Sermon on Exodus 1. The Rescuer Rescued.
From http://www.ozemail.com.au/~gsmunro/resource.htm
G.S. Munro. Scottsdale-Bridport Presbyterian Church, Sunday, September 21st, 2003.

For many Christians the Old Testament, the first 39 books of the bible, is foreign territory. Many put it in the too hard basket. It's full of lists of names, strange ancient laws and weird stories. But without the Old Testament, the New Testament of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, makes little sense. If you want to grow in your understanding of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, then you need to work hard at understanding the Old Testament.

The Old Testament is the story of the Jewish people. In about 2000 BC, God chose one man called Abram, to be the father of his people. Abram means exalted father, but God changed Abram's name to Abraham, meaning father of many nations. God made his covenant, his agreement, his promise, with Abraham. He promised to give him a people, a land, and a blessing. Through Abraham, God would bless all nations on earth. He promised what was in effect a return to the garden of Eden, where God's people lived in harmony with each other and with God's creation.

With Abraham and his descendants we see God’s plan of salvation for the world step up a gear. He creates a people for himself. That's where Exodus chapter one starts out. "These are the names of the sons of Israel who went to Egypt with Jacob, each with his family." Jacob and Israel are the same person of course. God changed Jacob's name, which means "he deceives" to Israel, which means, "he struggles with God." Jacob, or Israel, had 12 sons, and they are listed here in verses 2 to 5. These verses are a summary of the second half of Genesis, where you can read the exploits of these sons of Jacob, who became the fathers of the 12 tribes of Israel.

When you read Genesis, you find something about God that is repeated throughout the bible. God delights to choose the weak and foolish, not the strong and wise. He calls not the righteous, but sinners. Salvation is not by man's effort, but by God's choice. That's great news for us, because God hasn't changed. He accepts us unconditionally because of his great love for us.

God does something else. He begins to raise up saviours, rescuers to save his people from extinction. In Genesis we read about Joseph, who saved his father Jacob and his family. Jacob went with his whole family to Egypt, and lived in the land of Goshen, under the protection and favour of Joseph and the Pharaoh Joseph served so faithfully as vizier of Egypt. Then, we read from Exodus one verse 6: "Now Joseph and all his brothers and all that generation died, but the Israelites were fruitful and multiplied greatly and became exceedingly numerous, so that the land was filled with them."

Here is the promise to Abraham coming true. Abraham looked forward in faith to the time when God would keep his promise to give him descendants who would be a great people, and a land where they would live under God's care and rule. But the only part of the promised land of Canaan that Abraham ever owned was his burial plot. He died in faith, not seeing how God would forge a people for himself in the crucible of Egypt. Like Abraham, all we have to go on, is the bare word of God, and we need the same faith, as we await the return of Jesus.

Several hundred years pass since the time of Joseph and then we read: "a new king, who did not know about Joseph, came to power in Egypt.

"Look," he said to his people, "the Israelites have become much too numerous for us and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us, and leave the country."

We don't know exactly when the events of Exodus happened, because the text doesn’t name the Egyptian king anywhere, but simply uses his title, Pharaoh. But we do know that in about fifteen fifty BC, Egypt was ruled by Semitic people called the Hyksos. They were of the same racial group as the Hebrews. There was a civil war, the Egyptians won, threw off their yoke, and expelled them. The Exodus took place after this time, and this may explain the fears of the pharaoh in verse 10: "if war breaks out, they might join our enemies, fight against us, and leave the country." Sounds like a strange thing to worry about, until you realise what took place earlier with the Hyksos, people related to the Hebrews.

Now racial prejudice, and the fear of foreigners, has been around since the tower of Babel. We are suspicious of those who are different and strange. Like Pharaoh, people like Pauline Hanson put forward seemingly logical arguments to justify their prejudice. But racial discrimination is in the final analysis, irrational and evil, an excuse for our lack of love towards strangers. Whether Pharaoh's attitude to the Hebrews, or our attitude to new migrants or asylum seekers, it is irrational and wrong. Whether it is enslaving the descendants of Jacob, or locking up Chinese and Middle Eastern boat people for years in detention camps like criminals, it all springs from the same evil within human hearts that says "I will love only those who are like me, or of my kind. All others are to be feared and mistrusted."

Sometimes it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, doesn't it? Pharaoh embarks on a plan HE thinks will avert the disaster he fears. Ironically, it results in exactly what he does fear. If he had acted with kindness to the Hebrews, like the pharaoh of Joseph's time, then the Hebrews would have responded with loyalty and been a blessing to Egypt. But his xenophobia sets Egypt on a course for disaster that his son and grandson will have to bear.

He develops a cunning plan. This plan has two stages. The first stage is to enslave and oppress. Verse 11, "so they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labour... But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread; so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites and worked them ruthlessly. They made their lives bitter with hard labour in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields; in all their hard labour the Egyptians used them ruthlessly."

Since this didn't work, Pharaoh resorts to stage two. Genocide through murder and assimilation. We have seen variations of this plan used by many tyrants and conquerors in the sad history of humanity. It is not very far from our own history, either. Until recently, white Australia used it against the original inhabitants of this country. We didn't throw the babies in the river, we just took them away from their mothers and tried to bring them up as whites so they would be assimilated.  Pharaoh's plan is more starkly calculated and brutal, but based on the same principle. Kill the boys, make the girls marry Egyptians, and in a generation, their culture will disappear.

First, Pharaoh tries to get collaborators to do the job for him. I assume the midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, were Hebrews, though they may have been Egyptians. Presumably they were the chief midwives, since in such a large and rapidly reproducing community, there must have been more than two.

This story highlights just how much we ought to pray for those of our number who are in the medical profession. For they are faced often with serious ethical dilemmas. Sometimes, like these midwives, there may be a clash between faithfulness to God and obedience to the state.

Pharaoh instructed the midwives, " if it is a boy, kill him, if it is a girl, let her live."

Presumably, they were to do this by stealth, so that it would look like an accident or stillbirth. The midwives, whose job it is to bring life into the world, not destroy it, disobeyed, the bible says, because they feared God. They gave the excuse that the Hebrew women were so vigorous that they always gave birth before the midwives arrived.

At best this could have been only a half truth. Perhaps the midwives told the Hebrews what Pharaoh had instructed, so maybe they did wait until after the birth to contact the midwives. Who knows? But we can't escape the fact that the midwives were disobedient and deceitful towards Pharaoh. The scripture says, "they feared God and did not do what the king had told them to. They let the boys live."

Is it wrong to lie in such a situation? Was it wrong for Rahab the harlot, later in the bible, to lie to the king of Jericho in order to save the Israelite spies? She too was commended, not specifically for lying, but for fearing God. In both these instances, their actions were motivated by fear of God. Although the bible clearly teaches that we are to obey our rulers, stories like this illustrate that civil obedience ends when what the government commands is against God's law and character. The midwives feared God more than any human tyrant. They responded to that fear in the only way they knew - by deceiving Pharaoh. And God blessed them because of it, with families of their own, and the Israelites continued to multiply.

Pharaoh now takes the more direct route to achieve his goals. In the end every tyrant will resort openly to murder. He instructs his people that every Hebrew boy born must be killed. And this sets the scene for the birth of a very special boy.

His parents were from the tribe of Levi, which God would choose as the priestly tribe. The New Testament book of Hebrews says of them: "By faith Moses' parents hid him for three months after he was born, because they saw he was no ordinary child, and they were not afraid of the king's edict."

After a while it becomes pretty hard to hide a baby from your neighbours. They get rather noisy. So we have the famous story of Moses in the bulrushes, in verses 3 to 10 of chapter 2.

We don't know exactly what his parents had in mind. Did they intend to hide Moses among the rushes for an extended period? That doesn't seem feasible. Did they know the princess was kindhearted and would take pity on him? Or did they just trust that God would somehow do something? We simply don't know.

We get little hints here and there throughout Exodus that the people of Egypt were not as ill disposed towards the Hebrews as their king. And maybe that's why the king's plan failed. It seems that even this daughter of the king thought little of her father's edict. She could of course have had the baby dispatched immediately: she knows it is one of the Hebrews, but like the midwives, she chooses to be compassionate and ignore Pharaoh's cruel law.

This story shows us a lot about God's character and plan of salvation. For those who have faith in Him, God always does marvelously more than we could ever imagine. Within a few hours, baby Moses went from being a tiny fugitive marked for death, to the adopted son of a princess of Egypt! His mother, who formerly had to hide him every day in fear, would now be paid to nurse him in the open! What a sense of humour God has. What a joke at Pharaoh's expense! His own daughter was God's appointed rescuer for the baby who would grow up to rescue the people Pharaoh wanted to destroy. What enormous blessings God heaps upon those who fear him and put their trust in him.

This is just the beginning of the story of Moses, the first great rescuer of God's people. But Moses himself was just a forerunner to the one who would come. Another baby would be born, many centuries later, who would save not just one people, but many. He would rescue, not from political slavery, but from slavery to sin. And have you noticed how remarkably similar are the stories of the birth of Moses, and the birth of Jesus? Both special babies, born to be saviours of their people, but both themselves saved from tyrants who sought to destroy them. Like Pharaoh, King Herod ordered the death of every boy child in Bethlehem. And where did Jesus escape to with his family? Ironically, they fled to Egypt.

Behind all this history of the Old Testament, stands the King of History, the Lord God Almighty. That's why this is more than just an ancient story. It has relevance to us today, because God deals with us as he dealt with them. What can we learn from this story of the saviour saved? First, it teaches us about God's character and dependability. In our world at the start of the 21st century, we need as much as ever, as much as the ancient Hebrews did, to know that God remembers us. That He is in control of our lives and of our world. That He is mightier than all of the evil forces arrayed against us. Peter the apostle says "we know that we belong to God even though the whole world is under the power of the evil one."

God remembered his people in Egypt. He hadn't forgotten his promise made to Abraham. But that's easy for us to see, because we know the end of the story. We know Moses grew up to lead his people to freedom. They didn't. They had to suffer another 80 years of slavery. And we are no different. Very often the cares and worries and anxieties, the persecution, the illness, the weakness of our sinful nature, all the evil that comes upon us in this fallen world, from within and without, can wear us down. Like the Israelites, we groan. We cry out to God, "How long O Lord?" How long till I can rest? How long till the pain ceases? How long till I no longer struggle against sin, the world and the devil? Sometimes it seems like we are trapped, crushed, with no way out. But God is not absent. He has not forgotten you. He remembers his covenant with Abraham, which has been fulfilled in Jesus, our Jesus.

Is this the God you worship and love? Do you trust in the God whose hand is over all history for the good of his people? This requires faith. Hebrews 11 tells us we have the great example of Moses' parents, and of the midwives, and of all those countless other Hebrew parents who hid their boy children too, because, one way or another, the king's plan failed didn't it? The Hebrews were not wiped out. The boys lived and grew up and had children. Although they groaned under slavery for a further 80 years, when Moses finally led them out as an old man, he led a people that numbered hundreds of thousands.

Next week, we will see what God did with that special child when he grew up. God through Moses will win a great victory over the forces of evil. In the desert, he established his church, which in the Old Testament was the nation of Israel. But first, the saviour must be rejected by his own people. And that is the subject of next week's sermon.