A Savior Is Born (Exodus 1:1-2:10)

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Well, good morning. You can go ahead and grab your Bibles. Open up to Exodus chapter one. Exodus chapter one. If you do not have a Bible with you this morning, you should find one in the pew in front of you. If you’re using one of those black ones that we provide, we will be on page 44 also, if you don’t have a Bible, like if you don’t own a Bible, just go ahead and take that one. That’s yours. Now that’s our gift to you. We would love for you to have a copy of God’s word, especially as you follow along with us in this series. So Exodus one, go ahead and start turning there, but as you’re turning there, I was a boy scout as a kid, and so went spelunking at one point at a cave up in Wisconsin, and I was a little bit on the smaller side, and so figured I could get myself wherever I wanted to really and was doing a great job. Was way ahead of everyone else in my troop. And then reached that point where I could not go any farther and couldn’t turn around and couldn’t back my way out in a very narrow little spot. So I’m claustrophobic now, I’m sure, because of that so terrifying experience at this point, somebody you know had to come along basically, and kind of like wedged me out a little bit, you know, by the ankles sort of thing. It’s a metaphor for life for many of us, isn’t it? We get ourselves stuck in tight places, oftentimes because of our bad choices, like mine, there just keep crawling. Who cares how far you go? Sometimes, because of other people’s bad choices, that’s maybe not getting stuck in a cave. That’s more like getting stuffed in a locker or something like that. But same experience, we’re stuck because of other people’s bad choices. We need someone to come and get us out, to get us unstuck. We need somebody to come and get us out of and you could probably fill in the blanks here. You probably have experienced some of these, and they can feel a lot like being stuck in a very narrow spot in a cave to come and get us out of a financial crisis or a toxic relationship, a bad habit we just can’t seem to break, or as we’ll see in the book of Exodus, real injustice being inflicted against us. That’s what Exodus is all about. So we start our series in Exodus today. We’re actually going to be in Exodus all the way into January. Would HIGHLY invite you to take this journey along with us. It will be worth your investment. But I think it’s worth asking at the start of the series, why would you say yes to that? Why would you agree to keep coming for the rest of this series? And that’s because the book of Exodus is profoundly relevant to your life today for three reasons that I can think of, at least, although I’m sure we’ll come up with some more as we go through the book. First of all, Exodus is going to help us know God better. If you wanted to give just one theme for Exodus, in a nutshell, it’s knowing God just who exactly God is. And each of us needs to know God better. And some of you may be thinking, okay, but I don’t even know if he exists. Great. We could start there. That would be one of the most important questions we could settle, and Exodus will help us settle that question, Does God exist? If so, who exactly is he? Second, though, it’s not just that we need to know more about God and the abstract who he is, but we need to know what God is up to in this world. We need to know about how he intends to save us, restore a broken world, fix what’s broken, and especially as we feel just how deeply we need to be saved. Not everyone does all the time, certainly, but we’ll see even some today that we are, all of us stuck in caves and stuffed in lockers. And then we need to know exactly how God is going to get us out. Third though, we also need to know what this will mean for us today, like, what response should we have? What does God expect from us? I mean, as we look at a book like Exodus especially, should we be some of the those who are opening lockers and unsticking people who’ve been stuffed in there? I mean, just in our passage this morning, which is we’re barely getting into the book here, we’re going to see a whole bunch of stuff about how we treat immigrants, which feels like a pressing issue today, or how we treat the unborn, which feels like a pressing issue. Today, we’re gonna learn about what’s expected of us in terms of prayer and community and on and on as we go forward in the series. So the passage that we’re gonna look at today, though, it sets the scene for us. How exactly is Israel stuck, and how do they get. Unstuck. How do we get unstuck? Who is God? Who are we? These are some of the questions we’re going to answer in three scenes as we proceed through so. Scene number one, let me just read chapter one, verses one to seven for us. These are the names of the sons of Israel who went to Egypt with Jacob, each with his family, Reuben, Simeon, Levi and Judah, Issachar, Zebulun and Benjamin Dan and Naphtali Gad and Asher. The descendants of Jacob numbered 70 in all. Joseph was already in Egypt. Now Joseph and all his brothers and all that generation died, but the Israelites were exceedingly fruitful. They multiplied, greatly increased in numbers and became so numerous that the land was filled with them. Just pause there for now. Here, we’re really setting the scene. It’s actually interesting in the original language. Here, the first word of this book is and, and you can understand why they didn’t put it in your translation, because you’re not supposed to start books with and you’re supposed to start sentences with and and yet, here we are. Why? Because this is a sequel. This book assumes that you’ve already read the previous book, Genesis, that you’re familiar with it. And so this section, it functions a little bit like Star Wars Empire Strikes Back, you know, the scroll at the beginning of that one, the text that’s coming and whatnot, and that’s helping you out. If you hadn’t seen a new hope that scroll was not much help at all. They’re gonna talk about, you know, like Luke and Darth Vader and the Empire, and you’re gonna go, I don’t know if any of those people are, so it’s assuming familiarity with all of that, while also kind of bridging the gap. Okay, the movie ended. Now we’re starting this movie. You missed some stuff, so let me just catch you up real quick. What happened in that time? That’s how these seven verses function. That’s really important, because it means it sets this whole book in the context of God’s covenant with Abraham. So Abraham, the father of the nation of Israel, God, covenants with him, that is, he binds himself to Abraham and Abraham’s descendants forever through these promises that he makes, Abraham promises to turn him into a great nation, to give him a land, to make him a blessing to all peoples. But that raises some questions, if we’re familiar with those promises, if they were promised Canaan, the land of Canaan, what we think of as Israel today, why are they in Egypt? And maybe even more pressingly, why are they, as we’ll see in a moment, slaves in Egypt. That doesn’t sound like blessing to me. Has God forgotten his promises? Is he unfaithful, or is he unable to deliver his people from the current world superpower? Those are real questions, questions that the Israelites probably ask themselves daily, questions that maybe you’ve asked yourself, that we all feel daily, especially in trying seasons. You kind of look around at the circumstances and go, Hello, God. Are you there? Do you see? Do you care? But if we know Genesis, well, we have been given the answers already. Now it’s been eight years since we did Genesis, so let me help you out. Just need to know that this is happening exactly as God said it would. Why are they in Egypt? Well, God told Abraham, as he’s making these promises to him back in Genesis, 15, verse 13, that they’re going to be in Egypt. He says this, know for certain that for 400 years, your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there. So God is not unaware. He’s not surprised. This is exactly what he said would happen, in part because the sin of the Canaanites, the land that they’re going to be brought into, had not reached its full measure yet, it would have been an unjust conquest at that point. So it’s no surprise that they’re there, enslaved in Egypt, but they also are given this promise about how that chapter of their story will end too. So God tells Jacob, in Genesis, 46 as Jacob’s getting ready to move with his family to Egypt, he says this, I will make you into a great nation. There’s the promise to Abraham, there, you’re going to become a great nation in Egypt. I will go down to Egypt with you, and I will surely bring you back again. I love that, right? He says, I’m going to bring you back again. That sets the expectation. We know what’s coming here. It’s like when you you sit down to watch Lord of the Rings, you get to. The third movie in the trilogy, and it’s called The Return of the King. And you think to yourself, I bet the King returns in this one, right? Like that’s the same sort of expectation that we have at this moment, but in the meantime, which is that’s the tough place to live, isn’t it? Right? It’s in the meantime until God fulfills His promises. That’s where it’s so hard to live. In the meantime, Jacob and his family are given these two wonderful grounds for confidence. First of all, God says, I will go down with you. So you’re going down to Egypt. I’m going down to Egypt. I’m not gonna be over there. While you’re over here, I will be present in your struggle, which is important for us, because God is not mentioned in these seven verses. Don’t know if you caught that. It’s actually not mentioned until verse 17. I think that’s intentional. I think the author is drawing out how the Israelites were probably feeling. Is God here or not? And God says yes, yes, I am. I am right there with you. Second, he promised Jacob that he would be a great nation. There are only 70 people when they left. That’s not a great nation. But look at verse seven, that promise is fulfilled, right there. They increase in numbers. It becomes so numerous that the land is teeming with them. Is what it says. The promise is fulfilled. That’s also going to set up the conflict. In the next section, but you get the idea the circumstances are bad in this moment. Yes, but that doesn’t change the underlying reality the point of this first section, which is God is faithful. God is faithful. He keeps his covenant promises always the timing and the manner that’s up to him, and that’s usually where our frustration kicks in. But he is God and we are not. He gets to choose. But I love what Alec Mateer says about this. He says that they are there in these hard circumstances by divine command, under divine promise and awaiting divine intervention. I love that, because that describes our circumstances exactly, also wherever we are, we are there by God’s decree, under the promises that are all yes and amen in Christ, Jesus and we are awaiting divine intervention when Jesus comes again to set all things right. And you think of the hope that provides for us when we’re in difficult circumstances, when we are suffering to know we are awaiting God’s ultimate deliverance. He is faithful. He will deliver his people. That is hope for the suffering, whether they’re suffering because the bad choices they made like me in that cave, or because the bad choices that others made, like Israel, who are about to get stuffed in a locker, and that, by the way, is seen too. So here we are. We just learned God is faithful. What about us? What are we like? Let’s keep reading verses 822, the rest of chapter one. Then a new king to whom Joseph meant nothing, came to power in Egypt. Look, he said to his people, the Israelites have become far too numerous for us. Come. We must deal shrewdly with them, or they will become even more numerous, and if war breaks out, we’ll join our enemies fight against us and leave the country. So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses to store cities for Pharaoh. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread. So the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites and worked them ruthlessly. They made their lives bitter with harsh labor and brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields and all their harsh labor, the Egyptians worked them ruthlessly. The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shipra and Puah, when you are helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the delivery stool, if you see that the baby is a boy, kill him. But if it is a girl, let her live. The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do. They let the boys live. Then the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and asked them, Why have you done this? Why have you let the boys live? The midwives answered Pharaoh Hebrew, women are not like Egyptian women. They are vigorous and give birth before the midwives arrive. So God was kind to the midwives, and the people increased and became even more numerous. And because the midwives feared God, He gave them families of their own. Then Pharaoh gave this order to all his people. Every Hebrew bore boy that is born, you must throw in. Every Hebrew boy that is born you must throw into the Nile. But let every girl live. Alright, let’s get some historical context before we dig in. This is a real story. This is real event happening in history, right? It’s not happening in Narnia or Middle Earth. It’s happening in Egypt when we’re in the mid 15th century BC, almost certainly, the Exodus takes place in the year 1446, under the Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose, but for two cent. Centuries, a little bit before Thutmose there was a different dynasty in power. It was actually a Semitic dynasty so distant relatives of the Jewish people, the Semitic Hyksos dynasty ruled Lower Egypt, northern Egypt, the Nile Delta region. They are finally expelled after these two centuries under Pharaoh amosis in 1550 and he reunites the upper and lower kingdoms. Now you can imagine, then this Egyptian who’s just kicked out a Semitic usurper, is probably not going to look with favor on the giant population of Semitic people in his land. And so it’s a little bit like a new president. What’s the first thing a president does when he’s elected to office these days, undoes all the executive orders the last president, right? Makes you almost wish Congress did their job again, and then we wouldn’t have to go through this every four years. But no, that’s what happens. Well, that’s what he does too, right? So he just does, undoes all these executive orders the last regime’s tolerance stance toward them, and he turns them into this slave labor force. And it says specifically that they forgot. He forgot what Joseph did for Egypt, how he saved them from famine, and actually what he did for Pharaoh specifically, because he increased Pharaoh’s power exponentially during that time. So we run up here against the problem of historical memory, we so often forget what others learned the hard way. What a good word for parents, by the way. Like talk to your kids about what God has done for you, why you’ve given your life to him, why you so joyfully make sacrifices of time and money for his sake, for the sake of His kingdom, because we can forget what God has done as surely as Pharaoh forgot what Joseph had done. You actually see this story play out in Israel’s history after Joshua dies the exact same age as Joseph. By the way, it’s really interesting. Parallel. There it says that the Israelites forgot God. So it says here the king didn’t know Joseph. Well, we read in Judges 210, another generation grew up who neither knew neither the Lord nor what he had done for Israel, they forgot. And if you know anything about the book of Judges, you know what happens when you forget what God has done. It’s just this, like downward spiral into some of the grossest immorality in the Bible makes what the Egyptians do here look almost tame by comparison. This is why Moses says in Deuteronomy, four, verse nine, only be careful and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen. He’s talking to the Exodus generation. He’s talking to the people who are about to go through all of this. Don’t forget what your eyes have seen or let them fade from your heart as long as you live, teach them to your children and to their children after them. But Pharaoh forgets Joseph. Pharaoh forgets God, and so he steps into an anti God role. God wants the people to be fruitful, to multiply. Pharaoh wants to put a stop to that. His commentator, Phil Reichen says here, Pharaoh resents God’s people, rejects God’s promises and then resists God’s plan, so he becomes the obstacle to God’s plan in the world, specifically through his xenophobia when he’s doing what rulers often do when things are tenuous at home, which is blame the immigrant population. This is how Hitler rose to power. Our economy is not going well. It must be the Jews fault. This is how the white minority kept power in South Africa for so long. We gotta deal with the black problem. And you can see this in our own nation’s history. Of course, with every wave of immigrants that’s arrived on our shores, the Irish the Italians up to the present day, of course, again, all of this is anti God, by the way, because we see God’s heart for immigrants. We’re going to see it in this story. We saw it earlier. Caitlin read it for us in Psalm 146, verse nine, he watches over the foreigner and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked. Right? He cares for the marginalized, and he is against the wicked, and that’s what we see here, because he is against Pharaoh. Pharaoh does not have a heart for the immigrant, though he’s anti God again, and so he uses the slave labor to build these storage and distribution cities in terrible circumstances. There are no stones in Egypt, so they got to make their own bricks. It’s this tedious, tedious process, and you can see how hard the work was in the heavy repetition in verses 13 and four. 15, right? It says, And he worked them ruthlessly, made their lives bitter with a harsh labor, with all kinds of work in the fields and all their harsh labor, the Egyptians worked them ruthlessly. The repetition is actually even worse in the Hebrew, but you get the idea, right? This was harsh labor. They were being worked ruthlessly. You can feel the burden that they’re experiencing. Although it’s interesting, verse 12, in the middle of all that says that they just go on multiplying. So Pharaoh’s trying to keep them from multiplying, but he can’t thwart God’s plan. It says, you know, we got to work them, lest they multiply. And then basically it says, And he worked them, so they multiplied. The puns even better in the Hebrew actually, because lest they multiply is pen yerva, and then it says, Ken yerva. So lest they multiply, so they multiply just one letter different. Can’t thwart God’s plan. The writer is having fun with all of that, what hope for us today again, though, I mean especially in suffering, and especially in light of Jesus’s death and resurrection, I mean the criminal powers at work in the world then put Christ to death, lest he save us. So He saved us in His death, that’s the hope we have. You cannot thwart God’s plan. We know 100% how the story will end when the dead in Christ are raised to forever life in him. Could God stop our hard circumstances? Now? Though, yes, yes, but in his wisdom, he often leaves us in it for His glory and our good and His sovereign wisdom. So often the trials we endure as individuals and as the people of God lead to growth, exactly like we see here, right? The Israelites multiply. So what you see in the book of Acts when as soon as persecution breaks out, that’s when the church begins to multiply. You can see that still happening today, but in individual lives also, it’s in our trials that we often grow the most, in holiness, in Christ likeness. One reason that happens is because the trials here are what get us ready to leave. You have to ask yourself, if the Israelites were not in slavery in this moment, would they have followed Moses out of Egypt into a land they know nothing about? No They barely wanted to leave, even after the slavery, as we’ll see here in a few weeks. And what about you? Without some of the suffering in this world, would your heart’s desire be set on the world to come the new heavens and the new earth? God uses trials to pry our fingers from the things of this world. We long for that perfect joy and peace and love that we will have with him in eternity. Are you in a hard season now, ask yourself what God might be doing in it. Is he leading you deeper in your relationship with him, or is he leading you to him for the first time? Well, Pharaoh’s plan isn’t working because they’re still multiplying. So he shifts plots. Let’s just murder the baby boys. Instead, you’re anti God. You will inevitably be anti life. You’ll be anti humans, because we are his image bearers. In the end, the irony, of course, is that we don’t know his name, but these two lowly Hebrew midwives their names we know and are still talking about 3500 years later. Why? Because God loves to humble the proud, but he loves to exalt the humble, which is what we see here, because they take a courageous stand against this culture of death, against the world’s powers. They stood for God. They stood for what God values, like love and justice and righteousness. So it’s actually the first recorded act of civil disobedience in history, because they understood what the apostles will say later in the book of Acts, that we must obey God and not humans when the two are in conflict. And it tells us specifically verse 17, the reason why they did that, and that’s because they fear God most. They fear God more than anything else. They might fear the King and what he can do to them, but they know what God can do to Kings. They know what God does to empires, even that he topples them down and raises them up as he wills and so they take their courageous stand. Reminds me of the 10 Boom family. In Nazi occupied Holland hiding Jews who were escaping the persecution at the time in their home. And the father said it would be an honor to give my life for God’s ancient people. And he does, because they’re discovered, they’re arrested, and eventually the entire family is put to death, except Cory, who escapes survive the concentration camps. Why are they put to death, though? Why are they in the concentration camps for doing what is right? Needless to say, we have to ask ourselves, what we would do in circumstances like these, would we stand against evil powers that threaten us. This is not just an if question, right? This is not just if I were in this situation, what would I do? It is a What are you doing now? Sort of question, because we all have little ways where we can show this. Are you willing to do what’s right, even if it means you’ll be shunned by your friend group or canceled on social media, which, by the way, easy solution, cancel social media, then you don’t have to worry about it, right? You don’t even know you got canceled. It’s a beautiful thing. Would you be willing to blow the whistle on unjust practices at your company, even if it meant you could get let go or whatever else? We have to ask ourselves this question, especially when we see what results here. I mean, their civil disobedience is our salvation, in God’s providence, because if they don’t disobey, there’s no Moses. If there’s no Moses, there’s no Israel. If there’s no Israel, there’s no Jesus. Their civil disobedience is our salvation. So thank God for their courage. And again, just take a moment and think, will anyone ever thank God for my courage in standing up against what is wrong? So God blesses their obedience. He gives them families, which is fitting, because that’s what they were doing, of course, is protecting families, protecting children. And notice, by the way, the Israelites just keep on multiplying because you cannot for God’s will. God’s will will win every time. So Pharaoh shifts to his final solution. He involves the whole nation in the murder of the baby boys. They’re supposed to be tossed right into the river. There is a little irony here, because, of course, that’s exactly how Egypt is going to perish as the waters come over them, as we’ll see. But you get this common sequence that we just saw in Egypt is exactly what happens in, for example, Nazi Germany, where you go from propaganda at first to the boycotts to segregation, to the open violence of Kristallnacht to the ghettos and then ultimately to the horrors of Dachau and Auschwitz. That’s why we take courageous stands early on, by the way, interesting to see, though, he does involve the whole nation in this. So the whole nation is now guilty of the murder of innocent children. We have to keep that in mind as we keep reading in this series, God is faithful. That’s what he brings to the table. But what about us? What do we bring to the table? I think we see it quite clearly here. People are wicked, wicked, capable of such gross injustice. And I think you see that because it’s not just Pharaoh, but it’s the fact that as soon as Pharaoh says, Hey, you should kill all these baby boys, they go, okay, that’s what it takes for my economic prosperity. Yeah, absolutely, I’ll do that. It reminds me of what the Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn said he went to the Siberian gulag, you know, for a time and whatnot, eventually won Nobel Prize for Literature. And you would expect him to have a very clear sense of good and evil, right? Soviet Union, Communist Party, evil. Me, good. That’s not what he said. He said the line between good and evil passes directly through the human heart, through every one of us, we’re all capable of this. Evil people are wicked. That’s a problem, really. That’s the problem. That’s where we’re stuck, not a cave. It’s not a locker. We are stuck in sin. So how does a faithful God reconcile himself to faithless, wicked people. I’m so glad you asked. Scene three, chapter two, verses one to 10. Now, a man of the tribe of Levi married a Levite woman, and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. When she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months, when she could hide him no longer. She got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch, and she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him. Then Pharaoh’s daughter went down to the Nile to bathe, and her attendants were walking along the riverbank. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her female slave to get it. She opened it and saw the baby. He. Was crying, and she felt sorry for him. This is one of the Hebrew babies, she said. Then his sister asked Pharaoh’s daughter, shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you? Yes, go, she answered. So the girl went and got the baby’s mother, Pharaoh’s daughter, said to her, take this baby and nurse him for me, and I will pay you. So the woman took the baby and nursed him. When the child grew older, she took him to Pharaoh daughter, and he became her son. She named him Moses, saying, I drew him out of the water. We don’t get anything more about this decree to toss the baby boys into the river. It just serves to get us to the Moses story. And in God’s providence, Pharaoh’s evil decree initiates the events that lead to his defeat. Again, just a good preview of the cross, right? We crucified the Son of God. Were winning, right? Nope, that was your defeat. Actually, same thing here. There are two clues, very subtle clues, in this text that we are dealing with something entirely new, that God is breaking into history here. First in verse one, it says that he was a fine child, right? She saw that he was a fine child. Reads literally, she saw that he was good, which sounds like Genesis one, when God looked at the creation that he had made and saw that it was good. So we’re at a new creation moment. Here. God is initiating a new creative act. And then in verse three, it says that she placed him. And you even got a little footnote there that says, instead of basket, you could say Ark. It’s the same word, like Noah’s Ark. She placed him in an ark, like Genesis six to nine, which makes sense, of course, because it’s kind of the same story, because those who trust in God are saved from the waters, and those who don’t will be judged in the waters. Again, a preview of what’s coming. Exodus, 14 or so now Moses’s mom, you’ll notice, formally obeys the king’s command, the Pharaoh’s command, she throws her baby boy into the river, but only formally. We don’t know what her plan was. We’re not told what she’s thinking here. We can only speculate. Did she know that he would starve still, but that would be better than watching him drown right before her eyes. Did she plan to come back and try to feed him secretly on the river there, or did she know that somebody like Pharaoh’s daughter would be there and maybe would rescue him? It’s probably a good chance that she expected him to be found because of where she put him. She placed him in the reeds along the bank of the river in what would have been a shallow, quiet inlet. We know that because that’s where Pharaoh’s daughter goes to bathe. And you don’t bathe in the main waterway, right? You’d find a little pool somewhere. So I think she expected him to be found. No surprise that he got found. What’s surprising, though, is that Pharaoh’s daughter decides to save him. I mean, this is like an apple that fell way off the tree, right? This would be like if Hitler had a daughter, her following the 10 Boom lead, and like hiding Jews in Hitler’s home. That’s what she’s done here, for sure, but she hears the baby’s cry and feels compassion for him, previewing what God is going to do in the next section, by the way, which we’ll get to next week. Now, Miriam Moses’s sister has been watching. She offers to go get a Hebrew nurse, which, of course, is going to be Moses’s mom. Yoga is her name. There’s just some thick irony here in God’s grace, because she’s now getting paid to raise her own baby. And there’s even a little pun there in the Hebrew in verse nine, when she says, take this baby, it reads, literally, here, this is yours. And you’re like, yep, you are right. That is mine, in fact. But there’s still loss here. Let’s not, you know, sugarcoat this at all. Once he’s weaned, Moses’s mother gives him away to Pharaoh’s household, and there’s also this tension in this moment. What’s going to happen to Moses? Will he grow up to be Egyptian or Jewish? Will he be a son of Pharaoh or a son of Levi and so in a lot of ways, we come back to the same question we saw in that last section, Whom will he fear most? In the end, will he give God His worship, even if it costs greatly? This is the fundamental choice that we all face, of course, because what we fear will lead us to do either evil or good, and so we have to choose very, very carefully what we will fear most. If you fear threats to your safety, then you will keep yourself and your family safe, even if it means compromise. Yes, even if means collaborating with Nazis against your own people. If you fear insecurity, financial insecurity, especially, you will work long hours, neglect worship, neglect your family, cut ethical corners. If you fear loneliness above all, then you will compromise, maybe on the sort of person you end up with, or maybe morally long before then. But if you fear God, you know that he provides the safety, the security, the love, the peace, the joy, whatever it is, he provides all of that perfectly in himself, no matter the circumstances. And you’re freed to choose well. And then Pharaoh’s daughter names him. It’s interesting, in this culture, naming actually came after weaning, so probably at a couple of years old, because of the high infant mortality rates, they just wouldn’t name the kid until they knew the kid was going to make it. She names him. Moses. Moses is an Egyptian word it. It means child of son of fact, if you’re paying close attention, I’ve already given you two names that have Moses in it. Actually three names, who was the Pharaoh at the time of the Exodus, Thutmose, son of Thoth. And then who was the guy who kicked the Semitic dynasty out. That was a Moses son of ah, and then Rameses. We all know Rameses. That’s just ramosis, son of Ra so she just names him. Kid, basically, she says I named him kid because I drew him out. Now, does that just mean I named him kid because I’m the one who drew him out, so I’ve got the right to name him, or did she know enough Hebrew to know that she was making a pun, because that Mohs root in Hebrew means to draw out, maybe. But if she does, she gets it wrong. She should have named him mashui, which is passive tense, the one drawn out. Instead, she names him Moshe in the active tense, he draws out. And I keep saying this phrase because it’s here on just about every sentence in God’s providence. God’s in charge of all of this, right? Because that’s exactly what Moses will do. The name fits his role, because he will be God’s instrument to draw Israel out of Egypt. So it doesn’t seem like it. This is not an exciting story in many ways, like the heavens didn’t part. There aren’t choirs of angels singing Glory to God in the highest or anything like that. So it doesn’t seem like it. But there are plenty of hints that what Israel needs is here, a savior is here. A savior is here, the one who will draw Israel out of Egypt is here, but that is key. We didn’t fill in the blank on the slide, but here is the word there. It is alright. A savior is here, but that is key, the way I phrase it there, because a savior is here. The Savior is not here yet, Moses. We’ll learn this next week. Moses is a murderer. Moses has an anger problem that shows up in a few different stories. In fact, it shows up often enough that eventually he’s not able to enter the promised land. He leads people to the edge of the Promised Land, and God has him die there, he doesn’t get to go in. He is himself stuck in the same sin that we all are. But even if he hadn’t messed up, he still can’t be the savior, because Israel keeps getting stuck. Yes, they get stuffed in a few more lockers, but mostly they wedge themselves in caves. So they’re saved from Egypt, but they are not saved from Israel. They are not saved from themselves. They’re not saved from that sinful selfishness that plagues all of us from fearing others more than God. And so Centuries later, the prophet Isaiah promises that there will be another Exodus and another servant to lead them out. And so by the time we get to the first century BC, right around that shift to year zero, the Jewish people are waiting for the Savior. And what happens? There’s another boy born under a death sentence, and like Pharaoh, Herod, tries to kill him secretly. First, not with midwives, but with Magi. This time, tell me where he is so I can go and worship him. Sure. And then, when that fails, He decrees open slaughter of all the babies in Bethlehem, in this case, the slaughter of the innocents like Moses. God delivers Jesus and then names him according to his role, not Moses. He. Draws out, but Yeshua, Jesus Yahweh Saves because Jesus is Yahweh and he will save his people from not Egypt, not Rome. He will save His people from their sins. He delivers us not from slavery to a sinful people or from evil circumstances, but from sin and evil itself and the sin and evil that is in us because God is faithful and we are wicked. Do you ever feel stuck? Maybe you feel stuck even now, stuck saying the same words, falling into the same acts, habits that you know are wrong you just can’t seem to break out of that is true slavery. But I got good news for you. The Savior is here. He has come. This is the big idea. If you want to just remember one thing from the sermon, it would be this, we need a Savior, and God sent him. We need a Savior, and God sent him just like he sent Moses. And so we can reach out right when we get to that point where we are stuck in the cave, and we know that we are stuck, we can reach out, take Jesus’s hand, or, more likely, if you’re like me anyway, say, Hey, can you grab my ankles because I can’t get my hand around to you. Let him draw you out of your stuckness. And I got such good news for you. If you’re feeling stuck this morning, you don’t have to wait for that salvation. You don’t have to get your life in order first, that would be like asking me to get myself turned around and out of the cave before somebody’s willing to save me from the cave. That’s not how it works. All it takes is that we acknowledge our need. I’m stuck, acknowledge our sin. I am stuck because of who I am. The stuck is here. It’s not here. And then acknowledge our Savior. Acknowledge that we need a savior. Acknowledge that he has come Jesus Christ, who took the penalty for our sin on himself, on the cross of Christ, then was raised from the dead to triumph over death, yes, but sin and evil also, and who offers to give us that salvation in exchange for our sin when we trust in Him? So something to be thinking about now, if you’re here and don’t know where you stand with Jesus, the invitation is for you even now. So I’m going to pray for us at this point, if that’s you, if you know you’re stuck and you would like to be unstuck, if you want to reach out and see if the Savior will take your hand and would you join me in prayer? Now I’ll kind of lead you in a model prayer here, Lord, we acknowledge that we are stuck, yes, often stuck in hard circumstances. But more than that, we are stuck in ourselves, stuck in who we are stuck in our brokenness, our waywardness, our bad habits, our wrong choices. And Lord, it is clear that there’s not much we’re going to be able to do to turn ourselves around because we are wedged so deeply in our sin. We acknowledge it, Lord, we confess our sin and we ask for your help, Jesus, would you come and rescue us as we humble ourselves, as we acknowledge our sin, as we turn from it and turn to you? Would you draw us out and save us from our sin? Don’t just save us from our sin, Lord, but save us to yourself, bring us all the way into the promised land of your presence, that we might live with you forever. We pray in Christ’s name, Amen.