Saved from Extinction

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Transcript:

We’re going to be in Exodus chapter 1 this morning. Exodus chapter 1. I want to ask you a few questions as we start, as you’re turning there.

And usually I say, don’t raise your hands, but this time I will go ahead and ask for you to raise your hands. How many of you grew up in Sunday school as children? Can I see your hands?

Okay. Pretty decent percentage of the congregation. How many of you could name, how many of you could remember and name five sermons that you’ve heard through your life?

what was preached and why it had an impact on your life. Could you name five of them? Okay, a few of you.

Could you name ten? It’s a little harder, doesn’t it? I was asked these questions and I had to sit and think, I probably could name five, that’s because I preached them, but then other times, I don’t remember.

I had to call Charlie yesterday and say, I emailed her a copy of some notes and said, have I preached this one already or not? I don’t even remember. Not this one, but just a sermon I was looking at.

I’m the preacher and I don’t always remember from week to week what I’ve preached. So it’s hard to name 10 messages that have had an impact on us. Could you name for me 10 Bible stories that you remember hearing growing up?

Yes. Okay. Yeah, a lot less hesitation on that one.

When I asked about five sermons, there were some hands that went up, but you kind of thought about it for a second and went like that. 10 and then the hands started slowly going down and you just weren’t sure but there’s no hesitation on on the bible stories we remember the stories and I was asked these these same questions a few weeks ago at a bible study I was participating in they were talking about the the flannel boards that you used to have and I remember those uh growing up I think some churches may still use them they came over on the ark they’re actual they’re that old they’re actual portraits of of noah So these things have been around for a long time, but a lot of us remember these stories from the Bible.

I’ve been thinking about this subject for months now, if not years, because I may have told you Brother John Lindsay, who’s one of our missionaries to Ghana, came and spoke at our church in Fayetteville. I took him and his wife out to dinner afterwards. He was talking to me about illiteracy in Africa where they’re working and how people reason differently.

People think differently depending on their level of literacy and said, you know, we in the Western world are becoming less literate as a society and really they’re reaching people in Africa through storytelling, not so much through here are three points and 15 sub points and here we’re going to go through this in this way that we might be used to. And we are getting into a day and age in our culture here where people are being reached with the gospel through storytelling. Now, does that mean there’s no place for three points and sub points?

It doesn’t mean there’s no place for it anymore. But people are being reached through the telling of stories. I may have mentioned here that in my Bible classes at school, I’ve been teaching inductive Bible study.

Here’s how we ask questions and get the information out of the passage and we interpret and we go through all these steps. And I still think it was a good pursuit, but I noticed that with my students, they just were not there. They just were not getting out of it what I had hoped they would be.

A few weeks ago, I had an eighth grade girl tell me, you know, you talk about these stories in class, and people refer to these stories in chapel, and she said, I’ve grown up in church, and I don’t know a lot of these stories you’re talking about. She said, who is this Nebuchadnezzar, whoever he is that y’all keep referring to? I said, Nebuchadnezzar, she said, that’s the one.

I said, you don’t know who Nebuchadnezzar is? No. She said, I feel like I’m lost. I don’t know.

I don’t know these stories you’re talking about. And that particular day, I happened to have everybody from 6th grade through 12th grade in my class. It was a full day.

I was subbing for everyone. And I asked him, I said, quick show of hands, how many of you feel like she does? I’d say it was close to half the class.

I don’t know if it was over or under half, but it was right around half. I didn’t take a count. About half of them.

These kids have grown up in church, and I’ve talked to some of the parents and said, what’s the deal? Your kids are telling me they don’t know these stories. Your kids are telling me, and I know they go to church because they’re telling me, yeah, I’m in Sunday school.

And some of the parents are saying, well, the churches are teaching character traits, and you should do this, do this, don’t do this. Those things are important. Thank God that churches are teaching children, starting out early, that there’s a right way and a wrong way to live.

A lot of churches, you don’t even get that much. Thank God that’s being taught. But you know what?

If we don’t have a biblical foundation for why those are the case, not only are we not preaching the whole counsel of God, but I submit to you the gospel doesn’t make as much sense if we don’t understand the story. There is a reason God gave us everything that’s in this book. There’s a reason why he goes through Genesis and Exodus and Leviticus and goes through all these stories.

We understand things about God that we would not otherwise understand. I have started in my Bible classes. I teach fourth through eighth grade Bible.

And I’ve started in my Bible classes. I said, forget the inductive Bible study. We’ll come back to that at some other point.

We’re going back to Sunday school. And I’ve told them, come sit down and I’m going to tell you stories from the Bible. And another trick I learned, I’ve got them drawing pictures and I’ll probably have them do some other things with their hands that go along with the story.

That way they’re hearing it, they’re seeing parts of it, and they’re doing something and they’re more likely to remember. But they’ve been drawing pictures for me as I’m talking and we’re going through the stories and their response has been tremendous. They are remembering the things that they’re hearing.

They’re remembering the things that they’re learning. They’re getting it. At the end, they’re able to answer questions.

And we’re bringing everything back to the theme of redemption, which I have explained to them and I’ve probably told you is, as far as I can see it, the theme of the whole Bible is God’s redemption of man. And we’ve got a bulletin board out in the hallway on the second floor where I’ve stapled up some of the pictures they’ve drawn, and it says stories of God’s redemption. And we’re going through, and we’re up to Noah now.

We started in the Garden of Eden and we’re just going straight through. And a lot of people are puzzled. Well, why did God send his son to die?

Why did he have to die on the cross? Why did there have to be this blood? Why did this have to be?

And now we’ve not even made it through the first 10 chapters of Genesis. But my fourth graders can tell you the reason for that is because starting back in Genesis chapter 3, the innocent die for the sins of the guilty. They’re beginning to understand redemption.

Now, why am I telling you all this? because today, I’m not going back to Genesis with you at this point. We might at some time.

I may not go in order with you. But I want to start telling you some Bible stories. I want to start telling you some Bible stories.

These will be some things you’re familiar with, some of you. Some of the stories may be unfamiliar. That’s been interesting, too.

I’ve had a different mix of kids. Some have grown up in church. Some have not grown up in church.

Some are familiar with the story. Some are not. The ones who are not familiar with these stories are saying, oh, that makes sense.

The ones who are familiar with the stories are saying, oh, I didn’t know about that part of it. I never heard that part, or I didn’t realize how these fit together. Sometimes we need to go back and re-familiarize ourselves with the stories of the Old Testament, and the New Testament as well.

I want to start for the next, I don’t know how many weeks, I haven’t finished outlining it yet, but I want to start looking at some things in the book of Exodus. I want to start talking about this idea of God being our deliverer. God, from the very beginning pages of the Bible, was preparing the deliverance of his people.

God, from the very earliest pages of the Bible, was already talking about one who would come to be the deliverer of his people. We go back to Genesis chapter 3. Well, we go back to Genesis chapter 1, and we reread it, and it says, let us make man in our own image.

Who was God talking to? He’s talking amongst himself, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. In Genesis chapter 3, he talks about how the serpent’s head would be crushed and the man’s heel would be bruised, and that’s a reference to Jesus Christ. In Genesis chapter 3 as well, there’s an animal who’s killed in the garden so that the skins could be made into a covering for Adam and Eve because the innocent die for the sins of the guilty.

from the earliest pages of the Bible, God began talking about a deliverer who would come. That deliverer was Jesus Christ, the ultimate deliverer of God’s people who would set us free from our sins, who would pay for our sins, and who would give us a relationship with God. But some of the clearest pictures that we have in the Old Testament of the deliverer who would come are in the book of Exodus.

And we see chapter by chapter. We cannot read very many pages in Exodus without going, okay, God delivered them again. God’s pointing again to the ultimate deliverance.

There are a lot of parallels that we may talk about between Moses and Jesus Christ. And I’m not saying that Moses was God or close to it or anything like that. I’m saying God orchestrated events in Moses’ life as a picture of what Jesus would do, of what Jesus would do when he came. I want to go back and look at some of these stories in the book of Exodus and see some things that we can learn from these stories about how God has delivered his people in the past, how God is still working to deliver his people in the present, and how God will continue to deliver his people through the end of time.

And we start in Exodus chapter 1, and it begins with giving a list of the people who came with Jacob to Egypt at the end of the book of Genesis. You may remember the story, Joseph had ended up in Egypt because he’d been sold into slavery by his brothers, and through a series of circumstances, he ended up being the second highest ruler in the kingdom of Egypt, and God orchestrated all of these terrible things that happened to Joseph in order to work things out so that he would be in this position of power to save the nation of Israel alive during a time of famine. And so it says, now these are the names of the children of Israel which came into Egypt.

Every man in his household came with Jacob. There’s Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin, Dan, and Naphtali, Gad, and Asher. And all the souls that came out of the loins of Jacob were 70 souls, for Joseph was in Egypt already.

And Joseph died, and all his brethren, and all that generation. So it refers us back to the book of Genesis and said, all of these people came, Joseph was already in Egypt, all of these came with Jacob. It lists all the brothers and says that there were 70 that came with him.

We go on a few years and in verse 6 it said, And Joseph died and all his brethren and all that generation. After that, and the children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly and multiplied and waxed exceeding mighty, and the land was filled with them. Now there arose up a new king over Egypt which knew not Joseph.

So the story tells us that they came there to be saved from the famine because Joseph had stored up enough food in Egypt to last him through the seven years of famine. So when his brothers and his father and the rest of the family got hungry, they went to Egypt to try to buy food. And once he finally revealed who he was and that he’d forgiven them, he saw that they were changed men and regretted what they had done and he forgave them.

He said, why don’t you just come to Egypt? And they came there and they lived there and Pharaoh, out of respect for Joseph, gave them a part of Egypt to live in. Well, the problem arose after Joseph and all of his brothers had died, the problem arose that they had been so fruitful and they had multiplied so much that the new Pharaoh, was this the Pharaoh immediately after?

Probably not. Some things on the timeline make me think it could be as much as 400 years later. But over this period of time, they had multiplied so much that they were actually a threat to Egypt as they knew it.

And Pharaoh, this new Pharaoh who knew not Joseph, and what that means is he wasn’t around when Joseph saved the nation of Egypt. He’d forgotten the history. He might have known it, but he didn’t care.

He basically acted as though Joseph who saved Egypt, that never happened. And now all of these people, all of those people over there are a threat to our kingdom. We need to do something about them.

I had no respect for what Joseph and his family had brought to the nation of Egypt. And he said to his people, behold, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we. Come on, let us deal wisely with them lest they multiply and it come to pass, that when there falleth out any war, they join also unto our enemies and fight against us, and so get them up out of the land.

He said, we need to deal with them because there are so many of them, and they are so mighty in numbers. He said that they pose a serious threat to our national security. Because they live in Egypt, but they’re not really Egyptians.

Their loyalty is not to Egypt. And it makes perfect sense from his standpoint to want to say, we need to deal with them because they are a threat. I mean, I think any one of us could see why he might think that.

His solution, though, is not a good one because he decides he’s going to oppress them. He could have very easily said, you know what, if you want to be Israelites, you need to go back to your country. But instead, he says, let’s just enslave them.

Hey, that’s a great idea, isn’t it? Let’s just own other people. Oh my goodness.

I still don’t understand the logic of that. One of the apologetics questions I answered in chapel on Wednesday was, does the Bible condone racism and slavery? Nowhere in the Bible will you find support for the idea of owning another human being.

Now the Bible a lot of times deals with its reality, it’s what happened, so treat them well. But I don’t understand what gets you to the point where another human being can just be my property. Who thinks that way?

And yet he did. let’s put them to work serving us. They’re such a threat, let’s beat them down where they can’t be a threat anymore.

And he says, therefore, in verse 11, therefore they did set over them taskmasters to afflict them with their burdens. And they built for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and Ramses. And some people have questioned the accuracy of the Bible because they’ve said, well, there’s no proof.

There’s no proof that, you know, that the Hebrews built the pyramids or the Sphinx or anything like that. That’s not what the Bible says. We don’t know if they actually built pyramids or not.

It’s a wonderful part of, or it’s part of a wonderful movie, The Ten Commandments, that they were working on those things. It’s not what the Bible actually says, though. It just says they built cities.

They were enslaved and they built these cities. And by the way, if that’s a fairy tale, I find it very weird that Moses would include the detail of the names of the cities that they were working on. Generally, if you’re trying to lie, you want to keep it as vague as possible so you don’t get caught in the details.

But Pharaoh put taskmasters over them, slave drivers, and said, you’re going to build these treasure cities for me, Ramses and Pithom. But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew. And they were grieved because of the children of Israel.

See, a lot of times the world will try to oppress God’s people and say we’re going to make things so hard on them that they’re just going to fall apart. We see this going on today with churches in China and other closed countries where the harder they try to crack down on churches, where the harder they try to stamp out the gospel, the more the churches flourish and multiply to the point where some of the numbers I’ve heard there may be more born-again Christians in China than there are in the United States. Think on that for a moment.

But the Bible says that the harder they tried to afflict the people of Israel, the more God prospered them and the more they grew, the more they multiplied in number. And that doesn’t make sense. I’m not saying it didn’t happen.

I absolutely believe it happened. I’m just saying you can’t make sense of this naturally apart from God’s intervention because from a historical standpoint, this doesn’t make sense. When conditions are hard historically, people may have had more children at times in the past, but fewer of them survived.

When conditions are really hard, population numbers start to dwindle or at least plateau. But Exodus says the harder they were, the harder they tried to afflict the nation of Israel, the stronger they grew, the more they grew in numbers. You can’t explain that apart from God’s divine intervention and his hand of protection on the nation of Israel.

And they were grieved. They were grieved because of the children of Israel. I said, what are we going to do with this?

What are we going to do with them? If you want to put it in 20th century terms, terms that we’d be more familiar with of a government trying to oppress them, what’s the solution to the Jewish problem? Anybody heard that term before?

Well, the reason I throw that out there is because Egypt’s solution to the Jewish problem is not all that different from Nazi Germany’s solution to the Jewish problem. If we can’t beat them down enough to where they’re no longer a threat, Let’s just kill them. And the Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with rigor, and they made their lives bitter with hard bondage in mortar and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field.

All their service wherein they made them serve was with rigor. He says, we’re going to work them to death. We’re going to put them in camps.

We’re going to make them make bricks, hard bondage, mortar, make their lives bitter. We’re going to work them to death. I watched a short documentary last night about one of the Nazi concentration camps.

And sometimes we hear about that. I don’t know if any of you all are as into history as I am. But we can study things so much and we can hear about that period of history so much that we become desensitized to it a little bit.

And then we can see something from a fresh perspective and realize all over again how horrible it was. And the thing I was watching was talking about the camp at Buchenwald. And they said, well, it wasn’t like Auschwitz.

Auschwitz was a death camp. They were sent there specifically to kill them. The documentary almost made it sound a little bit better because at least at Buchenwald it was just a work camp.

They weren’t sent there for the purpose of murdering them in the ovens. It was a labor camp. It was a forced labor camp.

Oh, well, thank goodness for that. Except that they are working people to death. They said the life expectancy at Buchenwald was about three months when you got there.

But thank goodness they weren’t putting them there to kill them. Come on. So Pharaoh puts them in this hard labor trying to work these people to death.

Because if you’re shackled, hard bondage it says, and you’re being forced to make bricks all day, out in the hot sun with very little provision and little food, you’re not going to be much of a threat to the regime. And the king of Egypt spake with the Hebrew midwives. Okay, if that parallel wasn’t bad enough, here we go in verse 15.

And the king of Egypt spake to the Hebrew midwives, of which the name of one was Shiphrah and the name of the other Pua, and said, when ye do the office of a midwife to the Hebrew women, and see them upon the stools, if it be a son, then ye shall kill him, but if it be a daughter, then she shall live. And I doubt there were just two Hebrew midwives. It could be that these were sort of the ones who held sway with all the others.

I doubt they were unionized and these were sort of their representatives, but these may have been the ones who led the midwives. And he calls them into him and says, you know, when you go in to do the office of midwife, what does that mean to do the office of midwife? To deliver babies.

What a wonderful job. Tells him, when you go in to deliver the babies, when you go in to be part of this miracle of life, if it’s a boy baby, just kill him. If it’s a girl baby, you can let him live.

Now, what would be the purpose of that? First of all, I don’t know if it was out of the goodness of his heart that he didn’t want to exterminate the women. He could always add them to the harem.

He could always find work for them to do, but there will be no strong men of the Hebrew blood to rise up against Egypt. We need a solution to the Jewish problem. The solution was kill them.

Exterminate them. Drive them to extinction. by killing the men and intermarrying the women with the Egyptians, and we’ll make Egyptians of them yet.

So he says, if they give birth to a boy, kill the boy. But you can let the girls live. But the midwives feared God and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the men children alive.

Now this would be a hard position to be in. Not that it’s a hard, what should I do? I think all of us know what we should do in that situation.

but actually doing it would be a hard thing because you’re you’re torn between fear for your life before the pharaoh of egypt and fear for your soul before the god of heaven and you can’t obey both of them and on one hand I think it took real courage for these women to defy pharaoh and his order on the other hand though I think it would take a lot more courage to defy god they feared god and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them, but save the men children alive. Not just these two, but the Hebrew midwives altogether said, we’re not going to enforce this order. And the king of Egypt called for the midwives and said unto them, why have you done this thing and have saved the men children alive?

Why are there boys being born among the Hebrews? Explain this to me. I love this answer.

I love this answer in verse 19. And the midwives said unto Pharaoh, because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women, for they are lively and are delivered, ere the midwives come in unto them. Okay, not only is it a creative answer, there’s a subtle jab at Egypt in there.

Now, the Egyptian women, they just kind of lay around, they don’t want to push, and we have to come in and do all the work for them. Those Hebrew women, though, they’re wiry. They get in there and get right down to business, and they call the midwife, and then the baby’s already delivered as soon as we get in there.

It’s already delivered and what are we supposed to do? He didn’t tell us to go track down all the Hebrew children and kill them. It’s not what he said yet.

He didn’t tell us to go track down all the boy babies born to the Hebrew nation. You just said while we’re there on the stool delivering them. Sort of feels like dealing with my children.

No, you cannot have one more spoonful of ice cream. The next thing I see him in there with a carton with a fork. Okay, they got Pharaoh on a technicality here.

It’s not what you told us to do, and they were already delivered. So what if we took our sweet time getting down to where they were? They were already born.

I don’t know what you want us to do about it. We were just doing what you told us to do. Therefore, God dealt well with the midwives, and the people multiplied and waxed very mighty.

Now that word waxed, we see that a lot in the Bible. We don’t use that word a whole lot in modern day English. About the most common place I can think of it, unless we’re waxing something, but about the most, that’s not the same thing, about the most common place I can think of us using it is when we’re talking about the phases of the moon.

And for example, we will call, if we talk about it at all, they refer to the moon in a certain phase as a waxing crescent. That means when the moon is as a crescent, but it’s getting bigger, it’s going toward a full moon. And then you have the half moon, and then it’s a waxing gibbous until it gets to be a full moon.

Waxing means it’s growing. And so God dealt well with the midwives, and the people multiplied and grew very mighty. And it came to pass, because the midwives feared God, that he made them houses.

What does that mean that he made them houses? Did God build homes for the midwives? That’s one explanation, probably not.

As I read on this verse, because I thought, I think I know what this means, but I want to dig into it and study and make sure that I’m on the right track here. Had my own thought, and I saw about four explanations for what it could mean. God built them homes, or God did this.

The one I thought it meant, and the one most reputable commentators I saw thought it meant, was that God strengthened their houses, that God caused their families to multiply. Because they had saved the children of other Hebrew women, God blessed them with more children. And God in turn blessed the whole Hebrew nation with more children.

I’m kind of old school, I guess. I still believe that children are a blessing from God. Children are never a mistake.

We may not always like the circumstances they come from, but children are always a blessing from God. We ought to recognize that. So the essence of the story here is Pharaoh wanted to kill off the Jewish people because they were a threat to his security.

First, he thought he could oppress them. That didn’t work. Then he thought he could work them to death.

That wasn’t moving quite fast enough. So he decided, let’s go with genocide, which is the answer of all tyrants. said let’s just kill them off but God used some brave women to thwart his plans and through that the nation of Israel was saved from extinction now you may get tired of hearing me say this because as we go through the book of Exodus you will hear me say several times and so the nation was saved sorry that’s the point of the book that’s the point of the whole book the whole point of the Exodus, which gives the book its name, is that God saved the people, God saved Israel by leading them on a journey out of Egypt.

The whole book is about the deliverance of God, God delivering his people, God setting his people free. That’s why we can look at this and see how God has dealt with his people in the past and learn from it how God continues to deal with his people. I want to share with you now that we’ve been through the passage, been through the story, I want to share with you five real quick points about what I think we can learn from this and apply to our lives today.

And if you’re thinking, what about verse 22? You left off in verse 21. If I was dividing the chapters, because the chapter divisions are not divinely inspired like the rest of it, verse divisions either, but I would have tagged 22 on to the next chapter.

So we’ll talk about starting at verse 22 next week. First thing we can learn from this is that God prospered his people during and through their time in Egypt. We see in the very beginning that they had gone to Egypt to escape famine.

Okay, this wasn’t we’re moving up in the world. When they left Egypt, it was because of hard times. This wasn’t, oh, things are going well, but I’ve been offered a promotion, so we’re going to go to a bigger house.

This was, we’re going to run down to the soup line and try to save our lives. They left and went to Egypt because of hard times. They were there begging for food.

And God not only prospered them during that in spite of the fact that they were running from famine, God actually prospered them through that. That was God’s provision. You think God was caught off guard by the famine that came during Joseph’s time?

He warned Joseph. This was part of God’s plan all along. Joseph even points out to his brothers and says, God, what you meant for evil, God meant for good to save much people alive, to save a great number of people alive, to save your lives.

God allowed you to do this awful thing to me and worked it out the way he did. And so them being in Egypt was God’s provision for them, for them to be saved alive. And then while they were in Egypt, God continued to prosper them.

And folks, we can learn from that that during even our most difficult times. God is still at work in our lives. God still has plans to prosper us.

Now it may not look, I want to be very clear on this, it may not look the way we expect it to look. I heard on the news last night they were talking about Creflo Dollar and him wanting a 60 million dollar jet or something. And why that made the news when that kind of stuff is going on all the time, I don’t know.

But they said on the news, and he preaches something that is known as the prosperity theology. Yeah, so do a lot of churches in America saying that if you’ll just do this, this, and this, God wants to make you rich. When I say God will prosper you, that’s not necessarily what I mean.

If God wants to make you rich, he’ll make you rich, and that’s his business. But that’s not the only kind of prosperity there is. God, even in our most difficult circumstances, still has plans to take care of us.

For everybody? Yeah, for everybody. You can look at, and I’ve I looked at it just recently, the story of Richard Wurmbrand as an example.

He started Voice of the Martyrs. He was a pastor who ended up in prison in communist Romania for years. Was tortured.

Wrote a book called Tortured for Christ. You can read through his story and see how even when he was going through daily beatings, God had plans for him to use him and use him to witness to his jailers fo

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