Can you trust God’s promises? What do you do when nothing seems to come of what you thought God had said he’d do? What if you find yourself in a place that’s the exact opposite of what you were expecting? What if God has promised that he’ll look after you, that he’ll bless you and yet you feel like you’re actually experiencing God’s curse?
These aren’t idle questions. They’re the sorts of questions that people face every day. Too often people read the promises of God and conclude that he’ll reward those who fear him right now and in some material form. But then you read about Christians in Sudan or Indonesia or various Muslim countries for whom life is hard work, people who never experience anything like material rewards; in fact for whom mere survival is a triumph. How do they understand God’s promise to bless them?
The people of Israel must have felt just like them after living for 400 years in Egypt. Their distant history, their heritage, had little in common with their current experience.
They would have heard the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob over and over again. They knew all about the promises God had made to Abraham, how he’d be the father of a great nation, how God would bless him and his descendants; how he’d give him all the land of Canaan as his possession forever. But then they’d look around at their situation and wonder. Here they were living as slaves. It was all very well for Joseph to bring his family to Egypt to escape a famine, but Joseph was long gone and largely forgotten. 400 years of life in Egypt had resulted in their family growing to become a great nation just as God had promised, but as a result the king of Egypt had begun to get anxious about their growing power.
The first part of God’s promise had been fulfilled. They now numbered something over 600,000 people plus their children. But that just meant they’d become a threat and that threat meant they had to be controlled. So here they were caught in a bad place; oppressed, downtrodden, their babies being slaughtered by their Egyptian overlords. What could they do?
All they could do was to cry out to the Lord to save them. All they could do was to carry on hoping against hope that God would do something to relieve their situation. And here we see how God acts so often to rescue his people.
God’s Call
God hears our prayers and when the time is right he answers them. And so often he answers by calling one of us to be his agent of salvation.
God takes a Levite family and uses them to preserve one of the male babies in miraculous fashion. I trust you all know the story of Moses in the bulrushes and how Pharaoh’s daughter decides to raise him as her own. Moses grows up in Pharaoh’s household, but he retains his identity as one of the Hebrews. The only problem is, they don’t accept him as one of them. In fact in the end they turn on him and drive him away.
But God follows him out to the desert region of Midian where he marries the daughter of one of the local priests and has two sons. Then after 40 years living as a shepherd God appears to him in the burning bush.
The important thing to recognise at this point is that this rescue was God’s plan. It wasn’t Moses bright idea. In fact nothing could be further from the truth.
We don’t have time to go through the account of Moses being persuaded by God that he can do this job. Suffice it to say that Moses is a very reluctant saviour. He didn’t think he could do it. He was scared of what the Hebrew people would think of him. He was scared of what Pharaoh might do to him. But in the end God persuaded him to confront Pharaoh. God was about to act decisively to fulfill the rest of his promise to Abraham.
The sign that this is God’s plan comes first in the circumstances around the burning bush. This is no ordinary bush fire. The flames are rising but the branches don’t burn up.
Then comes the voice of God issuing a warning: "Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground." God has sanctified the ground on which Moses is standing through his presence there.
Thirdly God gives Moses his command: "Come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt." God sends Moses off with a mission: He’s to tell first the Israelites, then Pharaoh, that God has come down to deliver his people 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.
We didn’t really look at Genesis 15, but let me remind you what God’s promise was to Abraham 400 years before: (Gen 15:13-16) "Know this for certain, that your offspring shall be aliens in a land that is not theirs, and shall be slaves there, and they shall be oppressed for four hundred years; 14but I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. ... 16And they shall come back here in the fourth generation; for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete."
God hasn’t forgotten his promise. He’s just been waiting for the right time. As we’ll see in a moment it was necessary for God to wait until the time was right to bring his people back so they could take the land of Canaan for themselves. But now the time has come and so God calls Moses to lead his people out. But remember, it isn’t Moses who’ll rescue his people. No:
The rescue would be God’s
There was no way that Pharaoh was going to listen to Moses, even is he was raised in the king’s own household. The Israelites were far too useful an economic commodity for him to just let them go.
The only way they’d escape Egypt would be if God intervened. And so we read that God sent plagues on Egypt: plagues of increasing intensity. Plagues that were first matched by the Egyptian magicians either for real or by sleight of hand. But they soon gave up. The plagues got gradually worse and worse but still Pharaoh refused to budge. Until at last God said he’d kill the first born son of every household in the country from the king’s son down to the lowest in the land. Even the firstborn of the cattle would die. This was to be a catastrophe of Biblical proportions. It was a disaster that the Egyptians would never really get over.
But it also forms the setting for one of God’s great acts of salvation: a saving act that would be the prefiguring of God’s greatest act of salvation. God told the Israelites that on a particular night he’d go through the land and every firstborn son would die, as a sign of his judgement on the gods of Egypt. But whenever he saw a house with the blood of a lamb on the door posts he’d pass over it and no-one in that house would be harmed.
That night they were to hold a special feast of roast lamb. They were to eat it with their cloaks tucked into their belts, their sandals on their feet and their staff in their hands. They were to eat quickly so they were ready when the time came for God to bring them out of Egypt.
And so it happened. Every house in Egypt except those of the Israelites was affected. Pharaoh summoned Moses and begged him to leave. They took the bread they’d been making that hadn’t yet had yeast added to it and cooked it on the way. So they had bread that’d last them through the early days of their journey. The Egyptians urged their Israelite neighbours to hurry and leave the country. They gave them silver and gold and clothing to hurry them on their way. So God not only rescued them but allowed them to plunder the Egyptians as though they’d won a great battle.
But we need to stop for a moment and remember that this rescue of God’s people from the Egyptians was a foreshadowing of the far greater rescue that Jesus would achieve during another passover some 2000 years later. John described Jesus as the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Jesus died as the one who’d take our place; whose blood would be the sign for God to overlook our sins; whose death would bring an end to death and dying. This act of salvation from Egypt was a pale reflection of the far greater act of salvation that God had planned for his people through the coming of Jesus Christ.
But back to the story. Not only has God acted to rescue his people through the plagues and the passover, but he’s about to exert his power over the military strength of the Egyptians in the Red Sea.
It must have seemed like they’d made a big mistake when the Israelites stood on the shores of the sea and looked back at the cloud of dust raised by Pharaoh’s war chariots. They’d all have seen how devastating a weapon a chariot could be with it’s wheels mounted with blades and the soldiers wheeling their swords from above. Even if there were 600,000 fighting men in the Israelite ranks they had no hope against a well trained battalion of chariots.
But this was God’s rescue, God’s battle. Not for the last time, God was about to defeat their enemies without them lifting a hand to defend themselves.
First Moses reached out his staff and the waters separated. An east wind drove the waters back and dried out the seabed enough for them to cross over safely. Then, just as the Egyptians were about to catch up, Moses withdrew his hand and the waters closed over them and the entire Egyptian army was drowned. God had won the battle while the people just looked on.
Then began the march to their destination. To the land God had promised would be theirs forever. And again we see that just as the call was God’s and the rescue was God’s, so too, the land to which they were going would be God’s.
The Land would be God’s
None of them would have seen the land of Canaan before but listen to the description they’re given: "8I 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."
There’s both good news and bad there isn’t there?
First it’s a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey. The fruitfulness of the land was a sign of God’s blessing. God had prepared a place for them where they’d experience the blessing of God, the prosperity and comfort that comes from being God’s people in God’s place under God’s rule. This was a land where milk and honey flowed freely. It reminds me of that scene in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with the river of chocolate. I’m sure, if they’d known about chocolate back then, this would have been a land flowing with chocolate as well as milk and honey. But you get the picture don’t you? This is heaven on earth. This is a return to the fertility of the Garden of Eden where the curse of thorns and thistles is removed. This is a remaking of the blessed world in the midst of the condemned world. This is a place that’d make the surrounding people envious, that’d make them want to join God’s people so they too could enjoy his blessing.
By the way, notice how this has already started to happen in the escape from Egypt. Look at Exodus 12:37-38 "The Israelites journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides children. 38A mixed crowd also went up with them, and livestock in great numbers, both flocks and herds." It seems that there were others who decided to join them in their escape from Egypt, perhaps because they’d seen what the God of Israel was capable of and so wanted to be part of his people rather than on the side of his enemies.
But still, it isn’t all to be plain sailing, even after they’ve crossed the Red Sea. As you read the description of the land they’re going to, you realise they still have their work cut out for them. This is the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. Not to mention the Midianites and the Moabites that they’ll have to pass through on their way to Canaan. If they’re to settle in the land they’ll have to drive out the current inhabitants. Remember, God said he was waiting until the iniquity of the Amorites was complete. Well that time has come. The time, that is, for God to bring his judgement on their evil practices. And the way he’d bring his judgement on them was by sending his people to drive them out, to remove their evil influence from the land. But they’d have to do it.
You see, their removal was vital so it could become a place where God and God alone was worshipped. If they were to be God’s people in God’s place enjoying God’s blessing then there mustn’t be anything that might spoil their obedience to God. They had to get rid of every influence, every temptation that might lead them away from worship of the one true and living God. Sadly as we read through the book of Joshua where the conquest of the land is described, and then on into the book of Judges, what we find is a half-hearted effort resulting, in the end, in their failure to live up to their potential. They fail to take complete possession of the land. They leave the inhabitants there with their idol worship, their superstitions, their syncretistic understanding of the world, that is, there willingness to mix elements of various religions into something that feels good to them. And in the end the locals and their idolatry pervert the worship of the Israelites to the point where God begins to punish them for their unfaithfulness.
Sadly the story of so much of the Old Testament is filled with failure, with unfulfilled hopes, not because God is unfaithful, not because God doesn’t carry out his promises, but because the people continually turn away from him.
As the people of Israel enter the promised land for the first time there’s real hope that here at last the fall can be reversed. God has given them laws that regulate their lives so they can remain faithful to God, so they can live in love and respect for one another and so they can care for the land in a way that’ll maintain its fruitfulness for years to come. The potential is there for God’s creation to be renewed. The only thing stopping them is their own sinful nature and the only thing that will save them from that is the coming of Jesus Christ to renew creation for all time, and to remake human beings through the gift of his Spirit.
Yes, God can be trusted to keep his promises. He will carry out the plans that he has for us. Our task is to remain faithful to him. But for us that’s a little easier than it was for the Israelites, because God has given us his Holy Spirit to lead us and guide us. But we still need to allow the Spirit to do his job. We need to follow where he leads. Let’s pray that God would help us to allow him to lead us in faithfulness until Christ returns to take us to be with him in God’s new creation forever.
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