Sermon Tone Analysis

NOTE:

This is a manuscript, and not a transcript of this message.

The actual presentation of the message differed from the manuscript through the leading of the Holy Spirit.

Therefore, it is possible, and even likely that there is material in this manuscript that was not included in the live presentation and that there was additional material in the live presentation that is not included in this manuscript.

Engagement

Have you ever been going through a rough time in your life and got really discouraged because you felt like God just didn’t understand what you were going through?

Some of you might very well be feeling like that right now.

And if that’s the case you’re certainly not alone.

The Bible is full of stories of people who felt exactly that way.

All you have to do to see that is to read through the Psalms.

Or perhaps the best illustration is the account of Elijah who runs away from Queen Jezebel and hides in a cave and asks God to let him die because he doesn’t think God knows what he is going through.

But, as we’re going to see this morning, not only does God know every detail of what we are experiencing, but He is already at work in our lives, even before we cry out to Him and even when we don’t see it.

Tension

This morning we’re going to begin a new series in the Book of Exodus that will take us all the way to Spring break for those of you who are still in school.

And some of you may wonder why we’re going to take so much time to study a book of the Old Testament.

And you’re certainly not alone.

Several years ago a well-known pastor encouraged Christians to “unhitch” from the Old Testament, even making the claim that Peter, James, and Paul elected to do so.

But that just isn’t the case.

Here at TFC we’ve always been committed to preaching all the Scriptures, and if you’ve been here for any time at all you know that every year we teach from both the Old Testament.

There are a lot of reasons that we do that, but to me the biggest reason is that what we call the Old Testament is the Bible that Jesus and the apostles read and from which they frequently quoted.

So it seems to me that if it was relevant for them, it is still relevant for us today.

Truth

There is about a 300 year gap from the end of Genesis to the beginning of Exodus.

Genesis ended with Joseph’s brothers and father joining him in Egypt because of the famine in their land.

The opening verses of Exodus serve as a bridge between the two books:

Originally only 70 members of Jacob’s family had entered Egypt, but 300 years later God had blessed them greatly, just as He had promised Abraham, and they had multiplied greatly.

The exact number of Israelites in Egypt is not known, but there are some indications later in Exodus that by the time they leave Egypt, there are as many as two and a half million of them, including women and children.

Obviously we can’t cover every verse in the book of Exodus in detail in the time we’ve alloted for this series.

So the approach we’re going to take is to do more of a survey , or overview of the book and try to develop some overall themes that we find in larger sections of Scripture.

The overall theme of Exodus is that God provides a deliverer for His people.

And the reason that is so relevant for us is that we are also a people in need of a deliverer - someone to save and deliver us from sin so that we can have a relationship with a holy God.

So as we study the life of Moses, the deliverer that God provides for the people of Israel, we’re going to be able to better understand how God delivers us by sending His Son, Jesus, to be our deliverer.

Today we’re going to cover the first two chapters of the book.

I’m not going to read that entire passage, but we will focus on a few of the key sections as we make our way through the passage.

Here’s the overall idea we’re going to develop this morning:

Even when it might not look like it God knows

After Joseph died, a new king came to power in Egypt.

He viewed the Israelites as a threat to his power and so he made them slaves and afflicted them with heavy burdens.

But even though there is no indication that the Israelites call out to God at that point, God remains faithful to His people and His promise to make them into a great nation.

So they continue to prosper.

So the king of Egypt decides to take things to the next level.

Let’s pick up the account in verse 15:

We certainly see some similarities here with the edict issued by King Herod when Jesus is born and he orders all the male babies under two years old to be killed.

But in both cases, God is at work to protect His people and carry out His plans.

Let’s continue in verse 17:

The Israelite midwives feared God more than they feared the king of Egypt.

So they did what was right in the eyes of God even though that meant they opened themselves up to the anger of the king.

Although we don’t have a lot of information here, I think it’s safe to assume that their fear of God had been developed in their homes and in their community where the accounts of how God had been faithful to His people had been passed down from generation to generation.

We also see an important principle that is relevant to us here:

We are to respect and obey government authorities except when they require us to do something that violates the Scriptures.

Interestingly the law hadn’t been given yet, but God had clearly made it known that murder was wrong, going all the way back to when Cain killed his brother Abel.

So the midwives chose to obey God even though they knew they might face repercussions.

And because of that God blessed them and gave them their own families.

Most of us are probably familiar with what happens next.

An unnamed Levite man and his wife have a son.

It is not until chapter six that we learn the name of his parents - and probably for good reason.

Amram, the father, married his aunt, Jochebed, a union that would later be prohibited in the law that God would give to their son, Moses.

So not only is God working before anyone calls out to Him, He is even using someone with a checkered past to be the one to deliver His people from bondage in Egypt.

And the process of bringing Moses to that position of leadership is going to take a long time, as we’ll see.

When Jochebed could no longer hide her baby, she put him in a basket and placed it in the river.

When the king’s daughter came down to the river to bather, she found Moses, and in a plot twist that no one could have imagined, she hires Jochebed to nurse and take care of her own son and get paid for it.

Only God could orchestrate that!

So Moses grows up in the king’s house and is essentially raised as the king’s grandson.

But when we get to chapter 2, verse 11, we see that Moses somehow maintained his identity as a Hebrew.

The writer of the book of Hebrews provides us with this insight:

Apparently as his mother raises him in in the king’s house, she teaches him about his heritage, his people and his God.

So when he observes an Egyptian beating one of his fellow Hebrews, he takes things into his own hands and kills the Egyptian and hides the body.

The next day, Moses tries to intervene in a dispute between two of his fellow Hebrews and learns that his secret is out.

So when Pharaoh threatens to kill him, he flees to the land of Midian.

And it will take another 40 years before God has sufficiently humbled Moses to the point that he is ready to be used by God.

While in Midian, Moses marries Zipporah and has a son.

That brings us to the last part of chapter 2. Before we look at those verses, what I want to point out is that during the entirety of chapters 1 and 2 up to this point, we don’t see the Israelites, or even any individual within that community cry out to God in spite of the fact that they are suffering horribly at the hands of the Egyptians.

But in spite of that, God has been at work all long because He is faithful to keep His promises, even when His people do not.

Let’s take a moment to reflect on what God has been doing:

He caused the Israelites to flourish in spite of the obstacles they faced and had grown them into a large powerful nation.

He had worked through the Israelite midwives to save the lives of the Hebrew babies.

He had caused the deliverer he was going to use to be born to two parents that had violated the very law that Moses would receive directly from God one day.

He had preserved the life of Moses.

But even more amazing, in His complete sovereignty, He allowed Moses’ mother to be paid for raising her own child.

He had made sure that Moses understood his Hebrew heritage in spite of the fact that he was raised in Pharaoh’s house and that He at least knew of God to some degree.

He protected Moses when the king of Egypt wanted to kill him.

So with all that in mind, let’s look at the final words of chapter 2:

Finally the Israelites cry out to God.

And God takes action in response to their cry.

And each of those actions show that...

Even when it might not look like it God knows

FOUR ACTIONS THAT GOD TAKES WHEN ISRAEL CRIES OUT

God heard.

This is so encouraging!

Even though we find no evidence that the people had cried out to God for thousands of years, as soon as they cry out to Him, He hears their cries.

What I take away from this is that God is there waiting for us to cry out to Him.

He is constantly listening to His children.

The verb translated “heard” here doesn’t just mean to have something go in one ear and out the other.

It’s not the kind of selective hearing that we sometimes engage in, like I am sometimes guilty of doing.

There are times when I’m deeply engaged in some task and Mary will say something and I hear it but I don’t really pay attention to it.

But the verb that is used here means “to pay close attention to”.

So when God hears we have His full attention.

God remembered.

I need to spend a little more time on this one because if we’re not careful, we could mistakenly get the idea that God somehow forgot His people and only remembered them when they cried out.

What we’ve seen in this passage certainly refutes that idea because God had been at work the whole time in the lives of His people long before they cried out.