Moses and the Exodus

When Moses was a baby, in order to save his life, his family hid him in a basket, but he didn't stay hidden.

The baby cries, and it's a cry heard round the world. But the cry of the child is heard ironically, not by a Hebrew midwife, not by an Egyptian soldier, but by the daughter of Pharaoh himself. And thus began the life of a central Old Testament figure.

Moses was raised and trained under the most powerful regime on the planet. By the time he was a young man, his pedigree was faultless, but he could never have imagined what God had in store for him. In the Old Testament, the point of transition from the book of Genesis and the history of the early patriarchal period into the book of Exodus that gives us the history of what is probably, I would say, certainly the single most important redemptive event that takes place in the Old Testament, this time of transition is marked in the narrative in the end of Genesis and the beginning of Exodus of two remarkable individuals. The first is a man who began as a shepherd and became a prince. And the second is a man who began as a prince who became a shepherd. Of course, the first person was the son of Jacob, whose name was Joseph. And the latter portion of the book of Genesis tells this remarkable story and gives the account of the life of Joseph, which is one of the most inspiring and encouraging biographies that we'll find anywhere in Scripture.

Of a man who is the victim of jealousy and treachery, he's sold by his brothers into slavery, he's in prison for many, many years, he's utterly alone in a foreign land, and yet he remains faithful in these circumstances to the promises of God and remembers the covenant. And yet, as the story unfolds, we're aware that Joseph, due to the circumstances of God's providential control, is released from prison and elevated to become the prime minister of the land of Egypt, at which time in the providence of God a severe famine hits the neighboring countries and Egypt itself. But Egypt had stored up reserve supplies and people from distant lands traveled to Egypt to seek relief from the famine, and included in those travelers were Joseph's brothers.

And you recall that gut-wrenching scene when the brothers discover that the prime minister from whom they are pleading for these supplies is actually their brother whom they had betrayed. And they were terrified that Joseph would exact vengeance upon them, but instead he gave them mercy, and he inquired as to the well-being of his father and sent the message back with his brothers back to his homeland and invited Jacob and his whole family to migrate into Egypt to receive the special privileges granted by the prime minister. And so, at the end of the book of Genesis, we see two things. We see, first of all, the movement from Canaan down into Egypt of the family of Jacob, and they are given this parcel of land called the land of Goshen, there to enjoy the benefits that are provided by the son Joseph. And then the book of Genesis concludes when Jacob gathers his sons around him, and Jacob passes on the patriarchal blessing.

But he too does not give it to the eldest son, or even to the second eldest son, because they had disqualified themselves by their wickedness. But instead, Jacob gives the patriarchal blessing to Judah, who is promised a kingdom. The scepter shall not depart from Judah until Shiloh comes. And that is of enormous significance for the whole rest of the unfolding of Old Testament history as the kings of Israel must come from the tribe of Judah until we finally reach the crescendo in the New Testament where this one who was born who will restore the throne of David.

And once again, the tribe of Judah will be in power as the lion of Judah is crowned the everlasting king, the king of the kings, and the Lord of the Lord. So, you can't understand the ministry of Jesus apart from this Old Testament background and of the tribe of Judah and kingship and all that is unfolding as a result of the early family of Jacob. But therein, the book of Genesis closes, and as it does, we are introduced to a whole new situation in the book of Exodus. We leave the book of Genesis with the people of Israel enjoying privileged status, special status in the land of Egypt. But something ominous is introduced in the second book of the Old Testament in the book of Exodus where we are told that a Pharaoh comes to power who no longer remembers Joseph.

And now we read of a shift in the historical circumstances regarding the descendants of Abraham and of the family of Jacob. Now they also enjoy special status, but this special status is especially bad rather than especially good because the new Pharaoh comes in and imposes four distinct movements of oppression on these visiting Hebrews. The first thing we are told in the book of Exodus is that the Pharaohs appointed task masters over these people. Now initially, the task masters were like policemen who were ordering and exercising watch over servants of the state. This is the first step of a systematic program of enslavement of this foreign people. So, the first thing that Pharaoh does is that he appoints task masters and sets this visiting family who have now increased their population enormously. The first thing that Pharaoh does is increase their population enormously, and now he's going to use them for slave labor, to build the store cities for the storage of grain and for the reserves of the foodstuffs for the nation. And so, it begins with this servitude. And then we are told a little bit in Exodus that Pharaoh radically intensifies the terms of this oppression by not only having these task masters, but now he instructs the task masters to make these servants work with great rigor.

That is, there is an element of rigor that is added to the burden of these people. They are able to increase their quota of production by decreasing the goods that are given to them for that purpose. They are not allowed to have straw for the making of their bricks, which makes their task all the more arduous. And so, this nation of people who had settled in privileged status in the Goshen is now reduced to total enslavement. But even in their slavery they're multiplying and growing larger and larger in number, and Pharaoh begins to fear a rebellion. And so, he issues his third work of oppression where he commands the midwives of the Jewish people to kill every male child that is born to a Hebrew woman.

But what happens? The midwives refuse to carry out this decree of murder. And so, now the fourth step of Pharaoh takes place, where Pharaoh now commands all of the Egyptians to make sure that every male baby born among the Jews is killed. This is the first great slaughter of the innocents.

In fact, we could call it the first Holocaust, the first example of a systematic destruction of people. But one baby escapes, and we read the story of this child who is concealed in a homemade ark woven together by reeds consigned to a tributary of the Nile, wherein this Jewish mother, when the baby can no longer be concealed, allows her child to be set adrift in the river, and she consigns his destiny to the providence of God. And in that providence, the baby cries, and it's a cry heard around the world. But the cry of the child is heard ironically, not by a Hebrew midwife, not by an Egyptian soldier, but by the daughter of Pharaoh himself. And the Scriptures tell us that when she sees this child concealed by the banks of the river, and she opens up this little ark and sees this baby, and the baby cries, the Scriptures tell us that she had compassion. The irony in this is amazing because the rest of the history of the conflict between this little baby and the Pharaoh is the conflict between the Word of God and a king with a hardened heart. And yet this Pharaoh, who is infamous for the recalcitrance of his heart, has a daughter whose heart is moved to compassion. She can't bear to carry out the directive of her own father. She cannot drown this baby.

Instead, she takes it for her own. She draws it out of the water, redeeming the life of this child, and she uses the Hebrew name that means to draw out of the water for this baby, and she calls his name Moses. And then she hires Moses' true mother to be a caretaker for the lad. But because of this ironic set of circumstances, this little this little Hebrew baby is adopted by the daughter of Pharaoh herself and is now made a child of the palace, and he is reared in Egypt with the status of a prince. Do you see how this is the exact reverse order of what had happened with Joseph and now what happens to Moses? Moses grows up as a prince, but he knows his roots. He knows his own identity with his people, and we are told in the book of Exodus that on one occasion he sees an Egyptian guard mercilessly beating and harassing and tormenting a Hebrew slave. And Moses is moved to fury, and he rises up and he strikes this guard and inadvertently kills him.

And he quickly hides the body and looks around to see if anyone has seen this deed, and he doesn't see anyone but somebody had seen him. And now it becomes known that Moses had killed a member of the guard to defend his own people, and he must flee for his life and go into exile into the Midianite wilderness and live for decade after decade after decade in penury, in poverty, in isolation, far from the struggle of his homeland, far from the education, the sciences, and the wealth that was found in the palaces of Egypt. And then we have in the book of Exodus the story of Moses, a story that is so titanic, a story that is so magnificent that even Cecil B. DeMille was out of his league trying to capture the essence of the significance of this man. I really believe that it is not an overstatement to say that the single most important character in all of the Old Testament is Moses, because Moses is appointed by God to be the mediator of the Old Covenant. And there are only two real mediators in the Bible, the mediator of the Old Covenant and the mediator of the New Covenant. Moses is the mediator of the Old Covenant.

Christ is the mediator of the New Covenant. It is Moses who is the liberator, humanly speaking, of his people in Egypt. It is Moses through whom God gives the law.

It is Moses through whom God creates the Jewish state, the church of the Old Testament, the theocratic nation of Israel. And it is of Moses that the prophets speak that there will come one in the future who will be a prophet like unto Moses, whose life and whose mission is again foreshadowed by the life of Moses. And in a real sense, Christ in his own life recapitulates the life of Moses and the whole history of the Exodus. Again, if you want to understand the mission of Christ, it is unintelligible apart from the book of Exodus.

Augustine once said that the new is in the old concealed and the old is in the new revealed. Because just as God calls his son out of Egypt in the Exodus, so he calls his greater son out of exile after Jesus in his boyhood is forced to be shielded and protected from the edict of Herod when Joseph and Mary flee to Egypt. The fulfillment comes out of Egypt, have I called my son. The whole history of redemption in the New Testament is the history of the greater Exodus, of the greater release and liberation from bondage that is accomplished by the new Moses. And to understand what the new Moses does, you have to understand what the old Moses did. So, as I say, he is a titanic person in the Old Testament, and he is alone and isolated in the Midianite wilderness when God appears to him and speaks to him out of the bush, reveals himself to him, gives his sacred name to him, and says to Moses, I have heard the cries of my people. I have heard the groanings of the people that I brought into Egypt, and I am appointing you to go to the house of Pharaoh and to my people and to say to Pharaoh and to say to the people, let my people go. And with that mandate, all of the machinery of the Exodus is set in motion. And so, the point of confrontation comes where Moses comes before Pharaoh and understand that Pharaoh is the single most powerful person on this earth at that time.

And what this most important and most powerful monarch in the world has done has enslaved God's people and made God's people his unwilling servants. And the point that comes through here in this conflict, which really what unfolds in this whole tension in the book of Exodus, is a battle of the titans. It is the battle of two sovereigns. It is the battle between the sovereign God of the universe and the sovereign man of this world, Pharaoh.

And the contest takes place over the issue, whom will the people serve? Because the message that God directs Moses to take to Pharaoh is not simply stated in the phrase, let my people go. But what else does he say? You go to Pharaoh and you say to him that the Lord God Almighty says to you, let my people go.

Why? That they may go out and serve me. You see, the point of the Exodus is not simply a liberation of slaves from oppression.

It is not an ancient Marxist revolution, but it is a liberation to a new kind of slavery, a royal slavery, a redemptive slavery. And God is claiming his own. He says, these are my people, not yours.

And I have created them to serve me, not to serve you, so you better let them go. Or else. Pharaoh says, or else what? And Moses says, or else flies, or else maggots, or else frogs.

Or else lice, or else a river that turns to blood. And the contest is on. And then the first three plagues, everything that Moses does to bring the power of God to bear against the power of the Egyptians, the court magicians of Egypt answer in kind. But by the time they get to the fourth flag, the tricks of the magicians of Pharaoh are used up, and relentlessly, step by step, the contest continues. And God, through the hand of Moses, miraculously demonstrates his power over the world. There is no period in all of the Bible where miracles are so heavily concentrated, except for one other period, than this period.

And the other period was the period of the incarnation of the Lord himself. But apart from the life of Jesus, which was a blaze of miracle, there is no time in redemptive history where there is so much manifestation of divine power, and miracle, as in this book of Exodus, where God is manifesting on the plane of history that He is His people's Savior, and He is His people's sovereign. And He is to be the object of His people's worship. Again, Moses is saying to Pharaoh, let my people go, that they can come out and serve me.

Serve me how? By giving to me the sacrifice of praise, by coming out into the wilderness to worship me, to come out to enjoy my presence. And so the three major motifs that mark the entire book of the Exodus are the motifs of Exodus, law, and tabernacle. We will look at these dimensions of the content of the book of Exodus. The Exodus itself, the liberation from bondage, to the gathering of the people who have now been liberated to the base of Mount Sinai, where God delivers through Moses the law by which this holy nation will be established. In this sense, Moses serves as the father of the theocratic state, the George Washington of Israel, if you will, and the Thomas Jefferson and the Benjamin Franklin, all rolled into one because he is the one through whom God gives the Bill of Rights that will serve as the legal guideline for the structure of a holy nation and will become the basis for common law throughout the world, even to this day.

And finally, where God teaches His people how to worship Him and gives them a promise of His presence. These are the dynamic motifs of this single book of Exodus that call us to a deep, deep, serious reading of them in their details. Moses was unlike any earthly leader of his or any other generation. God chose him to be the mediator of the law to the people.

And as we just heard, Dr. R.C. Sproul called him the most important person in the Old Testament. It's important for us to understand these details if we are to grasp the narrative of the entire Bible. And this week on Renewing Your Mind, we're airing selected messages from Dr. Sproul's series, Dust to Glory. It's a series that provides a panorama of biblical truth from Genesis to Revelation. We'd like to send you the 57-part series on eight DVDs when you contact us today with a donation of any amount. There are a couple of ways you can reach us. Online you can go to renewingyourmind.org, or you can call us with your gift at 800-435-4343.

R.C. once said that he believed Dust to Glory is the most important teaching resource that Ligonier has produced. I think you can readily see how it would make a wonderful series for a Sunday school class or for a small group study in your home. So again, request Dust to Glory with your gift of any amount. Our phone number again is 800-435-4343, and our web address is renewingyourmind.org. Tomorrow we will see how a miraculous and tragic event in the Old Testament points directly to the Messiah. Once we understand what takes place in the Passover, for example, and later on in the celebration of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement for the Jewish people, then we will understand what's going on when John the Baptist comes by the Jordan River, and he sees Jesus approaching him, and he begins to sing the Agnes Day. I hope you'll make plans to join us Tuesday for Renewing Your Mind.