Three Models Of Mothering (Exodus 1-2)

I'm grateful for Dennis King's sermon, "Jochebed and Other Women" on Sermon Central. His work was the starting point for this sermon

Good morning! Please open your Bibles to Exodus 2. We are taking another break from Romans. Today, I’d like to preach a sermon specifically directed toward women who have a heart for children.

Notice I didn’t say “Mothers.” I hope today is a good day for Moms. That if your mother is still living, that you are finding ways to honor her today. If you are a new mom, or have a new mom in your life, you’ve been looking forward to this day. We’ve got a little of that gong on in our family. This is Trish’s first mother’s day as a grandmother.

And if your mom has gone on to be with the Lord, I hope today is a healing mix of sweet memories and appreciation for the lessons you learned from her. I know it’s been that way for me, as I am spending my first Mother’s Day without my own Mom. So there’s also some of that sadness for me.

Now, I’m also very conscious that there are some in our service today for whom Mother’s Day is uncomfortable at best and even painful at worst because they have tried, sometimes desperately, yet unsuccessfully, to have children. To them, Mother’s Day can be a reminder of unfulfilled dreams. And so I know there were some of you who struggled with whether or not to even come today, and others that may never even hear this message because they opted out of today’s service.

And so, to you, I would like to say welcome. I honor you for even showing up today. And I hope you are encouraged by one simple fact about this morning’s text: In Exodus 1-2, we see three great examples of what it means to be a mother. But strangely enough, only one is a biological mother. This Mother’s Day, whether you are mothering your own children, raising someone else’s children, or simply speaking up for the rights of children, we honor you today. This morning, we are going to look at three different models for mothering in Exodus 1-2, so I hope you will see yourself in at least one of them. Please let me pray for us, and then we will get into our study of God’s word.

[Pray]

Jochebed: Mothering by Biology

The first Mom we’re going to talk about is Moses’ mom. We are first introduced to her in Exodus 2.

To give you a little background if you aren’t all that familiar with the story of the Bible.

At the end of Genesis, a man named Jacob, whom God renamed “Israel” left the Promised Land with his eleven sons to go to live in the land of Egypt, where his twelfth son Joseph was the governor of the entire land. There was a worldwide famine in those days, and through Joseph, God made sure that his chosen people Israel wouldn’t starve to death. So Jacob and his sons and their families all packed up and moved to Egypt—seventy of them in all.

But then we get a time jump at the beginning of Exodus. Four hundred years have passed, and now the children of Israel have grown into a large nation—between 30,000 and 600.000, depending on how you read the Hebrew. And the new Pharaoh, the one who “knew not Joseph” was afraid that they would form an alliance with Egypt’s enemies and form an army against the Egyptians. So Pharaoh ordered all the Hebrew midwives to kill any male Hebrew the minute he was born. They defied Pharaoh, and we will talk more about them in a minute. But as a result, Pharaoh moved to his plan B, which was to authorize his own people to carry out genocide. Exodus 1:22 says that

22 Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, “Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live.”

So that’s the background for our first mom. Let’s read together what Exodus 2 has to say about her:

2 Now a man from the house of Levi went and took as his wife a Levite woman. 2 The woman conceived and bore a son, and when she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him three months. 3 When she could hide him no longer, she took for him a basket made of bulrushes and daubed it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child in it and placed it among the reeds by the river bank. 4 And his sister stood at a distance to know what would be done to him.

Okay. From this passage, we don’t even know what her name is Honestly, if we stop here, we don’t even know what the baby’s name is. Most of you probably know that the baby they are talking about is the main character of the book of Exodus. His name is… [crowd respond]. Right! Moses.