1: blinding immediacy of right now considerably more survivable than whatever
1:29:14
Speaker 1: this is. The mind under genuine threat does not calculate clearly.
1:29:19
Speaker 1: It reaches for what it knows. Moses answered them from
1:29:23
Speaker 1: a place that had no natural explanation for the confidence
1:29:27
Speaker 1: it contained. He was standing in the same situation they
1:29:31
Speaker 1: were standing in, with the same sea in front and
1:29:34
Speaker 1: the same army behind, and he had no tactical solution
1:29:38
Speaker 1: and no military force, and no exit he could point to.
1:29:42
Speaker 1: And yet what he said was this, do not be afraid,
1:29:46
Speaker 1: stand firm, see the salvation. The Lord will work for
1:29:50
Speaker 1: you to day. The Egyptians you see to day, you
1:29:52
Speaker 1: will never see again. The Lord will fight for you.
1:29:56
Speaker 1: You need only to be still. Be still, with six
1:30:00
Speaker 1: hundred chariots visible on the horizon. Be still. Then God
1:30:05
Speaker 1: spoke to Moses with a gentleness that contained a correction.
1:30:09
Speaker 1: Why do you cry to me? Tell the people to
1:30:12
Speaker 1: move forward? Not stay where you are and watch me work,
1:30:17
Speaker 1: Not remain in place and trust move forward. The time
1:30:23
Speaker 1: for the prayer of waiting has passed. The time for
1:30:26
Speaker 1: the prayer of action has come. Pick up the staff,
1:30:30
Speaker 1: stretch out your hand, move, lift your staff, God said,
1:30:35
Speaker 1: stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it.
1:30:38
Speaker 1: Before Moses moved, one more thing happened. The pillar of
1:30:43
Speaker 1: cloud that had been leading Israel from the front moved.
1:30:46
Speaker 1: It went around behind the camp and placed itself between
1:30:49
Speaker 1: the Israelites and the Egyptian army. On the Egyptian side,
1:30:54
Speaker 1: the cloud was dark, completely dark. The army could not see.
1:30:59
Speaker 1: On the israel light side, the cloud gave light through
1:31:02
Speaker 1: the night that was coming. Two entirely different experiences of
1:31:06
Speaker 1: the same divine presence, one side unable to advance, the
1:31:10
Speaker 1: other side being prepared. Moses stretched his hand over the sea.
1:31:16
Speaker 1: God drove the sea back with a strong east wind,
1:31:19
Speaker 1: all that night, all night. The scripture is specific not
1:31:24
Speaker 1: an instantaneous thunderclap of miracle, a wind that blew through
1:31:28
Speaker 1: the darkness hour after hour, moving water that had no
1:31:32
Speaker 1: business moving, exposing the floor of the sea as the
1:31:35
Speaker 1: water was driven back on either side, and the ground
1:31:39
Speaker 1: that appeared was dry ground, and the walls of water
1:31:42
Speaker 1: that stood on either side were held in place by
1:31:45
Speaker 1: a wind that was not behaving according to any law
1:31:49
Speaker 1: the Egyptians had a name for. By morning the path
1:31:52
Speaker 1: was there, and Israel walked into the sea on dry ground,
1:31:56
Speaker 1: with a wall of water on the right and a
1:31:58
Speaker 1: wall of water on the lane left. Place yourself in
1:32:01
Speaker 1: that walk for a moment, not the theological significance of it,
1:32:06
Speaker 1: but the physical sensation of it, the moment your foot
1:32:09
Speaker 1: left the shore and came down on ground that should
1:32:12
Speaker 1: be under water, the sea floor beneath your feet, firm
1:32:15
Speaker 1: and damp, with the smell of the deep water all
1:32:18
Speaker 1: around you, the walls of water rising up on either side,
1:32:22
Speaker 1: close enough to see the fish suspended inside them in
1:32:25
Speaker 1: the gray pre dawn light, the sound of the wind
1:32:28
Speaker 1: holding what could not naturally be held walking on the
1:32:31
Speaker 1: floor of a sea, because the one who made the
1:32:33
Speaker 1: sea told it to make room. Every step a small
1:32:37
Speaker 1: act of trust, every footfall on ground that had no
1:32:41
Speaker 1: natural reason to be there. Every person in that vast
1:32:46
Speaker 1: multitude made that walk. The children lifted on to shoulders,
1:32:51
Speaker 1: the elderly helped by the hands of those beside them.
1:32:55
Speaker 1: The animals pressed forward with the crowd, the bones of Joseph,
1:32:59
Speaker 1: carried by some one whose name we do not know,
1:33:01
Speaker 1: but who understood the weight of what they were carrying.
1:33:04
Speaker 1: Every single one of them crossed, and they came up
1:33:08
Speaker 1: on the far shore and stood on solid ground, and
1:33:11
Speaker 1: turned around and looked at the path they had just
1:33:13
Speaker 1: walked through. The Egyptian army came in after them, into
1:33:18
Speaker 1: the sea floor, into the corridor between the walls of water.
1:33:22
Speaker 1: Six hundred chariots and all the cavalry and all the
1:33:26
Speaker 1: forces of Pharaoh rode down on to the exposed ground
1:33:29
Speaker 1: and followed Israel's path into the sea. And in the
1:33:33
Speaker 1: early morning watch the pillar of fire and cloud looked
1:33:36
Speaker 1: down on the Egyptian army and threw them into confusion.
1:33:40
Speaker 1: The chariot wheels became clogged, the horses stumbled, The machines
1:33:45
Speaker 1: of war that had been designed for speed and pursuit
1:33:48
Speaker 1: found themselves moving with increasing difficulty, and the soldiers who
1:33:52
Speaker 1: had spent their lives training for this kind of pursuit,
1:33:55
Speaker 1: found themselves unable to function. And they said to one another,
1:34:00
Speaker 1: in the corridor between walls of water on the floor
1:34:03
Speaker 1: of a sea, let us flee from before Israel, for
1:34:07
Speaker 1: the Lord fights for them against us. They saw it
1:34:11
Speaker 1: in the moment when it was too late to act
1:34:13
Speaker 1: on it. Standing on a sea floor, between walls of
1:34:17
Speaker 1: water that were being held in place by the God
1:34:19
Speaker 1: of a slave people, the finest military force in the
1:34:22
Speaker 1: ancient world, finally understood what they were facing. God told
1:34:26
Speaker 1: Moses to stretch his hand over the sea again. Moses
1:34:30
Speaker 1: stretched his hand, the water came back, the walls collapsed,
1:34:35
Speaker 1: the floor of the sea became the floor of the
1:34:38
Speaker 1: sea again, the water returning to its place, with the
1:34:41
Speaker 1: force of everything that had been held unnaturally still for
1:34:45
Speaker 1: hours being released. At once, the Egyptian army, six hundred
1:34:50
Speaker 1: elite chariots, and all the cavalry, and all the forces
1:34:53
Speaker 1: that had followed Israel into the sea was covered. The
1:34:57
Speaker 1: scripture says, with quiet finality, not one of them remained.
1:35:02
Speaker 1: Israel stood on the far shore and watched it happen.
1:35:06
Speaker 1: They watched the power that had held them in bondage
1:35:08
Speaker 1: for four hundred years disappear beneath the water that they
1:35:11
Speaker 1: had walked through on dry ground. They watched, and the
1:35:15
Speaker 1: scripture says, something that lands with the weight of a
1:35:17
Speaker 1: long journey reaching its destination. Israel saw the great power
1:35:22
Speaker 1: that the Lord used against Egypt, and the people feared
1:35:26
Speaker 1: the Lord and believed in the Lord, and in his
1:35:28
Speaker 1: servant Moses. They believed. Then Miriam took a tambourine. This woman,
1:35:35
Speaker 1: the girl who had stood barefoot in the reeds as
1:35:37
Speaker 1: a child, with her heart pounding, watching a basket float,
1:35:41
Speaker 1: waiting to see what would happen to her baby brother,
1:35:44
Speaker 1: who had stepped forward to speak to the daughter of
1:35:47
Speaker 1: Pharaoh with a steadiness that had nothing natural to explain it,
1:35:51
Speaker 1: who had carried four hundred years of waiting in her
1:35:53
Speaker 1: body the way all her people had carried it from
1:35:56
Speaker 1: the inside, day after day, year after year, without being
1:36:00
Speaker 1: able to see the end. She took a tambourine, and
1:36:04
Speaker 1: all the women went out after her with tambourines and dancing,
1:36:08
Speaker 1: and Miriam sang sing to the Lord, for he has
1:36:11
Speaker 1: triumphed gloriously. The horse and his rider he has thrown
1:36:15
Speaker 1: into the sea. The first song recorded after the crossing
1:36:19
Speaker 1: of the Red Sea was sung by a woman with
1:36:21
Speaker 1: a tambourine leading other women in dance on a shore
1:36:24
Speaker 1: still wet from the miracle. Not a formal ceremony, not
1:36:29
Speaker 1: a planned liturgy, just a woman who had been waiting
1:36:32
Speaker 1: her whole life for a reason to dance like this,
1:36:35
Speaker 1: and who did not wait another second when the reason arrived.
1:36:39
Speaker 1: The same God who had kept a basket afloat on
1:36:42
Speaker 1: the nile had parted the sea. The same faithfulness that
1:36:46
Speaker 1: had covered a baby in the reeds had covered a
1:36:48
Speaker 1: nation in the night. The thread ran from the beginning
1:36:51
Speaker 1: to this shore, without breaking to night. Wherever you are,
1:36:55
Speaker 1: let the sound of Miriam's tambourine be the last thing
1:36:58
Speaker 1: you carry into sleep. Whatever sea has been in front
1:37:02
Speaker 1: of you, whatever army has been at your back, whatever
1:37:06
Speaker 1: impossible thing has been standing between you and the life
1:37:09
Speaker 1: you were promised, the same God who divided the water
1:37:12
Speaker 1: is watching over you in this darkness. The same faithfulness
1:37:16
Speaker 1: that carried a vast multitude through the night on dry
1:37:20
Speaker 1: ground is the faithfulness that covers you right now you
1:37:23
Speaker 1: do not need to see the path. Yet Moses did
1:37:27
Speaker 1: not see it until after he stretched out his hand.
1:37:30
Speaker 1: The sea did not part until the staff was raised
1:37:33
Speaker 1: and the step was taken. Stretch out your hand, the
1:37:37
Speaker 1: path appears. Sleep now, beloved, you are on the far shore,
1:37:43
Speaker 1: and somewhere ahead in the dark, the manner is already
1:37:46
Speaker 1: being prepared for the morning. Chapter eight, Wilderness, Manner, Water
1:37:54
Speaker 1: and quail. The morning after a miracle is quieter than
1:37:58
Speaker 1: you expect. The townmbarine is set down, the singing has stopped,
1:38:03
Speaker 1: the dancing feet are still, and the sea, which last
1:38:07
Speaker 1: night was the most extraordinary thing anyone in that vast
1:38:10
Speaker 1: multitude had ever seen or would ever see, is this
1:38:14
Speaker 1: morning simply the sea again, blue and wide and moving
1:38:19
Speaker 1: with the ordinary rhythm of water that does not remember
1:38:22
Speaker 1: what it did last night, And a head stretching in
1:38:25
Speaker 1: every direction. That is not the sea is the wilderness.
1:38:29
Speaker 1: The Sinai Wilderness does not offer the romantic solitude of
1:38:32
Speaker 1: a landscape designed for contemplation. It is rock and grit,
1:38:37
Speaker 1: and a sun that hits stone, and the stone throws
1:38:40
Speaker 1: the heat back doubled. The wind that moves through it
1:38:43
Speaker 1: carries fine particles that find their way into every fold
1:38:46
Speaker 1: of clothing and every corner of the eye. There is
1:38:49
Speaker 1: almost no shade, there is almost no water. There is
1:38:54
Speaker 1: almost nothing growing that a human being can eat without
1:38:57
Speaker 1: considerable effort and knowledge that most of these people did
1:39:01
Speaker 1: not have. Into this landscape. God led his people, a
1:39:05
Speaker 1: vast multitude who had spent their entire lives in a
1:39:08
Speaker 1: river delta civilization, who knew how to make bricks and
1:39:12
Speaker 1: tend fields and navigate the crowded streets of Egyptian cities,
1:39:16
Speaker 1: and who had almost no experience whatsoever with survival in
1:39:19
Speaker 1: one of the harshest environments on Earth. They walked south
1:39:23
Speaker 1: from the sea into the wilderness of shore, and for
1:39:26
Speaker 1: three days they found no water. Three days without water
1:39:30
Speaker 1: in the Sinai is not inconvenience. It is creses. The
1:39:34
Speaker 1: sun draws moisture from a body faster than people from
1:39:38
Speaker 1: gentler climates can easily imagine. Children become dangerously dehydrated within hours,
1:39:45
Speaker 1: Animals begin to fail. The entire column of people, already
1:39:49
Speaker 1: carrying the physical exhaustion of weeks of upheaval and travel
1:39:53
Speaker 1: and the emotional weight of everything that had happened, was
1:39:56
Speaker 1: now moving through the desert in a state of escalating
1:40:00
Speaker 1: physical desperation. On the third day, they saw water. The
1:40:04
Speaker 1: place was called Mara, the name means bitter, and the
1:40:08
Speaker 1: water was there, visible and available, the answer to three
1:40:13
Speaker 1: days of desperate need, right there in front of them.
1:40:16
Speaker 1: And when they put it to their lips it was undrinkable, brackish,
1:40:21
Speaker 1: and wrong in a way that made thirst worse rather
1:40:24
Speaker 1: than better. That told the body immediately, this is not
1:40:27
Speaker 1: what you need. Even as the need was acute, The
1:40:30
Speaker 1: people complained to Moses. They asked the most human possible question,
1:40:35
Speaker 1: in the most human possible circumstances, What do we drink?
1:40:40
Speaker 1: Not a theological question, not a question about the meaning
1:40:44
Speaker 1: of their journey or the character of the God leading them.
1:40:48
Speaker 1: What do we drink? We are thirsty, and our children
1:40:52
Speaker 1: are thirsty, and the water in front of us is bad,
1:40:55
Speaker 1: and we need to drink something now. Moses cried out
1:40:58
Speaker 1: to God, and God showed him a piece of wood.
1:41:02
Speaker 1: Moses threw it into the water, and the water became sweet.
1:41:07
Speaker 1: This is one of those moments in scripture where the
1:41:09
Speaker 1: ordinary material and the extraordinary outcome are placed side by
1:41:14
Speaker 1: side without explanation. A piece of wood thrown into bitter water,
1:41:18
Speaker 1: and the water becomes drinkable. The wood was not magical.
1:41:22
Speaker 1: The one directing its use was not operating within the
1:41:26
Speaker 1: limits of what wood can ordinarily do. The same God
1:41:30
Speaker 1: who had directed a staff and a wind and a
1:41:32
Speaker 1: sea was directing a piece of wood in a pool
1:41:34
Speaker 1: of water, and the result was what he said it
1:41:37
Speaker 1: would be. The water was sweet, The children drank, the
1:41:42
Speaker 1: animals drank. The desperate immediate need was met, and God
1:41:46
Speaker 1: spoke at Mara with a name for himself that he
1:41:49
Speaker 1: had not used before in this story. I am the
1:41:52
Speaker 1: Lord who heals you, not the Lord who commands you,
1:41:56
Speaker 1: not the Lord who tests you. The Lord who heals you,
1:42:00
Speaker 1: the one who takes what is bitter and makes it sweet,
1:42:05
Speaker 1: who meets you at the place of your disappointment, and
1:42:07
Speaker 1: does not lecture you about your lack of faith, but
1:42:10
Speaker 1: transforms the thing that needed transforming. From Mara, they moved
1:42:15
Speaker 1: to Elim, where there were twelve springs and seventy palm trees.
1:42:19
Speaker 1: Twelve springs, one for each tribe, seventy trees spreading their
1:42:24
Speaker 1: broad shade over ground that was no longer hostile. They
1:42:28
Speaker 1: camped there by the water and the shade and the
1:42:30
Speaker 1: sound of springs, and they rested a place of abundance
1:42:34
Speaker 1: prepared and waiting for them in the middle of the wilderness,
1:42:37
Speaker 1: at exactly the moment they needed it. God had been
1:42:41
Speaker 1: to ilimb before they arrived, but Elim was not the destination.
1:42:46
Speaker 1: The cloud lifted, and they moved on deeper into the
1:42:50
Speaker 1: wilderness of sin, and the food they had brought from
1:42:53
Speaker 1: Egypt ran out. The unleavened bread of the passover night
1:42:57
Speaker 1: was long gone. The provision they had carried were finished,
1:43:02
Speaker 1: and the desert offered nothing to supplement what they no
1:43:04
Speaker 1: longer had. They said to Moses and Aaron, would that
1:43:08
Speaker 1: we had died by the hand of the Lord in
1:43:10
Speaker 1: Egypt when we sat by the meat pots and ate
1:43:13
Speaker 1: bread to the full. You have brought us out into
1:43:16
Speaker 1: this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger, meat pots,
1:43:21
Speaker 1: bread to the full. Let that settle for a moment
1:43:24
Speaker 1: before moving past it. These were slaves, speaking people who
1:43:29
Speaker 1: had made bricks under the threat of the Overseer's rod,
1:43:33
Speaker 1: people whose sons had been ordered into the Nile, people
1:43:36
Speaker 1: who had prayed to leave Egypt for their entire lives,
1:43:39
Speaker 1: and the entire lives of their parents and grandparents, and
1:43:43
Speaker 1: their memory of Egypt, filtered through weeks of wilderness and
1:43:46
Speaker 1: the acute physical pressure of hunger, had become a memory
1:43:50
Speaker 1: of sitting by meat pots and eating bread to the full.
1:43:54
Speaker 1: This is one of the most psychologically precise moments in
1:43:57
Speaker 1: the entire story. Suffer has this effect on memory. Hunger
1:44:02
Speaker 1: has this effect on the past. Press a person hard
1:44:06
Speaker 1: enough in the present, and the mind reaches backward for
1:44:09
Speaker 1: comfort and finds a version of the previous life that
1:44:12
Speaker 1: was never quite as good as it now appears. The
1:44:15
Speaker 1: chains disappear from the memory, the bread remains. The Egypt
1:44:20
Speaker 1: that actually existed, the Egypt of the whip and the
1:44:23
Speaker 1: Nile and the impossible quotas and the dead sons recedes.
1:44:27
Speaker 1: The Egypt of the imagined meat pots moves to the front.
1:44:31
Speaker 1: God did not respond with anger or with the reminder
1:44:35
Speaker 1: of everything already provided. He responded with bread. I will
1:44:39
Speaker 1: rain bread from heaven for you, he told Moses. Every
1:44:44
Speaker 1: morning the people were to go out and gather enough
1:44:46
Speaker 1: for that day, exactly that day. On the sixth day,
1:44:51
Speaker 1: they were to gather double, because the seventh day was
1:44:54
Speaker 1: the Sabbath, and there would be none on the seventh,
1:44:57
Speaker 1: they were not to keep any overnight. That evening, before
1:45:00
Speaker 1: the bread came, quail arrived over the camp. They flew in,
1:45:04
Speaker 1: low and exhausted from their migration, easy to catch, covering
1:45:09
Speaker 1: the ground around the camp in a sudden abundance of
1:45:11
Speaker 1: meat where there had been nothing. The people ate, and
1:45:15
Speaker 1: the next morning, when the dew that had settled on
1:45:18
Speaker 1: the ground evaporated in the early heat, something remained on
1:45:21
Speaker 1: the surface of the wilderness around the camp, something thin
1:45:25
Speaker 1: and white and flake like, fine as coriander seed, lying
1:45:29
Speaker 1: on the ground the way frost lies on a field
1:45:32
Speaker 1: in the cold months, delicate and faintly, gleaming in the
1:45:35
Speaker 1: morning light. The people looked at it and said to
1:45:38
Speaker 1: one another the Hebrew words that mean simply, what is it?
1:45:42
Speaker 1: That question became its name, Maunna. What is it? Moses
1:45:48
Speaker 1: told them, this is the bread that the Lord has
1:45:50
Speaker 1: given you to eat. It tasted like wafers made with honey,
1:45:55
Speaker 1: thin and sweet, and unlike anything they had eaten before.
1:45:59
Speaker 1: Every morning it was there coating the ground around the camp,
1:46:03
Speaker 1: and every morning the people gathered it before the sun
1:46:06
Speaker 1: rose high enough to melt it. The ones who gathered
1:46:09
Speaker 1: more than they needed found when they measured it at
1:46:12
Speaker 1: home that they had exactly enough. The ones who gathered
1:46:16
Speaker 1: less found the same. Every one had precisely what they
1:46:20
Speaker 1: needed for the day, not more, not less. The instruction
1:46:25
Speaker 1: about not keeping it over night was tested almost immediately.
1:46:29
Speaker 1: Some people kept it anyway. In the morning it was
1:46:33
Speaker 1: full of maggots and smelled. The instruction had not been
1:46:36
Speaker 1: a suggestion. On the sixth day, the double portion was gathered,
1:46:40
Speaker 1: and on the Sabbath morning it was still fresh, no maggots,
1:46:45
Speaker 1: no smell. The same God who sent the manner also
1:46:49
Speaker 1: knew which day he had declared wholly. The manner was
1:46:52
Speaker 1: not just food. It was a class room with no
1:46:56
Speaker 1: walls and a curriculum that could not be taught any
1:46:59
Speaker 1: other way. God was teaching something that four hundred years
1:47:02
Speaker 1: of Egyptian slavery had actively worked against. He was teaching
1:47:07
Speaker 1: his people to live in daily dependence, to go out
1:47:10
Speaker 1: each morning with open hands and receive rather than accumulate,
1:47:15
Speaker 1: to trust that the one who provided to day would
1:47:17
Speaker 1: provide to morrow, and that this trust was not naivete
1:47:21
Speaker 1: but the most accurate possible understanding of how the world
1:47:24
Speaker 1: actually works when you know who made it. The manner
1:47:28
Speaker 1: never came early. It never came the night before, It
1:47:32
Speaker 1: never came in quantities large enough to make to morrow's
1:47:35
Speaker 1: gathering unnecessary. It came every morning exactly enough, and it
1:47:40
Speaker 1: required the people to wake up and go out and
1:47:43
Speaker 1: hold their hands open to receive what only God could give.
1:47:47
Speaker 1: This is the shape of a life lived in genuine trust,
1:47:51
Speaker 1: not the absence of effort, not passive waiting, the daily
1:47:55
Speaker 1: practice of going out and gathering what the day needs,
1:47:59
Speaker 1: and trusting them the next morning there will be more,
1:48:02
Speaker 1: not because you have stored enough, because the one providing
1:48:06
Speaker 1: it has never once failed to provide it. Every morning
1:48:09
Speaker 1: is a morning in which the manner has not yet appeared,
1:48:13
Speaker 1: and every morning it appears. The journey continued. They moved
1:48:17
Speaker 1: by stages through the wilderness, following the cloud until they
1:48:21
Speaker 1: came to Refidim. And at Refidim there was no water.
1:48:26
Speaker 1: This time the people quarreled with Moses, not complained, quarreled
1:48:31
Speaker 1: a word with an edge of genuine threat in it.
1:48:34
Speaker 1: Moses went to God with the honest desperation of a
1:48:37
Speaker 1: man who had been pushed past careful language. What do
1:48:40
Speaker 1: I do with these people? He said? They are almost
1:48:44
Speaker 1: ready to stone me. God told him to take his
1:48:47
Speaker 1: staff and go to a rock at Horeb and strike it.
1:48:50
Speaker 1: Moses did. Water came out of the rock in a
1:48:54
Speaker 1: flow sufficient for every one, and all the live stock
1:48:58
Speaker 1: water from solid stone, because the one who made the
1:49:01
Speaker 1: stone told it to yield. Moses named the place Massah
1:49:05
Speaker 1: and Merribah, testing and quarreling, not a triumphant name, an
1:49:11
Speaker 1: honest one, a record of what had actually happened there,
1:49:15
Speaker 1: the failure and the grace together, preserved in a name,
1:49:18
Speaker 1: so that neither the failure nor the grace could be
1:49:21
Speaker 1: quietly forgotten. The Bible does not clean up the wilderness.
1:49:26
Speaker 1: It does not edit out the complaints or the quarreling,
1:49:30
Speaker 1: or the moments when the people said things that they
1:49:32
Speaker 1: should not have said. It records all of it. Because
1:49:35
Speaker 1: the story of real people with a real God is
1:49:38
Speaker 1: not a story of unbroken faith. It is a story
1:49:41
Speaker 1: of stumbling faith met by unwavering faithfulness, over and over,
1:49:46
Speaker 1: and that is a more honest and ultimately more comforting
1:49:49
Speaker 1: story than the sanitized version would be. While they were
1:49:52
Speaker 1: at Refidiem, the Amalekites came and attacked. They came from behind,
1:49:57
Speaker 1: targeting the weakest members of the colonn the exhausted and
1:50:01
Speaker 1: the elderly, and the stragglers, the people most vulnerable and
1:50:04
Speaker 1: least able to defend themselves. Moses sent Joshua to choose
1:50:09
Speaker 1: men and fight, and Moses went up to a hill
1:50:12
Speaker 1: overlooking the battle, with Aaron and with a man named her.
1:50:16
Speaker 1: When Moses held his staff up, Israel prevailed. When his
1:50:20
Speaker 1: arm dropped from exhaustion, Amelek prevailed his arms grew heavy.
1:50:26
Speaker 1: The battle went on all day, and Aaron and her,
1:50:30
Speaker 1: watching from either side, understood what was needed without being told.
1:50:35
Speaker 1: They found a stone for Moses to sit on. Then
1:50:38
Speaker 1: they stood beside him, Aaron on one side and her
1:50:41
Speaker 1: on the other, and they held his arms up. They
1:50:44
Speaker 1: held them up until the sun went down, and Joshua
1:50:48
Speaker 1: defeated the Amalekites. This image, two men standing on either
1:50:52
Speaker 1: side of an old man on a stone, with their
1:50:55
Speaker 1: hands under his arms in the middle of a battle,
1:50:58
Speaker 1: says something that no amount of ect position can say better.
1:51:02
Speaker 1: No one carries the weight alone forever. The most faithful
1:51:06
Speaker 1: leaders have moments when their arms give out, and that
1:51:09
Speaker 1: people who notice, who move toward them quietly without being asked,
1:51:14
Speaker 1: and simply hold what is falling until it can be
1:51:17
Speaker 1: held again. They are part of every victory that follows.
1:51:21
Speaker 1: Their names are recorded because they belong in the record.
1:51:25
Speaker 1: To night, as the darkness settles around you and the
1:51:28
Speaker 1: day's weight begins to lift, hear this. The manner came
1:51:32
Speaker 1: every morning, not because the people deserved it, not because
1:51:36
Speaker 1: they had remembered the miracle at the sea well enough,
1:51:39
Speaker 1: or thanked God adequately for the water at Mara, or
1:51:42
Speaker 1: kept the overnight instruction without exception. It came because God
1:51:46
Speaker 1: had promised it would come. And God keeps his promises
1:51:50
Speaker 1: to his people, even when his people are quarreling and
1:51:52
Speaker 1: scared and misremembering Egypt as a land of meat pots
1:51:56
Speaker 1: and abundance. Whatever wilderness you are walking through right now,
1:52:01
Speaker 1: the morning provision is already prepared. You cannot see it yet.
1:52:05
Speaker 1: It will not appear until the dew lifts. But it
1:52:09
Speaker 1: is already prepared, and it will be exactly enough, and
1:52:12
Speaker 1: it will be there in the morning the way it
1:52:14
Speaker 1: has always been there in every morning of your life
1:52:17
Speaker 1: that you have lived to see. Some one is already
1:52:20
Speaker 1: moving toward you with a stone to sit on and
1:52:22
Speaker 1: steady hands. Sleep. Now the cloud is resting over the camp,
1:52:28
Speaker 1: the fire is burning low and steady, and in the morning,
1:52:32
Speaker 1: when the dew lifts from whatever wilderness floor you are
1:52:35
Speaker 1: walking across, there will be something white and sweet on
1:52:38
Speaker 1: the ground, exactly enough, as always, as it always will be.
1:52:47
Speaker 1: Chapter nine, Sinai, The Golden Calf and the Broken Covenant.
1:52:52
Speaker 1: There are moments when the distance between what God is
1:52:55
Speaker 1: and what we are becomes visible in a way that
1:52:58
Speaker 1: takes the breath away. Not because the visibility is painful,
1:53:02
Speaker 1: though it can be, but because what is revealed in
1:53:05
Speaker 1: those moments is so completely beyond the categories of ordinary
1:53:09
Speaker 1: experience that the only honest response is to stop and
1:53:13
Speaker 1: be small for a while, to let the vastness be
1:53:16
Speaker 1: vast without trying to reduce it to something manageable, to
1:53:21
Speaker 1: stand at the foot of the mountain, so to speak,
1:53:23
Speaker 1: and feel the ground shake. Israel was about to have
1:53:27
Speaker 1: one of those moments. Three months after leaving Egypt, exactly
1:53:31
Speaker 1: three months to the day, the vast multitude arrived at
1:53:34
Speaker 1: the wilderness of Sinai and made camp at the base
1:53:37
Speaker 1: of a mountain. Moses went up the slopes to meet God,
1:53:41
Speaker 1: and God spoke with a message for the whole people.
1:53:44
Speaker 1: You have seen what I did to Egypt, he said,
1:53:48
Speaker 1: And how I carried you on eagle's wings and brought
1:53:51
Speaker 1: you to myself eagle's wings. That image is worth holding.
1:53:57
Speaker 1: An eagle does not drive its young from behind. When
1:54:00
Speaker 1: an eaglet is learning to fly and its strength gives out,
1:54:04
Speaker 1: the parent eagles spreads its wings beneath it and carries it.
1:54:08
Speaker 1: The image God chose to describe forty years of wilderness
1:54:12
Speaker 1: and red sea, and the entire exodus was not a
1:54:15
Speaker 1: military operation, or a rescue mission, or even a miraculous
1:54:19
Speaker 1: display of power. It was a parent spreading wings beneath
1:54:23
Speaker 1: a falling child. I carried you to myself, not just
1:54:28
Speaker 1: to safety, to myself. And now God said, if you
1:54:33
Speaker 1: will listen to my voice and keep my covenant, you
1:54:36
Speaker 1: shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, a kingdom
1:54:41
Speaker 1: of priests, a holy nation. Moses came down and laid
1:54:45
Speaker 1: the words before the people, and all the people answered
1:54:49
Speaker 1: together with a unanimity that was real in the moment
1:54:52
Speaker 1: and meant in the moment everything the Lord has spoken.
1:54:56
Speaker 1: We will do three days of preparation, followed, wash your clothes,
1:55:02
Speaker 1: consecrate yourselves, set limits around the mountain, on the third morning,
1:55:07
Speaker 1: God will come down on the mountain in the sight
1:55:10
Speaker 1: of all the people. On the morning of the third day,
1:55:13
Speaker 1: it began thunder that did not stop, rolling from one
1:55:17
Speaker 1: end of the sky to the other without gaps. Lightning
1:55:21
Speaker 1: that moved differently from ordinary lightning, more deliberate, as if
1:55:25
Speaker 1: each bolt were placed rather than random. A cloud settling
1:55:29
Speaker 1: over the mountain unlike any cloud they had seen, dense
1:55:33
Speaker 1: and dark and charged with a presence that the air
1:55:36
Speaker 1: around it struggled to contain. And a sound beginning from
1:55:40
Speaker 1: inside that cloud, a sound like a trumpet, but deeper
1:55:44
Speaker 1: and more sustained, beginning already at a volume that was
1:55:47
Speaker 1: overwhelming and growing louder with every second that passed. The
1:55:52
Speaker 1: entire camp trembled. Moses led the people out to the
1:55:56
Speaker 1: foot of the mountain, and the mountain itself was wrapped
1:55:59
Speaker 1: in smoke because God had descended on it in fire.
1:56:03
Speaker 1: The smoke rose like the smoke of a great furnace,
1:56:05
Speaker 1: and the whole mountain shook violently, and the trumpet sound
1:56:09
Speaker 1: grew louder and louder, until Moses spoke and God answered
1:56:12
Speaker 1: him In thunder. Two million people at the foot of
1:56:16
Speaker 1: a burning shaking, smoke wrapped mountain, feeling the vibration in
1:56:20
Speaker 1: the souls of their feet, hearing something emerging from the
1:56:23
Speaker 1: fire that was unmistakably a voice, and that voice was
1:56:27
Speaker 1: speaking their language. From that fire, and that thunder, God spoke.
1:56:31
Speaker 1: The Ten Commandments, not one ethical option among many reasonable frameworks,
1:56:38
Speaker 1: not suggestions for improving community life, the fundamental architecture of existence,
1:56:44
Speaker 1: rightly ordered toward God and toward the people around you.
1:56:48
Speaker 1: Ten declarations that have shaped the moral imagination of civilization
1:56:52
Speaker 1: for three thousand years, and whose echoes are audible in
1:56:56
Speaker 1: every serious attempt at justice and decency that human society
1:57:00
Speaker 1: has made. Since you shall have no other gods before me.
1:57:05
Speaker 1: You shall not make for yourself an idol. You shall
1:57:08
Speaker 1: not misuse the name of the Lord, your God. Remember
1:57:12
Speaker 1: the Sabbath and keep it wholly. Honor your father and
1:57:16
Speaker 1: your mother. You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery.
1:57:21
Speaker 1: You shall not steal, You shall not give false testimony.
1:57:26
Speaker 1: You shall not covet. But the people could not bear
1:57:29
Speaker 1: the fullness of the direct encounter. The thunder and the lightning,
1:57:33
Speaker 1: and the trumpet, and the mountain in smoke were more
1:57:36
Speaker 1: than flesh and blood was designed to receive at close
1:57:39
Speaker 1: range without a mediator. They pulled back and stood at
1:57:43
Speaker 1: a distance and called to Moses with the honest recognition
1:57:46
Speaker 1: of people who know their own limits. You speak to us,
1:57:50
Speaker 1: they said, and we will listen, but do not let
1:57:53
Speaker 1: God speak to us directly, or we will die. God
1:57:57
Speaker 1: heard their words and said they were right, and he
1:58:00
Speaker 1: designated Moses as the one who would go into the
1:58:03
Speaker 1: thick darkness where God was the one who would receive
1:58:06
Speaker 1: the law and carry it back down to the people
1:58:08
Speaker 1: who could not survive the nearness of the source. Moses
1:58:12
Speaker 1: went up into the mountain, and he stayed for forty days,
1:58:16
Speaker 1: forty days and forty nights in the presence of God,
1:58:20
Speaker 1: not eating and not drinking, sustained by something beyond ordinary nurripent,
1:58:25
Speaker 1: receiving the detailed instructions for how the Covenant people were
1:58:29
Speaker 1: to live and worship and structure their common life around
1:58:32
Speaker 1: the Holy presence in their midst below the mountain, With
1:58:36
Speaker 1: the cloud still covering its summit and the memory of
1:58:39
Speaker 1: the thunder still in their bodies, the people waited. The
1:58:43
Speaker 1: first week was manageable. The second Moses was still on
1:58:47
Speaker 1: the mountain. The third still no word the fourth nothing
1:58:53
Speaker 1: into the fifth week, and still the cloud, and still
1:58:56
Speaker 1: the fire at night, and still no Moses, no message,
1:58:59
Speaker 1: no indation of when or whether this would end. Fear
1:59:03
Speaker 1: fills the spaces that information leaves empty with things that
1:59:06
Speaker 1: are never better than the truth. And as the days
1:59:10
Speaker 1: stretched and the silence continued, and the visible certainty of
1:59:13
Speaker 1: Moses's presence was replaced by nothing the people could point
1:59:17
Speaker 1: to or touch, the fear began to reshape itself into
1:59:20
Speaker 1: something that demanded a solution. They gathered around Aaron. Come,
1:59:25
Speaker 1: they said, make us gods to go before us. As
1:59:29
Speaker 1: for this Moses, the man who brought us up out
1:59:32
Speaker 1: of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.
1:59:35
Speaker 1: This Moses, not our leader, not the servant of God,
1:59:40
Speaker 1: this Moses. The dismissal in the pronoun was not cruelty,
1:59:44
Speaker 1: but desperation. They needed something, they needed it now, and
1:59:49
Speaker 1: the particular someone they had been depending on was not here.
1:59:53
Speaker 1: Aaron looked at the crowd. He felt the weight of
1:59:56
Speaker 1: what they needed pressing against him from all sides. He
2:00:00
Speaker 1: was capable, and gifted and genuinely faithful. He had stood
2:00:04
Speaker 1: beside Moses through every confrontation with Pharaoh. He had spoken
2:00:08
Speaker 1: for God's purposes through ten plagues. He was a good man,
2:00:13
Speaker 1: and in this moment, without his brother beside him, without
2:00:17
Speaker 1: the external structure of Moses's presence to hold the line
2:00:20
Speaker 1: against the pressure of the crowd, Aaron made the worst
2:00:23
Speaker 1: decision of his long and otherwise faithful life. He asked
2:00:28
Speaker 1: them to bring their gold ear rings. They brought them.
2:00:31
Speaker 1: He took the gold and fashioned it with an engraving
2:00:34
Speaker 1: tool and made a golden calf. And the people said,
2:00:38
Speaker 1: these are your gods, o Israel, who brought you up
2:00:42
Speaker 1: out of Egypt. Aaron built an altar before it and
2:00:45
Speaker 1: announced a feast, And the next morning the celebration that
2:00:49
Speaker 1: followed crossed boundaries it should not have crossed. On the mountain,
2:00:53
Speaker 1: God spoke to Moses with an urgency that cut through
2:00:57
Speaker 1: everything else. Go down. He said, your people, whom you
2:01:01
Speaker 1: brought up out of Egypt, have corrupted themselves. They have
2:01:05
Speaker 1: turned aside quickly out of the way I commanded. They
2:01:08
Speaker 1: have made a golden calf and worshiped it, your people,
2:01:12
Speaker 1: not my people. In that shift of two words, the
2:01:16
Speaker 1: sound of something broken is audible. God told Moses his
2:01:20
Speaker 1: anger burned hot. He was inclined to consume them and
2:01:24
Speaker 1: make a great nation from Moses alone. And Moses argued
2:01:28
Speaker 1: with God, not from arrogance, not from a belief that
2:01:33
Speaker 1: he understood the situation better than the one who made it,
2:01:37
Speaker 1: from love, from the love of a man who has
2:01:40
Speaker 1: been given people to carry, and cannot separate himself from them,
2:01:43
Speaker 1: even when they have done the very thing most calculated
2:01:46
Speaker 1: to make separation reasonable. Remember Abraham, Moses prayed, Remember Isaac
2:01:53
Speaker 1: and Jacob, Remember the promises you made to them, and
2:01:57
Speaker 1: consider what the nations will say. They will say your
2:02:01
Speaker 1: God brought them out only to destroy them in the mountains.
2:02:05
Speaker 1: The Lord relented from the disaster he had spoken of
2:02:08
Speaker 1: bringing on his people. Moses came down the mountain with
2:02:11
Speaker 1: the two stone tablets in his hands. Joshua was waiting
2:02:15
Speaker 1: part way down and heard the noise from the camp.
2:02:18
Speaker 1: Moses listened and said, it is not the sound of
2:02:22
Speaker 1: victory or defeat. It is the sound of singing. He
2:02:26
Speaker 1: came closer and saw the calf and the dancing, and
2:02:29
Speaker 1: he threw the tablets down at the foot of the mountain,
2:02:32
Speaker 1: and they shattered. The law of God written by the
2:02:35
Speaker 1: finger of God on stone broken against the mountain where
2:02:39
Speaker 1: God had just spoken it. The Covenant shattered at its delivery,
2:02:44
Speaker 1: because it had already been broken before Moses arrived to
2:02:46
Speaker 1: give it. The physical breaking of the tablets was the
2:02:50
Speaker 1: visible expression of what had already happened in the heart
2:02:53
Speaker 1: of the people below. He destroyed the calf. He burned
2:02:57
Speaker 1: it and grounded to powder, and scattered it on the
2:03:00
Speaker 1: water and made the people drink it. Then he turned
2:03:03
Speaker 1: to Aaron, What did these people do to you? He
2:03:06
Speaker 1: demanded that you led them into such great sin, And
2:03:10
Speaker 1: Aaron gave the answer that has been recognized in every
2:03:13
Speaker 1: era since as the most human excuse in human history.
2:03:17
Speaker 1: I took their gold, he said, In effect, I threw
2:03:21
Speaker 1: it into the fire, and out came this calf. Out
2:03:25
Speaker 1: came this calf, as if the calf had made itself,
2:03:28
Speaker 1: as if Aaron had been a passive observer of his
2:03:31
Speaker 1: own hands, as if the engraving tool had moved without him.
2:03:36
Speaker 1: Aaron was not a wicked man. This is important. He
2:03:40
Speaker 1: was not malicious or cynical or corrupt. He was a
2:03:44
Speaker 1: good man who crumbled under pressure, who bent when the
2:03:47
Speaker 1: crowd was large enough and insistent enough, and the leader
2:03:50
Speaker 1: he depended on had been absent long enough. He was
2:03:53
Speaker 1: the part of every one of us that knows what
2:03:56
Speaker 1: is right and chooses the easier thing when the conditions
2:03:59
Speaker 1: are difficult enough, and then tells itself a story afterward
2:04:03
Speaker 1: about what happened that makes the failure sound like something
2:04:06
Speaker 1: the circumstance is produced, rather than something we chose. There
2:04:11
Speaker 1: is an Aron in every human heart, the part that
2:04:14
Speaker 1: needs the right conditions and the right support and the
2:04:17
Speaker 1: right external accountability to hold the line, and who discovers
2:04:21
Speaker 1: in the moments when those things are absent what we
2:04:24
Speaker 1: are actually made of underneath them. Moses stood at the
2:04:28
Speaker 1: gate of the camp and called out, whoever is on
2:04:31
Speaker 1: the Lord's side, come to me. The tribe of Levi came,
2:04:36
Speaker 1: and a judgment fell on the camp that day that
2:04:39
Speaker 1: the scripture records without softening. Three thousand people died. Then
2:04:44
Speaker 1: Moses returned to God with a prayer that is, in
2:04:47
Speaker 1: its way the most selfless speech in all of Scripture.
2:04:51
Speaker 1: This people have sinned, a great sin, he said, they
2:04:54
Speaker 1: have made gods of gold. But now if you will
2:04:58
Speaker 1: forgive their sin, give it, and if not, blot me
2:05:02
Speaker 1: out of your book that you have written blot me out,
2:05:07
Speaker 1: not forgive them, because I asked you to blot me
2:05:11
Speaker 1: out instead. Moses was offering himself as an exchange for
2:05:15
Speaker 1: his people, not as a theological formula, but as a
2:05:19
Speaker 1: human being who loved the people he had been given
2:05:22
Speaker 1: and could not conceive of a future that contained himself
2:05:25
Speaker 1: but not them. God did not accept the exchange. The
2:05:30
Speaker 1: one who sins bears their own consequences, he said, But
2:05:34
Speaker 1: lead the people on. The journey was not over, the
2:05:38
Speaker 1: covenant was not finished. Then Moses asked for something that
2:05:42
Speaker 1: stands apart from everything else in his long life. Standing
2:05:46
Speaker 1: in the rubble of the worst disaster of the entire wilderness,
2:05:49
Speaker 1: having just interceded for people who had replaced God with
2:05:53
Speaker 1: gold at the foot of God's own mountain, Moses looked
2:05:56
Speaker 1: at God and asked for something purely personal. Show me
2:06:00
Speaker 1: your glory, he said, after everything, After the burning bush
2:06:05
Speaker 1: and the plagues and the sea, and forty days on
2:06:08
Speaker 1: the mountain, and the broken tablets and the prayer to
2:06:11
Speaker 1: be blotted out, after all of it, Moses said, I
2:06:14
Speaker 1: want to see you, not your acts, not your power.
2:06:19
Speaker 1: You show me your glory. God's response is something you
2:06:24
Speaker 1: can sit inside for a long time without reaching its edges.
2:06:29
Speaker 1: I will make all my goodness pass before you, he said,
2:06:32
Speaker 1: I will proclaim my name before you, but you cannot
2:06:36
Speaker 1: see my face. No one can see my face and
2:06:39
Speaker 1: live here. God said, there is a place beside me,
2:06:44
Speaker 1: a cleft in the rock. Stand there, and while my
2:06:48
Speaker 1: glory passes by, I will put you in the cleft
2:06:50
Speaker 1: of the rock and cover you with my hand until
2:06:53
Speaker 1: I have passed by. Then I will take away my hand,
2:06:57
Speaker 1: and you will see my back, but my faith shall
2:07:00
Speaker 1: not be seen. I will cover you with my hand.
2:07:04
Speaker 1: Of all the images of God in all of scripture,
2:07:07
Speaker 1: this one holds something that does not diminish with familiarity.
2:07:11
Speaker 1: The God who is so holy that seeing his face
2:07:14
Speaker 1: would end a human life is the same God who
2:07:17
Speaker 1: reaches down and places a man in the hollow of
2:07:19
Speaker 1: a rock and covers him with his own hand, so
2:07:22
Speaker 1: that the man can see as much of glory as
2:07:24
Speaker 1: it is safe for him to see. Not the distance
2:07:28
Speaker 1: of a deity keeping a respectful remove from fragile creatures,
2:07:32
Speaker 1: the intimacy of a hand placed gently over a person
2:07:36
Speaker 1: to protect them from something too vast for them to
2:07:39
Speaker 1: survive unprotected Moses went back up the mountain. God came
2:07:45
Speaker 1: down in the cloud and stood with him there and
2:07:48
Speaker 1: proclaimed his name the Lord, the Lord, a god merciful
2:07:54
Speaker 1: and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithful.
2:08:01
Speaker 1: Moses bowed to the ground and worshiped. New tablets were cut,
2:08:05
Speaker 1: the covenant was renewed forty more days on the mountain,
2:08:10
Speaker 1: And when Moses came back down, he did not know
2:08:12
Speaker 1: that his face was shining. The skin of his face
2:08:16
Speaker 1: was radiating a light. He could not see himself, a
2:08:19
Speaker 1: reflected light caught from forty days in the presence of God,
2:08:23
Speaker 1: and the people were afraid to come near him until
2:08:25
Speaker 1: he called to them. He put a veil over his
2:08:28
Speaker 1: face when he spoke to the people. He took it
2:08:31
Speaker 1: off when he went in to speak with the Lord.
2:08:33
Speaker 1: The man who had told God at the burning bush
2:08:36
Speaker 1: that he could not speak, that he was slow of speech,
2:08:39
Speaker 1: that he was the wrong person for any of this,
2:08:41
Speaker 1: was now so marked by time in the presence of
2:08:44
Speaker 1: God that his face required a covering when he spoke
2:08:47
Speaker 1: to ordinary people, because the light on it was more
2:08:51
Speaker 1: than ordinary eyes could comfortably look at. The golden calf
2:08:55
Speaker 1: was ash scattered on water. The broken tablets were replaced,
2:09:00
Speaker 1: and the people, humbled and changed, turned their remaining gold
2:09:04
Speaker 1: to a different purpose. They built the Tabernacle, every piece
2:09:09
Speaker 1: made exactly as God had specified on the mountain, every
2:09:13
Speaker 1: measurement precise, every material specific, every craftsman working with the
2:09:19
Speaker 1: attention of some one who understands that the space they
2:09:22
Speaker 1: are creating is intended to be inhabited by the living God.
2:09:27
Speaker 1: And the people gave so much, so freely, the gold
2:09:30
Speaker 1: and silver and blue and purple and scarlet yarn and
2:09:32
Speaker 1: fine linen and goat hair and ramskins, that Moses eventually
2:09:36
Speaker 1: had to tell them to stop. There was more than enough,
2:09:40
Speaker 1: more than enough to complete the work, more than enough
2:09:44
Speaker 1: from the same hands that had contributed their ear rings
2:09:47
Speaker 1: to the golden calf. Not inconsistency, transformation, the human heart,
2:09:53
Speaker 1: capable of terrible failure and genuine repentance and extravagant love
2:09:58
Speaker 1: in the same season, be being slowly and painfully and
2:10:01
Speaker 1: beautifully shaped into something it was always meant to be.
2:10:05
Speaker 1: The Tabernacle was completed, The cloud covered the tent of meeting,
2:10:10
Speaker 1: and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle so
2:10:13
Speaker 1: completely that Moses could not enter it. The space was
2:10:16
Speaker 1: too full of the divine presence for even the Mediator
2:10:19
Speaker 1: to simply walk in. God had come to live among
2:10:22
Speaker 1: his people in the center of the camp, a few
2:10:26
Speaker 1: steps from every tent present, not on the mountain, at
2:10:30
Speaker 1: a terrifying distance among them. Tonight, whatever wilderness you are in,
2:10:37
Speaker 1: whatever calf you have made in a season of fear
2:10:40
Speaker 1: and absence and the overwhelming pressure of a crowd wanting
2:10:43
Speaker 1: something from you that you should not have given, Hear this.
2:10:47
Speaker 1: The hand that covered Moses in the cleft of the
2:10:50
Speaker 1: rock is over you right now. The mercy that renewed
2:10:54
Speaker 1: the Covenant after the worst breach in the history of
2:10:56
Speaker 1: the Covenant is the same mercy that is available in
2:10:59
Speaker 1: this moment. The face that shone with reflected glory was
2:11:03
Speaker 1: the face of a man who had just argued with
2:11:05
Speaker 1: God on behalf of people who had earned nothing and
2:11:08
Speaker 1: been given everything. Anyway, you are not too far gone
2:11:12
Speaker 1: in this story. No one is too far gone. The
2:11:17
Speaker 1: cloud is resting on the tent, The glory has returned,
2:11:21
Speaker 1: and in the center of wherever you are, the God
2:11:24
Speaker 1: who heals and covers and renews is very near rest now.
2:11:29
Speaker 1: The Covenant still stands. The mercy is still new. The
2:11:34
Speaker 1: morning will bring more of what to night cannot contain. Sleep, gently, beloved,
2:11:40
Speaker 1: The hand is still there. Chapter ten, Forty Years and
2:11:47
Speaker 1: the Edge of Promise. There is a grief that belongs
2:11:50
Speaker 1: specifically to being almost there. Not the grief of the beginning,
2:11:55
Speaker 1: with its anxiety and the unknowable road ahead, Not the
2:11:59
Speaker 1: grief of the middle, with its exhaustion and the question
2:12:03
Speaker 1: of whether the destination is real. The grief of standing
2:12:07
Speaker 1: close enough to see it, close enough that on a
2:12:10
Speaker 1: clear day the hills on the other side are visible,
2:12:13
Speaker 1: close enough that twelve men sent to explore came back
2:12:16
Speaker 1: carrying a single cluster of grapes so heavy it took
2:12:19
Speaker 1: two of them to carry it on a pole between them,
2:12:22
Speaker 1: because one man's hands were not enough for the weight
2:12:24
Speaker 1: of the fruit. Close enough, and yet the gap between
2:12:28
Speaker 1: almost there and there would swallow forty years. This was
2:12:32
Speaker 1: not the plan. The wandering was not what God had
2:12:35
Speaker 1: intended when he parted the sea and led his people
2:12:38
Speaker 1: out with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. It
2:12:42
Speaker 1: was a consequence, real and long and costly, in a
2:12:47
Speaker 1: way that cannot be measured by anything less than the
2:12:49
Speaker 1: lives of an entire generation. It began with twelve men
2:12:53
Speaker 1: and a question that should have produced one answer and
2:12:56
Speaker 1: produced two. God told Moses to send one leader from
2:12:59
Speaker 1: each tribe into Canaan to explore it. The best men available.
2:13:04
Speaker 1: Twelve of them went in and spent forty days moving
2:13:07
Speaker 1: through the land. They walked through the Negev and up
2:13:11
Speaker 1: into the hill country. They came to the valley of Eshkol,
2:13:14
Speaker 1: where the grapes were growing, grapes of an abundance that
2:13:17
Speaker 1: neither word nor the standard grape cluster could capture a
2:13:20
Speaker 1: single bunch, requiring two men and a pole to carry.
2:13:24
Speaker 1: They brought back pomegranates and figs. They tasted the abundance
2:13:28
Speaker 1: of what had been promised. When they returned to the
2:13:31
Speaker 1: camp and stood before Moses and Aaron and all the
2:13:34
Speaker 1: congregation of Israel, ten of the twelve delivered a report
2:13:38
Speaker 1: that changed the trajectory of the entire story. The land
2:13:42
Speaker 1: is everything, they said it was. The ten conceded, flowing
2:13:47
Speaker 1: with milk and honey, this is its fruit. But the
2:13:52
Speaker 1: people who live there are powerful. The cities are fortified
2:13:56
Speaker 1: and very large. We saw descendants of giants. The Amalekites
2:14:01
Speaker 1: live in the south. The Hittites and Jebusites and Amorites
2:14:05
Speaker 1: occupy the hill country. The Canaanites hold the coast and
2:14:09
Speaker 1: the Jordan valley. We cannot attack these people, they said,
2:14:13
Speaker 1: They are stronger than we are. And then the sentence
2:14:17
Speaker 1: that defines the entire failure of that moment, and echoes
2:14:21
Speaker 1: through every generation of people who have ever stood between
2:14:24
Speaker 1: a promise and the obstacles standing in front of it.
2:14:28
Speaker 1: We seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and we seemed the
2:14:31
Speaker 1: same to them grasshoppers. Said by men who had watched
2:14:36
Speaker 1: the Nile run with blood. Said by men who had
2:14:40
Speaker 1: walked through the middle of a sea on dry ground
2:14:42
Speaker 1: with walls of water on either side. Said by men
2:14:46
Speaker 1: who had eaten bread that fell from the sky every morning,
2:14:50
Speaker 1: and drunk water that poured from solid rock. Said by
2:14:53
Speaker 1: men who had stood at the foot of a burning
2:14:55
Speaker 1: mountain while God wrote his low in fire, and the
2:14:58
Speaker 1: ground shook beneath their feet. Those men looked at the
2:15:01
Speaker 1: fortified cities of Canaan and saw themselves as insect. But
2:15:05
Speaker 1: two of the twelve did not see it that way.
2:15:08
Speaker 1: Caleb silenced the crowd before Moses with the kind of
2:15:11
Speaker 1: voice that cuts through panic without raising itself. Let us
2:15:15
Speaker 1: go up at once, he said, we are well able
2:15:19
Speaker 1: to overcome it. And Joshua tore his clothes the ancient
2:15:23
Speaker 1: gesture of some one in the presence of something that
2:15:25
Speaker 1: requires a visible response, and spoke to all the congregation.
2:15:30
Speaker 1: The land is exceedingly good. He said. If the Lord
2:15:34
Speaker 1: delights in us, he will bring us in and give
2:15:36
Speaker 1: it to us. Only do not rebel against the Lord,
2:15:41
Speaker 1: and do not fear the people of the land. Their
2:15:43
Speaker 1: protection is removed from them. The Lord is with us,
2:15:47
Speaker 1: do not fear them. Two voices against ten, two men
2:15:53
Speaker 1: who had seen the same giants and the same fortified cities,
2:15:57
Speaker 1: and arrived at a completely different conclusion, not because they
2:16:01
Speaker 1: had different information, because they were measuring with a different instrument.
2:16:06
Speaker 1: The ten measured the distance between Israel and the promise
2:16:09
Speaker 1: and found it too great. The two measured the faithfulness
2:16:13
Speaker 1: of the one who had made the promise and found
2:16:16
Speaker 1: it more than sufficient. The assembly did not follow Caleb
2:16:19
Speaker 1: and Joshua. The people wept that night, and in the
2:16:24
Speaker 1: morning the weeping had organized itself into something more purposeful.
2:16:28
Speaker 1: Let us choose a leader and go back to Egypt,
2:16:31
Speaker 1: they said, after everything, after all of it, God spoke
2:16:36
Speaker 1: to Moses, and the words carried something that had been
2:16:39
Speaker 1: building through the entire Wilderness journey, and was reaching in
2:16:42
Speaker 1: this moment a point of sorrowful clarity. How long will
2:16:47
Speaker 1: this people despise me? How long will they not believe
2:16:50
Speaker 1: in me? In spite of all the signs I have
2:16:53
Speaker 1: done among them? How long? Moses interceded again. The same
2:16:59
Speaker 1: Moses who had argue at Sinai argued here again, appealing
2:17:03
Speaker 1: to the same foundation. The nations will hear, he said,
2:17:07
Speaker 1: They will say, your God was not able to bring
2:17:10
Speaker 1: them into the land. He promised, forgive the iniquity of
2:17:13
Speaker 1: this people according to the greatness of your steadfast love.
2:17:18
Speaker 1: And God said, I have forgiven, according to your word. Forgiven.
2:17:24
Speaker 1: And yet not one person from the generation that had
2:17:27
Speaker 1: seen the signs and refused to trust would enter the land.
2:17:31
Speaker 1: They had said they wished to die in the wilderness.
2:17:34
Speaker 1: They would forty years, one for each day the spies
2:17:38
Speaker 1: had spent in the land, until the last of the
2:17:41
Speaker 1: refusing generation had returned to the earth. Then their children
2:17:45
Speaker 1: would cross the Jordan. Caleb and Joshua alone would enter
2:17:49
Speaker 1: because they had a different spirit, because they had followed
2:17:53
Speaker 1: god fully. The scouts who had brought the fearful report
2:17:56
Speaker 1: died immediately in a plague. And when the assembly heard
2:18:00
Speaker 1: the judgment, something desperate rose up in them that felt
2:18:04
Speaker 1: like faith but was not faith, felt like obedience but
2:18:08
Speaker 1: was not obedience. We have sinned, they said, we are ready.
2:18:12
Speaker 1: Now we will go up to the place God promised.
2:18:16
Speaker 1: Moses told them not to go. The moment had passed.
2:18:20
Speaker 1: God was not with them in this. They were going
2:18:23
Speaker 1: in presumption rather than in trust, in guilt rather than
2:18:27
Speaker 1: in surrender, which is not the same thing and never
2:18:30
Speaker 1: produces the same result. They went anyway, without the ark
2:18:35
Speaker 1: of the Covenant, without Moses, without the presence that had
2:18:39
Speaker 1: parted every impossible thing before them, And the people who
2:18:43
Speaker 1: lived in the hill country came down and defeated them
2:18:46
Speaker 1: and drove them back. You cannot manufacture faith after the
2:18:50
Speaker 1: window for faith has closed. You cannot decide to trust
2:18:54
Speaker 1: on your own timeline, in your own conditions, on terms
2:18:58
Speaker 1: you have negotiated for yourself. The time to trust had
2:19:02
Speaker 1: been when Joshua and Caleb were standing in the camp
2:19:05
Speaker 1: saying we are well able. That moment was gone, and
2:19:09
Speaker 1: the motion made now produced what motion made in fear
2:19:12
Speaker 1: would have produced defeat, and so the wandering began. Forty
2:19:17
Speaker 1: years of the cloud moving and the people following through
2:19:20
Speaker 1: the same general terrain in a great slow arc, burying
2:19:25
Speaker 1: the generation of the Exodus one by one as the
2:19:27
Speaker 1: years passed. The men who had been twenty years old
2:19:31
Speaker 1: when they crossed the sea were sixty when the wandering ended.
2:19:35
Speaker 1: The ones who had been forty were eighty, and many
2:19:38
Speaker 1: did not make it to the end. Miriam died in
2:19:41
Speaker 1: the wilderness of Zin, the girl who had stood in
2:19:45
Speaker 1: the reeds, the woman who had led the dancing on
2:19:48
Speaker 1: the far shore. She died in the desert and was
2:19:51
Speaker 1: buried there. Somewhere in the wilderness of Zin, the tambourine
2:19:55
Speaker 1: was set down for the last time. The desert sand
2:19:59
Speaker 1: covered the place where she had stood, the way it
2:20:01
Speaker 1: covers everything, eventually, without ceremony and without exception. The scripture
2:20:06
Speaker 1: records her death in a single verse, and the brevity
2:20:10
Speaker 1: of that verse contains more weight than many longer passages.
2:20:14
Speaker 1: One sentence for a woman who had been at the
2:20:16
Speaker 1: turning points of the entire story since the very beginning,
2:20:19
Speaker 1: standing watch over a basket while her brother floated on
2:20:22
Speaker 1: the nile, leading the singing when he crossed the sea,
2:20:25
Speaker 1: present at every critical moment of the journey. One verse,
2:20:30
Speaker 1: and then she was gone. Aaron died on the top
2:20:33
Speaker 1: of a mountain called haw God told Moses and Aaron
2:20:37
Speaker 1: and Elieza to go up together on the summit. Moses
2:20:41
Speaker 1: removed the priestly garments from Aaron one by one and
2:20:44
Speaker 1: placed them on Eliezar. The transfer of the high priesthood
2:20:48
Speaker 1: from father to son conducted on a mountaintop, with Moses
2:20:51
Speaker 1: watching his brother's face as Aaron stood there in the
2:20:55
Speaker 1: plain clothing beneath the garments, just Aaron, now not the
2:20:59
Speaker 1: high priest, just his older brother. Aaron died there on
2:21:03
Speaker 1: the mountain, and all the house of Israel wept for him.
2:21:07
Speaker 1: Thirty days the generation that had known Egypt was almost gone,
2:21:12
Speaker 1: but even Moses had one more hard moment ahead. They
2:21:15
Speaker 1: came again to a place without water. The people quarreled again,
2:21:19
Speaker 1: with the same words their parents had used a generation before.
2:21:23
Speaker 1: Moses went to God, and God told him to take
2:21:26
Speaker 1: his staff and speak to the rock before the assembly.
2:21:29
Speaker 1: Speak to it, and it will yield water. Moses took
2:21:32
Speaker 1: the staff, he gathered the people, He looked at the
2:21:36
Speaker 1: faces of a crowd he had been leading through the
2:21:38
Speaker 1: wilderness for forty years, and in a moment of exhaustion
2:21:42
Speaker 1: that was the accumulation of every hard thing those forty
2:21:45
Speaker 1: years had contained, he did something slightly different from what
2:21:49
Speaker 1: God had said. He struck the rock twice, and he said,
2:21:53
Speaker 1: to the people, shall we bring water for you? Out
2:21:56
Speaker 1: of this rock? We the wa aim abundantly. The miracle
2:22:03
Speaker 1: still happened, because God's faithfulness is not conditional on the
2:22:07
Speaker 1: perfection of his servants. But God spoke to Moses afterward,
2:22:11
Speaker 1: and the words changed everything. Because you did not trust
2:22:15
Speaker 1: in me enough to honor me as wholly in the
2:22:17
Speaker 1: sight of the Israelites, you will not bring this assembly
2:22:20
Speaker 1: into the land I am giving them. Moses would not
2:22:23
Speaker 1: enter the Promised Land. The debate about this judgment has
2:22:27
Speaker 1: continued for as long as people have read this story.
2:22:30
Speaker 1: The word disproportionate comes readily to mind. Forty years of
2:22:34
Speaker 1: extraordinary faithfulness and patient leadership and costly advocacy for a
2:22:39
Speaker 1: people who required advocacy more often than most, and a
2:22:42
Speaker 1: single moment of exhaustion, a pronoun shifted from God to we.
2:22:47
Speaker 1: A staff struck against stone instead of words spoken to it,
2:22:50
Speaker 1: and the land is denied. But something had happened at
2:22:54
Speaker 1: that rock that was more serious than a man losing
2:22:56
Speaker 1: his composure under pressure. Moses had stood before the people
2:23:01
Speaker 1: and spoken as if the water were his to give.
2:23:04
Speaker 1: He had made himself, in one moment, the center of
2:23:08
Speaker 1: the miracle, rather than the one pointing through himself to
2:23:11
Speaker 1: the source. He had placed himself in the space that
2:23:14
Speaker 1: belonged only to God. Moses received the judgment with the
2:23:18
Speaker 1: silence of a man who has lived long enough and
2:23:21
Speaker 1: walked close enough to know that the one who judges
2:23:24
Speaker 1: is also the one who loves, and that both of
2:23:26
Speaker 1: those things are simultaneously and completely true. He did not argue.
2:23:31
Speaker 1: He appointed Joshua, he laid his hands on him and
2:23:35
Speaker 1: transferred to younger and stronger shoulders the work he would
2:23:38
Speaker 1: not finish. And then he preached five weeks roughly on
2:23:43
Speaker 1: the plains of Moab, east of the Jordan, within sight
2:23:46
Speaker 1: of the land he would not enter. The great farewell
2:23:50
Speaker 1: address the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses standing before the people
2:23:55
Speaker 1: and retelling the entire story, not as history for its
2:23:59
Speaker 1: own sake, but as the living foundation of everything they
2:24:02
Speaker 1: were about to build, Remember, he said again and again.
2:24:08
Speaker 1: Remember what God did. Remember where you came from. Remember
2:24:12
Speaker 1: who brought you out. Remember the Covenant, Remember the Law.
2:24:17
Speaker 1: Write these words on your hearts, Teach them to your children.
2:24:22
Speaker 1: Speak of them when you sit in your house, and
2:24:24
Speaker 1: when you walk on the road, and when you lie down,
2:24:27
Speaker 1: and when you rise. Here, O Israel, the Lord, our God,
2:24:33
Speaker 1: The Lord is One. Love the Lord your God, with
2:24:36
Speaker 1: all your heart and with all your soul, and with
2:24:38
Speaker 1: all your strength. These words, spoken on the plains of Moab,
2:24:43
Speaker 1: with the Jordan visible in the distance, would become the
2:24:46
Speaker 1: center of Jewish prayer for roughly two and a half
2:24:48
Speaker 1: thousand years. The Shemah the declaration spoken every morning and
2:24:53
Speaker 1: every evening at the beginning of the Sabbath, at the
2:24:57
Speaker 1: end of a life, Here, Oh Israel, the Lord, our God,
2:25:02
Speaker 1: the Lord is One. Everything flows from that, every law,
2:25:07
Speaker 1: every command, every principle of justice and mercy and community life,
2:25:12
Speaker 1: all of it resting not on obligation but on love,
2:25:16
Speaker 1: not on a transaction, but on a relationship. Not on
2:25:19
Speaker 1: what we owe but on what we have received. Choose life,
2:25:24
Speaker 1: Moses told them, so that you and your children may
2:25:27
Speaker 1: live loving the Lord your God. Obeying his voice, holding
2:25:33
Speaker 1: fast to him, for he is your life. Then Moses
2:25:37
Speaker 1: climbed Mount Nebo to the top of Pisga, which looked
2:25:41
Speaker 1: out over the Jordan Valley and the hill country beyond,
2:25:44
Speaker 1: and the great Western Sea. Catching the afternoon light in
2:25:47
Speaker 1: the distance, God showed him all of it, every part
2:25:51
Speaker 1: of the land, the territory of every tribe, the valleys
2:25:55
Speaker 1: and the hills, and the plains stretching toward the coast.
2:25:59
Speaker 1: The land Abraham had been promised in a night vision
2:26:02
Speaker 1: more than six hundred years before, the land that Isaac
2:26:05
Speaker 1: and Jacob had lived in under the promise, the land
2:26:09
Speaker 1: that Joseph had asked to be buried, In the land
2:26:12
Speaker 1: that an entire generation had chosen not to trust God
2:26:16
Speaker 1: enough to enter. Moses saw all of it. And then Moses,
2:26:20
Speaker 1: the servant of the Lord, died there in the land
2:26:22
Speaker 1: of Moab, according to the word of the Lord, and
2:26:26
Speaker 1: God buried him in the valley. And to this day
2:26:29
Speaker 1: no one knows where, no monument, no marked grave, no
2:26:35
Speaker 1: tomb for pilgrims to visit. The man who had changed
2:26:38
Speaker 1: the world more than almost any other human being in history,
2:26:42
Speaker 1: has no memorial that can be found, just a valley
2:26:45
Speaker 1: somewhere in Moab, and the record that God himself buried
2:26:49
Speaker 1: him and kept the location private, as if even in death,
2:26:53
Speaker 1: the one who had spent his entire ministry pointing the
2:26:56
Speaker 1: people toward God rather than toward himself, was being given
2:27:00
Speaker 1: a burial that made continuing to look toward Moses impossible.
2:27:05
Speaker 1: The story was never about Moses. It was always about
2:27:08
Speaker 1: the God who called him from a burning bush and said,
2:27:11
Speaker 1: I will be with you. Since then, the scripture says,
2:27:15
Speaker 1: no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the
2:27:19
Speaker 1: Lord knew face to face, face to face, the man
2:27:23
Speaker 1: who once asked to see God's glory covered in the
2:27:26
Speaker 1: cleft of a rock by a divine hand, his face
2:27:29
Speaker 1: shining with reflected light, he could not see himself. That
2:27:33
Speaker 1: man face to face with God, Joshua, was full of
2:27:38
Speaker 1: the spirit of wisdom, for Moses had laid his hands
2:27:41
Speaker 1: on him. The people obeyed him, and the cloud moved
2:27:45
Speaker 1: toward the Jordan. The priests carried the ark to the
2:27:49
Speaker 1: edge of the river. The Jordan was at flood stage,
2:27:52
Speaker 1: wide and fast and deep, another impossible water, another barrier
2:27:57
Speaker 1: between the people of God and the promise of Godd.
2:28:00
Speaker 1: The moment the feet of the priests touched the water,
2:28:03
Speaker 1: the river stopped, piled up in a heap far up stream,
2:28:07
Speaker 1: and the people crossed over on dry ground again, dry
2:28:12
Speaker 1: ground again, the same God, the same faithfulness, the same
2:28:18
Speaker 1: path appearing where there was no path, because the one
2:28:21
Speaker 1: who made the water told it to stand aside. Twelve
2:28:25
Speaker 1: stones were set up on the bank at Gilgal, one
2:28:28
Speaker 1: for each tribe, a memorial, so that when your children ask,
2:28:33
Speaker 1: in time to come, what do these stones mean, you
2:28:37
Speaker 1: shall tell them that the waters of the Jordan were
2:28:39
Speaker 1: cut off before the ark of the Covenant of the Lord.
2:28:43
Speaker 1: These stones shall be to the people of Israel a
2:28:46
Speaker 1: memorial forever Israel stood in the land. The manner stopped
2:28:51
Speaker 1: the next day, the morning after they ate the produce
2:28:54
Speaker 1: of the land. For the first time, it was simply
2:28:57
Speaker 1: not there when the dew lifted. No one bouncement, no ceremony,
2:29:02
Speaker 1: just the absence of what had been present every single
2:29:05
Speaker 1: morning for forty years. Because what it had provided was
2:29:09
Speaker 1: no longer needed. The land itself would feed them. Now.
2:29:13
Speaker 1: The daily bread of the wilderness was replaced by the
2:29:16
Speaker 1: daily bread of the promised place. Before the battles and
2:29:20
Speaker 1: before the long, complicated years of building a nation, God
2:29:23
Speaker 1: spoke to Joshua at Gilgal with words that belonged not
2:29:27
Speaker 1: just to Joshua, but to every person in every generation
2:29:30
Speaker 1: who would ever stand at the edge of a calling
2:29:32
Speaker 1: too large for them and wonder whether the God who
2:29:35
Speaker 1: brought them this far would take them the rest of
2:29:38
Speaker 1: the way. Be strong and courageous, Do not be frightened,
2:29:43
Speaker 1: do not be dismayed. For the Lord your God is
2:29:46
Speaker 1: with you wherever you go. Wherever you go, not just
2:29:50
Speaker 1: in the wilderness, not just at the mountain, not just
2:29:54
Speaker 1: in the dramatic and visible moments of obvious divine intervention,
2:29:59
Speaker 1: wherever you go, into the ordinary years of the life
2:30:03
Speaker 1: waiting on the other side of the Jordan, into the
2:30:05
Speaker 1: battles and the harvests and the raising of children, and
2:30:08
Speaker 1: the keeping of promises, in the unremarkable hours of ordinary days,
2:30:13
Speaker 1: into every morning that begins without a visible sign of
2:30:16
Speaker 1: anything miraculous. Wherever you go, I am with you to night,
2:30:22
Speaker 1: as the darkness settles and the quiet deepens, and the
2:30:26
Speaker 1: day finally releases its hold on everything it has been
2:30:29
Speaker 1: holding all day, Let those four words be the last
2:30:33
Speaker 1: thing you take into sleep. Wherever you go, you did
2:30:36
Speaker 1: not arrive at this moment accidentally. The wilderness years that
2:30:40
Speaker 1: felt like wandering were carrying you somewhere. The seasons that
2:30:44
Speaker 1: looked like nothing from the outside were making something on
2:30:47
Speaker 1: the inside that the promised land ahead requires. The manner
2:30:52
Speaker 1: that came every morning was not just food. It was
2:30:55
Speaker 1: the daily faithfulness of a God who has never once
2:30:58
Speaker 1: let go of the people here called his own. The
2:31:01
Speaker 1: Jordan is behind you, or you are standing at its edge,
2:31:05
Speaker 1: and the feet of the priests are almost at the water.
2:31:08
Speaker 1: Either way, the same God who parted every impossible water
2:31:12
Speaker 1: is already on the other side, waiting. Sleep. Now, beloved,
2:31:18
Speaker 1: the stones are set up on the bank. The manner
2:31:21
Speaker 1: has done its work. The land is just ahead, and
2:31:25
Speaker 1: the God who carried you here on eagle's wings is
2:31:28
Speaker 1: not going to set you down before the journey is finished.
2:31:35
Speaker 1: We have walked a long road to night, from the
2:31:39
Speaker 1: banks of the Nile, where a woman pressed dark pitch
2:31:41
Speaker 1: into a basket by lamplight and carried her most precious
2:31:45
Speaker 1: thing to the water, and let go to a mountain
2:31:48
Speaker 1: in Moab, where an old man stood in the last
2:31:51
Speaker 1: light of his life and saw with his own eyes,
2:31:54
Speaker 1: everything that the faithfulness of God had been building toward
2:31:58
Speaker 1: across eighty years of an extraordinary and ordinary life. From
2:32:03
Speaker 1: a burning bush on a Sinai hillside, where a forgotten
2:32:06
Speaker 1: shepherd was told that the God who made his mouth
2:32:09
Speaker 1: was going to use it, to the far shore of
2:32:11
Speaker 1: a sea where a woman with a tambourine led the
2:32:14
Speaker 1: singing because she had been waiting her whole life for
2:32:17
Speaker 1: a reason to dance like that, and she was not
2:32:20
Speaker 1: going to wait one second more. From the first morning
2:32:24
Speaker 1: the manor appeared on the wilderness floor like something the
2:32:27
Speaker 1: knight had left behind, to the last morning it appeared
2:32:31
Speaker 1: when the land itself was finally ready to take over.
2:32:35
Speaker 1: This is the exodus, not only what happened to a
2:32:39
Speaker 1: people thousands of years ago in a land far from here,
2:32:42
Speaker 1: but the shape of a story that has been repeating
2:32:45
Speaker 1: in every human soul that has ever been held somewhere
2:32:48
Speaker 1: it did not belong, every heart that has stood at
2:32:52
Speaker 1: an impossible sea with the army of its past driving
2:32:55
Speaker 1: it forward and nowhere visible to go. Every person who
2:32:59
Speaker 1: has woken up in the morning and found just enough,
2:33:02
Speaker 1: exactly enough, and had to decide whether that was sufficient
2:33:06
Speaker 1: to trust the greatest escape in history was not accomplished
2:33:10
Speaker 1: by a great army or even by a great man,
2:33:13
Speaker 1: though the man was extraordinary. It was accomplished by a
2:33:17
Speaker 1: great God who looked at the suffering of his people
2:33:20
Speaker 1: and said three things that have never stopped being true.
2:33:24
Speaker 1: I have seen, I have heard, I know. And then
2:33:28
Speaker 1: he came down. He has never stopped coming down. He
2:33:32
Speaker 1: is here in this darkness, in this quiet, in the
2:33:36
Speaker 1: space between the end of the story and the beginning
2:33:39
Speaker 1: of sleep, as close to you as your own breathing.
2:33:42
Speaker 1: Let us pray, Heavenly Father, we come to you at
2:33:46
Speaker 1: the end of this long journey through one of the
2:33:48
Speaker 1: greatest stories ever told, and we thank you that it
2:33:52
Speaker 1: is not merely a story. It is a revelation of
2:33:55
Speaker 1: who you are, a window into your heart, a declaration
2:34:00
Speaker 1: that you see the suffering of your people, that you
2:34:02
Speaker 1: hear their cries, that you know their pain, and that
2:34:06
Speaker 1: you act. Thank you for Moses, for the basket in
2:34:10
Speaker 1: the reeds, and the princess who chose compassion over law,
2:34:14
Speaker 1: and the mother who got her son back for forty
2:34:17
Speaker 1: years in a desert that stripped away everything borrowed and
2:34:20
Speaker 1: left something real for a burning bush and a voice
2:34:24
Speaker 1: that knew his name, And a god who received five
2:34:27
Speaker 1: objections and sent him anyway. For the man who said,
2:34:31
Speaker 1: blot me out instead of them, who climbed a mountain
2:34:34
Speaker 1: at the end of his life and saw everything and
2:34:37
Speaker 1: was content to let some one else take it from there.
2:34:40
Speaker 1: Thank you for the manner, for the water from the rock,
2:34:44
Speaker 1: For the pillar of fire that burned through every wilderness
2:34:48
Speaker 1: night so that no one ever had to be afraid
2:34:50
Speaker 1: of the dark alone. Thank you that your provision has
2:34:53
Speaker 1: never been based on what we deserve. It has always
2:34:57
Speaker 1: been an expression of who you are. Thank You for
2:35:00
Speaker 1: the blood on the door frame, for the lamb that
2:35:03
Speaker 1: died so the people inside could live. For the mercy
2:35:07
Speaker 1: that passes over what is covered Lord, For those listening
2:35:12
Speaker 1: to night who are still in their own Egypt, who
2:35:15
Speaker 1: feel the weight of things that hold them, who have
2:35:18
Speaker 1: been crying out in the dark and wondering whether anyone
2:35:21
Speaker 1: has heard. Let them hear this. I have seen your affliction,
2:35:26
Speaker 1: I have heard your cry, I know your suffering, and
2:35:31
Speaker 1: I have come down. For those in their own wilderness
2:35:34
Speaker 1: right now, who are tired of gathering just enough and
2:35:37
Speaker 1: longing for more, who have looked at the giants between
2:35:40
Speaker 1: them and the promise, and decided the giants are more
2:35:44
Speaker 1: real than the God who made the promise. Let them
2:35:47
Speaker 1: hear Caleb tonight. The Lord delights in us. He will
2:35:51
Speaker 1: bring us in. Do not be afraid. For those standing
2:35:55
Speaker 1: at their own Jordan river, close enough to see the
2:35:58
Speaker 1: other side, waitaiting for the water to move, Give them
2:36:02
Speaker 1: the courage to let the feet of the priests touch
2:36:04
Speaker 1: the water. The miracle has never failed to come when
2:36:08
Speaker 1: the step was taken in trust. And for those who
2:36:11
Speaker 1: are simply tired tonight, who have been carrying something heavy
2:36:15
Speaker 1: for a long time and need to put it down
2:36:17
Speaker 1: and rest, let these ancient words be the place they
2:36:21
Speaker 1: put it. You have been carried on eagle's wings. You
2:36:25
Speaker 1: are still being carried. The arms that hold you do
2:36:29
Speaker 1: not grow heavy the way Moses' arms grew heavy at Refidim.
2:36:33
Speaker 1: They do not need Aaron and her to hold them up.
2:36:36
Speaker 1: They have been steady since before the beginning, and they
2:36:39
Speaker 1: will be steady until the end. You are not forgotten,
2:36:44
Speaker 1: You are not abandoned. You are not too far from
2:36:47
Speaker 1: your Jordan to cross it. Guard our sleep to night,
2:36:51
Speaker 1: renew our strength in the quiet hours. Let us wake
2:36:55
Speaker 1: in the morning, like Israel, waking to Manna, finding on
2:36:59
Speaker 1: the ground of the new day, exactly what the new
2:37:01
Speaker 1: day needs, given fresh by the same hand that gave
2:37:04
Speaker 1: it yesterday. We are yours, We have always been yours,
2:37:09
Speaker 1: We will always be yours. To you be all glory,
2:37:13
Speaker 1: all honor, all praise, the God who parts the water,
2:37:18
Speaker 1: the God who reigns bread from heaven, the God who
2:37:21
Speaker 1: covers his servant in the cleft of a rock with
2:37:24
Speaker 1: his own hand and says, I will be with you
2:37:27
Speaker 1: wherever you go, forever and ever. Amen. Sleep now, beloved
2:37:33
Speaker 1: child of God. The Exodus is complete. The journey of
2:37:38
Speaker 1: faith continues every morning. The manner, every wilderness, the pillar
2:37:44
Speaker 1: of fire, every impossible sea, a dry road through the middle.
2:37:49
Speaker 1: You are not a slave. You are not a wanderer,
2:37:52
Speaker 1: lost without direction. You are not forgotten in the desert.
2:37:57
Speaker 1: You are carried, You are covered, You are almost home.
2:38:02
Speaker 1: The same God who parted the sea is watching over
2:38:04
Speaker 1: you to night, and in his hands you are safe.
2:38:08
Speaker 1: Good Night,