We are continuing our series called The Story which is an overview of the story of the Bible and how all the small stories in the Bible connect up to the larger story of the Bible and more importantly how each of our individual stories connect up to the grander story of the Bible. For the last few weeks, we covered three chapters in the story. Today, we are starting on chapter 4. Because some of you may have missed some of the earlier sermons or you need a little refresher, I though what we would do is start by showing a story rewind so you can see where we have been and get an idea where we are going. (Video clip shown here.)
Hopefully, that brought you up to speed on what we have covered so far. The key events in those first few chapters of the Bible. Last week, if you were here, we talked about the story of Joseph and the amazing dream coat that he had. This week, we are going to talk about the story of Moses and specifically how God delivered the Hebrew people from the hands of Pharaoh using Moses. If you recall from last week, where we left off was Jacob and Joseph’s brothers ended up moving into Egypt where they were protected from the severe famine that broke out throughout all the land. We open up the book of Exodus today and we begin to see that several years have gone by and generations have died off. Jacob and Joseph and all the brothers are no longer there. We read in the early part of Exodus that “Then a new king who did not know about Joseph came into power in Egypt.” If we had time, we would see that this new king was threatened by this rapid, uncontrolled growth of the Hebrew people so he decided to do something about it. What he did was pulled those people into slavery. He assigned taskmasters over them and put them into hard labor making bricks and working out in the fields. But he was still feeling threatened by the population growth of these Hebrew people so he decided to take matters into his own hands. He told his people to go out there and take every newborn male and throw him into the Nile river and allow the girls to live. That is what his people began to do. As the story continues, there was a Levite woman who became pregnant and gave birth to a young boy. She was able to hide this boy for about three months before she got nervous about Pharaoh finding out about this boy. So she went down to the Nile river one day with a papyrus basket and put the little boy in the basket and gave him a gentle shove off into the Nile hoping and praying I suspect that somebody would find him and take care of that little boy. As God would have it, somebody did find the little boy and it was actually the Pharaoh’s daughter who found him. Pharaoh’s daughter told the servants to take this little baby out of the Nile. It just so happened that the little boy’s sister was over there hiding in the weeds. She comes out and says if you need somebody to nurse this little baby, I have just the person for you. She goes off and gets the baby’s mother. The baby’s mother comes and the Pharaoh’s daughter tells her you can nurse this baby and not only can you nurse this baby, I will pay you to nurse this baby. So the mother gets paid to nurse her own child, which gives a whole new meaning to working moms. I was wondering how that would go over!
As the story goes on, the child grew up and the boy’s mother brings the boy back to Pharaoh’s daughter and then the Pharaoh’s daughter gives him the name Moses saying because I drew him out of the water. That is what Moses means; being drawn out. As you would suspect, Moses had a very nice upbringing. He was raised in the palace of the Pharaoh which means he would have had a great education. He would have been trained in things like arts and sciences. He would have been trained in rhetoric and public speaking and even warfare and administration. He would have been a very gifted child. As the story continues, one day I guess Moses decided to go out and travel amongst the Hebrew people. He spotted an Egyptian slave master harassing and beating a Hebrew slave. Moses looked left and right and didn’t see anybody so he killed the Egyptian and he buried him in the sand. Right here, this gives us an idea that Moses had a compassion for his people. Even though he was raised in the palace, he still had compassion for his own brothers. It also revealed that Moses was somebody who wanted to take matters into his own hands. God would not have that.
Apparently word got out among the Hebrew community and among the Egyptian community that Moses had killed this Egyptian. Moses got frightened and decided to flee out into the desert of Midian which is a desert somewhere in Saudi Arabia right now. He flees into the desert and this is where he actually spends 40 years in the desert. This is where God breaks him down. Specifically, he breaks him of any notion that he can do anything by his own power. By knowledge, by his smarts, by his skills, by his strength, by anything. If anybody is going to deliver the people from the mighty hand of Pharaoh, it is going to be the mighty hand of God. So Moses spends 40 years in the desert. During that time, he meets a nice lady named Zipporah. They have a child they name Gersham, a little boy, which basically means I am an alien in my own land. That was the meaning of Gersham that I am an alien actually in a foreign land. Then he goes to work for his father-in-law Jethro tending the sheep out there. Pretty much he has a comfortable life taking care of the flocks. He is one of these guys thinking I am getting into my old age. Maybe like men in their retirement who just want to settle down and eventually move south and play a little golf and get a condo in Orlando. I would just like to practice a life of leisure. I don’t want to do too much more.
However, God still had a task for Moses. We know he had a great assignement for Moses. He reveals himself and this task to Moses in a very unique way. Apparently, Moses is out in the wilderness tending his flocks and sees a bush burning and he sees that the bush is not being consumed by the fire. He goes a little bit closer and hears his name called. Moses says here I am. God says take off your sandals because you are standing on holy ground. He says I am the God of your fathers. I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Once Moses realizes this, he gets on his knees and hides his face and is terrified. God says don’t be afraid. I have come down to rescue your people. I have heard the cry of your people and I have come down to rescue them. Then he goes on to say “So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.” Moses is taken aback. He goes on to say “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” Which is a clue that maybe Moses has been humbled. He is feeling very insignificant. He is feeling like he has no power to do anything. What that means is God has gotten him to a place where he can do something through him. With the apostle Paul he talks about God’s power is made stronger in our weakness. That is the situation here. When Moses responds like that God didn’t say listen Moses, don’t forget that you had this great education in the house of Pharaoh. Don’t forget that you have all these skills and all these things that you need. He didn’t say that. All he said was “I will be with you.” The five words “I will be with you.” In other words, my power is enough. My power is all you need to get through this thing. He goes on to say “When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain.” A continued theme throughout this section of Exodus is this idea of worship. When the people are released from bondage, they are to go to worship. If we had time, we would see that this would be a sign to the surrounding nations that it was not the mighty hand of man that delivered these people, but it was the mighty hand of God. As a side note, every Sunday when we gather here in worship, we are making a statement to the surrounding community that the reason we worship is that we have been delivered by God. That is the statement we are making being here today. They might not know it out there, but that is what we are saying. We are saying we are here to worship the God who has delivered us.
Apparently, there is not good enough for Moses. He begins to question God. He says suppose that I go to see Pharaoh and I say let my people go and he says who is this guy? What is his name? What should I say? God’s reply is simply “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites. ‘I Am has sent me to you.’” That is a very strange answer. “I Am who I Am.” It is not a strange answer because that is actually the personal name of God. The underlying Hebrew word is Yahweh. A word that even the Hebrew people were afraid to say. In fact, when you see it translated, you often see it translated in the Old Testament as LORD in all caps. You are seeing Yahweh. A word that the Hebrew people were terrified to say. As a side note, we say God all the time and really not in the best context. We say it in a profane way and in just a flip way like when we are sending a text to somebody OMG. You are using God’s name in vain so you have to think twice about how you use the name God. We don’t have time to unpack this idea of what the I Am means but at the minimum it means God is saying I am the only true God. I am over all your gods. It has a very powerful meaning behind it. You may recall in the book of John when the Pharisees were getting upset at Jesus because he was speaking with a little bit too much authority. They say how do you get off saying these things you are saying. Are you greater than our father Abraham? And Jesus replied “I tell you the truth, before Abraham was born, I Am.” Then they proceeded to try to stone him because he was putting himself on the same level with God.
As the story goes, Moses still begins to make excuses. He says I have faltering lips. I have a thick tongue. In other words, I am fearful of public speaking. Is anybody fearful of public speaking? You notice my hand is up. I am terrified of public speaking. It is hard. But you have to remember that Moses was trained probably in public speaking. God says quit your complaining. I am going to send your brother Aaron with you and he can help you to speak. Moses picks up his wife and son and his brother Aaron and they head off to the Pharaoh. They get to the palace and knock on the door and get in front of his throne. They say The Lord my God has sent me and he has told me to say to you let my people go. The Pharaoh’s response is “Who is the Lord that I should obey him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord and I will not let Israel go.” In fact, I will not only not let them go, I am going to take my slave masters and I am going to tell them to go and make the Hebrews work harder. I am going to raise the brick-making quota and I am going to remove straw so it is going to be that much more difficult to make bricks. I am not familiar with ancient brick making, but it is my understanding that the straw would be used as some sort of a bonding agent when you make the bricks and when you bake the bricks they would stay together. Without the straw, the bricks would fall apart more easily. So it would be that much harder to make the quota for that day. So as you can imagine, the bricks without straw didn’t sit too well with the Hebrew slaves and they began to complain to Moses. Moses what are you doing? You made us a stench to the Pharaoh. That is what they said. Moses, annoyed, goes back to God and says listen God. You said you were going to rescue the people and you haven’t done it yet. God simply reminds Moses of what he had said earlier. “I have heard the groaning of the Israelites, whom the Egyptians are enslaving, and I have remembered my covenant.” So go back and talk to them. Go back and demand that he would let the people go. In case you need a little boost to your self-confidence, when you get in front of Pharaoh next time, I want you to take Aaron’s staff and I want you to throw it down and it will turn into a snake. They get in front of the Pharaoh and he is being obstinate again. Aaron throws down his staff and it turns into a snake. Everybody is in a panic in the throne room except for Pharaoh. He is not impressed at all because he sees it simply as some sort of a magic trick. He calls his two magicians in and they duplicate the miracle. They throw their staffs down and produce two snakes. Not to be outdone, God has Aaron’s snake actually eat the other two snakes in two gulps. Pharaoh is still not impressed. It goes on to say that “Pharaoh’s heart became hard and he would not listen to them, just as the Lord had said.”
The Lord says to Moses what I want you to do next is go and meet Pharaoh on the bank of the Nile where he hangs out in the morning. I want you to meet him there and when you meet him there what I want you to do is, when he refuses to let the people go, I want you to take your staff and touch the Nile River with it. That is what he does. He touches the Nile River with it and the whole river turns into blood. Blood everywhere. Pretty soon there are dead fish everywhere and the place is just smelling up. It is this terrible odor. The people can’t find water anywhere but Pharaoh’s heart is still hard. He is not budging. That is when God decides to pull out all the stops and release eight more plagues on Pharaoh. It starts with the plague of frogs and frogs are everywhere. They are making it ultimately into the bedroom. Then the second plague is the plague of gnats. Gnats everywhere. Then flies. Then followed by a plague against the livestock. A terrible disease that inflicts all the livestock. Then a plague that inflicted the people with all these terrible boils. Followed by a plague of thunder and lightning with this intense hail that had never been seen before in all of Egypt and followed by a plague of locusts. And finally by a plague of darkness. Intense darkness that lasted three whole days. I don’t have time to go into the plagues. I wish I did. Some suspect that the meaning behind those plagues is the idea that God was targeting specific things. He was targeting the gods that would have control over these different things. He was saying I am the greater God.
If we were to read on, we would see that Pharaoh’s heart continued to stay hardened. He would not budge. This is when God says I will bring one more plague on Pharaoh and on Egypt. After that, he will let you go from there. When he does, he will drive you out completely. He will let you go. The plague is going to be a terrible one. I am going to send the Angel of Death. I am going to send it all through Egypt and it is going to kill the first born male Egyptian boys. That is a hard one to swallow but you have to remember that this was a whole culture that was obstinate to God. We don’t understand why God does it this way, but this was the way he did it. He told the Israelite people, in order for you to be protected from the Angel of Death, I want you to slaughter a one-year-old lamb without defect and I want you to take some of the blood and I want you to put it on the door frames. That will protect you from the wrath of God. After you have slaughtered the lamb, roast the lamb and serve it with some bitter herbs and bread without yeast. Enjoy the meal and then pack up and get ready to go because you are going to be leaving town really quickly. That is what happened. At the stroke of midnight, the Angel of Death comes through and goes through the city and you hear this loud wailing and weeping from all the Egyptian people who had lost their firstborn sons. But you didn’t hear that coming from the Hebrew household. When the Angel of Death came through and saw the houses that had the doorframes covered with blood it passed over those. They were protected. Which is where we get the idea of Jewish Passover. Jewish Passover is simply a looking back, a remembrance to that particular time. It is also where we get the idea of the communion table. We see Christ as our Passover meal. We see the communion table as an opportunity for us to look back not on the doorframe that was covered with blood but the cross that was covered with blood. We look back from our deliverance from sin; from death to life. That is how we get the Passover meal. That is how we get the communion meal.
So we have this situation where the Angel of Death had passed over the Israelites but ended up killing the firstborn Egyptians, including the Pharaoh’s son. It finally got to the Pharaoh. This was one plague he couldn’t handle. The Pharaoh goes on to say to Moses, “Up! Leave my people, you and the Israelites! Go, worship the Lord as you have requested.” He was letting them go. All the people pack up their stuff and pack up their carts. They even got a bunch of spoils from the Egyptians. Everybody wanted those Hebrews out of town as fast as they could. The people pack up and begin to head in the middle of the night through the desert. They are being guided by this pillar of fire by night and a pillar of cloud by day. That is their guide. That is God guiding them through the desert. Apparently, they reach this point in the desert where it comes to a V. It is this place where you have the desert on one side, desert on the other side and desert behind you. In front of you, you have the Red Sea facing you. They got to that point and had to stop and camp there. About that time, the pharaoh is beginning to have second thoughts. He realized that he had just basically freed all of his labor. He is supposed to build all this stuff and he freed them all. So he decides he is going to pursue after these guys in the desert. He gets 600 chariots mounted up and they go chasing after all the Hebrew people in the desert. At one point, the people got word that Pharaoh was in hot pursuit. They begin to get nervous and scared because they had nowhere to go. The desert was on either side of them and the mighty Red Sea in front of them. They began to complain. They said to Moses were there not enough graves in Egypt that you brought us out here in the desert to die? This is where Moses stands up and says “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today.” They were about to see it. The Lord said I want you to take your staff now and I want you to raise it up. When you raise it up, I am going to divide the waters of the Sea so that all your people can walk through on dry land. That is what happened. He raises his staff. The waters split. The people began to go through on the dry land. All the while the Lord is holding back the army so they cannot pursue him. All through the night the people are going through this dry land with a wall of water on either side. Apparently, by morning, they all get to the other side and the Lord tells Moses to let down your staff and see what happens. All the water comes over the chariots that were chasing them and they all drowned. Every last one of them it says.
That is basically the end of that particular story. Just because you have all paid so much attention and so well and because I can’t do justice to the story of Moses, I thought what I would do is show you a movie clip from the 1956 movie The Ten Commandments starring Charlton Heston as Moses and Yul Brynner as Pharaoh. (Movie clip shown here.) Not bad special effects considering it was 1956. I love the acting. I thought it was a pretty good movie. It is a pretty long movie but it gives an idea of what might have been going on there. That is really the story of Moses.
As I thought about it, what is the application for us today? Other than being a nice epic story, does it really have any application for us today? I thought about a number of things. Finally, it boiled down to I really feel that many of us today are in our own spiritual battles. The pharaoh out there is not some guy with a funny hat that looks like Yul Brynner. The pharaohs out there can take many different forms. Obviously we have a pharaoh that may be ambition or greed or possibly debt. It may be a pharaoh that is fear or insecurity or judgment or fear of change. It may be any sort of those types of pharaoh out there that has a grip on us and will not let go. If anything, the story about Moses is a story of deliverance. That is the key theme in the story of Moses. It is deliverance. God desires to set you free from those things that would enslave you. A related theme is the idea that this freedom can seldom come on your own strength, especially if it is a spiritual thing. Nine times out of ten I think it has a spiritual component to it. We cannot muster our own strength to somehow get past these things. All you have to do is look at successful businessmen out there who are able to lead multi-million dollar corporations with thousands of employees or look at the athletes out there that are able to do these tremendous feats of strength or look at the politicians as smart as they are, but a lot of them can’t deal with their own addictions and lusts and greed. Do you ever thing about that? They have all the power and smarts but they can’t deal with it. When it comes to the pharaohs in our life, we are all on an equal playing ground. Social status doesn’t matter. We all face these spiritual battles that we cannot win on our own. We cannot overcome on our own. But if you are a born-again believer, this is Christianity 101, you have to believe you have the spirit of God within you. It is the same spirit of God that Paul says was able to raise Christ up from the dead. That is the spirit of God that you are able to tap into whether you want to believe it or not. If you are a born-again believer, you have been given the spirit of God. Christianity 101. That means you can go up against any pharaoh in life. You can face any of them and demand that he would let go of you. That you would be free. Then begin to walk away. Some of you are saying yea right, Chuck. I have tried that route. It didn’t work. The good news is that you are in good company. It didn’t work for Moses the first time, the second time, the third time, the fourth time, the fifth time, the sixth time, the seventh time, the eighth time, the ninth time, but finally the tenth time. What makes you think you are going to release yourself of a bondage that you might have been carrying ever since you were a child. You are not going to. You have to be persistent. We have to remember from the story that pharaoh is a stubborn pharaoh. He has a very hard heart and he doesn’t want to let go of you. He doesn’t want to let you go because then you might become useful, not for him but for the kingdom of God. So he is going to hold on to you. He has that hardened heart and he is going to harden it even more. Sometimes it is not the pharaoh who has the hard heart. Sometimes it is you that has the hard heart. When you are trying to release those pharaohs in your life, you have to look at your own heart in a very honest way. You have to begin to allow the spirit of God to come in and reveal to you the thing in your heart that has a grip over you. Fear, ambition, pride, anything, lust. All these things can have a grip on you and don’t want to let go so you keep going back and back and finally one day you begin to see that maybe I am getting free from this thing. You begin to walk toward the desert. You begin to walk in freedom. Before you know it, you realize that you have 600 chariots coming behind you at 100 miles an hour because they want to get you back. Pharaoh wants you for his army. So he is going to come after you. To make matters worse, oftentimes you have a whole community of people around you that are complaining and saying you had it pretty good back there in Egypt. Why don’t you go back there? Why don’t you put this nonsense away and accept the fact that you are never going to be free from pharaoh. Here you stand. Many people are right there today where you are standing, and you are facing in front of you this huge sea and to the left is desert and to the right is desert and behind you are 600 chariots chasing you and surrounding you are a bunch of negative people that think you are never going to change. At that point, what you need to do is listen closely to the words of Moses. Do not be afraid. The Lord has granted you the deliverance even today. He will indeed deliver you. You have to believe that. Then what you have to do is walk. You can’t look back. You have to just walk. You keep walking until you get to the other side. When you get to the other side what you have to do next is get to a place of worship. Not just physical worship as in this building. You have to get to a place of whole-life worship. You have turned your whole life over to this God. The natural outcome, the natural response to being delivered from anything in your life that had a grip on you is to worship the one who released you. The one who is known as the only God. The one who is known as God the Father. The one who is known as Yahweh. The one who is known as the great I Am. Let us pray.
