Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / January 18th, 2015 | Route 66 - Exodus

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January 18th, 2015 | Route 66 - Exodus · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: How are you?
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's been a sober week around here.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Sandy's sudden passing.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and my uh mother-in-law, Melie's down in Dallas.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: Her mother's had a couple touch and goes uh this week, even last night, they put a pacemaker in at three.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna drive down this afternoon.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: But uh, you know, one thing uh one thing that makes everything okay in some ways is uh a little Josiah.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: You know, as a little as a grandbaby, I got to babysit my grandchild uh Reuben, my youngest one, a couple days ago, a couple nights ago, late at night.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: I was so glad that he didn't just fall asleep.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: And uh he's a little bit younger than Josiah, I guess, four, five, six months, somewhere in there, I don't know.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: And um, whatever.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: He's little, he's teething, I think, and not old enough to talk.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: But I still, that's some well, I like talking with him.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, because like I can put you guys to sleep.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: I can sometimes put kids to sleep by talking to them.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: I go, how are you doing?
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, I just I just chat with him for a couple hours.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and he chat back for like half an hour, you know, not non-verbal.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: I heard, and this is an introduction to my message actually, I I heard of a uh uh grandpa, papa, I am, uh, who was holding his three-day-old grandson and was talking with him the way I do, and and said, How you doing?
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: And to his utter astonishment, uh little boy said, I'm I'm doing I'm doing fine, grandpa.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: And and he was, this really happened.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, he says, uh, he says, Wow, um how do you know who I am?
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: He says, Well, I mean, your son, your daughter-in-law are my parents.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, You have any idea how you came into the world?
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: Well, well, duh, said the little boy.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, your son and his wife, my mom got together, and that's why I'm here.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: How in the world do you know that?
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: The Papa said, and the baby said, Well, I I wasn't born yesterday.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: Really happened, yeah.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: Just like that.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: I tell that story because um one of the sad things is to be around uh, you know, Christians who've been Christians for a little while and who have forgotten, maybe, how they were born, the miracle of their birth.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the great contributions that the book of Exodus makes to Route 66 is that you cannot open this book, wrestle with this book without without realizing that's what this book is about.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: If you're just visiting today, we're in a series, 66 Sundays, the 66 books of the Bible.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and just like there were rest stops sort of on the way, the old old Route 66, our first stop last week was Genesis.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: The second stop today is Exodus.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: And if you think it's just a typical pit stop, then wow, you don't realize this book is an epic adventure tale of fire and sand and wind and and water.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: And it's uh it pits two great nations, you can say, against each other.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, just one nation.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's a pretty unfair battle.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: One nation is the superpower of the earth.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: It is the nation of Egypt in the New Kingdom era.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: All those ruins you see in Egypt now, the cool ruins down south there, that's this period of Egypt.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: That's how strong it is.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: It was, it owned, you know, it was in control of much of Africa, all the way up through the Fertile Crescent, all the way up to Iraq today.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the phrase, the other nation is just, you know, peasants.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody owns any land, a couple million people, slaves.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: But it also, this book is also about two um two epic characters who face each other.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: One is named Moses, and the other is named Pharaoh.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: And this book is filled with unforgettable images like a burning bush or a little baby in a in an arc of bull rushes, you know, the beautiful princess takes out of the water, right?
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: And of a Nile river turning to blood, and a burning bush, and frogs hopping everywhere, and darkness, and and uh lambs being slain, and blood being put on doorposts, and firstborn people dying, and uh and then and then the Red Sea parting.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: Wow! And millions of people going through, and the Red Sea then crashing back down, and a pillar of fire, and a pillar of cloud, and a mountain that trembles, and Ten Commandments, and the glory filling the tabernacle.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: These are images that no one will forget, especially, let's say, the Jews.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: I hang around Jewish folks a lot and love them.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: And this book is their book because it's it's their birth, it's it's redemption, it's where it all started for them.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: And it's also the book of Torah on Mount Sinai, which is the single most center of their of that religion.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: But also important for Christians, right?
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: This is the gospel in the Old Testament.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: This is salvation, this is that picture that gets fulfilled in the New Testament.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: Also important, as you know, for slaves down through the millennia, 150, 200 years ago, African American slaves in America, many of whom were Christians, looked to this book, saw themselves as being down in Egypt and looked to this Exodus, this rescue, as a picture that gave them hope that they could one day be free at last, free at last.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's the book we're talking about.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's no wonder that one of the great Old Testament scholars in our country says, this, in my view, is the greatest book of the Old Testament.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: The problem is that this book solves, by the way, on Route 66, is that the last book ended so poorly.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: You know, remember, Genesis promised salvation to the whole world through the seed of one man, whose name was, starts with letter A.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: Abraham.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: Genesis 12, 1 through 3.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: And for a while everything prospered.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: Abraham prospered, he grew.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: His son, Isaac, his son, Jacob, his son, Joseph.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: But at the end of the book of Genesis, all we have there left are 70 scrawny souls of Jacob's family.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that's the guys, that's the wives, that's the children.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: And they're not even in the promised land, the land of milk and honey.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: They're down in the iron furnace of Egypt, under the thumb of the Pharaoh.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: How in the world then is God going to fulfill his promise that he'd made 300 years before, that he was going to bring salvation to the world?
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the book of Exodus answers that that question.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: Last month, a movie came out uh uh based loosely on this book.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: Movie called.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: Anybody see this movie?
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: Exodus?
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: God's amen.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: Anybody see that?
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, we're all going right now.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: Just kidding.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: Don't even think it's in the theater anymore.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that's Christian Bale, uh otherwise known as Moses.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, he doesn't look 80 years old to me like Moses.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'd kind of prefer Charlton Heston a little.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: And that chain mail thing he's wearing, which wasn't invented until a thousand years later, is uh I think that's just remarkable that he had one of those.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: But uh anyway, I I didn't see the movie, and I'm not recommending.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: I heard it's even you know farther away than Noah.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: I took a lot of flack last year.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: I preached through Noah when that movie came out and told everybody to go, and and then all of you yelled at me.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: So here you go, Pharaoh, Moses, Christian Baal.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: I can almost, if I was writing a subscriptor, I go Pharaoh going, look at me when I talk to you.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I don't know.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: But um, don't you ever like to do that in the stage pictures?
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, both of those outfits date from Middle Ages or even more recent.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: So these guys had also done the time machine thing.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: But um anyway, that's the, and I love the pictures.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the truth is that it seems to me this book answers uh some very different questions in the movie pose, and I have entitled the book God Draws Us to Himself.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: God Draws Us to Himself.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: Where it seems to me that this book falls into two parts.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: If you've got your study sheet, and I hope you do, you'll notice that it seems to me the keyword of this book is what?
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: Exit.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: What was the word keyword of Genesis?
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm switching series right now.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh keyword of Genesis was in the beginning, keyword of Exodus.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: It kept it easy for you.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: Exit.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: And verses you should know, theme.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: We're doing the last, uh, the the flip side, okay?
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: And this book falls into two parts.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: The first half of this book approximately tells about how God rescues his people, he draws them out of the land of Egypt.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's a story of their salvation, it's the picture of your salvation.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: And then in the last half of the book, God draws us in.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: He draws Israel to Himself.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so everyone who's knows the Bible at all will understand this is a wonderful picture of life, of a spiritual life.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: You'll recognize that your life begins, your eternal life begins when you allow God to rescue you, to draw you out of slavery.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then it continues the rest of your Christian life, God drawing you into fellowship with Himself.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: So we want to talk about that because uh chapters 1 through 15 seem to fall, it seems to me, into three parts.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: And if you are ever to escape your personal Egypt or ever to uh understand what happens when you became a believer, you'll realize you need to realize these three parts.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: That the story falls in three parts that you were helpless, that God went into battle for you, and then God drew you out and saved you.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: Chapters 1 through 5, we were helpless.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: We are helpless.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: Before Israel was saved from Egypt, they were like you and I before our salvation.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: We were utterly helpless.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: Israel was incredibly helpless.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: For this is the New Kingdom period of Egypt, as I said.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: And the Pharaoh of chapter 1 is Aminite II, incredibly powerful.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: The Pharaoh of the Exodus, 1446 BC, Moses III.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: When you go to Egypt today, you see the ruins of these people.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: Just phenomenally huge.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: And uh Egypt became the house of bondage for the Israelites.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: Exodus 13, 14, Exodus 20, chapter 2.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: They actually built some of these ruins that you and I see today when I take groups to Egypt.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: I sometimes ask them to just look around and consider that some of the things they are looking at were actually built by Hebrew slaves.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: So we read chapter 1, verse 11.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: Egypt put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Python and Ramses as supply cities for Pharaoh.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's absolutely remarkable.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it's almost funny when Charles Heston goes here before Yule Brenner and goes and says to Pharaoh, this is what Yahweh, the God of Israel, says, Let my people go.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: Pharaoh responded, Who is Yahweh that I should obey him by letting people go?
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: That bad thing to do, Pharaoh.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: You shouldn't, you shouldn't say that.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's not good.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: You could say, Who are you?
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: You're a twerp, but don't be messing with Yahweh.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: Who is Yahweh that I should obey him?
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know Yahweh, and I will not let Israel go.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: Buddy, you're gonna find out who Yahweh is.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: But Israel at this point is completely helpless.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: Now, how helpless were they?
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: This book answers that primarily in two ways.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: Now, one way, one picture you know well.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: The other picture, I'm guessing, you don't know well.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: And you need to know it better.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: That is, number one, you were so helpless before you became a believer that God had to liberate you from slavery the way he liberated Israel.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: Secondly, you were so helpless, you're like a baby in the womb that needed to be drawn out of the womb.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: Did you realize that in the Bible that salvation is called new birth?
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: You realize that, didn't you?
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Christ said that to Nicodemus.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: Nod your head up and down, because you know that.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's called new birth, like being born again.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: But did you know that the redemption of Israel from Egypt is also called a birth?
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: Out of Egypt I called my son, God says, Book of Hosea.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, we read in chapter one, we get this picture that the seed of Abraham was in the womb of a powerful mother, Egypt, and there was supernatural growth that went on during those 430 years.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: Because Israel started out as 70, just 70 people, 430 years ago.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: And now in 1446, they number at least two and a half million.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: Because uh and um because we're told in Exodus that there were 600,000 men aged 20 and older, and so if you assume each one of them is married, each one of them only had two children, that that gets you to 2,400,000.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: But that's a conservative estimate because if you do the mathematics on that, and I have, you find out that to get from 70 to 600,000 men, whatever, to two and a half million 430 years, you need to double every 35 years.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: You need every family to have five children, and every one of those five children to have five children, none of them to die.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: On the average, to get to that number, it's it's remarkable.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: And even if you do like some Old Testament scholars are doing now and saying, well, all those big numbers are just high by a factor of 10, so we have to divide that by 10, you know, so it's only uh 250,000 instead of two million.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, then you go, well, you know what?
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: If they all had five children, like like they probably did, you're still talking a million.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, so I don't care what game you play, you're talking about supernatural growth.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: So that God is is answering, he's meeting the fulfillment of his promise that he made to Abraham, I'm going to make, I'm gonna multiply you.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: Sand of the sea, stars of the sky.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: Like some little some little uh you know, boy who's at the beach, said, if they want to know how many, how many sands are on the beach, why don't they just count the number of Jews?
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I know that you can do that, but but God, even as Israel's in slavery, is giving them supernatural growth.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: But we find that this mother is not only powerful, this mother is a reluctant mother to this embryo inside her, this alien embryo.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: She does not like Israel inside her.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: She first tries to limit Israel's growth, and then we find she actually tries to destroy the baby while it's inside her, you know, with a command, you shall kill all the male babies.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: Remember that?
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: And is and Egypt goes overboard sending, you know, uh people in, and they're they're killing, they're killing all the male babies.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: But yet we find at the end of chapter one that God has supernaturally preserved this baby in the womb of this powerful, reluctant mother.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: But still, the question uh at the end of chapter one, how can these slaves ever escape the slave owner of Pharaoh, so powerful?
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: And how can this baby who's so helpless ever escape the womb of Egypt?
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: And the answer is given to us in chapters two and three.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: The answer is a person that God is going to use, a remarkable man, a man who 12 times in this book is called the servant of the Lord.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: And he is the true Israel, true son of Israel, because like the nation, he is under attack.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: He's a little baby, and they want to kill him.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: He's a boy baby, and his mother and his sister's father so worried about this.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: Amram, Jacobed, and Miriam, and so they take him down to the water, build a little ark of bulrushes, ark, same word, our own used of Noah.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: And in the same way, in the same way that this ark in Noah's day floated uh in the waters of death, protecting its contents to life on the other side.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: Same thing happens to Moses.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: This little ark floating on the waters of death, for this is where they were killing the babies, gets plucked out by God's supernatural protection, by the daughter of Pharaoh herself, uh, which uh Queen Hutsheps it, uh we think perhaps, and plucks him out, draws him from the water, and in fact, calls him Moshe, that is drawn from the water.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: Just like you, just like me, drawn from the water.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: God draws us to himself.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: And this man, Moses, is going to become the leader of this people.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: He's gonna speak for God, he's gonna say, Let my people go.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: He's gonna he's gonna pray to God and get and get provision and protection for God's people once they're in the wilderness.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: So, but anyway, they're helpless.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_01: So then God goes to battle for us.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: That's what happened to us in salvation, that's what happened to the nation of Israel.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: What we mean by that is that God goes to battle by bringing ten plagues on Egypt.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like a supernatural labor in the womb.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: Call it ten contractions, call it ten sonometers, call it whatever you want.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: But this is exactly what happened with the ten plagues.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, one of the top Old Testament scholars in the world today, Pete Enns, has recently written this.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: The plagues, he said, are not just a random series of weird cosmic and ecological disturbances.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, water to blood, frogs, lice, flies, sick cows, boils, hails, fire, locusts, darkness, death of firstborn.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: They show Israel's God, the God of slaves, marching into the home turf of the superpower of the day and basically beating up on their gods.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: This may sound silly to us, but this is how the Israelites understood the supremacy of our God.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: As Psalm 95 puts it, Yahweh is the great God, the great king above all gods.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: God is, every time you have a plague, you know, it's it's pushing the they worship the Nile.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: So the first plague, turn the Nile to blood, you know.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: And he topples that God off of the Egyptian shelf, showing that he is superior to that God.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: That you worship the frog as the God of fertility, I'll make you sick of frogs.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: You know, frogs all over the land, you know.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: And and uh there goes another god toppling, because only God should be worshipped.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there's loads of cartoons of these.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: This is the only one I decided to put on.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: The newscast that night, there is a dense frog advisory, in effect, for all of the Egyptian viewing area.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: Flies and gnats, they they they worshiped of all things flies and gnats among the hundreds of thousands of gods they worshiped.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: Hail and thunder! God sends hail, he sends thunder, he sends fire.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: These are photographs from the movie.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_01: So you don't have to go to the movie, you're seeing the photograph.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: Locus, number eight, just ruined their crops.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: Darkness is your number one God, Amon Ra, the God of sun.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: Do you wake up every morning?
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: We have 150 hymns that the Egyptians and pharaohs used to sing to Amon Ra in the morning.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: You are the God of heaven and so forth.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: So God shuts Amon Ra down for three days.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: You know, darkness.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: They're freaking out.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then just to show that God is greater than all of their gods, he goes to battle for us.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: And then chapters 11 through 15, the climax, God draws us out and saves us.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's what he did for you in salvation.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: You were helpless.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: He went to battle for you against Satan and against your foes.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: And then he finally drew us out and he saved us.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: Drew you out from slavery, chapters 11 through 15.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: Or you could call it supernatural delivery from the womb.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: For this reluctant mother decided she wanted to kill the baby in her womb and not let the baby even get out.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so, in order to get that baby out of the womb, here comes the tenth plague, the death of the firstborn.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_01: Even Pharaoh's son dies.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: And as you know, God said through Moses to Israel, listen, I'm going to bring death over the entire land of Egypt.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: And for you to be saved, each of you, every household, take a lamb, a pure, spotless lamb.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: Keep that lamb in your house so you come to love it.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm sorry, but then you'll need to kill it and you'll need to put its blood over the lintel, on the doorposts, because the angel of death is coming on this night.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: And when I see the blood, I will, there it is, pass over you.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: That's where you get the name Passover.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: And you know that that's where this is the beginning of days to Israel.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: This is so important to Israel, but it's so important to you.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: Because Christ is called what?
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: The Passover Lamb.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: And he is the one, not three days of darkness, but three hours of darkness, like the ninth plague, hangs on the cross for three hours of darkness, and then the firstborn, God's onlyborn son, he dies in the tenth plague.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: And that death saves us, his blood saves us, so long as we access the Lamb of God as our Savior.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: Wonderful, wonderful picture in the book of Exodus.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the problem is that, you know, once that baby, uh Pharaoh says, okay, get out of here.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: So now the baby uh comes out of the womb real fast.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: But now it's absolutely and utterly defenseless.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: Israel has no chariots, has no army, it has no power at all, and now all of a sudden, like a crazed animal, the mother, like a like a wild animal wanting to kill the thing that hurt it, starts chasing after Israel to try to try to kill, to try to kill this newborn baby.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so here is the newborn baby, you know, huddled by the shores of the Red Sea, looking back, thinking it's absol it's it's utterly lost.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: And that's when, by God's command, Moses raises his staff, and you have this incredible, it just feels good to do this with Charles and Huston.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I love the cartoons.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody sent me this from France, actually, uh, of Moses, you know, parting and the Yiddish guy, the Jewish guy, you know, winning the race against the swimmers.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh anyway, there's a lot of them like this, but but but anyway, I decided I'd only show you one.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: But the waters are divided, okay?
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: And then this the Israelites go through the sea on dry ground, like an obstetrician.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: The Lord reaches out and he draws this newborn who's being born out through the birth canal as the waters break, right?
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: As the waters break, here comes, here comes the baby, and Israel is born with the waters like a wall to them on their right and on their left.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: This is the reason that you can't really buy some of these naturalistic explanations.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I have no problem with God using nature to do this, but the problem is all of those explanations have one wall and the rest of the waters run away.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: The Bible says there was a wall, high wall waters on their right and on their left.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: And they came through.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: And they praised God, horse and rider thrown into the sea.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: But you know what?
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: Pharaoh had said, I don't know the Lord.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: And God said, Well, the Egyptians will know I am the Lord.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: One day God will make sure every knee bows and every tongue confesses, even those who have rejected him.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: He wants everyone to know that he is the Lord.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so he hardened Pharaoh's heart and they rush after Israel in all their might and in all their beauty, and then and then he directs Moses to put his staff down, and the waters crash down, and the Egyptian army is no more.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: And it says that the Israelites, as they stood there on the seashore, watched the bodies of the Egyptians washing up, and realized that day the Lord saved Israel from the power of the Egyptians.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: And when Israel saw, they believed in the Lord.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the story of faith.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: God sent from above, as David writes in Psalm 18.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: He drew me out of many waters.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: Does that happen to you?
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: If that's happened to you, would you read this verse out loud with me, one together?
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: He sent from above.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: He took me, he drew me out of many waters.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what God does.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_01: God draws us out.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: We're slaves, but he sets us free.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: We were uh we were in a womb and we were stuck, and it was a hostile mother, but God drew us out.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: Ask from one end of the universe to the other, Moses remarks close to the end of his life.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: Has anything as great as this ever been heard of that a God has taken for himself one nation out of another nation?
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: Isn't that remarkable?
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: Has that happened to you?
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the other half of the book, and I've spent most of my time with the first half, just have five more minutes, so it'll be quick, but God draws us in, last 25 chapters.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, uh, when you come to Christ by faith, he draws you out.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: And the rest of your life, God is out to draw you into himself, because he says, I have loved you with an everlasting love, and therefore with loving kindness have I drawn you.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: And every single day, the rest of your life, as one of his redeemed people, as a newborn child, God is whispering to you, luring you, seducing you, hoping you will draw nearer and nearer to him.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: See, he draws you out, and then he draws you in.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: It could never be the reverse.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: God could not draw you in first and give you his law and his guidance and everything.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: No, first he has to rescue you.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: He has to draw you out, and then he draws you in.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: And the three parts of this in the rest of the book is first we cry in the wilderness like a newborn.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: We squall, we whine, don't have water, don't have food.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: And you find this throughout chapters 16, 17, and 18.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: There's the crying and the whining and the grumbling of the children of Israel.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, it's very similar to the birth pangs of the nation of Russia after the Soviet Union fell in 1989.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: Remember all the struggles Russia had?
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: In some ways, it can be harder to be free than to be a slave.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: Because at least when you're a slave, the government gives you the basic food.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's a hard life.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: You're not your own person, but you know what?
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: Israel said, at least we had melons and we had cantaloupe and we had broccoli back there in Egypt.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: And now, I mean, what have we got?
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: We've got to work for it.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's go back.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: Fortunately, they didn't.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: As you can see from looking at Russia today, Russia has made a turn back to communism because it can be very hard.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: And for newborn Christians, it can be hard.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: You hear God saying, I want you to come in, come toward me.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: But there can be things in that old life that draw you back, and you say, I was having a lot more fun back then.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: See, God reveals himself next, and he gives his word to guide us.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: This is the famous Ten Commandments time, where God appears on Mount Sinai, reveals himself, and he says, I love you.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: You'll be my cherished possession.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: Listen, here's my word.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: You'll love it, it will guide you.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: And he gives them the Ten Commandments.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: He just handed them to Moses, apparently.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: The first time Moses broke them.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: Remember, he got mad seeing the golden calf, goes back up, and God said, This time you're gonna have to chisel them out yourself.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I love that story.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: But God gave them his word to guide them.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: And then in the rest of the book, you find God drawing his people to himself as we follow his word.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: These incredible stories.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_01: The golden calf of Moses standing there and teaching them the word of the guidance of the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire throughout all their journeys.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_01: This is the last verse of Exodus, by the way, throughout all their journeys.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: The cloud of the Lord was on the tabernacle by day, and there was fire in it by night in the sight of all the house of Israel.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: God came and lived with his people in the tabernacle, his Shekinah glory, in their presence.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: Because God will do anything, having drawn us out to draw us in and make us completely his possession.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: I love this uh verse.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: This is probably the theme verses of the last half of Exodus.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: As I read this, see if you can feel God's heart in this.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_01: You have seen, God says, how I bore you on eagle's wings and brought you to myself.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, I hope if you haven't seen the Hobbit book, we've read the Hobbit book.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: Anybody?
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know those stories?
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: If you haven't, you're living in sin.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: No, I'm kidding.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: But the Lord of the Rings, that should be right next to the Bible in your living room, folks.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, but but you know, the the the hobbits, which are, you know, innocent people there, they get surrounded twice in the book of the hobbits, surrounded twice by orcs, by goblins, and so forth.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_01: And all of a sudden, rescuing them come these gigantic eagles, which are killer birds, you know, raptors and so forth, but they also are great rescuers.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: They come down and they rescue.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: Rescue the hobbits, Bilbo, you know, and save them.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what God says.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: God calls himself an eagle here and in Deuteronomy.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_01: He says, I'm like an eagle.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: I've come and I bore you on eagle's wings.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: I brought you out of Egypt to myself.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: Now then he says, if you will obey my voice and keep my covenant, please, please, he's saying, You will be my treasured possession among all peoples.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_01: I desperately want to draw you to myself.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's what he does.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: He draws us out, then he draws us in.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: Let me tell you a story and I'll be I'll be done.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_01: One of the most amazing rescues that I've ever heard, that's taken place while I've been here at TBC, happened down in Alabama, Amtrak train derailed in the middle of the night.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_01: A tugboat uh uh had hit the railroad bridge.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: It was all foggy.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so the bridge had broken just minutes before the train, which is on a 3,000-mile trip all the way from LA to Miami, the train then came to the bridge, and in the middle of the night, cars started falling off this bridge into the water.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_01: Imagine that you're one of the people in the Pullman car sleeping, for there were a number of people sleeping.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: 50 people died, and and many of them were in that pull in those pullman cars.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: And you find that you suddenly out of your bed and you don't really know what's happening, but you can but she's finding it hard to breathe already because the next car is exploded, it's on fire, and then water starts filling up, and you're discombobulated and so forth.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: And a woman, you know, close to you screams out, My God, we're all going to die, and you realize that she's exactly right.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: And then at the end of the car, you see this thin ray of light, and you hear a strong young voice saying, Come this way, I'll get you out.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so you start crawling that way through the water and through the smoke, but but you realize part way that your leg is broken and and and you're having a hard time moving, but you get there and you see that what's happened is that a timber from the railroad bridge has pierced, broken open a window, a little window up there.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_01: And and this guy whom you don't know, you're gonna find out later, his name is Michael.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: He's 26 years old, 26 years old, and he's finished law school up here in Omaha, Nebraska, that that he was sitting up there and and he felt the hit and he lost his glasses, but he has on his keychain one of these little little lights, you know, and and and he found this hole in the window and he climbed out, and now he's leaning in and he's yelling at everybody, come this way, come this way.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_01: And he leans down in this impossibly small, high hole.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_01: You reach up your arm, and Michael helps you through that hole.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: And then you you're so happy until you realize it's now a six-foot drop into these dark waters, and with your broken leg, you can't swim.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_01: And and you tell Michael, but Michael's a water safety instructor as well, and so he jumps in the water and tells you to ride on his back and he swims you to the shore, and then he draws you out of the water and puts you safe on the shore.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: And he does that for 30 people, saves 30 people's lives that night.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: One one woman aged 59, or Alina said, I all I know is that his name was Michael and that he saved my life.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_01: Listen, friend, that's what's happened to you.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe all you can say is, all I know is his name's Jesus and he saved my life, but I was lost, I was a slave, I was stuck.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't think I would ever get rescued, but he drew me out one day.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: And listen, friend, having drawn you out, now he wants to draw you in.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_01: If on the journey of your life, if on your Route 66, you've never come to that place, by the way, where you know he's drawn you out, or you're still standing on the shore of the Red Sea, don't stand there for the rest of your life on the shore of the Red Sea waiting to pass on through.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: Let him pull you through, let him draw you out of that life that you don't want to live anymore, anyway.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: And friend, if you're on the other side, if he's drawn you out, realize that every moment of every day, right now, in fact, he's whispering to you, can I draw you in?
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: Can I draw you a little nearer, a little bit closer to me?
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_01: If you'll draw near to me, I'll draw near to you.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_01: Will you do that?
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_01: Will you?
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna let's bow our heads.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd like you, if you're willing to say to God, you know what, Lord, I thank you for drawing me out.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_01: I'm willing to let you draw me in to get nearer to you, to get closer to you this week.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_01: Heavenly Father, I pray for these dear folks to value, to cherish this miracle that you gave them when you brought them out of the house of bondage, saved them from slavery, brought them out of the womb of Egypt, breaking the waters and drawing them to safety.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_01: Father, would you please coax them in, draw them closer to you now?
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you that when I called on you, Lord, you answered, you rescued me, and now I just want to be where you are.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_01: In Jesus' name.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_01: Amen.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: Let's stand and sing that together.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_00: Have a blessed week.