“Where are you, God?” Exodus 1 Calvary Baptist Church of Holland Sunday October 4, 2015 Pastor Paul L. Davis Key Goals: (Know) Improve our ability to think unselfishly. (Feel) Deeply desire to sacrificially follow Christ. (Do) Give to, serve and love Christ’s Church unreservedly. Introduction: Exodus is a story about something that happened. That really happened. There are real people, real places, real hardship and real relationships with God. As we study this book you will find that we are in a far off place in a time long, long ago. And you are going to be tempted at some point to ask, “What’s the payoff? Why does this story matter?” Let me answer that up front. The book of Exodus is not an ancient story waiting for us to bring it into our world. Rather, it is God’s Word standing still in time defining the world that we see around us, molding what that world should look like, and then inviting us to enter that world. The book of Exodus is not designed to be a self-help manual filled with messages like "Five ways to love your wife more” or "Six strategies to effective parenting.” There is a place for sermons like that, but not from Exodus. Exodus is designed to tell us what God is like, it is designed to tell us how He thinks of His people, the lengths to which He will go to deliver them, and the proper response of God’s people to great deeds like what God did in this book.1 So as we look to make application to our lives from this series, the goal is more about changing how we think, how we see God, what His role is in our life, and how we see the world around us than it will be about changing what we do. I want us to think about God as a Redeemer (Exodus 6:6) and watch how He stepped into the lives of hurting people, how He saved and rescued a nation, how He taught them about Himself, His righteousness, holiness and power, how He literally bought them out of slavery and set them free to serve Him. I want us to think about that and ask ourselves questions like, “Have we forgotten what it feels like to be redeemed?” I also want us to see and experience God as a Warrior. Exodus 15:3 tells us The Lord is a warrior; Yahweh is His name. It is in the nature of God to wage war against those who rise up against Him and oppress His people. God the Warrior will fight for His people and He is a talionic warrior. (If you don’t know what that means you will soon.) He released the oppressed; He overpowered His enemies, He reached down from heaven and set them free. Our goal in this series will be for us to think thoughts like, "Because of God’s warrior nature, I can say with the Psalmist, 'The Lord is my strength.'” (Ps 28:7) The book of Exodus begins with a single letter. It is the Hebrew letter “Lemma.” It is a critically important letter because it is how you say “and” or “also” in Hebrew. If you wanted to say “Paul and Martha” in Hebrew, you would write it “Paul (the Letter Lemma) Martha.” Why is this important? Because everything we will read and study in the book of Exodus is connected to the book of Genesis. The two books have the same author, they were written at the same time AND the author begins the book with the word

                                                                                                                         

1 Peter Enns, Exodus, The NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2000), 31.

 

“and.” The title of this book should technically be “Genesis and Exodus.” What began in Genesis is being continued in Exodus. Creation (Gen 1-2): In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth; He placed a man Adam and his wife Eve in a garden. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Gen 1:28) And everything was very good, according to God, until… The Fall (Gen 3): where Adam & Eve rebelled against God and sinned by eating the forbidden fruit. Once sin began there was no end to where it would go. Sin grew so evil, so violent, that “every thought and intention of man’s heart was evil continually.” This offended the righteousness, justice and holiness of God to the point that God said He would “blot out humanity.” He was sorry that He had made us. So God sent a great flood… Great Flood(Gen 6): to destroy all the violence on the earth. But in that flood He saved one family by building a great ark. Noah: was spared because of his righteous relationship with God. We are told that Noah “walked with God.” So God saved him and his family, and when he, his family and all the animals came out of the ark, God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” (Gen 9:1) But once again man rebelled, huddled together and tried to build a tower to reach God. The tower of Babel (Gen 11): Because of man's refusal to obey, God confused the languages and man spread over the face of the earth. Then from a city named Ur in what is now modern Iraq, God called a certain man to follow him. His name was Abram. Abraham & Sarah (Gen 12-24): By faith Abraham followed and obeyed God. By faith Abram believed God and it was “counted for him as righteousness.” It is through Abram that we first understand salvation by faith. God's promise to Abraham because of his faith was, I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make you into nations, and kings shall come from you. (Genesis 17:6) So Abraham becomes the “seed” of God’s chosen people, and even though his wife is barren they give birth to… Isaac (Gen 22-27): Isaac was a promised son through whom Messiah would come. God called Abraham to sacrifice this, his only son, and Abraham obeyed. Through his obedience, Isaac becomes a powerful picture of the great sacrifice God will make for us through His Son. As Isaac grows older, he has two sons. Esau & Jacob (Gen 26-50): Esau is a picture of faithlessness—he will give up his birthright for a bowl of stew—thus God’s people will come from the 12 sons of Jacob who was given the name “Israel” meaning “one who wrestles with God.” Just before he died, Isaac blessed his son Jacob. God Almighty bless you and make you fruitful and multiply you, that you may become a company of peoples. (Genesis 28:3) But Jacob is a lesson for us in the fact that blessed people can be lousy husbands and fathers. He played favorites and caused all kinds of problems; and his favorite son was Joseph. Joseph (26-50): Joseph’s entire life is an epic journey from a little boy who helped his brothers harvest crops to a man that became the functional leader of the most powerful nation in the world at the time. He was the leader of Egypt during the 18th Dynasty, which is by far the best-known dynasty of Egypt. You have probably heard of King Tutankhamun, you might have heard of Queen Nefertiti, and if you are a

 

history buff you might even have heard of Amenhotep II who was most likely the Pharaoh of the Exodus. Joseph was second in power only to Pharaoh. This is how he saved his family, “the Israelites,” from starvation. He brought them all to Egypt during a great famine. That brings us right up to the “and” in Exodus 1. Let's begin reading at Genesis 50:22.

So Joseph remained in Egypt, he and his father’s house. Joseph lived 110 years. 23 And Joseph saw Ephraim’s children of the third generation. The children also of Machir the son of Manasseh were counted as Joseph’s own. 24 And Joseph said to his brothers, “I am about to die, but God will visit you and bring you up out of this land to the land that he swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.” 25 Then Joseph made the sons of Israel swear, saying, “God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones from here.” 26 So Joseph died, being 110 years old. They embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt. Genesis 50:22–26

Now turn the page to Exodus 1:1–5. AND… These are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob, each with his household: 2 Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah, 3 Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin, 4 Dan and Naphtali, Gad and Asher. 5 All the descendants of Jacob were seventy persons; Joseph was already in Egypt.

Seventy persons went into Egypt, not including Joseph. God protected them. They survived the great famine by living in the land, until Joseph and everyone in that generation died. They died, but they died with this promise on their lips, “God will visit you and bring you up out of this land…” Look at verse 7 But the people of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them. The Israelites were fruitful, they multiplied, and they filled the land. Do those phrases sound familiar? They should! This is the way that God described how life was meant to be when he originally created Adam and Eve. Genesis 1:28 says And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth…” This is what God said to Noah after he and all the animals came out of the ark. And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth…” (Genesis 9:1) It is what God promised Abraham. I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make you into nations, and kings shall come from you. (Genesis 17:6) It is how Isaac blessed his son Jacob just before he died. God Almighty bless you and make you fruitful and multiply you, that you may become a company of peoples. (Genesis 28:3) As Genesis ends and Exodus begins, God’s people were living in Egypt in exactly the way God intended them to live. They were being fruitful and increasing greatly. This is important for two reasons. 1. This was God’s faithful fulfillment of His promises. God had over and over again promised to make His people fruitful, and specifically that they would grow as a nation and a people. In modern America we may have forgotten the significance of this. In biblical times and even now, if you did not have a powerful people or nation, you were oppressed. You paid tribute to whomever was powerful around you. By blessing the nation with fruitfulness, what God was essentially doing was blessing them with power and strength. We will see next week that this was not lost on the new Pharaoh. Look at the end of Exodus 1:9. And he (Pharaoh) said to his people, “Behold, the people of Israel are too many and too mighty for us." Pharaoh knew what we have forgotten: fruitfulness = strength. This was God’s faithful fulfillment of His promises. Your God is faithful. Deuteronomy 7:9 says Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations.

 

So here is something to think about: Your God is a never-forgetting, always promise-keeping God. This is why you can put your faith in Him. When God told Abraham to drop the knife and not sacrifice his son because He would provide a lamb, He did. He provided for Abraham that day and then He provided His own son as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Your God is a never-forgetting, always promise-keeping God. God keeps His promises on His terms. God’s Word sets the terms and conditions of His promises. God is under no obligation to you and me. He is obligated only to His own Word. He will keep His Word based on His character and nature. He is God and we are not. Let us humbly remember our place and that God is faithful because of His character, not because of any debt that He owes us. God keeps His promises to His intended audience. We need to be careful reading God’s promises in the Bible because they don’t all apply to you and me. God promised Gideon that he would win a battle in Judges 7 if he followed God’s directions. President Obama cannot claim that promise. But God promised Noah in Genesis 9 that He would never again send a worldwide flood. That is a promise for us too. God keeps His promises by His own power. God’s omnipotence is an important aspect to His promise-keeping. God keeps His promises because He can. God keeps His promises in His time. This is important. Jesus is coming back (Mt 16:27); you will reap what you sow; you do have the Holy Spirit (John 16:5ff); those that trust Christ will inherit eternal life (John 6:35-40). None of that may happen today, tomorrow or the next day. But it will all happen in God’s time. 2. This was the people’s faithful obedience to God’s commands. The last thing I want you to see is that the fruitfulness of the people was also a result of their obedience. A theme that will pop up time and time again is the link between obedience and blessing. This is at the very heart of what it means to have faith! Faith is trusting God’s promises enough to obey. God promised Abraham a son. Abraham by faith believed and it was counted unto him as righteousness. God kept His promise. But then He asked Abraham to sacrifice his son. Why could Abraham obey? His faith and his trust in his promise-keeping God allowed him to obey even to the point of holding up the knife. He obeyed and God blessed. So when God calls me to love my enemies, forgive those who have hurt me, bless those who have used me, turn the other cheek when I am hit…I obey by faith. Not because I understand or “get” what God is doing in the situation, but because by faith I trust my never-forgetting, always promise-keeping God. I believe He will bring fruitfulness from each situation as I obey Him, because He promised. As we look forward to the next few weeks, we will see this theme of obedience and blessing as it plays out in a dark oppressive world. God has enemies, God’s people have enemies, and obeying is not always easy or even safe. Trouble is coming for the people of God. Will they have faith enough to overcome? © Calvary Baptist Church of Holland Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to use and reproduce this material in any format for spiritual, non-commercial purposes. We only ask that you do not alter the content in any way and do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction. Please include the following statement on any distributed material: by Paul L. Davis. © Calvary Baptist Church of Holland