Moses 1 THE HOME THAT GAVE US MOSES
Exodus 1:1- 2:10
“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.” (Heb. 11:23. See also Acts 7:20)
Part 1: From Egypt to Sinai
A. The Slavery (Ex. 1)
B. The Savior (Ex. 2:1-25)
1. His Birth and Rescue (2:1-10 / Heb.11:23)
Years ago in a hospital room I rejoiced with a new mom and dad from our church over the birth of their first child. A friend of theirs carelessly and thoughtlessly said, “My husband and I have decided not to have children. We don’t feel it’s right to bring a child into this kind of world.” Well, I know the best way to save face is to keep the lower half shut, but I couldn’t leave that remark alone. I said to those parents (and mostly to her), “I’m glad Moses’ mother didn’t feel like that. The baby she had saved Israel from a far worse world than ours.”
If ever there was a time NOT to have a baby it was when Moses was born. The people of Israel were being crushed beneath the lash of slavery by the Egyptians. Why? First, because of profit - Israelite slaves built their storage cities (Ex. 1:11). And also because of prejudice. Goshen, where Israel lived, was a ghetto, away from the Egyptian people. Joseph said, “. . . you will be allowed to settle in the region of Goshen, for all shepherds and detestable to the Egyptians.” (Gen. 46:34). Prejudice always breeds the worst kind of cruelty. When Moses was born, the Egyptians, to stop the rapid growth of the Jews, took their boy babies, at birth, and threw them into the Nile River. People like Hitler and the three men recently who drug an old black man to his death have always been around.
In this kind of world Moses was born. The Bible, in Hebrews 11, God’s HALL OF FAME chapter, says, “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” (Heb. 11:23). Strong young Stephen, ready to about be killed for preaching the gospel, I believe, was inspired by this ancient account of bravery. He mentioned this in his sermon that got him stoned. He said, “At that time Moses was born, and he was no ordinary child. For three months he was cared for in his father’s house” (Acts 7:20).
They stoned Stephen and left his mutilated body lying in the dirt, but he went up to glory and I see Moses and his mom and dad, Amram and Jocebed, filled with pride, taking him by the hand and saying, “Good job, young man. You did well! Your sacrifice will not be in vain. Let’s go over here and watch over the rail of heaven and see what God is going to do through you!” And they watched and saw a young Pharisee in the mob that killed him. His name was Saul but God turned him into Paul, the great missionary. Not have babies? Ridiculous! Have faith in God. Maybe God will use the little one he sends to make things right. Hope in hard times! That is the message of Israel’s long years in slavery. The whole story can be outlined:
The Slavery
A. The Prosperity God Sent (1:1-7)
B. The Perversion God Saw (Josh. 24:14)
C. The Pain God Allowed (1:8-22)
D. The Prayers God Heard (2:23-35)
The Savior
E. The People God Used (2:1-4)
F. The Purposes God Accomplished (Ex. 15-40)
I. THE PROSPERITY GOD SENT
(Ex. 1:1-7; Gen. 47:5; Ex. 12:37)
1. God Blessed Materially (Gen. 47:5). The Book of Exodus begins where Genesis stops, telling how Joseph’s family, seventy people, came to Egypt around 1876 B.C. The Pharaoh who elevated Joseph let them settle in Goshen, Egypt’s delta. It was a WONDERFUL PLACE, with rich pastures for sheep, called “the best part of the land” (Gen. 47:5).
2. God Blessed Numerically (1:7; 12:37). The Bible says, “. . .the Israelites were fruitful and multiplied greatly and became exceedingly numerous, so that the land was filled with them” (1:7). When Israel left Egypt under Moses, it had 600,000 men (12:37), so when you add women and children, the number is around TWO MILLION. This increase was a miracle from God. He needed a nation big enough to capture and fill Canaan. And only a place like Goshen could sustain so large a number. God built His nation in the devil’s back yard. God blessed Israel!
II. THE PERVERSIONS GOD SAW
(Gen. 50:24-25; Josh. 24:14; Ex. 32)
These Israelites came from a godly foundation. Abraham was the friend of God. Joseph has been called the most Christ like man in the Old Testament. He knew God’s promise to Abraham that after 400 years He would bring Israel out of Egypt (Gen. 15:16). When he died he made his family promise that when God did it they would carry his coffin back to Canaan (Gen. 50:24).
You would think that in gratitude to God for His blessings the Israelites would study His word, passed down from Abraham and Joseph. You would think they would gather at Joseph’s coffin and remember God’s wonderful promise to bring them back to Canaan. You would think they would love and serve the One who loved and blessed them. Some, like Amram, Jochebed, and Joshua, did. But most didn’t. The Bible reveals that, like modern day Americans, they turned their backs on God to practice the perversions of their Egyptian neighbors.
A few months out of Egypt, when Moses was late coming down from the mountain, the Bible says they made and worshipped a golden calf and the Bible says, “. . .they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry” (Ex. 32:6). God called them a “stiff necked and rebellious people” (Ex. 32:6; Dt. 31:27, etc.). Joshua charged the next generation, “Throw away the gods your forefathers worshipped. . .in Egypt and serve the Lord” (Josh. 24:14).
Ezekiel 20:8 says Israel did not put away the idols of Egypt or the ABOMINATIONS of Egypt. Ease and prosperity, as it almost always does, weakened their character and people like Moses, Joshua and Caleb were few and far between. That’s why perversions God saw were followed by. . .
III. THE PAIN GOD ALLOWED (1:8-22)
1. The Bad Situation (1:8-11). When a new Pharaoh came on the scene who remembered nothing about Joseph’s high place in government and the government’s promise to his family, Israel’s party was over. What he saw was shepherds, whom he and his people despised; free laborers for his building projects; and a vast crowd that might pose a threat if an enemy came against Egypt and they sided with them.
2. The Bitter Slavery (1:12-14). He and his people put them under the lash of slavery, with cruel taskmasters to beat them. See old men and young boys drop in the fields and left to die. See workers beaten to death, hanged, and tortured and you see what slavery is. You see the wages of sin. You see in your own heart the need of salvation for there is a little of Hitler, a little of cruel taskmaster in us all. Moses, who saw it, called it an “iron furnace” (Dt. 4:20).
3. The Brutal Slaughter (1:12; 15-22). In all of this Israel kept on growing. The Bible says, “But the more they were oppressed the more they multiplied and spread; so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites” (1:12). There aren’t enough weapons in hell’s arsenal to stop or even slow down the purposes of God in the earth. The church is like a torch, the more you shake it, the brighter it shines.
Hell reached way down deep into its evil heart as boy babies were ordered put to death to stop the growth. Hebrew midwives were ordered to kill them at birth but they wouldn’t do it. They lied to the king and said the Jewish women delivered before they got there. And God blessed those ladies, in spite of those lies, because they put their lives on the line to save Jewish babies.
Then the unthinkable and unbelievable happened. The people of Egypt became the murderers. They ripped baby boys from Jewish families and threw them in the Nile. I’m reading a book “HITLER’S WILLING EXECUTIONERS.” It tells how ordinary, educated, religious Germans, enlisted as police, got caught up in the killing of Jews. It became common place. Good people, who hesitated to kill, once they did it, found it easier. This is the fruit of greed and prejudice because it de-humanizes people and allows us to justify horrible cruelty. This is the fruit of our rotten nature and proof that Jesus was right when he said, “You must be born again” (Jn. 3).
IV. THE PRAYERS GOD HEARD (Ex. 2:23-25)
In pain, people who have turned their backs upon God, turn to Him and beg for help. You would think God would turn a deaf ear. You would think He would say, “You made your bed, lie in it. You didn’t want Me when things were good. I don’t want you now that things are bad.” Aren’t you glad he isn’t that kind of God? Aren’t you glad He doesn’t wait until we deserve His help to send His help? The Bible says,
“During that long period, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them.” (Ex. 2:23-25).
1. The Suffering of Saints. Many godly people cried out for deliverance but no deliverance came. God was using pain to PERFECT them. God delayed His deliverance to develop Israel. They, like us, wanted out of “heartbreak hotel” but God was using it to strengthen and use them. Egypt was their “iron furnace” (Dt. 4:20), but it was the furnace where God fashioned His sword. Why did God leave them in?
(1) To grow them into a nation with education, culture, arts, crafts, etc. (2) To make them large enough to drive out the Canaanites. (3) To develop in them a hatred of slavery and a spirit that would fight against it. (4) Thus, surviving through the centuries, they could and did give Jesus to the world.
Do your prayers seem unanswered? Are you begging God to get you out of some painful situation and He isn’t doing it? Then ask God WHAT YOU CAN GET OUT OF THAT SITUATION. What does God want you to become or do? The tragedy of self centered American Christianity where we want a pill for every problem is that we cannot see the hand of God unless He delivers us from our pain.
Corrie Ten Boom, the only one of her family who survived the Nazi death camps, has earned the right to speak about pain. In THE HIDING PLACE she said every experience God gives us is His perfect preparation for the future that He alone can see.
2. The Suffering of Sinners. Many who prayed were ungodly. They cried out to the God they had deserted. But no answer came. God was using pain to PUNISH them in love.
Thank God for the sadness and suffering of Egypt! Thank God for the friends who left the Prodigal Son and thank God for the hog pens! (Lk. 15). Thank God for broken homes and broken spirits and broken bodies and broken dreams and broken hearts sin causes. Thank God that the way of the transgressor is hard (Prov. 13:15); and that the wicked are like the troubled sea (Isa. 57:20). Thank God that we can’t get along without God!
The alcoholic prodigal never finds joy in the bottle. The adulterous prodigal never finds joy in the arms of a forbidden lover. The greedy prodigal never finds joy in his gold. Sin becomes a cruel taskmaster and a murderer of much that we hold dear. Egypt looked good at first, but later on it flashed its claws and tore the heart out of its victims.
It was the suffering and sadness in Egypt that made Israel willing to go out. It was the lack of friends and hog food that finally drove the Prodigal back home to the Father. F.W. Robertson put it bluntly,
“Men desert the world when the world deserts them. .
.the record of our shame (is that) invitation is not enough;
we must be driven to God.”
Are you suffering at the hands of this world’s system? Has the “good life” gone sour? Are you wounded and confused and hurt and empty in a world of technology, learning, religion and pleasure? Is it because Egypt is on the throne of your life and God is only a little side issue? Then your dissatisfaction is your hope. God is waiting for you. God is looking down the road hoping you will come home.
V. THE PEOPLE GOD USED
(Ex. 2:1-4; Heb. 11:23)
As Israel was crying out to God, no answer came. The whips kept cracking. The Jews kept working. The babies kept dying. But God was answering in His own way and in His own time. Finally, He touched the home of Amram and Jocebed and gave them a beautiful baby boy. Hebrews 11 calls them people of faith (Heb. 11:23). They could count. They knew the four hundred years God told Abraham about were close to being over (Gen. 15:16). Because they were people of faith they were also people of fearlessness. Hebrews 11:23 says, “They were not afraid of the King’s edict” (Heb. 11:23).
Two things cannot coexist in the human heart - faith and paralyzing fear. The emotions may feel fear but the will overrides it. We may shake in our boots but in those boots we, like Amram and Jocebed, will be standing up to do the will of God. They were also people of faithfulness. Their faith WORKED. They hid that precious baby for three months and then they did the strangest thing. They fashioned a little floating basket and placed their baby in it and laid it in the shallow waters of the Nile.
Why? A wave could tip it over. An alligator could swallow it whole. An Egyptian could kick it over. Only one answer satisfies me. God must have told them to do it and by faith they did. They placed that baby in the very place of slaughter. Egypt worshipped the Nile as her god of fertility. God had Moses placed right under the devil’s nose.
Why? Because He knew Pharaoh’s daughter would come there. He knew her heart and knew that if she saw that baby and that baby cried, she would love it and raise it as her own. And that’s what happened. Just as she looked in, I believe an angel pinched Moses and made him cry. She wanted him. Just then, Miriam, Moses’ sister comes up and says, “I know a lady who will wean him for you.” The daughter of Pharaoh sent Moses to his own mother and paid her for caring for him. About a year or two later, probably, she received him in the palace. Moses was trained as a Hebrew and as an Egyptian, receiving all he needed to be a deliverer and leader of Israel AND THE DEVIL PAID THE BILL.
Hope in hard times! Yes! Why - because our God is able. He is bigger than any situation we face. When prayers seem unanswered, we know answers are on the way. When evil seems to have the upper hand we know he is using that evil to work out a good purpose.
