Today we begin a new series of sermons on Exodus. (Outline available) As I said in that outline the story of the Exodus is the story of the people of God. What we find here is a precursor to what we find in the gospels and in a sense is a mirror of our own experience of being part of the people of God. So as we go through this book let’s think about how the history of the ancient Hebrews intersects with our own story? How does the way God interacted with his people back then reflect how he interacts with us today.
As we begin I thought we might think about where our picture of Exodus comes from? For many of us, I imagine, our picture comes from Hollywood: from Cecil B de Mille. Moses is tall and assertive, strong and courageous, destined for leadership, a champion of the poor and mistreated; sent by God to rescue his people from slavery. But that’s not actually how the story begins. In fact it’s the opposite. Moses is a hothead who runs at the first sign of danger. As we’ll see next week, even when God confronts him and tells him that he’s been chosen to lead his people to freedom, Moses does all he can to get out of it. No, as the story unfolds the early heroes are much less well known. These heroes aren’t the sort of people that Hollywood would have portrayed in one of its epic movies.
But we’ll come back to that. First look at how the story begins. The sons of Israel, that is the sons of Jacob, have come to Egypt during the time when Joseph was Prime Minister. Joseph, you may remember had saved Egypt and the surrounding countries from one of their greatest famines and in the process had made the King of Egypt, the Pharaoh, incredibly wealthy. So as the family of a national hero, they were warmly welcomed when they arrived. There were 70 of them in all, but that had been some 200 or more years before. By now, that generation had died and their descendants had multiplied and were becoming a sizeable ethnic subgroup within Egypt. So much so in fact that when a new King came to power he began to worry about their political and military might. It was a bit like the way certain people today worry about the influx of Asian migrants to Australia. The Pharaoh wasn’t interested in their contribution to the nation in the past. He was worried about what they might do if they didn’t like some of his policies? They were even getting to the point where they might mount a military threat to the government.
So he acts the way tyrants always act. He becomes paranoid. He begins to fear these people who are totally under his power. He begins to oppress them. He puts them to hard labour. They’re set the tasks of building two new store cities for the King, Pithom and Rameses. But not even that ploy has any effect. The people continue to grow strong. The more they’re oppressed the more they multiply and spread and it seems something of a mythology grows up around them so the people begin to dread them. And so we find the people working in bitterness and suffering.
But then we find a wonder. The King of Egypt gives the Hebrew midwives a directive: they’re to kill all the boys who are born to the Hebrew women. He doesn’t want to do it himself, so like all good tyrants he tells someone else to do his dirty work. And he does it from within the oppressed people. Now notice this. The King, as important as he is, is not named anywhere in this book apart from the title Pharaoh. But the two Hebrew midwives are. They’re Shiphrah and Puah. These are ordinary, probably untaught, women, probably barren, who had found a role to play in delivering the children of other women. No one would have remarked about them as they went about their daily chores. But then this word comes - from the absolute ruler - a God-King in fact. And it’s a word of genocide.
Shiphrah and Puah were nobodies: no armies gathered around them. They just had their lives and their work - and their orders. But they didn’t obey. This is the wonder. They refused power. They refused to kill. Think about how they must have felt. The fear, the anxiety, the self doubt. Who are we? What difference can we make? If we don’t do it someone else will. All we’ll achieve is the anger of the King. He’ll probably have us put to death.
Imagine how they felt when the King called them in. As they went from their poor village into the opulence of the King’s palace. Tall columns, beautiful furnishings, probably a throne set high above the people - all designed to overwhelm and impress. But they’re not overwhelmed. In fact the opposite: they turn aside the King’s question with a veiled insult to the Egyptian women. Don’t miss the irony here. Here’s the King thinking he’s going to deal shrewdly with the Israelites but it’s actually these two country bumpkins, these two women from a poor village, who end up dealing shrewdly with him.
At this point we need to ask "Where did these women get the courage to say no to the King?" There are plenty of people around today who when told to act unethically, to shave the truth here and there, will comply, because they fear the person who’s telling them to. There were a couple of cases last year when major buildings in Asia, somewhere, collapsed, because the builders had compromised a bit on the specifications. Probably the building inspectors had shaved the truth a little when they came to do their inspections, and so builders became destroyers. People died because of their lack of integrity. The more cynical among us might wonder how many people might have died in the Middle East for the sake of political expediency if it hadn’t been for the diplomatic efforts of Kofi Annan and his United Nations team this past week. And how many people would have refused to kill in those circumstances? It’s just not done is it?
So why did these two women refuse? Well, v17 tells us: they refused because they feared God. They knew that God was a God of light and truth, a God of justice, a God who watches over his people. And so they said No! No to killing; no to perverting their calling; no to power.
And so the people increased and became even more numerous. And God showed that they were right about him watching over them. He removed their barrenness and gave them families of their own. What was happening here, you see, was that God was fulfilling his promise to Abraham that he would become the Father of a great nation, and he was doing it through two seemingly insignificant women - 2 women whose names have been told and retold for close to 4000 years - 2 ordinary women who did their jobs - under God - in the fear of God.
But the story doesn’t end there. Pharaoh wasn’t finished. If the midwives wouldn’t do his dirty work he’d enlist his own people to throw any new born baby boys into the Nile. But again, we find two women who were willing to defy the King’s edict. The first is the mother of Moses. Like any mother she loved her son and wasn’t going to let anyone throw him in the Nile. So she hid him for as long as she could and when that became impossible she came up with a plan to save his life even if it meant losing him to someone else. She had noticed that Pharaoh’s daughter used to go down to the Nile to bathe, so she took her baby and placed him in a waterproofed basket and floated him in the reeds near where Pharaoh’s daughter would come.
When Pharaoh’s daughter saw the baby her heart went out to her and she too decided to defy her father’s orders. She realised this was a Hebrew baby, but she wasn’t going to let it die. Miriam, Moses’ sister, is watching and comes up to her and offers to find a wet nurse for the baby - naturally Moses’ own mother. I guess Pharaoh’s daughter would have been pretty slow if she couldn’t work out what was happening. In fact she appears to play along with the charade, asking Moses’ mother to take the child and raise him for her until he’s old enough to be brought to the palace.
So here we have four faithful women, all of whom refuse to do what the King commands, because they won’t go along with any plan that involves killing innocent children. 4 women who are remembered all these years later for their part in fulfilling God’s plans for his people.
But as we read on we find a fifth person who’s central to God’s plans. But this person is different. Moses grows up in the court of the King and it seems he becomes something of a hothead. Quick tempered and probably fairly strong; trained for leadership, but still pretty rough around the edges. Well, one day he goes out to see what’s happening with his people. He’s aware of his own ethnic origins and as he sees how the slave drivers are treating his own people he loses it. First he makes sure no-one is around to see him and then he kills the Egyptian and buries him in the sand.
Well, he thinks he’s got away with it until the very next day he comes across two Hebrews fighting and tries to break it up. Well, the one who’s doing the attacking doesn’t like this upstart fancy talker interfering with his affairs so he asks him "Who made you boss over me? Are you going to kill me the way you killed the Egyptian?" Well, Moses then realises just how quickly news travels in a small community, and if these two know about it, it won’t be long before Pharaoh finds out. So what does he do? He decides that discretion is the better part of valour. He who ups and runs away, lives to run another day. So he hightails it to Midian, out in the Sinai Desert, far enough away to be out of the reach of Pharaoh. There he marries Zipporah and has a son, Gershom. He lives there for about 40 years, until the King dies.
Well, the chapter ends with the people of Israel groaning in slavery, crying out to God for rescue and God hearing them and remembering his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
What we see in this story thus far, is that God’s plan for his people has a fragile beginning. But we also see that it has significant similarities to the Gospel reading we had today. The story of Jesus hangs on as slender a thread as that of the Exodus. God seems to take an enormous risk in letting everything depend on two helpless midwives, a frail basket, a cowardly leader, a last-minute flight to Egypt.
By contrast, the power of the world seems so impressive and invulnerable. The world sees God’s salvation as a threat, so it unleashes all its power against it. Pharaoh senses a threat and acts on it, long before the Hebrews are ready to resist. The magi seem so naive and powerless before the scheming of Herod. And in each case when the first plan fails, the force of the world is ready to strike out with all its power. Yet even before such a show of power, the plan of God, the power of God, is such that we witness a wonderfully unexpected rescue from a seemingly impossible situation. The rescue of Moses comes from within Pharaoh’s own family. The magi are allowed the joy of seeing and worshipping the Christ-child before being warned in a dream not to return to Herod. Jesus is hurried off by night just ahead of Herod’s deadly stroke.
And even as we realise that this is God’s plan of rescue in action, we see that it happens in the face of fierce opposition. The world doesn’t welcome God’s rescue, it opposes it. In both cases the opposition comes in the form of slaughter of children. The rescue of the people is still in the future. For the present there’s suffering - wailing and loud lamentation as Rachel weeps for her children. In Moses’ day the opposition comes from a foreign King. By Jesus day the opposition comes from God’s own people, from the King of the Jews.
This fight continues today. The world still opposes God’s plan of salvation with all it’s might. Revelation ch 12, speaks of the dragon, who is Satan, seeking to devour a child who is born, but who is rescued and taken to be with God in heaven, and a great war breaking out as Satan and his angels fight with Michael and his angels until Satan is thrown down. It’s an image of the battle that continues to rage between Satan and the Church, as Satan seeks to oppose God’s plan of rescue. That is, as he opposes the gospel.
And how do we find God’s plan being worked out? What is it that will be the means of the gospel having it’s effect throughout the world. What was it that made the difference in the story of Moses? Wasn’t it that ordinary people, seemingly insignificant people, chose to trust in God and to do his will? The farmer who sows the seed is just a humble worker. His job is to spread the seed. But God gives the growth. The Kingdom of God, Jesus said, is like a mustard sed that starts from humble beginnings but grows to huge proportions. Each of us has a part to play in that growth. We may appear to be fairly insignificant in the greater scheme of things. A church of 60 or so people wouldn’t seem to be the sort of thing that could shake the earth, but all God asks of us is that we do our little bit and leave it to him to bring the rest to completion.
As we go through this book, we’ll see how at every stage there were drawbacks and failings; there were insignificant people who chose either to obey God or to ignore him, there were setbacks and successes. But in the end, God was in control, bringing his plan of rescue to completion. And we’ll see I hope that that plan is still in operation. That God has brought salvation to all people through Jesus Christ, but that we’re still waiting for its final fulfillment. And I hope we’ll see that just like Shiphrah and Puah, Moses’ mother, and Pharaoh’s daughter, we all have a part to play in bringing about that final fulfillment.
