From the Marsh to the Mansion

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Transcript:

My kids are fascinated by buffalo, not the city, the animal, which I found out this week are actually called bison. Evidently there is a difference between buffalo and bison, and anything we have here in North America is bison. So with them being so fascinated by them, I took my herd up to see a herd of bison.

We had tried before last month to go down to the Wichita Mountains, and they have some there, but with all the other people that you’re competing with to see them, if they’re not right up by the road, you have to find a place where you can stop and look, and then the kids are complaining they’re so far away, and they can’t see them, and it’s just a big mess. So we drove up to Pawhuska, about three hours away from us, about four hours from here, and went to go look at bison. It was nice.

Anywhere you looked, there were bison. And I think we were the only ones on the tall grass prairie preserve that day. It happened to be raining, so not a lot of people were out.

And we got to look at bison. We stopped at some point and got them out. I let them sit on the hood of the car so they could look out and see the bison off in the distance.

Well, as we were driving through, we came to another fence, another cattle guard. And I do know that those are actually not people who guard the cattle. I do know that much.

I love sometimes when I talk about agricultural stuff and y’all just look at me like he does not know anything. I do at least know what a cattle guard is. So we drive over the cattle guard and notice that as the fence goes off at an angle in another direction, there’s a herd of bison standing right there.

So I about gave everybody whiplash trying to pull the car over. There are signs up all over the place if you’ve never been there that say loose bison or dangerous in case people didn’t actually know that. I guess there are some people out there who don’t know that.

Loose bison or dangerous. I got the kids out, and the way the fence went, it was almost running parallel to the road. We were able to get out and stand probably 15 to 20 feet away from this herd of bison.

Now, if the fence had not been there, I would not have gotten my children out of the car. But when they’re on the other side of that big fence, they’re not really loose bison anymore in relation to us. So we got to stand out there, and they got to see them probably as up close as they’ll ever get to, and look at them, and they just stood there and watched them, and then talked the rest of the day about how bison just stand there and eat grass, and then they run and eat grass.

They stood there and watched them and loved it. They talked about the bison the rest of the day. Had to buy them stuffed bison, because they saw those in the gift shop in spring break.

So you may think, where am I going with this? Sometimes we end up getting to be part of something amazing only because of being in the right place at the right time. How many times have I gone, how much time have I spent taking them to look for bison?

And how many other herds did we see that we just had to look at in the distance? But we just happened to be going across this cattle guard at the same time they were coming up to the fence. And because our paths converged at the right place, At the right time, we got to experience something that we don’t get to experience every day.

We were in the right place at the right time. And I don’t know if Madeline will remember, but that’s probably something Benjamin may remember. I remember a few things from when I was three or four, and that may be something that he remembers the rest of his life.

It’s certainly something that he remembers now. And if they don’t remember, I’ve got pictures. But incredible things happen when we are at the right place at the right time.

Now sometimes that’s coincidence, but where God is concerned, I don’t believe there are coincidences. And the Bible story that we’re going to look at today, starting at the end of Exodus chapter 1, is one of these stories of not only somebody being at the right place at the right time, but of several people being at the right place at the right time. And we read through it, and it’s not just coincidence.

It’s not just that, oh, so-and-so happened to be here, and then another person stumbled up on the scene. You read this, and you come away from it with the sense. You hear the story, and you come away from it with the sense that this could not have worked out the way it did had God not been intimately involved in these people’s lives.

And as we continue to read through the book of Exodus and continue to look at these stories, I told you last week I may not necessarily go verse by verse through the book of Exodus, Because I’m not, this sounds terrible. I hope it’s not. I’m not so concerned in this series that you get the verse by verse of everything that’s in Exodus.

I want you to be familiar, if you’re not already, you may already be. I want you to be familiar with the stories of the book of Exodus. And if you’re already familiar, then we’ll re-familiarize ourselves.

Because if you’re like me, I can read something in the Bible 15 times, And on that 16th time I go, oh, I’ve never seen that before. And so we’re going to go story by story through the book of Exodus and look at these stories. I’ll go through the story with you, give you a few points of how it applies to our lives today, and then we’ll send you on your way to lunch this morning.

But we’re going to start in Exodus chapter 1, the last verse of Exodus chapter 1. I told you last week, I feel like verse 22 goes better with chapter 2 anyway, as far as the story is concerned. We learned last week about how Pharaoh decided to try to oppress and cripple the nation of Israel so they wouldn’t be a threat, and he tried to work them to death.

When that wouldn’t work, he tried to exterminate them, and through some, really I like to describe them, some smart-mouthed Hebrew midwives, his plans were foiled. They said, you just told us to kill the babies while we’re sitting there delivering them. It’s not our fault that the Hebrew women are there.

They’ve already delivered the babies by the time we get there. So there was nothing for us to do. We’re just following orders.

Well, then we pick up in chapter 1, verse 22. It says, And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying, Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river, and every daughter ye shall save a life. And he’s not talking about the nation of Egypt.

If we’re not paying attention to the story, we could read this verse and get the idea. He’s talking about throughout his kingdom, every boy that’s born now has to be cast into the river, has to be drowned. And every girl should be saved.

He’s not talking about the entire nation of Egypt. He’s talking about the Israelites, the Hebrews, who lived in his kingdom. Why?

Again, because just like last week, he was worried about their growing numbers, their growing population being a threat to him. Not that there were more of them than there were of the Egyptians. But at this point, they’re getting to be a significant enough part of the population that if Egypt went to war with somebody, that all of a sudden they could ally with whoever Egypt’s at war with, and now they’ve got an enemy from within.

And so he told, okay, we’re skipping the Hebrew midwives altogether. They’re unreliable. He couldn’t scare them.

He couldn’t force them into doing what he wanted. So he tells his people, soldiers included, charged all his people, Every Hebrew boy that’s born needs to be cast into the river. You can save the women alive, but cast the boys into the river.

It’s because the men were a bigger threat. The men were a bigger threat. The men were the ones who would be the warriors, who would go to war, who would ally with the other countries.

And the women still had use for the Egyptians, whether they would make them servants, whether they’d make them slaves, whether they’d make them concubines. They still had worth to the Egyptians, So they said, we’ll just keep the women and throw the, keep the girls and throw the boys into the river. It says in chapter 2, verse 1, and there went a man of the house of Levi and took a wife, took to wife a daughter of Levi.

We know from chapter 6 that this man is named Amram and his wife’s name is Jacob. And the woman conceived and bare a son. And when she saw him that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months.

Now, she could have been killed herself for this act of hiding her child. But I want you to think back, those of you who have kids, or have had kids, which is just about everybody in the room, I think. But think back to that moment when you first laid eyes on your child, especially your first child.

And that new feeling that you’ve never really felt before. I mean, you’ve loved people before, but this feeling of just this overwhelming, unconditional love, that I would die for this tiny person. And I think that’s what the Bible means when it says she saw he was a goodly child.

Now, was there something noteworthy about Moses’ physical attributes or otherwise? Possibly. It’s possible that he was a baby that would have stood out from the others.

But I think as much as anything else, he was a goodly child because he was her child. She couldn’t bear the thought of him being thrown into the river. When she saw him that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months.

It is hard. I’ve never tried, but it would be hard to hide a baby. They’re fussy and they’re cranky and they’re noisy.

And yes, they’re cute when they sleep, whenever that is. Certainly not at night. But she managed to hide this baby for three months.

To hide him not only from the soldiers, to hide him from every Egyptian she would have come into contact with, but I don’t think I’m going too far out from the scriptures here when I presume that she probably would have had to have hidden him from some in her own community as well. We see all the time, not only in history, but in biblical history as well, there were always people who were wanting to collaborate with the powers that be to try to save their own skins. There are parallels here between the Egyptians under this Pharaoh and the Nazis, as we talked about last week, with wanting to exterminate the Israelites.

If you’re familiar with some of the stories that come out of World War II at all, not only if you hid Jews from the Gestapo would you be put in a concentration camp yourself. But if you knew someone else was hiding them and you didn’t tell somebody, you’d suffer the same fate. So I don’t think it’s going too far out and making too big of presumptions to assume she probably would have had to have hidden the child from people in her own community because there were probably some who were only too glad to collaborate with the Egyptians and turn in babies and mothers to save their own skins.

And when she could not longer hide him, So she took for him an ark of bulrushes and daubed it with slime and with pitch and put the child therein. And she laid it in the flags by the river’s brink. So she made a basket.

She took bulrushes from the side of the river. She took these naturally growing tall grasses. And she wove them into a basket.

And she daubed it with slime and with pitch. I don’t know exactly. Pitch, I believe, is tar from my study of Noah’s Ark, that he pitched the outside of the Ark to make it waterproof.

Slime may just be the mud and gook that shows up at the edge of the river. But she daubed the outside of his basket with things to make it waterproof, or water-resistant at least, so that it would float. She was making, essentially, an Ark for her child.

We used to do Bible trivia with the youth group at Southgate, and the question was asked a few times, which came first, Noah and the Ark or Moses and the Ark? They always thought it was a trick question. Actually, there were two arcs in Moses’ life.

She was essentially making an arc, just as they did in Noah’s day. Granted, a smaller one, but making an arc to keep her son safe from the waters of Pharaoh’s judgment. So she weaves this basket, she makes it water-resistant, and she put her child in the basket and stuck it out in the flags by the brink of the river.

I have in my mind a marshy area along the edge of the river with, I don’t know what the technical term is for it, but we call them cattails growing up. You see all those plants that grow up out of the water. She put them in there where at least he’d be kind of hidden, and probably that way he’s not being carried all the way down the river to the sea by the current.

It would be, I cannot even imagine how hard it would be to let your child go like that. And yet we see even in the letting go, she’s making provisions that he would be safe, as safe as she could make him. But then also, she has to be able to trust God and let go and trust that God will protect her son.

As we’re going to see that he does, as we see all of these stories through the book of Exodus are about God’s deliverance of his people. And Moses is no exception to that. His sister, verse 4, and his sister stood afar off to wit what would be done with him.

done to him. His sister’s name is Miriam, we know from later on in the book as well. Miriam stands there after Jacobed puts him in the basket in the bulrushes.

My guess is Miriam, being a child or a young lady, would not be all that unusual for them to be playing down by the riverbank where Jacobed would have stood out. Miriam might not. So Miriam was down there amid the bulrushes by the riverside, keeping a distant eye on her brother to see what would be done.

Well, here we have somebody that God, I believe God has put here at the right place at the right time. And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to wash herself at the river. And her maidens walked along by the river’s side.

And when she saw the ark among the flags, she sent her maid to fetch it. So Pharaoh’s daughter comes down, apparently as she did on a somewhat regular basis, to bathe herself in the river or to clean up. I don’t know if it’s a full bath, but she came down to wash herself at the river.

and her ladies-in-waiting were with her as she went down to the riverside. She looks out through the grasses and things that grow along the edge of the river. And I would think you’d want to be very alert of what’s going on in the grasses at the edge of the river.

There’s no telling what lives in those things. But she sees the basket and thinks to herself, what is that? What could that possibly be?

So wisely, I think on her part, she sends somebody else into the marsh to get the basket. And when she had opened it, she saw the child, and behold, the babe went. You know what that tells me?

He was okay. The scariest times, the scariest times for me is when they’re, as a parent, is when they’re hurt and they don’t cry. Madeline has this habit.

She falls down a lot. All the time. She’ll fall down.

She’ll run into something. She’ll stand up under the table. She’ll do something.

And then she will hold her breath. And sometimes it’s a good 10, 15 seconds before she’ll start to cry. And even though I know it’s coming, I know she can’t possibly be that badly hurt from what she’s just done.

That waiting, that tension, is she okay? Because when they’re crying, you know they’re breathing. The babe wept.

He was alive. He was healthy. He hadn’t drowned in the river.

If he drowned in the river, he wouldn’t be crying. So she opened it and she saw the child, and behold, the babe wept. And she had compassion on him.

This is one of the more amazing parts of the story for me, this part of verse 6, and she had compassion on him. Well, who wouldn’t have compassion on a child that they just pulled out of the river? But the next part of that says, and said, she said, this is one of the Hebrews’ children.

This is a princess of Egypt. and she pulled the baby out of the river, and who wouldn’t have compassion on the baby she pulled out of the river? But as the princess of Egypt, she knew.

This wasn’t a secret. She knew that this was a slave child. And depending on which Pharaoh, it says the daughter of Pharaoh.

Now, we don’t know if she was the daughter of this Pharaoh or the previous. She was either the daughter or the sister of the sitting Pharaoh, her father or brother. Does that make sense?

I’m not saying she’s not the daughter of Pharaoh. I’m just saying she may be the daughter of the previous Pharaoh. Either her father or her brother, whoever was in charge of the kingdom, whoever had absolute rule over Egypt, had decreed that this child should be put to death.

And yet she had compassion on the child. Now it would be hard not to. As I said, it would be human nature to have compassion on this child.

But also to know you’re putting yourself in a little bit of jeopardy. I don’t know that she would have been killed being a member of the royal family, but certainly there would have been some kind of consequence for her. Put your own self in jeopardy for a slave child.

This is hard to imagine. This is hard for me to picture this working out the way it did without God’s intervention. And the Bible talks later in the book of Exodus about God hardening Pharaoh’s heart, which we’ll talk about later and try to explain that.

I believe God softened her heart toward this child. She had compassion on him and said, this is one of the Hebrew’s children. And you know, if you grew up watching the Ten Commandments, the movie, you may have had, as I had, the impression that all of this was a big secret, that he was a Hebrew.

She knew from the very beginning. He probably knew. He had to have known from early on who he was.

That’s not to say that everyone knew, but it wasn’t the secret that I had imagined it would be. Then said his sister, don’t forget about Miriam hiding out there on the edge of the water. Miriam just happened to be there at the right place at the right time.

Then said his sister, Miriam, to Pharaoh’s daughter, shall I go and call to thee a nurse of the Hebrew women, that she may nurse the child for thee? This was not like today where you could just run down to Walmart and buy formula. Pharaoh’s daughter was going to need a way to feed the baby.

So Miriam pops up out of the marsh grasses and says, Would you like me to go find one of the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you, to feed the child? Now there would have been no shortage of Hebrew women available to nurse him because there were all sorts of Hebrew women who had just had children themselves who had been thrown into the river and now had no one to feed. And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, Go.

And the maid went and called the child’s mother. went and called her mother, Yaakovet, who just happened to be at the right place at the right time. And Pharaoh’s daughter said unto her, Take this child away and nurse it for me, and I will give thee thy wages.

And the woman took the child and nursed it. She got hired to care for her own child under the protection of Pharaoh’s daughter. And the child grew, and she brought him unto Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son, and she called his name Moses, And she said, because I drew him out of the water.

There are some incredible parts of this story to me. I mean, the whole story is incredible. The whole story is unimaginable to me, apart from God’s intervention.

Pharaoh says, kill all the babies. Kill all the boy babies. One woman sets her child adrift on a basket on the river so that he won’t be drowned in the river.

He survives in this basket. Pharaoh’s daughter happens to be the one who finds him. his sister says to Pharaoh’s daughter would you like me to find one of the Hebrew women to feed him and she agrees and she runs back and gets the child’s mother who now is able to raise him the way she should have been able to all along but now she’s not going to be killed for it she’s going to be paid her wages for it and still gets to spend some of this time with the child she brought into the world and then this child is going to be adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter and God is going to put him in the right place at the right time.

There’s so much about this story that is inconceivable if God is not involved. Folks, we see from this story, you’re going to get tired of hearing me say this because it’s in every story, but it’s there. It’s not me.

It’s not my idea. This comes from the Scriptures. God is always at work to deliver His children.

That deliverance does not always take the form or the idea that we think it should have. It doesn’t always look like we think it should. And yet God is always at work to deliver his children from the things we need to be delivered from.

Three points I’m going to share with you and then we’ll be finished this morning. First of all, God often allows us to enter hard situations to deliver us from harder ones. God often allows us to enter hard situations so that he can use that to deliver us from harder ones.

Now Moses was put into a hard situation. He was set adrift on the river. I was listening to a radio program on the way down here this morning, and it was about something else, but they happened to be talking about adoption and how sometimes children have scars from, even if they have loving adoptive families, they have these scars from the idea that their parents put them up for adoption.

Even if it was a loving thing to do in the best interest of the child, there’s still some longing within them a lot of times. Can you imagine being the boy whose mother put you in a basket and sent you adrift on the river? If he knew that story at all.

That would be a hard situation. Moses was put into this, apart from God’s protection, what would have been an incredibly dangerous situation. Now, not as dangerous as it could have been.

It’s not like she just stuck him out there on a floating log and said, there you go. She made attempts to protect him. That was a dangerous situation.

why would God put him in such a hard situation why would God allow why would a loving God allow that to happen to an innocent little baby folks sometimes God allows us to go through hard situations so that he can deliver us from something harder sometimes he’ll allow us to go through something that looks dangerous to us to deliver us from something that’s even more dangerous and the daughter of Pharaoh came down to wash herself at the river and her maidens walked along by the river side and when she saw the ark among the flags, she sent her maid to fetch it. We are talking about what God used this situation, what God used this situation for was to eventually work the deliverance of the entire nation of Israel from slavery. Am I saying that God would kill Moses and his life wasn’t worth anything?

That’s not what I’m saying. God didn’t let Moses drown. God didn’t kill Moses.

God let Moses go through a hard situation because there was a much harder situation that his entire nation of people were in bondage. Not only in bondage, they were in bondage to a tyrant who wanted to destroy them, who wanted to beat them down, work them to death, and if that didn’t work, to annihilate them. I would say between the two difficulties, that one was the greater.

And so yeah, God let Moses go through a hard situation so that he could deliver Moses and the rest of his people from a much harder one. I was talking to a friend this week about some things that had happened in her life over the last several years. Just some awful things that she’s been put through.

And I told her, because we were talking about some things that I’ve gone through as well. I say friend, she’s more like a family member, but is a family member, I should say. You can be both.

Do you know that? You can have your family members be friends, too. We were talking about some things that I’ve been through and some awful things that she’s been through the last several years.

And I told her, I said, I wish all of that had not happened. I wish you had not had to go through that. And she made a statement that brought me to tears.

She said, I don’t wish it hadn’t happened. She said, because if I hadn’t gone through that, I wouldn’t know how to help you now. I wouldn’t know what to tell you now.

And sometimes God will. . .

Folks, this is not just Bible story time. I believe these Bible stories that we’re talking about actually happen. They happen in the real lives of real people.

And we can learn. . .

It’s not just I’m telling you stories so that you’ll know the stories. We can learn things from these people’s lives about how God interacts with us and how it applies to our lives today. And I’m telling you, sometimes God will allow us to go through hard situations.

He will allow us to suffer. He will allow us to endure pain. Not because he takes pleasure in it, but because he uses that.

He can use that situation to deliver us from something much, much worse. He can use it to help us out of something much, much worse. So when you get to a hard situation and think, God, why would you let me go through this?

Why would you put me through this? Why did God put Moses? Why did God allow Moses to go adrift on the river?

Sometimes he lets us go through hard situations to deliver us from something harder. Second of all, God causes deliverance to come through means that defy explanation. I’ve already hit on this this morning.

For a lot of the things that happen in this story, there is no explanation. There is no explanation that I can arrive at for why people did the things that they did. I can’t explain how Jacob was able to set her child adrift.

I mean, I know why she did it. I understand why she did it I can’t explain how she did it if it were me I’d be trying to hide the child I’d be trying to flee Egypt I’d be trying to do something how she could have that kind of trust in God wait a minute you’re the preacher you’re supposed to have perfect trust in God and everything no it doesn’t work that way I’m just like the rest of you I try I try and I have to remind myself every day God has always been faithful he can handle this too but it’s not like I just wake up in the morning with total faith that everything. No, God has to work on me on a regular basis.

How she had the kind of faith in God that she did, that she was able to do this, I can’t explain how she was able to set her child adrift. I can’t explain why the princess of Egypt would take pity on a slave child and risk her own neck to some extent to say, I’m going to take him in and I’m going to raise him as my own. And yet she did.

I can’t explain why she had one of the Hebrew women to nurse this child, when I’m sure they had people on the payroll already. There are so many things about this story that I can’t explain why they happened the way they did, apart from God’s intervention. You know, there’s so much about the Bible that doesn’t make sense in human terms, right?

Remember back all those months ago, me talking about the Trinity, and some other things, and telling you I’m going to talk to you about something this morning I don’t understand? There’s a lot about God that doesn’t make sense in human terms. But in God’s terms, they make perfect sense. And sometimes we just have to trust that His deliverance, we can’t see how He’s going to deliver.

Oh, I’m talking to me this morning. I just realized that. We don’t understand how God’s deliverance and provision are going to come.

We look at the storms all around us. We look at the situation we’re in in life, and we say, I don’t understand how this possibly could work out. I know God can handle anything, but I don’t see it.

How is this going to work? And yet God’s deliverance for us and in our lives seems to come, the deliverance seems to come from places that defy explanation. I don’t know how he does the things he does other than the fact that he’s God.

We’ll talk about this some tonight. We’re not going to be talking about Exodus tonight, but we’ll talk about this some tonight. We don’t always have to know the end of the plan.

We think we do. I want to know how everything’s laid out, what route we’re going to take. We don’t have to know the end of the plan.

We just have to trust God. that he keeps his promises. And when God has promised to deliver us from something, that deliverance is going to come in some ways that defy explanation.

We’re not always going to be able to put our finger on it and say, that’s how it’s going to happen. He’s going to do it just like this. Very few people were looking for a Messiah who was going to come and be born in a stable.

And yet that’s exactly how God sent deliverance. God causes deliverance to come through means that defy explanation. And finally this morning, God puts people in unusual places to deliver his children.

God puts people in unusual places. We’ve talked about this already. God put Miriam there on the bank watching over her brother.

God put Pharaoh’s daughter where she would happen to find Moses in the basket. God put Miriam in a position to be able to talk to Pharaoh’s daughter. God put Yaakov in a position where she was able to nurse Moses.

God put Moses in a place where he’d be able to deliver the people of Israel from Egypt. He wouldn’t have been able to deliver them from Pharaoh if he’d just been a lowly slave. God raised him to the royal palace, as we’ll see next week, and put him in control.

God raises people into unusual places in order to deliver his children. I don’t know if any of you watched the speech or any part of the speech or have heard any part of the speech on the news that Prime Minister Netanyahu gave to Congress a few weeks ago. I got weird looks.

I was watching it on YouTube while I was at the gym. It was an incredibly powerful speech, but the part that stuck with me, he was talking about Iran and their nuclear program and wanting to annihilate the nation of Israel. And the one line of the speech that stuck with me is when he told Congress, and I’m not sure if he was telling Congress or the American people, he said, I come to you as Mordecai.

I come to you as Mordecai with a warning. And you remember the story, don’t you? God put a nice Jewish girl in a position to be the queen of Persia because some of the leaders in Persia wanted to annihilate the Jewish people.

That woman’s name was Esther. And if you don’t know this already, Persia was the name for Iran until, I believe, 1935. God put her on the throne to be able to change the heart of the king.

And her uncle Morde

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