Introduction to Exodus

Welcome to our spring Bible study that we're calling Divine Deliverance. You know me, you know I love alliterations, love light and logic, divine design, Minnesota miracle. I love all of them. That was pretty fun. If you don't know about NFL football, you can talk to me later. But anyway, Divine Deliverance is our Bible study. It's going to be a verse by verse study of the first 20 chapters of the book of Exodus. When you hear that we're studying Exodus, you might think to yourself, oh, this is going to be like a geography study or this is going to be a tedious history of ancient peoples with difficult to pronounce names, or you might think that makes so much sense. Because last January, we were here studying Genesis. So you would think this is super logical because it is a continuation of that story. It is true, it is a continuation. In fact, most of the early books of the Bible begin with the word and, which is sometimes translated now in the NASB and the New King James, and the ESV leaves it out, which I'm a little bit disappointed about. But the point is, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, they all start with and, this book starts with now, these are the names of the sons of Jacob. So it's a continuing story from what we started before. Makes a lot of sense for us to study it. When we studied Genesis last year, we approached it in a more relational way. Genesis has 50 chapters. It wasn't going to fit our time frame to do chapter by chapter, verse by verse. So what we did is we had this relational study where we lifted out the people that God lifted out of history for us to know. We started with Adam and Eve. We moved on to study Noah and his wife. We moved on to study Abraham, his wife Sarah, their son Isaac, and his wife Rebecca, their son Jacob, his 12 sons. That pretty much encompasses the whole book of Genesis. That is what it is about, and it ends right there. You could say that the boundaries of Genesis, since Adam started in the Garden of Eden, and Joseph, the one who has some closing words in Genesis, ended in Egypt, you could say that Genesis is from Eden to Egypt. On the cover of this study guide, you'll see that I put divine deliverance from Egypt to Sinai. So that's a boundary that we're using to help us maybe have some information to hang it on. God never, it was never his plan. He didn't intend to leave his people in Egypt. He wants to deliver them from there. But we can expect more from this study than just knowing what nation moved where, and when, and what their names were, and who crossed the Red Sea on dry ground, and who didn't. I hope that what we take from this are some real spiritual understanding, to understand God's unfolding story of mankind and his unfolding story of Jesus, so that we understand God's plan for Israel and God's plan for you. How God fulfilled his promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and how he's fulfilling his promises to us. Israel, in this story, they needed to believe in God's protection over them with the blood of the Passover lamb. We need to believe in the protection of the blood of Jesus Christ to deliver us. Israel needed to grow in patience as they were waiting for God's plan to unfold, and we need to grow in patience as we wait for God's plan to unfold in the context of our life. Oh, here's a good one. Israel needed to stop grumbling and complaining at every turn on their journey through the wilderness, and we need to stop grumbling and complaining at every turn in the things that come into our life. But I think one of the most vibrant things for me is that Israel experienced God when they were faced in an impossible situation with the Red Sea on one side, and the Egyptian army on the other side. That was an impossible situation for them, and they experienced God in that impossible situation. And we need to experience God when we are in those same impossible situations in our life, when we feel hemmed in. And so these are some of the things that I hope are going to just burn in our hearts through this nine weeks of study. The Apostle Paul knew how important an understanding of Scripture, Old Testament Scripture, was in the life of a follower of Jesus. When he wrote to the Romans, he said this. I'll put this up on the screen for you. He said, whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of Scriptures, we might have hope. So these things are written for our instruction, that we might have hope. He even told the Corinthians, they are examples to us. So exodus is relevant, it is fast-paced, it's vibrant, it's for our instruction intended to give us hope. So if you want to open your study guide to page six and seven, there's some room to take some notes as we go through some of the opening things that we always want to do when we start a new book of the Bible. We have some questions to ask, questions to answer, that are going to help us have a baseline of understanding about what we're going to study. The first question we should always ask is, who wrote this book? Who wrote the book of Exodus? And the answer is that Moses, almost all Bible scholars agree, Moses wrote the whole Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. He wrote this book. And in fact, those first five books are often called the books of Moses. And he wrote that through written and oral traditions, his own life experiences, but also the inspiration of the Holy Spirit that guided him in what to write. When was this book written? Well, you might know, as we go through this story, that Moses for 40 years had little more to do than guide a bunch of complaining people through the desert and write books. And so he likely wrote this during the wilderness journey. And now, as far as the Exodus itself on a timeline, it can be difficult to pin down for a couple of reasons. But Bible scholars will have a date as early as 1450 BC, as late as 1260 BC, somewhere in that 200 year period. Pinning down the exact date isn't relevant to our Bible study. But hey, if you want to go work on that, you come and tell me what you learn. What is the writing style of this particular book of the Bible? That's important to know the general sense. What is this that we're studying? Well, it is a historical narrative, and it's written in the third person. When you start reading this week in chapter two, you'll read sentences that sound like this in third person. When Pharaoh heard of it, he sought to kill Moses, but Moses fled from Pharaoh. And now when you think about that, you might say to yourself, well, that doesn't make any sense because you just told me that Moses wrote this. And so that sounds weird because we don't talk like that. Like I don't write a letter to my mother and say, when Sue saw that the lamp at Savers was only $5.99, Sue quickly put it in her shopping cart, right? We don't talk like that. And so you can kind of say, well, I don't know. Is that right? But the reason we think that is because this is how we write now. And we always think that now is right because it's now. But that's not necessarily the case. Ancient writers often wrote in third person. It's not uncommon at all for them to have written things about themselves in third person. And I honestly think that this concept of reading about Moses, which we'll do a lot in this study, knowing that he himself penned that by the inspiration of the spirit, it gives us a great assurance of the accuracy of scripture. Because who writes unsavory things about themselves, right? If you're writing about yourself, you would want to cast yourself in the best possible light always. At least I would. But yet we're going to read that Moses was insecure. He was afraid of his peers. He lacked faith at times. He was short fused. He was human, just like us. Which also reminds us, Moses is not the hero of this story. Jesus is the hero in every part of Bible. Moses will point us to the greater than Moses, who is Jesus. But it helps us remember that he's not the hero here. Another question, who is the intended audience for this book? And I often say that the Bible is written to us. But before it's written to us, it was written to someone else first. Who was this written to first? It was written to the descendants of Abraham, so that they would know where they came from, where they are going, so that they would know God's design for them as a nation, so that they would know God's promises to them, given to Abraham and passed down. But most important, and so that they would recognize their Messiah when he showed up. It was written to them so they would recognize their Messiah. Now, John wrote something that Jesus said, which is awesome. It's in John 5, 39. Put it up for you. Jesus was talking to the Jews, and he said, you search the scriptures. He could have said, you search the books of Moses. You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that bear witness about me. God inspired the scriptures to bear witness about Jesus, our Messiah. That's why we look in scripture. We look for Jesus on every page that we can find. We're looking for that, rejoicing in that. So all scripture is intended ultimately for anyone who will see Jesus in it, believe in Jesus, and receive eternal life. And that's why when we study, I sound a little bit like a broken record, but we ask those questions. What does it say? What is the general sense of the passage? What is the clear sense of the passage? What does it mean? What did it mean to the original hearers? And then what does it mean to me? What does it mean to a New Testament Christian? What does it mean to Sue? That's the process that we go through as we study scripture. Well, another question is, what's the central theme of Exodus? What is the point of this book? And I kinda wanna qualify. When I, throughout this whole Bible study, when I say Exodus, I am actually going to be talking about chapters one through 20 because that's why I made it clear on the cover. This is Egypt to Sinai. Because Exodus is a very long book. It doesn't fit in the context of our session, but also it changes dramatically from when the law is given in the last half. So I'm not going to qualify that all semester long and say chapters one through 20 of Exodus. I'll just tell you now, and from now on, when I say Exodus, that is what I'm talking about. So what is the point of Exodus? What is the main theme? Well, to answer that, I wanna ask you a question. What would you say is the main event, the most important event of the New Testament? And if I gave you about 10 seconds to think about that, you would say, oh, the most important event of the New Testament is the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is the companion passage to that in the Old Testament. And we're going to discover that. I'm not gonna explain all of it now, but you'll totally get it as we go through there. Israel had no ability to free themselves from the grip of Egyptian bondage. They had no ability to change their current impossible situation. They had no ability to walk in the promises that God had given Abraham to have a land of their own. They were totally dependent on what God was going to do for them in his way and in his time. So deliverance is the central theme of Exodus. Genesis means beginning. Exodus means departing, literally a going out, okay? So that's why I chose this title, Divine Deliverance. So you can open up your Bibles to the book of Exodus. Often when we do an introduction, we use a first initial passage to sort of whet your appetite. This is your appetizer course so that when you go home this week, you are going to have a ravenous hunger for digging into your Bible study and going through the first lesson is gonna be chapters one and two. But I'm gonna do the first seven verses of chapter one. I'll read them and we'll kind of talk about that a little bit and set the stage for what is happening in history right now, what is happening to Israel. So it begins this way.

And we'll stop there. Again, I said, you know, when we read from the ESV, we're missing that and, but maybe some of you have New King James or NASB and it starts off now, these are the names of the sons of Israel, which reminds us that this isn't technically brand new information. This is a continuation of the book of Genesis. And Genesis ended somewhat abruptly. It was a little bit of a cliffhanger. Like every good Star Wars movie, it ends up making you think, oh, I wonder what's gonna happen to so and so. I wonder how this situation is going to resolve. And that's how we ended things last spring. We wonder what happened next. What happened to those sons of Israel? Sons of Jacob, what happened to the promises that were made to Abraham? And when we read this phrase, sons of Israel who came to Egypt, that's the last time we're gonna read that phrase now because our eyes, our focus is gonna be turned away from a husband and wife and their family to a whole nation. And so that phrase goes away. Now we're looking at Israel in a much bigger perspective. And 105 times in this book, you're now going to read the people of Israel rather than the sons of Israel because they have become a large volume of people enslaved by a Pharaoh who didn't know Jehovah. All right, what do we learn in these opening verses about the people of Israel? We learn they've been fruitful and they increased greatly. Lots and lots of babies going on. We learn that they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong. And now we also get the sense that they are a nation that is without a shepherd, without purpose, without direction, and only a very slim reminder because hundreds of years have passed. So only a slim reminder of who they're descended from. And that is because of the mark of the covenant in the flesh on their males. That is a reminder to them of who it is that they're descended from. And then we learn that they're in bondage to Pharaoh. So as we set the stage for this opening, we think to ourselves between Genesis and Exodus, wow, how could things turned out like this? In Genesis, God seemed to have their back all the time. Blessing, blessing, blessing. He was always fixing things for them that they had fumbled. And now all of a sudden things aren't that way. In fact, in Genesis 20, Joseph is talking. Joseph is talking and he's telling his brothers, you meant evil against me. When you sold me to the Ishmaelites who dumped me off in Egypt, you meant evil against me. But God meant it for good. Look at God had our back. God was blessing. To bring it about that many people should be kept alive as they are today. And those are words to celebrate with. But that's not what we're seeing here. In fact, I wanna go back and talk about how engaged God seemed to be with them in Genesis. To Abraham when we went through in chapters 12 and 15, look at these phrases, God's words. I will bless you and make your name great. To your offspring I will give this land. I will make of you a great nation. I am your shield, your reward shall be very great. Now when you go home this week and you start this Bible study, here's the phrases you're gonna read. Afflicted with heavy burdens, oppressed, treated ruthlessly, worked as slaves, bitter and hard service. Does that sound anything like great nation, I am your great reward? No, it doesn't. And so we have this conflict that the song of Israel has turned so minor as we open this. And I wonder if those people in that day that did know and remember we are Abraham's descendants. We got these promises. How did they feel? How did they feel? Because God was silent in their life. He appeared to be silent. In fact, he appeared to be ignoring them. Have you ever felt that way in your life? That God was silent in what was going on? I wonder if they were tempted to think the way we think. And I know you think this way too because you're just like me. Think things like, ah, I must have done something wrong here. I wonder why God's unhappy with me. What did I do to get outside of his will, right? We become introspective and we make it all about what we have done in those situations. Now I wanna qualify along this reasoning and say, in the. of Israel, as we go through their entire history, there certainly will be times, future to Exodus, that they will be disobedient to the Lord, that they will commit spiritual adultery against the Lord, that they will forsake God, and God will send them prophets to warn them and say, don't do this, don't turn your backs, and then God will ultimately discipline them. And God does that in our lives too. Have you ever been disciplined by the Lord to bring us back, however, what I wanna say is, that is not the context of what we're looking at right here. This is not discipline from the Lord that they were there 400 years, this is just the way things were. And so, here in Exodus, you know, it seems like something's not right, but yet everything was right. Everything was in the right place. It wasn't easy, but it was right. And that happens in our life sometimes. Things aren't easy, but they're right. God had told them, God had led them, and God had said he would go with them, and I wanna prove it to you. So, first of all, what God said to Abraham in Genesis chapter 15, he said, "'Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners, "'they will be travelers, in a land that is not theirs, "'and they will be servants there, "'and they will be afflicted for 400 years.'" This is during the covenant with Abraham. Then, when Jacob was going into Egypt, when Joseph had sent for him, God said this to Jacob, look at this, in chapter 46, God spoke to Jacob, "'Do not be afraid to go down to Egypt, "'for there I will make you into a great nation.'" "'It is there, in the affliction, for 400 years, "'that I will make you into a great nation.'" Do you see that this was part of God's plan? That's how we see it in scripture. But look at this, God says to Jacob, "'I myself will go down with you to Egypt, "'and I will also bring you up again.'" God was with them the whole time. God had not left them, God was not ignoring them. He told Jacob, he goes, "'I myself will go down with you to Egypt, "'and I will also bring you up again.'" That is an amazing reminder for us, when we think God is silent, we need to remember that he is with us. Jesus said this in the upper room, and I didn't make a slide for it, but he said some of these things to his followers that night before he was crucified. He said, when he was praying to the Father, he says, "'As you've sent me into the world, "'so I send them into the world.'" So in other words, you're going into the world, you're staying in the world, that's what he was telling us, you're in the world. He said, "'In the world, you will have tribulation, "'as long as your life is.'" We're not gonna live 400 years, maybe 80 years, right? But Jesus said this, "'I'll give you a helper to be with you forever, "'he will be in you. "'I will go with you, I will be with you.'" And that's a good reminder for us to see for our personal lives, as we look at what's going on in Egypt. God said he'd go down with them and he'd bring them up again, in his time and in his way. So we can remember, this is important for us to remember, because we're North American Christians and we have a great amount of prosperity gospel that just infuses into our experience. We have to remember that affliction and tribulation may be part of the plan, not a failure and not a departure from the plan. It may be part of the plan. God said, "'That's how I'm gonna make you "'into a great nation, 400 years. "'You're gonna be really kind of kept to yourselves. "'You're gonna have babies and babies and babies, "'and you're not gonna be able to intermarry. "'There, I'll make you into a great nation.'" And that is exactly what happened. So Israel was in Egypt by divine command, under divine promise, awaiting divine deliverance. And so God had never left them, even though he was silent. And the message for us, the message for them, was trust the wait. God is hard at work. And the message for us, trust the wait. God is hard at work. There are things that don't seem like they are what they should be, but maybe it's right, and we need to trust the wait. God is not ignoring us. God is restoring us. God is not demeaning you, he is redeeming you. And God has not left you, he has indwelt you, if in fact you are born again. We're on a journey, and we need to fight the temptation to think our journey is always all about us, don't we? It's always all about my choices, and what I do, and these sorts of things. You know, there are times when God has a plan with such a broader perspective. Another place in scripture, God said for, you know, the iniquity of the Amalekites has not reached yet its full height. God's plan was looking at the whole thing, and maybe that's happening in our world as well, that what we are facing has bigger implications. I always think of some of my favorite women in history, think of like Corrie Ten Boom, and if you could ask her, was your life easy, she'd say no, and we'd say, was it right? Oh, yes, right? Fanny Crosby, my favorite hymn writer who was blind. Was that easy, being blind? She lived to like 95, wrote thousands of hymns. She'd say, no, it wasn't easy. Was it right? Oh, yes, I've quoted from her before, that she said, I wouldn't have taken sight if it had been given to me because of what the Lord did. Johnny Erickson taught, is that easy for you? No, is it right? Yes, and the reason I bring up some of these women is because as we start our study in the next, in this week, next two chapters, we are gonna see a lot of women at work in the affliction and the tribulation of the Israelites, and so this is a women's session, this is a women's Bible study, so it's great for us to look at that and say, what do women do in difficulty? What do they do? How do women respond when things are difficult? And that's what we're gonna see. Well, they do the next thing. They do what needs to be done, and if I say very much more, this will no longer be an appetizer and I'll be right into the first course. I have to stop right there, but I hope you're excited to go home and dig into those first two chapters. I wanna just close by giving some just practical information about how the study is set up, and this is a five-day study. Each lesson has five days to it, so you'll wanna think to yourself how you're gonna do that if you'd like to do it, just particular days of the week, and most of the lessons start by asking you to read the entire chapter, and then you'll focus on just a few verses for that. The questions in your study guide will direct your attention to what is being said in the passage and help you answer the question, what does it say? It's called a directed Bible study, and so there are going to be some questions that will help you identify key words, repeated phrases, just sort of the atmosphere of the text and those things, and it's useful to answer the question, what does it say? And then at the end of the five days, there's a section that I've called God's Unfolding Story of Jesus, and we said that in every passage of scripture, we want to look to find Jesus, and there's some questions there and some thoughts, some fuel for discussion as we ask the question, what does it mean? Because every lesson, we're gonna see these amazing things about our Messiah that were given to the descendants of Abraham to see, but they were given for our enrichment, for our understanding as well. And then at the end of the lesson, the last thing is questions for application and discussion, and this is where we get an opportunity to maybe look at our face in the mirror and see our reflection through scripture, through some of those questions that are given to us. This is going to be a lot of fuel that your discussion leaders will use in our group times to discuss this, and don't skip these last two sections. I put them at the end just for formatting purposes because it just made sense. You go day one, two, three, four, five, and then Jesus, and then us, you know? But I would not recommend that you do all five days and then get to those last ones because you'll run out of time, and then you'll wish that you had pondered it more, so even though it's formatted that way, do your best to go to those sections and look through that and be prepared then in your discussion to share what the Lord has shown you through your study and to listen to the next one and get a new perspective of what the Holy Spirit is doing in our lives as we study this scripture. And if you have any questions about things, you can always email me or come and talk to me. So I'm just gonna pray for our entire study. Father, I pray that as we go home and begin to invest. ourselves in these particular scriptures Lord I pray that you would enlighten our hearts that your spirit would be with us that you would remind us Lord through the study that you are with us and even if we feel that you're silent we can know that you indeed are with us guiding us and in your time and in your way father help us to carve out the time and practical terms that we need to open up the scripture to study and listen to your voice and I pray that you would bless each one that's doing this study in Jesus name amen