EXODUS 1–14
Abraham had a son named Isaac. Isaac had two sons named Jacob and Esau. Jacob (whose name got changed to Israel) had 12 sons, one of whom was named Joseph (who had an amazing Technicolor dream-coat!). And Joseph, as you may or may not know, found his way down to Egypt (okay, he had a little “help” from his brothers).
(I seem to be making a lot of parenthetical statements).
It’s a good thing Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery. If they hadn’t, the entire story would have ended early and badly. A famine struck the land where Jacob lived with his family, and because Joseph was in Egypt, he was able to stave off starvation and save his entire family.
But they were still just a family. They weren’t really a nation yet.
The whole family relocated south and lived in relative ease and comfort. They were related to Joseph, after all, and Joseph was the second-most-powerful man in Egypt.
And they started having babies. Turns out the sons of Abraham were a lot more, er, fertile than their patriarch. They were so fertile, in fact, that the new pharaoh — who didn’t know Joseph or his family like the old pharaoh — started to notice how many of them there were. He started to fear that they might want to take over the place, so he had them enslaved (while he still could). But the people kept growing. Pharaoh, feeling even more threatened, started killing all the baby boys.
The descendants of Abraham were supposed to be a great nation, but they didn’t even have their own land yet. They were slaves, powerless to stop a ruthless madman from performing post-birth abortions on their children. They must have wondered about those great promises YHWH had made to Father Abraham. Maybe they were just old wives’ tales, stories you tell to children to get them to behave.
But God wasn’t finished yet. He was still working, first through a tiny baby boy who shouldn’t even have survived, then through the pharaoh’s daughter. (You’ll see as we go, God loves working through outsiders.) That baby boy grew up to be Moses, the greatest leader in the Old Testament.
Now, it was hardly a straight line from being hidden from Pharaoh in a floating basket made of reeds to leading 2.5 million people (or so) out of bondage and into the land of milk and honey, the land that God had promised to Abraham. Moses tried taking matters into his own hands — which, we already know, never works out well in the Bible — and had to flee from the long arm of the law.
He spent 40 years tending sheep in the middle of nowhere, until he had a conversation with a bush that appeared to be on fire but refused to burn up (how long did it take him to figure that one out?). Out of the flames, God broke the news that He had chosen fugitive Moses to run as manager on His mission to liberate His people. Moses reluctantly agreed to talk to Pharaoh, and then watched as God miraculously rained plague after plague after plague down on the Egyptians until the oppressors begged the Hebrews to leave. (The Egyptians even threw money at them on their way out.)
And so it happened, God’s people become a nation, leaving behind their chains of oppression on their way out the door to the Promised Land.
Here’s something we’re already learning in this Big Story. God has one central plot-line that relentlessly moves the story forward, but He is also content to chase a lot of rabbit trails along the way (He even speaks in parenthetical statements sometimes). He does things at His own pace. Sometimes it’s painfully slow and other times it’s faster than you can blink.
But it’s His story, so He gets to decide when and how things happen.
Prayer
God of our fathers, I give thanks that You have revealed Your great and surprising story of redemption to us in Your extraordinary Word. Through the Scriptures, I see that there is always a purpose in what You do, and that nothing catches You by surprise. You are fully sovereign over human history, and I am grateful that You have embedded Your people in a larger Story. It is this Story that gives me perspective and hope amidst the uncertainties and obstacles of this earthly sojourn. Your creative plans behind the scenes turn the apparently hopeless situations we face into manifestly hopeful outcomes. Your deliverance and Your timing are surprising, but I want to learn to trust in Your wisdom and not in my own. May I hope in Your providential care and not in my own limited plans and efforts.
In Jesus’s name, Amen
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