Faith on the Banks of the Nile

This is God-determined, God-ordained, God-provoked pity, where you have Jacob at planning everything she can plan, but at this moment, she opens the lid and the baby cries, and you have, in the heart of the only one, probably in the entire kingdom, who can make her daddy Pharaoh come up with an exception to the edict, see this baby, and God joins the crying of a baby with the longing of her heart, and there is pity. Welcome to Wisdom for the Heart with Stephen Davey. Do the names Hezekiah, or Jephthah, or Ehud sound familiar to you?

What do you know about them? If you had to write a list of the important people of the Old Testament, these names probably wouldn't be on it. Today, Stephen begins a series in which he dusts off a few of the most impactful, yet overlooked stories in the Old Testament.

As he does, you'll learn some valuable lessons about God's grace and goodness. Today, we go to the banks of the Nile River and meet three brave women. Moses takes center stage in the drama of Exodus, but were it not for these women, he would have never made it past infancy.

This message is called Faith on the Banks of the Nile. If you traveled back to Egypt a few thousand years, the person who mattered most would be this arrogant, cruel warrior, newly crowned Pharaoh who was commanding a vast empire. For nearly 350 years, he had been helped. He had enjoyed the benefits of free labor, a race of people subjugated into cruel slavery.

He had inherited them from his forefathers. Ask anybody in the world, and they would tell you who mattered most, and they would be able to tell you who mattered least, who didn't matter at all. And I'll tell you who certainly wouldn't have mattered, and what would not have mattered at all. It would be the fact that in a slave hut near the banks of the Nile, a woman would give birth to a baby boy, a woman whose name many of us may not remember, but she actually mattered most. In this series of sermons I've entitled Forgotten Lives, Remembered Truths, I want to take a look at a woman who's overshadowed by the events of her world, and in fact, she's overpowered by the circumstances of her life. She's completely helpless, yet she is completely dependent upon God, and that will change the history of the world as we know it. The truth of the matter is Moses would have never been introduced or known, or let alone be alive if it were not for her courage along with her husband.

However, the focus of Scripture tends to point toward her, more than likely he is away, doing hard labor. Her name is Jacobit, and I introduce this text to you for our exploration, would you turn to the book of Exodus. Now by the time you get to the end of chapter one, and many of you who are old enough in the faith probably have read this, and you know, so I'll just quickly touch down. Pharaoh is terrified that the Jewish people are multiplying faster than rabbits, certainly faster than the Egyptians. So chapter one ends with this rather cruel edict, look at verse 22, then Pharaoh commanded all his people, that is the entire empire, saying, every son who is born you are to cast into the Nile, this is the son among the Hebrews by the way, and every daughter you are to keep alive.

Now before we dive in to perhaps what we know, and try to pull some things out that we may have missed, there's a larger context to understand here that I think we do miss. What you've just read is one of Satan's earliest attempts to avoid the prophetic promise of God in a number of ways, certainly the promise of a coming Messiah, he's going to eventually or at least here, try to stamp out the Hebrews, he's going to short circuit the prophecy of a coming Messiah who will come from the Hebrew people. So this is Satan behind the scenes manipulating this. Now Satan doesn't know the future any more than we do other than what the Bible has revealed, but you can be certain that he is a careful student of Scripture, especially prophecy. And there's a prophecy that we miss in this that's actually about to come to pass. It's a prophecy delivered by God to Abraham, if you went back and we won't for the sake of time, but you might write into the margin right next to verse 22 in Exodus chapter 1, the reference, Genesis 15 verse 13. That prophecy tells us God delivers to Abraham the news that this people that will come from him will be enslaved for four generations, about 400 years, a little more, but then they will be released from their slavery and they will come out prospering. So Satan has his calculator out and he knows that it's going to be in the next few years more than likely that a baby boy who will lead the people out is going to be born. It will be the fourth generation. Moses is the fourth generation.

In fact, these babies born in Egypt around this time represent the fourth generation. Three hundred and fifty years have gone by and Satan's alarm clock is ringing. So you need to understand that behind this edict is a bigger picture. There is the prince of darkness.

There's more than the paranoia and the cruelty and the greed of Pharaoh. You have the prince of darkness manipulating, suggesting, impressing, leading this emperor and his counselors to make a decree that will effectively bring God's promise to naught and stop this prophecy of a deliverer. All right, now with that in mind, let's go to chapter 2 and verse 1. Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a daughter of Levi, that is they belong to the same tribe, and the woman conceived and bore a son.

Stop for a moment. Like so much of the narrative in the Bible, the main point is the main point and you're driven to it quickly and other points are left out, you find out later. I want to tell you here at this point that you discover a little later, it's actually chapter 6, that Moses isn't the firstborn.

This might lead you to believe that or think that, he isn't. There's a three-year-old boy running around that slave hut by the name of Aaron and there's a seven-year-old, a sister who's going to be a big help to mommy and her name is Miriam, verse 2, and the woman conceived and bore a son. And when she saw that he was beautiful, she hid him. Jacob delivers actually another son. Now you have this edict that all male babies are to be thrown into the Nile, which means that when Aaron was born, the edict hadn't been delivered. Pharaoh wants to slow down the population explosion, bless the Hebrews, mount an army.

The larger picture is Satan wants to overturn the prophecy of God. When this baby boy is born to these slave parents, we know now what should have been a time of celebration is a time of desperation. Now we're told that he's beautiful.

Every mother thinks their son is. We're given a little hint into what this means in Stephen's sermon in Acts 7, and for the sake of time I'll just tell you that you can loosely translate this that he was no ordinary child. In fact, Stephen adds this interesting phrase, at his birth Moses was lovely unto the Lord.

So we obviously don't have all of the story here, but something supernatural happened. Something revelatory occurred to tell Jacob that this boy is unique to God in a special sense, marked out for God. In fact, Josephus, the first century Jewish historian, passes along a tradition that a dream from God was given to Amram that Moses would become the deliverer. Now we can't be sure because we're not told, but what we do know is that these Hebrew slaves had their calculators out as well. They knew the prophecy. In fact, among these slave huts with the newborn cries of every boy for the last 20 or 30 years, there was the hope that maybe he would be the deliverer and fulfill the Abrahamic promise in this regard.

So they've been keeping their eye on the calendar too. But in this case, God somehow, in some way we're not told, revealed to them, and particularly by the way the text tells us, to Jacob, again Amram's probably not even there. She receives some sort of sign that this child has a special destiny before God.

He is lovely unto God. And so it says here, did you notice, so she hid him. She hid him. When Amram came home, she no doubt told him what had happened. Whatever this revelation was, they marveled no doubt and conspired to hide him.

Now the problem here is that we pass over this too quickly and I think miss what was taking place. There is no basement in this hut. There is no attic.

There is no back bedroom. What's really happening here? They can't hide the fact that they have a newborn baby, but they can keep its identity concealed, covered up. Yes, they obviously have a newborn, but notice they're not throwing him into the Nile, so it must be a girl. And isn't she lovely?

Sounds like a song for just a moment there. By the way, when you see a newborn you don't know if it's a baby girl or a baby boy, do you? I wonder if over time people noticed how she would change the subject when it focused on her baby.

It would be so easy to slip and say him rather than her. And if you've noticed it, there is no name given to him for three months. Can you add to that the horror, if you can imagine it, of Jacobet and Amram grieving with other families as their newborn sons are ripped from their arms and thrown into the Nile? We don't know if neighbors have become suspicious. All we're told is at the end of three months they can't hide him. They can't conceal this.

We don't know why. Did little Aaron blurt it out to a cousin? Did Miriam tell a friend, a neighbor?

We're not told, but we're just informed in verse three that she can't conceal his identity, is the idea, any longer. But listen, don't think for a moment. They haven't been planning. They have been planning what to do.

Let me show you. Verse three, when she could hide him no longer, she got him a wicker basket that's made out of interwoven papyrus stalks and covered it with tar and pitch. Tar would have kept the vessel waterproof.

Pitch was a substance made from a plant that the Egyptians had discovered much earlier that would repel crocodiles. Now notice verse three. Again, she put the child into it and set it among the reeds by the bank of the Nile, and his sister stood at a distance to find out what would happen to him.

And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the Nile with her maidens walking alongside the Nile. And she saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid, and she brought it to her. Now if there's a phrase to underscore, it's this phrase, she set it among the reeds. There goes a mother now to set her baby among the reeds.

Well, this is much more than a coincidence, beloved. She's chosen this place. She didn't just, you know, get the basket out and push it out into the current and say, well, you know, I've done everything I can do.

God, it's all up to you now. Well, perhaps that may have been her only option, but hardly. What you have here is a well-thought-out plan. She's been thinking over it for months. While she's going to leave the ultimate result of God because God's going to have to do some things that only God can do, she is going to do everything she possibly can. And she knows that at a certain time, at a certain place, this princess is going to come and bathe.

And Jacobed has the basket placed in the reeds at that very spot. Now for centuries, this particular daughter of Pharaoh, unnamed here in the text, has been known and passed along from one Jewish generation after another with several different names, two primary names, Thermusa and Bithia. Many believe her name was changed a little later on from Thermusa to Bithia. What you need to understand, at least at this point I'll say more about her in a moment, is that Bithia is not coming to the Nile with a washcloth and dove soap to take a bath because it's Saturday night.

That's not what she's doing here. It isn't that kind of bath like we'd think of a bath. In fact, the only people in this culture that bathed in the Nile to be clean were slaves. She lived in the palace. She didn't have to come to the Nile anyway to take a bath. She lived in incredible opulence and technological advancement unknown to most of her empire. We now know through excavations that ancient Egyptians at this point in time had already engineered indoor plumbing systems and lavatories that flushed and drained through underground piping systems. The princess would have had her own marble-encased bathroom custom-made with everything she needed and in total privacy. So why is she coming down to the Nile, this muddy banked river, and she has her attendants walking along, watching out for wildlife?

Why? Because this isn't a bath. This is a ceremonial bathing.

This is a ritualistic, superstitious, religiously motivated ceremonial bath. The Egyptians believed that the waters of the Nile were spiritually infused and tied to their God. From what we can piece together, and I'm giving you the summation of a lot of study, she is either a single adult at this point, but more believe she is married and childless. We do know that she will have children later by someone else I'll introduce you to, but we have every reason to believe that she is married and she wants a child, and so she is following the Egyptian superstitions that bring her down to the Nile as was her custom to this same location, hoping and longing and wishing for a baby of her own.

Don't think for a moment that Jacob-bed doesn't know this. She set the basket among the reeds at the very spot where Bethea, the princess of Pharaoh, will arrive with longing in her heart. Maybe the God of the Nile will answer me. Verse 5, she saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid and she brought it to her. When she opened it, she saw the child and behold, the boy was crying.

Evidently, the basket had a lid on it. She opens the lid, behold, biblical way of saying, look, the boy inside the baby is crying. Miriam is waiting nearby the next few verses, tell us, and has placed this at just the right spot. She's planned at least this much. Miriam has a line memorized.

Moses is in the basket at the right spot at the right time. I have no doubt that when she opened the lid, a little baby boy is wearing his cutest outfit ever. After all, the narrative isn't really how clever she is. She is clever, but it's really God at work using her planning and her clever thought and honoring her faithfulness. What you have here, at the moment this lid is lifted, a baby crying, perhaps he's blinded by the sudden sunlight, we don't know, somewhat fearful with his surroundings. And you watch, notice, and she had pity on him and said this is one of the Hebrew's children. You've got to be kidding.

Those two statements don't belong in the same sentence. This is one of the Hebrew's children and she had pity on him. It should be this is one of the Hebrew's children is thrown in the Nile. This is one of the Hebrew's children and she had pity on him.

This is treasonous. This is God determined, God ordained, God provoked pity, where you have Jacob at planning everything she can plan, but at this moment she opens the lid and the baby cries and you have in the heart of the only one probably in the entire kingdom who can make her daddy Pharaoh come up with an exception to the edict. See this baby and God joins the crying of a baby with the longing of her heart and there is pity.

This is God at work. It's at this point that Miriam steps forward and delivers her line. Verse 7, then his sister said to Pharaoh's daughter, shall I go and call a nurse, a wet nurse that is, that she may nurse the child for you. Again, don't read this and think for a moment that this little eight year old girl has somehow ingeniously come up with on the spot a plan that will allow her mother to nurse the baby. These lines are well rehearsed.

They don't know if this will happen, but if it does we'll be ready. These lines are planned, but totally dependent on God to do what only God can do. The lesson here is to prepare, to plan, to do our best, to think things through and depend on God for the final word. Jewish traditions have kept the story of this other remarkable woman, this princess who also was very courageous, alive and passed it along honoring her for her compassion and her courage. Her given name, as I mentioned, was Thermusa, but later changed to Bethea for a reason. Bethea means daughter of Jehovah. This princess is no doubt influenced by Moses and after some 30 plus years she chooses to belong to God as well. In the first book of Chronicles chapter 4 it records the lineage of the Hebrews coming out of Egypt at the Exodus as Moses led them out.

You might want to turn there if you care to, but it's 1st Chronicles chapter 4 and verse 17 where you are given this stunning revelation. These are the sons of Bethea, the daughter of Pharaoh, whom Merod took or married. Merod is a Jewish, he's Hebrew. When the Exodus occurs and the people leave Egypt, guess who is among them?

This princess. She marries a Hebrew man by the name of Merod and these are the names of her sons. She has two of them, Shammai and Ishba. These are the sons of Bethea, the daughter of Pharaoh, whom Merod took to his wife or to be his wife. Their names are Shammai and Ishba. That's not all.

If you haven't turned, just listen. We're given not only the names of her sons, which is accurate and ordinary and normal in a genealogical record. We're never given the names of women or daughters, only ever so rarely as in Matthew 1, but in this case we're given the name of her firstborn, which just so happens to be a baby girl. Verse 17 tells us that she names her daughter Miriam.

I love that. Maybe in honor of the fact that it was Miriam's scripted lines that introduced her to a faithful mother and father and a little boy who will grow up and never forget who he was. All of this divinely orchestrated by God to checkmate once again Satan's murderous plans to exterminate the Jewish nation. This Pharaoh won't be the last. Not only divinely orchestrated by God to liberate a nation, but to liberate and redeem a woman, an unlikely woman, a woman who was entirely superstitious and entrenched in her religious system, who would go to the Nile River time after time hoping for an answer, hoping for a purpose, and God in his grace introduced her not only to a baby, to a redeemer, to a husband, to a new nation, but to the living Lord of creation. She says, you know what? I'm going to change my name in this exodus. I am now the daughter of Jehovah. Don't you just love that? You just can't make that up, right? God in his grace. By the way, don't ever underestimate the power of one little line that you might deliver in someone's life. You might think it's not all that great and it faltered a bit.

You didn't have it memorized down just packed. So, don't ever underestimate that. Don't underestimate what God has in store for his children who trust him. Don't underestimate the grace of God to change superstitious religious ritualistic pagan despairing hopeless creatures and turning them into forgiven, redeemed new creations who are added to his people and who will, with us, sing one day what we have sung today of his wonderful, marvelous grace. The lesson you just heard is called Faith on the Banks of the Nile, and it comes from the series entitled Forgotten Lives, Remembered Truths. In addition to today, Stephen's going to spend the next five lessons looking at some Old Testament characters who might be a little obscure, but their lives are a powerful example for us. This is Wisdom for the Heart with Stephen Davey. We'd love to hear how our teaching ministry has helped you grow in your faith.

Do you have a story or testimony to share? We'd love to hear your experience. If you have a comment, question, or need more information, you can email us at info at wisdom online dot org. We're also available by phone at 866-48-bible or 866-482-4253. And our office hours are weekdays from 830 a.m. to 4 o'clock p.m. Eastern Time. If you prefer to write, our mailing address is Wisdom International, P.O.

Box 37297, Raleigh, North Carolina, 27627. We're eager to connect with you, whichever way works best. I'm Scott Wiley, and for Stephen and the Wisdom International team, I thank you for listening. Join us next time to discover more Wisdom for the Heart.