Does it every feel like everything is spinning out of control?  One of the truths about God is that He is control.  God was in control of the situation the His people were in, and He is in control of our situation as well.

At the start of Exodus, we find God’s people going through some difficult times as the slaves of Egypt.  It might seem like God didn’t know or didn’t care about their situation.  But God was with them the entire time, and He never forgot about them.   No matter what you’re going through God knows, He cares and as a believer, He is with you.

The very first passage of Exodus deals with the great theme of Exodus: deliverance. God had delivered His people in the past. God will deliver His people in the future. No matter what the trouble may be, no matter how terrifying and hopeless, no matter how helpless the circumstances may seem—God will deliver Israel again, deliver them just as He had delivered them in the past.  God is in control.

He will even work the terrifying circumstances out for our good. This is the promise of God to His people, to those who truly love and follow Him (Romans 8:28). God will deliver us; He will save us. This is the assurance of this introductory passage of Exodus.

God used Israel’s experiences in Egypt to prepare them for the special tasks He gave them to accomplish on earth: bearing witness to the true and living God, writing the Holy Scriptures and bringing the Savior into the world.  God is in control.

Notice what God is doing,

God Prospers His People

Blessing (vv. 1-7). During the years Joseph served as second ruler in Egypt, his family was greatly respected; and even after Joseph died, his memory was honored in the way the Egyptians treated the Hebrews. God kept His covenant promise to Abraham by blessing his descendants and causing them to multiply greatly (Gen. 12:1-3; 15:5; 17:2, 6; 22:17). By the time of the Exodus, there were more than 600,000 men who were twenty years and older (Ex. 12:37; 38:26); and when you add the women and children, the total could well be nearly 2 million people, all of whom descended from the original family of Jacob. God certainly kept His promise! He is in control.

But a new Pharaoh wasn’t happy with the rapid multiplication of the Jewish people, so he took three steps to control it.  We see these same steps today used by tyrants and oppressors, but God is in control.

Step #1—Oppressing the adults (vv. 8-14). With hard labor, heavy taxes- Do you ever feel overworked, with unrealistic demands or a heavy tax load? This is what oppressors can do.  God had told Abraham that his descendants would go to a strange country and there be enslaved and mistreated, but He had promised that He would set them free by His power at the right time (Gen. 15:12-14). God compared Egypt to a smoking furnace; see Deut. 4:20) where His people would suffer, but their experience in that furnace would transform the Israelites into a mighty nation (Gen. 46:3).

During the centuries the Jews had been in Egypt (Ex. 12:40-41), they had seen several Egyptian dynasties come and go; but who was the new king who was ignorant of Joseph and his family and tried to destroy “the people of the children of Israel”? The 17th Dynasty, the Hyksos, were foreigners and “strangers” in the land as were the Jews, so they were probably sympathetic with Israel; but the 18th Dynasty was Egyptian and their rulers expelled foreigners from the land. This may have been the dynasty that began the persecution of the people of Israel.

Why would the Egyptians want to make life miserable for the Jews? Israel was a source of blessing in the land, as Joseph had been before them (Gen. 41:39-57), and they weren’t causing trouble. Pharaoh’s stated reason was that the presence of so many Jews was a security risk: since the Jews were outsiders, if there were an invasion, they would no doubt ally themselves with the enemy. However, whether Pharaoh realized it or not, the real cause was the conflict announced in Genesis 3:15, the enmity between the people of God and the children of Satan, a conflict that still goes on in the world today.

No people in recorded history have suffered as the Hebrew people have suffered, but every nation or ruler that has persecuted the Jews has been punished for it. After all, God’s promise to Abraham was, “I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you” (12:3, nkjv). God kept that promise in the way He dealt with Egypt and Babylon in ancient days and Stalin and Hitler in modern times. God is long-suffering as He sees nations persecute His chosen people, but eventually His hand of judgment falls on the oppressors.

The Egyptian taskmasters “worked them ruthlessly” (Ex. 1:13, niv), forcing the Jewish slaves to build cities and work in the fields. But the blessing of God caused the Israelites to continue to multiply, and this frightened and enraged their captors even more. Something else had to be done to keep Israel under control.

Step #2—Killing babies (vv. 15-21).  Sound like today?  Killing babies and abortion are not a modern invention.  This plan of evil has a long history.   If this plan had succeeded, Pharaoh would have wiped out the Hebrew people. The future generation of men would be dead and the girls would eventually be married to Egyptian slaves and absorbed into the Egyptian race. But Genesis 3:15 and 12:1-3 said that God would not permit such a thing to happen, and He used two Jewish midwives to outwit Pharaoh.  God is in control.

This is the first instance in Scripture of what today we call “civil disobedience,” refusing to obey an evil law because of a higher good. Scriptures like Matthew 20:21-25; Romans 13; and 1 Peter 2:11 teach Christians to obey human authorities; but Romans 13:5 reminds us that our obedience must not violate our conscience. When the laws of God are contrary to the laws of man, then “we ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). You see this exemplified not only in the midwives but also in Daniel and his friends (Dan. 1; 3; 6) and the apostles (Acts 4-5).

Were the midwives lying to Pharaoh? We do not know.  It’s likely the babies were born before the midwives arrived because Shiphrah and Puah had told their assistants to be late. What we do know is that their actions were right.  God blessed the two leading midwives for putting their own lives on the line in order to save the Jewish nation from extinction. However, He honored these two women: He gave them children at a time when it was dangerous to have children! Perhaps all their children were daughters, or perhaps God protected their sons as He protected Moses. However, this blessing from God shows how precious children are to the Lord: He wanted to give these two women His very best reward, so He sent them children (Ps. 127:3).

Step #3—Drowning the male babies (v. 22). When Pharaoh discovered he’d been deceived, he changed his plan and commanded all his people to see to it that the Jewish male babies were drowned in the sacred Nile River. It’s interesting that Pharaoh chose drowning as his method of death and that later he himself would be drowned by God. We reap what we sow.  God is in control.

Since Pharaoh’s police couldn’t check up on every Jewish midwife, he commanded that the Egyptian people keep their eyes on the Jewish slaves and report when a boy was born. But one boy would be born that Pharaoh couldn’t kill. God is in control.

We will look at his birth (Moses) in the next post.

Darrell

www.Upwards.Church

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Sources:

The Preacher’s Outline & Sermon Bible – Exodus I, (Chattanooga: Leadership Ministries Worldwide, 1996), WORDsearch CROSS e-book, Under: “A. The Past Deliverance of Israel: The Picture of God’s Deliverance and God’s Faithfulness, 1:1-7”.

Warren W. Wiersbe, The Bible Exposition Commentary – Pentateuch, (Colorado Springs, CO: Victor, 2001), WORDsearch CROSS e-book, 180-181.