Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / January 3, 2021 | Exodus - Small Heroes

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January 3, 2021 | Exodus - Small Heroes · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
0:02
SPEAKER_00: How's everybody?
0:04
SPEAKER_00: Happy New Year.
0:07
SPEAKER_00: You are so um deserving of extra points in heaven for making it on on this day.
0:16
SPEAKER_00: What weather we're having.
0:19
SPEAKER_00: So uh as you can tell, uh we are beginning a new series today.
0:25
SPEAKER_00: Let me start a sentence.
0:28
SPEAKER_00: Six words long.
0:29
SPEAKER_00: Let me start a sentence and you finish it with the first thing that comes to mind.
0:33
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
0:34
SPEAKER_00: I'll start the sentence, you finish it.
0:37
SPEAKER_00: Winter is a good time for.
0:42
SPEAKER_00: Winter is a good time for.
0:46
SPEAKER_00: Apple pie.
0:48
SPEAKER_00: Who said?
0:51
SPEAKER_00: I hadn't even thought of that, but that's the best answer I've ever heard of.
0:56
SPEAKER_00: So the interesting thing is uh it strikes me that there are two opposite sort of answers that people give to this when they answer immediately with the first thing on their mind.
1:06
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes opposite answers given by people who are in the very same family.
1:12
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: So some of you, I would imagine, immediately gave an outdoor answer.
1:17
SPEAKER_00: Uh Leona Masterson, my executive secretary, would definitely do that.
1:22
SPEAKER_00: She would immediately give an outdoor answer there.
1:24
SPEAKER_00: Yes, she ought to.
1:25
SPEAKER_00: You're smiling.
1:26
SPEAKER_00: Um winter is a good time, they'd say, for sledding.
1:29
SPEAKER_00: Winter's a good time for snowboarding, winter's a good time for skiing, winter's a good time for snowshoeing, whatever, for ice skating.
1:37
SPEAKER_00: Winter's a good time for outdoor sports, going outside, building snowmen.
1:42
SPEAKER_00: Chances are, however, it strikes me the person next to you probably, this is the way God designed our relationships, uh, probably gave the opposite answer.
1:53
SPEAKER_00: Winter's a good time for holding up indoors by the fire.
1:57
SPEAKER_00: Winter is a good time for curling up on the couch with a cup of hot chocolate.
2:01
SPEAKER_00: So you can tell a lot about a person, for instance, maybe by how they answer that question, though sometimes we answer that question oppositely, depending on the day.
2:11
SPEAKER_00: Well, three years ago in 2018, we decided that winter was a good time for our church to do an in-depth Bible study.
2:21
SPEAKER_00: That is, um, to take the winter from January through up until Easter, and to take three months, and as a church, as much as possible, to take a book of the Bible, a large book and an important book, and to read it together, and then um to do devotionals together that are on our Topeka Bible Church website, uh, three, four, five of those a week.
2:46
SPEAKER_00: And then each Sunday I would preach on that book so that we could get to know an important book of the Bible.
2:53
SPEAKER_00: Each year uh since 2018, my choice of the book was based upon two factors.
2:59
SPEAKER_00: Number one, was it a big enough book to occupy us for three whole months?
3:06
SPEAKER_00: And secondly, was it uh uh a book that was relatively unfamiliar to people, and yet at the same time extremely important.
3:19
SPEAKER_00: So first year, first and second years, we took the fourth and sixth largest books in the Bible, Ezekiel and Isaiah, very, very important books.
3:30
SPEAKER_00: Last year we took actually the longest, the biggest book in the whole Bible, about 32,000, 33,000 words, book of Jeremiah.
3:36
SPEAKER_00: So we've taken big books that have occupied us, that have stretched us for three months, uh, fully, for three months, and and books that are, those are the three most important Old Testament prophets.
3:48
SPEAKER_00: They are full of prophecy, they are full of great stuff.
3:50
SPEAKER_00: I think those of you who went through those would agree with me.
3:53
SPEAKER_00: Those were really valuable.
3:55
SPEAKER_00: If you haven't done that, uh there are people today, I know uh some people, my daughter may be listening, but up in Canada, and she's now teaching a study on Isaiah and is using those notes from a couple of years ago.
4:08
SPEAKER_00: So uh I encourage you to do that.
4:10
SPEAKER_00: Well, this year, as you can tell, my book choice is a book that's slightly more familiar.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: It is uh the book of Exodus, which is the fifth longest book in the Bible.
4:22
SPEAKER_00: And um it is a book that's just super whoops super familiar to nearly everybody, right?
4:34
SPEAKER_00: Because it's an epic tale that we're all familiar of fire and wind and water and and and sand, of snakes that bite and water that drowns, and all of this blood and murder and everything takes place just out just beyond the shadow of the pyramids of Egypt.
4:51
SPEAKER_00: It's a face-off between the powerful nation of Israel and the slaves of Israel, who aren't even a nation yet.
5:00
SPEAKER_00: And uh they are led by their liberating hero whose name is Moses, and who doesn't know Moses?
5:04
SPEAKER_00: He's been played by Charlton Heston and Val Kilmer and Christian Bale, so how can you not know uh Moses?
5:10
SPEAKER_00: And then there's the great Pharaoh of Egypt, and and all of the scenes of this book, and the first half of this book.
5:19
SPEAKER_00: First half of this book is the familiar half.
5:21
SPEAKER_00: It's the story half.
5:22
SPEAKER_00: And the scenes are unforgettable, right?
5:24
SPEAKER_00: A baby in a basket, and and then a fire that doesn't go out in a bush, and and then uh a let my people go, and then the plagues, there's uh the Nile turning to blood, and the frogs and the angel of death, and then the crossing of the Red Sea and the drowning of Pharaoh's army, and and then the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night, and the coming to a great mountain, and thunder, and lightning, and water from a rock, and manna, and a golden calf, and I mean unforgettable stories.
5:55
SPEAKER_00: So if it's so familiar, and this was my struggle, why take it?
6:02
SPEAKER_00: Why study this book?
6:05
SPEAKER_00: And I have two reasons for you.
6:07
SPEAKER_00: Number one, because there is so much of untapped treasure in this book.
6:17
SPEAKER_00: So much that people don't know.
6:20
SPEAKER_00: I was reminded as I thought of this of the young pastor new at his church, who was going around to visit the people of the church, and he was visiting a sweet older lady, and he was extremely nervous, and she had offered him a drink and offered him snacks and so forth, and so he just in his nervousness was devouring everything, and he apologized at the end as he was about to leave.
6:40
SPEAKER_00: He noticed he'd finished all of her, you know, he'd finished her bowl of peanuts, and he apologized for eating them all, and she said, that's okay, Sonny.
6:48
SPEAKER_00: I have already gummed all the chocolate off of them anyway.
6:51
SPEAKER_00: You know.
6:52
SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean pretty bad story, but the Exodus still has a lot of chocolate on it.
6:58
SPEAKER_00: Though you may have read the stories, heard the stories, seen the stories, watched the Prince of Egypt, it's astounding.
7:04
SPEAKER_00: And I think I'll show you a little of that this morning because uh not only after this introduction to the book, I'm gonna show you something out of chapter one before we have the Lord's Table.
7:14
SPEAKER_00: So there's just, it's just a rich book, and the riches are nearly untapped.
7:20
SPEAKER_00: And the second reason is because Exodus is not only less familiar than people think, but it is, I think, far more important a book than people think.
7:30
SPEAKER_00: John Durham, famous commentary, word biblical commentary, his first sentence is the book of Exodus is the first book of the Bible.
7:36
SPEAKER_00: You say no, it isn't.
7:37
SPEAKER_00: Genesis is.
7:38
SPEAKER_00: But what he goes on to explain is that Genesis, in a sense, is an introduction to Exodus, because Exodus creates and begins and is the source of all of the major themes of the Bible.
7:49
SPEAKER_00: This is where God reveals his name, this is where God chooses his people, this is where God gives his special deliverance and his special covenant and special guidance and his special worship and all of this other stuff.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: And so John Durham begins the book of Exodus as the first book of the Bible.
8:04
SPEAKER_00: Genesis basically is a prologue.
8:06
SPEAKER_00: Or another famous commentary, R.
8:07
SPEAKER_00: Alan Cole.
8:08
SPEAKER_00: Exodus stands at the heart of the Old Testament.
8:10
SPEAKER_00: This is not just a simple book with simple stories.
8:14
SPEAKER_00: This book is the font of, you could say, all of the great themes of the Bible.
8:20
SPEAKER_00: Salvation.
8:21
SPEAKER_00: This is where you look, this is where the rest of the Bible looks back to when it starts to talk about salvation, salvation from Babylon, salvation from sin.
8:29
SPEAKER_00: It's always talking about going back to salvation from Egypt.
8:33
SPEAKER_00: Miracles.
8:34
SPEAKER_00: There are three periods of miracles in the Bible.
8:36
SPEAKER_00: Great periods of miracles.
8:37
SPEAKER_00: This is the first of the three, the second, Elijah and Elisha, the third is Jesus.
8:42
SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna have all kinds of miracles in Egypt.
8:45
SPEAKER_00: Then this is the introduction to the Torah, to the law.
8:48
SPEAKER_00: That's why this is the single most important book for Jews, because this is the very heart of their religion, not only their salvation, but this is also where their Torah comes from.
8:57
SPEAKER_00: And then worship.
8:58
SPEAKER_00: This is where the tabernacle gets created.
9:00
SPEAKER_00: This is where God invites people in to get to know him and worship and to get to know him personally.
9:06
SPEAKER_00: So that's what this book is.
9:08
SPEAKER_00: It is that important.
9:09
SPEAKER_00: And I have vacuum-packed all of those things into this title.
9:13
SPEAKER_00: Two phrases, breaking us out and inviting us in.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: Now the fact is that when I would say at least half of the books of the Bible fall into two parts.
9:25
SPEAKER_00: They are what scholars call bifid books.
9:27
SPEAKER_00: They just seem to fall into two parts.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: You think of Paul's epistles, right?
9:32
SPEAKER_00: Ephesians 1 through 3, doctrine, Ephesians 4 through 6, practice.
9:36
SPEAKER_00: Same with Colossians, a lot of Paul's epistles.
9:39
SPEAKER_00: Same with the three prophets we studied these last three years: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, all of them fell into three into two parts.
9:48
SPEAKER_00: Well, Exodus does two, and the first part is about breaking us out, and the second part is about inviting us in.
9:56
SPEAKER_00: This is the theme verse of the book, and I want to show you the theme from that before I get into chapter one.
10:02
SPEAKER_00: Exodus chapter 6, 6 and 7.
10:04
SPEAKER_00: You may want to circle these verses or put an asterisk by them in your Bible, because this is how important Exodus 6, 6 through, we could say 6 through 8 are.
10:15
SPEAKER_00: He begins, therefore say to the Israelites, I am Yahweh, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians.
10:25
SPEAKER_00: I will free you from being slaves to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment.
10:35
SPEAKER_00: This is a statement of salvation.
10:37
SPEAKER_00: It's a statement of redemption.
10:39
SPEAKER_00: It's a statement of what happened to you when you trusted Christ as your Savior.
10:43
SPEAKER_00: Because in the New Testament, it's always going back and quoting words like these.
10:49
SPEAKER_00: That's what God did for Israel.
10:51
SPEAKER_00: He brought them out, he broke them out from under the yoke of the Egyptians, he freed them, and he redeemed them.
10:57
SPEAKER_00: But then in his next words, he says, I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God.
11:04
SPEAKER_00: And then you will know that I am Yahweh, your God, who brought you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians.
11:11
SPEAKER_00: Now he's talking about knowing him and getting to know him personally.
11:17
SPEAKER_00: And by the way, you'll notice the verse continues, and I will bring you to the land I swore with uplifted hand.
11:24
SPEAKER_00: That's not Exodus.
11:25
SPEAKER_00: That's Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua.
11:28
SPEAKER_00: So Exodus sort of stops right here with breaking us out, breaking Israel out, and then inviting us in.
11:36
SPEAKER_00: Just to remind you before I move on from this, the breaking us out part is Exodus chapters 1 through 15, the stories we know best, where God breaks Israel out of Egypt.
11:48
SPEAKER_00: Exodus 16 through 40 is he invites us in.
11:52
SPEAKER_00: And there we have the parts of the book that many of us haven't read very well or with very much interest.
11:58
SPEAKER_00: Not only the Ten Commandments and Exodus chapter 20, but all of the rules and the laws and the tabernacle and so forth.
12:06
SPEAKER_00: Exodus 1 through 15 is about the land of bondage and freeing us from that.
12:11
SPEAKER_00: The second part of the book is about the mountain of God, Mount Sinai.
12:15
SPEAKER_00: The first part is about salvation.
12:17
SPEAKER_00: The second part is what we would call sanctification.
12:20
SPEAKER_00: The first part is about new birth across the Red Sea.
12:24
SPEAKER_00: The second part is about a new way of living.
12:26
SPEAKER_00: The first part is about being rescued by God, and the second part is about knowing God.
12:31
SPEAKER_00: So this is going to capture all that we need to know from before we became a Christian, how to become a Christian, and all the way up through our spiritual life.
12:44
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
12:45
SPEAKER_00: So I would like to challenge you to accept the Exodus Challenge this January, February, and March.
12:53
SPEAKER_00: I'd like you to read the 40 chapters in the book of Exodus.
12:56
SPEAKER_00: That's four chapters, ten weeks a chapter.
12:59
SPEAKER_00: Four chapters until Palm Sunday.
13:02
SPEAKER_00: And we'll all climb this mountain together.
13:04
SPEAKER_00: This week, read chapters one through four.
13:07
SPEAKER_00: And starting tomorrow, we'll have uh daily devotionals.
13:11
SPEAKER_00: Exodus chapters one, two, and three, four will be on there this week.
13:14
SPEAKER_00: I hope you'll join me in that.
13:15
SPEAKER_00: I hope I won't be the only one doing this.
13:17
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
13:18
SPEAKER_00: I know a lot of you did this last year.
13:20
SPEAKER_00: It was great.
13:21
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
13:22
SPEAKER_00: So let me uh before the Lord's table, let me show you how cool, just to start off Exodus one, let me show you something really, really neat that that I don't think very many people see in Exodus chapter one.
13:35
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
13:36
SPEAKER_00: Um and I left my Bible and back.
13:40
SPEAKER_00: So um there's a Bible in the back of the pew.
13:43
SPEAKER_00: Can can somebody grab me a Bible?
13:46
SPEAKER_00: This is the NIV and the translation I'm using on screen.
13:51
SPEAKER_00: Uh I'm just excerpting parts of this.
13:54
SPEAKER_00: If you have a Bible, please open it to Exodus chapter 1.
13:57
SPEAKER_00: If you have a cell phone, just as good.
14:03
SPEAKER_00: So Exodus 1 is going to um tell us, it's going to be a transition from Genesis chapter 1.
14:15
SPEAKER_00: From the book of Genesis.
14:16
SPEAKER_00: In fact, the very first word of the book of Exodus is the word and.
14:19
SPEAKER_00: So uh to let us know that Exodus is part of a bigger story.
14:24
SPEAKER_00: It is part of the story of the Pentateuch.
14:27
SPEAKER_00: And literally it says, and these are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt or entered Egypt with Jacob, each with his family.
14:40
SPEAKER_00: And then we have 11 names: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin, Dan, and Naphtali, Gad, and Asher.
14:53
SPEAKER_00: And then it says the descendants of Jacob numbered 70 in all, or the Christian Standard Bible says the total number of people then was 70.
15:04
SPEAKER_00: The emphasis here is on how few there were.
15:07
SPEAKER_00: This is actually a quote from the end of Genesis.
15:11
SPEAKER_00: It's trying to create a link to say that Jacob came down, his family came down, there were just a few of them, they were given the land of Goshen, but they were just a tiny number, all right?
15:21
SPEAKER_00: And then it says Joseph was already in Egypt.
15:26
SPEAKER_00: So Joseph makes 12, the 12 sons of Jacob, all right?
15:29
SPEAKER_00: And then it says, now Joseph and all his brothers and all that generation died.
15:35
SPEAKER_00: That's a significant statement.
15:38
SPEAKER_00: Because what that means is that the Israel's Israel's spiritual leaders were gone.
15:45
SPEAKER_00: And some of you immediately know what that's like.
15:47
SPEAKER_00: You grew up in a family where your grandparents perhaps were the spiritual leaders in that family, and when they died, there was a spiritual gap.
15:55
SPEAKER_00: In 1875 BC, Jacob came down to Egypt.
16:00
SPEAKER_00: He had a link with God.
16:02
SPEAKER_00: His sons had a link with God.
16:04
SPEAKER_00: If you lived, if you were part of their extended family and you wanted to know, is God really reliable?
16:10
SPEAKER_00: You went and saw old Jacob.
16:12
SPEAKER_00: Or you went and saw your grandfather, Joseph, or whatever.
16:17
SPEAKER_00: And you had your faith renewed.
16:20
SPEAKER_00: But then they died.
16:23
SPEAKER_00: And now you are this little group of people surrounded by all kinds of people.
16:28
SPEAKER_00: The Egyptians didn't like, uh they didn't like people, you know, they didn't like the Israelites who had sheep.
16:34
SPEAKER_00: And so you're surrounded by people that don't like you very much.
16:38
SPEAKER_00: And you have no spiritual leaders.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: This is very common, by the way, in the mission field.
16:43
SPEAKER_00: Especially if you go to a third world country, you try to establish a church, and they can't find a spiritual leader.
16:51
SPEAKER_00: There are people who trust Christ as their savior, but I remember for years in Morocco looking around for one person who could be a spiritual leader.
17:01
SPEAKER_00: So this is a familiar story to many of us in our families, or especially to missionaries.
17:07
SPEAKER_00: So all you have is a few people, and then Joseph and all of the great saints, grandma, grandpa, they all die.
17:14
SPEAKER_00: The leaders are gone.
17:16
SPEAKER_00: And you hear, and by the way, you're gonna know this.
17:20
SPEAKER_00: We read the Bible, you don't notice this.
17:22
SPEAKER_00: You will not find the name of God anywhere in chapter, in chapter, uh, in chapter one, at least not God acting.
17:31
SPEAKER_00: So you don't hear from God.
17:34
SPEAKER_00: God seems to be absent, and yet something happens.
17:37
SPEAKER_00: But the Israelites were seven words, fruitful, increased rapidly, multiplied, became extremely numerous so that the land was filled with them.
17:45
SPEAKER_00: The book of Exodus loves the number seven, and when it's trying to make a point, it says something right after, you know, in seven different ways.
17:52
SPEAKER_00: Why are these words so important?
17:56
SPEAKER_00: Well, if you know Genesis chapter one, you know these are the words that are used in God's creation when God blessed the earth and God multiplied the animals and they began swarming, the birds and the beasts and people and so forth.
18:10
SPEAKER_00: And when Noah came out of the ark, God said to him, I'm going to bless you, and I'm going to make all of your people increase and multiply.
18:16
SPEAKER_00: And then when God chose Abraham, he said, I know Abraham, it's just you, but you know, God's, I'm going to do something for you.
18:23
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to turn you into a great nation, and you're going to become fruitful, and you're going to increase and multiply and become a great nation, become extremely numerous.
18:30
SPEAKER_00: And as you go through the book of Genesis, you have these repeated promises by God when he says, I am going to bless you in the sight of my blessing, is you're going to become numerous.
18:39
SPEAKER_00: This is a creation blessing and a blessing to his people.
18:43
SPEAKER_00: So even though God seems to be absent, yet something is happening.
18:47
SPEAKER_00: And if if those people were watching, they would say, you know, there's a miracle happening here.
18:51
SPEAKER_00: Somehow, somehow, even though even though we're just a small group of people, we must be being blessed by God.
18:59
SPEAKER_00: That's in verses 1 through 7.
19:02
SPEAKER_00: So it says in verse 7, so that the land was filled with them.
19:07
SPEAKER_00: My point here, and the point that we're going to find common in this chapter, is when the spiritual leaders are dead and gone and God is absent, look for signs of his promises.
19:17
SPEAKER_00: If you feel alone in your extended family, if you feel as though there's no spiritual leaders, if you feel as though God's not acting, or even if in today's world you feel as though somehow God has abandoned our world and he doesn't seem to be acting, and oftentimes that seems to be true.
19:33
SPEAKER_00: Look for signs of his promises.
19:37
SPEAKER_00: Evidence.
19:38
SPEAKER_00: The promises that God has made in his word are coming true.
19:43
SPEAKER_00: For some of you, I know the promises that Israel is going to return to the land in the end times, that's an important promise that reminds you, right?
19:50
SPEAKER_00: That God is working today because you've seen what's happened since 1948.
19:55
SPEAKER_00: Or sometimes you find that God has made you promise God made you promises in Psalm 23 that when you go through the valley of the shadow, he would be with you.
20:03
SPEAKER_00: And when you lost that loved one, you felt his presence like you've never felt it before.
20:08
SPEAKER_00: When the spiritual leaders in your life are dead and gone and God seems to be absent, look for signs of his promises.
20:15
SPEAKER_00: But it gets worse for Israel.
20:17
SPEAKER_00: A new king, verses 8 through 14, chapter 1 divides into three even parts, seven verses each.
20:23
SPEAKER_00: A new king who did not know about Joseph came to power.
20:27
SPEAKER_00: Now you have a new dynasty.
20:29
SPEAKER_00: This is about 150 years after Israel has been in Egypt of the 400 years that they're going to be there.
20:36
SPEAKER_00: They're multiplying and they're getting more, but all of a sudden a new dynasty comes.
20:40
SPEAKER_00: And that dynasty doesn't know about Joseph and all that Joseph did for Egypt, and he came and he came to power in Egypt.
20:48
SPEAKER_00: Look, he said to his people, the Israelites, Israelite people are more numerous and powerful than we are.
20:54
SPEAKER_00: He's exaggerating.
20:56
SPEAKER_00: But this is what tyrants do, this is what Hitler did.
20:59
SPEAKER_00: You scare people, you make it sound far worse than it is.
21:02
SPEAKER_00: They're too numerous and they're taking over.
21:04
SPEAKER_00: Watch out for those Jews here in Germany.
21:06
SPEAKER_00: They're going to wipe us out.
21:08
SPEAKER_00: And so you uh you know, you play the race card, and that's exactly what it does.
21:12
SPEAKER_00: The Israelites have become much more, much too numerous for us.
21:15
SPEAKER_00: Come.
21:16
SPEAKER_00: We must deal, let's deal shrewdly with them.
21:19
SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, they will multiply further.
21:22
SPEAKER_00: And when war breaks out, they'll join our enemies, fight against us, and leave the country.
21:26
SPEAKER_00: That's through verse 10.
21:27
SPEAKER_00: And so as a result, the Egyptians assign taskmasters over the Israelites to oppress them.
21:32
SPEAKER_00: Suddenly, they're living from living in Shangri-La up in Goshen, up in the Delta, the northern part of Egypt, where there's a lot of fertility.
21:40
SPEAKER_00: All of a sudden, all of a sudden, they're now in prison.
21:44
SPEAKER_00: They're now in a death trap.
21:46
SPEAKER_00: They're now in slavery.
21:47
SPEAKER_00: The Egyptians assigned taskmasters over the Israelites to oppress them with forced labor.
21:53
SPEAKER_00: And we read in verse 11 and they built Python and Ramses as store cities for Pharaoh.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: These are, we think we know where these cities are.
22:03
SPEAKER_00: And these were not only supply cities, but probably, it seems, military bases from the archaeology.
22:09
SPEAKER_00: But the more the oppressed them, notice that the more they multiplied and spread till the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites.
22:16
SPEAKER_00: And here again, they're enslaved, they're starved.
22:20
SPEAKER_00: God is silent.
22:22
SPEAKER_00: They're feared.
22:23
SPEAKER_00: They're hated.
22:24
SPEAKER_00: God is silent.
22:25
SPEAKER_00: And yet, enslaved and starved and by this, so the evidence seems to be that they had labor camps that is sort of like uh what the Chinese are doing to the uh Magyars up north in China right now.
22:38
SPEAKER_00: They have these huge labor camps in which the they get the they get they get the the Egyptians solved an economic problem.
22:46
SPEAKER_00: They got all of these cities built for free, and at the same time, they were trying to curb the population growth of Israel.
22:54
SPEAKER_00: And you do that by taking the men away from the families, a hundred miles away from their families and keeping them in labor camps and making them work till they're exhausted, and then of course the they can't work the fields, and then you have people dying of starvation and so forth.
23:07
SPEAKER_00: It's just uh a horrible control.
23:10
SPEAKER_00: And God seems to be silent, and yet, if you had your eyes open, you would say, but yet, the more they oppress us, the more God's promise that he's gonna grow us into a great nation seems to be fulfilled.
23:25
SPEAKER_00: When people oppress you and your God seems to be absent, look for signs of his promises.
23:33
SPEAKER_00: Go to the book, go to the Bible, read Psalm 23, read some of his promises and ask yourself, is God not fulfilling some of these promises?
23:42
SPEAKER_00: When I look at the land of Israel, do I not see God beginning to fulfill some of his promises?
23:48
SPEAKER_00: But this uh this second section in verse 13, again the number seven, mentions how grievous, how grievous this uh enslavement was.
24:01
SPEAKER_00: Seven different ways they talk about the work.
24:04
SPEAKER_00: They worked the Israelites ruthlessly and made their lives bitter with difficult labor and brick and mortar and all kinds of field work.
24:10
SPEAKER_00: They ruthlessly imposed all this work on them.
24:14
SPEAKER_00: This was a horrible time.
24:15
SPEAKER_00: Let's never underestimate how bad this was for Israel.
24:19
SPEAKER_00: And then in verses 15 through 22, the third section of the chapter, we find that we have a new population control method, moving from slave labor to secret murder, and finally to genocide.
24:32
SPEAKER_00: We read about that in verses 15 through 22.
24:35
SPEAKER_00: The king of Egypt.
24:37
SPEAKER_00: By the way, would you notice something?
24:39
SPEAKER_00: The most important man in the world never gets named, which drives us scholars crazy.
24:50
SPEAKER_00: We could answer so many historical questions about the book of Exodus if they would just name who this pharaoh is.
24:59
SPEAKER_00: If three pharaohs referred to in this chapter, none of them is named.
25:04
SPEAKER_00: You know why?
25:06
SPEAKER_00: I think I think God disdained them.
25:11
SPEAKER_00: They may be the most powerful person in the world.
25:14
SPEAKER_00: They may be, if you ask anybody in his in Egypt, if you ask the Pharaoh himself, who are you?
25:20
SPEAKER_00: He would say, I am the in flesh, incarnation of Ray, the sun god.
25:27
SPEAKER_00: They really did believe that the sun God came down and incarnated himself in flesh and the Pharaoh.
25:33
SPEAKER_00: That's how important he thought he was, but that's not how God looked at him.
25:36
SPEAKER_00: Because, see, God had a plan.
25:38
SPEAKER_00: God had a plan for his people to grow them and prosper them and multiply them.
25:42
SPEAKER_00: And who was the one person on earth more than anyone else working against God's plan and God's promise and God's blessing?
25:49
SPEAKER_00: The answer was it was the Pharaoh.
25:51
SPEAKER_00: He was opposed to God, and so I think Donald Gray Barnhouse, the old preacher, was right when he said he was Satan incarnate in a way, not God incarnate, but he was the Satan on earth working against God's plans.
26:03
SPEAKER_00: And so you have here a terrible battle of Pharaoh versus Yahweh, the king of Egypt versus the king of the universe.
26:12
SPEAKER_00: And one way that God shows his disdain for the king of Egypt is not even to name him.
26:19
SPEAKER_00: God may not be named in this chapter.
26:23
SPEAKER_00: He may not be making an appearance, by the way.
26:25
SPEAKER_00: By the way, first two chapters of this book, God hides out.
26:28
SPEAKER_00: He's absent, drives Israel crazy.
26:31
SPEAKER_00: And all of a sudden, in the last couple verses of chapter two, God announces himself, steps forward, comes from backstage, and stands at the middle of the front of the stage and takes control of the rest of this book, and he is on every every single page of this book.
26:46
SPEAKER_00: But not right now.
26:48
SPEAKER_00: Right now, he's still backstage.
26:50
SPEAKER_00: He's absent.
26:51
SPEAKER_00: And God's not going to give the king of Egypt any glory by naming him.
26:55
SPEAKER_00: So the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, and now finally, for the first time, we have somebody named in this chapter.
27:04
SPEAKER_00: And it spends a lot of time, literally, in the Hebrew, saying, and the first one of them was named Shifra, and the second one of them was named Puh.
27:13
SPEAKER_00: And you're going, whoa! I'd give anything historically to know who the Pharaoh was.
27:18
SPEAKER_00: And God says, not important.
27:20
SPEAKER_00: I'll tell you who's important.
27:22
SPEAKER_00: A midwife named Shra.
27:24
SPEAKER_00: Another midwife named Puah.
27:26
SPEAKER_00: It's clear from this chapter if you look at it in a close reading, that these were like the head nurses.
27:31
SPEAKER_00: They were the head midwives of the country, and there were all kinds of midwives who worked underneath them.
27:35
SPEAKER_00: By the way, Shifra's name means something like fair, and Pu'ah means something like fragrant.
27:39
SPEAKER_00: And they were fair and fragrant.
27:40
SPEAKER_00: They were the first pro-life resistance, you know, in the whole world.
27:44
SPEAKER_00: And they were in charge of all of the midwives of the Israelites who were extremely busy.
27:49
SPEAKER_00: And as we study midwives in ancient days, they generally did not have families.
27:54
SPEAKER_00: They were very busy, so they were single women, these were probably older women, did not have families at this time.
28:01
SPEAKER_00: Notice how God's going to bless them.
28:03
SPEAKER_00: But it gives their names because they are the heroes of this chapter.
28:08
SPEAKER_00: These two women we never think about are the heroes of this chapter, and they get named.
28:14
SPEAKER_00: And Pharaoh says to these two women, he calls these two leading, these two sort of head nurses, head midwives, and he says, When you help the Hebrew women in childbirth and observe them on the delivery stool, if it's a boy, kill them.
28:28
SPEAKER_00: If it's a girl, let her live.
28:30
SPEAKER_00: The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do.
28:37
SPEAKER_00: Let the boys live.
28:39
SPEAKER_00: That's uh this the whole the the plan of Pharaoh here is secret murder, where the midwife would, as the uh Hebrew uh woman was giving birth, the he uh the midwife would take the baby out and then throttle the baby or wrap the cord around its neck or something like that and would kill the baby and say, Oh, I'm so sorry.
28:56
SPEAKER_00: It looks as though your boy has died.
28:58
SPEAKER_00: And in a day where, as you know, a quarter to a third of all babies died in childbirth, this would not be shocking.
29:04
SPEAKER_00: Well, this was the technique, and somehow the king of Egypt thought that this was being shrewd, that he could get Hebrew midwives to do this.
29:12
SPEAKER_00: We know they're Hebrew because of their names, very Hebrew, Hebrew names, they're not Egyptian.
29:17
SPEAKER_00: So, um, but they feared God, it says.
29:20
SPEAKER_00: They feared God more than they feared the king.
29:22
SPEAKER_00: So incredibly brave, they decide not to do it.
29:26
SPEAKER_00: So you have these, you can just imagine them going into a house and being concerned and giving, you know, help helping a woman with a baby.
29:34
SPEAKER_00: Now, I don't know how long this took before the king of Egypt realized.
29:37
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if it was the the kindergarten teachers at all of the uh public schools across Egypt said, you know what?
29:43
SPEAKER_00: We're we're not, I thought you told us we were gonna have only girl Hebrew babies after a while.
29:48
SPEAKER_00: We've got just as many boy babies as ever.
29:50
SPEAKER_00: So, whatever it is, he somehow finds out that they're not doing it.
29:53
SPEAKER_00: And so the king of Egypt summons the midwives, and now they're in trouble.
29:58
SPEAKER_00: And he asks him, Why have you done this?
30:00
SPEAKER_00: Why have you let the boys live?
30:03
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, he had used a carrot and a stick early on.
30:06
SPEAKER_00: He said, If you do this, I'll reward you greatly, but if you don't do it, you know, I'll kill you.
30:11
SPEAKER_00: But now he summons them and he says, Why have you done this and let the boys live?
30:14
SPEAKER_00: And the midwives, midwives answer him.
30:17
SPEAKER_00: Hebrew women aren't like Egyptian women.
30:20
SPEAKER_00: They are vigorous and give birth before the midwives arrive.
30:26
SPEAKER_00: And that's all they needed to say.
30:28
SPEAKER_00: And the Pharaoh, who prided himself on being so shrewd, clearly is a couple bricks short of a pyramid.
30:34
SPEAKER_00: Because I mean, he he doesn't think, uh, well then why would there even be midwives if you never get there in time?
30:42
SPEAKER_00: I mean, what would that make no sense?
30:45
SPEAKER_00: And but no, he he falls for it.
30:48
SPEAKER_00: He believes it.
30:49
SPEAKER_00: Now, obviously there's a moral problem here, and I'll deal with that in my devotion.
30:54
SPEAKER_00: But let me just say, see, so because people go, well, you know, they lied to him.
30:59
SPEAKER_00: And and how in the world, how in the world can you do that?
31:03
SPEAKER_00: How is that okay?
31:04
SPEAKER_00: And then some people take, take, take, you know, you know, get into advanced ethics and talk about the greater evil and the greater good and so forth.
31:11
SPEAKER_00: I I don't do that at all.
31:13
SPEAKER_00: I just want to say that if, you know, if if they had told him the truth, which he did not deserve to hear, truth telling is telling a person the truth that they deserve to hear.
31:26
SPEAKER_00: If they had told him the truth that they said we fear God more than you, he would have killed them and then found midwives who have killed the Hebrew babies.
31:33
SPEAKER_00: And so if if I'm a Jewish person and I'm hiding in your house and and the Nazis are at the door, I I hope you'll be clever, and I hope you won't tell the truth.
31:44
SPEAKER_00: Uh but anyway, uh we'll talk about that uh in devotionals, uh, because I I know this can offend people.
31:51
SPEAKER_00: So um so God was good.
31:53
SPEAKER_00: Notice the the the proof that God loved what they did is you have all of these statements.
31:59
SPEAKER_00: God was good, so God was good to the midwives, and the people multiplied and became very numerous.
32:04
SPEAKER_00: Here we have God's blessing again.
32:06
SPEAKER_00: And since the midwives feared God, he gave them families.
32:10
SPEAKER_00: I think this was like a Sarah miracle.
32:12
SPEAKER_00: They're old, and yet God blessed them with families as well.
32:15
SPEAKER_00: And so Pharaoh then commanded all of his people, you must throw every son born to the Hebrews into the Nile.
32:21
SPEAKER_00: That's how the chapter ends with now open genocide, and we can we are reminded of nothing uh so clearly as uh World War II.
32:31
SPEAKER_00: And and Hans Franck, who killed thousands and thousands of Jewish people in Poland, who said to his cabinet, and there he is right here next to his hero, uh, as far as the Jews are concerned, rid yourselves of all pity.
32:45
SPEAKER_00: We must annihilate them.
32:49
SPEAKER_00: And that's uh that's what we have going on at the end of Genesis chapter one.
32:55
SPEAKER_00: But here's the lesson that I think is just really cool I love from Exodus chapter one.
33:01
SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry.
33:01
SPEAKER_00: When God's enemies rule and God's children groan, and God is nowhere to be seen, small people become great heroes.
33:12
SPEAKER_00: And some of the great literature that you and I love, some of the great novels, some of the great stories that you and I love, the stories of, let's say, Lord of the Rings, feature small heroes with great courage who, when all looks lost, Hobbits, Frodo and Sam, William Tell, um, the Mr.
33:28
SPEAKER_00: and Mrs.
33:29
SPEAKER_00: Beaver, you know, and the lion, the witch in the wardrobe.
33:32
SPEAKER_00: Small people, small heroes that step forward that God raises up and brings forward at times like this when God's enemies rule, crushing God's children and God's nowhere to be seen.
33:43
SPEAKER_00: Small people become great heroes.
33:45
SPEAKER_00: When we cry out for God, yet he remains invisible and silent.
33:49
SPEAKER_00: One way we know he is there, working behind the scenes, is that he raises up brave heroes to save the day.
33:57
SPEAKER_00: And there are brave heroes like that.
33:59
SPEAKER_00: Quiet people, little people around the world today.
34:02
SPEAKER_00: Some of them are walking hospital halls, some of them are walking, you know, prison wards, some of them are in public schools today.
34:09
SPEAKER_00: They stand up for Christ, they stand up for God, they are brave.
34:13
SPEAKER_00: They refuse to kill babies in abortions.
34:17
SPEAKER_00: They're like uh they're like the woman there in Pakistan who lost everything that was dear to her when the Muslim terrorists started killing all those she loved, and yet she refused to recant her faith and she stayed true to God.
34:30
SPEAKER_00: They are like that professor at uh Virginia University when uh fellow Cho came through and started shooting people, and and this engineering professor, who, by the way, had himself already survived concentration camps in World War II, told his students to climb out the window, stood there at the door, and as Cho shot him repeatedly, blocked his way until all his students could get free.
34:51
SPEAKER_00: There are heroes in our world today, people that we don't know, small people, quiet people that God raises up, even when he himself seems to be invisible and absent.
35:01
SPEAKER_00: Look for those people.
35:03
SPEAKER_00: If you have a chance, be one of those people.
35:05
SPEAKER_00: Small acts of courage are what let other people know that God is still active when he does not seem to be visible and when he seems to be silent.
35:17
SPEAKER_00: And that I think is one of the wonderful lessons of uh Exodus chapter one.
35:26
SPEAKER_00: So uh we're gonna we're gonna take the Lord's table at this point, and um just I want you to think for just a second.
35:35
SPEAKER_00: This is another sign that Exodus is so important.
35:38
SPEAKER_00: When when Jesus um uh went to the Mount of Transfiguration, remember he took Peter, James, and John, and he was transfigured, and two Old Testament men came down to join him.
35:50
SPEAKER_00: One was Elijah, the other was Moses.
35:54
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
35:55
SPEAKER_00: The Moses of this book.
35:57
SPEAKER_00: And it says they talked about Jesus' death and his departure from the earth.
36:03
SPEAKER_00: And the word used in Luke chapter 9 for that is the word Exodus.
36:08
SPEAKER_00: They talked about Jesus Exodus.
36:11
SPEAKER_00: And when you think about it, Jesus was Exodus incarnate.
36:16
SPEAKER_00: He went down to Egypt like the children of Israel did.
36:19
SPEAKER_00: Remember, as a baby, to escape death.
36:23
SPEAKER_00: He himself was uh constantly oppressed.
36:26
SPEAKER_00: He himself was the great Moses who delivered all of us.
36:31
SPEAKER_00: And and he is the model of both the children of Israel and the book of Moses, and the man Moses.
36:38
SPEAKER_00: So as you take uh the bread in the cup this morning, realize that the bread and the cup are uh are a continuation of the book of Exodus, and let's celebrate the salvation that God gives us.
36:51
SPEAKER_00: The God who sent his son Jesus Christ, who was the new Moses, who showed us the way out of Egypt.
36:58
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
37:00
SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, thank you for your grace, for your love for us, for uh, for for for uh bringing your son to a dark place to earth to die for us.
37:16
SPEAKER_00: At times it seems as though you stand aloof from us.
37:19
SPEAKER_00: We see horrible things happening.
37:22
SPEAKER_00: Um this is this has been a lost year for many people this last year.
37:27
SPEAKER_00: And yet I know you would want it to be a found year for us.
37:30
SPEAKER_00: That we would have found you and found that in the darkness you are still there, that you keep the promises in your word, and you love us, and you died for us, and you want to live for us, and you want us to live with you.
37:44
SPEAKER_00: So, as we take the bread and as we drink the cup, help us to see you on the cross and remember what you've done in Jesus' name.
37:50
SPEAKER_00: Amen.