Almost nobody wakes up one morning and decides to drift away from God. That's not how it works. Instead, we add, we supplement. We keep praying. We keep attending. We keep using all the right words. But somewhere along the way, we quietly open up other accounts. A little security here. a backup plan there. We're not rejecting God. We're just diversifying, hedging our bets. And before long, we've assembled an entire collection of fallback options. And we can barely notice that our functional trust has shifted from the living God to a portfolio of substitutes that we've carefully constructed with our own hands. That is the situation that Isaiah confronts in chapter 57 today. And what God says to his people there is more terrifying and also more comforting than we might expect. He exposes but then he offers himself. He warns but then he stoops. The Text: Isaiah 57:13-15 So let's read our text for this morning and you can follow along in your Bibles on your devices again. Isaiah 57:es 13- 15. And it reads like this. "When you cry out, let your collection of idols deliver you. The wind will carry them all off. A breath will take them away. But he who takes refuge in me shall possess the land and shall inherit my holy mountain. And it shall be said, 'Build up, build up, prepare the way. Remove every obstruction for my people's way.' For thus says the one who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is holy. I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite." This is God's word. What does it look like when God's people have not abandoned him outright, but have simply just again supplemented him? When the language of faith remains intact, but the heart has quietly diversified. This section in in Isaiah is particularly difficult to comprehend because there are at least three different audiences being written to here. The first is the audience that God himself tells Isaiah earlier in chapter 6 prior to the Babylonian exile that will not listen to him. And because this is a prophetic work, the second audience are those who returning from that exile between 50 to 70 years later or those few who had been left behind. A physical remnant who were leaving a pagan culture and who are already beginning to fall into the same kind of compromises that their grandparents and their great-grandparents did. More on them in a moment. And of course, the third audience is God's covenant people, including us. those of us who struggle with the same kind of struggles that have plagued us since the fall in the garden. So, one text and three audiences. It's a little strange and so it might help us to get some perspective so that we can try to see what God has for us here. So, we'll do a little bit of history. Isaiah 57 belongs to the later portion of Isaiah's prophecy spoken into a moment of deep covenant confusion in Judah. Isaiah's ministry of encouragement in the latter part of the book was focused on the remnant who would survive the exile. Verses 13- 15 come from the last section of Isaiah chapters 56- 66 which scholars sometimes call the third Isaiah based on the thematic shifts. Though I here affirm that Isaiah is the author of this text and writing prophetically under the Spirit's inspiration to audiences whom he would never meet in his lifetime. The future audience that Isaiah was prophetically writing to are the Jewish exiles returning to Judah after 70 years in Babylon who had come home to utter devastation. The land had been abandoned and neglected for nearly three generations. Vineyards were dead, olive groves gone, the terracing systems destroyed, the basic infrastructure like walls and gates and roads that were necessary for life all lay in ruins. And so most returnees were poor and the wealthy Jews who had prospered in Babylon stayed there. For those who those who came back faced immediate survival challenges. how to grow food in exhausted land. How to defend themselves without military protection, how to pay crushing Persian taxes that drove families to mortgage their fields and even sell their children into slavery at times just to survive. They were a frontier society trying to rebuild civilization, surrounded by hostile neighbors who actively sabotaged their efforts and a Persian empire that extracted a heavy tribute. So recovery in other words for these people would take generations not just years. So into this context of economic desperation and social vulnerability Isaiah's words would have landed with tremendous force when God promises in verse 14 to build up build up prepare the road remove the obstacles. These just weren't metaphors, although they were certainly that. They were also literal and urgent needs. The returning exiles faced overwhelming physical obstacles. Rubble to clear, walls to rebuild, hostile opposition to overcome. And you can read more about this in Ezra and Nehemiah in much more detail. But more than their external circumstances, their greatest need was what verse 15 promises. That the high and exalted one who lives forever would dwell with those who are contrite and lowly in spirit. Exile had crushed their national pride and left them dependent and broken and humbled. And in their poverty and in their weakness, they discovered they needed not just an economic restoration, but they needed God himself dwelling among them, reviving the spirit of the lowly and giving life to the contrite heart. So this nation still stood l under the looming shadow of judgment, returning from exile, and the spiritual conditions that led them there were still a danger even to this people. Isaiah's original audience, their grandparents from two or three generations previous rejected God again and again. And like we saw in our study um in Exodus with Pharaoh and the people of Egypt, the people of Israel and Judah had had hardened their hearts toward God over and over again were then hardened by God so that they would not and they could not listen and so they went into exile. The grandchildren returning from exile faced a different but related danger. The exile had cured them of their grandparents blatant idolatry. They would not bow to Baal or sacrifice their children to Molech. But the subtler temptation remained for them to trust in alliances to rely on ritual performance to hedge their bets with quiet compromises. The outward guy idols were gone, but the inward drift toward self-reliance was still there. So Isaiah writing prophetically holds up a mirror of their ancestors sins as a warning to them and to us. This is where a divided loyalty leads. The false shepherds and the careless watchmen condemned earlier in the chapter had failed this previous generation. Would this generation learn that lesson? By the time we reach verse 13 in our text, the Lord addresses people who still cry out in distress. But the question hanging over them is whether their hearts will be wholly his or whether they too will quietly reorient toward substitutes. And yet this chapter does not end with abandonment. It ends with God declaring where he chooses to dwell. The same God who announces that idols will fail also announces that he himself remains a refuge. The same God who exposes pride also prepares a way back for his people. And the same God who inhabits eternity stoops to revive the contrite. And so that's the situation Isaiah is writing into and writing to us through a people who still pray and who still gather and still use the language of faith, but whose hearts have quietly diversified. They haven't abandoned God, but they are beginning to supplement him. And God is about to expose what that looks like and where it leads. So look with me in your text at verse 13. This is a warning and it's sharper than you might expect. It says, "When you cry out, let your collection of idols deliver you. The wind will carry them off. A breath will take them away." The passage does not say here, if you look carefully, if you cry out, he says when you cry out. So here, God's people are still praying to the living God. They're still calling for help, but God is dis exposing the divided heart behind the prayer. And the word here in Hebrew for collection is devastating. It is not a single false god replacing the Lord. It is a carefully assembled set of alternatives. These idols are like insurance policies for the soul. God's people first in Israel and then later here in Judah had accumulated spiritual backup plans, alliances with Egypt, fertility rituals borrowed from Canaan, personal shrines along temple worship. So the judgment is devastatingly simple that when crisis comes, these collected securities will prove absolutely worthless. The wind will carry them off. A breath will take them away. what they had accumulated to protect them could not even protect itself. This warning would go unheeded in the pre-exilic Judah as I Isaiah had predicted and it proved to be true. Consider for a moment how quickly for those people, the pre-exilic people, how quickly all of their idols failed them and how quickly it all collapsed. For over a century after the northern kingdom fell to Assyria, Judah had survived. When Sinakarb's army surrounded Jerusalem in 701 BC, God delivered them miraculously. 185,000 Assyrian soldiers dead in a single night. And that deliverance calcified into Judah as presumption. The people began to believe that Jerusalem was indestructible, that the temple guaranteed their security, and that God would never allow his city to fall. Even though Jeremiah warned them for 40 years, they dismissed him as a traitor. They had their temple and their rituals and their religious confidence. And then Babylon came. The Babylonian siege lasted well over a year. But when the walls were finally breached in the summer of 586 BC, the end came to Judah with terrifying speed. Within weeks, the temple that had stood for nearly 400 years was now a smoking ruin. The king watched his sons executed before him before his eyes were gouged out, the last thing that he would ever see. The city's leading citizens were marched off in chains and everything had accumulated that they had accumulated rather to secure themselves. Political alliances and military defenses and religious presumption had all been scattered now like chaff. The wind carried it off. A breath took it away. Um Jeremiah 21:13 speaks about this. He says, "My people have committed two evils. They have forsaken me. the fountain of living waters and hewed out sistns for themselves, broken sistns that can hold no water." It's the same pattern. It's not an outright rejection, but supplementation that becomes abandonment. And Jesus himself later in Matthew 6:24 would say, "No one can serve two masters." So Jesus applies this principle to money, but it's the same principle. Divided allegiance is an impossible allegiance. And you might ask how this applies to us because most of us here in this audience are reformed evangelicals and we're not bowing to bail or refusing or or or visiting shrine prostitutes like Judah. But the pattern of accumulated spiritual insurance is alive and well among doctrinally sound Christians. Some examples in the age of unprecedented access to information for us. We have planning tools and life optimization systems and AI. And the temptation is for us to pray to God while trusting in our systems to save us. We ask for God's guidance on the one hand and then we follow the algorithm on the other. We request his provision and then anxiously monitor our portfolios and our calendars. Prayer becomes ceremonial for us very often. The device is what becomes the trusted thing. I once knew a missionary family that had s served in uh posts Soviet Romania after the fall of the Iron police protection, public services in general could not be counted on at all. And so this family particularly the children of an otherwise western parents grew up praying for basic everyday things. And when they came to the US for furlow, one of the children remarked to their parents about our well functioning nation and they said this. The child said to their parents, "It's kind of sad here. everything just works and nobody really seems to need to pray for their everyday needs." Because of this outsider perspective, they saw what we tend to forget that we are surrounded by conveniences that constantly threaten to pull us toward mixed confidence. Also, when anxiety arises or conviction presses, we reach for the phone, the almighty phone, the magic box. The doom scroll becomes a refuge instead of scripture. Instead of prayer, our entertainment provides an anesthetic for us to forget our troubles for a few minutes or for a few hours. We often do not formally reject God. we just simply have other places to run when he feels too demanding to us or maybe too silent. Um 2024 2025 to give another example was was a year when the evangelical church felt the gravitational pull of hoping that the right election outcome might help us to secure our collective futures. It's very easy for us to confess Christ's lordship while at the same time functionally placing our confidence in a political victory as important as those are. So the question is not whether we should vote or whether we should engage but whether we have collected political security alongside or in place of our security in Christ and his lordship alone. One other danger for us uh we here at Sunrise are again largely reformed evangelicals and we are under very good teaching and so we can face a unique danger in this. We can collect doctrines in the same way that Judah had collected idols not as substitutes for God but rather as supplements to give us a sense of security of being right. right answers can become their own kind of false refuge and a very sneaky one if they do not drive us to the living God himself. Um, let me just take a personal moment uh and make this personal because I'm not pointing fingers at you from a safe distance because I've struggled with every one of these particularly in the last few years as probably many of you have. you. Like you, I have seen the geopolitical landscape shift and I've watched economic realities change. I've watched social and political ground move beneath my feet. Sometimes daily, it seems like, especially if you're paying attention to your phone. I often feel the weight of the roles that God has given me. I'm a husband of a beautiful wife and father to an adolescent son and now the last year an elder to this church, a leader in my job. I'm a disciple of Christ. The pressures compound and the uncertainties can multiply. And in seasons like that, um I've often found myself reaching for my own collection of idols. So I feel this. The AI tools and the calendars and the organizers that promise control and the phone that offers an escape. The political outcome that whispers security. The theological precision that often makes me feel right even when my heart has slowly started to grow colder and colder. And so I'm just confessing. I've often drifted and I've often supplemented. I've needed to come back and repent of this over and over again. And that's not failure. That's kind of the Christian life. But it only works if we see when we've wandered. And church, when our aisles have idols have failed us, when they have failed us, not if they leave us exposed and afraid. But let's look at the second half of verse 13 back in our text. Because God does not his abandon his people to this fear. Watch for the word in verse 13. But that little word is the hinge of the whole passage. But he who takes refuge in me shall possess the land and shall inherit my holy mountain. So the same God who exposes our idols offers himself not just as the alternative but as the only remedy for them. And what he offers is not a strategy, not five easy steps to spiritual security. It's refuge in him in our savior Jesus Christ. So verses 13b and 14 say, "But he who takes refuge in me shall possess the land and shall inherit my holy mountain." And it and it shall be said, "Build up, build up, prepare the way, remove every obstruction from my people's path, for my people's way." So the contrast here is stark. The wind scatters our idols, scattered Judah's idols, but he who takes refuge in me shall possess the land. So the Hebrew, the Hebrew word for refuge here also appears throughout the Psalms as a technical term for covenant trust. Fleeing to God as one flees to a fortified city. The word refuge assumes danger. It assumes you'll be weak. It assumes weakness. It assumes that something must be fled from. Pride never seeks a refuge. Only humility does. The one who takes refuge admits, "I cannot protect myself. My accumulated resources and tools are insufficient. I need shelter that only another can provide. I need what only Christ can offer." Look again at verse 14. The tone now turns decisively towards mercy. Build up, build up, prepare the way. God does not merely warn his people. He clears the path for their return, for our return. The image echoes Isaiah 40:3. It's the same language that will later describe John the Baptist preparation for Christ. And it reads, "A voice cries in the wilderness, prepare the way for the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill shall be made low. The uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. For the mouth of the Lord has spoken." God clears the road not only to display his power but to bring his wandering children home. And notice in this verse, he offers himself as the destination. Like Proverbs 18:10 says, the name of the Lord as a strong tower. The righteous man runs into it and is safe. See that verb runs. Refuge is not passive. It requires active urgent movement away from the idols that can't save you and the tools that can't save you and towards the only one who can. And then notice the tender phrase at the end of verse 14, my people. Despite the rebuke and despite the exposure, God has not disowned these people. He has not disowned us. He is removing obstacles from my people's way. So church, the same is true of us right here and right now. God has not disowned you or turned away from you if you are truly in him. He runs to the sinner. He calls the sinner to run to him. And the same God says in Psalm 46 verse1, God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Same vocabulary in the same exclusive claim. We find it in the New Testament as well in Hebrews 6:18. We who have fled for refuge have might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us. The New Testament applies this refuge language directly to our hope in Christ. So if you find yourself this morning at the end of this year exhausted, worn down by years of cultural conflict and economic insecurity and information overload like I am. That exhaustion may be grace. Is it possible that that this exhaustion exposes the limits of your own resources and drives you towards a refuge that you can't manufacture for yourself? Or maybe you finally uh you find yourself quietly hedging your bets, trusting God, but quietly maintaining a plan B. So this call to exclusive refuge confronts you. Will you trust him alone? Or will you run to him for refuge without any backup plans? Maybe you've drifted and fear the road back is too long for you. So if so, hear me out. God does not say find your way home. He says, "I will clear to the way." But here's the question that verse 14 leaves hanging. Why? Why would the God of heaven bother with rebels who have spent decades chasing their idols? Why would he run toward a people who ran away from him? And verse 15 answers that question. Look at it. The answer might either offend you or undo you. Maybe it will do both. Verse 15 doesn't just tell us what God does. It tell us who God is and where he has choose chosen to make his home. It says verse 15, for thus says the one who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is holy. I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite. So before God tells us uh where he dwells, he reminds us who he is. Four titles establish his transcendence. Look at the text first. High and lifted up. This echoes Isaiah chapter 6 where the serum hide their faces and the temple shakes. This is the God before whom Isaiah earlier cries, "Woe is me. I am undone." The second is who inhabits eternity. He does not merely exist forever, but he fills all of time as his dwelling place. He is not bound by time that constrains us. Third, whose name is holy. His essential character is set apart and utterly pure and categorically different from everything that he has created. And fourth, he says, I dwell in a high and holy place. This natural habitat is unapproachable glory. And then the term, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, not instead of, but also with. God does not lower his holiness to dwell with the humble. As Jesus Christ, as the God man, he brings his holiness with him. And instead of destroying the contrite, he revives them. He revives us. The Hebrew word for contrite means crushed, broken, pulverized. The word for lowly means low, humble, brought down, meek. And these are not impressive qualities. These are broken conditions. And God says that is where I make my home. The purpose of his dwelling is not judgment but revival and restoration to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite. The text says revival is not just encouragement although it is certainly that. But it is life returning where it seemed to be gone, strength returning where it was spent. Try to sum up in your imagination just for a moment that what this would have meant for the Judeian reader returning to uh from from exile between 60 to 70 years in Babylon. Their parents and grandparents had lost everything because of their hard-hearted refusal to listen to God and to repent of their incredible wickedness. They would return to a ruined land that was a shadow of what it had been for their ancestors. and their people were scattered and broken and compromised because of their sin. And yet here is God comforting these people, not condemning them. As one Isaiah commentary I researched puts it, "None among the gods resembles Jehovah. None can be compared to him. Jehovah is the only God among the nations who saves." So back to us, those who are under good reformed teaching can inadvertently develop a kind of theological competence that feels like qualification. We know all the right doctrines. We can articulate the gospel. We've read the right books. But verse 15 insists that God's dwelling place is not with the impressive, but with the broken. knowledge does not that does not produce contrition has missed the whole point. And so there's good news for you who are struggling here in 2025 for the spiritually depleted. If that's you, if the last few years or or if Christmas, the Christmas season has crushed your spirit. If you have failed more than you have succeeded, if your prayers feel hollow or your devotions feel cold, hear what God says about where he makes his home. He does not dwell with the impressive. He dwells with the contrite. Your brokenness is not a barrier to God's presence. Your broken, humble, and contrite heart is the address where Jesus Christ makes his residence. Many believers live with a lowgrade fear. A fear of death or fear of loss, fear of man's opinions, fear of the future. What might that hold? What does 2026 hold for us? Verse 15 speaks to every one of these. The one who inhabits eternity holds your life, holds your death, holds your future, holds your past. The one whose name is holy defines your worth. The one who revives the heart promises restoration through every loss. Fear is not conquered by denial. You can't doom scroll your way out of it. You can't eat your way out or drink or drug your way out of it. It is conquered by nearness to God and our mediator. an intercessor, the friend of sinners, Jesus Christ our Lord. And so verse 15 tells us where God dwells with the contrite and the lowly. But it raises an urgent and practical question. What is contrition? And perhaps more importantly, can I just manufacture this for myself? Because if contrition is the address where God takes up residence, some of us are immediately tempted to try to produce it for ourselves to work ourselves up into a right emotional state to perform brokenness so that God will show up. But that would just be a disaster. That would turn the gospel back into law. And so before we move to how to apply this, we need to understand the posture that receives this revival. what it is and what it is not. So what is contrition not? What isn't? What isn't it? Contrition is not self-loathing. The goal is not to hate yourself, but rather to be honest before God. Self-hatred is still just a form of pride. It's a form of self-focus. Contrition turns the eyes upward. It's not despair because despair says there is no hope. But contrition says there is hope. There is no hope in me, but there is hope in Jesus Christ. The contrite heart does not sink into hopelessness, but rather as we see in the text, it flees to refuge. Contrition is not performance. We cannot manufacture a broken heart. It is not a technique for unlocking spiritual benefits. Rather, it is a condition that comes when we stop pretending and stop positioning and stand honestly before God. So what is it? Contrition. Humility is truthfulness. At least it is agreeing with God about our sin and our need and our insufficiency. It is the end of spinning. It's dependence. It is a posture that says, "I bring nothing except sin. I deserve nothing except wrath and I depend entirely upon mercy." It's open-handedness. It's releasing the grip of our collected securities and our tools and our devices and our plans and holding out empty hands to receive what only God can provide to us. So examine your collection is the first application. Ask the Lord to show you, to show us what we have been accumulating besides him. It's not to produce guilt, but it's to produce clarity. The goal here is not to make you feel worse about yourself. It's to help yourself, to help you to see yourself clearly so that you can flee to this refuge. Ask yourself honestly here today. If this is the first time this year where you've asked yourself this question honestly, where is my real and functional trust? Where is it really? Not your theological trust. We may know the right answers. A lot of us do in this room. But where is your functional trust when the rubber meets the road? The thing that you actually lean upon when the ground starts to shift underneath you. What do you reach for when anxiety rises? When you can't sleep at 2 am? Where does your mind go? Does it go to prayer or does it go to desperate planning and ruminating? To the promises of God or to your cell phone? When the news cycle spins up and the world feels unstable, what settles you? Christ's lordship over history or hoping for that right political outcome. Here's another diagnostic question that may sting. What would devastate you more? The loss of some earthly security or the loss of of your communion with Christ if your portfolio collapsed tomorrow or if your health failed you or if the election went the other way, which it might. If your reputation takes a hit, if you lost your job again, would these losses grieve you more than a cold and distant prayer life already does? I'm not asking these questions to condemn you again. I'm asking you because I've had to ask them of myself. And the answers often this year revealed a collection that I didn't know that I had been assembling that you may be assembling even now. The wind will carry them all off. A breath will take them away if you're not careful. It's better to see it now and to run to refuge than discover it when the crisis comes. And the crisis will come. So number two, stop polishing your prayers. Don't we do this? We come before God and we clean ourselves up first and we often use this religious language and we use the right phrases and we project this version of ourselves that we wish that we were the attentive disciple or the grateful believer the spiritually mature Christian and then we wonder why our prayers prayers often feel hollow. So real humility is cultivated when we bring our actual selves before the Lord in prayer. Not the selves that we wish that we were, but who we really are. Doubting, distracted, divided in that moment. Perhaps God already knows. He's not fooled by all the polish that we put on these prayers. The question is whether we will be honest about what he already sees in us. The Psalms give us language for this. David didn't come to God with tidy prayers. Read them. He said in Psalm 139:23, "Search me, oh God, and know my heart. Try me and know my anxious thoughts." Notice that David doesn't claim to already know his own heart. He just asks God to search it because he knows that he's capable of infinite selfdeception. and so are we. And so pray the unpolished prayer and tell God, admit that you're distracted or you're confused or you're discouraged. Tell him you're not sure you believe what you're saying. Tell him you're going through the motions and you don't know how to stop. Admit it. Tell him you don't believe in his word. You don't trust these words are his and that they're real and they're inspired. Tell him about your idol that you reach for this week when you should have reached for him. Admit it. Confess it. That kind of honesty does not disqualify you from his presence, but rather it is a door into it. So remember, he dwells with the humble. He dwells with the contrite and the lowly. And you cannot be contrite and lowly about your sin sins. If you're still pretending that you don't commit them, if you've been distant or cold or drifting this year, do not wait until you feel worthy to return. God is clearing the path for you. The obstacles are being removed. The father is running to meet the prodigal. Come home. Run to Christ. If he's running to you, run to him. Don't run away from him. And if you're broken, truly broken, take heart. You are not disqualified from God's presence. You are precisely where he has chosen to dwell. The high and holy one has stooped to revive you. And so, ex, let's examine our collections and pray honest prayer. Let's receive the cleared path and rest in God's dwelling. But underneath all of this, underneath the warning, underneath the refuge, underneath the dwelling, there is a deeper question. Why does any of this work? Why can the idoltor find refuge? Why does the holy God revive the crushed instead of consuming them in wrath? And the answer is not just in Isaiah 57. The answer is also at Calvary at the cross. Christ is the fulfillment of this passage. He was high and lifted up but on a cross. He who inhabited eternity entered time. He whose name is holy bore our sins for us. And though his death and and through his death and his resurrection, he has made a way for the contrite and the humble and the lowly to dwell with God forever. This God who inhabits eternity stooped all the way down. Not just to the advent, not just at Christmas, but also to the cross. He was crushed so that we the crushed could be revived. Um John Newton, famous psalmist and pastor, understood this. The former slave trader had he become a pastor. A man who had seen the depths of human cruelty and his own participation in it said near the end of his life. "My memory is nearly gone but I remember two things that I am a great sinner and Christ is a great savior." And that's the sum of it. Great sinner, great savior. So if you are here this morning and you have never come to Christ, if your refuge has been everywhere but him, hear this invitation this morning. Hear the text invite you. Hear Christ invite you this morning. The wind will scatter all the things that you put your trust and security in. Your house is built on the sand that will be washed away in death and in disaster. But he who takes refuge in the Lord will inherit his holy mountain. He will inherit Christ himself. So if you are a believer and you've been drifting, maybe that the end of this year you found yourself drifting and this text has wakened something in your in your heart. You're supplementing God with substitutes and you're maintaining all the correct religious forms while your heart has been cooling and cooling. Hear both the warning this morning and the welcome. The path is cleared. Come home. If you are broken or crushed or low, hear the covenant promises that are found only in Christ. Run to Christ this morning. Run to Christ this year. The Holy One of Israel makes his home with you. Not to condemn you, but to revive you. Where does God dwell? In the high and holy place, yes, but also with the contrite, with the lowly, with you and with me. Church, let's pray.Watch at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh6zTQ-vwH4

Waiting is hard. Have you ever had to wait for something for a long time? Maybe youve been through times when youve had to wait for really big things like: waiting for God to intervene in a hopeless situation, or waiting on guidance from God for a major decision, or waiting to hear news from a doctor about a recent diagnosis. Waiting for things this big can be agonizing. Or maybe youve been through times when youve had to wait for really small things like: waiting in traffic, or waiting longer than usual for your meal at a restaurant, or waiting for someone whos late to a meeting. Waiting for small things like this can also be difficult. But, why is waiting so difficult? Whether the situation is big or small, waiting reminds us of our lack. Its a humbling reminder that were not in control. We wait because we have reached the limit of our own powerwe cannot do something, we cannot figure out something, or we cannot fix something on our ownso we wait. If you can relate to that, then you can relate to the Israelites in our passage today. They were enduring a cruel enslavement in Egypt. Theyd been there over 400 years, and had likely given up hope of God ever coming to rescue them. They werent strong enough on their own to right this wrong, so all they could do was wait. And yet, into their darkness, God came! The promised rescue began, and they watched God attack Egypt with nine fierce plagues. As we come back to the story today in Exodus 12, we see the glorious moment when their waiting finally comes to an end as the final plague falls and the Exodus begins. And those just happen to be our two main headings today. See first The Final Plague (v29-32) At midnight theLordstruck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt,from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock.And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he and all his servants and all the Egyptians. And there wasa great cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where someone was not dead.Then he summoned Moses and Aaron by night and said, Up, go out from among my people,both you and the people of Israel; and go, serve theLord, as you have said.Take your flocks and your herds, as you have said, and be gone, and bless me also! In these verses God carries out the tenth and final plague as He said He would back in the start of chapter 11. v29 brings us right into the devastating scene. The Lord descends to strike down all the firstborn in Egypt, from the palace on high to the pits in the depths. We can so easily just read by these things and not even notice whats happening, so lets pause right here and look at this. Here in the Bible we read of God killing people. Can our theology handle this? Does our doctrine of God even have a category for this? Or do we just immediately believe something else must be going on because certainly this is too cruel and unjust an act for God to do? Church, we would do well to see this as it is rather than explaining it away. Remember the context. Early on in Exodus we saw Pharaoh enjoying the enslavement and oppression of the Israelites. Then Pharaoh raised the bar by murdering as many Hebrew baby boys as he could. Into this murderous scene God sends His deliverer, Moses, and keeps him safe in a little ark. Years later after God called Moses out and sent him back to Egypt, God gave him these words to tell Pharaoh in Exodus 4, Israel is My firstborn son. Let My son go that he may worship Me. But if you refuse, I will kill your firstborn son (Ex. 4:22-23). Now, in our passage this morning, this Word comes to pass. So what do we make of this? Church, God is not committing wickedness here, no, God is carrying out justice against Egypt for all their many sins. And carry it out He did, as v30 says, And there wasa great cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where someone was not dead. Of course, we know that in the land of Goshen, most (if not all) the homes were safe from this plague for one reason onlythe blood of the lamb. The unblemished Passover lamb, slain as the substitute for the firstborn child. When God came near in this tenth plague to destroy and saw the blood He passed by. But for all the homes with no blood, He entered in order to carry out justice. The word for cry in v30 is ironic in the original Hebrew. Its the same Hebrew word used earlier in Exodus to describe Israels crying out to God in the midst of their suffering. Its ironic because now the same word is used to describe the deep cries of death rising all throughout Egypt.[1] This was such a devastating blow to Pharaoh, that after he rises, sees his own child dead, and cries out himself, he summons Moses and Aaron and tells them to take all the people and leave. Can you imagine what this moment was like for him? To finally give in after losing a child? What else could he do? He had been effected before in the previous plagues, but not like this. This time, the plague took his own child, so he commands Moses to take the people and go. But notice in his parting words Pharaoh asks Moses to bless him. Weve seen him ask Moses for prayer on many occasions by now, but here I think we see something different. I think this is Pharaoh acknowledging, in a manner of speaking, that the God of Israel is really where all power and authority lie. Pharaoh once believed he was a god himself, and yet in plague after plague the Lord forced Pharaoh to face the unsettling reality of his own powerlessness. So in a real way, I think Pharaoh knows that God is on the side of Israel, and so he asks for a blessing from the God of Israel. This hasnt happened since the days of Joseph years before this moment.[2] See it Church, here in this final plague Pharaoh is defeated, as God rids him of all the resistance left in him,[3] causing him to finally let the people go. And, the moment Israel has waited fornow finally arrives. The Exodus (v33-42) The Egyptians were urgent with the people to send them out of the land in haste. For they said, We shall all be dead.So the people took their dough before it was leavened, their kneading bowls being bound up in their cloaks on their shoulders.The people of Israel had also done as Moses told them, for they hadasked the Egyptians for silver and gold jewelry and for clothing.And theLordhad given the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so thatthey let them have what they asked. Thus they plundered the Egyptians. And thepeople of Israel journeyed fromRameses to Succoth,about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children.Amixed multitude also went up with them, and very much livestock, both flocks and herds.And they baked unleavened cakes of the dough that they had brought out of Egypt, for it was not leavened, becausethey were thrust out of Egypt andcould not wait, nor had they prepared any provisions for themselves. The time that the people of Israel lived in Egypt was 430 years.At the end of430 years, on that very day, all the hosts of theLordwent out from the land of Egypt.It was a night of watching by theLord, to bring them out of the land of Egypt; so this same night is anight of watching kept to theLordby all the people of Israel throughout their generations. Finally, the Exodus event long anticipated begins, and as it begins the text is soaked with a deep sense of urgency. In v33 the Egyptians were urging and pressing Israel to make haste and get out of Egypt. They did this because the plagues had so terrorized them they thought theyd all be dead soon. This impressed a deep sense of urgency on Israel in v34, causing them to quickly pack up belongings and leave. They left so quickly took their food, bowls, and clothingput it on their shoulders and left. v34 is also more evidence of how the Passover ceremony and tradition will become normal for Israel from this point on. God reminds Israel of this as theyre about to cross into the Promise Land in Deut. 16:3 saying, You shall eat no leavened bread with it.Seven days you shall eat it with unleavened bread, the bread of afflictionfor you came out of the land of Egyptin hastethat all the days of your life you may remember the day when you came out of the land of Egypt. All that came from this here. In this urgency, just as God had said, Israel plundered the Egyptians on their way out in v35-36 by asking and gladly receiving much silver and gold. On one hand this shows the great favor God gave His people with Egypt. That they were so favored is astounding because think of how drastically things have changed for the Israelites and the Egyptians. Before Israel was a weak, suffering, enslaved peoplenow by Gods great work Israel is the greater nation, enjoying great riches in Gods great victory.[4] But on the other hand we see a double edge in this. You see, this silver and gold would be both used and abused. Israel would use it for godly purposes in the making of the tabernacle but they would also use it in the making of the golden calf. Lesson? When Gods gifts and favor are used in godly ways, it serves the purpose of building their new identity in the Lord. But when Gods gifts and favor are abused in ungodly ways, it serves the purpose of maintaining old idolatries.[5] Church, isnt this true of all of Gods gifts?[6] His favor and blessing is great, and used rightly it serves to build Gods people, but used wrongly it destroys Gods people. Then, what a moment, the Exodus begins in v37-39. Beginning at Rameses they went out toward Succoth. Both of these were historical cities, Rameses being a city Israel likely helped build and Succoth being most likely a city to the southeast.[7] Out they went, 600,000 of them, or were there more of them? Its very likely there were more because of says 600,000 men. Including the women and children this was a company of two to three million people leaving Egypt. And notice, it wasnt just Israelites that left. In v38 it says a mixed multitude left. This is an explicit reference to non-Israelites joining up in the Exodus. They would soon be called sojourners, who joined up after witnessing the great works of God and being convinced that following Him and doing life among His people was the best thing for them. They foreshadowed the many foreigners soon to join up with Israel like Rahab and Ruth. The passage ends with a summary in v40-42 bringing the section and our time in Exodus for the next few months to a close. Conclusion: Here we have seen the Exodus itself, long awaited by Israel, much postponed by Pharaoh, yet carefully prepared by the Lord.[8] We began today with waiting. How waiting is hard in the big things and in the small things. Why? Because of how the act of waiting forces us to face our own lack. Israel had waited over 400 years for God to save them, but save them He did! All of us have to wait on God in life with Him, some of you are waiting right now for big or small things. So, question: how can you and I today take heart and be confident in our own waiting? Answer: we can take God at His Word. Church, we can take God at His Word. God promised long ago to Abraham in Genesis 15 that He would lead His people out of great suffering one day, and that He would punish the nation who caused their suffering. Church, God said this, and guess what? It all happened. Israel went into another nation under the care of Joseph, and they were treated well, but when a new Pharaoh arose, everything changed and their suffering began. Egypt turned on them, enslaved them, and Israel suffered for years. But God came to rescue them! Through sending Moses and through attacking them with ten plagues, God saved His people, and they walked out of Egypt in victory. Israel learned anew that they can take God at His Word. The rest of the OT reveals this too, as Gods people ebbed and flowed throughout their history, they were waiting for the Messiah to come and rescue them! God said He would come. God said His coming would bring great light into their darkness. And God said when He comes nothing would ever be the same. And sure enough, in the fullness of time, He came. The eternal Son of God took up residence in the womb of the Virgin Mary, and was born as one of us. He showed Himself to be the true and better Moses, yes, He is the true Passover Lamb, yes, but He is also the true firstborn son who dies for us and leads us out in a greater Exodus, freeing us from the slavery of our sin. All who trust in Him are victorious in His victory. But then He ascended back into the heavens, and were still here. And though much gospel light has now dawned, this world is still very dark in sin. And so we wait, for the Son of God to come again. God said He would come. God said His coming would bring great light into this darkness. And God said when He comes nothing would ever be the same. So Church, as we waitwe can take God at His Word. Do you do this? Do you take God at His Word? Herein lies our confidence as we wait Church. If were to take God at His Word, we must be in His Word, taking it into ourselves, living by it, living near it, and living to spread it around. (expand?) Dont miss that our passage ended today in v42 with God watching over His flock by night. Sound familiar? He watched over them by night at the Exodus. As the Great Shepherd He watched over His flock by night at Christs birth. Church, He watches over us still. Therefore, in all our waiting we have great hope! [1] Douglas K. Stuart, Exodus NAC (Brentwood, TN: BH Publishing, 2006) 292. [2] Stuart, 294. [3] John D. Currid, Exodus 1-18 - EP Study Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: EP Books, 2014) 248. [4] Stuart, 296. [5] Victor P. Hamilton, Exodus: An Exegetical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2023) 193. [6] Hamilton, 193. [7] Currid, 252. [8] John I. Durham, Exodus - WBC (Waco TX: Word Books, 1987) 173.Watch at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nkDAdbUNUs

Calendars are important. Over the ages there has been a handful of different calendars used by different cultures. The one we use currently and have been using for near a millennia now is called the Gregorian calendar. It was invented in 1582 and named after Pope Gregory VIII. Before this time many used what was called the Julian calendar, but apparently it didnt keep time well, because important dates in the year kept moving back each year. So in October 1582, when the Gregorian calendar was put into place, they decided the date would have jump ahead a bit in order to catch up, so overnight it went from October 4th to October 15th. The Gregorian calendar, even though it fixed many of the problems of the previous system, didnt catch on right away, but eventually it would. Many other nations would eventually begin using it as well, down to us today who still use itat least until someone comes up with another idea. Long before Pope Gregory VIII signed off on this new calendar, the Church had made and used a calendar to guide their year as well. The church calendar is mainly used by liturgical traditions (smells/bells), and it seeks to center the yearly rhythms around Jesus life, death, and resurrection. It begins withAdvent(preparation for Christmas), followed byChristmas (birth of Jesus),Ordinary Time,Lent(repentance),Holy Week (Passion/Death),Easter(Resurrection), andPentecost(Holy Spirit), before returning to more Ordinary Time once again. The Bible doesnt command us to use a certain calendar, at least not in the NT, but it is worth our attention that for millions of Christians, the yearly Christian calendar drove everything. Why would Christians seek to order their year like this? One reason is that God did this for Israel in the OT. God ordered Israels yearly life to follow certain rhythms that emphasized certain truths about Him and certain great works He has done. I mention all of this today because in Exodus 12 (our text for today) we see this begin. So, while all of Scripture is inspired by God and given to us for our great good, certain chapters in the Bible stand out like Mt. Everest. In all of Exodus, chapter 12 is such a chapter, standing out as one of the most important chapters of the book. To it we now turn A New Calendar (v1-2) TheLordsaid to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt,This month shall be for you the beginning of months. It shall be the first month of the year for you. Here in v1-2, for the first time in Exodus God tells His people about the importance of specific days in their calendar. At first glance this might not seem all that monumental to you, but Church, this is huge. Why? Because this shows us that even while Israel was in Egypt God was re-ordering their lives.[1] Many people believe (and Ive even said to you a few times) that God rescued His people out of Egypt and then re-ordered the lives of His people at Mt. Sinai by the Law. Rescue and re-ordering, in that pattern. This is generally true. God does re-order Israel at Sinai by the Lawbut some of the changes God wanted to make in Israel didnt wait until Mt. Sinai, nope, God brought about some of these changes while Israel was still in Egypt. Thats what were seeing here in v1-2. Israel, once driven by Egypts yearly rhythms, now has a calendar unique to them that begins with a celebration remembering the Exodus event. What does this teach us? God is not only going to take Israel out of Egypt, Hes going to take Egypt out of Israel.[2] You see that? So much of the Egyptian way of life has been ingrained in the Israelites over their 400 year captivity, BUT, by Gods grace Israel will learn a better way. This is huge for them! Think of what their calendar was like under Pharaohs cruel thumb. When Pharaoh was in charge, Israels days became an endless repetition of wearisome toil that seemed to just go one forever. The ideas of past and future slowly morphed into a confused unbearable present.[3] But what happens when God rescues them and saves them? A new beginning occurs! Bright expectation replaces dark resignation, lively hope replaces dead numbness, great celebration replaces wretched toil. The Lord is indeed kind to His people, not only in saving them but in remaking their calendar to begin each year by remembering His great work in the Exodus! Thats what v1-2 is all about. But what exactly will Israel do to remember the Exodus as each new year begins? They will keep the Passover. Thats what the rest of our text is all about. A New Ceremony (v3-28) Tell all the congregation of Israel that on the tenth day of this month every man shall take a lambaccording to their fathers houses, a lamb for a household.And if the household is too small for a lamb, then he and his nearest neighbor shall take according to the number of persons; according to what each can eat you shall make your count for the lamb.Your lamb shall bewithout blemish, a male a year old. You may take it from the sheep or from the goats,and you shall keep it until thefourteenth day of this month, when the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill their lambs at twilight.Then they shall take some of the blood and put it on thetwo doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it.They shall eat the flesh that night, roasted on the fire; withunleavened bread and bitter herbs they shall eat it.Do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water, butroasted, its head with its legs and its inner parts.Andyou shall let none of it remain until the morning; anything that remains until the morning you shall burn.In this manner you shall eat it: withyour belt fastened, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. And you shall eat it in haste.It is theLord's Passover.ForI will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and onall the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments:I am theLord.The blood shall be a sign for you, on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you, when I strike the land of Egypt. v14, This day shall befor you a memorial day, and you shall keep it as a feast to theLord; throughout your generations, as astatute forever, you shall keep it as a feast.Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread. On the first day you shall remove leaven out of your houses, for if anyone eats what is leavened, from the first day until the seventh day,that person shall be cut off from Israel.On the first day you shall hold aholy assembly, and on the seventh day a holy assembly. No work shall be done on those days. But what everyone needs to eat, that alone may be prepared by you.And you shall observe the Feast of Unleavened Bread, foron this very day I brought yourhosts out of the land of Egypt. Therefore you shall observe this day, throughout your generations, as a statute forever.In the first month, from the fourteenth day of the month at evening, you shall eat unleavened bread until the twenty-first day of the month at evening.For seven days no leaven is to be found in your houses. If anyone eats what is leavened,that person will be cut off from the congregation of Israel,whether he is a sojourner or a native of the land.You shall eat nothing leavened; in all your dwelling places you shall eat unleavened bread. All these instructions can easily become difficult to follow so lets carefully look at what God is commanding in this ceremony. In v3-4 God commands that each family is to take a lamb for their household. In v5 God commands that this lamb is to be unblemished, a year old, male, and taken from the sheep or the goats. In v6 God commands that the family keeps watch over this lamb until the fourteenth day of the month when they will kill the lamb at twilight. Then in v7 God commands they take the blood of the lamb and put it all over the entrance to their house. God will tell them more about the blood soon, but first He tells them something else. In v8-11 God commands the family to cook and eat the rest of the lamb, but this meal was to be a meal like no other.[4]Meat was normally cooked in an oven, or in a pan, but not this time, here the lamb is to be roasted over a fire. Normally bread would contain leaven to help it rise, but not this time, here it is to be unleavened bread, coupled with bitter herbs to reflect their bitter slavery. And normally meals were eaten in a relaxed manner, around a table, but not this time, this meal was to be eaten in haste, as they were dressed ready to travel with staff in hand, and their belts and sandals on. Part of the sacred nature of this meal is that it isnt like all the other meals. Yes its a meal, but it isnt to be like all other meals because of what it represents. In v11b God gives the ceremonys name, it is the Lords Passover. Why is it called this? v12-13 explain it, ForI will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and onall the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments:I am theLord.The blood shall be a sign for you, on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you, when I strike the land of Egypt. Here we see the Passover ceremony is bound up with the tenth and final plague God will bring against Egypt. As weve seen, in this plague He will come and put to death all the firstborn in the land of Egypt. This judgment is against the Egyptians and all their gods, and it will bring death to every house in Egypt, every houseexcept those covered by the blood. The blood will be a sign, so when God comes and sees the blood, He will pass over that house, leaving them safe from death. All this wouldve been alarming to the Israelites to hear. Not only was God coming in great might to deliver one final blow to Egypt and their gods, but they must prepare for it lest they leave themselves open to suffering the loss of their firstborn along with the Egyptians. Certainly each Israelite family wouldve been sobered as they heard these words. But, can you imagine what it was like for the firstborn child in each family to hear this news? The importance of the lamb was not lost on the oldest children in Israel.[5] The lamb would be their substitute, its blood would be spilled to save them, as it would die in their place. God said more about this moment in v14. There God calls Passover three things: a memorial day (meaning that it serves as a special day set aside to remind them of the Exodus), a feast (meaning a celebration), and a statute forever (meaning something Israel is to keep on doing every year to remind themselves and teach their children what God has done). In v15-20 God also commands a weeklong feast to be done along with the Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread. These arent two separate holidays but rather they form one weeklong celebration. In the rest of the OT this entire week is sometimes referred to as Passover and at other times its called the Feast of Unleavened Bread.[6] This feast is all about leaven, and the instructions are specific and strict. Four times God commands Israel to not eat anything with leaven, and twice God says anyone who does will be cut off from Israel. Again, normally they can have it, but this week is to be a week in their year thats unlike all the others, and one way its to be different is the lack of leaven. Whats all of this about?[7] Unleavened bread symbolized a clean break from Egypt. How so? Well, for Israel leaven was a bit of unbaked dough set aside from the days baking, kept to be added to the next days baking. That little bit of leave once added to the new dough wouldve worked through the whole new batch causing it to rise. For God to command Israel to banish the leaven during this feast symbolized leaving behind all the Egyptian influences working through their whole life to corrupt them more and more. Thus, I say it again, God is not only going to take Israel out of Egypt, Hes going to take Egypt out of Israel. Paul will even quote this in 1 Cor. 5 to emphasize the holy life God saved us to, calling Christ our Passover Lamb, and warning us against the leaven of the world. Lastly, in v21-28 we see Moses tell Israel all these instructions. Then Moses called all the elders of Israel and said to them, Go and select lambs for yourselvesaccording to your clans, and kill the Passover lamb.Take a bunch ofhyssop anddip it in the blood that is in the basin, and touchthe lintel and the two doorposts with the blood that is in the basin.None of you shall go out of the door of his house until the morning.For theLordwill pass through to strike the Egyptians, and when he sees the blood onthe lintel and on the two doorposts, theLordwill pass over the door andwill not allow the destroyer to enter your houses to strike you.You shall observe this rite as a statute for you and for your sons forever.And when you come to the land that theLordwill give you,as he has promised, you shall keep this service.Andwhen your children say to you, What do you mean by this service?you shall say,It is the sacrifice of theLord's Passover, for he passed over the houses of the people of Israel in Egypt, when he struck the Egyptians but spared our houses. And the peoplebowed their heads and worshiped. Then the people of Israel went and did so; as theLordhad commanded Moses and Aaron, so they did. Much here is repeated from the previous verses, but notice Moses emphasis in v24-27. Here he anticipates the coming day when Israel is settled down in the Promise Land when their children ask them about the meaning of the Passover. How wonderful a thought, right? This is so far ahead of them, yet it is ahead of them! Little do they know how much theyll have to go through to get there, but by Gods grace theyll get there! And when they do, as each new year begins and they celebrate the Passover, Moses gives them words to say to their children. When they ask What does this mean? a true education is to take place. This is the sacrifice of theLord's Passover, when we remember and celebrate how God passed over the houses of the people of Israel in Egypt, when he struck the Egyptians but spared our houses. All of this is the new to Israel here in Exodus 12, but this new pattern was now to be the norm from this point forward. Conclusion: This chapter has presented to us with a few massive realities. A New Era: In this chapter God gave Israel a new way to tell time and keep track of their yearly calendar, and it begins with the celebration of Passover. A New Substitution: In this chapter God made a way through the blood of the lamb for Israel to safe and secure in the final plague. A New Feast: In this chapter God instituted a weeklong feast for Israel to maintain each year to remember and teach their children about Gods great work in the Exodus. Church, all three of these things find their fulfillment in Christ. A New Era: In Christ the Kingdom of God and the age to come dawned on earth. Meaning, into our darkness God Himself descended to save a people for Himself and re-order their lives by redeeming them. A New Substitution: In Christ we see the true lamb of God. When John the Baptist saw Jesus he cried out, Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). Paul also calls Christ our Passover lamb in 1 Cor. 5. This Lamb of God is spotless in that He had no sin of His own, yet this Lamb is the substitute for our sins dying in our place, so now all who look to Him in faith are covered by the blood. So on the final day when God judges the world in righteousness and looks out and sees the blood of His Son covering all who believe, His wrath will pass over them, while all who ignore the Son will face His wrath. A New Feast: In Christ we too have received a new feast to maintain, and like Israel this feast marks a new beginning, and in this feast we remember and teach one another about Gods great work in the gospel. This is the called the Lords Supper. Let me end with this. The Exodus changed everything for Israel, and their calendar reflected this. Church, the gospel changes everything for us, may all our days reflect this! [1] John D. Currid, Exodus 1-18 - EP Study Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: EP Books, 2014) 230. [2] Philip Graham Ryken, Exodus: Saved for Gods Glory Preaching the Word Commentary (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015) 311. [3] Victor P. Hamilton, Exodus: An Exegetical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2023) 179. [4] Hamilton, 181-182. [5] Ryken, 301. [6] Ryken, 307. [7] Ryken, 311.Watch at: https://youtu.be/XKzyoPfOxHE

Over the past five weeks we have slowly progressed through the plagues God brought against Egypt. I pray its encouraged you, sobered you, and comforted you. God shows Himself to be who He is here, and it results in two reactions. For the Egyptians it wouldve been all fear. Watching the God of Israel do these mighty works wouldve dismayed them as all Egypt is destroyed. Seeing all they hold dear ruined wouldve undone them and put a heavy dread within them. They knew they had come to their end. But for the Israelites, I think it wouldve been a double edge. On one hand, watching God do these mighty works wouldve sobered them as well. Seeing His might, wrath, justice, and power revealed wouldve overwhelmed them certainly. But on the other hand, that God would come after Egypt so fiercely for their sake, wouldve brought them great comfort and peace. Yes Hes almighty God, but He has come out to show His might for them, to save them, and rescue them! Church, it reminds me like a moment in C.S. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe there is a moment when the two girls, Susan and Lucy, are playing with Aslan rolling around and wrestling in the grass after a great victory. In that moment the girls say they didnt quite know how to describe it. One moment it felt like they were playing with a soft kitten, but the next it felt like they were playing with a great thunderstorm! Such is the glory of the sobered satisfaction Israel felt watching God come rescue them. Nine plagues have come and gone, and these nine occurred in a carefully constructed pattern, in three sets of three, serving to highlight the singular devastation of the tenth and final plague. That is where weve now arrived, at least in part. Exodus 11 is before us today. Ive divided it into three portions, that show us three wonders. See first The Wonder of Favor (v1-3) TheLordsaid to Moses, Yetone plague more I will bring upon Pharaoh and upon Egypt. Afterward he will let you go from here.When he lets you go, he will drive you away completely.Speak now in the hearing of the people, thatthey ask, every man of his neighbor and every woman of her neighbor, for silver and gold jewelry.And theLordgave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians. Moreover, the man Moses was very great in the land of Egypt, in the sight of Pharaoh's servants and in the sight of the people. What God tells Moses in v1 are words weve been expecting.[1] Back in chapter 3 and again in chapter 6 God told Moses He would strike Pharaoh and Egypt so powerfully that Pharaoh would be compelled to let Israel go. But after nine plagues Pharaoh is still refusing. So as we hear God say in v1, one plague more I will bring we know this moment long expected has now arrived. The first nine plagues increased in their severity, one by one, and in them God caused so much destruction in Egypt that even the servants of Pharaoh cried out in despair, saying Egypt was ruined, and telling Pharaoh to give in and let the people go. But he wouldnt. These opening verses remind us of this explicitly. In v1 we see Gods about to make one final devastating move against Egypt. In v2-3 we see two more things will happen to Israel. In v2 they will plunder the Egyptians on their way out, and in v3 they will be held in great favor by the people of Egypt. What a turn of events here! The people once enslaved and oppressed now become objects of awe as well as the new owners of many treasures. And of course it ought to be like this! God has come and shown Himself to be the God of wonders, and Moses to be His powerful servant.[2] They ought to be held in favor. But dont hear this wrongly. Yes, it says God will give them favor in the sight of the Egyptians, but the favor is more like a fearful awe than a celebrity crush. The Egyptians viewed Moses and the Israelites with awestruck wonder, because they knew when this man raises his staff, stuff happens! Stuff they had never seen before. So they will be more than willing when Israel comes asking for their treasures. Why? Because its as if the whole nation is feeling, Enough is enough. What do they want? Gold, silver, jewelry? Give it to them and get them out of here. This isnt the Israelites stealing from the Egyptians. No, God has so shown his might that they will freely give to His people. And long ago God promised it would be like this. In Gen. 15 God told Abraham that after He punishes the nation who enslaved His people, they shall come out in freedom with great possessions (Gen. 15:13-14). But, notice it Church, who is not mentioned in v2-3? Pharaoh. Why is he not mentioned? Because it seems that a great distance has developed between Pharaoh and the rest of the Egyptians by this point.[3] Everyone seems to realize that resistance to the God of Israel and Moses was useless, that continuing to refuse the command would only bring about Egypts sure end. Everyone knew this, everyone that is, except Pharaoh. Pharaoh was still digging in his heels. Yet here in this tenth and final plague, things will be different. What God does will be so severe that Pharaoh will not only let Israel go out of Egypt, Pharaoh will drive Israel out. The Wonder of Judgment (v4-8) So Moses said, Thus says theLord:About midnight I will go out in the midst of Egypt,and every firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sits on his throne, even to the firstborn of the slave girl who isbehind the handmill, and all the firstborn of the cattle.There shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there has never been, nor ever will be again.But not a dog shall growlagainst any of the people of Israel, either man or beast, that you may know that theLordmakes a distinction between Egypt and Israel.Andall these your servants shall come down to me and bow down to me, saying, Get out, you and all the people who follow you. And after that I will go out. And he went out from Pharaoh in hot anger. At this point in the chapter, there is a matter of difficulty to address. In v4-8 we see Moses speaking to Pharaoh. But, didnt their last meeting already occur? I thought we saw Pharaoh say at the end of chapter 10 that hed never see Moses face again? Well he did say that. So, what do we make of this here occurring in chapter 11? Did Moses go back into Pharaohs presence to give one more word from God? Some do think thats whats happening here, but I dont. I think whats going on is that chapter 11 is not chronological, but topical, focusing on the final plague.[4] So this dialogue between Moses and Pharaoh that occurs here, I think took place at the end of chapter 10, but Moses includes it here in chapter 11 to highlight the severity of the final plague, and to prepare the stage for the Passover, which will be introduced in chapter 12. In v4 God is ironic. Pharaoh has said repeatedly that he will not let the people go out of Egypt, so what does God say? I will go out into Egypt Its as if the nine plagues weve seen so far have just been a prelude to this one, where God decides to step onto the scene Himself.[5] And when He goes out, nothing will ever be the same. Here the final and most terrible plague is announced, every firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sits on his throne, even to the firstborn of the slave girl who isbehind the handmill, and all the firstborn of the cattle. What God intends to do here in the death of the firstborn will bring about massive carnage.[6] Thousands will die in this one act. You could, wrongly, invent naturalistic explanations for all the other plagues. But not here. There is simply no other explanation than the God of Israel coming to strike Egypt with a final blow. How are we to view this? Is this unfair? Is this overly cruel? Or is this not enough? We can only go so far in arriving at an answer in this, but Id think we do well to see this as justice being done for all the sins of Egypt. Early on in Exodus we saw the Pharaohs enjoyed a long pastime of enslaving and oppressing the Israelites, 400 years of it. Then a new Pharaoh arises, who raises the bar by murdering as many Hebrew baby boys as he can. Into this murderous scene God sends His deliverer, Moses, keeping him safe throughout the whole bloody affair. And then God says to Pharaoh in chapter 4, Israel is My firstborn son. Let My son go that he may worship Me. But if you refuse, I will kill your firstborn son (Ex. 4:22-23). Now this Word is coming to pass. There is mercy mixed in with justice here to see. It was a mercy to have these firstborn children to die in the middle of the night during their sleep as opposed to another more violent manner.[7] Yes there will be wailing, but this wailing will occur in the morning when families rise and discover such devastating death. Once it was Israel crying out greatly in their suffering, now its Egypt crying out greatly in a suffering the likes of which theyve not known nor heard before, nor will ever know or hear again. All the firstborn children in this plague will die, from high up in Pharaohs palace down to the lowliest places among the servants who labored in the mills. God will be no respecter of persons here, all of Egypt is in view. Even the firstborn among the cattle are in view, because of how intimately connected the lives of cattle were to the Egyptian way of life. Moses says more to Pharaoh here. He says not even a dog shall growlagainst any of the people of Israel, either man or beast, that you may know that theLordmakes a distinction between Egypt and Israel. This is to emphasize once again that nothing in Egypt can come against Israel any longer, not even the stray dogs, because the God of Israel has worked so powerfully. Lastly Moses tells it like it is to Pharaoh. That in the end, all his servants will come to Moses, and bowing downwill ask him and Israel to leave. At this final word, Moses walks out in hot anger. The Wonder of Sovereignty (v9-10) Then theLord said to Moses,Pharaoh will not listen to you, thatmy wonders may be multiplied in the land of Egypt. Moses and Aaron did all these wonders before Pharaoh, and theLord hardened Pharaoh's heart, and he did not let the people of Israel go out of his land. Once again but not for the last time we read here of Pharaohs hard heart. Overall in Exodus we hear of his hardened heart 19 times.[8] Three times we hear it phrased as Pharaoh hardening his own heart; six times we hear it phrased as a general reference that his heart became hardened, and ten times we hear it phrased explicitly said that the Lord has, is, or will harden his heart. Many falter at this kind of language, believing God to be doing something out of bounds or unjust to Pharaoh. I can understand why many feel like this. But that misses much of whats happening here. Pharaoh is not a passive robot merely subject to a sovereign God, no. Pharaoh is an active and agreeable participant in the sins against God and His people. God was indeed sovereign over the heart of Pharaoh, but to quote our confessions of old, God is sovereign over all hearts in such a way that upholds personal responsibility and culpability. In other words, God is not making Pharaoh do something he doesnt want to do here. In his hardened sinful state, Pharaoh is happy to keep on doing what he desired to do. Why did God do this? It tells here in v9-10. God hardened Pharaohs heart so that the plagues could happen, so the Exodus could happen, and so the Israelites could tell these stories to their kids, and grandkids, and on and on as each new generation repeats the great stories of old. Or to put differently, the God of Wonders did all these wonders for the glory of His name and the good of His people. Thats what chapter 11 is all about. Conclusion: So Church, I want to end with this thought: God is not just sovereign over all people, but sovereign for His people.[9] Do you know see the difference in those two statements. We affirm the sovereignty of God, yes. There is no rogue molecule in the universe, there are no surprises to God, He never says oops, He is never caught off guard, He ordains and rules over all, amen! But the plagues push us to go further. We saw it in v4 didnt we? God Himself will go out, to bring one more plague against Egypt, why? To rescue His people! He is sovereign, yes. Church, He is sovereign for us. The same reality applies to the very first Christmas. God made all things, made us, and all was very good until it went very wrong. We sinned and brought death into the world and into ourselves. And the ebbing and flowing of the whole OT is the prelude to the moment when God Himself walked on stage in the Person of His Son. Why did He come? To lead a new Exodus, out from the power of Satan the greater Pharaoh, and out from the cruelty of sin the greater slavery. In Christ we have redemption. This is why we call Christ Lord, because He has saved us, body and soul, from all our sins, not with silver or gold but with His precious blood, and has freed us from all the power of the devil to make us His own possession.[10] Church, this Christmas I pray you feel the same double edge Israel felt in Exodus 11. They saw the Lords might come out against Egypt in great wonders and they all knew that God was God, that no one else was god, and that nothing is too strong or hard for this God. But they also knew God came out in great power against Egypt, for their sake. So too in Christ. God the Son came to the world in order to come out against the world, the flesh, and the Devil, displaying His great might in signs and wonders. He overwhelmed many that were proud and arrogant, but He drew near sinners. Are any of you here today sinners, overwhelmed by sin and its wreckage in you and around you? Look to Christ! If you look to and trust in Christ, know this, the great sovereign God of wonders is for you, not against you. Though all hell break loose, you need fear no evil, because the Lord has saved you and will keep you. He has said that He is making all things new, including us. [1] John I. Durham, Exodus - WBC (Waco TX: Word Books, 1987) 147. [2] John D. Currid, Exodus 1-18 - EP Study Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: EP Books, 2014) 225. [3] Douglas K. Stuart, Exodus NAC (Brentwood, TN: BH Publishing, 2006) 263. [4] Brevard S. Childs, The Book of Exodus (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004) 161. [5] Durham, 150. [6] Victor P. Hamilton, Exodus: An Exegetical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2023) 168. [7] Stuart, 265. [8] Kevin DeYoung, God of Wonders, sermon on 3.20.2016, accessed via christcovenant.org, 12.5.2025. [9] DeYoung, God of Wonders. [10] Heidelberg Catechism, question 34.Watch at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK-8d5rRk9g&list=PLyIh9eJuev_zLnKg5Bkl6HPrCbDcP9ss7

Introduction-Advent (From Darkness to Light) Advent is one of my favorite times of the year, but at the same time, I never grew up in a very liturgical church -We celebrated the Christmas season and of course as every good Baptist the yearly cantata -But when we take a moment and step back and see things from a more traditional liturgical (fancy word for order of worship) view Advent adds so much to this time of year and especially as we come to days text there is a depth of meaning of the hope that light will shine into darkness. -Each week of advent we light another candle signifying the work of Christ and the anticipation of His coming. With each candle the light becomes greater slowly pushing back the darkness that surrounds it, until in Christmas eve evening the final candle is light and the room is bathed in the light of Christ. Each week shows the triumph of the gospel over darkness And this year for Advent we are actually continuing straight through our Exodus series as in it we will see the judgment of sin and the hope found in the Passover lamb. And how through the death of the first born comes redemption. As I said though as we approach Advent we begin in Darkness and shadow a symbol of judgment and un creation and with that in mind let us turn now to the text before us: Where we will see today both the reality of a literal and spiritual darkness has the work of Gods judgment and the grace of his light towards his own: So first we see the Literal Darkness descend: I. A Literal Darkness (21-23) Exodus 10:2123 Then the Lord said to Moses, Stretch out your hand toward heaven, that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, a darkness to be felt. So, Moses stretched out his hand toward heaven, and there was pitch darkness in all the land of Egypt three days. They did not see one another, nor did anyone rise from his place for three days, but all the people of Israel had light where they lived. We have seen now 8 plagues fall upon Egypt: (each attacking the strength of Egypt and their so-called gods) -Blood -Frogs -Gnats -Flies -Pestilence -Boils -Hail -Locus Here we come to the final plague in the final triplet: Darkness The Lord Commands Moses -No Warning (Just as with the Boils and Gnats good gives no warning to Pharaoh only tells Moses to act) SO, he does -Illustration of darkness falling There is a terror in this reality if you spend anytime really thinking about the suddenness and the depth of what is befalling Egypt This is straight out of a disaster movie -One minute there is light and calm the next darkness rolls over the land -In this we can clearly see the supernatural reality of this moment Purely supernatural -Each of the others have some natural occurrence or are replicated by the magicians -As you go back over the last eight plagues there are elements that these are natural things that happen but have been supernaturally turned up to 11 by God as a sign of his judgment -The only other non-natural occurrence is the Nile to blood which is still replicated by the magicians. Here there is no doubt of the source, there is no middle ground. Darkness does not fall as it does here: -Some falsely try to give it a natural occurrence such as a strong sandstorm (but the language doesnt line up for such a reading) -Rather in this darkness we see the undoing of creation for those not under gods protection -An Undoing of creation (A return to darkness) a return to before creation as the light no longer shines on them they are subject to complete darkness (Genesis 1:12 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.) -Darkness in scripture is often associated with judgment or of those outside Gods covenant John 3:19 And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. Amos 5:20 Is not the day of the Lord darkness, and not light, and gloom with no brightness in it? -It is also an attack on their False god Ra (Who is the sun god) -IN many dynasties of Egyptian worship Ra is the preeminent of their deities as he is the one who governs all that happens in the world being the source of light and re birth -Here again God challenges their own false worship by showing his supreme authority over their gods. -For whom else can cover the suns power and quench its effects -Not only though does the light from the sun cease to sign in Egypt, but light itself seems to flee For it was a Darkness you could feel It Was a Dark Darkness (The Hebrew doubling adds context to the depth of this reality) A Darkness you could Feel -Darkness has some pretty wicked effects on the human psyche (Thus they become completely inactive) -This darkness was paralyzing to the people -For three days they did nothing (That is darkness) Illustration-Touring caves in Kentucky you get to sections where the turn off the lights and you cant see your hand even if it is right in front of you. -Now turn it up again to 11 -And far more terrifying than I think we can imagine -Truly the perfect set up for the final plague (Not wasted) So, we have seen the judgment of God through literal darkness we will now see in 24-29 the judgment of God through A spiritual darkness: II. A Spiritual Darkness (24-29) Exodus 10:2429 Then Pharaoh called Moses and said, Go, serve the Lord; your little ones also may go with you; only let your flocks and your herds remain behind. But Moses said, You must also let us have sacrifices and burnt offerings, that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God. Our livestock also must go with us; not a hoof shall be left behind, for we must take of them to serve the Lord our God, and we do not know with what we must serve the Lord until we arrive there. But the Lord hardened Pharaohs heart, and he would not let them go. Then Pharaoh said to him, Get away from me; take care never to see my face again, for on the day you see my face you shall die. Moses said, As you say! I will not see your face again. We see the realty that Pharaohs heart remains darkened to the reality before him: Pharaohs continues his halfway measure of seeking a compromise He is still seeking to make a deal to keep the people -Moses is done with this and we now see he challenges Pharaoh (Not only will we leave with our animals you will prove some as well) This is a bold moment as we have seen Pharaoh time and again play with the Israelites and with Moses and each time Moses prays for Pharaoh and again Pharaoh refuse to relent or repent truly from his ways, rather we see him even in his compromises show he has no desire to change course. The darkness is greater in him than that which he just walked through, and he doesnt even realize it Once more the Lord seals Pharaohs heard and steadys his resolve to keep the people -And so, we see God seal Pharaohs fate. He will see this thing through to the end Pharaoh become enraged at Moses (Now he threatens him, no more prayers in this moment) He will not turn back he has put all his chips in and will not be deterred In this moment he is done seeking prayers and restoration he is so angry with Moses, and he would rather see them Dead (Should he see them again) -And they are cool with this Moses is equally done with the whole situation -Its hard to watch someone continually drive themselves into destruction -The darkness is deep within Pharaoh and as we have seen God is the one at works so that the whole of Egypt and Israel will Know that HE IS GOD! And so, we have now seen that literal darkness that has befallen the land of Egypt in 21-23 and the Spiritual Darkness of Pharaoh in 24-29 we should go back as we move to the final point to look at the great hope in the midst of all this and it is the light of Hope in vs 23 A Light of Hope (23) Exodus 10:23 They did not see one another, nor did anyone rise from his place for three days, but all the people of Israel had light where they lived. This simple verse shows the immense mercy of God in two direct ways and also as a precursor to what we see throughout the scriptures: 1st we see directly the mercy of God The Darkness was Limited to 3 days; it is short and yet dully powerful. We saw in the first point that the dark darkness was a terrible reality, and it was a paralyzing judgment, but the reality was it was still limited, God was still merciful in his execution of judgment Gods judgments are purposeful and direct they 2nd we see the Light of God is always upon His people Again, God is with his people for they are of the light because God is light (not of any good that they have done, but because he is their God) God continues to preserve his covenant people and keep them here from the judgment facing Egypt. It is another moment of God reminding them of who their God is and showing them the immensity of his mercy, love and grace towards them. As we have seen the plagues are not just about Pharoah Knowing who God is, it is about Israel knowing who their God is, these are the moments while they seem subtle are essential moments for them to learn that He is! So that throughout their history in the midst of hardship their descendent such as Micah can say: Micah 7:8 Rejoice not over me, O my enemy; when I fall, I shall rise; when I sit in darkness, the Lord will be a light to me. The two final aspects that we can glean from the light of hope are more forward looking as well as we see this text point us firmly forward toward the greatest day of judgment and redemption the world has ever known at calvary: For in that place for three hours light failed as the wrath of God is poured out on himself to save us sinners: Luke 23:4445 It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour, while the suns light failed. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. It is no accident that the judgment of God is seen in the darkness of the day or that it held for 3 hours. These are all part of Gods divine work, pointing to the reality of Gods judgment against sin, and also His forgiveness. Which leads to the concluding purpose and that is the truth that: Christ Advent was meant to bring s out of the darkness Matthew 4:1517 The land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles the people dwelling in darkness have seen a great light, and for those dwelling in the region and shadow of death, on them a light has dawned. From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. He came preaching the truth repent and believe -The great light shines forth into the darkness, hope for those in the shadow -The sun has shown are we watching do we appreciate the reality or is our spiritual darkness so great we do not cherish the reality of the sun. For he is the light of the world: John 8:12 Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life. May we who have seen live in light of these truths. May we proclaim these truths to those who do not yet know: Acts 26:1718 delivering you from your people and from the Gentilesto whom I am sending you to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me. For we this advent season we who have experienced the light of hope in Christ, the Gospel grace shown upon us by the father who has transferred us from the kingdom of Darkness into his great kingdom of Light, may we shine bright with this wonderful hope that the light of Christ remains for those who will look and see that the baby born in the manger came to die, came to take on himself the darkness of sin and death, so that we may truly experience the light of God and life to the full. Watch at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWnnKBr2cmQ&t=15729s

The Plagues, part 4 Exodus 10:1-20 Introduction: Long ago Charles Spurgeon wrote the following words, “Every believer thirsts for God, and longs to climb the hill of the Lord, seeing him face to face. We ought not rest content in the mists of the valley when the summits await us. Our soul thirsts to drink deep of this cup, yet, many saints are content to live like men in coal mines, who see not the sun; they are content to wear the miner’s garb when they might put on king’s robes; tears mar their faces when they might anoint them with heavenly oil. Rouse yourself, O believer, from your low condition! Cast away your sloth, your lethargy, your coldness, or whatever interferes with Christ. Make him the source and center of all thy soul’s delight. What has enchanted you into such folly as to remain in the mines when you may climb the heights? Live not in the lowlands of bondage but press forward to things more sublime and heavenly. Aspire to a higher, a nobler, a fuller life. It is ours in Christ, O believer, reach out for it!” Pray with me. Meat: Well good morning Church, open your Bibles to Exodus 10. Four headings of bright beauty to behold today, see first… Visit 1 (v1-6) “Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go in to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his servants, that I may show these signs of mine among them, and that you may tell in the hearing of your son and of your grandson how I have dealt harshly with the Egyptians and what signs I have done among them, that you may know that I am the Lord.” So Moses and Aaron went in to Pharaoh and said to him, “Thus says the Lord, the God of the Hebrews, ‘How long will you refuse to humble yourself before me? Let my people go, that they may serve me. For if you refuse to let my people go, behold, tomorrow I will bring locusts into your country, and they shall cover the face of the land, so that no one can see the land. And they shall eat what is left to you after the hail, and they shall eat every tree of yours that grows in the field, and they shall fill your houses and the houses of all your servants and of all the Egyptians, as neither your fathers nor your grandfathers have seen, from the day they came on earth to this day.’” Then he turned and went out from Pharaoh.” As we have seen before now a few times, this eighth plague begins just as the second and fifth plague begin, with Moses coming straight into Pharaoh’s presence in his palace court with a command and a warning. In this way the eighth plague is like what we’ve seen before. But there are new things to see here as well. First, notice the reasons God gives to Moses in v1-2. We’ve heard God say He has hardened Pharaoh’s heart before and that He’s bringing about the plagues so that Egypt may know He’s the Lord, God has said that a few times now. But see the beginning of v2? There we learn God is bringing about the plagues not just for the sake of Egypt, but for the sake of Israel. Why? So that Moses can tell his son and grandson about it. In other words, God is doing a work He wants His people to remember, so He commands Moses to tell his sons and grandsons about this. Now, we all know kids love stories, and I think adults do too if their honest enough. If you think about what makes a good story, the Exodus has all of it. An evil villain, an unlikely hero, a bitter conflict, miraculous twists and turns, a daring rescue, the triumph of good over evil, which ultimately, brings about a happy ending. The Exodus all of this. As much as kids would’ve loved this story, God’s writing this story here not just to entertain the kids but to teach them. That’s what Exodus teaches us. It is the story of Israel’s salvation. It is a story that explains everything they needed to know. It explains who God is: that He’s the LORD, the God over all, the God of their fathers, the true King of power and glory. It explains who they are: the people of God, enslaved by Pharaoh. It explains how God rescued them: by His strong and mighty outstretched arm. It explains where they came from: out of Egypt. It explains where they’re going: into the promise land. And it explains why God rescued them: to glorify Him! This story answers all the big questions, doesn’t it? Who is God? Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? What is the meaning of life? This story is important, so important that it must not stop with Moses’ generation, it must reverberate down through the ages. Church, I don’t want to wait till the end of the sermon to get the gospel, it’s right here at the start today, in this point! As God gave Moses and Israel a story, He’s given us a story to tell our descendants! And the story He gave us is greater than the Exodus, and in it God tells us everything we need to know! It explains who God is: our Father in heaven, full of grace and truth. It explains who we are: made by Him, in His image, but fallen in sin. It explains how God rescued us: by the Work of His beloved Son. It explains how the Son’s work is applied to us: by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. It explains where we’ve come from: sin’s cruel death and slavery. It explains where we’re going: to be with God in glory forever. And it explains why God rescued us: to glorify Him. This story answers all the big questions too! And this story, ancient as it is, remains the story we repeat and rehearse as we gather together to worship, as it also remains the story we scatter together to spread abroad! May our children hear it from us, may their children hear it from them, and on and on and on until the dawn of the last day! Let’s get back to Moses. He and Aaron go into Pharaoh’s court, and notice what they first say in v3? “How long will you refuse to humble yourself before me?” This is a good question. Seven plagues have come and gone; how much longer will Pharaoh stubbornly dig in his heels? God is clear in this question, either Pharaoh humble himself now, or God will humiliate him further. After this comes the plague announcement. If Pharaoh refuses to let the people go, locusts will come. So many locusts that they won’t even be able to see the ground. They will eat everything in the land left over from the hailstorm, and they will fill every house, from Pharaoh’s palace to the servants huts. Such a thing, Moses adds, has never happened nor will ever happen again in Egypt. Then notice it, directly after this Moses turns and leaves Pharaoh’s court, without allowing him a chance to respond. This left an impression. See now v7-11… Visit 2 (v7-11) “Then Pharaoh's servants said to him, “How long shall this man be a snare to us? Let the men go, that they may serve the Lord their God. Do you not yet understand that Egypt is ruined?” So Moses and Aaron were brought back to Pharaoh. And he said to them, “Go, serve the Lord your God. But which ones are to go?” Moses said, “We will go with our young and our old. We will go with our sons and daughters and with our flocks and herds, for we must hold a feast to the Lord.” But he said to them, “The Lord be with you, if ever I let you and your little ones go! Look, you have some evil purpose in mind. No! Go, the men among you, and serve the Lord, for that is what you are asking.” And they were driven out from Pharaoh's presence.” Pharaoh, remember, had already heard a question in v3 beginning with the words “How long…” and now he gets another one, this time from his own servants in v7. And what a question this is! It’s not only a call from Pharaoh’s own people to give in to Moses, but it also shows us how bad things have gotten in Egypt. They say in the end of v7 that Egypt itself is ruined. For this reason they tell Pharaoh to let Israel go, so that Moses would no longer be a snare to them. How ironic is that? The very ones who enslaved the Israelites, keeping them trapped and denying them their freedom, they’re now getting a taste of their own medicine, as they feel like Moses is holding them captive! So Pharaoh quickly brings Moses and Aaron back in and in v8 says that he’ll let them go…but he adds a question to it, “Which ones are to go?” Moses responds in v9 saying all of them will go, their young, their old, their sons, their daughters, even their herds are to go. Pharaoh sarcastically bursts out in v10 when he hears this saying, ‘HA! The Lord would indeed be with you if I let all of you go, you clearly are up to some evil here. No, you all cannot go, only take your men.’ Apparently, Pharaoh had a very low view of women and children. To him, only men seem to matter when it comes to worship, so why should they all go? What Pharaoh doesn’t know is that all God’s people matter to God, from the least to the greatest. So Moses tells him this, that they all must go: the young, the old, the sons, the daughters, the men, and the women. Implied in Moses’ response to Pharaoh is a clear reminder that the commands of God are not open for discussion, for debate, or for negotiation. Moses rejects any conditions or limitations added to God’s Word. When God calls, commands, or declares, what He says stands, with no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Yet, Moses doesn’t get a chance to respond to this because, very quickly, Pharaoh kicks them out of his presence without allowing any more discussion. So, we’ve seen two visits with Pharaoh so far, I think we know what’s coming next. See it in v12-15… Lots of Locusts (v12-15) “Then the Lord said to Moses, “Stretch out your hand over the land of Egypt for the locusts, so that they may come upon the land of Egypt and eat every plant in the land, all that the hail has left.” So Moses stretched out his staff over the land of Egypt, and the Lord brought an east wind upon the land all that day and all that night. When it was morning, the east wind had brought the locusts. The locusts came up over all the land of Egypt and settled on the whole country of Egypt, such a dense swarm of locusts as had never been before, nor ever will be again. They covered the face of the whole land, so that the land was darkened, and they ate all the plants in the land and all the fruit of the trees that the hail had left. Not a green thing remained, neither tree nor plant of the field, through all the land of Egypt.” It's astonishing to me how fast the scene unfolds for us. The command comes in v12, Moses obeys in v13, and we see the results in v14-15. This eighth plague is simply devastating in scope. We know something of locusts don’t we? Each year our own locusts begin small and black, but after a few weeks they’re bigger and yellow and prehistoric looking…but they don’t really bother. They seem more scared of us than we are of them. There have been reports of locust hordes sweeping across the world throughout history. In the 1920’s locusts swept across Africa consuming everything over five million square miles, which, is a space double the size of the United States. Another report came in 2001 of a locust horde sweeping across central Asia, which was so vast the New York Times reported the infestation reached ten thousand locusts per ten square feet. Can you even imagine that? This gives us some kind of idea what was occurring in Egypt in this plague. Perhaps that first night the Egyptians thought they’d be fine as they just heard and felt this great wind that God stirred, a strong east wind. This phrase east wind occurs a few other times in Scripture, mainly in the Psalms and the Prophets, and it’s always referring to judgment and dark and dreadful things (see Ps. 48:7, Jer. 18:17, Ezek. 19:12, Hos. 13:15, Jonah 4:8). So that night the east wind came, and in the morning the dawn brought a different story. That wind brought hordes upon hordes of locusts. v15 says they were so numerous they covered all the ground, nearly blotted out the sun, and consumed all the vegetation left alive from the hailstorm. Nothing green remained. Notice also that the phrase in v14 “such a dense swarm” in the original Hebrew is again the phrase we’ve heard before, kabed m’od, or very heavy. The locusts laid heavy on Egypt. Lesson? God has brought another plague to Egypt as heavy as Pharaoh’s hard heart. But God was up to more than this, wasn’t He? This time the Lord set His sights on their god Senehem (the divine protector against pests) and their god Anubis (the guardian of the fields). These idols failed to do what they were supposed to do, as the God of Israel proves Himself the stronger. This is the eighth plague. The Same Sad Story (v16-20) “Then Pharaoh hastily called Moses and Aaron and said, “I have sinned against the Lord your God, and against you. Now therefore, forgive my sin, please, only this once, and plead with the Lord your God only to remove this death from me.” So he went out from Pharaoh and pleaded with the Lord. And the Lord turned the wind into a very strong west wind, which lifted the locusts and drove them into the Red Sea. Not a single locust was left in all the country of Egypt. But the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart, and he did not let the people of Israel go.” As the passage concludes we see more of the same. Pharaoh quickly gets Moses and Aaron back in front of him, and begs for relief. The words he uses are good, he even calls this eighth plague “this death” certainly shows more urgency on Pharaoh’s part as he’s recognizing more of the gravity of the situation. But while these words would seem to give the impression of sincerity, we know Pharaoh is after redemption, only rest from a God who’s afflicting him. But Moses prays and God removes the locusts, blowing them with a west wind into the Red Sea, perhaps foreshadowing what will come of Pharaoh in the end. And Pharaoh did what Pharaoh has done each time, he didn’t let the people go. Conclusion: Come back to v3 with me. There we heard the question, “How long will you refuse to humble yourself before me?” It was a good question for Pharaoh, it remains a good question for us. Peter tells us “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you” (1 Peter 5:5-6). Of course the question can be put in other terms. ‘How long will you continue living in your sin?’ ‘How long will you destroy yourself and those nearest you?’ ‘How long will you put off the day of repentance?’ Think of how you’d answer the question for yourself. Think of Jesus Himself, thorn crowned head and pierced hands, think of Him coming close to you, looking you in the eyes, and in His thunderous loving voice asking you, “How long will you refuse to humble yourself before Me?” Church our passage today confronts us. You may not see it today and you may not see it tomorrow, but you can count on this: everyone will either humble themselves or be humiliated before God. Maybe you’ve seen it, in your own life, or in a family member, or a close friend. It’s always tragic…the devastation of sin. The tragic thing about sin is that, sometimes, when people hit rock bottom, they keep digging. This is what sin does. It keeps persisting in folly even when the wreckage it produces is clear. Church, sin ruins you. This is how our passage confronts us. But Church, our passage can comfort us as well, if, we humble ourselves. So hear it again. Hear God ask you today, “How long will you refuse to humble yourself before me?” As I stated at the beginning, we were made to soar on the heights of heaven, yet we are far too willing to settle for the mines below. God promises terrible things to those who refuse to humble themselves like Pharaoh. We see that here. But Church, He promises heaven to those who come to His Son. Forsake your many sins, flee to the Savior, and find shelter and rest for your soul. Watch at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T2EzMd_mFM&t=1996s

Watch at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUew5daOnMQ

Think for a moment about the most insignificant things you deal with every day. Maybe its sand on your floorboard, dust in your house, or a tiny gnat that you must keep waving away. These things are nothing, but they remain a nuisance. Now think about what would happen if these insignificant things were multiplied by a million? What happens when the very dust beneath your feet rises up and becomes a suffocating, inescapable swarm? Thats the terrifying reality Pharaoh faced in the third and fourth plagues. God didn't send a dragon or a tidal wave. He sent the smallest things, gnats and flies, and delivered a message that was impossible to ignore. The text before us today is Exodus 8:16-32. As has been the case, Lord willing, today will be no different as there is much for us to glean and enjoy here. See first Plague 3: Gnats (v16-19) Then theLordsaid to Moses, Say to Aaron,Stretch out your staff and strike the dust of the earth, so that it may become gnats in all the land of Egypt.And they did so. Aaron stretched out his hand with his staff and struck the dust of the earth, andthere were gnats on man and beast. All the dust of the earth became gnats in all the land of Egypt.Themagicians tried by their secret arts to produce gnats, but they could not. So there were gnats on man and beast.Then the magicians said to Pharaoh, This isthe finger of God. But Pharaoh's heart was hardened, and he would not listen to them, as theLordhad said. Right away we need to remember the pattern of the plagues.[1] Before the final and most devastating plague of all, the first nine plagues come in three sets of three. In each set of three the first plague begins with Moses meeting Pharaoh in the morning (plague 1, 4, and 7), the second plague begins with Moses coming into Pharaohs palace (plague 2, 5, and 8), and the third plague begins with no warning at all (plague 3, 6, and 9). This order reveals serves to highlight the last plague which stands in the place of prominent dread. As this third plague begins in v16 what do we see? No warning, no visit with Pharaoh, no command to let the people go, the plague just begins. God instructs Moses to tell Aaron to stretch out his staff and strike the dust of the earth so that it would turn into gnats. Aaron did so in v17, and gnats covered everyone in Egypt. Lets ask some questions here. First question, does the phrase dust of the earth stand out to you? It ought to. This is not the first time we have come across this phrase in the Bible. It first appears in Genesis 13 when God makes a great promise to Abraham. God said He would make Abrahams descendants as the dust of the earth meaning, Hell make his descendants so numerous theyll be beyond count. As glorious as that promise is back then in its context, God uses the phrase here in v16 to indicate how the gnats about to descend onto Egypt will also be beyond count. This is hard to grasp, isnt it? I mean, we know gnats. One gnat, or a few gnats arent that problematic. A simple wave of the hand and they fly away to not bother us again. Will Pharaoh be able to do that here? No way. He and everyone else in Egypt will be so surrounded by gnats that they wont be able to look down and see their feet clearly. The scope of this third plague is incredible. Second question, were they really gnats? I ask this because of the Hebrew word here translated as gnats has some other options. Options that seem far worse than gnats. The Hebrew word is ken (pronounced kain) and it can also refer tolice or maggots. Gross right? Some of you might have been thinking, Gnats arent so bad. But lice and maggots? This third plague just turned into the stuff of nightmares. Lice beyond count, crawling all over you, biting you, laying their eggs, making you itch, sick! Or maggotsnasty, oozy, slimy things, creeping over everything and all over you? No thanks! But, it could also be gnats. Now, you should know that here in the third plague, just like the first two plagues, many try to find a natural explanation. One notable opinion is as follows.[2] Because all the frogs have been destroyed throughout Egypt in the second plague, there necessarily would follow a surge in gnats throughout the land with no frogs to eat them. Thus, this third plague is completely understandable. Church, this is a bad interpretation of the plagues. Why? If we can point to a natural explanation, we lose the main point God is making. All the plagues are miraculous, wonders worked by God for the display of His great power and might. This is what God desires to show both Egypt and Israel. Third question, why gnats? Remember God is up to far more than just destabilizing Egypt in the plagues, Hes attacking the gods of Egypt and showing Himself to be stronger. Here in the third and fourth plague (which well see soon) God is attacking the Egyptian deity named Khepri, the god of life who is often depicted in Egyptian religious imagery as a flying insect.[3] That God here sends a multitude of gnats and later on a multitude of flies, shows us that He is openly challenging Khepri and displaying how this god cant do a thing to stop Him. In this the Egyptians learn afresh how strong and great the God of Israel truly is. While this is all very similar to the first two plagues, one clear difference is found in v18-19. Pharaohs magicians tried, as before, to duplicate the wonders God had done, but now they were unable to do so. For these experts in the secret arts, having to admit defeat was humiliating. Lets pause right here. Ive said before, and Ill say it again now I think these magicians did what they were able to do because of the power of Satan. But what do we learn in their inability in the third plague? Church, learn here the limits of the Devils power.[4] Dont get me wrong, the Devil has power. He has the power to rebel, to tempt, to deceive, to accuse, to hold captive, to afflict, to oppress, to oppose, and to destroy our earthly bodies. But, think of what Satan cannot do. He cannot create, he cannot redeem, he cannot love, he cannot be humble, he cannot undo what God does, and he cannot go where he desires to go, being that he is subject to Gods sovereign pleasure. Like a dog on a leash, the Devil serves Gods designs. All his evil proves to be an instrument for bringing about things far more lovely than he ever desired. This third plague was a defeat for Satan, as his servants could not create gnats. But the Devils greatest defeat was still far off. It would come one day though, on the best of all days, on resurrection morning. He thought he won his greatest battle when the Son of God died on the cross and entered the tomball hell rejoiced, and Satan smiled in vile pleasure seeing a dead Messiah. But the Son who died didnt stay dead, He rose from death, defeating it forever, leading forth a host of captives who come to Him in faith for salvation. In this victory the Devil was defanged. We must remember this, Church. As Christians we dont just face hard times, struggles, and seasons of hardship in this life. We face an enemy and must contend with him. So remember, Satan is potent but not omnipotent, wise but not omniscient, present but not omnipresent. God is stronger. God can deliver us from evil. God can enable us to stand against him. And God can keep us safe in His arms. What we see here in this third plague is meant to bolster us in this fight. The Devil is limited, God is infinite. Be encouraged Churchyes were in a battle, but we fight an already defeated foe, our victory is sure, his doom is absolute. Back to the narrative. After these magicians admitted defeat, they told Pharaoh the last thing he wanted to hear in v19, This is the finger of God. You might initially think this confession is a conversion to the God of Israel, but its not. The word they use here for God is a generic term, and it was a plural term, meaning it was a word they wouldve used to describe their own gods.[5] What are they saying then? Theyre saying a power greater than theirs has proven stronger than their magic. Theyre admitting that theyre in a spiritual battle, and that theyre losing.[6] And theyre saying these gnats are of divine origin.[7] Yet, even this confession of defeat doesnt sway Pharaoh. Due to the hardness of his heart, he remains firm in his unbelief. Thats the third plague. Now see Plague 4: Flies (v20-32) Well start with v20-24, Then theLordsaid to Moses,Rise up early in the morning and present yourself to Pharaoh, as he goes out to the water, and say to him, Thus says theLord,Let my people go, that they may serve me.Or else, if you will not let my people go, behold, I will send swarms of flies on you and your servants and your people, and into your houses. And the houses of the Egyptians shall be filled with swarms of flies, and also the ground on which they stand.But on that dayI will set apart the land of Goshen, where my people dwell, so that no swarms of flies shall be there,that you may know that I am theLordin the midst of the earth.Thus I will put a divisionbetween my people and your people. Tomorrow this sign shall happen.And theLorddid so.There came great swarms of flies into the house of Pharaoh and into his servants' houses. Throughout all the land of Egypt the land was ruined by the swarms of flies. As v20 begins the fourth plague we see God command Moses to rise up early and go to Pharaoh as hes going out into the water. This is the same pattern as the first plague, when the Nile was turned to blood. That this fourth plague begins the same way the first plague does shows us how this fourth plague is the beginning the next cycle of plagues.[8] Pharaoh himself could very well be thinking as hes going out into the water and sees Moses approaching him, Oh boy, here we go again[9] And he would be right to think that. God isnt done. Much more is about to happen. For the sixth time, Pharaoh hears Gods command to let His people go, or else. This time if he wont let Israel go, God will send swarms of flies on all Egypt. The word flies might really mean flies here, but the Hebrew word is general referring to all manner of biting and nonbiting insects.[10] So think flies, but think also horse flies, mosquitoes, no-see-ums, and the like. Psalm 78 gives us an idea of what these flies were like when it says in v45, God sent among them swarms of flies, which devoured them. That Psalm 78 tells us the flies devoured the Egyptians tells us these flies were of the biting variety. Which is alarming to say the least. Again, this is not just one fly or two flies, or even ten flies. God tells Pharaoh here, that just as the frogs swarmed earlier, so too these flies will now swarm and get into every nook and cranny of Egypt. But, something new happens next in v22-23. See it? God makes a divine distinction, saying this fourth plague will not touch His people at all. The flies will cover Egypt and every Egyptian, but not one Israelite in Goshen will be bit. Why does God make such a division? Was it because Israel worked so hard to earn Gods protection? No. Israel, as weve seen and will continue to see, is a stubborn, sinful, and stiff-necked people. Why then does God make such a division here in this fourth plague? One answer we could give is that God has always been a God who makes divisions. He made divisions at the beginning in the days of creation. He made a division between male and female. He made a division between Noahs family and the rest of the world, Abrahams family and the rest of the world, and here He is making a division with the Israelites and the Egyptians. But, why does God make this divine distinction here in the fourth plague? Answer: because of covenant. In Exodus 2 God heard their groaning and remembered His covenant In remembering the covenant, He came and acted to save His people! Covenant is the guarantee, covenant is the pledge, covenant is the assurance that God will always be God to His people, even despite His people. Deuteronomy 7 states this so well when it says, It was not because you were more in number than any other people that theLordset his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples,butit is because theLordloves you and is keepingthe oath that he swore to your fathers, that theLordhas brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.Know therefore that theLordyour God is God,the faithful Godwho keeps covenant and steadfast love (Deut. 7:7-9a). So God made this distinction, and brought the flies onto Egypt, and see what happened in v24? the land of Egypt the land was ruined by the swarms of flies. But thats not the end of our textsee the what happens next in v25-32, Then Pharaoh called Moses and Aaron and said, Go, sacrifice to your God within the land.But Moses said, It would not be right to do so, for the offerings we shall sacrifice to theLordour God are anabomination to the Egyptians. If we sacrifice offeringsabominable to the Egyptians before their eyes, will they not stone us?We must gothree days' journey into the wilderness and sacrifice to theLordour Godas he tells us.So Pharaoh said, I will let you go to sacrifice to theLordyour God in the wilderness; only you must not go very far away.Plead for me.Then Moses said, Behold, I am going out from you and I will plead with theLordthat the swarms of flies may depart from Pharaoh, from his servants, and from his people, tomorrow. Only let not Pharaohcheat again by not letting the people go to sacrifice to theLord.So Moses went out from Pharaoh and prayed to theLord.And theLorddid as Moses asked, and removed the swarms of flies from Pharaoh, from his servants, and from his people; not one remained.But Pharaohhardened his heart this time also, and did not let the people go. Here our passage ends with Pharaoh not even bothering to call in the magicians. They failed last time, so clearly theyre no more use to Pharaoh.[11] Instead he tries to bargain with Moses, giving up some ground, offering a kind of partial obediencesaying Israel can go and perform their sacrifices to the Lord within the land. Moses calls him on this, that it would be against Egyptian law, which would be dangerous for Israel. So Pharaoh gives up even more ground and says they can go and leave Egypt, but they cant go too far away. And quickly, Pharaoh asks for Moses to pray for him. Moses is again faced with a choice. He knows Pharaoh promised this before and went back on his word, so hes certainly wondering if Pharaoh will do that again. So before leaving, Moses challenges Pharaoh asking him to not go back on his word like he did last time. So off Moses goes to pray and God removes all the flies in Egypt in an instant. Not one remained. And Pharaoh, after seeing this, went back on his word and didnt let the people go. Why? Because he hardened his own heart against the Lord. Thats the fourth plague Conclusion: Church weve seen Gods power displayed in Him using the smallest of creatures to humiliate the greatest of enemies, and by drawing a line in the sand at Goshen, proving His covenant faithfulness. The magicians looked at the gnats and confessed, This is the finger of God. In this they beheld a power they could not replicate. This power exposed the Devil as limited and finite. But the defeat of Satan was not just in the gnats, ultimately it would come in the empty tomb. So our victory is sure because our God is stronger. But the most urgent question for us today comes from the divine distinction between Egypt and Israel. There God set His people apart. Church, this is also the reality of the New Covenant. Were a people God has rescued and redeemed and called out of darkness into His marvelous light. In a true sense were citizens of Goshen in a world that is still Egypt. So, I askdoes your life look like Goshen, or does it look like Egypt? Is the line of distinction clear in your choices, your speech, your priorities, and your worship? Or have the flies of the world, the flesh, and the devil begun to swarm and ruin your life? Be reminded: Gods covenant is not a suggestion; it is a declaration of ownership. He has redeemed you. He has set you apart. So, live like the people of the covenant. Live like you belong to God, because Church, you do! [1] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, vol. 1 (New York, NY: Norton, 2019) 243. [2] Philip Graham Ryken, Exodus: Saved for Gods Glory Preaching the Word Commentary (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015) 212. [3] John D. Currid, Exodus 1-18 - EP Study Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: EP Books, 2014) 177. [4] Ryken, 216-217. [5] Currid, 175. [6] Currid, 175. [7] Douglas K. Stuart, Exodus NAC (Brentwood, TN: BH Publishing, 2006) 212. [8] Currid, 176. [9] Stuart, 214. [10] John I. Durham, Exodus - WBC (Waco TX: Word Books, 1987) 114. [11] Currid, 179. Also notice from this point on, the contest only seems to be between Pharaoh and Moses. With the departure of the magicians, we also see the departure of Aaron as well.Watch at: https://youtu.be/6XmrtPG5ito

Watch at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu7IAsilmEo

Today we come a turning point in the book of Exodus. As we concluded chapter 6 last week we saw a genealogy, and when we came to that part of the text I told you the genealogy was put there for help us as the readers pause and reflect on what weve seen and learned in the narrative so far. Now, as chapter seven begins we launch back out into the main plot. What will be the main theme and reality in view in the chapters to come? The plagues. The plagues are about to fall on Pharaoh and all Egypt. In these plagues God Himself will attack the gods of Egypt, and make it plain as day who is God and who is not. Our passage this morning, 7:1-13, prepares us for all of this. How? By giving us a preview of the contest to come, hence the title of this sermon, a prologue to the plagues. Two headings this morning. See first Commission (v1-7) And theLordsaid to Moses, See, I have made you likeGod to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron shall be yourprophet.You shall speak all that I command you, and your brother Aaron shall tell Pharaoh to let the people of Israel go out of his land.ButI will harden Pharaoh's heart, and though Imultiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt,Pharaoh will not listen to you. Then I will lay my hand on Egypt and bring my hosts, my people the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great acts of judgment.The Egyptiansshall know that I am theLord, when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring out the people of Israel from among them.Moses and Aaron did so; they did just as theLordcommanded them.Now Moses waseighty years old, and Aaron eighty-three years old, when they spoke to Pharaoh. As we left Moses in the end of chapter 6, he had yet another moment of doubt as he said he was uncircumcised in lips, meaning unfit and unqualified to do what God had called him to do. God had every right to respond with severe rebuke for Moses doubting yet again, but look at what God does. God give Moses another commission, and in so doing God gives Moses divine authority by saying See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh Now be clear, Moses is not God, God is God. But God has made Moses like God to Pharaoh, and like God, Moses will speak to Pharaoh through the mouth of his prophet, Aaron. It is helpful to remember at this point that Pharaoh considered himself to be divine, an incarnation of the gods of Egypt.[1] So when God says Moses is to be God to Pharaoh here in v1-2 God is putting Pharaoh in his place. Moses in a sense will appear before Pharaoh as no one ever has, for he will be like God to him.[2] This is indeed setting the stage for whats about to happen. This emphasizes that the Exodus conflict isnt a political struggle between nations, but a cosmic clash between the sovereign Lord and a rebellious, human king. Pharaoh might truly believe he is divine and mighty at this moment, but he'll soon learn that the One making these demands of him is mightier still. Yet, though this is the case Pharaoh will still resist and refuse to listen to Moses. See v3? In v3, for the second time, we read of God hardening Pharaohs heart. The last time we saw this was back in chapter 4 and there the reason for God hardening Pharaohs heart was generally put, that Pharaoh would not let the people go. Now see more of the reason here in v3. God will harden Pharaohs heart, why? So God can multiply His signs and wonders in Egypt. Meaning, Pharaohs resistance is a key ingredient in setting the stage for the plagues, which will display both the great might of the true God as well as the weakness and frailty of the gods of Egypt. Again by telling this to Moses God is removing Moses resistance and giving him realistic expectations about what will happen as he goes back to speak to Pharaoh. Moses needs to know that Pharaohs rejection is part of the plan and is part of the catalyst for the plagues to come.[3] v4-5 further describe the plagues using the phrase God laying hands on Egypt. This phrase is used often in the OT and it usually refers to hostile actions or judgment, which leads to death.[4] Here this phrase is used to speak of what God will do to Egypt. Add to this what v5 says. There Gods actions to Egypt are described as God stretching out His hand against Egypt. This language of a mighty stretched out hand was used a lot in ancient writings to refer to the power of a king or rulers strength in war. Ancient Egypt even used this phrasing to describe many of their Pharaohs, saying they were strong armed.[5] Taking v4 and v5 together, this is quite the imagery being used isnt it? It gives us a sense of Gods fierce intent toward Egypt for oppressing His people. Perhaps, think about it like this. In a playful manner, sometimes when I play with my kids, Ill bear hug them or, wrap around them, and they try to escape or get out of my grip somehow. They try and try and try and try andwhen they cant and give up, what do they learn? They learn how strong Dad really is, yes, but they learn more. They learn how safe they are in Daddys grip, and how Dad can protect them against the bad guys. In a much more violent and strong and frightful manner, this is something of what God is saying He'll do to Egypt in v4-5. God will harden Pharaohs heart so that he wont let the people go, then God will reveal His wondrous strength as He stretches out His had and lays hold of Egypt, and then God will lead His people out into freedom. When God does this what will the Egyptians learn? Notice the beginning of v5, The Egyptiansshall know that I am theLord What does this mean? Does it mean the Egyptians will be saved and forgiven? Does it mean the Egyptians will be redeemed and know Gods great love? No. This means all of Egypt will learn who God is, but what they learn wont encourage them or bring them rest or comfort, no. What they learn about God will terrify them. In the Exodus they shall come to know that God is God and Pharaoh is not. See the double edge here. When God attacks in the plagues Israel will be redeemed, while Egypt will be judged. One God, doing His singular work, revealing His glory, brings about two different results. Salvation for Gods people, judgment for Gods enemies. This double edge is real. It is said, The same sun which melts wax hardens clay. We see that reality displayed for us here. This is something we need to remember. I often meet people who truly believe that when it comes to God they are unaffiliated, or neutral, as if its all a matter of personal choice. How blind we are. Becoming a Christian, and following Jesus is not a personal choice, as if one group of people decides to take up a hobby of knitting while we have decided to take up religion as a hobby. No, no, no. Church, no one is neutral when it comes to things of God. The double edge reality we see here in Exodus remains true for the gospel too. How? The same Gospel which melts some to repentance hardens others in their sins.[6] Well, as Moses was commissioned again in v1-5, we might wonder how he responds to all of this. Will he doubt again? Will he bring more objections or complaint to the Lord? Praise God we dont see any of that. In v6 we see a refreshing sight. Moses and Aaron obey, doing all just as the Lord commanded them. In fact, for the next long while, we do not see Moses doubt or complain at all. He is 100% on board with what Gods doing. What changed? It doesnt say explicitly, but we can make an educated guess. Moses has tried and failed, and yet, God has called him to go back again. In this I think Moses has realized three things: 1) his own weakness is great, 2) the task before him is impossible, and 3) Gods call remains clear. Perhaps in these things Moses is beginning to understand that he cannot do what God has called to do in his own strength and wisdom. He must trust the Lord to do all of this through him. And so he goes back to Pharaoh courageously, not trusting in himself, but in God who has called him to go. So too Church, we can find strength and courage to obey God, to even try the impossible, not because of what we find within ourselves, but because of the God we look to in faith![7] And lest you think doing hard things for the Lord is a young mans game, did you see v7? Moses and Aaron were both in their 80s! This affirms what we see later on in Deuteronomy, where it tells us Moses will die at 120 years old, which shows us how Moses whole life was evenly split into three 40 year segments. D.L. Moody described it best, Moses spent 40 years in Pharaohs court thinking he was somebody, 40 years in the desert learning that he was nobody, and 40 years showing what God can do with a somebody who found out he was a nobody.[8] May we embrace such a posture as well. Look ahead now to our second heading Contest (v8-13) Then theLordsaid to Moses and Aaron,When Pharaoh says to you,Prove yourselves by working a miracle, then you shall say to Aaron, Take your staff and cast it down before Pharaoh, that it may become a serpent.So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and did just as theLordcommanded. Aaron cast down his staff before Pharaoh and his servants, and it became a serpent. Then Pharaoh summoned the wise men and the sorcerers, and they, themagicians of Egypt, alsodid the same by their secret arts.For each man cast down his staff, and they became serpents. But Aaron's staff swallowed up their staffs.StillPharaoh's heart was hardened, and he would not listen to them,as theLordhad said. v8-13 is a brief moment, but in it there is contained most all of what well soon see in the plagues: the obedience of Moses and Aaron, the counterfeit miracles of Satan, the power of God, and the hardening of Pharaohs heart.[9] Here all of these themes are present as the great contest begins. God commands Moses in v8-9, When Pharaoh asks you to prove yourselves by a miracle, throw your staff down on the ground before Pharaoh that it might become a serpent. Question: why a snake? Of all things God could have chosen, why a snake? Answer: because of what the serpent means to the Egyptians. Many historians note that Egyptians were afraid and fascinated by snakes. So many Pharaohs wore the symbol of a snake on their crown or head-dress to strike fear into others. That God turns a staff into a snake tells us He is directly challenging and assaulting Pharaohs supposed sovereignty.[10] To use a modern comparison, it would be like someone taking a bald eagle into the Oval office and wringing its neck.[11] Can you see the challenge in view in that? By doing this before Pharaoh, God begins the great contest of power. Moses and Aaron obey in v10, cast down the staff, and it becomes a snake. Or did it? The normal word in Hebrew for snake is the word nahash but here in v10 the staff becomes a tannin. This Hebrew word tannin can also mean snake, but curiously it has other translation options as well. In Ezekiel and Jeremiah this word tannin is used to describe not just a snake but a large reptilian monster like a crocodile. Some even believe Ezekiel and Jeremiah are referring to a dragon by using this word tannin.[12] So, what did the staff become? A snake, a crocodile, a reptilian monster, a dragon? I always thought it was a simple snake, and it really might be, but the Hebrew word used here is intentionally slippery, causing us to pause and wonder if something more menacing is in view.[13] Whatever it was, it was powerful, because see what happens next. In response to this miracle Pharaoh summons his own wise men, magicians, and sorcerers and in v11 it says they did the same by their secret arts. Pharaohs henchmen were able to reproduce the miracle, but is that the way were to interpret this? Some people believe they were able to reproduce to miracle by magic or a kind of parlor trick, illusion, or sleight of hand. Others believe they were gifted snake charmers who knew the exact nerve on a snake to make them straighten out stiff as a board. But still others believe they really did turn their own staffs into snakes because they had given themselves over to the powers of darkness. Heres what I think. Many modern scholars tend to believe trickery was used here, I disagree. All naturalistic explanations seem, at least to me, to be misleading. The whole point of this moment is the great contest of strength between the Lord and the powers of darkness. So I think Pharaohs magicians really did duplicate this feat but that they did so by demonic spells and incantations, ultimately by the power of Satan. But look what happens in v12. See it? There was a great swallowing. When the magicians of Pharaoh duplicated the wonder, the staff turned to serpent monster from Moses and Aaron swallowed up the others. Pay attention to this phrase swallowed up. It occurs many times in the Bible from this point forward. There is a swallowing up here. Pharaoh and is armies will soon be swallowed up by the Red Sea in Exodus 15. Korah and the rebels will be swallowed up in the earth in Numbers 16. And Jonah will be swallowed up by the fish in Jonah 1. All these moments indicate a snuffing out, or a destroying. Here Pharaoh learns firsthand how much greater and stronger the Lord is, that God can destroy the supposed gods of Egypt, but that this God is the true God over all. Church, this closing scene reminds us that there are spirituals powers and forces all around us, both good and evil. While God is stronger than them all, the spiritual powers of evil are still considered powers. In many cultures around the world families have little altars in a corner of their homes dedicated to various spirits who have plagued their family, village, or region. We saw this in Vietnam firsthand when we went there, and it was dark. But the good news was truly good to them when they heard how Christ had existed well before these spirits and had power over all the spirits and could protect them from the spirits forever. I think in v11-12 we see a glimpse of a small spiritual battle, not only showing us what God is greater, but showing us a preview of the bigger battles to come in the plagues. Yet, v13 ends our text with a sobering note. Pharaohs heart was hard and he would not listen. This sobering final note is a warning to anyone who sees the power of God and yet refuses to bow the knee before God.[14] Conclusion: Id like to end by showing you the rich fulfillment of this passage. Weve seen Moses dwell with the Lord on the mountain by the burning bush and descend to save Gods people suffering in Egypt. This Moses who came down from the mountain of God was like God to Pharaoh. In a richer and greater way, one day far after this moment the eternal Son of God would descend from the presence of God to save Gods people suffering in sins of all kinds. This Son of God is far greater than Moses because He would not just appear to be like God, He would be God Himself wrapped in flesh. And this Son of God would fight greater battles, and would win them all, showing us the true power of the Lord. But in the end, many thought all was lost as death swallowed Him up on the cross. But what happened? The greater swallowing would occur. Yes, the Son of God died in our place, bearing our sin, as our substitute on the cross, and He would enter the grave. But in His resurrection, as He walked out of the tomb death itself was swallowed up in defeat! So Paul rejoices in 1 Cor. 15 saying, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death where is your sting? Church we began with Luthers reformation, and we end with it too. Luther once said, When the devil throws your sins in your face and says you deserve death and hell, tell him this. I know I deserve death and hell, what of it? I know One who suffered on my place, and made satisfaction for all of my many sins. His name is Jesus Christ, Son of God, and where He is one day I shall be also! Praise God! [1] Philip Graham Ryken, Exodus: Saved for Gods Glory Preaching the Word Commentary (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015) 172. [2] John I. Durham, Exodus - WBC (Waco TX: Word Books, 1987) 87. [3] John D. Currid, Exodus 1-18 - EP Study Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: EP Books, 2014) 148. [4] Victor P. Hamilton, Exodus: An Exegetical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2023) 114. [5] Hamilton, 114. [6] This phrase is normally attributed to Charles Spurgeon. [7] Jay Sklar, ESV Expository Commentary, vol. 1, ed. Iain Duguid, James M. Hamilton Jr., Jay Sklar (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2025) 508. [8] D.L. Moody, quoted in Ryken, 175. [9] Ryken, 182. [10] Currid, 154. [11] Ryken, 185. [12] Durham, 91. [13] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, vol. 1 (New York, NY: Norton, 2019) 239. [14] Ryken, 190.Watch at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0YQpysdU0E

Watch at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq6d24xjQzs

Every now and then its good to remind ourselves what were doing here in this teaching moment called a sermon. Were in a sermon series where were going through the book of Exodus, yes. Were working through it verse by verse, yes. But, how are we approaching this book as a whole? Four ways.[1] Were approaching the book of Exodus historically, meaning were seeking to see the historical context in which these events occur. Were approaching the book of Exodus theologically, meaning were seeking to see who God is and shows Himself to be in Exodus. Were approaching the book of Exodus Christologically, meaning were seeking to see how Exodus points far on ahead of itself to the Person and Work of Jesus Christ. Lastly, were approaching the book of Exodus practically, meaning were seeking to see how Exodus, like everything else in the Bible, teaches us how to live the Christian life. This is how were approaching the book of Exodus. Today we come to Exodus 5:10-21. But remember whats going on in the story. Three big themes are beginning to emerge that will continue to stand out as the main themes for the next ten chapters or so.[2] First there is the demand God makes to Pharaoh to let His people go. Second, there is Pharaohs resistance to that demand which will grow in the chapters to come, even though it ebbs and flows at times. And lastly, there are the consequences Pharaoh and all of Egypt face for Pharaohs resistance to Gods commands. Its these three themes weve begun to see and will continue to see throughout many chapters ahead of us, as God and Pharaoh face off in head-to-head combat. But at this point where we are in chapter 5, weve only seen Moses first interaction with Pharaoh, Pharaohs initial stubbornness, and Pharaoh increasing His cruelty toward Israel. And yet, we must remember, Israel is moving closer and closer towards freedom, even though their suffering is increasing in the present moment. God is saving them, yet, their discomfort grows. This is the big idea set before us today in 5:10-21. A Cruel Yoke (v10-14) So thetaskmasters and the foremen of the people went out and said to the people, Thus says Pharaoh, I will not give you straw.Go and get your straw yourselves wherever you can find it, but your work will not be reduced in the least.So the people were scattered throughout all the land of Egypt to gather stubble for straw.Thetaskmasters were urgent, saying, Complete your work, your daily task each day, as when there was straw.And the foremen of the people of Israel, whom Pharaohstaskmasters had set over them, were beaten and were asked, Why have you not done all your task of making bricks today and yesterday, as in the past? So after Moses and Aarons first chat with Pharaoh didnt go so well in v1-9, v10-14 shows us the result of that poor encounter. Pharaoh said to Moses and Aaron that the people are clearly far too idle if they have time to think about going out to worship their God, so he set his mind to increasing their workload by not giving them any straw to make bricks while still demanding the same daily quota of bricks. How does Pharaoh carry out this cruel measure? v10-11 show it, Pharaohs taskmasters went out to the foreman of Israel to convey the cruel message. But notice a few things about the message.[3] It begins with the phrase, Thus says Pharaoh This is not the normal way Pharaoh would speak. He does this to make a mockery of Moses and Aarons request. Back in 5:1 Aaron said, Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel so as Pharaoh rejected the Lord and His commands, he now uses the same language to ridicule God and the Israelites. Also notice what he says after this. The message of Pharaoh is, Thus says Pharaoh, Go Why is this the first word he chooses to say? Because that was the main message Moses and Aaron came with, to let the people go. Now, in arrogant mockery Pharaoh will let the people go, not to leave, but to gather up their own straw to make bricks. This language shows us the great contest has begun between Pharaoh and the Lord. And we as readers can look back in wonder and awe because we know Pharaoh wont stand a chance in this fight. The Lord will win, were just watching it play out. In the meantime Israel suffers in many ways. The command was clear, the same number of bricks are required, but now they wont be provided any straw to make them, which means theyll have to go out and gather their own. So off they go in v12-13, scattering all over Egypt to try and get what they need while the Egyptian taskmasters are urgently reminding them of the required task. The sense we get in v12-13 is that they cant find much straw at all and have to resort to using stubble to try and make bricks. What is this about?[4] Well, normally the straw used in brick making came from the stalks of longer crops, normally from grains and vegetables in the fields. When those were harvested they would set the stalks aside and give them to those making bricks. Thats where the straw came from. And straw was an essential part of making bricks as it would reinforce the clay and help it not fall apart when it dried. You can see this firsthand for yourself in many museums around the world that display artifacts from ancient Egypt. In some of them you can see bricks with pieces of straw sticking out of them.[5] Stubble on the other hand, is different. Stubble was the short part of the stalk but the stubble was just above the root. It was not only a bad substitute for making bricks and holding clay together, it was incredibly hard to gather. Not only would it have to be harvest season to get it, but gathering the stubble required tedious cutting and careful pulling to not damage it in the process. So as Israel hears this command, a few days pass and it becomes clear the quota of bricks is simply not going to be met under these harsh new conditions, which is what leads to the dreadful scene in v14. There we see the foremen of Israel are brought before the taskmasters of Egypt, and theyre beaten. Why? Because they didnt meet the quota of bricks. And as theyre being beaten the taskmasters mock them by asking a question they already know the answer to, Why have you not done all your task of making bricks today and yesterday, as in the past? At this point the sense of crushing desperation and injustice is high for Israel.[6] Out of sheer spite and arrogant mockery, Pharaoh requires an impossible task and then beats them when theyre unable to complete it. This is a complete humiliation of Israel. One commentator described the scene in vivid detail saying, They worked out in the hot Egyptian sun all day, driven to optimum production by their taskmasters. They had no hats to protect their heads and wore nothing but thin aprons on their bodiesno one stood by to give the slaves a drink every few minutes. It does not take much imagination to conclude that the severe rigor imposed on the Hebrews resulted in many of them dying of dehydrationheat stroke and the like.[7] This comment was about their normal toil when they had straw! Can you imagine how impossible their work became when they no longer had any straw? Their enslavement was horrid enough, and now Pharaoh just made it worse. What do we learn from this? Well we certainly learn about the historical context of the Israelites enslavement in Egypt. But we can learn more. Weve already mentioned how Moses is a type or preview of Christ, and weve rejoiced as weve seen that so far in our time in Exodus. If we pull those threads a bit further, and say that Exodus gives us a powerful picture of what it means and looks like to be enslaved by sin.[8] Just as the children of Israel were held prisoner in the house of bondage in Egypt under Pharaohs cruel thumb, so too all humanity comes into the world already incarcerated in the prison of sin. Just as the Israelites had to take orders from Pharaoh and despaired in his service, so to all sinners have a worse and crueler master in the Devil, and all in his service face the greatest despair. You see, sin is a harsh taskmaster. Many have said it because of how true it is, sin will take you farther than you want to go, keep you longer than you want to stay, and cost you more than you want to pay. When you indulge in sin, you think its done, that youve satisfied the hunger, and you can move on. But the tricky part about sin is that its hunger only increases. It only grows and increases until it consumes everything in its path. The Devil promises great freedom, but he never tells you about the cost of life in his service. See, the more you give room to sin, the more he tightens his grip, and the more he tightens his grip, the more he binds the chains of sin around our necks. Satans strategy is always like Pharaohs, more bricks, less straw. But praise God (!), just as Pharaohs cruel yoke on Israel would be broken by the Lord, so too the Devils crueler yoke on sinners is broken by Jesus as soon as that sinner turns to Christ. Jesus said, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin but if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. (John 8:34, 36) Considering how cruel Pharaohs yoke is to Israel, how wonderful is the yoke of Christ? Matthew 11:28ff, Come to Me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy, and my burden is light. So to all who are weary and need rest, all who feel worthless and wonder if God cares, all who sin and need a Savior: the gospel offers welcome in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Weve seen the cruel yoke of Pharaoh, now see A Confused People (v15-21) Then the foremen of the people of Israel came and cried to Pharaoh, Why do you treat your servants like this?No straw is given to your servants, yet they say to us, Make bricks! And behold, your servants are beaten; but the fault is in your own people.But he said, You are idle, you are idle; that is why you say, Let us go and sacrifice to theLord.Go now and work. No straw will be given you, but you must still deliver the same number of bricks.The foremen of the people of Israel saw that they were in trouble when they said, You shall by no means reduce your number of bricks, your daily task each day.They met Moses and Aaron, who were waiting for them, as they came out from Pharaoh;andthey said to them, TheLordlook on you and judge, because you have made us stink in the sight of Pharaoh and his servants, and have put a sword in their hand to kill us. Here in v15-21 there are really two scenes. In the first we see the foremen of Israel before Pharaoh in desperation, and in the second we see the foremen of Israel before Moses and Aaron in anger. In both scenes we see Gods people in deep confusion. Well take them in turn. As this dire situation continued to play out with the Israelites suffering at the hands of Pharaohs decree, the leaders of Israel, called the foremen here in v15, come before Pharaoh. Perhaps they believed there had been some mistake in protocol, breakdown in communication, or failure in the chain of command going on. Clearly the fault lies with these Egyptian taskmasters who refused to give straw and were beating them for not reducing the quota of bricks, and maybe Pharaoh didnt know about it.[9] Notice the words used in v15. It says they came and cried out These are familiar words. As they face moments of deep distress we see Israel doing a lot of crying out to God. They did it back in chapter 2 during their suffering, theyll do it again at the Red Sea, theyll do again it in the wilderness, and theyll do it in many more places too. But here, who are they crying out to? At the first sign of trouble, they run to Pharaoh. Theres no mention of them coming to the Lord and crying out to Him. It seems that theyve recognized Pharaoh as not the source of their problems but as the one who can give them relief. This shows their confusion. I think this is confirmed even further in v15 when we see them identify themselves. See it? How do these foremen identify themselves in v15? Why do you treat your servants like this?Here and in the verses that follow they identify themselves like this two more times. I think this is more than mere words.[10] It seems they have a true and real devotion to Pharaoh, which is completely out of bounds. They ought to see themselves as servants of the Lord, wherever they are, whatever their condition, yet here we see their confused identity. This is one reason why the Exodus must happen, to save them from Pharaoh and from themselves, and this is one reason why God begins the Ten Commandments, not with a command, but with an assurance of their true identity. Exodus 20:2 says, I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. They must ever know the Lord as their Redeemer and know themselves as the redeemed. But here they come before Pharaoh in bitter distress. They state the obvious in v16, and Pharaoh responds in v17 with the same reasoning hes given before, You are idlethat is why you want to go and worship, go make bricks, go back to gathering your own straw, I will not reduce your quota. In Pharaohs words the foremen of Israel learn two things. First, they learn the reason behind all their trouble is Moses and Aaron. They went and asked to be let go, Pharaoh heard that and believed the people were idle, so he stopped giving them straw and forced them to get their own. The second thing they learn is in v19, see it? At this moment they saw how dire their troubles truly were. Its like a wake-up call for them, as they realize how difficult it actually will be to be freed from Pharaohs grasp, if its possible at all. This brings us to the second scene. The foremen go out from Pharaohs presence and, what do we see in v20? Moses and Aaron are waiting for them to see how things went. Whats this whole scene like from their perspective? Perhaps theyre hoping against hope, maybe they believe Pharaoh will realize his mistake, repent of his sins, alleviate the misery of the people, and let them go. But what happens? The foremen see Moses and Aaron on their way out and they say the following to them in v21, TheLordlook on you and judge, because you have made us stink in the sight of Pharaoh and his servants, and have put a sword in their hand to kill us. On one hand their anger is understandable. When people are angry they always try to find someone to blame. So here Gods people in their anger blame the leaders God sent to them. And humanly speaking, they were right, Moses plan had entirely failed. Moses sought to free them and ended up increasing their sorrow and suffering. For this they are angry, and they turn that anger toward Moses and Aaron, using strong spiritual language to rebuke them, going as far as to say God will judge them for their actions! While their anger is understandable on one hand, its entirely inexcusable on the other hand. Instead of suffering and running right back to Pharaoh, they shouldve gone straight to the Lord and pled for rescue and relief! Their current anger is a dark contrast to the worship at the end of chapter 4. Remember that? They met with Moses and Aaron, saw the signs of God, heard the words of God, they believed that God was going to come save them, and so they worshiped God! Im sure they boldly encouraged Moses and Aaron to go out and speak with Pharaoh, without even giving thought to the fact that there might be a cost. They were worshiping, but now at the first taste of increased suffering, their worship turns to anger and confusion. Question, what is their sin is this moment? Its a common one, I wonder if you see it. You might think its anger, or doubt, or even treating Moses and Aaron so poorly. While all of those could truly be in view, I think the biggest sin of Israel here in this text, is believing God wouldnt let such bad things happen to them. Their Gods people after all, hadnt God appeared to Moses in the burning bush and called him to do all these things, and given him the signs to prove it? Hadnt God said He was going to free His people and bring them out by His strong arm? Yes! So why in the world are they suffering so much if God had promised them all of these things? Has God forgotten them? Has Moses and Aaron made all of this up? Clearly something has gone astray, because obedience to God doesnt bring this much suffering, right? Remember the big idea here. Israel is moving closer and closer towards freedom, even though their suffering is increasing in the present moment. God is saving them, yet, their discomfort grows. For this they grow angry. Weve all heard language like this before from Christians, perhaps youve even said it yourself. Language that assumes if people come to God and obey God and love God that bad things wont happen to them. I remember hearing it when I first became a Christian, Adam, staying in the middle of Gods will for your life is the safest place to be. But Church, thats a lie. This passage reminds us that being in the exact place God intends us to be, might just be the most unsafe place to be. Yes, God commands obedience, but God never promises an easy road if we obey. Conclusion: Why do we think this? I think deep down, many Christians believe that if they obey God, God will be in their debt and will give them a good life here and now. Its almost a kind of prosperity light gospel. Of course, none of us would say this out loud, but our anger in hard circumstances might just reveal it. What then are we to do? Church, were to trust the Lord. Wherever He calls us to go in life, even if its incredibly difficult, it is truly the best place for us to be. Amid all the hardship and pain and suffering, God will be God to us, even there! We should never assume that our obedience will bring us a life of ease. The kingdom of darkness never rages so fiercely as when Jesus invades the world. Gods servants will face fierce opposition from the enemy and sometimes from the Church too. But Jesus continues to reign over it all. He will build His Church nonetheless. In His reign and rule, we can ever rest! [1] Philip Graham Ryken, Exodus: Saved for Gods Glory Preaching the Word Commentary (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015) 132. [2] Douglas K. Stuart, Exodus NAC (Brentwood, TN: BH Publishing, 2006) 159. [3] John D. Currid, Genesis 1:1-25:18 - EP Study Commentary (Holywell, UK: Evangelical Press, 2015) 119. [4] Stuart, 165. [5] Ryken, 133. [6] Currid, 121-122. [7] Howard Vos, quoted in Ryken, 135. [8] Ryken, 136. [9] Ryken, 137. [10] Currid, 122.Watch at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ld9GflF2LI

I. A Bold Approach (1) Exodus 5:1 Afterward Moses and Aaron went and said to Pharaoh, Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness. -Ill: There is a boldness that comes from assurance, that sometimes gets us a bit ahead of ourselves -Moses here jumps right to the end with the word of the Lord to him in Exodus 4:2223 Then you shall say to Pharaoh, Thus says the Lord, Israel is my firstborn son, and I say to you, Let my son go that he may serve me. If you refuse to let him go, behold, I will kill your firstborn son. Ignoring the original commands from Exodus 3:18 And they will listen to your voice, and you and the elders of Israel shall go to the king of Egypt and say to him, The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us; and now, please let us go a three days journey into the wilderness, that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God. A few things missing and off: -The Elders do not appear to Join Moses and Aaron before Pharaoh (Lots of speculation) -They begin with the Role prophetic command (Let my People go/release in Hebrew) -There is no designated time her the Hebrew is a command of permanent release (They are released from Pharaohs hand to the Lords) There is plenty of Debate as to whether or not Moses was in the Wrong here at the beginning but not following Gods original command or if he simply to his wires crossed with the different phases of Gods plan. but what we do see ultimately is the His encounter with the Lord combined with the worship of Gods people have embolden these two men to stand before the most powerful man in the known word and speak the words of God. So while I would fall in to the camp of seeing Moses being Moses and getting to far a head of himself the reason he does it is quiet remarkable. He Believes God will do what God said he would do -We are reminded of the disciples boldness to go and proclaim the gospel -Have you ever had that kind of faith to boldly proclaim the gospel without fear but with assurance that Gods word doesnt return void - Moses is living life high on the mountain top of God and just went for it, laying all the cards out on the table right from the start. -Of course we have seen his excitement he has left many questions unanswered of which Pharaoh will quickly point out: II. A Prideful Rejection (2) Exodus 5:2 But Pharaoh said, Who is the Lord, that I should obey his voice and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, and moreover, I will not let Israel go. -Pharaoh is not impressed by Moses presentation and command -Pharaoh is quick to point out and question who is this Lord -Israel up to this point doesnt us the name Yahweh so even here it could come across as some new foreign deity -Pharaoh is a god unto his own mind and has no room to take any commands from a would be usurper to his own authority (Letting them go would look poorly on him) -This Lord is of no match for his own power in his own mind (Since Israel has been enslaved for generations where has this Lord been) -The Bold words of Moses and Arron fall on deaf ears -Ill: Now it is quick to Look at Pharaoh and call him a fool, I want to linger on a quick application point before we move to the Purposeful response of Moses to Pharaohs words: Pharaohs reaction should reminds us of the depths of the blindness that exist for those who do no know the Lord. -Yes Pharaoh is a prideful king, but even we apart from Christ were just as self centered and prideful -Our world today has created an individualized culture were each person is their own god with their own value systems (that should not be challenged) and their own set of ethics, which usually entails they are never wrong, never in the wrong, and are never to be questioned about the possibility of being wrong. And if you are amenning that statement about others be reminded you are apart of the same world. -So Apart from the move of God no man willingly sees their need of a savior and no man hears the call of the Lord with humility and a brokenness, they must meet God and know God to be changed by God. -And there are only 2 end results of knowing God being changed by him in repentance or broken by him in the rebellion. (Pharaoh will as we see experience the later) -The call for Christians here is to not forget you once were a pharaoh in your own mind, but God is the one who broke through and redeemed you not yourself, He paid the price and so now you have no place to see yourself as the any type of Pharaoh but rather as the humble recipient of the grace of God who saved you. just as Israel will. We can not place ourselves above one another but rather in humility understand our place equally as recipients of Gods grace So from the place of Pharaohs complete rejection of anything Moses just said Moses responds: III. A Purposeful Response (3) Exodus 5:3 Then they said, The God of the Hebrews has met with us. Please let us go a three days journey into the wilderness that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God, lest he fall upon us with pestilence or with the sword. Now Moses Returns to the original wording of chapter 3 when he was first commissioned to go: -Yahweh is the God of the Hebrews -He has physically meet with them (They are not coming of their own accord or power) -It is not a call to permanently release the people but a simple request of a three day trip to worship God -We covered this back in chapter 3 that this was to proves the pride and hardheartedness of Pharaoh that even this simple request was too much for him (according some ancient tablets dating back into approximation of the exodus It was common in Egypt to let slaves have a break/ holidays if you will for the purpose of worship (Now ether that was a result of the exodus or common practice can be debated) -He adds though here at the end an very interesting addendum: If we dont go free the pestilence and sword will come -Now no where do we see God saying this to Moses about Israel but he says it often about Egypt so Moses is doing 1 of 2 things: He is trying to leverage sympathy for Israel with Pharaoh that God would punish Israel and Pharaoh should show kindness. (Seems like a stretch) He is saying that the us in view is both Israel and Egypt. God will rain down on them all with pestilence and the sword. (Thus giving Pharaoh a warning that judgment is coming if he doesnt listen and it will be widespread) -Ultimately we see in Moses second response a fuller explanation to Pharaoh about who God is and what he has in store for the future should pharaoh not relent and let the people of Israel go to worship their God. -Of course God has already revealed to Moses that they will not be released except after Pharaoh is humbled greatly and the Lose of his first born, but that doesnt equally negate God command for Moses to warn and offer the hand of repentance (in this case releasing the people and rejecting his own false sense of Lordship over them). So even here we now have another example of Moses after being rebuffed: calmly and accurately presenting the word of God to Pharaoh. -He isnt enraged if anything he might be a little more subdued, but he doesnt back away -Which is still a great reminder for us that people will reject the gospel, but that doesnt negate our call to be a light in the sharing of it. -The rejection of the message is not an excuse to cease being a messenger, especially when we unlike Moses dont know the final result of the messages proclamation However Moses calm and polite response to Pharaohs prideful first response is now an out right and malevolent denial of the whole endeavor: IV. A Malevolent Denial (4-9) Exodus 5:49 But the king of Egypt said to them, Moses and Aaron, why do you take the people away from their work? Get back to your burdens. And Pharaoh said, Behold, the people of the land are now many, and you make them rest from their burdens! The same day Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters of the people and their foremen, You shall no longer give the people straw to make bricks, as in the past; let them go and gather straw for themselves. But the number of bricks that they made in the past you shall impose on them, you shall by no means reduce it, for they are idle. Therefore they cry, Let us go and offer sacrifice to our God. Let heavier work be laid on the men that they may labor at it and pay no regard to lying words. -With Pharaohs First response we see he has no regard for God now we see has no regard for man -Pharaoh doesnt even interact with their request he simply dismiss them as a waste of his time. -Pharaohs heart isnt just dismiss of the word that they brought his actions indicated he is angered by them. -He will now seek to crush this new found optimism in this Hebrew God Yahweh who claims to be worthy of his peoples worship, Pharaohs authority is challenged by God and so in many ways pharaohs is going to show them whose god -So he calls them lazy for wanting to take a break and worship God, if they have so much free time maybe they need to work harder. -The goal as we see is to stomp out their faith through brutal labor showing that Pharaoh is stronger than their god. He is no different than those today who see the experiences of the saints and are confused by the faith in the midst of hardship and the belief in that which is unseen. Od those who wish only to make life more difficult based on their misperceived reality. 1 Peter 3:1217 For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer. But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil. Now who is there to harm you if you are zealous for what is good? But even if you should suffer for righteousness sake, you will be blessed. Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect, having a good conscience, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame. For it is better to suffer for doing good, if that should be Gods will, than for doing evil. 2 Peter 3:47 They will say, Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation. For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly. In the end though Pharaohs attempts to bring Israel down into a miry pit of pain and sorrow will only lead to a greater display of the truth of who their God really is and how much more powerful he is over Pharaoh.Watch at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOykZ3KjPlc

This morning we continue our journey through the book of Exodus, and today we arrive at a passage that is both foundational and perplexing. Fresh from his encounter with the living God at the burning bush, Moses is now tasked to go back to Egypt and lead Israel out of slavery. But his return journey is not without its difficulties. We see Moses navigating family dynamics, receiving further divine instructions, and experiencing a deeply unsettling incident involving his own family and the covenant of circumcision. This passage forces us to grapple with profound theological truths: Gods sovereignty and mans responsibility in the hardening of Pharaohs heart; and the foreshadowing of a greater salvation through a bloody sacrifice. Our text is Exodus 4:18-31, and it is a text that challenges our assumptions and deepens our understanding of a God who is both mighty in power and intimately involved in the lives of His people. Let's pray and turn our attention to God's Word. Again our passage is Exodus 4:18-31, see our first heading this morning in v18-23 Toward Egypt (v18-23) Moses went back toJethro his father-in-law and said to him, Please let me go back to my brothers in Egypt to see whether they are still alive. And Jethro said to Moses, Go in peace.And theLordsaid to Moses in Midian, Go back to Egypt, forall the men who were seeking your life are dead.So Moses tookhis wife and his sons and had them ride on a donkey, and went back to the land of Egypt. And Moses tookthe staff of God in his hand. And theLordsaid to Moses, When you go back to Egypt, see that you do before Pharaoh all themiracles that I have put in your power. ButI will harden his heart, so that he will not let the people go.Then you shall say to Pharaoh, Thus says theLord,Israel is myfirstborn son,and I say to you, Let my son go that he may serve me. If you refuse to let him go, behold, Iwill kill your firstborn son. Here we begin to see Moses return journey to Egypt, and the first thing we see him do is return to his father-in-law Jethro. Why? One reason is because Jethro is his father-in-law, and Moses desires his blessing before leaving. Another reason is that Moses has been the one shepherding Jethros flock, so he needs to return his sheep back to his care, so Jethro can find another shepherd. Yet another reason is the one Moses gives to Jethro in v18, he desires to leave in order to see how his fellow Israelites are doing. Do you find this to be interesting request? I do. Im glad to see Moses identifying with the Israelites, yes, but I find it interesting because he mentions nothing about what just happened to him on the mountain. He mentions nothing about the burning bush, about God appearing to him, and about God calling him to go back to Egypt to deliver Gods people from slavery. Moses tells none of that to Jethro. Why did he leave all of this out? I dont think Moses was trying to deceive Jethro. I think Moses said what he did in v18 because Moses himself was still struggling to process and believe everything that had just happened to him. Like many people, I think Moses was somewhere between belief and unbelief.[1] Jethros answer is simple and straightforward, Go in peace. And we dont hear of Jethro again until chapter 18 where he and Moses are reunited.[2] So off Moses goes, or did he? Im unsure of how much time passes between v18 and v19 but I think some time does go by because the next thing we see happening in v19 is God speaking to Moses to encourage him to actually leave for Egypt. God tells Moses that all those who were seeking his life are dead, which means, Moses no longer has to fear returning to Egypt and facing former enemies. So what does Moses do upon hearing this? He leaves. We see it in v20. He packs up and all his family and his staff, and they ride out of Midian toward Egypt. This moment in v19-20 is very similar to a moment much later on in Matthews Gospel when Joseph and Mary remain in Egypt until the death of Herod and only upon hearing of Herods death do they return home. Just as Moses knew it was safe to return to Egypt when Pharaoh died in our text, so too Jesus parents knew it was safe for them to leave Egypt and go home in Matthew 2. This isnt the only foreshadowing in our text, more will come soon. As Moses and his family are leaving to return to Egypt God speaks again to Moses in v21-23 and in this moment Moses learns much from God. Two massive realities in fact. First, God tells Moses hes to do the signs and miracles before Pharaoh, to reveal the power of God. So while these signs are intended to validate his calling and ministry from God with the Israelites, what does God intend to do in these signs with Pharaoh? See it? Through the signs He gave to Moses, God intends to harden Pharaohs heart, so that he will not let the people go. This is the first time in Exodus we see the reality of God hardening Pharaohs heart, and this is important for us to see because this is a major theme throughout Exodus. I dont think this should surprise us all that much really. Weve already read back in 3:19 that Pharaoh wont let the people go unless compelled by a strong and mighty hand, and in the plagues God will do just that. But what does this language mean, God hardening Pharaohs heart? Throughout the Exodus event well read about Pharaohs hardened heart in three different ways.[3] Sometimes well see it phrased that God is hardening Pharaohs heart. Other times well see it phrased that Pharaoh was the one who hardened his own heart. And at other times, well see it phrased more generally, stating that Pharaohs heart was hard without telling us who did the hardening. Church, we affirm all of these. Too often people like to see this one way only, saying it was only God who hardened his heart, or only Pharaoh who hardened his heart. But as the Bible displays in many instances, here is the affirmation of both Gods full sovereignty and mans full responsibility. So yes God was at work hardening Pharaohs heart so that he would not let the people go. This opened the way for the ten plagues were about to see, and thus, revealed the greatness and power of God over all the gods of Egypt. And yes, Pharaoh was a sinner himself who made bad choices that resulted in the hardening of his own heart, and thus in the same way, his choices paved the way for his downfall to come. As we keep on in Exodus and see more of these various statements of hardening, well say more on them as we see them in their own context. For now, just notice this is the first instance of this theme, where we see God as the sovereign One at work, ordaining all these events for His glory and His peoples good. So Moses has learned about Gods hardening of Pharaoh yes, but he learns more in v21-23. The second massive reality he learns about Israels sonship. For God, the Exodus is a family affair. See that detail in v22? God calls Israel His firstborn son. What does this mean? Simply put, it explains why the Exodus happens. Why did God go to all the trouble to strike the Egyptians to save His people? Because they belong to Him! The Exodus, then, is a story about a Fathers love for His son. How that Father rescued His son from great suffering to bring him out to the mountain to worship Him. God loves His son Israel so much, that for enslaving them, God warns that He will strike Pharaoh where it hurts the most by taking his own son away from him. God is a jealous Father. Later on in OT the prophet Hosea will speak of this. In Hosea 11:1 God says, When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called My son. Much later on in the Bible, the NT picks up this thread and uses it to speak of Jesus. In Matthew 2, the very same text we mentioned earlier where we see Joseph and Mary leaving Egypt to return home after Herods death, Matthew says this in 2:15, This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, Out of Egypt I called My Son. What does this mean? By quoting Hosea 11 and Exodus 4:22 Matthew is showing how Jesus is retelling and summing up the story in Israel in Himself.[4] Since Israel disobeyed, Jesus has come to do what they should have done, so in His own life Jesus retraces Israels steps and at each point where they proved faithless, He proves faithful. Lesson? Jesus is the true Israel of God, meaning Hes the true Son. Theres great encouragement to grab hold of here Church. This matters so much not only because it shows us more of the glory of Jesus, it matters so much because it shows us more of ourselves. We who believe in Jesus, what do we become upon believing in Him? We become adopted sons and daughters of God, who are so closely united to Christ that well now never be without Him. So to trust in Jesus the Son is to become sons ourselves, and being sons we relate to God as our Father, and to read Exodus as a Christian is to see and know our Father for who He really is. Our strong and mighty God who will always defend us from our enemies and rescue us in the end. Amen! As wonderful and clear as this is, we now move to something more difficult and unclear in v24-26. Toward Death? (v24-26) At a lodging place on the waytheLordmet him andsought to put him to death.ThenZipporah took aflint and cut off her sons foreskin and touched Mosesfeet with it and said, Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me!So he let him alone. It was then that she said, A bridegroom of blood, because of the circumcision. This is a tough text indeed. Many of you actually requested we deal with this text in our current Sunday evening series on tough texts, but because were in Exodus on Sunday mornings we knew wed arrive at this passage and would deal with it then. Well Church, here we are. I have many questions about these three verses.[5] Question 1: who is God seeking to kill in v24, Moses or one of his sons? Question 2: if its Moses, why seek to kill him when God just labored with Moses to convince him to go to Egypt? Question 3: if its Moses, what did he do to anger the Lord? Question 4: why does it say God sought to kill him? Cant God do whatever He desires to do? Is this evidence of God being unable to carry out something? Question 5: in v25 how does Zipporah immediately seem to know what to do to solve this problem? Question 6: why does she touch Moses feet with the foreskin she just cut off? Question 7: what does bridegroom of blood mean? Question 8: who is the bridegroom of blood Zipporah is referring to? And question 9: why is God satisfied in v26 with Zipporahs actions? Anyone have any answers to these questions? This is certainly among the most difficult passages to understand in the Bible. Perhaps, we can view it like this. As they were resting during their travel, God sought to put Moses or Moses son to death. Why? Because of circumcision. I think its safe to assume this was the issue here, because v25-26 gives circumcision a central place. So whats going on is that God was not going to let someone in this family get to Egypt due to circumcision.[6] But what about circumcision so angered the Lord? In v25 we see that Zipporah performed a circumcision on their son and then seemed to give Moses an emphatic remark, Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me! This leaves the impression that she was angry at Moses for not doing the circumcision, thus implying Moses was the guilty party in view, which Zipporah made up for by doing it herself, which allowed them to continue on their journey. If this is what happened Zipporah would then be another woman in these early chapters of Exodus who saves the day. After this, Zipporah took the foreskin and touched it to Moses feet[7], which seemed to signify that the blood serves as a covering or atoning sacrifice for Moses sin because v26 says So He (God) let him alone. All in all, because of his sin Moses almost loses his life or the life of his son. God truly was about put someone to death, but when the blood covered Moses, God stayed His anger. This tough and strange text, in a deep way, prepares us for whats to come.[8] The God who appears here in anger, ready to kill father or son is the same God who will meet Pharaoh in the plagues. This is the same God who will provide atonement for His people in the blood of the Passover lamb, that is, if they put the blood over the doors. Zipporah responded well by offering a bloody sacrifice to atone for sin. How will the rest of Egypt and Israel respond to God in that final plague? How glorious to see it Church, here God makes a way through the blood. How beautiful to see it, and to see the greater moment this leads to far ahead to the cross of Christ. There its not the blood of circumcision, or the blood of a small lamb, but the blood of Gods beloved Son. His blood that speaks a better word, His blood that opens a better and more lasting way, His blood that can atone for all the sins of all who would come by faith. Just as God stayed His anger at Moses through this hurried circumcision, so too anyone who comes to the Son of God in faith wont be met by an angry God out to kill, but a God of love eager to forgive and save and keep forevermore. Indeed, God makes a way through the blood. Now, after working through a very complex passage, we end our text with clarity once again in v27-30 as we see a final summary. Toward Worship (v27-31) TheLordsaid to Aaron, Go into the wildernessto meet Moses. So he went and met him at themountain of God and kissed him.And Mosestold Aaron all the words of theLordwith which he had sent him to speak, and allthe signs that he had commanded him to do.Then Moses and Aaronwent and gathered together all the elders of the people of Israel.Aaron spoke all the words that theLordhad spoken to Moses and did the signs in the sight of the people. And the peoplebelieved; and when they heard that theLordhadvisited the people of Israel and that he hadseen their affliction,they bowed their heads and worshiped. These final verses of the chapter serve as a summary, moving us as the reader away from the scene at Sinai and the burning bush in chapters 3-4, toward the scene at Egypt in chapter 5 and beyond. Here were brought back to see more of what Moses and his family did before leaving for Egypt. We see Aaron heading out to meet Moses in v27. We see Moses telling Aaron all the words of God, and the signs of God, and we see them both set out for the people of Israel in v28. We then see Moses and Aaron gather the people, speak to the people, and perform the signs for all the people in v29-30. It's a fast wrap up for sure. But does the fast pace surprise you? It's worth noticing how little space is devoted to this meeting between Moses and the people. I say this is worth noticing because this is the moment Moses was dreading and fearing, so much so that it caused him to doubt the Lord before the burning bush. But despite all his fears when the moment finally came, the moment went fine. Moses fear proved to be an invention of his own making. There's a big lesson in this for us. Worrying about what might happen in the future so much so that we doubt the Lord is a sin that can overburden the soul. Once Moses obeyed and went out to meet Aaron and the people, it went fine! Lesson? If God calls you to it, Hell take care of you in it. Theres no need to worry. If youre on a train and you enter a dark tunnel, you dont jump off for fear of the dark, do you? No! You trust that the engineer knows what theyre doing even if you cant see the tracks ahead. Church, when can see, when we cannot see, trust the Lord. He is God, and He is good! Conclusion: Hear v31 again, And the peoplebelieved; and when they heard that theLordhadvisited the people of Israel and that he hadseen their affliction,they bowed their heads and worshiped. Here at the end we see the people who Moses said would not believe, believe, and more, we see them worship God because of what He had said to Moses![9] This is right for them to do.[10] We should take their cue. We know more than Israel does in v31. We have not only heard of the Lord visiting us in the Person of His Son, we have read of it, and we have come to know and trust and love this beloved Son of God. Into our darkness Christ descended to save, and ascended to reign! We know the gospel offer, of freedom from all our sins, and freedom to enjoy God by glorifying Him forever. The only right response to seeing these wonderful works of God, is to worship God. [1] Philip Graham Ryken, Exodus: Saved for Gods Glory Preaching the Word Commentary (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015) 113. [2] Douglas K. Stuart, Exodus NAC (Brentwood, TN: BH Publishing, 2006) 143. [3] Ryken, 114-115. [4] G.K. Beale, A New Testament Biblical Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011) 406-422. [5] Victor P. Hamilton, Exodus: An Exegetical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2023) 81-82. [6] Stuart, 152-153. [7] Feet here refers to the male genitalia of Moses. [8] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, vol. 1 (New York, NY: Norton, 2019) 229. [9] John I. Durham, Exodus - WBC (Waco TX: Word Books, 1987) 59. [10] Ryken, 120.Watch at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgHvkq71_Jk

Watch at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFhlnyGoXQQ

After the events of the Exodus Moses led all of Israel in singing the following song, I will sing to the LORD, for He has triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea. The LORD is my strength and my song, and He has become my salvation; this is my God, and I will praise Him, my fathers God, and I will exalt Him. The LORD is a man of war; the LORD is His name. Pharaoh's chariots and his host he cast into the sea, and his chosenofficers were sunk in the Red Sea. Thefloods covered them; theywent down into the depths like a stone. Your right hand, OLord, glorious in power, your right hand, OLord,shatters the enemy. In thegreatness of your majesty you overthrow your adversaries; you send out your fury; itconsumes them like stubble. At theblast of your nostrils the waters piled up; thefloods stood up in a heap; the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea. The enemy said,I will pursue, I will overtake, Iwill divide the spoil, my desire shall have its fill of them. I will draw my sword; my hand shall destroy them. Youblew with your wind; thesea covered them; they sank like lead in the mighty waters. Who is like you, OLord, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome inglorious deeds,doing wonders? Question: how did Moses first learn that God is a God who of wonders? Answer: long before Moses saw Gods wonders in Egypt, and long before Moses saw Gods wonders by the Red Sea, Moses learned of Gods wonders at the burning bush. In our passage today, Exodus 4:1-9, we see this very thing. Weve been with Moses before the burning bush for two weeks now. Last week we looked at the glories and beauty of the Divine Name given in 3:14, and the week before we looked at all of chapter 3 and the first three scenes of this great burning bush moment. Today we come to scene 4 in this great moment, found in 4:1-9. The passage easily divides into two points, see first The Weakness of Man (v1) Then Moses answered, But behold, they will not believe me or listen to my voice, for they will say, The LORD did not appear to you. As we begin, see Moses in v1. He now raises yet another objection. This is becoming quite the pattern for him. Back in chapter 3 we saw him fearfully doubt God in v11 and v13, inventing excuses twice even though God had revealed His own name to him and promised that His own presence would go with him into Egypt. More so, God promised to do wonders in Egypt to ensure Pharaoh let them go in v20. And God promised He would give Israel such favor that theyd plunder the Egyptians on the way out in v21-22. How does Moses respond to God after all these gracious promises and encouragements? He continues to question God. Thats what we see in 4:1. Even though God had said the people will listen to him, Moses stubbornly says they wont listen to him or believe him. There is a lot to learn in v1. First, I think this is ironic.[1] Why? Because Moses is accusing Israel of doing exactly what he is doing to God right now. Moses doesnt believe Gods Word, he hasnt trusted what God has said, and in his own lack of trust he believes Israel wont trust what he says! Ironic indeed. Second, I think this is almost reasonable.[2] We can understand why Moses would ask this question. He was the only eyewitness to this appearing of God in the burning bush, and now God was calling him to go tell Gods people of this moment and that their God was sending him to be their savior? Remember the last time Moses tried to speak to some Israelites about him saving them from the Egyptians? In 2:14 they told Moses, Who made you a prince and judge over us? Its understandable, remembering how poorly the previous moment went, that Moses would doubt that theyd listen to him in the present moment. No one else is with Moses on this mountain before the burning bush, so hed have to explain it to the Israelites and theyd have to trust his word about all of this, and theyd have to trust him in all of this.[3] But third, I think that as understandable as this is, his doubt is inexcusable. Why? Because its a direct denial of what God said. Look at 3:18. There God tells Moses they will listen to your voice yet here in 4:1 Moses says, They will not believe me or listen to my voice Understandable? Yes. Inexcusable? Yes. Church, see in this the weakness of man. God has revealed so much to us in His Word, and yet we still doubt Him. God has been faithful to us on so many occasions, and yet we still doubt Him. God has proven again and again to us how trustworthy He is, how kind He is, how strong and true He is, and yet we still doubt Him. We look at Moses here and frown on him as he doubts and fears, while we so often do the same. What will it take for us to trust the Lord? Church, here in v1 is a sin to avoid. Doubting God and the fear of man, as understandable as it is, is also inexcusable. These things will rob much of your assurance and joy in the Christian life. Hear it plain and simple Church, God has given us no reason to doubt Him, He can be trusted. Somay you trust Him, and from trusting Him, may you cease fearing man. The Wonders of God (v2-9) TheLordsaid to him, What is that in your hand? He said,A staff.And he said, Throw it on the ground. So he threw it on the ground, and it became a serpent, and Moses ran from it.But theLordsaid to Moses, Put out your hand and catch it by the tail so he put out his hand and caught it, and it became a staff in his hand that they maybelieve that theLord,the God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has appeared to you.Again, theLordsaid to him, Put your hand inside your cloak.And he put his hand inside his cloak, and when he took it out, behold, his hand wasleprouslike snow.Then God said, Put your hand back inside your cloak. So he put his hand back inside his cloak, and when he took it out, behold,it was restored like the rest of his flesh.If they will not believe you, God said, or listen to the first sign, they may believe the latter sign.If they will not believe even these two signs or listen to your voice, you shall take some water from the Nile and pour it on the dry ground, and the water that you shall take from the Nilewill become blood on the dry ground. As we saw before in chapter 3, now we see again in chapter 4 as God responds to Moses doubt graciously. In response to his doubt God gives Moses 3 signs. The first sign comes in v2-5, the staff turned to serpent. This is the first time in Exodus we hear of Moses famous staff. In the time to come he will use this staff to bring many of the plagues onto Egypt, part the Red Sea to walk through, as well as close the Red Sea on Pharaohs armies. In many ancient and modern cultures the staff functions as a symbol of rule and authority and power. Such was the case in ancient Egypt as well. Numerous historical images show Pharaoh with a staff. Some of them even picture Pharaohs staff with an animal head on it. That Moses carries a staff doesnt only remind us of his humble origins as a shepherd, its a subtle hint that Moses carries great authority. Authority that is greater than Pharaohs. Authority will take the form of an animal itself. All of this shows us Gods power. We know Moses isnt going to Pharaoh in his own authority, but Gods. Pharaoh will be forced to learn this in time too. But be sure to note, for now these signs are given to Moses to do before Israel so that they will trust and believe what hes saying. The first sign is described simply enough. In v2 God asks whats in Moses hand. Moses responds that its his staff. In v3 God tells him to throw it on the ground, he does, and wonder of wonders, it becomes a snake. Humorously Moses runs away from it. But God in v4 calls him back and tells him to pick it back up by the tail. Why the tail? I think its because God was encouraging Moses to trust Him. After all, grabbing a snake by the tail can be dangerous because its head can swing around and bite you (which is why most people who pick up snakes grab them near the head). Moses did this from a distance, notice that? It doesnt say to walked up to it and grabbed it. It says he stretched out his hand, implying some distance, and picked it up. And as soon as he did this, the snake became a staff again. Then in v5 we read this sign was given so Israel would believe God had appeared to Moses. God is teaching Moses a lesson in this staff to snake and back again sign. If God can do all these wonders with a stick, imagine what He could do with Moses! The apologist Francis Schaeffer once commented on this very thing in his book No Little People saying, Many years ago when I was just a young pastor out of seminary, the study of Moses rod which I called God so used a stick of wood was a crucial factor in giving me the courage to press onconsider the mighty ways in which God used a dead stick of wood. Though we are limited and weak in talent, physical energy and psychological strength, we are not less than a stick of wood. But as the rod of Moses becomes the rod of God (Exodus 4:20), so that which is me must become the me of God. Then I can become useful in God's hands. The Scripture emphasizes that much can come from little if the little is truly consecrated to God.[4] A bit further on in the same book he makes his point clearer saying, Those who think of themselves as little people in little places, if committed to Christ and living under his lordship in the whole of life, may by God's grace change the flow of a generation. And as we get on a bit in our lives, knowing how weak we are, if we look back and see we have been somewhat used of God then we should be a rod surprised by joy.[5] This is what God is teaching Moses in his staff. That He can take the smallest and weakest of things in the sight of the world, and change the world with them. And it just so happens, God was about to do just that. The second sign comes in v6-8, the leprous hand. This second sign is like the first in that it was something harmless changing into something harmful and then changing back again.[6] But its not a snake this time, its leprosy. That word, leprosy, is an umbrella term, referring to a variety of skin conditions, most of which were severely dangerous and contagious. Which is why later in Leviticus we find many laws and precautions given so that those infected do not come into contact with others. This shows us how dangerous leprosy could be, and this is the second sign God chooses to give to Moses. Again its described simply enough. In v6 God tells Moses to put his hand into his cloak and pull it out. He does so and as he pulls his hand back out it is leprous, white as snow. In v7 God tells Moses to repeat this, and when he took his hand out this time it was back to normal. Then comes the interesting detail in v8. God says He is giving Moses this second sign, just in case they do not believe the first one. So this is a backup wonder. And for good reason. If they didnt get it with the staff and snake, this sign surely wouldve stunned them. When Moses put his hand in his cloak and pulled it out all leprous-like people wouldve immediately recoiled from him, just like he did from the snake because no one would want to catch the disease. But when he put it back in and pulled it out as normal as can be. It wouldve been seen as nothing short of miraculous. They wouldve been stunned at this second sign because in this culture there was a strong association between diseases and divine judgment.[7] Such that if you had leprosy of any sort it was assumed that the gods were judging you for something you did. That Moses can take his hand in and out of his cloak and go from unclean to clean in a moment wouldve been to the Israelites something only God can do. The third and final sign comes in v9, the bloody Nile. This sign is different from the first two because its uncertain if Moses actually did this one. And it doesnt seem to be about Moses credibility with the people either, about them believing him as the other signs are. Rather, this third sign seems to be of a grander sort, hinting at the fact that God has some serious threats in store for Egypt.[8] Whether this third sign was reserved for the plagues alone, or if Moses did it unknowingly giving Israel a preview of whats to come, v9 is clear. If they people dont believe the first two signs, this greater third sign then comes in. Moses simply is to take water from the Nile, pour it on the ground, and it will become blood. Unlike the first two signs there is no going back in this third sign. Once the water becomes blood, it stays blood. To Egypt this wouldve been terrorizing. Not only was the Nile a source of life to them, giving water to all their livelihood, but the Nile was revered as a god in Egypt. Seeing Moses take some of the water and turning it to blood wouldve been like watching one of their gods bleed. Lesson? God is the strongest god. No one is like Him, and no one messes with His people. As terrifying as this wouldve been to an Egyptian, it wouldve been bolstering for an Israelite. That God would not be overpowered by the gods of Egypt. That He would stand His own. And that He would defeat and lay waste to His enemies to save His people. Yes and amen. These then are the signs and wonders God gives to Moses.[9] In the first sign something supportive becomes something serpentine. In the second sign something healthy becomes something harmful. And in the third sign something pure becomes something putrid. Each of them will resurface in the time to come. And each of them served the purpose of validating Moses credentials, and authenticating his ministry as being from the Lord.[10] Israel must believe Moses as we see Moses here struggling to believe God.[11] And it seems from what we read later on in v30-31 that Moses did all these signs before Israel, and that upon seeing them, they believed and bowed their heads in worship. Conclusion: As signs and wonders are present here, signs and wonders continue down through redemptive history, all the way to Jesus Himself, who performed many signs and wonders. Yet, He would rebuke the people for needing them or even demanding them in order to believe His message. Ultimately though, He would provide one of the greatest signs wonders ever seen in the history of the world. The signs given to Moses were powerful, but they pale in comparison to the power displayed when Christ walked the earth. In Christ, we see God's power not just to change the nature of objects, but to change the nature of man. He takes our dead hearts and makes them alive. He takes our doubting and fearful souls and makes them whole. He gladly and willingly bears the leprosy of our sin on the cross and makes us clean forever. So Church, let the wonders at the burning bush remind you of God's incredible power, and then let your gaze go forward and be fixed on the greatest sign and wonder of all, the cross and empty tomb of Jesus. Here our salvation was accomplished. Here all sins are defeated. Here all hopes are secured. Here all fears are dashed. Here all that is sad is declared to be untrue. In the face of all the evil and dark sin in the world, this gospel shines bright. May the light of Christ lift up your soul afresh today. [1] John D. Currid, Genesis 1:1-25:18 - EP Study Commentary (Holywell, UK: Evangelical Press, 2015) 91. [2] Philip Graham Ryken, Exodus: Saved for Gods Glory Preaching the Word Commentary (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015) 95. [3] John I. Durham, Exodus - WBC (Waco TX: Word Books, 1987) 44. [4] Francis A. Schaeffer, No Little People (Grand Rapids, MI: IVP, 1975) 13-17. [5] Schaeffer, 25. [6] Douglas K. Stuart, Exodus NAC (Brentwood, TN: BH Publishing, 2006) 130. [7] Stuart, 131. [8] Stuart, 131. [9] Victor P. Hamilton, Exodus: An Exegetical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2023) 71. [10] Ryken, 98. [11] Durham, 46.Watch at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_HDfUl4T2Q

Id like to begin with a question this morning: what was God doing before He created the world? This is a question every Christian eventually asks. One way to answer this is to say that before God made the world He was lonely, feeling a lack, and desired to fill an emptiness within Him, leading Him to make the world and all in it. And now that the world is here and we ourselves are here, God isnt lonely anymore but feels fulfilled and whole.[1] If you took a survey of Christians from all over, asking them this question, I think youd hear something like this answer quite often. This morning Id like to propose a different answer to the question. What was God doing before He created the world? I dont think He was lonely, feeling empty, or just twiddling His thumbs, no, I think God was just fine. More than fine in fact. I think before God created the world He was infinitely content and happy in Himself. Why do I say this? Because the God of Scripture is a God who has no needs, is fully independent, and fully self-sufficient. And Church, I think this is very good news for us. Last week we arrived at one of the most foundational moments in the whole Bible, the moment where God appears to Moses at the burning bush. We took a big look last week at all of chapter 3, and when we came to v14 where God tells Moses His name I said wed spend our entire time together this week on that very reality. Well Church, here we are. Open your Bibles to Exodus 3. Again the single verse before us today is Exodus 3:14 which says this, God said to Moses, I AM WHO I AM And he said, Say this to the people of Israel: I AM has sent me to you. All kinds of books covering all kinds of things have been written on this single verse. That alone ought to let us know that this is so significant a verse that it demands at least one entire sermon. To simplify this, Ive decided to focus on two major realities this verse teaches us. First, the God not like us. And second, the God who became like us. The God Not Like Us In the context of Exodus 3 we must firstly say that this verse is Gods gracious response to Moses fearful questioning. There he expressed great doubt and fear. God had commanded him in v10 to go back into Egypt, to Pharaoh himself, to demand that he let Israel go. We saw last week how this terrified Moses in v11. He expresses his fear to God, and God responded to Moses fear by making a great promise v12. He promised Moses that His very presence would be with him as he went before Pharaoh. Yet Moses fear and doubt remained, prompting him to ask God a new question in v13. This time he asked God what he should do if one of the Israelites ever asks about Gods name. And then we see it. In v14 we see Gods gracious response to Moses fear and doubt as God reveals His divine name. While v14 is certainly Gods response to Moses questions, it is far more than a response to Moses. Here God is making an assertion of authority, a confession of eternal and essential reality.[2] When God says His name is I AM WHO I AM, and that Moses should say I AM has sent him, the name actually given here is only four Hebrew letters, YHWH. These four letters are the imperfect tense of the Hebrew verb to be, meaning I am or I will be. This name is sometimes called the tetragrammaton because it only contains four Hebrew consonants. If we supply the vowels needed it becomes something like Yahweh. Now, Jews of old believed this name was so holy and so revered that you should never utter it for fear of taking it in vain. This is reflected in our English translations. When the divine name shows up it's usually translated with the word LORD, in all caps. The KJV does a bit more, adding more vowels to the divine name, ending up with the name Jehovah. In this name we learn much. We learn that God is not like us. Why? Because Hes the I AM. Meaning He is self-existent, He is the Creator and Sustainer of all things. He is utterly separate and unique and independent over and above all things. Moses asked a question and God responded, yes. But Gods response isnt so much an answer as it is an entire theology.[3] Church, almost all of what is revealed to us here in v14 can be boiled down to one attribute of God, His aseity. Have any of you ever heard that word before? The word aseity comes from two Latin words, a meaning from and se meaning self. God is thus from Himself. Aseity is the first attribute of God we encounter in the Bible.[4] Think back to how Genesis begins, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. In this opening chapter to the Bible we see many beginnings. The beginning of the heavens, the beginning of the earth, the skies, the sea, the land, birds, fish, creatures, and mankind. Many beginnings indeed. But dont miss that in Genesis 1:1 we also are introduced to the God who was there before the beginning, the God who never had a beginning. It makes perfect sense then, that when God reveals His name to Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 3, He reveals it as I AM. That God is the I AM, that He has aseity, leads us to think of the great difference between God and us. We are born into this world as dependent finite beings. Our existence comes from our mother and father. We are because they had us. More so, the whole of our lives, from conception to death, must be upheld and sustained by God, making us dependent not only on our mother and father, but above all on God. In other words, the whole of our life comes from God the author and source and fountain of life. Church, God is not like this. His nature isnt like our nature. Unlike ourselves and unlike everything in this world, His existence doesnt come from someone or something else. No one brought him into being and He isnt dependent on another to be sustained in His existence. We can be measured, God is immeasurable. We are contingent beings, God is not contingent on anything else. Our entire existent is grounded in Him, Gods existence is grounded in Himself alone. We are because of others, we continue because of another. God simply is. He is the I AM. St. Anselm of Canterbury described this long ago saying God has of Himself all that He has, while other things have nothing of themselves. And other things, having nothing of themselves, have their only reality from Him.[5] So while our nature is that of a derived being, having our source in God, Gods nature and essence is pure being. What does this mean? It means that God isnt like us. He and ourselves are different types of beings. While we are needy, weak, dependent creatures, God is an eternally and perfectly independent being. All this comes from the fact that God has aseity, that He is the I AM. This is weighty stuff I know. So perhaps an illustration will help. On occasion Holly and I will hear our kids get into arguments with each other making big statements of ownership. For example we will sometimes hear them say to each other, You messed up my room. Or, Dont move my stuff. Or, You knocked over my Legos. This is pretty normal for kids to talk like this, its actually pretty normal for us too. When our kids get a bit too intense in moments like this we come in, try to assess the situation, de-escalate tempers, dole out the appropriate correction/discipline, and remind them that they dont own anything. Everything they have was given to them by us as a gift. It is good parenting to remind our kids of this truth. And if its good for our kids to be reminded of this, its also good for ourselves to be reminded of this truth too. That all we are, all we have, all of usmeaning all our needs that are met, all our weaknesses that are strengthened, all our lack that is filled comes from the God who has no needs, no weakness, and no lack in Himself. Lets ask a further question then. Why does God give anything to us at all? Or perhaps a bigger question is better. Since God has eternally been fully content and sufficient in Himself, why did God create anything in the first place? Well, it certainly wasnt to fill a lack in Himself, no. He created and sustains and gives and blesses because He is gracious. And as an eternally full being, like a fountain, God cannot help but overflow. This truth has a massive effect on our worship. In Psalm 50 this comes out so clearly. There God has been stirred to anger because of His peoples sin, and they think in all their sin they can worship with no problems. God rebukes them for this saying in Psalm 50:7-15, Hear, O my people, and I will speak; O Israel, I will testify against you. I am God, your God. Not for your sacrificesdo I rebuke you; your burnt offerings are continually before me. I will not accept a bull from your house or goats from your folds. For every beast of the forest is Mine, the cattle on a thousand hills. I know all the birds of the hills, and all that moves in the field is Mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and its fullness are Mine. Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats? Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and perform your vows to the Most High, and call upon Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify Me. Then in an astounding statement, a few verses later God rebukes us for thinking He was like us. In Psalm 50:21 God says, you thought that Iwas one like yourself. But now Irebuke you andlay the charge before you. Our worship of God, then, is not intended to meet the needs of God, as if He were insecure and our worship of Him gave Him security. No, Hes the I AM. The essence of our worship is fueled by who God is and what God has done. At His holiness, righteousness, greatness, and wisdom. And this great God has done great things, for usso we worship Him as a being utterly above us in every way possible. Church, this grand reality is the very thing Moses is hearing on the mountain in Exodus 3:14. The God Moses encountered in the burning bush was the God of absolute and infinite being, different from himself in every way possible. I hope you can now see a little bit of why Exodus 3:14 is absolutely foundational for how we view God, how we approach God, what we think of God, and the words we use to describe God. Only aseity belongs to Him, only He is the I AM. In this it is crystal clear, God is not like us. The God Who Became Like Us Weve seen how foundational the I AM moment is, and weve seen how different God is from us. But as time would unfold God did something we would never believe unless the Bible told us. This God, the God who has aseity, the great I AM, became like us. Into all our sin, all our darkness, all our fears, concerns, worries, doubts, and weaknesses. Into all that we are not, God descended. How did He do this? In the person of His Son. When Jesus came, He came not just in the name of God as a prophet or a messenger, He came as God Himself. And again and again He attributed the name of God to Himself. Meaning, He took Gods own name, I AM, as His own. In John 6 the disciples were scared in a boat as a great storm raged around them. They looked up and through the wind and waves and miraculously they saw Jesus walking on the sea directly toward them. At this they didnt shout for joy, or feel a great sense of relief. They knew storms. They knew no mere man could do what Jesus was doing at that moment and so John 6:19 says they were afraid. What did Jesus say as He drew near the boat? John 6:20, It is I, do not be afraid. When Jesus says do not be afraid we understand that. God often told that to people in the OT. Angels would even say this first to anyone God sent them to, and for the fearful disciples to hear do not be afraid from Jesus in the midst of the storm had to be an encouraging moment for them. But He said more than just do not be afraid. He said, It is I; do not be afraid. Do know what the phrase It is I in v20 is in the original Greek? Ego eimi. Do you know what that literally translates as? I AM. Therefore, when Jesus comes to the frightened disciples walking on the water He literally says I AM, do not be afraid They wouldve understood the weight of His words. They wouldve understood the reason Jesus was giving them to not be afraid. Why should they not fear? Because Jesus is the great I AM, God Himself. No storm can defeat a God as great as this. Later on in a heated exchange with the Pharisees Jesus makes a similarly staggering claim. In John 8:56 he says to a group of angry Pharisees, Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see My day. He saw it and was glad. They responded in the next verse saying, You are not yet 50 years old, and have you seen Abraham? To which Jesus famously replies in John 8:58, Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I AM. Using the divine name of God revealed to Moses on the mountain in reference to Himself was a clear claim to deity. It cannot be taken any other way. He did not say I was to teach simply old age and long years, he said I AM to teach of His aseity and divine nature. Jesus would of course do this many more times, using the I AM name to attribute deity to Himself. I AM the bread of life. I AM the light of the world. I AM the door of the sheep. I AM the good shepherd. I AM the resurrection and the life. I AM the way, the truth, the life. I AM the true vine. Then wonder upon wonder, there is a greater glory to behold. Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, the I AM, the God who has aseitywillingly died for sinners. This is staggering. The more we see of His greatness and glory in Exodus 3, the more well come to see how low He truly came to save His own. The same I AM who burned in the bush, who struck Egypt with plague after plague, who thundered on Mt. Sinai, would one day cry in the manger, and ultimately would embrace death on the cross for all who would ever believe. No wonder the grave couldnt hold Him down, Hes the I AM. Hes the eternally perfect infinite fountain full of life and beauty and majesty in Himself. Death fled from His presence as He walked out of the tomb that Sunday morning. Conclusion: Church, throughout history every culture has searched for something that is a se. Theyve searched for some kind of ultimate being, or ultimate standard of truth. People have tried to say its Mother Nature, this god or that god, human knowledge or human experience, reason, logic, or some type of combination of these things. Philosophers for ages have sought after the concept of the Absolute because they know if such a being exists that being would be the origin and source from which all other life flowed forth. But the world has refused to see Jesus Christ as ultimate in any way. Thus, the souls search for the ultimate a se being has been frustratingly empty because though theyve never found it, He is directly before their eyes. The result of this frustration is that many give up the search and choose to embrace the dark idea of chaos or meaninglessness as the ultimate reason or answer for existence. Contrasting this is Exodus 3:14, which is bright with hope. Only this God, of the Bible can give meaning to human experience and reason. So dont think divine aseity or the independence of God is something that is only abstract, or a theory to be known or taught in classrooms. The bottom line is this: if God were not a se, and fully independent, if He depended on anything else for His being, He would cease to be God. This makes us thankful for who He is. There is no one like Him, and there is no god but Him. Praise God that He would willingly and gladly desire not only to create us and to reveal Himself to us, but to redeem us in Christ as well. [1] Matthew Barrett, None Greater (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2019) 55-56. [2] John I. Durham, Exodus - WBC (Waco TX: Word Books, 1987) 38. [3] Goldingay, quoted in Victor P. Hamilton, Exodus: An Exegetical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2023) 66. [4] Kevin DeYoung, Daily Doctrine (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2024) 49. [5] Anselm, On the Fall of the Devil 1, quoted in Barrett, None Greater, 57.Watch at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSpIM3CSZrU

A single day can change your life forever. Davids life would never be the same after the day he fought Goliath. Pauls life would never be the same after the day he met Jesus on the Damascus Road. And the day that would change all our days, the day the stone rolled away revealing an empty tomb. Exodus 3 is like this. It begins on a day like any other day. Nothing special. Moses isnt in a palace anymore, he isnt living as a son of Pharaoh. Hes been in the desert for forty yearstending sheep. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, just desert, sheep, silence. But then on an ordinary day, in an ordinary place, he sees something extraordinary. A bush burning yet not being consumed. He draws near, and in a moment, everything changes. This day would not only change the course of Moses life, it would change the course of history. Church, today we come to the great burning bush moment. It begins in 3:1 and goes all the way until 4:17. It is so monumental a passage, that well take the next month to work through it. Today, Ill begin by leading you through the first three scenes of this great moment, all of which are found in chapter 3. Scene 1 (v1-6) Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Midian, and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, themountain of God.Andthe angel of theLordappeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed.And Moses said, I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.When theLordsaw that he turned aside to see,God called to himout of the bush, Moses, Moses! And he said, Here I am.Then he said, Do not come near;take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.And he said,I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face, forhe was afraid to look at God. As we see Moses keeping the flocks of Jethro in v1 we need to remember a few things. First, we need to remember Stephens sermon in Acts 7. There before hes stoned Stephen gives an overview of this moment in Moses life and he says in Acts 7:29-30, Moses fled and became an exile in the land of Midian,where he became the father of two sons. Now when forty years had passed,an angel appeared to himin the wilderness of Mount Sinai, in a flame of fire in a bush. So as Exodus 2 ends and Exodus 3 begins, we need to keep in mind that 40 years have passed, making Moses an 80 year old man. Second, back in chapter 2 we met Moses father-in-law the priest of Midian. Hes called Reuel in chapter 2, and here in v1 hes called Jethro. As we saw last week, many think Reuel was his priestly title and that Jethro was his given name. He has surely grown older, because now we see Moses is the one keeping the flocks. Right here from start then dont miss what God is doing. To man, Moses is a picture of a failure. He had to flee Egypt after a failed attempt to rescue Israel, and now hes reduced to the simplest kind of labor, shepherding. But to God, all is going according to plan. Here is one who has been humbled, reduced to shepherding, yes, but one who will one day shepherd all of Israel.[1] God is indeed preparing Moses for whats to come. The rest of v1 serves the purpose of letting us know how Moses came to be so far away from where he normally leads his flock.[2] He went way out into the west side of the wilderness likely because it was unusually dry and all the grass had dried out. Thus, he comes to Mt. Horeb. Horeb, you should know, is either another name for Mt. Sinai or its the region Mt. Sinai is located in. And its called the mountain of God in v1 because thats what it will become to Israel in the future. For now, its just a mountain. But is it? Look at v2-3. Here we see a thing of wonder. The angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in a burning bush. Moses wouldve known how to keep warm on cold nights and wouldve known that once a regular bush was lit on fire it would soon burn up. Yet this bush was burning while not burning up.[3] So what does he do? He goes nearer to get a closer look. As he draws near in v2-3, the moment comes, and angel of the Lord appears in the fire. Fire is often associated with the presence of God and the purity of His holiness, as well see in the rest of Exodus, and sure enough, Moses is about to have an encounter with God. But, who is the angel of the Lord mentioned here? Weve seen this language before back when God appears to Hagar, and well see it again when God appears to Joshua. There is much debate here as you can imagine. Some believe the angel of the Lord is a literal angel functioning as a messenger of God. I dont think this is the case because while the text identifies this angel as being from the Lord, it also identifies this angel with the Lord. And in v4 it says God called out from the bush, meaning this angel didnt just speak for God, He spoke as God.[4] So I believe we have two options. Either the angel of the Lord is God Himself come down to meet with Moses, making this a theophany (God revealing Himself to man), or the angel of the Lord is the pre-incarnate Christ (making this a Christophany, Christ revealing Himself to man). While I tend to believe that this is the pre-incarnate Christ, good arguments can be made on both sides of this. All in all, do not miss the forest for the trees here. From no initiative of his own, Moses meets God on this mountain. As Moses nears the burning bush God calls out in v4, Moses, Moses! Moses responds Here I am. God then says two things. First He says, Do not come near;take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.And secondly God says, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. That Moses was to keep a distance and not come near, emphasizes the gap between the holy God and sinful man.[5] This is the first time in the Bible that the word holy is explicitly used in reference to God.[6] That explains much about this scene. Moses must remove his sandals, not because sandals are unholy, but because of reverence. Just as one would normally remove their shoes in this culture when coming into the presence of or the home of a superior, so too Moses removes his shoes because he now knows Mt. Sinai is where God has chosen to dwell. Thus, Gods holy presence makes ordinary ground, holy ground.[7] What did Moses do next? See v6, Moses hid his face, forhe was afraid to look at God. His curiosity turns to fear as He realizes who has appeared to him. In this moment Moses learns from God what Israel would one day learn from him, that God is holy, that no one comes into Gods presence irreverently, because God is a consuming fire.[8] Now only the bush is burning with the holy fire of God, soon the whole mountain will burn as Israel draws near to receive the Law.[9] Lastly, v6 shows us that what we learned (as readers) in 2:23-25, Moses learns for Himself as God declares that He is the God of his father, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is of utmost importance. It highlights that God is now continuing the story He began in Genesis. This is the covenant faithfulness of God. It reminds us that He keeps the promises He makes. Much time has passed yes, His timing isnt our timing, yes, but He remains faithful to His Word, yes. Thus, our hope in Him can always remain firm. Scene 2 (v7-12) Then theLordsaid,I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of theirtaskmasters. I know their sufferings,andI have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians andto bring them up out of that land to agood and broad land, a landflowing with milk and honey, to the place ofthe Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.And now, behold,the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have also seen theoppression with which the Egyptians oppress them.Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.But Moses said to God,Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?He said,But I will be with you, and this shall be the sign for you, that I have sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt,you shall serve God on this mountain. Now we hear God tell Moses of His own intimate knowledge of the woes of His people. God has seen, God has heard, God knows all the suffering of all Israel. And He will act. See it in v8. God will come downto bring His people up. We see so much gospel in these words dont we? God comes down, to what? Bring us up! As Israel couldnt do it on their own, we cant do it on our own. As God delighted in saving them in the Exodus, so too He delights in saving us in Christ. Our God is a God who saves! What will God bring Israel out and up to? A land that God describes in three ways.[10] First, the land will be good and broad. That is, it will be bigger and larger than their cramped lodging in Egypt. Second, the land will be flowing with milk and honey. That is likely a figurative description of Canaans fertile and full nature as opposed to a literal description of milk and honey. Milk and honey are often used as pictures of purity and abundance throughout the OT, and I think the same is meant here. And third, the land will also be full of people. See the list of the various peoples? The list occurs frequently in Moses writing, it appears in different variations, but this list is nearly identical to the list God gave Abraham in Genesis 15 when He first made these promises. This hints at what is coming for Israel. Yes, theyll be saved out from Egypt, but theyll have to fight their way into Canaan. Will that be hard? Yes. But v9 assures them, the God with them now in their troubles will also be with them then in the midst of their fight. In v10 there is a bit of a shift. Moses now learns he will not be an onlooker to God saving Israel, he will be the means by which God saves them. This seems, I think, to strike fear into Moses because he responds in v11 with doubt. Some do say Moses is showing a true humility here, but I disagree.[11] Throughout the burning bush moment Moses repeatedly calls the mission into question and speaks of his inability to carry it out.[12] The question then becomes, why does Moses doubt? The answer likely lies in his past. Specifically, his past experience in failing to come to rescue Israel. I think this stayed with him and dogged him, and as soon as he heard God was going to call him back there, a familiar fear sprang up afresh in him.[13] Yet, see how God responds to his fear and doubt in v12. God doesnt tell Moses to stop his negative thinking.[14] God simply says, I will be with you intending to replace his fear with trust. More so, God then gives him a sign to prove all of this, saying the sign of His presence with him will bewhen Israel returns to this mountain to serve God. It is certainly unique that this sign will not occur until the Exodus is over, but perhaps thats where the point. Moses must step out in faith, go to Egypt, and do what God has commanded of him, and lead the people out. Then and only then will Moses get the assurance of the sign, once the people have returned to serve God at the mountain. That word serve, by the way, is the Hebrew word for worship. Thats what God is saying here. The sign is that after the rescue of God, the people of God, will gather before this mountain to worship God. Scene 3 (v13-22) Then Moses said to God, If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, The God of your fathers has sent me to you, and they ask me, What is his name? what shall I say to them?God said to Moses, I am who I am.And he said, Say this to the people of Israel:I amhas sent me to you.God also said to Moses, Say this to the people of Israel: TheLord,theGod of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you. This ismy name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.Go andgather the elders of Israel together and say to them, TheLord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, has appeared to me, saying,I have observed you and what has been done to you in Egypt,and I promise thatI will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt to the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, a landflowing with milk and honey.Andthey will listen to your voice, and you and the elders of Israelshall go to the king of Egypt and say to him, TheLord, the God of the Hebrews, hasmet with us; and now, please let us go a three days' journey into the wilderness, that we may sacrifice to theLordour God.But I know that the king of Egyptwill not let you go unless compelledby a mighty hand.SoI will stretch out my hand and strike Egypt withall the wonders that I will do in it;after that he will let you go.AndI will give this people favor in the sight of the Egyptians; and when you go, you shall not go empty,but each woman shall ask of her neighbor, and any woman who lives in her house, forsilver and gold jewelry, and for clothing. You shall put them on your sons and on your daughters. Soyou shall plunder the Egyptians. In v13 we see Moses second fearful doubting. Gods promise that He will be with Moses and will indeed return to this mountain to worship doesnt seem to be enough for Moses, so he now asks another question. He asks God about His name. This question is interesting. Does Moses not know Gods name? God has used it before, but maybe after all the years of steeping in Egyptian culture and being oppressed by them slaves Moses has forgotten it? That is a real possibility, and maybe even Israel no longer knows it as well? Well, one thing is certain. Throughout the Exodus, no Israelite ever asks Moses about the Gods name, as if that were the sign or password to gain Israels trust. Moses then is like us, he seems to excel at raising problems that will never come into reality.[15] Gods answer to Moses in v14-15 is so famous and foundational for our understanding of God nature and character that well spend our entire time together next Sunday morning looking at the divine name in v14. For now, just know Gods answer is that His name is I am who I am and that is what Moses is to tell Israel, that the I AM, Yahweh, is saving them. As our passage comes to a close in v16-22 we see God instruct Moses on what to say to the Israelites. In v16-17 he is to go and tell them that God sees, observes, and knows all their suffering, and that He will bring them up and out of their slavery to a full and fertile land. In v18-20 God instructs Moses to tell all of this to the elders of Israel. Here we see that not only has Israel organized itself by putting leaders in place, but God now calls these elders to go with Moses to Pharaoh and demand to be let go. This is a command that clearly wasnt obeyed, as none of the elders go with Moses.[16] Yet theyre all to tell Pharaoh let them take a three day journey to worship. Whats this? Its merely a simple request, a request that Pharaoh will not grant at all. His denial of such a simple request exposes what v20 makes clear, that Israel will only escape Egypt by Gods strength and wonders.[17] Lastly in v21-22 we see God make another promise. When Israel is freed, God will give them such favor that Egypt will be plundered like God said would happen back in Genesis 15. As great as this is, there is a hard truth to see in it. Some of the gold they take out of Egypt will be used to build the tabernacle, but some of it will be used to make the golden calf. Conclusion: As we close, remember we believe the entire Bible has one unified story that culminates in the Person and Work of Jesus. The goal in preaching then isn't to find a clever way to mention Jesus, but to see how every story, including this one, finds its ultimate meaning in Him. So where is the gospel here? It shines brightest in the contrast between Moses's doubt and Gods answer. When God called, Moses's response is our own, Who am I? Its the cry of a man who knows his failures, his weaknesses, and his sin. And it is our cry, too. We look at our lives, the ordinary routines, the past mistakes, the feeling of being stuck in the desert, and we know we are not enough. We are not holy enough, not strong enough, not good enough. Into that honest cry of inadequacy, God speaks. He doesn't tell Moses to look deeper within himself. He reveals His own name, I AM. And He promises His own presence. This is a promise that points far beyond the wilderness of Midian, directly to the Lord Jesus Christ. Into our sin, our darkness, and our doubt, the great I AM did not stay distant. He came near. He became one of us in the person of His Son. The same I AM who met Moses in the fire is the I AM who stood in the temple and declared His divinity. He is the I AM who draws near to us now in the gospel. But He did more than just draw near. He took our sin and shame and fear, all of our Who am I? questions on Himself and carried it to the cross where He would enter the ultimate wilderness, ultimately dying in our place, so that in exchange, we can be forgiven, washed clean, reconciled to God, and be given His very presence. Thus, Jesus says to all who look to Him in faith, I am with you always, to the end of the age. Because of His finished work, His holy presence is now our guarantee. That changes everything. It makes all our days holy days. It makes the very ground we walk on, in our homes, in our workplaces, in our struggles, holy ground. Not because of who we are, but because the great I AM who is with us. [1] John D. Currid, Genesis 1:1-25:18 - EP Study Commentary (Holywell, UK: Evangelical Press, 2015) 71. [2] Douglas K. Stuart, Exodus NAC (Brentwood, TN: BH Publishing, 2006) 108. [3] Stuart, 109. [4] Philip Graham Ryken, Exodus: Saved for Gods Glory Preaching the Word Commentary (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015) 71. [5] Ryken, 72. [6] Ryken, 72. [7] Stuart, 115. [8] Stuart, 114. [9] Victor P. Hamilton, Exodus: An Exegetical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2023) 47. [10] Currid, 77-78. [11] Stuart, 118. He cites Davids similar language in 2 Sam. 7, yet I still disagree, seeing David as humble but Moses as fearful and doubting. [12] Currid, 80. [13] Hamilton, 58. [14] Hamilton, 59. [15] Hamilton, 63. [16] Currid, 85-86. [17] Currid, 86.Watch at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGy5OMbKAWM

Context: Moses according to Acts 7 is now about 40 Acts 7:23 When he was forty years old, it came into his heart to visit his brothers, the children of Israel. -Last week we left off with the birth of Moses and his adoption into the house of Pharaoh The people of Israel have been oppressed the Pharaoh has begun a mass genocide of the male children and yet in the midst of these tragedies the Lord spares this child through the ingenuity of his mother and the kindness of Pharaohs daughter. Moses in retelling his birth leads us with many questions but few immediate answers as he pulls us deeper into the work that God did in his life to use him to lead the people out of Egypt. And so from his birth we quickly jump forward 40ish years, and now find our prince of Egypt striving to be a would be savior to his people: I. The Life of a Would-Be -Savior (11-22) A. Moses Avenges his own (11-12) Exodus 2:1112 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. When we time jump we now find Moses no identifying with his place in the royal palace but with his own people. -We dont have a exact reason for the change in him, We dont know what spurs him on that here he is 40 years of watching the Hebrews be oppressed, but now he cares. -What we know is this is all part of Gods timing and for whatever reason Moses now will no longer identify with the house of Pharaoh but will now align with the nation of his birth. -But the first thing we see with this adult Moses is that he has a sense that Justice is being distorted int he the Land of Egypt. -He sees their burden and seems to be amazed that these things are transpiring. -He sees an Egyptian Beating (Same word that we will see later for what Moses does, but this context seems to be a normal occurrence not killing him ) a Hebrew -The phrase that he looked this way and that has 2 debated meanings (Either he was looking to make sure no one saw him or he was looking to see if anyone would stand up for the injustice being perpetrated against the Hebrew being beaten) -Both carry with them the fact that Moses is concerned with what is transpiring against his own people -Maybe a bit of a There but by the grace of God go I moments But either way Moses does take justice into his own hands and kills the Egyptian hiding his body and seeming to be proud of himself. The book of Acts will highlight that Moses in this moment did see himself as a type of savior to his people. Maybe he could free them from their bondage, maybe he was the right man at the right time to rise up and ends Pharaoh oppression of his people -He has a sense that he has accomplished something, unfortunately we will see he has done nothing of true consequence but seal his own fate and future and in this moment it is not as a leader of his people, for what he attempted to do of his own strength will be of no use for he is quickly dismissed by his Own As we continue: B. Moses Rejected by His own (13-15a) Exodus 2:1315 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. -The very next day he goes out again to his own, but now no longer seeing them oppressed by Egypt but rather oppressing each other. -Its an amazing fact of life that the oppressed and abused historically become oppressors and abuser, In their weakness they seek to beatdown those weaker than themselves. - Our text doesnt sugar coat the people of Israel here. They too are not innocent of violence (No one comes out clean and worthy of Gods mercy on their own) -MOSES the seeker of Justice now turns to the one in the wrong and question his actions and is quickly rebuffed and rejected. -These are the first words of Moses in the text and they give us a picture of his heart. He is seeking the good of his people and justice, unfortunately the people are not as concerned as he is Ill. The Students Revolution in France (Les Miserable) -The man asks a very pointed question that will take 40 years in the wildness of Midian to materialize but it was relevant in the moment: what gave Moses the right to judge them -In that moment the only position he had was as a son of Egypt they did not recognize him as their own -His killing of the Egyptian didnt change his place in their eyes -If anything this could be used rather as a way to boost this mans place by turning Moses over to Pharaoh -Our would be saviors time has run out and he is not going to save the people, rather he is the one in needing of salvation and so with Pharaohs anger kindled against him he flees -He has no home in Egypt and no home with the Hebrews and so to the land o Midian he will go. -and there we will begin a new life at a well. (Sound familiar) -We say many wells in Genesis and many new family formed there. -Both Rachael and Rebecca are found at wells. C. Moses Saves Reuels Daughters (15b-21) Exodus 2:1521 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. Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters, and they came and drew water and filled the troughs to water their fathers 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. And Moses was content to dwell with the man, and he gave Moses his daughter Zipporah. Moses quick transitions in the storm help to feel the intensity and quickness of how the Lord moved him out of Egypt and into the wilderness. -Midian is general associated with the region from the red sea to the northern Sinai peninsula, but that is often debated. They are generally considered a nomadic people from the son of Abrahams second wife (Genesis 25:12 Abraham took another wife, whose name was Keturah. She bore him Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, and Shuah. ) Moses Highlights here his third attempt at seeking justice (this time involving 7 daughters of the priest of Midian) -Here he is successful and not only does he save them but he then gives water to their sheep. -Moses really putting the moves on here (No indication that that is happening) -The daughters when returning home tell their father everything -His name here is probably more often associated with his position (Rue El means Friend of El) -He will later be called Jethro throughout the book of Exodus -The refer to him as an Egyptian which probably highlights that his appearance was in keeping with his royal place _ He calls Moses to join them (A proper right of hospitality) D. Moses Accepted in Midian Exodus 2:2122 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 in a foreign land. -While Moses was cast off from Egypt and Israel in Midian he finds a new home -He is given a wife -He has a son -His name has been interpreted in two ways -Moses is a sojourner in Midian Moses was a sojourner in Egypt -Based on the context it seems best to see him highlighting the fact that he has now found his home having been cast out of his old life -This also parallels the fact God will continually refer to his people as sojourners in Egypt awaiting their new home -just as we are sojourners -For Moses though at the end of our text His life is good He is settled in a new land with a new family, but life back in Egypt has not gotten any better II. The Covenant Faithfulness of the True God (23-25) Exodus 2:2325 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 Israeland God knew. -While Moses is living it up in Midian the Pharoah has died but the trials have not gone away -New King same problems -But into the seen we now have a glimpse into heaven -The time has come The final 3 verse of chapter 2 are the catalyst for all that is top come and a bridge to all that has been For through it all there is the question where is God -He blessed the midwives (but death continued) -He spared Moses (Oppression didnt end) -Where is God Its a serious question but also one the harkens back to genesis 15 Genesis 15:1316 Then the Lord said to Abram, Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. -God will now act -4 Words describe this moment with God A. God Hears -The people actively Cry out for help -They seek salvation from their oppression -They acknowledge their inability to save themselves (Even Moses failed at this) -He was not deaf to their sorrow (This theme of crying and hearing will carry on throughout the OT) -His timing was active even in their suffering App: God Hears our suffering cries (Even if it doesnt feel like it) B. God Remembers -From their cries the text says he remembers -It is not that he forgot -Uses human language to convey a deeper meaning -IN remembering it highlights God is now going to bring about the covenant promise form Gen 15. It is a call back -It is also a reminder that the work he is going to do in Israel is not a new work, but a continuation of what he began in Abraham (We see this even in the parallels of Moses as a new Patriarch figure) App: God will never forget his promises to his children. Our salvation is secure even if it looks bleak C. God Saw -He saw his people -He saw them let that sink in, There is an intimacy in the text. -He sees his own (His people) D. God Knew He knew -The ESV gets this translation right, but leaving it objectless. -The final phrase her captures the sense of God at work. -He knew, we has about to act, he was at work, the time has come Two Cathedrals (2.22) Mrs. Landingham: Look at you, you're a boy king. You're a foot smarter than the smartest kid in the class. You're blessed with inspiration. You must know this by now, you must have sensed it. Look, if you think we're wrong, if you think Mr. Hopkins should honestly get paid more than Mrs. Chadwick, then I respect that. But if you think we're right, and won't speak up because you can't be bothered, well, god, Jed, I don't even want to know you. Jed: Mrs. Mueller gets half as much to teach band as Mr. Ryan does to coach crew? Mrs. Landingham: You're going to do it. Jed: Well, I didn't say that. Mrs. Landingham: Yes, you did. Jed: When? Mrs. Landingham: Just then. You stuck your hands in your pockets. You looked away and smiled. That means you made up your mind. Gods Mind is made up, His sovereign plan from the beginning told to Abraham is now about to begin, but he will need to call a man to lead his people out of bondage, and what better choice is there, then their failed would be savior living it up as a shepherd in Midian. God will succeed in enacting justice where Moses failed So what do we do with all this: We learn that our plans are not the same as Gods plan We learn that suffering is not the same as being left alone by God We see Christ suffer for us to bring us salvation We learn that we have a God who will not forsake us And it is not because we are so Great it is because he is so merciful If we are in Christ his promise are for us If you are a believer then He is a God who Hears, remembers, sees and knows Even if you dont you can trust he does He works all things according to his timing In the full ness of time Christ came bringing salvation (many generations removed from Watch at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEEUy25MXCs&t=6s

As we dive into Exodus 2 we are witnessing one of the greatest contests of strength in history. In one corner stood Pharaoh, and Pharaoh had a plan, kill every Hebrew baby boy. In the other corner was the Lord, who also had a plan, save one baby boy and through him save a nation. Pharaoh had power, soldiers, and an army on his side. God had a crying baby in a waterproof basket. Guess who won? Our passage today, Exodus 2:110, is the story of Moses birth, how God took the weakest thing imaginable and used it to topple the strongest empire in the world. But Exodus 2:110 is not just the story of Moses, its the story of a God who delivers His people through unlikely means, and who can turn the place of death into the place of life. If He could do it then, He can do it for us now. Lets see these things for ourselves in the Scripture. See first The Birth of Moses (v1-4) 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. 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 riverbank. And his sister stood at a distance to know what would be done to him. Right away as the passage begins were introduced to Moses parents. Were not told their names yet, well find out later they are Amram and Jochebed, but what we are told is that they are Levites. This is not an insignificant detail, because it tells us that Moses, who is called by God to lead the people in all things spiritual, is himself from the tribe chosen by God to lead the spirituality of the nation.[1] That Moses will be a Levite by birth tells us as readers how he is qualified for the task of spiritual leadership. The next thing were told about Moses parents is that they married and had a son. If we forget how chapter 1 ended, we might be filled with warm fuzzies celebrating with them at the birth of a child. But if we remember the end of Exodus 1, about Pharaohs plan of death for all Hebrew baby boys, were not filled with warm fuzzies but filled with dread for this newly married couple because we fear what might happen to their child. But in their action we see great courage. During the desperate times of Exodus 1, these two dared to marry and conceive, knowing they might give birth to a boy. But on they went, the moment came, and sure enough, the baby was a boy. And what a boy he was! See that detail in v2? The Mother looks down at her newborn baby and sees that he was a fine child, so she hid him for three months. That word fine doesnt mean the baby was beautiful instead of ugly, nor does it mean the baby was good instead of evil, no. Rather the word fine in v2 means the baby was healthy.[2] Many infants died just after birth, and so it seems the mother was worried about that, but when she looks at him she is happy to see him looking as well as a baby could. So what does she do? She hides him! Why? Because he was born under a death sentence and any moment some Egyptian might hear his cries, come get him, and cast him into the Nile.[3] The book of Hebrews confirms this in Hebrews 11:23 as it says, By faith Moses, when he was born, was hidden for three months by his parents, because they saw that the child was beautiful, and they were not afraid of the kings edict. Why only hide him for three months? Because they must have thought they could hide him easily until about that time, when he would grow old enough, to be active enough, and loud enough to be noticed by others. So v3 says when she could hide him no longer, she did what no one guess! She hid him in the one place no Egyptian would ever think to look, the Nile river, the exact place where Hebrew baby boys were supposed to be cast into.[4] Thus in quite the clever way she can be said to have obeyed Pharaohs dreadful decree.[5] Two things are worth your attention here. First, do not miss what Moses is put in. It says in v3 that she took a basket made of bulrushes, covered it with bitumen (tar) and pitch to make it waterproof, and then put Moses in that basket and then put him in the river. The word for basket in the original Hebrew is the word tebah. This word is only used in one other portion of Scripture, in Genesis 6-9 where we find the description of Noah and the ark.[6] That small Hebrew word tebah is the word that's used again and again there for ark. Lesson? Moses mother places him in an little baby size ark! We're meant to see the connection here between Moses and Noah. They both were raised up by God to deliver Gods people, both were led by God into and out of danger to a new location, where Gods people would be established, as a new stage of God's redemptive plan began.[7] Second, consider the mothers motives here. The passage does not tell us what the mother is thinking in this action of hiding Moses in the river. We could just say that God put this plan into her heart for reasons only known to Him.[8] That would be true, but I think we can say more. I think to her she was doing the best she could to protect Moses in this little ark. And the river was a great place to hide him. The thickness of the reeds on the riverbank, the noise of the water and the animals around it would all be contributing factors to hiding the noise of the baby. By doing this she could continue to care for him, keep watch over him from a distance, visit him, and even nurse him when no one was nearby.[9] And we learn more in v4. Up to this point we might think Moses is an only child, but now we find out he has an older sister. Shes unnamed here but well learn later on that her name is Miriam. For now, just see his sisters actions in v4. She stood at a distance to know what would come of her brother. Apparently this was something of her custom to do, staying off at a distance, watching to be aware of anything that happened to him. At this point were left wondering, what will happen to him? Will he be alright? Will he be eaten by crocodiles? Will he be found by someone else? Will he survive? To find out we must turn to see the rest of our passage and our second heading. Weve seen the birth of Moses, now see The Preservation of Moses (v5-10) 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 becameher son. She named him Moses, Because, she said, Idrew him out of the water. So weve seen the birth and the plan to hide Moses in a spot on the river where he was unlikely to be discovered. But then in v5-6 another important woman comes into the view, a daughter of Pharaoh. She comes down the river to bathe and lo and behold, she sees the basket and finds Moses. She gets the basket, hears the baby crying, opens it, sees its a Hebrew baby boy, andwhat? We as readers think that the death of Moses is near at hand. Right? Thats supposed to happen when an Egyptian finds a Hebrew baby boy. But surprise of all surprises, in direct violation of her fathers command Pharaohs daughter has compassion on the baby. Moses sister must have been close enough to see this play out, and notice Pharaohs daughters compassion toward the baby. Maybe she even heard her express worry in words like Oh no, hes crying, or Hes probably hungry, or I cant leave him like this.[10] Whatever she heard and saw, at this point Moses sister comes nearer and in v7 says, Shall I go and call you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?Of course, she knows who would be a perfect fit for this job. And Pharaohs daughter responds with one word, Go. So off she went to fetch her mother. Can you imagine what that conversation wouldve been like? She bursts into the home, sees their mother and says, An Egyptian woman, one of Pharaohs daughters has found Moses! You have to think their mother was terrified at what that meant, but as she heard the whole story she surely wouldve been calmed and convinced that now she must go out and come face to face with what used to be her worst fears.[11] We see the conversation between Moses mother and Pharaohs daughter in v9. Here another surprise comes. Whether there was more to this conversation or not, what we see in v9 is that Pharaohs daughter telling Moses mother that she will pay her to nurse the child. Which means two massive things. Not only does she no longer need to hide Moses, but also she could now openly care for him without worry. As wonderful as this news wouldve been, there was a sharp edge to it. One day in the future Pharaohs daughter would take Moses away from them, for Moses to grow up in Pharaohs own house. Even so, if she never sees him again, she is hoping a childhood growing up in the palace would not lead to working in the Hebrew slave camps. How crazy is this? One of Pharaohs own children delivers a Hebrew child who would later save Gods people from slavery to Pharaoh.[12] Only God could write such a story of redemption. That moment comes in v10, see it? The time came, Moses grew older, Moses mother brought him to Pharaohs daughter and he became her son. And she names him Moses, saying Idrew him out of the water. The name seems prophetic doesnt it?[13] Just as Moses was drawn out and saved from the waters of the Nile, so too will Moses one day draw out and save the Israelites from the Egypt itself. But it has more than just this meaning. The name Moses also means son of. It was a common ending to many names of Egyptian Pharaohs like Thutmose meaning son of Thut, Atmose meaning son of At, and Rahmose meaning son of Rah. That Moses is merely the ending means his name is just son of. So the text itself leaves us wondering, whose son will he be? He was born a Hebrew, will he be a son of Israel? Hes going off to be raised in Pharaohs palace, will he be a son of Egypt? We know the answer of course, Exodus shows us and the book of Hebrews tells us briefly in Hebrews 11:24ff, By faith Moses, when he was grown up,refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter,choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoythe fleeting pleasures of sin.He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking tothe reward. Church, we now get to see this play out before our very eyes as we keep on going in Exodus. Conclusion: I end with this thought: sometimes Gods greatest works begin in the most impossible places. The birth of Moses doesnt happen in a time of peace and comfort, it happens under a death sentence. Pharaohs decree has just gone out: every Hebrew boy is to be thrown into the Nile. The river that gives Egypt life has become a place of death. Into that darkness, a nameless couple has a child theyre not supposed to keep. We might expect the story to be about their courage or their ingenuity, but its really about something else: the quiet, hidden hand of God. A basket floating in the Nile becomes an ark of salvation. The daughter of Pharaoh, the one who should be the enemy, becomes the rescuer. And the little baby who should have been drowned will one day stand before the king and lead a nation out of slavery. The parallel to the birth of Jesus is clear. Moses is a savior, but he is not the Savior.[14] What Pharaoh was to Moses, Herod is Jesus. What his mother and sister are to Moses, Mary and Joseph are to Jesus. In both instances God sovereignly watches over and preserves the life of the little one who will emerge as the one chosen by God to save Gods people from their sins, either the sins of others (as in Moses case) or from their own sins (as in Jesus case).[15] So, what do we do with this? First, we must remember that God still works like this today.The same God who brought life out of the Nile and hope out of a manger is the same God at work in your life right now. Maybe you feel like youve been pushed into the reeds. Abandoned, vulnerable, exposed. But what looks like the end to you may just be the beginning to God. The hidden hand of God is not gone from you. Second, we must remember thatGod delights to use weak things.A crying baby, a worried mother, a watchful sister, even the compassion of a pagan princess, these were the instruments God used to defeat Pharaoh. In the same way, He takes our weaknesses, our small faith, our trembling obedience, and He weaves them into His mighty plan. Dont despise the day of small things. Dont even despise the smallness of what you can do. God delights to use weak things for more than you could ever imagine. Third, we look to Jesus. Moses was drawn out of the water so that one day he could draw out Gods people from slavery. But Jesus was drawn out of death itself so that He could draw us out of the slavery of sin. What Moses began, Jesus finished. And where Moses points us to hope, Jesusisour hope. So Christian, take heart If your life feels like chaos, He can bring order. If you feel dark, He can bring light. If you see nothing but death, He can bring resurrection. The same God who wrote Moses story is still writing yours. God still turns rivers of death into rivers of life. He still takes what is weak and makes it strong. He still delivers His people through unlikely means. And just as Moses was drawn out of the water, and Jesus was raised up from the grave, so too will God draw you out and bring you safely home on that final day. Thats the hope of Exodus 2, and thats the hope of the gospel. [1] Douglas K. Stuart, Exodus NAC (Brentwood, TN: BH Publishing, 2006) 86. [2] John D. Currid, Genesis 1:1-25:18 - EP Study Commentary (Holywell, UK: Evangelical Press, 2015) 51-52. [3] Philip Graham Ryken, Exodus: Saved for Gods Glory Preaching the Word Commentary (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015) 41. [4] John I. Durham, Exodus - WBC (Waco TX: Word Books, 1987) 16. [5] Durham, 16. [6] Victor P. Hamilton, Exodus: An Exegetical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2023) 20. [7] Stuart, 88. [8] Currid, 53. [9] Stuart, 89. [10] Stuart, 92. [11] Stuart, 92. [12] Currid, 54. [13] Hamilton, 23. [14] Ryken, 49-50. [15] Hamilton, 26.Watch at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNC8XdTd_ow