When God wants to be seen through his People, there is simply no obstacle strong enough to stop him. If you were impressed by Michael Schofieldâs elaborate plans to escape from Fox River State Penitentiary in the TV series Prison Break, you will love what happens in Exodus 1 and 2. The Greek word Exodus means literally exit or way out, and these chapters form the prelude to the Old Testamentâs great escape story.
Make no doubt about it, Egypt in the fifteenth century BC was the worldâs largest prison. The seventy Hebrews had gone there in obedience to the Lordâs promise in Genesis 46 that he would turn them into a mighty nation in Egypt and bring them back to Canaan as conquerors of the land. Almost four centuries later, such promises looked like pipe dreams, and the Devilâs agenda to keep the Lord invisible looked more successful than the plotting of a clever prison guard on any television show.
First, the Hebrews lost their privileged status in the nation. Joseph had saved Egypt from disaster under the Twelfth Dynasty of pharaohs, and his family had been rewarded with possession of Goshen, the most fertile fields in the land. Pharaoh appointed Joseph as his royal vizier and mummified his body when he died as if he were one of his own. But shortly after Josephâs death, the Twelfth Dynasty fell and five new dynasties came and went during two turbulent centuries known as the Second Intermediate Period. Pharaoh Ahmose I of the Eighteenth Dynasty founded the New Kingdom by expelling the Canaanite Hyksos, but this made him naturally suspicious of the Hebrews who remained. Hadnât these foreigners originally come from Canaan? Were they not natural allies to the Hyksos if they reappeared with a new army? So he enslaved them and forced them to build great monuments which shouted to the world that Egyptâs new regime was here to stay. Pharaoh turned their Goshen into his Gulag.
But the plan backfired, spectacularly. Moses tells us in 1:12 that âthe more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread.â He uses five separate Hebrew verbs in 1:7 alone to describe the ensuing Hebrew baby boom. Alarmed by the Egyptiansâ open hatred towards them, Jacobâs family tried to multiply and soon became a seven-figure nation. God had promised Abraham this would happen in Egypt in Genesis 15, and he was at work behind the Devilâs clumsy scheming. âThe Lord made his people very fruitful; he made them too numerous for their foes, whose hearts he turned to hate his people.â
The Devil tried a second strategy. He incited Pharaohâs heart to order the Hebrew midwives to murder every baby boy at birth. Future Hebrew slave-girls were useful to Egypt, but boys were potential insurrectionists and must not be allowed to live. Again this fresh attempt to thwart Godâs plan backfired, as it galvanized the flagging faith of the dispirited Hebrews to put their hope in him. Spurred on by Pharaohâs threats of murder and the Hebrew midwivesâ brave defiance, Moses tells us in 1:20 that âthe people increased and became even more numerous.â
Satanâs third strategy was increasingly desperate, provoking Pharaoh to order that every Hebrew baby boy be drowned in the River Nile. This time the Lordâs response outshines the very best of Michael Schofield, as he turns Satanâs worst into the centrepiece of his plan. âOne weak link can break the chain of a mighty dynasty,â worries Pharaoh in the animated movie The Prince of Egypt. He had no idea that the Lord was smarter by far and could even use infanticide as a way to smuggle his deliverer into Pharaohâs palace.
Pharaohâs decree forces two Hebrew parents to take their baby boy down to the river and hide him in a basket among the reeds. They pray to the Lord for a miracle, and he reveals himself as God the Saviour when Pharaohâs very own daughter finds the baby and adopts him as her son. By Godâs power, he had not been overheard crying during his three months in hiding, but now he cries at the right moment to move Pharaohâs daughter to compassion. His sister Miriam is hiding and appears in time for the Lord to use her to make Pharaoh pay Mosesâ mother to look after his enemy! The Lord runs rings around his would-be opponent Satan. He is smarter by far and will let nothing foil his plan.
Even now, God hasnât finished. He has another trump card left to play. The baby grows up with a dual nationality which is epitomized by his name. Moses means Drawn-Out in Hebrew, but it also means Born in Egyptian and sounds like the names of Pharaohs Ahmoses and Thutmoses. Moses is therefore given a royal education in Egyptâs wisdom, and gains unparalleled know-how of the inner workings of Pharaohâs court, yet his primary spiritual influence remains his mother so that âwhen he had grown up, he refused to be known as the son of Pharaohâs daughter. He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time.â
The Devilâs three strategies to thwart Godâs great prison break had failed, because God wants to be seen through his People. All those strategies did was create a larger, more unified, more devout Hebrew nation, which cried out to God for a deliverer and found one forged in the furnace which the Devil had stoked against them.
The story of Godâs great escape is even cleverer than Michael Schofieldâs Prison Break at its most fanciful. This baby in the basket grew up and went on to write Exodus as his personal account of the Lord as God the Saviour. He smiles at us through these opening verses and assures us that nothing can stop the Lord from succeeding in his plan. He is going to be seen through his People.
God wants to be seen through his People, but it certainly didnât feel that way to the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. They had none of the hindsight we enjoy today to reassure them that he was working in secret on his prison break. Many of them began to doubt whether he actually wanted to be seen through them at all. We can all feel the same during our own periods of waiting.
If you have been a Christian for any length of time, you will have discovered that God is not in a hurry. Like Gandalf in the film The Fellowship of the Ring, he âis never late; nor is he early. He always arrives precisely when he means toâ â but even so, the Christian life involves a lot of waiting. A marriage partner, a job search, the conception of a baby, the salvation of a friend â whatever it is, he is invariably the God âwho acts on behalf of those who wait for himâ. As I write this, I am entering a second year of trying to sell my house, which doesnât make sense when I have told all my neighbours that I serve the God who answers his Peopleâs prayers. Situations like these can make us doubt whether the Lord truly wants to be seen as much as the Pentateuch suggests. Thatâs why Exodus begins with an encouragement that âwaiting is not wastingâ, because the Lord can be seen through his People even as they wait.
During Israelâs darkest night, the Lord still used them to reveal himself as God the Faithful One. When Pharaoh commanded the Hebrew midwives to murder every newborn baby boy, they were tempted to put their faith to one side and to compartmentalize their working lives. Pharaoh demanded that his subjects address him as âMy King, my Lord, my God, my Sun, the Sun in the skyâ, and he had power to execute any health worker who refused to obey his edicts straight away. When the midwives âfeared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to doâ, they gave the Lord an opportunity to demonstrate his faithfulness through their lives. Moses tells us that âbecause the midwives feared God, he gave them families of their own.â In fact, although he does not even bother to identify the pharaoh who gave the order, he makes sure to record the names of Shiphrah and Puah because they made Godâs faithfulness visible through their courage while they waited.
In the midst of delay, the Lord also revealed himself as God the Saviour. Moses tells us in 6:20 that his parents were named Jochebed and Amram, meaning Yahweh is Glorious and The People are Exalted. This implies they were a family who still believed that God wanted to be seen through his People despite the confusingly long delay. They kept such faith in the Lord that he describes himself to Moses in 3:6 as âthe God of your fatherâ (not the God of your fathers),
and they saw something in their newborn baby boy that made them trust God to save him and give him a role in delivering his People. We can see this even more clearly if we understand a bit of Hebrew, since the word tebah is used in only two places in the Bible: twenty-six times to refer to Noahâs Ark and twice here to refer to Mosesâ basket in the Nile. By faith, Jochebed copied Noah and coated a papyrus basket with waterproof pitch, then took her baby down to the very riverbank where Pharaoh ordered that he be drowned. When she trusted the Lord to save him from the floodwaters and bring him to rest on an âAraratâ of his own, her unflinching trust in her unseen Lord made him visible as God the Saviour.
When the grown-up Moses refused to wait any longer, the Lord was even able to reveal himself as God the Indweller through his sin. The New Testament tells us that he hoped to give the Lord a helping hand, assuming that âhis own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them, but they did not.â It only took one nasty comment from a Hebrew to send Moses running into forty years of exile in the desert. He learned the hard way that man-made solutions always fail, but he âpersevered because he saw him who is invisibleâ. When the Lord met him at the burning bush and sent him back to Egypt with a promise that this time âI will be with youâ (3:12), he made God visible to the rest of Egypt too. T...
