Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / January 10, 2021 | Exodus - Three Women And A Baby

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January 10, 2021 | Exodus - Three Women And A Baby · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Breaking us out and inviting us in.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I love our bumper video.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that cool?
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: So today we have a story about how God used three women to save a baby from death.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's breaking us out.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to invite all of you to join us these three months in taking, accepting the Exodus Challenge, which means that between now and Palm Sunday, we're reading four chapters a week, 40 chapters in the book.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: And this coming week will be the second week of the Exodus Challenge, chapters five through eight.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: How many of you read chapters one through four this last week?
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Way to go.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry I didn't get the devotionals on promptly on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday mornings, but I'll get used to it.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: It takes me a while to click in early on.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: And they're not just devotionals.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: I want to tell you if you haven't done these yet.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: These are Bible studies, devotionals.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: They are ways of taking the story that is 3,500 years old and bringing it into today.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: So I hope you'll join me in that.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: And today we have the story of how God used three women to save a baby from death.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: It features one mother and two daughters, two girls, but by the end of the story, one of the girls here in chapter 2, verses 1 through 10, becomes a mother as well.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: She becomes Moses' adoptive mother.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Not one of the women is named in the story, but they are heroes because they save a baby who is going to grow up and be the greatest hero and deliverer that the world has ever seen up to that day, and they defy an order from the greatest ruler in the world, Tutmosis I, the Pharaoh, king of Egypt.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: They use their wit, they use their courage, and in the case of two of them, their faith.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: So as the story begins, just for those of you who may not be familiar with chapter one, went around last week, the Hebrews, who are the ethnic descendants of Abraham, have grown into a massive group of people, perhaps two million people, within the land of Egypt.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: They live up north in what's called the Nile Delta because their ancestor Joseph saved the country and was given prime property.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now, because they have grown so much, the Pharaoh, who is somewhat paranoid, excuse me, like many people when they see immigrants growing and multiplying, he's paranoid they're going to take over the country and he set out to reduce the number of the population.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: And after a couple of failed events, one, which is slave labor, and the other, which is trying to bribe the lead Hebrew midwives, Shifra and Pua, chapter one names them, they are heroines, bribe them to kill the boy babies.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: After a couple of failed events, uh Pharaoh authorizes every Egyptian citizen to kill on site each and every Hebrew baby boy.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: So that brings us to chapter two, when Moses is born and when it's open season on Hebrew baby boys.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, we're getting to a super important birth.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: This is the birth of Moses, the most important event, one of the most important events in all of Hebrew history, because he becomes the greatest man of God in the Bible to live during the 2,000 years between Abraham and Jesus Christ.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: His birth happens sometime around 1525 BC, in what's called the 18th dynasty of Egypt.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: He has an older sister named Miriam, about 10 years older, and he has an older brother named Aaron, who's about three years old.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: Neither one of them gets named either.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: So as the chapter begins, we read, now a man from the family of Levi married a Levite woman.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Notice it doesn't identify them by their names, it identifies them by their tribe.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then it says the woman became pregnant and gave birth to a son.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: Why does it identify them by their tribe?
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer is that we're going to find out later in this book that this is of all the tribes, the Levite tribe is the spiritual leader tribe.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's the clergy tribe.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's the tribe of those who are going to lead the nation spiritually.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: Numbers chapter 8, 16, God says, the Levites are exclusively assigned to me.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: And that means that because he has whatever, whoever this boy is, and whoever his parents are, this first verse is letting us know and reminding the Israelites who would read this later, that Moses is fully qualified.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: This boy is fully qualified to be the spiritual leader of the nation.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's why it mentions the tribe.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Verse 2 goes on to say, when she saw, that's his unnamed mother, we know her name is going to be, we're going to be told in a few chapters, her name is Jochebed, J-O-C-A-T-B-D.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: We'll just call her Joe.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: Father's name Amram.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: We'll just call him Am.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: But when Joe saw that he was beautiful, she hid him for three months, which is a little problematic, I don't know, for you, for me when we read it, as though somehow the other women in Israel didn't see that their babies were beautiful.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it's sort of a misunderstanding.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: The word actually is when she saw that he was Tov or good, which is the word used constantly, let's say, in Genesis chapter 1.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: God saw the light and it was Tov.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: God saw things and they were good.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: Eve saw the apple apple, grape, probably a grape, and she saw that it looked good.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: And all this means is that like any Hebrew mother, any mother at all, she saw him, she longed to keep him, she didn't want to lose him, she loved him, she hid him.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, for three months.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, in Hebrews 11, 23, we find almost a quote of this verse by faith we're told, Moses' parents hid him, and that word, by the way, hid, the Greek word hid is this cool word that implies there's a treasure involved.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: She hid him like a treasure.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: For three months after he was born, because they saw he was no ordinary child.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's NIV.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Other translations, maybe yours says, because he was beautiful, but it just means because he was special to them, like any baby is to any parent, and they were not afraid of the king's edict.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: So they had faith, they knew they knew that they didn't care what happened to them, they weren't about to let him die.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: So we move back, Exodus chapter 2, verse 3, but it says, but when she, that is mom, could no longer hide him, that is, after about three months, and I assume what happened is that the Egyptian soldiers are doing a sweep every day or every couple of days to the Israelite settlements up there in the land of Goshen, coming through the towns and so forth.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: And up until uh baby's about three months old, it doesn't move around much.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: You can nurse it to keep it quiet, you can hide it pretty easily behind furniture.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody will see it if they check.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: But after three months, that gets harder.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: So when she could no longer hide him, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with asphalt or tar and pitch.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: A couple things about this, this is an unfortunate translation in most of our translations.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: Basket, for one thing, of course, we picture baskets as being open things, and a lot of the photo, the photographs you see of Moses on the Nile have him in an open basket, which is crazy.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: You know, so so it's a closed basket, it's got a lid that can be sealed, but more importantly, the word basket is a the word basket is a rare word in Hebrew.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's only used one other time in the Old Testament.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's used in Genesis 6 and the time of the flood for the ark.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: So this is actually, we are meant to think, this is a small version of what Moses, of what Noah wrote in, and what saved the people, uh, God's people, back in Genesis chapter 6 during the flood.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: We are meant to think back of the flood and how the flood was a watery death and it was doomed for so many people.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: But this was a saving ark.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: This was a special uh uh chest, let's say, that that is supposed to remind us that that Moses is like Noah.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Moses like Noah is going to be a deliverer who makes it through the water, who survives the great waters, and he is going to come out the other side, and he is going to establish, in a sense, a new world for his people, the way Noah did.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: He's going to establish a wonderful new place where they can start all over again.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's what we're meant to see here when it says ark.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a little ark for a little baby, and she makes a papyrus basket because there's very little, if you've been to Egypt, you know, even still, there's very few trees down there.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: There certainly weren't very many trees, but there's a lot of papyrus reeds on aligning both sides of the Nile River.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: And those papyrus reeds are strong and they grow high, and certainly a lot of furniture in Egypt, we can be sure was made out of woven papyrus.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: This kind of stuff right here that we still use, you know, for chairs by the pool or whatever.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: So we don't know if she purchased this basket or whether she already had a uh a chest made out of papyrus, but she got this, and then what she did, her her uh what she did with it is that she coated it with pitch, with tar, which is really common in Egypt, so that it would be watertight.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I think we can also be sure that she had air holes, you know, for the baby.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we we can probably also imagine, if you've ever been to Egypt, you know, with all the mosquitoes, that she might have had a little bit of mosquito netting in there as well.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: She certainly decked it out nicely, but it was big enough for a three-month-old baby boy.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so she gets this basket for him and she coats it with asphalt and pitch.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: And verse, at the end of verse 3, she placed the child in it and she set it among the reeds by the bank of the Nile.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: And what we're meant to see is that there are these tall reeds by the bank of the Nile.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: Nile's a scary place.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: There are crocodiles in the Nile, and and and and and the water is moving in the Nile, so you you don't want to put it there and have it drift downstream.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: So you need to have it sort of secured.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: But they have these clumps of reeds.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: She needs it to be invisible from the shore.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: So she puts it just a little ways out in a place where it's clearly not going to be able to be seen, where it's not going to be moving, where it's not in open water, where the crocodiles, you know, can can make a meal out of it.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: And and so she she finds this place, which is perfect because it's outdoors, because the cries of the baby then are going to be muffled by the papyrus uh chest, and also by the sound of the river, and by the sounds of people going by in the water.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so his cries are gonna be muffled.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, this doesn't mean that she she just left it there 24-7.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you a baby's not gonna survive then or today without being fed.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so, of course, she she had it in a place where when the police weren't around or whatever, you know, she could go out there and she could nurse the baby.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I have no doubt that she that after nightfall, when there was when when there were no flashlights back then, and the soldiers or the police weren't gonna be making sweeps through looking for baby boys, I'm I'm sure that they took that and she brought this baby back home and she slept with it during the night and then took it out uh before daylight the next morning.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't think we're meant to see that the baby was out there 24-7, starving.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: And then his sister, we're not told her name either, but she's the second of the two great women in this chapter.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: She stood at a distance in order to see what would happen to him.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: How old was this?
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: Was her as the sister.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: I've already told you, I think she was about 10.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: She had to be, she couldn't be so young, I would say under eight years old, so young that it would be strange to see this single little girl playing alone by the Nile River.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: That would have been uh that would have been strange.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: She needs to be older so she can at least appear to be playing, lounging, whatever, by herself, and nobody would think twice.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: But she can't be older than 11 or 12, because then uh she she would that would look strange because every 11, 12, 13, 14-year-old girl, they're about marriageable age anyway, but they're supposed to be home or out in the fields helping their mother during the day.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: So she's got to be somewhere between about eight and twelve, and so I would guess she's about ten.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: Plus, the the the wisdom, the smarts, the cleverness that she uses here shortly is going to evidence that she can't be.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I know your five or six-year-old little girl is brilliant, but but you know, the what she does is really, really amazing.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: So she's standing at a distance in order to see, so she's standing guard in order to see what's going to happen to him.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: And she's spending hours out there, right?
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: And and loving her her little brother.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: Pharaoh's daughter, we then read, went down to bathe at the Nile while her servant girls walked along the riverbank.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: And immediately, immediately, immediately, down through the years, we've had a loud objection from scholars and critics.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: Whoa, stop right there.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: There's no way that Pharaoh's daughter got in a chariot and drove the hundred miles north from the palace down in Memphis, north to Israelite territory to take a bath.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: There's no way that Pharaoh would have a palace, or that his family, the royal family, would be up there where all of the hated and detested Israelites would be.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: This makes absolutely no sense.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: We laugh, we mock, and so forth.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: Until, and by the way, just to take a look, the Thutmosis palace, the main palace, was down here in Memphis, which is just 13 miles south of present-day Cairo, which didn't exist back then.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: And this green area right here is the Delta.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: That is, it's the fertile area where the Nile sort of splits into all of these small little tributaries and irrigates all this, and this is where you get, you know, a whole lot of the uh whole lot of the agriculture and so forth.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: And then when Joseph, remember, came down, and Israel came down from Israel during the famine, uh, hundreds of years before this, uh, because uh because of how Joseph had saved Egypt, they were given uh up here the uh the the the this area called the land of Goshen here in the Nile Delta on the right-hand side.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's no way, they said, why?
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: If she could go to the Nile right outside her door down here in Memphis, why would she get in a chariot and ride clear up here into Israelite territory?
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: It makes absolutely no sense.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: But then uh we find uh Dr.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: Manfred Biatch, who's an uh Austrian, uh famous Austrian archaeologist from the University of Vienna, who's digging up in the Nile Delta uh ever since 1966.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: In 1993, uncovered to a surprise a huge 10-acre uh palace complex up there in the Nile Delta.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he called it Tel El Daba.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: And and they dug and they found just fascinating things.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: Let me uh uh in fact, they found that that this was at a location that in ancient days, in fact, during when the Israelites were, it was called Avarice.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: Later it would be called Ramses, and about the city of Ramses, and we read in the last chapter that the Israelites did slave labor and they built the city of Ramses, but the city of Ramses, that's just that's a later name for what it was called when they were actually there.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: So he's finding, he found up here in the Nile Delta, up here in the land of Goshen, up where here where the Israelites lived, he is uncovering this royal palace at a place called, very famous place in Egyptian history.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: This is all the Mediterranean here, of course, at a place called Avaris, A-V-A-R-I-S.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: Here are all of the Israelite settlements here in Egypt.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: This is, of course, the Nile River.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh in other words, um, we're finding that there was, Pharaoh had a palace up here at Avaris or Ramses, right in uh the Israelite settlement.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a uh the archaeologists have done a reconstruction after digging of what it looked like.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: And you can see here's the Nile River, the palace, part of this 10-acre complex.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: There's actually two palaces here, uh, and they've left off the watchtower and so forth.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the Nile River, just 100 feet out the back door.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, what we have is this incredible confirmation of the story in Exodus chapter 2, that Pharaoh could have a daughter of probably his many daughters, but he could have a daughter who would live up here who would go out and take a bath in the Nile.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: And you ask, why wouldn't she take a bath in the bathtubs that we found that archaeologists have found?
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer is that the Nile was considered a sacred river, and just the way Indians today in India love to go bathe in the Ganges, you know, it was typical.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: They wanted to bathe in the sacred river.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: So we have this picture of how this girl, who we suspect wasn't much older than Miriam, was maybe about 10 years old, she and her attendants come out and she's bathing here in the Nile River.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's such a confirmation.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: Let me say this that one of the reasons I love archaeology so much is that it seems that every time they they put down a spade into the dirt and dig something up, and it happens every couple of weeks over in Jordan and Israel and Egypt, the lands of the Bible, it it always seems to, it always seems to confirm instead of uh deny what the Bible says.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: It always seems to support it.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: And this discovery in 1993 and the studies since then, confirming that Pharaoh actually had a palace right up there in the midst of Israelite territory, the last thing anyone would have expected, is incredible confirmation of the story.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I would stop and just say a gentle word to anyone who's watching online or whatever else, and just say, if you hesitate, if you've hesitated to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, to trust him as your personal Savior, partly because, partly because what you've heard is the Bible is an unreliable book and it can't be trusted historically or archaeologically or textually.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: Can I just can I just encourage you to do a little more research?
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: Can I say to you that the Bible for the last since the middle 1800s has been subjected to more intense and careful scrutiny by critics than any other book in the history of the world, and it always passes with flying colors, and we have this another really interesting and startling confirmation of something that was absolutely not believed up until just less than 30 years ago.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: So we have this palace up here at Avaris, and we have we have a girl out there, and by the way, this is uh another reconstruction from the Nile itself.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: I have I like to think of this as the picture that Miriam would have had as she is sort of walking along the shore, and maybe as as she knows her little baby brother is in this chest a little while, a little a little ways away, and hoping that she will not hear him cry, and hoping that they can get through another day with him alive, and as she looks at this beautiful palace not very far away.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: So, and by the way, uh here's an archaeologist I've dug with over in Israel, a well-known archaeologist named Dr.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: Bryant Wood, a Christian, and he said, he puts it this way: the discoveries that tell El Daba strikingly corroborate the accuracy of the Exodus account.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: And he uh he continues by saying, Moses quite likely played among these buildings as a child, walked the halls of the palaces as an adult, and then later he and Aaron confronted Pharaoh right here with God's message, let my people go.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it was probably right here that Pharaoh mobilized 600 chariots to pursue the Israelites, chapter 14, verse 7, unquote.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's been discovered.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: Is that cool?
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: So again, don't miss the bigger point.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: The scientific evidence supports the biblical account.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: But now the story, and by the way, let me add something else that's really interesting.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: So, the Pharaoh at this time, as far as I can restruct, reconstruct, and other people reconstruct, uh, from the middle 1500s, uh, it's about 1526 BC, was one of the great pharaohs in Egyptian history.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: He has his own tomb, he was the first one to establish his own tomb in the Valley of the Kings.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: His name is Pharaoh Tutmos I.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: We have all he's got, we've got all kinds of obelisks of him and so forth.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: This is him with his mother in a famous picture.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: This is in, I think, the British Museum.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: He, he, he, the whole world knew Pharaoh Tutmos I, and he was the powerful Pharaoh who was in charge of this genocide at this time.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: And we think we may know this girl.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: This princess in our story.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: We think she may be none other than Queen Hatshepset.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: She doesn't need to be.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's likely Pharaoh had many daughters, but the interesting thing is that Egyptian literature tells us the only one of all of his children who survived to adulthood was Hatshepset the Queen.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: And this is one of the many renditions of her face.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then the computer-generated picture of what this face would have looked like in real life.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: She actually looks like some of you, you know, some people I know.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, she was, she was an incredible, she grew up to be an incredible person.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'm taking a tour that'll include Egypt in 2022, Lord willing.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: Lord willing, of course.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: But uh I love to take people down uh near Luxor, uh hundreds of miles south of Cairo in Egypt.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: One of the places we love to go is called Queen Hot Shepsut's Temple, by the way.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: Egyptian Guide always helps uh my tour group uh remember her name by telling them to say Hot Cheap Soup.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: Hot cheap soup.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: So say that with me.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: Hot cheap soup.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, soup.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: So, so, but that's close to her name.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: So, anyway, so she has a temple there, and and and uh she would have died, by the way, just before Moses returned to Egypt to say, Let my people go in history.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: But she grew up to be this famous queen, this Pharaoh by her own right, and it is really fun to go up to this temple where, by the way, all of her, all of her statues have been defaced.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: And there is some question uh over why that is, but uh, but anyway, very, very famous woman.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it isn't interesting to know that we possibly actually know the princess who is part of the story, who's one of the three women that God used to save baby Moses.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: So we find out that Pharaoh's daughter went down to bathe at the Nile.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: Her sister girls walked along the riverbank.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: She saw the basket among the reeds.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, I I love our Bible story.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: This is the most famous picture of this.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: But the artists don't really pay much attention to the text, do they, at times?
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because remember, she's in the Nile, and her girls are guarding her by walking along the riverbank, but not in the most famous picture.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: She's dressed beautifully, she has a rose on her head, she's dry, her girls are wet.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: So, so anyway, so she sees the basket.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: She's out there, and of course, the basket can't be seen from the shore.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: She sees the basket among the reeds.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: She sends her slave girl because it's close to the shore, and she didn't want to make her way through the reeds.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: She sends her slave girl, she takes it, she opens it, she saw him, the child, and there he was.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: She wants you to just be there in that moment.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: The writer, Moses, says, and there he was, a little boy crying.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: She felt sorry for him and said, This is one of the Hebrew boys.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: She knew, she knew this boy was supposed to be killed.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: If she had any other Egyptian, this is God's working is just astounding, and that's my point today.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: Any other Egyptian comes along, a law-abiding Egyptian citizen, that baby gets drowned.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: Or it could have been a crocodile lunch, but God preserves that baby and brings along a girl.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then, you know, Proverbs 21:1 says, the Lord uh has the heart of the king in his hand.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: And we'd say he has the heart of a queen in his hand or a princess in his hand as well.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: And because God's in charge, he holds her heart and he pours into her heart this compassion for him.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: He makes sure that little baby Moses is crying, you know, so that her heart goes out to him.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: And even though this is the edict of her powerful father, she doesn't even hesitate.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a typical maybe 10-year-old girl.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: She knows her daddy and will let her do anything she wants to do.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so she is, she is, and so you can hear her.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure I imagine Miriam, her the sister, can hear, can is terrified.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: Oh no, baby's been discovered.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: And but then here's her saying, Oh, he's so cute.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, he's crying, oh, he's probably hungry.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I can't, I've got to take care of him.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so then his sister comes up.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: Here she is.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: We've got a photo of her.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: And she says to Pharaoh's daughter, Should I go and call a Hebrew woman who is nursing to nurse the boy for you?
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: How brilliant is that?
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: How smart, how clever, how quick-witted is she to say, Shall I go and call a Hebrew woman who's nursing?
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, because she's saying, Oh no, baby needs to be fed.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so immediately, this just you know how God works here, but go, Pharaoh's daughter told her.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: So the girl went and called the boy's mother.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: Can you imagine how Jochabad, how Joe fell when breathless, her daughter comes running through the door, they found him, they found him, they found him.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: Oh no, and then her heart sinks and she says, It's the princess from Omanopalas has found him.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: And her heart still sings.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: He says, I told her, I tell she she likes him, and I asked her if she wanted somebody to nurse him, and she said, Yes, and so why don't you do it?
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: Come on, come on with me right now, quick.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so you can see the mother just scared, you know, her heart in her throat and running out there and not knowing what's gonna happen, and her face turning red and blue and just terrified.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: And and and Pharaoh's daughter says to her, Little Pharaoh's daughter, take this child and nurse him for me, and I will pay your wages.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that awesome?
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: Is life good?
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, God is so clever.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: God working behind, notice God never gets mentioned in this story.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: Not once does he get mentioned.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: He loves to hide behind the scenes, he loves to be invisible, and he does seem to be so invisible today, doesn't he?
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: What a horrible week we've had.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know, with what's happened in Washington, D.C., and then the Antifa attacking a police station in Portland.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, in our personal lives, sometimes God seems so invisible.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: In our land, he seems so invisible.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: But listen, you need to know that he's there.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: He's behind the scenes, he's working even though you have no idea how he's doing it.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: And he's doing it in an amazing way here, and he's even gonna pay mommy for nursing him.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: So the woman took the boy and nursed him.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: Can you imagine how Am felt?
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: Amram felt when he got home from slave labor all day, and he sees them, wife and baby, playing with the baby, his wife and his daughter.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: Shh, what are you doing?
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: What are you doing?
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: They say, it's okay.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: He's protected, he's got the protection of the Pharaoh's daughter.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: No, not the daughter of the very man who's ordered him killed.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, yes, it's just incredible.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: Can you imagine how he felt at that point?
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine how they said to themselves, Wow, is God protecting us?
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: And the final verse, when the child grew older, she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: Notice the Pharaoh's daughter did not say, come and come into the palace and nurse him there.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: It was probably unthinkable that a Hebrew woman would have been in the palace nursing someone, so forth.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: So, no, she says, take the boy, take the baby.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: And weaning back then, breastfeeding, lasted three to four years.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: Not smart today.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: I remember my mother reading this account and so forth, decided, uh, one of my little brothers that she would she would do that, that she would try to be more biblical, make it last three or four years.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: I was sitting beside her in church at Staub Memorial Congregational Church when I was about eight years old or nine years old, when my three and a half-year-old little brother ripped off, just tore the buttons and just ripped off.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: Or Top decided it was time, it was time to feed right then in the middle of the sermon.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's when we stopped that exper, that's when mom and dad stopped that experiment.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: So I did not mean to tell you that story, but my mother would have told you that story if she was teaching this to you, okay?
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: So it was three to four years back then, and so and she knew, and it must have been a little sad, but you know what that meant?
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: They had three years, three years of loving that baby and teaching that baby.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: You can teach a baby a lot.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: And and and so then she takes him, and by this time, you know, Hotshepsit or the princess is 13, 14 years old, and she named him.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: Now he finally has a name, she named him Moshe, M-O-S-A-C.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: This which is a very common name.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, she named him after her father, right?
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: Her father's name was Tutmos, M-O-S-E.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: Just means son.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's just in in one of the most common Egyptian names is Mos.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: Great-great-grandfather's name, Amos, M-O-S-E, or Ramses, the name of the most famous Egyptian Pharaoh, R-A, Ra, the God, the sun god, M-S-E-S, son of Ra.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: So that's that's an Egyptian name.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: But the princess, who also knows Hebrew, perhaps says, because I drew him out of water, because Moshe in Hebrew means drawn out.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: And he is going to draw his people out of Egypt one day.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: God is going to draw them out before he invites them in, and he's using Moses the deliverer to do that.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now, just imagine, he is in the palace, and and you say, uh what Moses gets to go in the palace and is treated like the royal family.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: And even when Pharaoh Tutmos saw him there, we have a history in Babylon with Daniel and others that oftentimes immigrants, one immigrant would be adopted, would be brought into the palace, and that's who he was, and as a result, he had all the rights and privileges thereunto, and that included education.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: There was no public education in Egypt at that time, not for Israelites, not for Egyptians.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: The only people who were publicly educated like that would be the royal family.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: And because he was a prince, Moses was educated, as Stephen says in Acts chapter 7, and all the wisdom of the Egyptians became a man who was powerful in speech and in action.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: And now, once again, you can see what the Lord is doing behind the scenes.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: Because Moses would have been trained, he would have been taught medicine, he would have been taught mathematics, he would have been taught how to read and write, he would have been taught letters, he would have been taught administrative and leadership skills, and that's exactly what he needed, isn't it?
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: He needed to be able to write because God was going to use him to write the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: He needed organizational skills because he was going to organize and administrate a group of two million, perhaps, just recalcitrant people, the Israelites in the wilderness.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: He needed leadership skills to be able later to lead them through the wilderness.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: He needed, I mean, it's just astounding what all of the things that Moses needed that he got simply because he was um he was taught there in the palace.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: He learned military skills and he would need those.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: He needed he needed to learn legal and jurisprudence skills because he was going to be the primary judge in all of Israel.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: And you can somehow now see how it was.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: Though no one understood at the time that God worked behind the scenes, using the hands of three women to bring about his incredible plan.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think any of them knew.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: I imagine that there were times that during this time Moses' mother was crying in her home and saying, Lord, what are you doing?
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: You've taken him away from us.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_00: Moses' father was going, Oh, Lord, at night, it said you've got him in that cesspool of a palace, that horrible, idolatrous place over there.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: What in the world is going on?
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine Moses' older brother and sister going, God, why did you take our little brother away from us?
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_00: I imagine Moses at night is going, God, I don't understand why I have to be here when my family is out there and I have to be here among all these strangers.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_00: I feel just like an alien.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, looking back, we see that God behind the scenes was working without ever mentioning his name, invisibly, working in remarkable ways to save Moses and then to train him in all of the special ways that he needed to be trained so that he could be the great deliverer of his people.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: My time is almost up, and I just would ask you to apply that to your life.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: In your life and in our land, we do not understand what is going on.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: We do not see why God would work as he does.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_00: But this is how we know when a person starts developing spiritual maturity because they begin to trust what they cannot trace.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: They begin to quote Jeremiah 29, 11, for I know the plans I have for you.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: And immediately we go, but I don't know the plans you have for me.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: And God says, That's okay, you're not supposed to.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: But I have plans for you.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: And there are plans to prosper you and good plans.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a person who looks over at Romans 8.28, where it says, And we know that God causes all things to work together for good, to those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: This person says, God, I don't see that it's good.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: I don't understand that it's good.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't look good.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, it's bad.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_00: And God says, I don't ask for your judgment.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: I just ask you to trust where you cannot trace.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: I know you don't understand what I'm doing.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_00: I know it seems as though I'm invisible, but I don't expect you to understand.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: I just expect you to trust.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I would challenge you this morning from this simple little account of three women and a baby, and God working behind the scenes in remarkable ways, bringing together some of the most powerful people in the world to save and preserve the future deliverer of his people.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: I just challenge you to look into your life, into those places where you feel as though life is out of control, where you do not understand what God is doing, and to believe him that God is in control, but God's got this.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's what God's asking you to do this morning.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: Will you do it?
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, thank you for this delightful little story and for the reminder of how amazing you are that in these impossibilities, how could Moses stay alive?
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: How could he make it alive out of that little papyrus chest and out of the Nile River?
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: How could he ever eventually lead his people?
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: But today we too live in hard times like Moses and Amram and Jacobed, like them.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_00: We just take the next small step, Lord.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: We we're building our own little papyrus arcs and we're trying to stay safe, we're trying to protect our children, we're trying to just move on to the next week.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: Help us, Lord, to see that behind the scenes, even though we don't see you, we see you working in ways that we cannot imagine.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: I want to thank you now for keeping your promise to watch over and protect us in Jesus' name.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_00: And God's people said, Amen.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for coming.