TUESDAY
Yesterday I introduced our new campaign called The Presence of God. If you haven’t read yesterday’s devotional, I would encourage you to begin there. Remember, we are looking at the life of Moses and seeing his progress in experiencing the presence of God. This week we are going to set the scene for Moses’ experiences with God. His first experience with the presence of God is in chapter 3, but God is clearly at work in his life in the first two chapters as well. We aren’t going to be able to cover the whole book of Exodus in the time we have in this campaign, so we will have to keep our focus on Moses’ experiences with God.
To set the scene, the people of Israel are in the land of Goshen in Egypt. Joseph brought his whole family to Egypt to save them from a massive famine. While in Egypt, the people of Israel thrived and their numbers grew rapidly. When a new Pharaoh came to power, likely a new dynasty that took over from the Hyksos (”foreign rulers” in Egyptian) who had Semitic origins, who didn’t know Joseph or have sympathies for the Semitic people, the Israelites were enslaved. They were enslaved for fear that they would become too numerous and align with their enemies and leave (Ex. 1:10). The Egyptians oppressed them harshly. But the more the Israelites were oppressed the more they thrived and multiplied (Ex. 1:12). So Pharaoh told the Hebrew midwives to kill the baby boys when they are born. “The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do; they let the boys live.” (Ex. 1:17) Pharaoh then orders his people to throw the baby boys into the Nile when they are born.
God’s people are now in slavery to the most powerful nation in the world, in a foreign land, and facing extinction. This is obviously a major problem for the people of Israel. However, this is also a problem for God. At this point it’s difficult to see how God’s promise to Abraham is going to come true.
Genesis 12:2–3 2 “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”
This is a challenge of power between the gods of the Egyptians and Yahweh. Is God really powerful enough to overcome this seemingly hopeless situation? If he doesn’t, the book of Genesis ends as a blip on the radar of history and Yahweh becomes known as an unfaithful, weak God.
“God needs to deliver his people to continue to demonstrate to the world who he really is and where the only hope of deliverance lies.” - Allen Ross and John N. Oswalt, Cornerstone Biblical Commentary: Genesis, Exodus, vol. 1 (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2008), 291.
At the end of chapter 1 of Exodus, we are left wondering what God will do about the plight of his people. The rest of the book is God’s response to this challenge. At the end of chapter 2 we read,
Exodus 2:24–25 (NIV) 24 God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. 25 So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them.
Although the people of Israel had been in slavery for 400 years, God saw them and was aware of their plight. He is not a God who created the world and left it alone to run on its own. He is actively involved in redeeming his creation. This is step one of the seven realities of experiencing God from Experiencing God. The first step, then, is to recognize that God is working all around us and learning to identify what he is doing and participate in what he is doing. We will revisit this as we go through the story.
Additional Content
Reflection
Recognizing God’s work is probably the most difficult aspect of experiencing God. It requires a development of spiritual eyes to see. It requires a surrender of will and agenda. It requires patience.
This takes time. For today commit to looking for God’s action in your life. What is God currently developing in your inner life? (Think the fruit of the Spirit.) How can you surrender more to his work? What would God be concerned about in your interactions with others today? What would God want you to focus on today? Look for little God moments today where he gives you a thought, calls you to pray, or maybe brings an opportunity for you to share with someone about him. The possibilities are endless for what God can do, so the key is to be open, surrendered and watchful.