Preparation Series

The Story of Moses: Preparation

Exodus 2:11-25

Pastor Jefferson M. Williams

Chenoa Baptist Church

03-02–2025

Obituary

Last week, I helped Debbie, Patrick’s daughter, write his obituary. It’s a strange thing to write an obituary of someone you loved.

It’s even stranger to read your own obituary. That’s what happened to Alfred Nobel. When his brother died in 1888, the papers published Alfred’s obituary by mistake.

They called him the “Merchant of Death” and “Dr. Nobel, who who became rich by finding ways to kill more people than ever before, died yesterday.” They were highlighting his invention of dynamite.

Alfred was horrified that this is how he would be remembered. Upon his death, he left his fortune to found the Nobel Prize. He wanted to leave behind a better legacy.

Have you ever felt that way? Have you wanted a “do-over?” Have you failed at something and were afraid that failure would define you?

Moses knew that feeling completely and that’s what we are going to study this morning.

Review

Last week, we learned that Joseph’s family settled in the land of Goshen. They were shepherds by trade and the reigning king was a shepherd as well. At the end of Genesis, the children of Israel were a small group of 70, living in the middle of nowhere.

But as we begin the book of Exodus, four hundred years after the end of Genesis, there are somewhere between two and three million Jewish people in Egypt.

This presented a problem to the new Pharaoh, who did not know the story of how Joseph saved the nation from starvation. All he saw was a military threat:

“Then a new king, to whom Joseph meant nothing, came to power in Egypt.  “Look,” he said to his people, “the Israelites have become far too numerous for us.  Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country.” (Exodus 1:8-10)

In the case of a military conflict, they could join the attacking force and then get out of there.

The king had a shrewd solution:

“So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh. 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 harsh labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields; in all their harsh labor the Egyptians worked them ruthlessly.” (Exodus 1:11-14)

The Egyptians enslaved the people of Israel, just as God had told Abraham when he made the covenant with him to give him offspring as numerous as the stars in the sky. (See Gen 15)

The Israelites became slaves. They were political, economic, and social slaves. But most of all, they were in spiritual bondage.

The plan backfired because the more they were oppressed, the more numerous they became.

Pharaoh first tries to order the midwives to start killing all the Hebrew baby boys but they feared God more than him.

Next, he begins a war on the Jewish people that still rages today:

 “Then Pharaoh gave this order to all his people: “Every Hebrew boy that is born you must throw into the Nile, but let every girl live.” (Exodus 1:22)

Because of this decree, Jochabed and Amram hide their new baby boy as long as they could. When his cries became too loud to hide anymore, Jochabed devised a plan.

She placed the baby in a basket made of reeds, a little ark, and sent it out in the Nile current, praying that it would be kept safe and God would guide it to the Pharaoh’s palace.

The plan worked:

“Then Pharaoh’s daughter went down to the Nile to bathe, and her attendants were walking along the riverbank. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her female slave to get it. She opened it and saw the baby. He was crying, and she felt sorry for him. “This is one of the Hebrew babies,” she said.” (Exodus 2:5-6)

Pharaoh’s daughter probably saw this baby as a gift from the river god, Osiris.

Miriam, his older sister, had followed her little brother and emerged from the bullrushes and offered to get a Hebrew woman to nurse the baby for her.

Jochabed received her baby back and was even paid to nurse him. But after he was weaned, he would be taken to the palace.

“When the child grew older, she took him to Pharaoh’s daughter and he became her son. She named him Moses, saying, “I drew him out of the water.” (Exodus 2:10)

This same Moses would later live up to his name and “draw out” the Israelites from Egypt. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.