The Stuff You Didn't Know You Didn't Know Part 3
Key Themes in Exodus
Summary:
The following are some major themes in Exodus that will help us in our understanding of the book:
Redemption- To redeem something is to purchase it for yourself at some cost to yourself. Think of being at Chuck E Cheese or Dave and Busters and seeing that one huge prize that costs 500,000 tickets and deciding you’re not going to leave until you take that back home with you. That was how God felt toward Israel in this book. He wasn’t leaving Egypt until He took them back with Him, if you will. This redemption was not just spiritual but very much physical. God desires physical freedom, and we should be active in seeking it for people who do not have it.
Oppression and Power- Our circles don’t talk much about this theme, but it’s very common in the Bible. God gives people position, power, and privilege with the goal of having those people then help the people who don’t have position, power, or privilege. Instead, what often happens is those with power abuse it in order to find ways to keep from losing their power. Pharoah exhibits this principle well, and the first half of Exodus centers around God’s calling him out on his misuse of power.
Scarcity V Abundance- Human beings often act as though there’s not enough to go around. But the Eden mindset of God is that there is enough and that the more you share the more you’ll have as well. Jesus evidenced this belief as He fed roughly 15,000 people off one boy’s lunch. At the end of Genesis, Egypt was ruled by a Pharaoh who used his power to help the people under him and even to welcome in a foreign family in need. In a time of scarcity, he was willing to give abundantly to help others. The Pharaoh of Exodus ruled out of fear, his own fear of losing the power he had, thus leading him to abuse those under him. In a time of abundance, he acted as if there wasn’t enough to go around, and God judged him for it. Once Israel gains her freedom later on in the book, she begins to act like Pharaoh in assuming there isn’t enough to go around.
Atonement- In short, atonement is the ability to be reunited with God. Since we chose to define good and evil on our own terms in the Garden, God has been working to reunite with humanity. In Genesis 11, He chose to do that through one family line, that of Abraham. Between Genesis and Exodus 400 years pass where God seems not to move the story forward in any meaningful way, but He is about to take massive steps in reuniting heaven and earth, God and humanity. Exodus ends with the construction of the tabernacle, a place where heaven and earth meet for the first time since the Garden. Eventually Solomon will turn that into a permanent temple. Then Jesus will allow for us to become multiple versions of that meeting place of heaven and earth in order to reach the world.
Eden- Since atonement, the return to an Eden-like state, is such a major theme, it only makes sense that Eden imagery and language crops up all along the Exodus narrative. The first one shows up just 7 verses into the book. Most people would likely just read over that verse and think it’s saying that a lot of Jewish babies were born, but take careful note of the words used—“the children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly and multiplied.” That’s straight out of Genesis 1:28—“Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth.”
Priesthood- We notice the priesthood coming into focus more once we get toward the end of Exodus and into Leviticus. That’s usually the same time we start cursing ourselves for trying that read through the Bible in a year plan again. But those later parts of Exodus aren’t actually as confusing as they first appear once you’re able to look at them as a whole. We’ll likely spend a week on this theme later in the course. Priests are important because they act as the go-between between heaven and earth, God and humanity. They represent humanity to God and God to humanity. God is going to set up a priesthood with some pretty specific rules so that they can be key elements of restoring Eden, reuniting God and the world.
Instruction- The Hebrew word for instruction is torah. We often say it means “law,” but it’s really much broader than that. The Torah, the 5 books of Moses, are so much more than just laws. There are some laws, to be sure, but there’s also narratives, poetry, etc. While the laws were for a specific people in a specific time, all people in all times can draw instruction from the wisdom literature that is Exodus.
Moses Foreshadowing Israel- Foreshadowing is a literary technique where an author gives away a key later part of the story but in such a way that you don’t often realize it until it happens again. In Empire Strikes Back, Luke sees his own face in the mask of Darth Vader while on Dagobah, foreshadowing that Vader was his father. Early in Jaws, Brody trips over an air cannister, and later in the movie, he uses the air cannister to kill the shark. In the first several chapters of Exodus, events that happen to Moses frequently foreshadow what will happen to Israel later in the story. Moses is rescued out of the water just as Israel is rescued through the water at the Red Sea. Moses leaves Egypt and goes to Sinai just as Israel will 40 years later.
Order V Chaos- Genesis 1 opens with a contrast between the chaos of the pre-creation state and the order that God brings out of it with just a few words. Ancient Near Eastern cultures frequently used the sea to represent chaos. Exodus includes multiple scenes where God fights the chaos of this world with His order. Tuck this one away in the back of your mind; it’ll come back next week.
God’s Identity- Exodus includes the first mention of God’s name, Yahweh. See below for more details on why this is so important.
God Against the Gods
The Bible is full of weird stuff, and part of my job is to get you more comfortable with the weird stuff because most preachers don’t even mention it, usually either out of ignorance or discomfort. But if it’s weird, it’s important. One of the weird things in Scripture is how often there is mention of other gods and spiritual beings. Well, it’s weird to us, but if you grew up in an Ancient Near Eastern culture, it would make perfect sense to you. If you were anything like me you heard in church that there’s God, angels, demons, Satan, Gabriel, Michael, and that’s about it. Any of the gods of the pagan nations were just idols that they made up to have something to serve. But that’s not true. According to the Bible, those gods are very real and play a very important role in the Biblical story. In Genesis, God created two realms—the skies and the land. He placed spiritual beings in the spiritual realm and physical beings in the physical realm. Unfallen creatures can exist in either realm, but after the Fall, humans have been limited to the physical realm. We cannot exist in the spiritual realm without something changing about us. Hence why atonement is so important in Exodus and the rest of the Bible. The Bible describes multiple beings in the spiritual realm. Elohim- Preachers often define elohim as meaning God or gods, but it’s broader than that. Elohim is a class of spiritual beings. It’s a word that refers to beings that are not of a physical nature. Some of those elohim make up a divine council (Psalm 82). This is like a king’s court, full of advisors and spiritual rulers that interact with Yahweh and each other. Deuteronomy 32:8-9 tell us that when God divided the nations at the Tower of Babylon in Genesis 11, He appointed an elohim, a member of the divine council, to rule over each nation. Job 1 is by far the most famous passage in which this council appears. They also play a key role in the overthrow of Ahab in 1 Kings 22:19.
Angels- Angels are messengers. That’s the meaning of the word in both Hebrew and Greek. They’re the gofers of heaven. (They’re also never described as having wings.)
Cherubim- Cherubim (pronounced care-uh-veem with a hard C sound in Hebrew) are depicted as the throne guardians of heaven, basically God’s bodyguards. Their appearance changes depending on the passage, but they’re almost always found in passages describing the tabernacle/temple or some place where heaven and earth meet.
Seraphim- Seraphim appear only 7 times in Scripture. Isaiah 6:2 and 6 are what people think of, but they’re also in Num 21:6, 8, Deut 8:15, Isa 14:29, Isa 30:6. The word often translated “fiery serpents” is seraphim. So that incident in the desert wasn’t just venomous snakes. Those were spiritual beings.
Watchers- Watchers are strange members of the divine counsel mentioned only in Dan 4:13, 17, 23. Apparently they get to make decisions, but we don’t know much beyond that. This all matters for Exodus because God says that His purpose in bringing the plagues on Egypt was to judge the gods of Egypt for their corruption. Check out Exodus 12:12 and Numbers 33:4. The gods of the Bible are real, and Exodus is a story of cosmic war. All those Egyptian gods you read about in high school or saw in a tv show or movie—Amun, Anubis, Hek, Ra, Horus, Mut—all those were actual divine beings. They probably were not quite how we’ve come to portray them, but they were real, and they had real power, and Yahweh needed to completely upend all of them if He was to start over with the Israelites.
Next Week:
We’ll touch on some key figures on the bad side of the spiritual realm—demons, the satan, and corrupt gods.
Did you know sea serpents show up in the Exodus story? They’re there. See if you can find them before next week.
0n 10/30, we’re going to have an open forum discussion time for questions related to Exodus, so if anything has piqued your interest that you want to go into more detail on, let me know before then so we can go over it.
Recommended Resources:
The Bible Project’s “Spiritual Beings” series
Michael Heiser’s Unseen Realm, Angels, and Demons. These 3 books are available in print, digital, and audio formats. Logos Bible Software also just released video summaries of all 3 books, each about an hour long, on YouTube. If this is all new to you, I recommend starting with The Bible Project’s 7 videos, then watching the videos on Logos’ YT channel. Start with Unseen Realm, then Angels, then Demons. If you’re still interested, go ahead and grab the full book versions.
Brian Godawa has a fun Biblical fiction novel series called Chronicles of the Nephilim that presents familiar Old Testament Bible stories within this ancient supernatural world mindset. They’re very easy reads and will get you thinking of the Bible like you never have before.