Before the Dawn
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
Moving to WI
It is our tendency to think that opposition and difficulty are a sign that something is wrong, sometimes that is the case, but in this text we will see that they are often a sign that God is active
Previously On…
Previously On…
The Genesis Story
The Genesis Story
Seed of the woman v. seed of the serpent
15 I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel.”
Promise to Abraham
14 The Lord said to Abram, after Lot had separated from him, “Lift up your eyes and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward, 15 for all the land that you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever. 16 I will make your offspring as the dust of the earth, so that if one can count the dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted. 17 Arise, walk through the length and the breadth of the land, for I will give it to you.” 18 So Abram moved his tent and came and settled by the oaks of Mamre, which are at Hebron, and there he built an altar to the Lord.
Land
Offspring
God’s faithfulness to execute the promise throughout Genesis
Those who bless Abraham are blessed
Those who curse Abraham are cursed
Promised children
Protection in battle
Material prosperity
The End of Genesis
The End of Genesis
God’s people are protected in exile through Joseph
They are becoming a people; God has blessed
They lack a land
26 So Joseph died at the age of a hundred and ten. And after they embalmed him, he was placed in a coffin in Egypt.
Starting Exodus
Starting Exodus
Three movements of Exodus
Out of Egypt
To Sinai
At Sinai
The first movement is characterized by conflict between God’s people and Satan’s people
The first chapter advances that conflict with two intertwining strands – opposition and promise
The first chapter of Exodus is going to intensify Israel’s trouble in three episodes
Episode 1 – Israel multiplies
Episode 1 – Israel multiplies
1 These are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob, each with his household: 2 Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah, 3 Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin, 4 Dan and Naphtali, Gad and Asher. 5 All the descendants of Jacob were seventy persons; Joseph was already in Egypt. 6 Then Joseph died, and all his brothers and all that generation. 7 But the people of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them.
Thes verses establish continuity with Genesis
Be fruitful and multiply
28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Abraham’s descendants becoming a great nation
God’s promise is being fulfilled
The Israelites go from a small clan of 70 to the land of the greatest world power being “filled with them”
4a statements in v. 7
Fruitful
Increased greatly
Multiplied and grew exceedingly strong
The land was filled with them
600k men (12:37)
There’s something missing though
Abraham has been given a land but the people are not in it
430 years pass without being present in the land (Ex. 12:40)
God’s promise of a fertility has come to pass, but God’s people are still in Egypt
They are about to face opposition
Pharaoh opposes God’s work of creation itself (“be fruitful and multiply”)
Things are about to go from bad to worse
Episode 2 – Israel Enslaved
Episode 2 – Israel Enslaved
8 Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. 9 And he said to his people, “Behold, the people of Israel are too many and too mighty for us. 10 Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and, if war breaks out, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.” 11 Therefore they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with heavy burdens. They built for Pharaoh store cities, Pithom and Raamses. 12 But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad. And the Egyptians were in dread of the people of Israel. 13 So they ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves 14 and made their lives bitter with hard service, in mortar and brick, and in all kinds of work in the field. In all their work they ruthlessly made them work as slaves.
There is a new king
Unnamed (here and Genesis)
God’s promise is being fulfilled through the dramatic expansion of Israel
Israel faces opposition because Pharaoh fears their power
Pharaoh deals with his fear by enslaving Israel
Harsh labor in brick and mortar
All kinds of work in the fields
Ruthlessness
Pharaoh’s opposition is apparently futile and Israel continues to grow
The purpose was to oppress them
The result was multiplication
But the suffering was still real
Backs hurt
People were exhausted
God’s promise remained
When slavery doesn’t stop God’s promise from advancing Pharaoh turns up the dial.
Episode 3 – Genocide
Episode 3 – Genocide
The Midwives
The Midwives
The dial is turned up to secret conspiracy to murder infant boys
15 Then the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, 16 “When you serve as midwife to the Hebrew women and see them on the birthstool, if it is a son, you shall kill him, but if it is a daughter, she shall live.” 17 But the midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live. 18 So the king of Egypt called the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this, and let the male children live?” 19 The midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.” 20 So God dealt well with the midwives. And the people multiplied and grew very strong. 21 And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families.
Here we meet Shuprah and Puah
They are named, contrary to Pharaoh – mighty king is anonymous while little known midwives are named
The midwives motivation is made explicit – they fear God (v. 17)
Contrast with Pharaoh’s fear of God
Contrast with their fear of Pharaoh
Pharaoh intensifies his opposition through a planned secret genocide
By having the midwives kill the baby before birth, he is trying to disguise his actions
The midwives do not assist Pharaoh because they fear God
The midwives resist with a story about how quickly the Hebrew women give birth
Is their story a lie?
We are led to ask this question because God explicitly blesses them
This also leads us to conclude that they are proactively doing something
Possibly: This introduces a challenging moral question – is it right to lie in order to preserve life?
Another option: As a fulfillment of the promise of God to Abraham, the Hebrew women’s fruitfulness includes particularly quick labors. God providentially protects the boys through this rapid labor
Another option: The midwives would deliberately come slowly
Their resistance is small (they don’t preform miracles like Aaron, call down plagues like Moses, or topple Pharaoh’s regime), but they are blessed for their action and remembered for their loyalty to God
The midwives are blessed with children of their own
“I will bless those who bless you”
Pharaoh tries to solve a birth rate disparity through murder, but blessing God’s people would have been a more effective way for Egypt to prosper
The River
The River
When his secret plan to murder the baby boys doesn’t work, Pharaoh turns up the dial again and publicly exterminates the Israelite children.
22 Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, “Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live.”
The river God used to give Egypt life was used to bring death
Foreshadowing
The river will be the place of baby Moses’s salvation
Judgment on Pharaoh will be brought forth from the river
Pharaoh is successful at bringing suffering, but her utterly fails at stopping the march of God’s promise.
Application
Application
First Considerations
First Considerations
The first audience
Israel in the Wilderness
A rescued people prone to lose their faith need to be reminded of the one who saved them
The purpose of Exodus
So Israel knows God
5 “that they may believe that the Lord, the God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has appeared to you.”
So the Egyptians know God
3 But I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and though I multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, 4 Pharaoh will not listen to you. Then I will lay my hand on Egypt and bring my hosts, my people the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great acts of judgment. 5 The Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord, when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring out the people of Israel from among them.”
So Pharaoh knows God
17 Thus says the Lord, “By this you shall know that I am the Lord: behold, with the staff that is in my hand I will strike the water that is in the Nile, and it shall turn into blood.
So the nations know God
10 And he said, “Behold, I am making a covenant. Before all your people I will do marvels, such as have not been created in all the earth or in any nation. And all the people among whom you are shall see the work of the Lord, for it is an awesome thing that I will do with you.
So we learn from them
6 Now these things took place as examples for us, that we might not desire evil as they did.
God is using this story (and the whole book) to tell us something we need to know about him.
This book gives us a shadow of an even greater Exodus which we experience today – the exodus from death into life.
Seeing Jesus
Seeing Jesus
We are advancing the Genesis plan for redemption
Woman v. serpent (advancing the conflict Gen 3)
Pharaoh is called a dragon/serpent
3 speak, and say, Thus says the Lord God:
“Behold, I am against you,
Pharaoh king of Egypt,
the great dragon that lies
in the midst of his streams,
that says, ‘My Nile is my own;
I made it for myself.’
Pharaoh resists God’s plan just like the serpent
“Be fruitful and multiply”
Pharaoh’s miraculous serpents are consumed by God’s servant’s
12 For each man cast down his staff, and they became serpents. But Aaron’s staff swallowed up their staffs.
But pharaoh is not the great serpent and Moses is not the great deliverer. The Exodus account is always pointing us forward to a greater redemption in Jesus
Jesus is born under the power of an evil king who will destroy infants to bring prosperity
He is the one who will ultimately bring us into promised rest
He is the one who most embodies the intertwining threads of oppression and promise
He is despised and rejected, but he ends oppression
3 He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
14 From oppression and violence he redeems their life,
and precious is their blood in his sight.
On the cross Jesus died, but so did death
The serpent bruised his heel but Jesus crushed the serpent’s head
Living with Oppression
Living with Oppression
We are not slaves like Israel was, but we still live in the effects of the battle between the Serpent and the Seed
Genesis gives us examples of many ways the curse affects us
Conflict between husband and wife
Conflict between siblings
Futility of labor
Death and disease
Temptation
Some of you look at the world around you and see it’s fallenness as a reason to fight against the creator.
The path to blessings isn’t resistance to God it is submission to him.
Are you battling with the Serpent and the curse he brought?
We live between promise and fulfillment
Be patient
God is barely mentioned in this chapter
430 years
Shakespeare was 32
There was no permanent English settlement in the New World
Galileo had not yet learned about the telescope and become an advocate for heliocentrism
The presence of God’s enemy is not evidence of God’s absence
In fact it is often the opposite
In those times where the serpent seems most powerful, he is actually about to be crushed.
Trust the one who destroys him.
Quotable
Exodus doesn’t ignore pain, it submits pain to a greater plan.
Exodus doesn’t tell you that Pharaoh is weak, it tells you God is stronger.
Exodus doesn’t tell the the serpent can’t wound, but that the serpent can’t win.
Take heart
Israel was delivered
Jesus was delivered
You will be delivered
