The Faithfulness of God | Exodus 1
Brian Hedges | August 28, 2022
Let me invite you to turn in Scripture this morning to the book of Exodus, Exodus 1.
One of the few theological words that still has some resonance with people in our culture today, even with nonreligious people, is the word “redemption.” We are accustomed to sometimes seeing or hearing stories of redemption, and the theme of redemption is a theme that pops up fairly often in our literature, in our music, even in our films.
You might recall that the original Star Wars trilogy was called the redemption of Anakin Skywalker. It was a redemption story about this villain, this man who had become Darth Vader.
You might think of Johnny Cash, surely one of the greatest, most iconic musicians of the 20th century, and if you listen to his music there is a theme that emerges from a lot of his songs, and it’s the theme of redemption. In fact, he had at least three songs with “redemption” in the title: the songs “Redemption Day,” a cover of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song,” and—perhaps my favorite—a song that’s simply called “Redemption.” Of course, this was a part of Johnny Cash’s story, part of his life, because he was a man who struggled much of his life with addiction and with various demons, but he found grace and hope and redemption through Jesus Christ.
Redemption is a theme that runs through the Scriptures. In the Old Testament over and again God is called our redeemer, the Lord our redeemer. In the New Testament, the apostles take the language of redemption and reconfigure that language around Jesus, as we just read in Ephesians 1. It is in him that “we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses.” The word “redemption” also points us forward to our future hope, the redemption of our bodies and the redemption of the world itself in resurrection glory.
But the book of the Bible that really gives us the vocabulary for understanding redemption, the book of the Bible that gives us the first real story of redemption using that language, is the book of Exodus.
We’re beginning a new series this morning—this will be our series for the fall—a series in the book of Exodus. A number of people have asked me over the past few weeks, “What’s your next series?” I’ve told them Exodus, and at times I’ve wondered if I saw a little look of disappointment on their faces, because we may not think of the book of Exodus as the most interesting book in the Bible. I want to persuade you otherwise, and I want to give you three reasons why I think it’s worth studying this book. Why Exodus? Why does that come next here at Redeemer Church?
(1) One reason, of course, is that this is a crucial part of Scripture. One of our convictions at Redeemer Church is that we see and savor, we taste and see Jesus every week in Scripture and at the Lord’s table. It’s a part of our worship that we come to the word of God and we open the word of God. Really, the main course of spiritual teaching, our main diet, we might say, here at Redeemer Church, is just taking books of the Bible and working through those books sequentially, chapter by chapter.
Now, for the last ten or twelve weeks we’ve been looking at some topics, different topical series, and it’s important to do that from time to time. But really, we need to just be working through books of the Bible together. We’ve been through Genesis, and most recently we’ve finished the Gospel of John, so now we’re going back to the Old Testament to look at the book of Exodus, with this conviction that all Scripture is breathed out by God and is profitable for us for teaching and for reproof and for correction and for training in righteousness. We will never be fully formed disciples of Jesus unless we give attention to the word that Jesus read as well as the words that he said, and Jesus was immersed in the stories of the Old Testament. So we need books like this.
(2) This is also one of the most dramatic books in the Bible. If you think the Old Testament sounds boring, Exodus sounds boring, think again. Here’s just some of the things that we’re going to have in the book of Exodus. We have the story of the burning bush—I mean, what could be more exciting than that? We have the ten plagues in Egypt. We have the story of the Passover. We have the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud. We have the dividing of the Red Sea. We have God speaking from the mountain in lightning and in fire and the giving of the Ten Commandments. We have God establishing his covenant with his people Israel. We have the whole incident of the golden calf, and then God revealing himself to Moses on the mountain in this stunning revelation of the glory of God. Then the book ends with the glory of God filling the tabernacle. There’s a lot of drama in the book of Exodus! Some of the most iconic stories in all of Scripture are found in this wonderful book. So it invites our attention and our reading.
(3) The most important reason, I think, for studying the book of Exodus is because it does provide us with the pattern, the images, and the vocabulary for understanding the gospel. The book of Exodus was central to Israel’s identity. They understood themselves as a people redeemed by God, and they looked back to the story of the exodus.
The Old Testament scholar Chris Wright puts it like this:
If you had asked a devout Israelite in the Old Testament period, “Are you redeemed?” the answer would have been a most definite yes. If you had asked, “How do you know?” they would have taken you aside to sit down somewhere while your friend recounted a long and exciting story, the story of the exodus. For indeed it is the exodus that provided the primary model of God’s idea of redemption, not just in the Old Testament but even in the New, where it is used as one of the keys to understanding the meaning of the cross of Christ.
So as we work through this book together, the goal for us is not just to try to understand the history of the book, although that’s important; it’s really to uncover the theology of the book and how it unpacks for us the essential categories for understanding the gospel, sin, and redemption in our own lives. I believe that as we do this God will use his word in our hearts to help us be more earnest followers of Jesus and to more deeply understand and proclaim his gospel.
This morning we begin with Exodus 1, and really, the first two chapters of Exodus are a prologue to the main adventure, the main drama in the story. There’s a big gap between Exodus 2 and Exodus 3. We’re just going to begin with Exodus 1 today, and for this message I think the main theme of this chapter is the faithfulness of God. It’s seeing that God is faithful, and we’re going to see that worked out in several ways in the passage. I want to just begin by reading verses 1-7.
Now, as we read this, you may not think this is the most exciting opening to a book, okay? It’s going to be a long list of names. But you know how in some of the great epic movies, in order to get a context for what’s going to happen in the movie, the movie begins with a prologue? You remember how the first Lord of the Rings movie begins with this 15-minute prologue that’s just kind of giving you some of the history of Middle Earth and the rings of power? Or even a Star Wars movie starts with a crawl that’s kind of giving you context. Well, think of these first seven verses kind of like that. This is giving us some context, and it’s teaching us something very important about God’s faithfulness. Let’s read it, verses 1-7. It says,
These are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob, each with his household: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin, Dan and Naphtali, Gad and Asher. All the descendants of Jacob were seventy persons; Joseph was already in Egypt. Then Joseph died, and all his brothers and all that generation. But the people of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them.
1. God is faithful to his people and his promises
It’s a long list of names, the names of the children of Israel. Why does this book start in this way? In fact, it starts with the word “and” in Hebrew, and the reason is because it is a continuation of the story that has already begun in the book of Genesis. The author here is making a very important point. He is telling us that God is faithful to his people and to his promises. That’s really the first point of the message this morning, and we need to see that in this passage. There are a couple of ways in which we see it.
(1) We see it just in the fact that the story continues, and we see it in how the author here connects the beginning of this book with everything that went before in Genesis. I’m not going to take time to go back and read those passages from Genesis, but here’s a chart that just shows you how these first seven verses connect.
Verses 1-4 are virtually a repetition of Genesis 35:22-26. Verse 5 corresponds with Genesis 46:27; verse 6 with Genesis 50:26; and then verse 7 goes all the way back to the creation account, Genesis 1:28.
What this passage is showing us is that God is faithful to his people, and particularly to his promises that were made to his people. You remember how in the book of Genesis the real turning in the book is Genesis 12, when God calls a man out of ancient Chaldea, he calls this man and he gives him promises. That man’s name was Abram, and then God gave him a new name, Abraham. One of those promises is, “Abraham, I’m going to give you a son, I’m going to give you descendents. Look up into the heavens and try to count the stars; that’s what your descendents are going to be like. They’re going to be like the sand of the sea. I’m going to give you these numberless descendents, and through you and through your descendents all the nations of the earth are going to be blessed.”
God promised Abraham a family, and the reason why Exodus 1 begins with the list of names in a family is to show us that God has kept that promise. These people, this family of Israel or Jacob, the grandson of Abraham who went into Egypt, they have now multiplied; they have now become a great people—not just a small family, but a great people.
(2) In fact, it’s also a fulfillment of God’s basic purpose for creation itself. Do you remember how in Genesis 1 God had given this mandate in creation to the original human beings: he said, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” That language of being fruitful and multiplying, that’s the language that’s used here in Exodus 1:7 and again in verse 12 and again later on in the chapter. It’s a thread that runs through this chapter to show us that God isn’t finished. He wasn’t finished with his people.
Now, get this. Those first seven verses cover 400 years! Four hundred years without a fresh word from God, four hundred years without any special revelation recorded for us, but four hundred years where God was still at work, where God was silent but working, and working faithfully, to fulfill these promises.
You know, all of us sometimes struggle with the silence of God. We struggle in our lives with the hiddenness of God. We go through seasons in our lives where it doesn’t seem like God is at work. Do you ever feel that way? You’re praying, you’re asking, you’re seeking, but you maybe don’t have a sense of God’s presence, you don’t have a sense of God’s favor. You certainly don’t see answers to your prayer. We all pray that prayer from Psalm 13, “How long, O Lord?”
Stories like this in Scripture are here and they are written to assure us that God is still faithful. He’s faithful to his people, he’s faithful to his promises; even in the silence, even in the hiddenness, even in the years and in this case the centuries that go by, God is doing something. He is preparing this nation, and through this nation he is going to send a deliverer—a deliverer immediately in the book of Exodus in the person of Moses, but ultimately another deliverer, the deliverer we know as Jesus the Messiah. God is faithful to his people and his promises.
2. God is still faithful even in the worst of circumstances
He continues to be faithful even as things take a turn for the worse. Look in verse 8 and following. “Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.” That’s an ominous note. Joseph had been something like the prime minister of Egypt, but now years have gone by, Joseph has died, and a new king arises, a new person in power.
And he said to his people, “Behold, the people of Israel are too many and too mighty for us. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and, if war breaks out, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.” Therefore they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with heavy burdens. They built for Pharaoh store cities, Pithom and Raamses. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad. And the Egyptians were in dread of the people of Israel. So they ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves and made their lives bitter with hard service, in mortar and brick, and in all kinds of work in the field. In all their work they ruthlessly made them work as slaves.
God has been faithful to his people, and his people have grown and multiplied, but not things get even worse. They’re not only in Egypt, not in the Promised Land, but they’re in Egypt, and the Egyptians begin to oppress them. They enslave them. They take them captive. They put them to forced labor.
You have to try to imagine what that felt like. You have to try to imagine—get into the imagination in your heart and try to feel what they felt. Some of you years ago saw the animated adaptation of the story of the exodus in the film called The Prince of Egypt. It’s pretty good as far as it goes; it doesn’t get everything right and takes some creative license, but I think what’s particularly good are some of the songs in the film. There’s a song, and it’s when the slaves are laboring under the taskmasters, right? If you’ve ever heard it maybe you’ll remember how it goes. They’re singing,
With the sting of the whip on my shoulder,
With the salt of my sweat on my brow,
Elohim, God on high, can you hear your people cry?
Help us now; this dark hour deliver us!
They’re groaning under this burden. “Deliver us, Lord! Deliver us!” This goes on for years.
Yet, as we see in verse 12, the more they were oppressed the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad. There it is again. You know what it’s showing us? It’s showing us that God is still faithful even in the worst of circumstances. Things are going from bad to worse, and they’re even going to get worse after this for the Israelites in Egypt, but everything that’s happening here is happening under the sovereign eye of God, who is fulfilling his promises and fulfilling his word. Did you know that even their affliction is a part of what God had prophetically revealed to Abraham would take place?
I will read this passage, Genesis 15:13-14. This is when Abraham had that mysterious encounter with the Lord and the Lord made this covenant with him. Listen to what the Lord had said. “Then the Lord said to Abram, ‘Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions.’”
That word is the word that is being fulfilled here. They are under that affliction, they are beginning to groan under these burdens, but God is still faithful.
Brothers and sisters, you and I need to know this as well, that God is still faithful in our lives even in the worst circumstances. Even when we’re suffering, even when we’re languishing, even when the church seems like it’s declining or when Christianity seems on the wane.
You know, there have been many times in the history of the church when God’s people might have been tempted to think that all was lost. Think about those centuries of bloody persecution where the Christians were nailed to crosses or thrown to the lions or lit up as torches to light the gardens of Nero. Yet the more they were persecuted, the more they spread.
Do you remember what the church father Tertullian said? “The blood of the martyrs is seed,” the seed of the church. Or you might think of the Puritan era in England in the 17th century. In 1662, two thousand pastors were kicked out of the pulpit, and if they went back and tried to preach they could be arrested and jailed; some of them were arrested and jailed. Think of John Bunyan, who spent twelve years in the Bedford jail because he wouldn’t agree to not preach. Was God faithful to Bunyan during those years? Read The Pilgrim’s Progress that he wrote during those years and see. You can see how God was working even in those dark times.
In fact, some of the greatest literature in the English language in the history of the church was written right in the wake of that great ejection, as those two thousand pastors, banished from their pulpits, put their pens to paper and poured out their hearts and wrote some of the greatest classics of Christian spirituality.
It’s tempting for you and I to sometimes think that things are worse than they’ve ever been. You might think that when you think of moral decay in the nation. It’s tempting for Christians to wring their hands and think, “God must be finished with us.” We may feel that in our hearts, but the word of God reminds us that God is still faithful, even in the worst of circumstances.
It’s worth pausing for a moment on verses 13 and 14. I want to read them again. This is somewhat obscured in English, but the emphasis here is on the slavery that they experienced. This really is setting up the need for the exodus event, for the great redemptive event here in the book of Exodus. You can see it with the underlined words.
“So they ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves and made their lives bitter with hard service [or hard slavery] in mortar and brick and in all kinds of work [or all kinds of service or slavery] in the field. In all their work [or all their slavery] they ruthlessly made them work as slaves.”
So five times it’s emphasizing their condition as slaves. We can’t read something like that without thinking with deep sadness on the sad history of slavery in our own nation and the injustice of that. We shouldn’t read a passage like this without remembering that even today slavery is an issue, a justice issue, in our world. Did you know that there are 40 million plus people globally who are enslaved right now? Did you know that slavery, human trafficking, is a 150 billion dollars a year industry? Do you wonder what drives that kind of inhumanity? It’s money; that’s what it is. Did you know that one in four victims of forced labor are children?
But God still hears the cries of the oppressed, and he calls us to be involved in trying to meet that need. If you want one practical way to do that, I would point you to a ministry called International Justice Mission. Go to their website; you can read, you can give. I have a good friend who once worked for International Justice Mission; he’s now a pastor friend of mine. I can vouch for this organization. It’s a wonderful evangelical organization with concern for the gospel and a concern for justice. When we think about the plight of slavery, we should certainly pray and act.
But Israel’s slavery here is also a vivid picture of a deeper, spiritual captivity. It’s a picture of slavery to sin. The New Testament uses the language in this way. Do you remember how Paul talks about how “at one time you were slaves of sin, but now you have been set free”? Or in Titus 3:3 he says, “At one time we ourselves were foolish, disobedience, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures.” Maybe that describes some of us this morning. Do you know what it is to be enslaved to passions, to desires; to be addicted, to be bound up?
One of my favorite films—in fact, I would say it’s my favorite film of all—is Terrence Mallock’s movie The Tree of Life. I’ve mentioned it before; some of you have seen it. There’s a segment in the film about this teenage boy named Jack O’Brien. This is a coming-of-age story, set in Texas in the 1950s. There’s this segment where Jack is clearly on a path of destruction. He’s constantly making choices that are destructive, that are harmful to relationships. He’s not doing well in school, he is defiant towards his mother. He’s breaking windows, he’s sneaking into the neighbor’s house and stealing things, he’s getting himself into trouble. He’s just absolutely cruel to his younger brother.
He’s going through all this obviously wrestling with his conscience, and in a voiceover he quietly says, “What I want to do I can’t do. I do what I hate.” Of course, it’s an echo of Romans 7. It’s the voice of the person who is bound by sin.
Does that describe you this morning? We’ve all experienced this at some point in our lives, the captivity of our hearts and our imaginations to the worst impulses, the basest desires, the darkest, ugliest parts of ourselves. I want you to know this morning that if that’s where you are there is hope, because the God of the Bible is a God who redeems slaves. He is the God who rescues addicts; he is the God who rescues us from ourselves; he is the God who saves us from our sins.
Remember that great hymn from Wesley?
He breaks the power of canceled sin,
He sets the prisoner free;
His blood can make the foulest clean,
His blood avails for me.
He is a faithful God.
3. God shows his faithfulness in surprising ways
There’s one more lesson for us to see, this lesson from verses 15-21. What we learn here is that God shows his faithfulness in surprising ways. Look at verse 15.
Then the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, “When you serve as midwife to the Hebrew women and see them on the birthstool, if it is a son, you shall kill him, but if it is a daughter, she shall live.” But the midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live. So the king of Egypt called the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this, and let the male children live?” The midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.” So God dealt well with the midwives. And the people multiplied and grew very strong [there it is, the people multiplying]. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families.
I think this little episode is showing us that God shows his faithfulness in surprising ways, because initially in the book of Exodus the heroes of the story are not people that you would commonly think of as heroes, especially in the ancient world. The women did not have much cultural clout, especially these midwives. Some of the scholars tell us the midwives would usually be women who were unable to have children of their own, and especially in the ancient world where a woman’s worth was determined, in large part, by her ability to bear children, the women who were not able to bear children were considered the lowest of society. They were relegated to this task of midwife.
Yet it’s these women that God chooses to use to preserve the promised seed. Pharaoh institutes this policy of genocide: “Kill all the male children.” These midwives, because they fear the Lord, will not do it.
Incidentally, Pharaoh is never named. Historians have spent a lot of time trying to figure out which Pharaoh this was and in what part of Egypt’s history this took place. It’s hard for us to know exactly, and whatever the answer is, it doesn’t really change the point of this passage. But what’s interesting is that the king of Egypt is never named, these midwives are named. They’re named! Their legacy is preserved for all of God’s people through history. They are the heroes of this story.
It does raise a question of ethics, and people have already asked me about this when they knew I was coming to Exodus. Did they lie, and was it okay that they lied to Pharaoh? I think that answer is, first of all, that the text never says that they lied; you kind of have to read that between the lines. Also, some biblical scholars would actually argue that Scripture doesn’t require speaking truth to those who would do evil with that information. There are some scholars who absolutely disagree with that, so it’s interesting to read the contrast between, say, Calvin and Luther.
But in any case, that’s not the point of the passage. The passage makes no comment on what they said to Pharaoh; what the passage is really focused on is the fact that they feared God and therefore they obeyed God rather than man, and because they feared the Lord they protected the lives of these little baby boys, and God blessed them, and he used them to overthrow the plans of Pharaoh.
The chapter ends on a cliff-hanger in verse 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.’” As we will see next week, there is a boy who’s cast into the Nile, not in the way that Pharaoh imagined, but a boy that God will raise up to become the deliverer of his people.
God shows his faithfulness in surprising ways. In this passage it’s through these gutsy midwives in an act of civil disobedience when they place God’s purposes, God’s will, God’s value on human life ahead of a wicked king’s policy.
Brothers and sisters, we can’t read this story without thinking of another wicked king who also sought to destroy all of the male Hebrew children in a little village two thousand years ago in Bethlehem. Do you remember this? Once again, God was preserving his people, preserving the Messiah, the Christ child. An angel of the Lord warned Joseph in a dream to take the child to Egypt, where he would be protected. Then the text tells us that “this was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: ‘Out of Egypt I have called my son.’”
I think what the Gospel writer is doing is he’s drawing a connection all the way back to the exodus story, and he’s showing us that the God who is faithful to his promises, that the God who is faithful even in the worst of circumstances, and that the God who shows his faithfulness in surprising ways supremely shows that faithfulness to us in our sinful circumstances. He shows that faithfulness to us in the surprising way of sending his Son to be incarnate among us, and then not to triumph over our enemies in military might and victory, but rather to be crucified for us; to be, as it were, the Lamb of God who was slain for the sins of the world, in order to bring about the true exodus, the true redemption, the redemption that we have through Jesus Christ and his shed blood.
I don’t know where you are this morning. I don’t know what you’re going through, I don’t know what’s going on in your heart or in your personal life. But whatever your circumstances, and yes, whatever your sins this morning, the hope of the gospel is this: that God is faithful to his promises and that we can look to him in his faithfulness and in his redemptive grace we can trust him. We can ask him, we can cry out to him even as we feel the burden and the weight of our sins. We can cry out to him for grace and for mercy. Just as the children of Israel eventually cried out to God and God heard them—he heard their cry and he sent a deliverer—so God will deliver us if we seek him. Look to the Lord this morning. Let’s pray.
Gracious God, we thank you for your word, we thank you for your faithfulness to your purposes, your faithfulness to your people and to your covenant promises. Thank you that you have shown that faithfulness supremely in your Son, Jesus Christ. We do right now look to Christ. We look away from ourselves. We’re unable to rescue ourselves, we’re unable to redeem ourselves. But we acknowledge that we need your grace, so we ask you, Lord, for Jesus’ sake, to bring redemption and salvation into our lives. I pray this especially for all who do not know you this morning. But I pray that for all of us, even as believers, that we would enter into the fullness of that redemption and salvation, the fullness of what Jesus came to give us.
Lord, as we come to the Lord’s table this morning we come in faith, not looking to ourselves, but looking to Christ, who was crucified for our sins and who was raised from the dead. May we this morning by faith feed on Christ, the living bread. May we find grace, mercy, and help in our time of need as we come to your throne of grace. May we know the presence of your Spirit with us. So Lord, work in us this morning, we pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
