2 Tim 3:16-17
All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.
So since God has said it that should be the end of it but I find that most people spend much more time in the New Testament than in the Old Testament and I’m included in that. It is really short sighted because the Old Testament books give us context for the Gospel revealed in the New Testament. Genesis has a bunch to say about the doctrine of election. Exodus is primarily focused on the doctrines associated with election and redemption. These books are primarily history books but God teaches doctrine and foreshadows the details of the Gospel.
As second book in the Bible it takes the number for division and opposition. So we find lots of divisions and separations described in the book. The primary doctrine in Exodus is redemption and the division that occurs there. The doctrine isn’t explained explicitly but God uses an illustration to teach us and you need to remember that God is teaching us spiritual things and not just historical things in these historical books.
I’ll be referring from time to time to a bible teacher named Arthur W. Pink. I was teaching on this topic a few years ago and Francis McClendon (now Francis Rice) asked afterwards if I had been reading from Pink. Well I hadn’t but I did after she asked that. He has tremendous depth and clarity and Francis was being very kind to insinuate that my lesson sounded like Pink had contributed. You can still get his works and I’d recommend him as a resource for Bible study.
Although we will go into more detail, Pink has the following short list of symbols to be found in Exodus:
1) Israel in Egypt illustrates the place we were in before Divine grace saved us.
2) Egypt symbolizes the world, according to the course of which we all walked in time past.
3) Pharaoh, who knew not the Lord, who defied Him, who was the inveterate enemy of God's people, but who at the end was overthrown by God, shadows forth the great adversary, the Devil.
4) The cruel bondage of the enslaved Hebrews pictures the tyrannical dominion of sin over its captives.
5) The groaning of the Israelites under their burdens speaks of the painful exercises of conscience and heart when convicted of our lost condition.
6) The deliverer raised up by God in the person of Moses, points to the greater Deliverer, even our Lord Jesus Christ.
7) The passover-night tells of the security of the believer beneath the sheltering blood of God's Lamb.
8) The exodus from Egypt announces our deliverance from the yoke of bondage and our judicial separation from the world.
9) The crossing of the Red Sea depicts our union with Christ in His death and resurrection.
10) The journey through the wilderness—its trials and testings, with God's provision to meet every need—represent the experiences of our pilgrim course.
11) The giving of the law to Israel teaches us the obedient submission which we owe to our new Master.
12) The tabernacle with its beautiful fittings and furnishings, shows us the varied excellencies and glories of Christ.
We will use the big picture of the people of Israel to look at our salvation and to praise God again for what He has done in every believer’s life and especially today for each of us to thank Him for His work in our lives. Think about Isaiah 61:3 for a minute:
Isaiah 61:3
To console those who mourn in Zion, To give them beauty for ashes, The oil of joy for mourning, The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; That they may be called trees of righteousness, The planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified.”
Salvation is God’s work and we become the trees of righteousness planted by God in which He and He alone is glorified. Beauty, joy, and praise are to be your characteristics. You are clothed in the righteousness of His Son so you are beautiful before God, your sins against God are forgiven in this beauty and so you have joy, and the natural response of a heart in this condition is praise.
Today we start to follow the Children of Israel from Egypt into the Promised Land. Today I want you to consider the Children of Israel corporately as a picture of you before and after your salvation as God moves them from Egypt to the Promised Land.
Exodus 1:13-14
So the Egyptians made the children of Israel serve with rigor. And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage— in mortar, in brick, and in all manner of service in the field. All their service in which they made them serve was with rigor.
Bondage was the character of their service in Egypt and it was enforced with rigor so that they had bitter lives. It is a tradition to eat bitter herbs at Passover as a reminder of how things were.
Remember that as Genesis ends Jacob and his family settled in Egypt. After about 30 years they seem to have become enslaved. The Egyptians didn’t like shepherds and it may have grown from there. Maybe the Egyptians were threatened by the way God cared for the Israelites. So they entered into bondage for 400 years. It is natural to wonder about why God would wait 400 years to take them out of Egypt. Pink offers a few possibilities. First, they grew into a nation that was big enough to face the task of the Promised Land. Second, the Amorite’s sin grew and was fully ready for judgment. Thirdly, the sins of Joseph’s brothers was judged by God to the fourth generation.
Fourthly, this built Egypt as a picture of our bondage in sin before our redemption by God. Egypt is a different kind of place. The Nile and the desert make it what it is and at that time it was a tremendous civilization. The nation is shaped by a river that periodically overflowed and renewed the fertility of their soils along with desert on either side. So you lived in a civilized place, in bondage, with desert on both sides. The Scriptural name for Egypt is Mizraim meaning “double straitness” because of the two strips on each side of the river. They don’t look up for their living. They look down and at the river. They don’t depend on it raining from heaven on their fields. Imagine telling them that “God sends His rain on the just and the unjust” and the blank stares from the people of those days. They depend on rain in Ethiopia. They are, in a sense, disconnected from “the heavens” for their living. When the children of Israel go to Canaan they will learn to look up and be dependent on what falls from heaven rather than independent. This is what we learn after our salvation. You’ve got to stop looking down and start looking up. You move from independence to dependence. It isn’t always pretty but that is what God will do in your life.
Arguably the greatest literary monument from Egypt is titled “The Book of the Dead”. Beautiful art, great science, a true civilization but dead. Vanity or uselessness is what we have apart from a life lived before the face of God. You can embalm death and dress it up with gold but a remarkably well preserved corpse is still a corpse.
It seems likely that the new Pharoah may have been Assyrian rather than Egyptian who began the particular persecution designed to kill all the male children born to the Israelites. He patterns the enemy of our soul (Gen 3:15) as he demonstrates the “enmity” against the woman and her Seed.
It was such a severe bondage that the rulers could demand that every male child will be killed at birth and no rebellion took place. If you can just imagine what kind of bondage it would be place on a people that they wouldn’t rebel at a ruling like that. They saw no way out of bondage.
John 8:33-36
They answered Him, “We are Abraham’s descendants, and have never been in bondage to anyone. How can You say, ‘You will be made free’?” Jesus answered them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin. And a slave does not abide in the house forever, but a son abides forever. Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.
You were in bondage just as severe and most of you, just like the Pharisees, would have argued about it too.
Ephesians 2:12 that at that time you were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.
You had no hope. If you were saved as a child you may have little or no recollection of this. Maybe you never really recognized your state as either a child or an adult. However, that doesn’t change the truth. You were a slave to sin without any hope of freedom or any real knowledge of the depth of your bondage.
Exodus 2: 23-25 Now it happened in the process of time that the king of Egypt died. Then the children of Israel groaned because of the bondage, and they cried out; and their cry came up to God because of the bondage. So God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. And God looked upon the children of Israel, and God acknowledged them.
God remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He didn’t remember the merit of the Israelites or their qualities that would make them valuable and useful if He saved them. They had no quality He needed to accomplish His plans. He remembered what He said He would do. And He was faithful to His word.
In preparing Moses for the task of taking the Israelites out of Egypt, God developed the most unique individual between Adam and Jesus. Here is a brief list of some of the contrasts in the life of Moses.
1) He was the child of a slave, and the son of a queen.
2) He was born in a hut, and lived in a palace.
3) He inherited poverty, and enjoyed unlimited wealth.
4) He was the leader of armies, and the keeper of flocks.
5) He was the mightiest of warriors, and the meekest of men.
6) He was educated in the court, and dwelt in the desert.
7) He had the wisdom of Egypt, and the faith of a child.
8) He was fitted for the city, and wandered in the wilderness.
9) He was tempted with the pleasures of sin, and endured the hardships of virtue.
10) He was backward in speech, and talked with God.
11) He had the rod of a shepherd, and the power of the Infinite.
12) He was a fugitive from Pharaoh, and an ambassador from heaven.
13) He was the giver of the Law, and the forerunner of grace.
14) He died alone on Mount Moab, and appeared with Christ in Judea.
15) No man assisted at his funeral, yet God buried him.”
Moses’ mother acted in faith and did not act in fear in placing Moses in the basket. We learn that in Hebrews. It is reasonable to assume that God instructed Moses’ parents. Most of the time I think we see this placing of Moses in the basket as an act of desperation but Scripture tells us that it was not.
This passing through the water can be seen as a sort of baptism. In any natural way it would be assumed to be putting the child to death but instead the child comes up royalty. This “death and resurrection” picture works as Moses is a picture of Christ’s death and resurrection. We’ll see additional pictures of this in Moses’ life.
