This morning, we're going to start a series on Exodus, and it's called the God who saves or the God who rescues. We've really had a look at the New Testament for the past few months. We've been dealing with some really great theology on church and on mission and all that sort of stuff. But we're going back to the Old Testament and I love the Old Testament. I really enjoy going to it because it is so real and so tangible and it's so full of imagery.
So for me, I like that sort of stuff. It's really in a context that I can relate to. So we're going to be spending a few weeks, if not months, in Exodus looking at the ministry of Moses, looking at the God who he serves and the people of Israel and their formation. Maybe let's just have a quick, I guess, summary of the story or the message of Exodus. The name of the book Exodus means departure.
It means a going out. And that really is the main theme of this book. It records the departure of the Israelites from Egypt where they had been living for four hundred years. They had entered the land at the end of Genesis, the book before Exodus. They had entered the land of Egypt as a small family.
I think of about 70 or so the Bible says. And they left four hundred years later as a nation of hundreds of thousands. Central to the story of the exodus is the life of one man called Moses. And many of us are probably aware of him or at least his name. He was to become God's agent for a time in history of immense transition and significance.
The divine call on this man's life would influence the destiny of nations. This morning we begin a series on Exodus looking at the life of Moses and his ministry, but more importantly, the God who called this man to ministry. Exodus is not about Moses. Exodus is not about Moses. It's not about Israel.
It is about Yahweh, the God who introduces Himself for the first time in that way, the God who rescues. And for a thousand generations afterwards, the people of God, including ourselves, have looked back at Exodus to glimpse the heart of a God who will go to incredible lengths to keep His promises. Time and time again in this story, God shows Himself to be faithful, to be moved by the struggle of the oppressed, to be slow to anger, but abounding in love. Now while the story of Exodus may seem far removed from us in a far off country with terrain that we might not be able to understand quite yet in this nice little area of the Gold Coast. The audacious rescue mission that the story of Exodus explains echoes throughout eternity.
We will discover that the God who saved Israel saved us. He is the same God with the same heart. So let's get cracking. Actually, before we get there, let me encourage you to read the story of Exodus yourself. We do this in our series.
Read the book in your personal time or with family after or before dinner or whatever. It's a really great story for kids to listen to, again, because it's so tangible. It is so accessible. It's got such drama involved in it. So I really wanna encourage you because the way we're going to be doing this series as well is, we're going to be taking, snippets of the story.
So we're not going through verse by verse. We're looking at significance, significant turning points in the story, and you'll notice that this morning again as well. So, actually, we're not even going to start in chapter 1, verse 1. We're going to summarise the first chapter and we're going to read this morning Exodus 2:11 to the end of the chapter. Exodus 2:11.
The story goes on like this. One day after Moses had grown up, he went out to where his own people were, and watched them at their hard labour. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people. Glancing this way and that and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. The next day, he went out and saw two Hebrews fighting.
He asked the one in the wrong, why are you hitting your fellow Hebrew? The man said, who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian? Then Moses was afraid and thought, what I did must have become known. When Pharaoh heard of this, he tried to kill Moses.
But Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian where he sat down by a well. Now a priest of Midian had seven daughters and they came to draw water and fill the troughs to water their flock, their father's flock. Some shepherds came along and drove them away, but Moses got up and came to their rescue and watered their flock. When the girls returned to Reuel, their father, he asked them, why have you returned so early? They answered, an Egyptian rescued us from the shepherds.
He even drew water for us and watered the flock. And where is he? He asked his daughters. Why did you leave him? Invite him to have something to eat.
Moses agreed to stay with the man who gave his daughter Zipporah to Moses in marriage. Zipporah gave birth to a son and Moses named him Gershom, saying, I have become an alien in a foreign land. During that time, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. God heard their groaning and He remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.
So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them. So far, our reading this morning. To summarise, if you need to be reminded of the story, in chapters 1 and the first half of chapter 2, we read the story of how God's people, the Israelites, become so numerous in that four hundred years that they become a threat to the nation of Egypt. The pharaoh views them as a threat. He was afraid that they might overthrow the kingdom.
And so he decides to oppress them by putting them into forced labour to act as slaves in other words. But even that wasn't enough to reduce the numbers because they kept multiplying. God, it says, blessed the Israelites and they were fruitful. They had plenty of kids. And so, Pharaoh goes one step further and says that every male baby that gets born was to be killed, was to be executed.
One of these male babies was Moses, and he was born in that time. And his mum hid the baby who was then rescued by the queen of Egypt, the wife of Pharaoh, and was ironically brought up in the house of this Pharaoh. He would have been educated, Moses, by the finest scholars of that time. He would have been trained in diplomacy and etiquette by the best merchants and diplomats of that time. Taught warfare by the best generals of that time.
This was Egypt. It was the best of the best. He would have known how to run a nation by being taught by his adopted father, the king of Egypt. So he was wealthy. He was educated and he was well connected.
Moses had it all. He had it all laid out. He had it seemingly all together. But then we see this happen at the start of our passage this morning and this is where the story takes a huge turn. For a man with all that training and all that diplomacy, listen to what happens.
Moses sees an Egyptian man beating a Hebrew and he kills him while trying to remain undetected. This man who knew how to kill someone was trained by the best generals, perhaps. Tries to remain undetected, but ironically, the very next day, people are already aware of what he had done. That next day, two Hebrew men are fighting each other and he and Moses, being a Hebrew himself, tries to intervene. But again, ironically, no one wants his intervention.
Who are you to who or who has made you judge and ruler over us? Who are you to tell me what to do? Moses, are you going to kill me like you killed the Egyptian? The man trained to rule a nation isn't even accepted among his own people group. And so Moses, fearing his life, knowing and hearing that Pharaoh wants to execute him for his murder, flees and heads to a place called Midian, which is a wasteland.
It is a desert. Again, ironically, despite the fact that Moses was a Hebrew, and I'd strongly identified with that, comes to that well, and one of the ladies that speaks to their father, Reuel, calls him not a Hebrew but an Egyptian. What a stab to the heart that would have been. This man fighting for everything that is Jewish, that is Hebrew, is identified not as a Hebrew, but as an Egyptian. It's a kick in the guts.
And so Moses ends up marrying one of these daughters and he tends his father-in-law Jethro's sheep. The man from the palace, the man with the training, the man with the wealth, the man with the status winds up in the wilderness. He thought his life is a write off. But as the story unfolds, we see that God had a very different plan in mind. Now, if you've read the Bible, you will notice that there is often a recurring theme throughout the Bible on this aspect of the wilderness.
It is actually something that is very profound. And we don't hear it too much in our preaching, I don't think, these days. Both in the Old and the New Testament, we find people like Elijah, Ezekiel, David, Jesus, Paul, who all had wilderness experience. And when I say wilderness experience, it was physical wilderness. Even Israel, as we read through Exodus, had forty years of wilderness. There is actually a rich theology, if you wanna call it that, surrounding the idea of God sovereignly sending people into the wilderness for refinement.
It was a case for God's people then, and I believe it's a case for God's people today. And so I think there's a few things that I want to simply point out this morning from the story of Moses regarding God's teaching in the wilderness. Firstly, the wilderness is a time of waiting. The wilderness is a time of waiting. Acts 7:29-30 says that Moses fled and became a resident alien in the land of Midian where he became the father of two sons and forty years passed in the wilderness.
Forty years. That's a lifetime. In the microwave culture of today where preparing something in five minutes is a long time, can you imagine what forty years feels like? It is an eternity for some of us. Gen Y, definitely me.
It is. I recently read a contemporary marriage preparation insight that uses this as a test in our current culture. If you really want to know whether someone is worth marrying, see what their reaction is to slow internet. Think about it. See how they act when that thing isn't loading in point two of a second.
Everything nowadays is fast. It is compressed. It is condensed. But this is often not so with God's teaching in the wilderness. When it comes to walking with God, there is no such thing as instant maturity, which is the end result of the wilderness experience time and time again.
There is no such thing as instant maturity. God doesn't mass produce His saints. Each one is handmade. And that always takes longer than expected. An impatient activist like Moses, and he was an activist for the oppressed.
An activist like Moses with a blood rush and a giant ego needed forty years in the desert to be sanded down, to be formed, to be refined. God's work was painstakingly slow, but it had to be because no lasting lesson is learned overnight. No real change of will, no real change of desire, of passion is made overnight. Even in our conversion, even when we come to accept Jesus Christ as our Saviour and Lord, our lives aren't immediately set right and our relationship with God isn't immediately perfect. In order to shape Moses, God had to use time in the wilderness, lots of time, to prepare him for God's supreme purpose.
So the wilderness is a time of waiting. Secondly, it is a time of solitude. To be in the wilderness is a time of solitude. In late 2004, I had the amazing privilege to take a team of cyclists all the way from Brisbane to Uluru. I was on the support staff that saw this eight or nine cyclist cycle something like 3,000 kilometres in total to get to Uluru from Brisbane, from Ipswich technically.
It was one of the most amazing things to be a part of and we spent three weeks travelling through the outback. At one point, and I remember it so clearly, we stopped at a little roadhouse for refuelling and so on and we decided we're going to climb up this small mountain that was there that overlooked these immense plains of the outback. And we climbed up this mountain and everyone sort of remarked how beautiful it was and so on. I purposely decided to linger until everyone started heading back down the mountain, until I was the only one left just to experience what it was. And I kind of begin to really express the silence of that place.
I didn't hear a cicada chirping. I didn't hear cars rushing by. I didn't hear the chatter of voices or anything like that. It was silence. The only thing you could sense was a little bit of a breeze skimming across your skin.
When I think of solitude, I think of that place overlooking that vast plain land. We forget so easily what solitude really feels like. It has its own sound. And Moses was in a place like that. No iPod, no Walkman, no car radio, no phone to distract, not even a book to read.
If you stay in a place like that long enough, you start sensing your thoughts beginning to probe your conscience. Just under the shallow thoughts where most of us walk in our day to day living, the soul wants to examine itself. Given enough time in that solitude, you will find yourself growing deeper. Through Moses' long career as a leader of a nation, he would be questioned. He would be attacked.
He would be accused. He would be hated. He would be betrayed. And through it all, he would stand alone. He would be a very lonely man.
And how could he do it? How would he endure? Well, he had to be trained in the wilderness. He had to major in solitude in the university of God. He had learned to become dependent on one thing only, the providential love of God above all.
So secondly, the wilderness is a time of solitude. And thirdly, lastly, the wilderness is a time of discomfort. There was nothing comfortable about the wilderness of Midian. There was nothing comfortable about it. It was a hard place.
If you go and do a study of Egypt, if you can ever go on a tour of Egypt through to Israel, it is an inhospitable place. It is not a place you want to pitch a tent in. It is oppressively hot. It is notably deficient in all areas of creature comforts. There's not even a porta loo around.
And Moses had gone from the glimmering palaces of Egypt to the rocky dusty backwater end of the desert. He had learnt to survive with a dry throat, with cracked lips, with a perpetual squint in his eyes. There was nothing comfortable about that wilderness. And the reason we don't like talking about the wilderness when we start looking at our life is because above all, the wilderness is uncomfortable. It sucks.
We don't wanna be there. It is uncomfortable. It is painful. Sometimes it is downright crippling. But it is in that discomfort that we really become honed and taught by God.
In traditional Jewish practice, it's fascinating, they would put a pebble in their shoe when they were mourning to remind them of that grieving that was happening. To act as a physical reminder. And the wilderness for us, the discomfort of the wilderness is that constant reminder that God isn't finished with you yet. The pebble will be uncomfortable. The pebble has a lesson to teach you.
But depending on the way you look at it, that pebble is a reminder that God is still busy in your life. You can look at it two ways. You can look at it as God's forsakenness, or you can look at it that God is still busy. Now, I myself, even at 29 years of age, I've gone through some stages of wilderness. I'm not gonna compare it to anyone else's, but I suspect for me, there might even be some more wilderness experiences ahead.
It's actually often the case that God's leaders will go through difficult things to sharpen them for ministry. But unfortunately, I haven't always been the greatest example of persevering in the wilderness. There's often a few ways we can and do handle it. The first is the attitude that I don't need it. I don't need this.
It's a response from pride. My neighbour can have this experience. My friends need it, I reckon. My boss definitely needs this. But me, I don't need it.
The second attitude or way we can handle it is to say, I'm tired of this, to punch out. It's a response of shortsightedness. It's where we don't understand that God's timing is involved in this. You might say, k j, I've been in this desert land for so long. I don't know what the other side of the desert looks like.
I'm tired of it. I'm gonna give up. Now in real life terms, this is the point where things start heading towards the deep dark areas of life, where those dark thoughts come in. Where suicide becomes an option. It's saying, I'm tired of this.
I want out. But then thirdly, the final response is, I accept it. And although this is the most difficult response, it is also the most mature approach. And you may have experienced some old saints in your lives who have undergone so much trial and yet are completely confident and content that their lives are in the hands of God. I don't know if you've seen those sort of people.
There's a man, V. Raymond Edman, who was a principal, the headmaster of Wheaton Theological College, who wrote a small book called In Quietness and Confidence. And he wrote about his desert experience, his wilderness experience. This is what he writes. Something painful happened to me, and this is how I met it. I was quiet for a while with the Lord, and then I wrote these words to myself.
First, He brought me here. It is by His will that I'm in this place. In that fact, I will rest. Next, He will keep me here in His love and give me grace as His child. Then He will make the trial a blessing, teaching me the lessons He intends me to learn and working in me the grace He needs to bestow.
Last, in His good time, He can bring me out again how and when only He knows. And he says, let me say therefore, I am here first by God's appointment. I am here first by God's appointment. Second, I'm in His keeping. Third, under His training.
And fourth, in His time. That is a mark of a man who has been in the wilderness and survived. That's a man who has come to know the character of God at the very deepest, perhaps darkest place of the soul. There's one more part of this passage this morning that we must also see. After the miserable failing of Moses, this activist that was going to save the nation of Israel one Egyptian at a time, the man that seemingly had it all together but needed forty years of refinement, we see him being compared to the one who is actually capable of making a difference.
Yahweh, the God of the great rescue comes onto the scene. Have a look at verses 23-25. Moses' adopted father dies and the new Pharaoh, presumably Moses' stepbrother, becomes king. Verse 23 says that Israel groaned in their slavery and cried out. Now this word in Hebrew is aqa and it's just guttural sounding, isn't it?
It's not used very often, but in the context that it is often used, it is a cry from deep anguish. It's really a deep cry from a place of danger. It is raw and so Israel is in deep trouble. Their backs are bending under the heavy iron sceptre of Pharaoh. But verse 24 says that God hears their zaak, their cry.
This is what it says. Verse 24, read that. God heard their groaning and He remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So God looked on the Israelites and He was concerned about them. Friends, you'll never read a verse more beautiful than this.
You'll never read a better verse to describe the father heart of God that will get you through any wilderness experience you will ever experience. Notice a few things here. Firstly, Israel did not cry out to God. Israel did not cry out to God. They didn't pray to God in their distress.
Their cry went out into the deep blue sky. Israel at this point had long forgotten God. They forgot the God of their forefather Abraham. Four hundred years in Egypt would do that. In fact, many scholars believe that these Israelites were worshipping the Egyptian gods.
The Bible doesn't say they cried out to God. Their cry went out for anyone to help. Israel didn't know God but God knew them. Notice the verbs in verses 24 and 25. God heard.
He remembered His promise. He looked and He saw them and He was concerned. While Israel's cry went out into the wide blue sky, Yahweh, the living God, heard their cry. He remembered His covenant promise to Abraham and his descendants to be their God, and He was moved by His promise. God's eyes became fixated on His children who had wandered away from home, and His heart was broken.
His heart was broken by their plight. What an image. This is the God we call father. The image of Moses and God put side by side here in chapter 2 makes one point. While both have hearts for the oppressed, while both have hearts for the weak, only God can do anything about it.
While Moses' heart may have been in the right place, he went about it in the wrong way. Despite all his credentials, he was going to rescue the Hebrews in his strength. But ironically, not even the Israelites wanted his help. This flawed attempt at a rescue is then contrasted with the entire story of Exodus that flows from it. Chapters 3 to 40 of how God is the one who can rescue.
Even from the powerful hands of the most powerful force on the planet Egypt, namely Pharaoh. Moses stumbles in chapter 2, but chapters 3 to 40 shows God's incredible rescue unfolding. And friends, whether you find yourself in the wilderness now or whether you are preparing yourself for a time to come, remember God is a God who remembers His promise, who said to you and me, I want to be your God, and I want you to be My people. The God who swore to Himself to protect and defend that promise whatever may come. The Exodus, the story of the Exodus later in the New Testament becomes the backdrop for the salvation of all mankind.
The salvation of Israel was based on a promise from the God who heard, from the God who remembered, the God who saw, the God who was concerned. That God has never changed. And He was exemplified fully in Jesus Christ. The one who came, the Son of God who said, I have come to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, to release the oppressed. And because of Him, we can and we will survive the wilderness.
Why is that? Because like we sung this morning, He walked the desert first in His humanity. He felt its heat. He tasted its loneliness. He endured its obscurity, and He will never ever forget or forsake the one who follows Him across that sand.
Let's pray. Thank You for Your faithfulness, O God. Thank You for the encouragement or the huge encouragement of these words, of this message to our hearts. That You are the God who doesn't forget, the God who doesn't forsake. You are the God who remembers and sees and acts.
Lord, and we know that even in the acting with Israel, You allowed them to enter into that wilderness as well, to enter into a time of refining, of deepening, of maturing. That You allowed even Your servant Moses, the one who was to lead them through that, his time of forty years. Father, we know and we have experienced wilderness in our hearts and lives. And not many here may attest to that physical wilderness experience. Lord, we have felt the sting of loneliness and obscurity.
We have sensed the strong sensation of solitude of our hearts and our minds being drawn into deep reflection. Lord, that we may even be at that point right now. Lord, we pray that in all of that, we will be patient in waiting, that we will be patient in enduring that, and Father, that ultimately You will come through to rescue us. That we will learn the lessons that You are trying to teach us, that we will be humble and gracious in that. And that Father, that through it all and because of it, we may glorify You even more with our lives.
Be with our aching hearts, Lord. Be with our struggles and the moments we try to save ourselves. Forgive us, Father, for our shortcomings. Extend our patience, we ask. In Jesus' name. Amen.