Deliverance Series

We are continuing our series called The Story which is an overview of the story of the Bible and how all the small stories in the Bible connect up to the larger story of the Bible and more importantly how each of our individual stories connect up to the grander story of the Bible. For the last few weeks, we covered three chapters in the story. Today, we are starting on chapter 4. Because some of you may have missed some of the earlier sermons or you need a little refresher, I though what we would do is start by showing a story rewind so you can see where we have been and get an idea where we are going. (Video clip shown here.)

Hopefully, that brought you up to speed on what we have covered so far. The key events in those first few chapters of the Bible. Last week, if you were here, we talked about the story of Joseph and the amazing dream coat that he had. This week, we are going to talk about the story of Moses and specifically how God delivered the Hebrew people from the hands of Pharaoh using Moses. If you recall from last week, where we left off was Jacob and Joseph’s brothers ended up moving into Egypt where they were protected from the severe famine that broke out throughout all the land. We open up the book of Exodus today and we begin to see that several years have gone by and generations have died off. Jacob and Joseph and all the brothers are no longer there. We read in the early part of Exodus that “Then a new king who did not know about Joseph came into power in Egypt.” If we had time, we would see that this new king was threatened by this rapid, uncontrolled growth of the Hebrew people so he decided to do something about it. What he did was pulled those people into slavery. He assigned taskmasters over them and put them into hard labor making bricks and working out in the fields. But he was still feeling threatened by the population growth of these Hebrew people so he decided to take matters into his own hands. He told his people to go out there and take every newborn male and throw him into the Nile river and allow the girls to live. That is what his people began to do. As the story continues, there was a Levite woman who became pregnant and gave birth to a young boy. She was able to hide this boy for about three months before she got nervous about Pharaoh finding out about this boy. So she went down to the Nile river one day with a papyrus basket and put the little boy in the basket and gave him a gentle shove off into the Nile hoping and praying I suspect that somebody would find him and take care of that little boy. As God would have it, somebody did find the little boy and it was actually the Pharaoh’s daughter who found him. Pharaoh’s daughter told the servants to take this little baby out of the Nile. It just so happened that the little boy’s sister was over there hiding in the weeds. She comes out and says if you need somebody to nurse this little baby, I have just the person for you. She goes off and gets the baby’s mother. The baby’s mother comes and the Pharaoh’s daughter tells her you can nurse this baby and not only can you nurse this baby, I will pay you to nurse this baby. So the mother gets paid to nurse her own child, which gives a whole new meaning to working moms. I was wondering how that would go over!

As the story goes on, the child grew up and the boy’s mother brings the boy back to Pharaoh’s daughter and then the Pharaoh’s daughter gives him the name Moses saying because I drew him out of the water. That is what Moses means; being drawn out. As you would suspect, Moses had a very nice upbringing. He was raised in the palace of the Pharaoh which means he would have had a great education. He would have been trained in things like arts and sciences. He would have been trained in rhetoric and public speaking and even warfare and administration. He would have been a very gifted child. As the story continues, one day I guess Moses decided to go out and travel amongst the Hebrew people. He spotted an Egyptian slave master harassing and beating a Hebrew slave. Moses looked left and right and didn’t see anybody so he killed the Egyptian and he buried him in the sand. Right here, this gives us an idea that Moses had a compassion for his people. Even though he was raised in the palace, he still had compassion for his own brothers. It also revealed that Moses was somebody who wanted to take matters into his own hands. God would not have that.