as we learned before, Pharaoh believed he was descended from the supreme god. He believed that he had power over all facets of Egyptian life. He had magicians and wise men who could perform ‘miracles’. Whether these came by illusion or from demons is not told in the scripture. However, they could reproduce some of the things that God sent upon the Egyptians. But they could not reverse anything that God sent. God would soon show them that their gods had no power. One by one, the gods would fall.
Author: Pamela Porterfield
I am a graduate of Bethany Nazarene College which is no Southern Nazarene University. I have a Bachelor of Arts in Speech, English, Creative Writing and Drama with a minor In Educations. I live in Baton Rouge, La, with my husband of 45 years, Stan. We are members of the Baton Rouge First Church of the Nazarene. I am excited to be doing what God has inspired me to do.
LET MY PEOPLE GO
Moses had a simple message. This is what God says, “Let my people go.” But Pharaoh was having none of it. Instead, he made it harder for the Israelites to make the bricks that they were forced to make for the Egyptians. God told Moses to go to the people and tell them that God had heard their suffering and remembered the covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. To tell them that He would free them and lead them to the land promised to the patriarchs. Moses passed this message on to the people and they would not listen to him because they were discouraged. They had had hope and all it got them was more work.
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NEVER HEARD OF HIM
By this time, the Israelites have descended into abject slavery. They were forced to make bricks. Their newborn sons were being thrown to the crocodiles. Those that were fortunate enough not to be making bricks were household or field slaves with nothing of their own. Their whole lives were dedicated to making the lives of the Egyptians easy. It was into this that Moses arrived to bring the hope of freedom.
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DELIVERANCE IS ON THE WAY
Moses, reluctantly, decided to follow God’s Instructions. Every felt like that? God tells you to do something and you really don’t want to. I know that I felt that way often growing up when my parents told me to do stuff. Often I didn’t want to, but equally more often, I did it anyway. Most of the time, it was ultimately rewarding. Other times, not so much. Moses had tried and tried to get out of going back to Egypt.
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EXCUSES, EXCUSES
How easy is it to overthink things? When a situation in your life comes up that is kind of out of the box, it’s so easy to think what if . . . I fail . . . I cause more problems than I fix . . . I can’t make people understand what I’m trying to do. I know I do. When I look at the test results before I speak to the doctor, my mind runs all over the place. Is it cancer? Is it something else? What happens now? What am I going to do if . . .? My brain is a very imaginative place. I can think of a million scenarios, most of them bad. So, here is Moses. He is overthinking. In doing so, he doesn’t take into account that God is in control. When God tells you that you are to do a particular thing, we need to remember that we will not be alone. God is there. He will provide all that we need.
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I KEEP MY PROMISES
God has identified Himself as the eternal God. The God of the ancestors of those Israelites who were now suffering in Egypt. He has confirmed that He has not forgotten them. He is stating that now is the time for the promise of deliverance to be fulfilled. Moses, who once may have thought he could deliver his people, has learned that he can do nothing without God. That he must walk in the path that God lays out for him and for the people of Israel. God now begins to tell Moses what will happen in general terms. The specifics will be seen as time unfolds.
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I AM WHO I AM
Moses is standing before God and has been told that he will go to Egypt to lead the Israelites out and into the Promised Land. Moses knows he is speaking with God. He knows that God has given him a monumental task. What do you think his response should be? Yes, sir!! I’m on it! And off he goes. Right? Nope. Not this Moses. He asks another question. Who are You? Well, not in so many words, but you know what I mean.
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WHO AM I?
One would think that Moses would be ready to do God’s bidding. He knew that his people were suffering. He knew that he had run away after killing an overseer. He knew that he had a price on his head in Egypt. But he knew that now he was a nobody. A shepherd. The kind of person that the Egyptians despised. He was no longer a prince of Egypt, the son of the daughter of Pharoah. I mean, really. He had been gone for forty years. He could just see the reaction of both the Israelites and the Egyptians. And he voiced it in three words, “Who am I?”
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FIRE!!
Moses had to move the sheep from place to place to find grazing for them. So, here he is on the mountain, and he sees a fire. Fire probably wasn’t uncommon in the desolate desert where dried vegetation could spontaneously catch fire. But he looks at the fire and notices that there is something different. The bush is not burning. The leaves did not curl, nor did the branches break and fall off. It’s on fire but it is not burning.
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MAN ON THE RUN
When we left Moses last time, he was a baby and was adopted by the daughter of Pharoah. A princess of the land. It follows that Moses was educated as a prince of Egypt. He was a trained warrior and a scholar. He probably knew several languages, the customs and traditions of several nations as well as how to run a province or even an entire country. He lived a life of privilege but at the same time he knew that he was not Egyptian by birth but a Hebrew.
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REALLY, I FOUND HIM IN THE RIVER
Exodus 2 begins with a birth announcement. A man and woman of the tribe of Levi had a child. A baby boy. Jochebed and Amran had two children before this baby. Aaron and Miriam. All of these children would be used of God over the next 120 years. We’ll see just how in our study of Exodus.
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SETTING THE STAGE
Exodus 1 is setting the stage for the Exodus. It tells us what had happened to the Israelites in the time since Joseph. Joseph and his brothers are gone, and the Israelites have multiplied. There came a Pharoah who knew nothing about Joseph and what he had done for Egypt. Well, it has been over three hundred years at this point when this Pharoah came to power.
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EGYPT AND THE EXODUS
As we begin to look at Exodus, we need to approach it with open minds and not be fixed on the traditional views of the journey. We need to understand that archaeology may or may not have gotten the timing and places right. There are so many different opinions of when the Israelites left Egypt, where they left from, the route they traveled and which body of water they crossed that killed the entire Egyptian army.
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DAD’S GONE, JOE’S GONNA KILL US
Jacob was gone. Joseph and his brothers mourned his death. Joseph ordered that his father be embalmed as Egyptians were embalmed before burial. We know from archaeology that ancient Egyptians, at least the wealthy, were mummified for burial. So Joseph was following the customs of his time when he had Jacob embalmed. The Bible tells us that it took 40 days for the embalming to be completed. We are also told that the Egyptians mourned him for 70 days. This tells me that the Israelites were respected because of Joseph. They were not slaves at the beginning of their time in Egypt.
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JACOB BLESSES HIS SONS
Jacob lived another seventeen years after he arrived in Egypt and died at the ripe old age of one hundred and forty-seven. Very venerable to the Egyptians. Before he died, he called all of his sons together to bless them. These blessings were not only expected but were important to the inheritance of the father’s wealth and authority. We will find as Jacob blesses his sons that, again, birth order does not count.
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TWO MORE SONS FOR JACOB
Jacob adopts the two sons of Joseph. This adoption placed them as legal sons of Jacob. Jacob said that they were now as much his sons and Reuben and Simeon. This placed them as equals to the rest of the sons of Jacob, with all the rights and privileges. They would have a part of the inheritance when they returned to Canaan. Jacob stated that they would be named as sons of Israel and called by his name. His adoption was his desire to turn them from the wealth and riches of Egypt to the spiritual richness of God’s chosen people. He named them as heads of two of the tribes of Israel.
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OFF TO EGYPT, AGAIN
The prophecy given to Abraham, that his descendants would be “strangers in a country not their own,“ is beginning to come true. (Genesis 15:13) I am sure that Jacob and his sons knew of that prophecy, but it was not foremost in their mind at the time. They may have thought that it wasn’t their generation that it applied to. A lot of us look at prophecies in scripture and think that it is not our generation that it applies to. Don’t be so certain. We do not know the future. At any rate, Jacob and all of his family, possessions, servants, flocks and herds packed up and headed to Egypt.
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HEY GUYS, IT’S ME!
Joseph now knows that his brothers have changed over the years. He has seen the change in their honesty and in their concern for family. He also sees a great change in Judah. It was Judah who suggested that Joseph be sold to the slave traders back in the day. The testing was over and Joseph’s emotions were overwhelming.
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TAKE ME INSTEAD
Let’s look back at what Joseph has done to his brothers and why. But let us also be aware that Joseph was being led by God. His actions were God’s tools to bring the brothers to repentance. First, he accused them of being spies and threw them in prison. I would imagine that they were interrogated, not only by Joseph but by his servants as well. I mean, if you are arrested as spies, wouldn’t you expect to be carefully questioned? Then, rather than letting them all go, he kept Simeon as prisoner and sent the rest back to Jacob. Then he sent them away with the money they had paid for the grain secreted in their grain sacks. What is he trying to find out? What is God doing in the brothers’ lives?
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OK, LET’S TRY THIS AGAIN
The famine is getting worse, in Egypt and surrounding lands. Soon the food purchased on the first trip to Egypt is running low and to survive, the sons of Israel must go back to purchase more food. Jacob said that they had to go back to Egypt, BUT the brothers dared not go back without Benjamin. The ruler had told them that they would not see his face if he was not with them. Jacob was not about to let his youngest son, by his beloved Rachel, out of his sight.
