One Story: Redemption
Notes
Transcript
The Set up
The Set up
So you’ve hung with me for two weeks as I bulldozed through the book of Genesis, congrats on that! Today we are going to pick up where the story left off. So if you remember, God called one family from among the nations to be his covenant partners in blessing the world. And that family ends up living down in Egypt because one of its members, a man named Joseph, had become a really important person there and had basically saved Egypt and most of the middle east from a suffering under a seven year famine.
The very next book of the Bible is Exodus, and it begins in this way.
These are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob, each with his household: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin, Dan and Naphtali, Gad and Asher. The total number of people born to Jacob was seventy. Joseph was already in Egypt. Then Joseph died, and all his brothers, and that whole generation. But the Israelites were fruitful and prolific; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them.
Basically what has happened is that 400 years have passed. And this family of 70 has become a numerous people. They were fruitful and they multiplied… just as God had commanded people to do. God says this in Genesis 1:28 after creating humans (you might remember this from a few weeks ago).
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 air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”
So the Israelites are living out this mandate given to all of humanity by God at the beginning, and God is living into the promise that he made to Abraham in Genesis 17:1-6 which we discussed last week. God basically tells Abraham — your offspring are going to exceed your wildest imagination.
So thats the set up for what’s to come. These chosen people of God are living out the theme of creation from week 1, and God is living out the theme of covenant from week 2 and everything seems to be going alright. But what happens next is most certainly not going to be ok.
A New King
A New King
Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. He said to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.” Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites.
What happens is this new King of Egypt, a man simply referred to as Pharaoh, comes to power and is afraid of these foreigners who live in his land. He’s afraid that their loyalty isn’t to Egypt, so he enacts state sponsored oppression of them, enslaving them, and creating a general hatred of them amongst the public.
This is a moment where I want to just pause for one second. Because this is a theme that has repeated in one way or another throughout history. It speaks to our human desire for power, and the lengths that we will go to as persons and as a society to keep power that we have. This is kind of the natural progression when nationalism becomes the religion of the people. We saw and still see what kind of world that breeds over the past 2 centuries in parts of Europe and Asia. And we would do well to recognize its signs in our own home, because this part of our Bible isn’t going to tell us that its a good thing. Ok, back to Pharaoh.
Pharaoh then institutes a type of genocide, ordering that all male babies that are born to the Hebrew people be put to death. But one mother hides her baby, and then in a desperate act puts him in a small raft and floats him down the Nile river, where none other than Pharaoh’s daughter finds him and adopts him. This baby’s name was Moses.
Moses grew up in Pharaoh’s house and when he was older went out and saw the oppression of the Hebrew people, his people. He sees a guard beating the slaves and out of anger strikes him and kills him. And he realizes this is really bad, so he flees out into the wilderness. Pharaoh finds out, and is intent on killing Moses, so he stays gone for a long time. And things don’t get any better for the Hebrew slaves
But things are about to change for the better, and it begins here with these words at the end of Exodus chapter 2.
After a long time the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned under their slavery, and cried out. Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God. God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them.
So the Pharaoh dies, which means there’s going to be a new Pharaoh, who’s even worse. But more importantly than that, this is really the turning point in the text, even though there’s a lot to plod through next. This is really the central idea that I want you to hold on to for the rest of this sermon and the rest of your lives. God hears the cry of these oppressed people, people whom he has a covenant with. It says he remembers, which really means called to the forefront of his mind (God doesn’t forget stuff) the covenant that he made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (that whole thing we talked about last week). And he sees them and he took notice, which in Hebrew says “he knew them.” To know someone in Hebrew is to have an intimate relationship with them, in this case for God to draw near to and feel their pain.
Hatching a Rescue Plan
Hatching a Rescue Plan
Because God has this experience with his people, he sees that they are in dire need of Redemption from their slavery. God also has promised them that they will possess the land of Canaan, so he decides that it’s time to lead the people out of Egypt and into the Promised land. So, he approaches Moses through a burning bush and says to him this in Exodus 3:7-10 :
Then the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”
And Moses is kind of like no thanks. Hard pass man. The people and Pharaoh won’t listen to me. And God is like no its cool man, Just tell them YHWH sent you. And Moses is like um, but I’m not good with words. So God is like fine, take your brother Aaron with you. He can do all the talking.
So Moses finally complies, he heads back to Egypt, meets with the leaders of the Hebrews, does some miraculous things that God has empowered him to do and then finds his brother Aaron and they are off to confront Pharaoh. So far it went well. God said tell them YHWH sent you, and it worked with the Hebrew people, they believed him, so lets see what happens next.
Moses and Aaron go to Pharaoh and say “hey, we need you to give us a day off from working so we can worship YHWH,” and this is Exodus 5:2
But Pharaoh said, “Who is the Lord, that I should heed him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, and I will not let Israel go.”
And this sets the stage for a very real physical, but also cosmic battle between Pharaoh and the God of Israel. You see, to Egypt, Pharaoh was a god. The people worshiped the Pharaoh as the all powerful one. So what happens next is really a battle between the God of the Hebrew people and the god of the Egyptian people. And it takes place in the form of the plagues.
The plagues are structured in a super interesting way that really dismantles all of the evil work that Pharaoh has done. They strip pharaoh of his claim to supernatural authority because his magicians can’t reproduce them, his political authority because his officials start to lose faith in him and bail, and in the final plague the very genocidal act of Pharaoh’s father against the Hebrew people is turn back on itself, and the first born of each family in Egypt dies, including Pharaoh’s own son.
And this is a tragic thing, I don’t know any other thing to say about it. But it is the event that finally breaks Pharaoh and moves him to let the Hebrew people go. For a time. They pack up and head out and get to the edge of the Sea of Reeds when Pharaoh realizes his workforce is gone, and so he sends his army after them. And Moses delivers the people through the sea, which collapses on Pharaoh’s army.
The people are freed from slavery. Finally. They are redeemed, and they commemorate the occasion with a song. Listen to the undertones, what this song is saying about who God is and what God has done in Exodus 15:11-13
“Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods?
Who is like you, majestic in holiness,
awesome in splendor, doing wonders?
You stretched out your right hand,
the earth swallowed them.
“In your steadfast love you led the people whom you redeemed;
you guided them by your strength to your holy abode.
and then in Exodus 15:21
And Miriam sang to them:
“Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.”
For the Hebrew people this is a cosmic and a physical victory. Their God, YHWH, has trampled the powers of spiritual darkness (who is like you among the gods aka the gods of Egypt in this case) as well as the physical powers that enslaved them. They are finally free to worship YHWH and freed from the physical bondage of slavery.
But this doesn’t mean that all will be well. It doesn’t take long for the people to have need once again. The very next story tells of the people revolting against Moses because there is no good water. Moses cries out to God, and God delivers them fresh water. Then they are hungry, and God hears their complaints and provides bread from heaven. Then they are thirsty again, and Moses cries out to God, and God provides water.
The Ultimate Redeemer
The Ultimate Redeemer
This pattern continues throughout the rest of our Bibles, even when Israel is at its worst, God continually sends them a lifeline, with an offer of both physical and spiritual redemption. He hears the cries of the oppressed within Israel and sends prophets to correct the direction of their society. He hears the cries of the exiles and answers them, delivering them once again from the hands of an oppressive empire. But still, God’s people are in need of redemption. Things are not going well.
Jesus was born into a world and to a people who faced political, religious, and spiritual persecution. They were pawns and subjects of the mighty Roman empire. They were stuck between the world of paganism and often overly legalistic Judaism — the religion of their ancestors that had been infiltrated by power hungry religious elites. They were oppressed by their taxes, oppressed by spiritual forces of darkness, and somehow oppressed by the religion that followed the God who originally liberated them.
Jesus came and he redeemed his people in a similar but different way than God had through Moses. He subverted the oppression of the religious elites by showing compassion and love to those whom they deemed unworthy. Samaritans, Canaanites, Romans, the poor, the sick, and the lame all found healing and comfort in the acts of Jesus.
Jesus may not have led a physical revolution or unleashed a flurry of plagues on Rome and Jerusalem, but he did cast out demons and flip over tables in the temple court. He may not have led his people through the sea, but he led them to see their world and their place in it differently. He led them to see the Kingdom of God.
And in his final redemptive act, he took to the cross. And on that cross the oppressive political, religious, and spiritual powers that ensnared God’s people were overturned. The guards who had pledged their lives in service to the god-emperor Caesar declared “this man was truly God’s son.” The veil in the temple that served to separate God’s presence from God’s people was torn. Evil’s power was overturned as death was rendered powerless through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.
Jesus’s mission was to come into this world and redeem it. His work offers us new life, redemption from both the spiritual death that we experience apart from him, and physical redemption from the ways that our attitudes and behaviors cause oppression and brokenness in our lives. Jesus is the embodiment of God’s redemptive activity, which continues in our world to this day.
Continual Redemption
Continual Redemption
The crux of this whole discussion still lies in that pivotal text, that God heard the cries of the Israelites and he remembered his covenant and he knew them. Jesus comes to us and he finds us because he truly hears our cries for help. He hears our audible cries and he hears those silent but still cries from the bottoms of our heart. God hears them and God feels them.
And so if you’ve never cried out to God and said God help me, Redeem me, I can’t keep doing this anymore without you, I’m inviting you to make that move and to allow your life to change forever.
But a big problem in our world is that we forget that God still listens. God still hears our cries long after God redeems us. We become like those Israelites, who have felt and seen the redemptive power of God, but we find ourselves wandering out in the wilderness. Our situation deteriorates and we start to grumble, start looking back at where we came from. Surely it was better in Egypt they said, surely life was easier before Jesus we say. Surely I had more money, surely it was easier to just walk past those suffering without a care, surely it would be easier if I just didn’t have all of these ethical boundaries to navigate through.
Or maybe you just forget that God still cares. That God isn’t a once and done kind of redeemer. But God is. And God does. God shows up, and sometimes what it takes for us to realize that is for us to just drop the act, drop the I’ve got this all figured out attitude and just cry out. Just yell at God for the mess you’re in, realize that you don’t got this, you can’t handle this all on your own and just let God know you. Let God come alongside of you. I can’t promise that all of your earthly struggles will end, but I can promise you that the God you cry out to knows.
Jesus knows what it’s like to be rejected. Jesus knows what it’s like to be betrayed. Jesus knows what it’s like to be hungry, to be tired, to be lonely, to be disparaged, to be despised, to be beaten, to be accused, and to be laughed into the grave. You worship a God who knows you. He knows you by name and he knows you by pain. So cry out, reach out. Know that you haven’t been redeemed and abandoned, but rather you have been redeemed and brought into the greatest love that has ever existed. Know, in the very depths of you soul, that God Shows up.