Moses’ Miraculous Childhood - Exodus 1:15-2:10
SERMON TRANSCRIPT
How are we doing today? Are we doing well? I'm just going to answer out loud. You can give the thumbs up, you can go like this, not so good. Totally fine. I hope this weekend, so far is going well for you, that you were able to take some rest. I know some of us are on, as Pastor Chris mentioned, summer schedules, so maybe kids are home now, and that's a whole other energy that we need to provide as parents. Or maybe the older kids are back home, and it's really fun to hang out with them again from college or whatever. But as restful as summer, we think it is, sometimes it's just a lot more energy that is given. So if you're here and you're tired, that's okay. Totally fine, God wants you here too. I wanna mention something about Sabbath. Hopefully this weekend and today is a part of your Sabbath. And Rabbi Abraham Heschel wrote this. He says, "Six days a week, we wrestle with the world, "wringing profit from the earth. "On the Sabbath, we especially care, "we take care of the seed of our eternity "planted in the soul." So I love that phrase of taking care of the seed of eternity planted in our soul, taking special time on a weekend, on a Sabbath day, to mine for what's inside of us, what God has planted inside of us. And we hope as Spring Valley Church that Sundays, this time together as a church in the morning, is a part of your Sabbath. And I wanna take a moment right now to pray for all of us and to pray together.
So you guys bow your heads and close your eyes one more time. I want you to focus your heart and your mind on God and I wanna pray this prayer from LECTEO 365. So as we pray together it says, Lord show us what it means to care for the seeds of eternity in our souls. Help us to stop counting the minutes and to relinquish control. Inspire us to live and breathe with greater ease as an eternal being loved by you. God that's our prayer. That your spirit would guide and form us to be made more into the image of Christ. Help us this morning to listen with all that we have, that your word and your truth would grow deeper inside of us and that we'd have a deeper appreciation of understanding who you are and what you do in our lives. God, I pray that this Sabbath today would be restful and that we continue to rest in you and draw from your spirit. Be with us in this portion of our service. We pray this in your name, amen.
I have the joy of starting a new series this morning as we've been mentioning, Impossible Moments, where we're taking a break from our Roman series. We're going to continue that in the fall, so we only covered so many chapters in Romans. Don't worry, we're going to finish the book back in, or later in September. But this summer we're going to be looking into impossible moments in the Old Testament, looking at true historical biblical events where the situation or task was impossible through the human lens. In the eyes of the people in these accounts, there was seemingly no way forward, no means of success, no possibilities that would lead to their benefit. And yet, in God there was a way. Each scenario in this series tells of a story of a success or a victory that was only possible through the power of God. Throughout the Bible, God intervenes in lives and plans of people for their benefit, but ultimately, and more importantly, for God's glory. Sometimes it means defeating an enemy's army, other times it means bending the laws of physics, the way we understand them in the world, for the benefit of his people. And still other times it just means overcoming impossible odds to bring life and joy and righteousness into the world. Whatever the scenario, in each story, there is only one possible explanation, and that is God. Our goal in this series will be to learn and be reminded of what God has done and who He is, specifically in the Old Testament. In each impossible moment, there is something to be learned about who God is and how He operates in this world, and we wanna take a deeper look into the miraculous accounts but also learn what it reveals about God's character. We know that God is amazing, He is sovereign, all powerful, and He works in mysterious ways and in awesome ways. And so this series will showcase that mighty God that we worship and adore. By the way, as a heads up, this series does not follow any chronological order. So today we're in Exodus. Next week, we may be in the prophets. We may go back to Genesis. I'm gonna keep you on your toes. It's okay. Don't we know, by the way, I don't want you to know, like we don't know what we're doing. we do know what we're doing, we're just not going in chronological order. Yeah, relief.
We're gonna begin this series with a story that's been on my heart for a couple years, I'm so excited to finally get to preach on it, to talk with you about it, it's the story of Moses' birth, and how his life, from the very moment that he was born, was at risk. By human understanding, this situation and the circumstances should have meant that Moses would have died. It's by God's hand that Moses not only lives, but grows up in such unique circumstances that benefit him, his family, and all of God's people. So let's go ahead and read this story together and get into this impossible situation of Moses's miraculous childhood. If you wanna turn in your Bibles to Exodus 2, now we've been in Romans on one half of the book, we're going back to the beginning. Exodus 2, I'm gonna start in verse one. It says, "Now a man of the tribe of Levi married a Levite woman and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. When she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months. But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile." I'm gonna pause right there and just take this section at first. Moses is born under extreme circumstances. Mom here in this story is trying to keep baby Moses under wraps as long as possible. She knows that there is no possible long-term future for him to be alive, let alone a part of the family. And can we just pause here for a moment and put ourselves in this story and imagine the emotions here, the heartache, the feeling of loss and desperation of hurt and pain, anger. but what she does next seems to imply also that she has a bit of hope. In verse three, we see her in an act of desperation and hope, she tries to save her son. We'll come back to how that all works in a minute, but I first wanna ask and back up and kinda get some perspective.
Why is all this happening? Why is Moses' mother acting out of such desperation? Well, in order to find that out, we gotta go back a little bit in the book of Exodus to understand what makes this situation so impossible. And before we back up in the book, I just wanna give a brief history, just get us all on the same page, of how we got to this point here in scripture with Moses and everything. So, brief history lesson. The Hebrew people, the Israelites, had come to Egypt through Joseph, just a couple generations after Abraham. And Joseph was sold into slavery, and by God's hand came to be in second in command over all of Egypt. This is another impossible story that we might cover in this series, but Joseph is a man who's left to die in a pit by his own brothers and becomes the second most powerful leader in Egypt and really in the whole world. Joseph, after coming to that amazing seat of power, brings his whole family to Egypt and they dwell there, they put roots down and their family starts to grow. After Joseph dies, however, the relationship between the Hebrew people and the Egyptians becomes a bit strained. The new leader of Egypt, the new Pharaoh, has forgotten all of what Joseph did for the people of Egypt, and in the past, and the good that Israel brought to Egypt. And so this new Pharaoh is very fearful of what might be. There's no evidence of any threat that Israel poses to Egypt, but he just becomes paranoid. And he says, in his mind, he's thinking, If these Israelites who are growing and growing and growing, if for whatever reason, if they were to attack us, they could possibly defeat us because they're growing so rapidly, they might outnumber us soon. Did Israel do anything to threaten them? No. This Pharaoh is just becoming paranoid. They're multiplying, and so what does he do with this unfounded fear? Well, he oppresses the Israelites. He enslaves them. which I'm not totally sure, I've never been a dictator or world leader, but I don't know if the possibility of someone overthrowing me, if the right move would then be to oppress them. I feel like that would just ensure that they would become angry and an uprising would actually happen. So, Pharaoh, not sure what you're doing there, what you're thinking, but he enslaves the Israelites, and he and the conditions are just brutal, and the Israelites are crying out to God, crying out, "God, please save us. Do you see what's happening to us here? Please, please, save us from this. Pharaoh's efforts to slow down the growth of Israel backfire. In fact, Israel just grows even more. They are producing a lot of people, and now Pharaoh becomes even more fearful. And so I want to go back in Exodus, if you're in your Bibles, we're going to just go to the chapter before, chapter 1, and I want to read 15 through the end of chapter 1. It says, "The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah, when you are helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the delivery stool, if you see that the baby is a boy, kill him. But if it is a girl, let her live. The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do. They let the boys live. Then the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and asked them, why have you done this? Why have you let the boys live? The midwives answered Pharaoh, Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women. They are vigorous and give birth before the midwives arrive. So God was kind to the midwives and the people increased and became even more numerous. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families of their own. Then Pharaoh gave this order to all his people. Every Hebrew boy that is born, you must throw into the Nile, but let every girl live.”
There's a lot to unpack here as we gain some understanding of the context of Moses' birth. Pharaoh is making a serious, wicked effort to thwart Israel's entire existence. His plan is that any Hebrew newborn boy (that's a tongue twister, by the way, say that three times) Hebrew newborn boy must be killed and anyone can execute that order. But before that, Pharaoh had confronted two midwives about what is going on. He wants to execute his plan through these midwives. And I just want to say and point out that the fact that these midwives are named is very significant. It's an honor in the Hebrew, by the Hebrew authors that they are remembered for their brave acts against a ruthless dictator. Their courage and belief in God is meant to be noticed by just their names being in the text. In fact, this whole passage is an amazing story of women in the Bible trusting and believing in God and having courage in the midst of terror, standing up against evil and doing what is right. God is obviously the miracle worker and the hero, the ultimate hero of this story, but the women in this story are also heroes. So these midwives, they're possibly the head midwives over all the midwives, or maybe they're just the two midwives over Israel, but they disobey Pharaoh. And in verse 17, they make it clear to the reader, to us, that they were never going to kill any babies. They hold to this sanctity of life. And it's an amazing stand of faith with Yahweh, God, against Pharaoh, who, by the way, considers himself a god. So from the beginning of Exodus, we see that there is a face-off between a lowercase god, Pharaoh, and Yahweh, the true god. Yahweh crushes, as the story goes on and further you read in Exodus, Yahweh crushes this lowercase god, Pharaoh. We often think that this battle between Pharaoh and God starts later in the story, but it actually starts right here in chapter 1. The Egyptian culture is one of many gods, and the ultimate god in that culture was Pharaoh himself. But this Pharaoh is fearful of what he cannot control, the Israelites, which already tells us that he is a lesser god, a lesser being than Yahweh, who fears nothing. Nevertheless, Pharaoh, he doesn't know it yet, but he is going toe to toe with the Lord of Lords, the King of Kings, the creator of the universe. And that's who the midwives fear. That's why they disobey Pharaoh's orders. In verse 18 of chapter 1, Pharaoh confronts them again because his instructions didn't seem to work. He told them one thing, they didn't do it, and so he calls them back, he's like, "Hey, what's going on? I told you to do this, and what's happening?" And in verse 19, they lie to Pharaoh. And I love this line that they tell Pharaoh that the Hebrew and the Israelite women are just built different. They're like, "Hey, sorry, Pharaoh, "like they're really strong "and they do it before we get there." Which I just appreciate that comment. It's just funny, it makes me chuckle in this story. Maybe it's true, maybe that really is true of the Israelite women, but I think more than that, they're just lying to Pharaoh for the sake of keeping life. They know who they really serve and who is really to be feared, and they know that Yahweh's purposes and power are not to be messed with. In verses 20 through 21 of chapter one, we see that God blesses the midwives.
In the ancient world, it was customary, it was a possible option for barren women to become midwives, and now God has blessed them with families of their own. It's another smaller example within this larger story of God addressing something that was impossible by human means and made it possible. These women who couldn't have families are then blessed with families and the only explanation is God. And in verse 22, it explains that Pharaoh continues this dangerous downward spiral of acting out of fear and the desire to be in total control, exercising his evil power. He doubles down and instead of just having the midwives carry out the orders, he puts it out there for anyone. Says every Hebrew baby boy must be thrown into the Nile and every girl should live. Pharaoh's plan here is multifaceted. Not only is he trying to weaken Israel by getting rid of their males, who in the future could be soldiers against Egypt, in his mind, they could be enemies, but he's also keeping the females in order that he can integrate them into Egyptian culture, so that they could marry Egyptian men and then give birth to more Egyptians. and Egypt would grow as Israel would lessen.
This is a god v. God moment here. Pharaoh thinking himself as a God, picking a fight with Yahweh. And this is the moment where it begins. And while we know who wins in the end after the plagues and after the Red Sea, this is still a very dark moment for Israel. This is the context for which Moses is born into. So let's jump back into our story now, and see the miraculous way in which Moses lives. If you want to jump ahead with me now to chapter 2 verse 3, we'll pick up again. It says, "When she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. And then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him. Then Pharaoh's daughter went down to the Nile to bathe, and her attendants were walking along the riverbank. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her female slave to get it. She opened it and saw the baby. He was crying. She felt sorry for him. "This is one of the Hebrew babies," she said. Then his sister asked Pharaoh's daughter, "Shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women "to nurse the baby for you?" "Yes, go," she answered. So the girl went and got the baby's mother. Pharaoh's daughter said to her, "Take this baby and nurse him for me, and I will pay you." So the woman took the baby and nursed him. When the child grew older, she took him to Pharaoh's daughter and he became her son. She named him Moses saying, "I drew him out of the water.”
This is truly an amazing story that has God's fingerprints all over it. And even in the Hebrew text, if we were to read this in the Hebrew, it indicates to us that God begins to intervene in this situation. And so I just wanna take some time to go verse by verse, looking at the story through the lens of how a Hebrew would hear this story and see God's hand at work. Starting in verse three, where Moses is in a basket. Moses' mother, not named here, but we find out later her name is Jacobed, the J makes it sound like Jacobed, so I'm just gonna say Jacobed is Moses' mother. And she has made a basket out of reeds and made it so that she can put the baby in and protect the baby. Now, the Hebrew word for basket, little Hebrew lesson here, very important, the Hebrew word here for basket has only appeared one time in the Old Testament so far up until this point. And Hebrew authors are very intentional with their words. They love to paint images and they want you to, if you hear a word, they want you to draw the visual image in your mind. And so they're very intentional with it and this is very purposeful. And all who would have heard this would have thought of the previous use of this word. The word for basket here is the same word that God uses when telling Noah to build the ark. It's the word, it's ark. And as a Hebrew, imagine then what this tells us of the story of Moses because of what we know of Noah. A righteous man surrounded by the evil of the world, the wickedness and sin set apart for God's purpose and saved by God for his purposes. So like the ark with Noah, it was a little temple, right? Everything that God had created, some plants and animals was put on that ark, a little temple, in order that there could be a restart in a sense, a restoration of what was meant to be, a redeeming of God's creation. And now we have Moses in the midst of Pharaoh's wicked and evil scheme in a little boat, in a little ark, kept alive by God to restore and to restart, to redeem God's people. And so for the Hebrew, and for us now, God has entered this story. Now God is a character in this story, and we're ready to see God intervene and be at work in the midst of Moses' circumstances.
This was a mood setter or tone setter for the Hebrew people. Now having the miraculous situation referenced about Noah, they are anticipating that God will do something. It's kind of like in movies, when you watch maybe in a very intense movie and the good music starts playing. And even if the scene is very intense, there's good, you're like, okay, but I know this is good because the music is good. So it's gonna be good, it's gonna be okay. It's bad, even if, you know, when the bad music plays, you're just anticipating. The good music, always a relief. This is the good music in this scene. God is present. In chapters three and four, Moses is then set among the reeds in the Nile. And historians believe that this situation is equivalent to modern times when a baby is left at a hospital or a church. They want the baby to live. They're giving it the best chance they can, but it's the last resort. Jacob was giving Moses the best chance, away from the deep waters, away from dangers, the wild animals. but still this is not ideal. And while this is happening, his sister Miriam is watching over him, seeing what will happen. And then in verse five, Pharaoh's daughter comes into the picture, going down to the river and sees the basket and asks her servant to get it and retrieve it for her. And she opens the basket, this little ark, this little boat, and sees the baby and has pity. She knew it was one of the Hebrew babies. And what I want us to focus on is she knows the circumstances that are present. I imagine she put together quite quickly why she found a Hebrew baby boy in the river, knowing the decree that her father had given throughout the land. And yet her next actions are also what make her one of the heroes of this story. She doesn't execute her father's command. She doesn't kill the baby. She doesn't listen to her father's orders and throw him into the Nile, but instead she's remembered for drawing Moses out of the Nile.
It's another moment in our story where a woman chooses to disobey Pharaoh to save a life. Another example of God at work at his providence being on display. And just a small moment here, but I love that the story says that the baby cries. Usually babies cry, and I'm sure when Moses' mother had him for the first while that the baby was crying too, but imagine those circumstances and the fear that Moses' mother had every time the baby cried, knowing that that could give away what she had with her, and knowing that at any moment an Egyptian could come in and carry out Pharaoh's orders to kill that baby boy. And now, for the first time maybe, Moses is crying and it's okay. It's okay that the baby cries. There's no threat over him right now in the arms of Pharaoh's daughter. In fact, maybe that crying endears Moses to Pharaoh's daughter helps her have pity on him. What happens next is also no small miracle, but an incredible redeeming moment. And remember, we're clued in as readers to what God is gonna be doing in this story, anticipating when he will do his miraculous work, and it's starting and here's another big moment, verse seven. Moses' sister Miriam then approaches Pharaoh's daughter. She's been watching the basket, she sees all this happening and she says, she's seeing that this Egyptian princess, Pharaoh's daughter, has not killed the baby and says, "Shall I go get one of the Hebrew women "to nurse that baby for you?" I love, I mean that's courageous and brilliant by Miriam to say, "Hey, I see what's going on "and I'm sure that was God working in her "to even say those words." And Pharaoh's daughter says, "Yes, and praise God "she says that." And so Miriam goes and gets Jacob and brings the boy's own mother. And now we are right now in the Hebrews who are listening to the story are just breathing sighs of relief and maybe the emotion is washing over us and it starts to hit us just how amazing this story is, how impossible this situation was and how God orchestrated it to be better than Moses' own mother or anyone in the story could have ever predicted this outcome to be. Pharaoh's daughter says to Jacob, take this baby, nurse him for me, and I will pay you. So Jacob gets to raise her own son in safety and is paid to do so. I mean, the irony here is amazing. This is great. And this situation has completely flipped from one of fear and heading towards death and sadness to joy and relief and blessing. An important note about Jacob getting to raise Moses is that now he gets to hear about Yahweh as he is being brought up, which is instrumental for God's plans later in his life. So that later when God approaches Moses through the fiery bush, He has some frame of reference for who is talking to Him. It's not one of the many deities in the Egyptian culture.
This is the Israel, this is the God of Israel. This is Yahweh reaching out. And then in verse 10, the text tells us that Moses, when Moses was older Pharaoh's daughter took over the mothering duties and named him Moses, which means again to draw out of the waters. An amazing story, I just wanna recap for us this impossible moment in the Bible, and how one of the most influential leaders and priests in Israel's history almost never made it past infancy. The story is about how under the orders of infanticide, Moses survives through miraculous events, being in a little ark, his life is saved, he is rescued and is raised by his own loving mother, who had also just said her last goodbye to him. Moses was also raised under Israelite tradition for a while, even after being rescued by the daughter of Pharaoh, God continues to work by then orchestrating events that Moses' own mother would be able to raise him and teach him about the Hebrew culture. An impossible thought at one point in the story, now made possible. And then Moses being raised as an Egyptian royalty in the future, right underneath the nose with the very man who wanted him and every boy dead. God is bringing about an instrument of his redeeming plan that would be the downfall of Pharaoh and an unthinkable reality in anyone's mind becomes Moses' very life. This truly is a story of God making the impossible possible. And a couple of points I want you to take with you today. Number one is that God was inverting every human effort against him and his people to actually benefit his cause, his purpose, and his people. From that order of infanticide that was meant to wipe out Israel's future, God made it so that Israel actually prospered and grew in number.
He can do the same in your life. And maybe without you knowing in the moment, in life's most difficult circumstances, maybe he is inverting things and you don't know it yet, but he will bring you to blessing. I have no doubt in mind that we will all get to heaven one day and we're gonna have conversations with God and God will tell us about our life and we're gonna have these conversations that he's gonna reveal to us, hey, you remember that time that you were in this circumstance and it was really hard and then you got through it? Yeah, by the way, that was me. I was doing all these things behind the scenes that you weren't aware of. And so it led you to this. Or there's gonna be times where maybe we are tuned in, I'm like, "Hey, I think God was at work here and he's gonna confirm." Yes, that was me. I did this and all this that you weren't aware of to bring you to this place where you were even better than before. So God can invert every human effort against him and his people to actually benefit his cause, his purpose and his people. Secondly, God blesses those who live not out of fear of men, but with the fear of God. Think of the midwives, the pharaoh's daughter in this story. Think of Miriam, amazing women who acted with such courage, some of them faith, to disobey the orders of a tyrant, the man who thought himself God. God blesses those who live with the fear of God, not man. God blesses them. Sometimes the blessing is a reward that we get to experience immediately, like those midwives, God blessed them with families. So God blesses those who fear Him.
Thirdly, know that God is a part of your story and you can eagerly await for Him to move in your life. As we look back at this story of Moses, we can see the various ways that God was working, that God was orchestrating things and how God was present throughout all of it. Even though the Bible, the text doesn't say that God did this, God did that, we know that that was God moving and working in the story. You can be assured that God is working in your life, that God is present, that he is in control, he is a part of your story. In fact, probably the better way to say it is that really you are a part of his story. And he has a significant role for you to play. He has plans for you. He wants to use you for his kingdom. But you can await that God will be present and moving in your life. And then lastly, know that God is aware of your circumstances and more than capable of overcoming them. If you are right now in the midst of a difficult circumstance, a challenging time, know that God is aware. God knows. He still wants you to communicate with him, he still wants you to express what you're feeling, but he knows what you're going through. And he is more than capable of helping you overcome it, get through it. It may mean a total change in circumstances, miraculously. It may mean that you continue through the hardship, but you can do so with God's power and strength inside of you, getting through those times. If this sounds familiar, it's because this is what we've been covering in our Roman series too, right? The words of Paul remind us of the same truth that God is sovereign over all, the power of the gospel to transform lives in the midst of life's most challenging moments is real. God is aware and hears your cries and he's capable of helping you overcome whatever is in the way of his purpose of making you more like Jesus. We serve a mighty and powerful God. So I just wanna ask, do you believe that today? Do you believe that God is capable, can handle anything, that He has a plan and a purpose for you? Do you believe that even though you may not see a way forward, that you can't see how you're gonna get through the next moment, the next couple days, the next couple weeks, that God sees a way, that God knows that there's a way that you are gonna get through each and every moment? Then when you feel like there is no hope that you're on the brink of living out of fear constantly, do you know that God is able, that God is at work? I hope that as you dwell maybe this week on this story of Moses, that you are reminded that God is at work in your life, that He cares about you and that He loves you. Be encouraged, believe that today, believe in a God that can handle anything and make your impossible moments a possible future where he is blessing you, looking after you, and loving you.
Let's pray. God, thank you for this account of just amazing providence that you work in the life of Moses. And we see through multiple people in this story, even before Moses, how you are present in hard times, in impossible moments. I pray that we today would be reminded of that, that we would be encouraged, that we'd be empowered, that our souls would be uplifted, knowing that you are in complete control, that you are a part of our story. You know every single thing that is going on, every emotion that we are feeling. And God, I pray that we would rely on you, that we would trust you. to put our faith in you. That's an ongoing decision. I pray that in every moment that we would continue to believe, continue to have faith. So I pray that as we leave this morning, as we sing this last song, as we leave and go about our week that we would rest in you, that we would have faith in you, we would stand on your promises, God. We give you all the glory, amen. - Thanks for listening. And if you would, please take a moment to subscribe and leave an encouraging review to help others find our podcasts on whatever platform you are listening on. We hope you have a wonderful day. We'll catch you next week.