The Promise of Deliverance | Exodus 2
Brian Hedges | September 4, 2022
Turn in your Bibles this morning to the book of Exodus. We’re going to be looking in both chapters 1 and 2.
For the last several months I’ve been reading a biography of John Newton, who was the famous author of “Amazing Grace,” probably the most famous hymn in the English language. This particular biography is subtitled From Disgrace to Amazing Grace, and this is actually the first time I’ve read a full-length biography of Newton. I kind of knew the bare-bones details of his life, but there were some things I didn’t know.
One of the things I didn’t realize is that, though I knew Newton had been a slave captain, the captain of a slave-trading ship, and also had been imprisoned himself at one time—he himself was a slave for a period of time in Africa. I didn’t realize that he actually became a slave trader after he himself had been a slave. I thought it had been the other way around.
Even after he first called on God for mercy when he was scared to death in the midst of a storm, he then began to seek the Lord to some degree in his life, but it was actually some years before he really came to understand the wickedness and the evil of the slave trade that he had been involved in. It was only in later life that he really began to publicly lament that.
It took a number of years for Newton to make a transition into ministry, and even though he felt called to ministry and was seeking a post, he sought numerous times to be ordained to the ministry in the Church of England and was turned down. Only after some years was he appointed to his first parish, in Olney, England.
The other thing I didn’t realize was just how influential Newton had been over William Wilberforce, this young member of Parliament in England, who was only 26 years old. Wilberforce himself had a spiritual awakening, came to a deep faith in Jesus Christ, and he actually went to Newton seeking counsel. He was thinking about leaving politics to go into the ministry, and Newton was the one who talked him into staying in Parliament and taking up the cause of abolishing the slave trade. It was when Newton then published an account of his firsthand experiences as a slave captain and talked about all of the inhumane and brutal conditions of that industry, that’s really when the tide began to turn. It was published in England, and public opinion really then began to side against the slave trade, and that kind of made the way for Wilberforce to be able to pass that bill in Parliament.
The two men really did make history, and I think the title of this book is appropriate. John Newton went from disgrace to amazing grace, and as a man who himself had been a slave, had also been a slave captain, and had been enslaved to sin, it was God’s grace that set him free and then later used him to abolish the slave trade in England.
As I finished the book, I thought there are certain parallels with the story that we’re studying together in Exodus, because Exodus is a book about slaves who are liberated through God’s grace, and they are liberated through a man that God used, but only after preparing him for a really long period of time. That man, of course, is Moses.
Last week we began a new series in the book of Exodus. It’s the story of redemption. It’s an exciting book and a book I’m excited to study with you because it is one of the most dramatic, action-packed books in all of Scripture, but especially because it’s in Exodus that we get the stories and the patterns, the images, the language, we might even say the vocabulary of salvation. All of the New Testament language of rescue and deliverance and salvation and redemption really comes from the book of Exodus. If we want to understand our salvation that we have in and through Jesus Christ, we’re going to understand it best when we understand those original stories and images that so filled the imagination of Jesus and his disciples.
Last week we began with Exodus 1; today we’re going to mostly focus in Exodus 2. The theme for this chapter and for this message is the theme of deliverance. I want us to think about deliverance, and we’re going to look at it in four steps. We’re going to look at the need for deliverance (looking back at chapter 1 for just a moment); then the Irony of deliverance (I’ll explain what I mean when we come to that); then thirdly, the pattern of deliverance; and then, finally, the promise of deliverance. And I think you’ll be able to see each one of these things as we work through the text.
1. The Need for Deliverance
We begin this morning with the need for deliverance. Really, this is just brief review. Remember chapter 1 and how it described the plight of the Israelites, as they are enslaved in Egypt. We could look especially at Exodus 1:13-14, which says that “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.”
This was the literal, physical condition of the children of Israel, the people of God, who now for 400 years have been enslaved in Egypt. That’s the crisis. That’s the great need in this story.
Things actually only move from bad to worse when, because the children of Israel continue to multiply and grow and increase, Pharaoh feels threatened by that, and he enacts a policy of genocide. Remember how he tells the midwives to kill all of the male children, and when the midwives don’t comply he tells all of the Egyptians to be involved in this. You see this in chapter 1:22; it’s the last verse in chapter 1, which really ends on this cliffhanger. Exodus 1:22 says, “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.’”
That’s the crisis; that’s the need. In other words, the children of Israel are enslaved literally and physically. They are in servitude to Egypt and their lives are at stake. So this really gives us the whole situation against which this book has to be understood.
Of course, as we saw last week, this mirrors for us our spiritual condition, and the New Testament uses this language of slavery, slavery to sin and slavery to the fear of death (as Hebrews 2 puts it), to talk about our condition as human beings. Really, the story of Israel mirrors the story of the whole world. Israel is kind of like a microcosm of the world, and even though they are called to be God’s people, they go through so many experiences that have a spiritual parallel for us.
You and I also have a need for deliverance, don’t we? We have a need for rescue, and it is the need we have to be released, to be liberated from the oppression of sin and death.
I think one of the best illustrations of this is from St. Augustine, that fourth century African bishop who really invented the literary genre of spiritual biography in his Confessions. He talks about his own slavery to sin. He really was a sex addict; that was his problem. He was in bondage to his carnal desires. He describes this in Book 8 of The Confessions. He describes it like a chain. Listen to what he says. He says,
"It was no iron chain imposed by anyone else that fettered me, but the iron of my own will. The enemy had my power of willing in his clutches, and from it had forged a chain to bind me. The truth is that disordered lust springs from a perverted will. When lust is pandered to, a habit is formed; when habit is not checked, it hardens into compulsion. These were like interlinking rings forming what I have described as a chain, and my harsh servitude used it to keep me under duress."
He was enslaved; enslaved to his own desires. He describes it in terms of this chain with several links: disordered desire, perverted will, habit, and then habit hardening into compulsion.
The bottom line for Augustine is that he could not rescue himself. He could not liberate himself from his own desires. He was in absolute slavery to his desires.
That may be some of us this morning. It may be that you’re enslaved to some kind of desire, to some kind of addiction. It could be a substance addiction such as alcohol or drugs. It could be even something a little more innocuous, like an addiction to food. Some of us just don’t know how to stop eating and to control our appetites. It could be an addiction to illicit sexual desire.
Or it could be maybe what we wouldn’t call an addiction, but still a deep kind of compulsive bondage to the approval of other people, where we’re constantly calculating every decision and all of our words and actions in order to win the approval of others. We’re constantly involved in image management and we’re definitely afraid of what other people will think of us, and we just live in that bondage. It could be bondage to some kind of anxiety, a deep, debilitating kind of worry in your life. I mean, there are a thousand forms it can take. Each one of us knows the secrets of our own hearts and how that bondage to sin works itself out in our own lives.
Wherever you are this morning, the hope of the gospel is that the God of the gospel, the God of Exodus and the God revealed to us through his Son, Jesus Christ, is the God who redeems the captives. He releases slaves, he sets his people free. He comes to do that; that is his purpose, that’s his will, and that is the good news of the gospel, the freedom that we can have in Jesus Christ.
My hope for you in this series is that, wherever you are, you will either experience liberty and freedom for the first time as you encounter the God revealed in the book of Exodus or that you will grow into a deeper kind of freedom that comes through worship and through serving our God as he is revealed in the gospel.
The need for deliverance—that really sets the stage for everything in this book, and certainly sets the stage for chapter 2, when we remember this edict from Pharaoh that every male child that is born is to be cast into the Nile River, which, by the way, was a god of Egypt. It was essentially child sacrifice, throwing these babies into the Nile.
2. The Irony of Deliverance
That really sets up chapter 2 and the first ten verses, which are all about the irony of deliverance.
Maybe I need to explain the term “irony.” Most of us probably recognize it when we see it but we may not know what to call it. Irony is a technique in literature or in other forms of storytelling, even in film, where the outcome is the opposite of what you would expect.
There are all kinds of examples to this. There’s tragic irony; you have that in a lot of Shakespeare’s plays. Sometimes there’s comical irony. A really simple illustration would be to think of a child who’s running away from someone who has a water balloon or a water pistol or something like that; he doesn’t want to get wet. As he’s running, he trips and he falls into a pool. Right? That’s irony. It’s an unexpected outcome, and in that case it’s actually kind of funny.
But the Bible is actually full of irony. The way the story is told has all these elements of irony, and it’s there for a really important theological purpose. We see that in the book of Exodus in these first ten verses of chapter 2, the irony of the story that really shows how God in his providence is at work to undermine the schemes of Pharaoh, and to do it in unexpected, surprising, and really even in some humorous ways.
Let’s read those first ten verses together, Exodus 2:1-10. It says,
Now a man from the house of Levi went and took as his wife a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son, and when she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him three months.
Of course she would! This is her baby, and she knows that if this boy is even seen by another Egyptian that baby could be yanked out of her arms and thrown into the Nile River. But three months go by. Verse 3 says,
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. And his sister stood at a distance to know what would be done to him. Now the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her young women walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her servant woman, and she took it. When she opened it, she saw the child, and behold, the baby was crying. She took pity on him and said, “This is one of the Hebrews' children.” Then his sister said to Pharaoh's daughter, “Shall I go and call you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?” And Pharaoh's daughter said to her, “Go.” So the girl went and called the child's mother. And Pharaoh's daughter said to her, “Take this child away and nurse him for me, and I will give you your wages.” So the woman took the child and nursed him. When the child grew older, she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son. She named him Moses, “Because,” she said, “I drew him out of the water.”
That’s a story that all of us are pretty familiar with, at least from Sunday school if you grew up going to Sunday school, or maybe reading Bible story books. So we know the story; we know that at least for this one family there’s a happy outcome, as this little baby, baby Moses, is saved. But it’s easy, perhaps, for us to miss the irony of the story. I think the irony is there, and it’s there to teach us some important things. We see it in several ways.
Pharaoh gives this edict, “Kill all of the male children,” but he’s sparing the female children. He spares the daughters but wants to kill the sons. But it’s actually the daughters who become the heroes of the story, right? It’s the daughter of Moses’ parents, Moses’ older sister. We know her name to be Miriam. She’s the one who’s kind of behind the scenes, and she’s watching this little basket floating down the river, and she’s the one that arranges, then, for Moses’ own mother to be his nurse. It’s as if the very daughters that Pharaoh spares are the undoing of his policy and actually will lead to the rescue of Moses and eventually the deliverance of the people of God.
You also see it in that Pharaoh’s daughter herself undermines his policy, because, unlike her hard-hearted father, she has a heart of compassion. When she sees this child, she feels pity. Even though she knows this is a Hebrew baby, she’s not going to follow the decree that her father has made.
There’s even some humor in the story, because Moses ends up being raised and protected by the household of Pharaoh itself. I love the way Old Testament scholar Ralph Davis puts it. He says,
We must notice the humor in this episode. Pharaoh’s own daughter frustrates Pharaoh’s decree, his own mother gets to be the child’s nurse, his mother gets a regular government check for providing kiddy care for her own kid, and the child is raised under state protection. Heaven is laughing!
It shows us something about how God’s providence works in mysterious but ironic ways to undermine the schemes of men and to accomplish his own purposes. I think the theological point of the passage is that God works in ways that we don’t expect. He works in surprising ways. We saw it last week with the midwives; he surprises us, showing his faithfulness in ways that are completely unexpected. The heroes of the story are the daughters, the women.
This is so often the case in Scripture: God uses the underdog. He uses the weak rather than the strong. He uses the poor rather than the rich. He chooses not the noble and the mighty; he chooses the off-scouring of the earth, as Paul will put it, to accomplish his purposes.
This is nowhere more clear than in 1 Corinthians 1, where Paul says that “the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” He says, “Consider your calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were perfect, not many were of noble birth; but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are.”
Why does he do that? Why does God work in this way? Why does he bring salvation, bring redemption in this way, this unexpected way? Full of irony, using the low, the despised, the foolish, and the weak. Why does he do it? Paul answers in 1 Corinthians 1:29. “So that no human being might boast in the presence of God.”
We see it in the gospel itself, as God rescues sinners, as he saves us from our sins, and he doesn’t do it by our own works, and he doesn’t do it in the worldly ways of military might and victory. No, when Jesus comes, he comes as a child and he lives his life in relative poverty and obscurity. Then, at the end of his ministry, what happens to him? He goes to the cross, and it’s through his death that we get eternal life. It’s through his suffering that we receive glory. It is through his weakness that we are saved and redeemed. This is the irony of the gospel. It’s the irony of deliverance, as God works in these unexpected ways.
3. The Pattern of Deliverance
We see the need for deliverance (our slavery to sin and death), we see the irony of deliverance as God works in these unexpected ways, and then the third thing we see in this passage is the pattern of deliverance.
We see this in a couple of ways. One way we see the pattern of deliverance is with an echo of something from the book of Genesis. Maybe you missed it; it’s easy to miss it in the translation I was reading, the English Standard Version. But the little basket that Moses is placed into, some of your translations call it an ark. It actually is the word—that word that’s used twice in chapter 2 is the word that is only used one other place in Scripture, and that’s in the story of Noah in Genesis 6-9. There the word is used many times because it’s this ark, this large boat that saves, that delivers Noah and his family from this flood of judgment that comes upon the world.
I think the way this story is being told here in Exodus 2 is to show us that there’s a parallel; that just as God was preserving a remnant through Noah, rescuing the promised seed through this one man and his family, so God is preserving Moses. He is delivering the one who will be the future deliverer, and he’s doing that through this ark that protects Moses in the river Nile. That’s part of the pattern of deliverance.
We see it also in all the stories that unfold about Moses from verses 11-22. It’s interesting that the chapter actually skips 40 years of Moses’ life. We know from the New Testament, from Acts 7 and Hebrews 11, that he’s raised up in Pharaoh’s household, as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He is schooled and educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. But then here is Moses, he’s about 40 years old, and a series of events happens here in chapter 2 that will set the course for the rest of his life. I think the way the story is told it’s telling us something about God’s preparation of Moses and the pattern of deliverance that is to follow.
Let’s work through these verses together. The first episode is verses 11-12, where we might see Moses here as the vigilante. It says, "One day, when Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and looked on their burdens, and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his people. He looked this way and that, and seeing no one, he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand."
This is Moses’ first act of deliverance. Again, when you read the sermon of Stephen in Acts 7, Stephen tells us that Moses supposed that his people would understand that he was called to be the deliverer, so it seems that Moses already had some kind of understanding of what his role was to be.
So he sees this Egyptian, and he’s mercilessly beating one of the Hebrew slaves, and he intervenes. The text says he looks “this way and that,” and the way it’s worded it might give the idea that he’s looking to be sure that he won’t be caught. But the phrase that’s used there is actually used in the book of Isaiah, where it says that “the Lord saw that there was no man; he wondered that there was no one to intercede.” It’s the same Hebrew that’s used there, where the Lord, as it were, is looking around to see someone who will intervene, and there’s no one, so the Lord himself steps in to bring salvation and to bring justice and righteousness.
So it seems that something like that is actually what’s happening in the text. Of course, the commentators all debate, was Moses wrong? Was this an act of justice or was it an act of murder? You can line up the commentators on either side of that. Calvin sees it as basically a positive thing, and Augustine sees it as a negative thing, and the list goes on.
I think, regardless of how you characterize this act, what is clear is that Moses here is beginning to enter into the oppression of his people, and he has some kind of understanding of what needs to take place. What he doesn’t have right is the timing. Moses here is acting a vigilante before he’s really received the call and the commission of God that will come in Exodus 3.
That leads right into another scene, verses 13-15, where Moses tries to intervene, now in a dispute between the Hebrews. It says, "When he went out the next day, behold, two Hebrews were struggling together. And he said to the man in the wrong, 'Why do you strike your companion?' He answered, 'Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?' Then Moses was afraid, and thought, 'Surely the thing is known.' When Pharaoh heard of it, he sought to kill Moses. But Moses fled from Pharaoh and stayed in the land of Midian. And he sat down by a well."
Moses the vigilante now becomes Moses the fugitive. Maybe for the first time in his life he knows fear. For the first time in his life, his life is actually in danger—at least the first time since he was rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter. For the first time he’s actually kind of entering into the plight of his own people, and he has to run for his life. He becomes a fugitive.
Then there’s another encounter in verses 16-19, and once again we see Moses intervening, we see Moses stepping in to try to help those who are oppressed. This becomes characteristic of Moses’ life. It says, "Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters, and they came and drew water and filled the troughs to water their father's flock. The shepherds came and drove them away, but Moses stood up and saved them, and watered their flock. When they came home to their father Reuel, he said, 'How is it that you have come home so soon today?' They said, 'An Egyptian delivered us out of the hand of the shepherds and even drew water for us and watered the flock.' He said to his daughters, 'Then where is he? Why have you left the man? Call him, that he may eat bread.'"
So three times Moses intervenes. I think what’s really significant is, when you look at the language that is used here in Exodus 2, all of the verbs that are used of Moses, and you see how those words get used again and again and again in the rest of the book of Exodus, and what you see is an emerging pattern of deliverance, where Moses here is acting on the small scale as a deliverer of the oppressed, and it foreshadows what God through Moses will do on a much larger scale.
So he looks and he sees in verse 11. You can see this in a chart that should come up on the screen. He looked and he saw in verse 11; it’s the same word that is used of God himself in Exodus 3:7, when the Lord says, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt. I have heard their cry because of their taskmasters.” Moses here is experiencing that.
It says that he struck this man and killed him, and it’s the same word that is used when the Lord strikes the firstborn of Egypt in the last of the plagues, the tenth plague, in Exodus 12.
In verses 17-19 you have a pair of words, the words “saved” and “delivered.” These also are words that are used of the Lord and his redemption of his people in Exodus 3:8. God says to Moses, “I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians,” and in chapter 14:30, “Thus the Lord saved Israel that day from the hand of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore.”
Even the drawing of water to water the flocks of the priest of Midian’s daughters; even that kind of foreshadows how Moses will be the one that God uses to provide water in the wilderness for the people of God following their exodus from Egypt.
We’re seeing the pattern set right here, as Moses is beginning to enter into this role of the deliverer. But here he is, the vigilante become a fugitive, now an exile. In verses 21-22 he gets married, and he becomes a sojourner in the land. It says,
And Moses was content to dwell with the man, and he gave Moses his daughter Zipporah. She gave birth to a son, and he called his name Gershom, for he said, “I have been a sojourner [or a stranger] in a foreign land.”
What’s really going on in this passage? I’m arguing here that it sets the pattern for redemption or the pattern for deliverance, but I think there were things going on in Moses’ life that were preparing him to be this deliverer. I think Moses had to enter into Israel’s experience. He had to somehow come to have a deep sympathy, a deep identification personally, with the need of his people by seeing their affliction and then actually having to fear for his own life. Even his years in the desert—we think this probably was the Sinai peninsula—it was preparing him for being the leader that he would be as he led the children of Israel for 40 years in the wilderness.
I think it shows something that’s true in all of our lives, that it’s really only as we live through a number of different experiences, and especially as we personally experience the grace of God changing us, saving us, sustaining us, carrying us through trials and through difficulties that we’re really equipped to be able to minister to others.
I know in my own life that as a young minister, as a young preacher, I was well intentioned, and I certainly tried to show sympathy to those who experienced grief. I did the best I could, and this church has always been very gracious to me in that. But I know that now, having experienced some grief in a very personal way, having lost a parent, that when I hear of someone who has lost one of their parents, I immediately have a kind of empathy that I never could have had before, because I’ve lived through that. I understand that in a new way.
That’s true in all of our lives. As we grow in the Lord, if we’re growing in grace and if we’re growing in our spiritual experience and we’re going through many things in life trusting in the Lord, the more we go through, the more we are equipped to be used by God to minister to others.
Paul talks about this in 2 Corinthians when he says that “we comfort you with the same comfort with which we are comforted.” He says, “This is why we were afflicted, so that we can have this comfort and share it with you.” The things that you and I go through, when we trust God with them, God is using them in our lives to prepare us, to equip us to be able to minister to others.
Moses had to experience this. Moses also needed a divine call and commission, which he will receive 40 years later, as we’ll see next week in Exodus 3. We see how God is leading Moses, preparing him for what will come.
But the pattern here doesn’t stop with Moses. The pattern here also points us to the pattern of deliverance in the life of Jesus, because Jesus also had to be made like his brothers in order to deliver them. Read Hebrews 2. He had to share in flesh and blood with us in order to deliver us from slavery and from the fear of death. Read how the Gospel writers structure the narrative.
Did you know that the Gospel of Matthew is actually built in some ways following the pattern of the book of Exodus? In Matthew 2, baby Jesus in Egypt, and this was to fulfill what was said by the prophet, “Out of Egypt have I called my son.”
Then what happens in chapter 3? Jesus goes through the waters of baptism, similar to how the children of Israel passed through the waters of the Red Sea. Then what happens in chapter 4? Jesus is driven into the wilderness for 40 days to be tempted, to be tested, just as Israel spent 40 years being tested in the wilderness.
What happens in chapter 5? Jesus ascends a mountain and he expounds the law of God, the kingdom of God, declaring that to his people, just as Moses from the mountain had been the mediator of the law of God to his people.
There’s a pattern here, a pattern that is set early on in Scripture, and then that pattern that just gets deeper and deeper and clearer and clearer as the Scriptures unfold.
4. The Promise of Deliverance
We see here the crisis, the need for redemption. We see the irony of it, we see the pattern of it, and then number four and finally, we see the promise of deliverance or the promise of redemption.
You see it in verses 23-25, a wonderful three verses with which this chapter ends. Listen to what it says.
During those many days the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel—and God knew.
In many ways, we could say that those three verses are the hinge on which the big events of this turn. This is the turning point. I mean, everything in these first two chapters is preface and prologue, leading up to the moment when God begins to act. There are two things that happen here that are kind of the impetus or the catalyst, it seems.
It seems in verse 23 that “during those many days the king of Egypt died.” Dale Ralph Davis makes this observation that it seems that their groaning is intensified when the king dies. He suggests, and quotes the scholarship to back it up, that perhaps the children of Israel had been hoping that when there was a new king, a new Pharaoh, that their suffering would end, because it was common for Pharaohs, when a new Pharaoh, a new king of Egypt, would ascend the throne that he would declare an amnesty. Prisoners would be set free, captives would be liberated, the oppressed would receive mercy. This was often done, according to the literature, according to the records. A Pharaoh would do this. Perhaps the children of Israel were hoping for that. They were waiting for some kind of political change, and that would be their liberation.
It doesn’t happen, and it underscores where our hope comes from and where it doesn’t come from. Our hope does not come from worldly methods, worldly kings, political change. It’s rather hope that is only found in God’s faithfulness to his covenant promises.
The other thing that happens here is that the children of Israel begin to cry out. Here they are; they are groaning. They are crying. These are visceral words to describe their prayer to God. They’re crying out to God.
Notice what God does in response. Notice how God attends to their cries. Look at the verbs here for God in verses 24-25. It says God heard their groaning, God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob; God saw the people of Israel, and God knew. God heard, God remembered, God saw, God knew. It will only be a short time before God will act.
Why? Because of the promise. He remembered his covenant with Abraham and with Isaac and with Jacob; his covenant promises to the fathers, and it’s on that basis that he will act and he will bring deliverance. It’s a promise of deliverance.
Let me end by telling you a story that a few of you probably have heard me tell before, but it’s been three or four years. It’s a story that comes from the revival that took place on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland, during the 1940s and ’50s. One of the prominent figures during that revival was a man named Duncan Campbell. Duncan Campbell was a preacher; he preached all over the world, but did a lot of work there in Scotland. There was a woman that Duncan Campbell would sometimes talk to and sometimes she would just call him. She was an older woman who had a deep and rich prayer life, a deep walk with the Lord. She would sometimes call Duncan Campbell to tell him what she felt like the Spirit of God was teaching her or leading her to do, or even direction, perhaps, for Duncan Campbell himself.
One day she called him and she said, “I want you to go to this particular village, it’s on the island. The Lord has impressed on me that you’re to go.”
He had no appointments there, there was no reason why he should go except for this woman, but he trusted her counsel. He followed that direction, believing that the Lord was leading, and he went to this island, not knowing what to expect.
When he was there, he was driving down a road, and on the side of the road he saw a young girl, a teenage girl. She was sitting on the side of the road; she was obviously upset. He thought, I’ll stop and try to help her. Maybe I can talk to her about the Lord or pray with her.
So he stopped, and he asked her, “What’s going on? How can I help you?”
She was sobbing almost uncontrollably, and she said, “You cannot help me; only God can help me.”
He said, “Well, I’m a minister. Maybe I can help you. Why don’t you tell me what’s bothering you? Let me see if I can help you, if I can pray for you.”
Again she said, “You cannot help me; only God can help me.”
Finally he got her to tell him what was wrong, and this is what she said. She said, “There’s a man named Duncan Campbell, and God has told me that he is to come to this island to preach so that my uncle and my brother will hear the gospel and will be saved.” She had no idea that she was talking to him.
He said, “How do you know this? Who told you this?”
She said, “You don’t understand. I’ve been praying, and God told me. I’ve been praying. I spent all night in prayer.”
He said, “You spent all night in prayer?”
She’s weeping through her tears. “You don’t understand! My uncle and my brother are lost, and they need to hear the gospel, and Duncan Campbell must come and preach in my village.”
He took her gently by the shoulders, he shook her, he looked her in the eye, and he said, “Look at me. I’m Duncan Campbell.”
She threw her arms around him, sobbing and crying. This is what she said. She said, ‘You are a covenant-keeping God! You are a covenant-keeping God!”
That night Duncan Campbell went to her village, he preached, and her uncle and her brother were saved.
It’s a moving story. It’s a story that happened within a hundred years of right now. It’s a story that reminds us that the God of the exodus, the covenant-keeping God, is the same God that you and I serve today. He still keeps his promises. He still answers prayer. He still moves in the hearts of his people. He still liberates those who are enslaved. He is still able to work and to redeem.
I don’t know where you are this morning, but I want you to take heart this morning that our God is a prayer-answering, covenant-keeping God. I started with John Newton; let me end with his words. Newton said in one of his hymns,
Approach, my soul, the mercy-seat,
Where Jesus answers prayer.
There humbly fall before his feet,
For none can perish there.
Listen to this.
Thy promise is my only plea;
With this I venture nigh.
Thou callest burdened souls to thee,
And such, O Lord, am I.
He keeps his promises. His promise is our only plea. Where do we get that promise? We get it in Jesus. All the promises of God are yes and amen in him. Jesus is the way; fall before his feet. Trust in him. Whatever your need, whatever your situation, whatever your difficulty, whatever you’re enslaved to this morning, he can free you. He can redeem you. He can deliver you.
Brian G. Hedges
