Exodus 1 – 3
I know it’s strange, but I never read Exodus without thinking of the movie, The Ten Commandments. Charleton Heston plays Moses, Yul Brynner plays Pharaoh Rameses and John Carradine plays Aaron. The only Oscar received for this movie was a well-deserved one for Special Effects. The scene where God parts the waters of the Red Sea is one I remember vividly to this day, even though I first saw that movie in 1956, when I was 11 years old.
Chapter 1 sets the stage for what is to follow. Basically, the Israelites multiplied and prospered and grew extremely powerful in the land. A new king came to power who knew nothing about Joseph or what he had done. In short, Egypt had an immigrant problem: people who were not Egyptians were getting stronger and more plentiful than the native population.
This ruler takes extreme measures to bring this problem to a halt:
- He made the Israelites their slaves
- He appointed brutal slave drivers over them
- He hoped to wear them down with crushing labor
- He forced them to build the cities of Pithom and Rameses as supply centers for the king
BUT…the more the Egyptians oppressed them, the more the Israelites multiplied and spread and the more alarmed the Egyptians became.
Then, more extreme measures were taken:
- The Egyptians worked the Israelites without mercy
- They made their lives bitter
- They forced them to mix mortar and make bricks
- They forced them to do all the work in the fields
- They were ruthless in their demands
When this didn’t work, Pharaoh told the Hebrew midwives to kill any boy babies when they were born, but let girl babies live.
The midwives – Shiphrah and Pulah – feared God and refused to obey Pharaoh.
Then, Pharaoh ordered every newborn Hebrew boy to be thrown into the Nile, but to let the girls live.
In chapter 2, we are introduced to Moses, whose parents hid him for three months and then put him in a papyrus basket and laid the basket in the reeds along the bank of the Nile River. The baby’s sister (probably Miriam) stood at a distance and watched as Pharaoh’s daughter finds the boy. The sister offers to find a Hebrew woman to nurse the baby for her. Moses’s own mother nurses him and is even paid by Pharaoh’s daughter to do so. Hasn’t God got an amazing sense of humor?
Pharaoh’s daughter adopts Moses and he grows up as her son. He must have known he was a Hebrew, because he eventually visits his own people and ends up killing an Egyptian who was beating one of the Hebrews. Moses flees when he finds out Pharaoh is out to kill him. He goes to live in the land of Midian. Midian was the name of one of the sons Abraham’s second wife Keturah bore him (Genesis 25).
One day, he rescues the daughters of the priest of Midian and waters their sheep for them. The girls, who think he is an Egyptian, tell their father Reuel what he did for them and he invites Moses to dinner. Moses settles there with them and eventually marries one of Reuel’s daughters, Zipporah. They have a son named Gershom.
“Years passed and the king of Egypt died. But the Israelites continued to groan under their burden of slavery. They cried out for help and their dry rose up to God. God heard their groaning, and he remembered his covenant promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He looked down on the people of Israel and knew it was time to act.” As if God could forget a covenant promise! But it must have seemed that way to the Israelites.
In chapter 3, the Bible calls Moses’s father-in-law Jethro (people often went by multiple names – there is even another named mentioned in Judges 4:11 – Hobab).
In any case, while Moses tended sheep for his father-in-law, he came to Sinai, the mountain of God. The angel of the Lord appears to him in a blazing fire from the middle of a bush. What a way to get someone’s attention! Moses isn’t so much amazed at a blazing fire as he is that the bush is not burned up by it. When he takes a closer look, he hears a voice from the bush – “Moses, Moses!”
He is warned to take off his sandals because he is on holy ground. God identifies himself as the God of your father – the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. No doubt Moses’s mother had told Moses about God. Moses covers his face because he is afraid to look at God.
God tells Moses that he has seen the suffering of the Israelites and intends to rescue them from the Egyptians and lead them out of Egypt into a land flowing with milk and honey, in short, the land of Canaan.
Moses isn’t happy when God tells him He has selected him to lead the people out of Egypt. He asks God how he should answer when the Israelites ask for the name of the one who sent him to bring them out. God identifies Himself to Moses as “I am that I am” – YHWH. He also says to tell the Israelites He is the God of their ancestors, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He tells Moses what to say to the elders and what to say to Pharaoh, warning him that Pharaoh will not let them go unless “a mighty hand forces him,” but assuring him that not only will they leave Egypt, but they will not leave empty-handed.
Wow, what an honor God intends to bestow on Moses.
Tomorrow, it’s Exodus 4 – 6.
Outrageous!
Remember when critics of Obamacare were criticized for saying that it would result in “Death Panels"?” It turns out they were not too far off base. The following link discusses bioethicists at Duke University and the National Institute of Health suggesting that killing someone with no autonomy left is not morally wrong. Doesn’t this sound like Nazi Germany where the elderly, disabled and infirm who were not contributing to society were disposed of as so much waste? Read about this here:
Also, in an unprecedented move, the Catholic Church has indicated it will “against the Obama administration are centered upon a Health and Human Services Department requirement that employers must include contraception and abortion-inducing drugs in health-care coverage.” A letter was read from the pulpit at most Catholic churches yesterday – an almost unheard of event – indicating the Catholic church will not comply. You can read about this at:
Until next time…
No comments:
Post a Comment