What I Learned: Exodus

Knowing God requires discipline

I try, in these “What I Learned” essays, to go over new insights I gained by my outlining my Scripture reading this year. The outline of the book is elsewhere and I may not address the content that I feel is already familiar. These are the lessons I learned reading and outlining the book of Exodus:

• Fulfillment of prophecy: After Abram believed God that his descendants would be like the stars of the heavens in number, and God reckoned it to him as righteousness, and before God made the covenant with Abram regarding the Promised Land, He warned him: “Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, where they will be enslaved and oppressed four hundred years. But I will also judge the nation whom they will serve, and afterward they will come out with many possessions. As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you will be buried at a good old age. Then in the fourth generation they will return here, for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete” (Genesis 15:13-16).

• All about making a people, His people: God continued to reassure Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob about His promises, even as all of Abraham’s descendants are leaving the land promised them to go to Egypt: “God spoke to Israel in visions of the night and said, ‘Jacob, Jacob.’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ He said, ‘I am God, the God of your father; do not be afraid to go down to Egypt, for I will make you a great nation there. I will go down with you to Egypt, and I will also surely bring you up again; and Joseph will close your eyes’” (Genesis 46:2-4).

• Faith: Jacob and Joseph believed God’s promises. Jacob died in Egypt but asked to be buried where Abraham and Isaac had been buried (Genesis 47:29). His sons honored his request. And “Joseph made the sons of Israel swear, saying, ‘God will surely take care of you, and you shall carry my bones up from here’” (Genesis 50:25). Four-hundred and thirty years after Abraham’s descendants arrived in Egypt, they went out from the land (Exodus 12:41), and “Moses took the bones of Joseph with him” (Exodus 13:19). Think what effort it took both to act on this faith and to hand down this faith.

• God is amazingly patient and enacts His plan over years, decades, and even centuries. Abraham was 100 when he had his promised son Isaac. Isaac and Rebekah had 20 years of infertility before they had Jacob and Esau. Jacob had to work 14 years to earn his marriage to Rachel. Joseph was imprisoned in Egypt for 14 years. The Israelites were enslaved in Egypt for centuries. Consider, then, all it took to make Moses into the leader that he was for the sons of Israel. By law, he should have been killed at birth. He was rescued and raised in Pharaoh’s household. He had the heart to deliver his maltreated kinsman, but his first attempt was via murder…and he was exiled for forty years. It was a much humbler Moses God sent back to Egypt. He knew the sting of his kinsmen’s rejection and was concerned that they would not believe God had actually sent him this time.

• God enables: Moses made excuses about his speaking ability, hoping God would excuse him from his assignment. This actually angered God (which should humble us, given that we are prone to excuses ourselves), but He gave him a solution in Aaron. It’s interesting to observe how progressively Aaron did less and less speaking and demonstration of signs in front of Pharaoh and Moses did more and more. Aaron ended up having an incredible failure when he was placed in charge, allowing the Israelites to get out of control (Exodus 32:25) and making for them a golden calf to worship. Our excuses and our crutches can hurt us.

• “Knowing” is important: “Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph” (Exodus 1:8). “But Pharaoh said, ‘Who is the LORD that I should obey His voice to let Israel go? I do not know the LORD, and besides, I will not let Israel go’” (Exodus 5:2). “Then I will take you for My people, and I will be your God; and you shall know that I am the LORD your God, who brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians” (Exodus 6:7). “The Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD, when I stretch out My hand on Egypt and bring out the sons of Israel from their midst” (Exodus 7:5). It’s a worthy exercise to continue this word search.

• “This is the finger of God”: Initially, the wise men, sorcerers, and magicians of Egypt could mimic the signs that Moses and Aaron displayed. When they finally couldn’t, with the plague of the gnats, they themselves declared, “This is the finger of God” (Exodus 8:19). From that point on, God put a division between the people of Israel and the people of Egypt, ensuring that His people, and where they lived in the land of Goshen, were spared the subsequent plagues. God’s miraculous actions were so all would know they were of Him.

• “you exalt yourself against My people by not letting them go”: We can dangerously entertain the thought that God was not “fair” with Pharaoh by causing his heart to be hardened. God knew Pharaoh’s heart. The people of Israel were a resource for him to control. He had demonstrated that by harshly enslaving them before the plagues even started. He’d seem to relent in response to God’s plagues, but his heart was transparent to Moses as well: “I know that you do not yet fear the Lord God.” When God relented, he sinned again (Exodus 9). Can we relate to such a pattern ourselves when God relents in our lives?

• Consequences for breaking covenant: Amalek seems to fight against Israel unprovoked (Exodus 17:8). Amalek were descendants of Esau, Isaac’s son and Abraham’s grandson. After they fight against Israel, God pronounces He will blot out their memory from under heaven. Israel has lots of enemies for whom this declaration is not made. I wonder if it because of where Esau is, and therefore Amalek are, in the line of descendants from Abraham, with whom God made the covenant of the Promised Land. Is it because they so rejected and defied this covenant by attacking their own kindred that God declared such serious judgment against them?

• We are capable of learning how to judge: When Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, came to visit, Moses was the only one “judg[ing] between a man and his neighbor and mak[ing] known the statutes of God and His laws” (Exodus 18:16). Jethro suggested Moses teach the people the statutes and laws, and then “select out of all the people able men who fear God, men of truth, those who hate dishonest gain” and “place these over them as leaders of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties and of tens” (Exodus 18:20-21). Major disputes went to Moses, but minor disputes were judged by others. It is important to note that it is God’s statutes and laws that are the criteria for judgment, not our own opinions.

• God is the authority: God told Moses, “I am the Lord; and I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as God Almighty, but by My name, Lord, I did not make Myself known to them” (Exodus 6:2-3). God then established the pattern that all things were done under the authority of His name. His Ten Commandments start with His declaration, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Exodus 20:2). Everything we do is because of Who He is.

• God’s laws and ordinances, which I wrote about here, reveal that He cares that we treat Him as holy and that we treat each other with justice and fairness. His laws demonstrate protection and care for women, children, and the poor, vulnerable, or oppressed. He cares if a baby is harmed in utero. It is this circumstance where He appoints the penalties we are familiar with: “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound” (Exodus 21:23-24). His ordinances call us to pay penalties or make restitution when we harm others or their property. He does consider some things worthy of death. If we should hate what He hates, these things are worth noting: murder, striking or even cursing one’s mother or father, kidnapping, not protecting others from animals known to be dangerous, seduction outside of marriage, sorcery, sexual activity with animals, and sacrificing to other gods. The people learned this lesson regarding that last offense when they worshiped a golden calf so soon after not only learning God’s laws and ordinances, but entering into a blood covenant with God that they would obey, and 3000 people were killed as a consequence (Exodus 32:28).

• Signs and wonders, and commandments and ordinances, are insufficient to bring about obedience or fear of God: The Israelites seeing and hearing from God on Mount Sinai, and then so quickly worshiping a golden calf, is positively sobering. God had just told them, “You yourselves have seen that I have spoken to you from heaven. You shall not make other gods besides Me; gods of silver or gods of gold, you shall not make for yourselves” (Exodus 20:22-23). We have short memories. We need hearts that desire to please Him. Praise God that He promises to transform us by the power of His Holy Spirit. This is the difference between the Old Covenant delivered on Mount Sinai and the New Covenant in Christ. It’s timely that my pastor husband Kirk spoke about these differences in his February 12, 2023 sermon on Hebrews 12, which discusses these events in Exodus. Here is a link.

• Knowing God requires discipline: This may be the most valuable lesson of my taking the time to outline my Bible reading this year. In Exodus, it forced me to comb through four chapters of God’s laws and ordinances, looking for His heart and intent in them. It forced me to comb through thirteen chapters on the construction, erection, and consecration of the tent of meeting of the tabernacle and all it contained, also looking for the heart and intent of God. Moses spent 40 days with God on Mount Sinai first getting these directions and then another 40 days getting them reviewed after the incident with the golden calf. Those first 40 days turned Moses into an intercessor for his people: “now I am going up to the Lord, perhaps I can make atonement for your sin” (Exodus 32:30). That is the heart of God, making provision for atonement for our sin. Think how much Moses already knew of God, but he asked to know more, and God rewarded Him: “Then the Lord passed by in front of him and proclaimed, ‘The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth; who keeps his lovingkindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression, and sin; yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations” (Exodus 34:6-7). After this interaction, Moses’ face would shine whenever he met with or communicated the words of god. Our choices determine which character of God we meet. He longs to be gracious to us. God first appeared to Israel on the Mountain of Sinai to declare the Ten Commandments in the third month after they had left Egypt (Exodus 19:1). Moses twice spending 40 days with Him on the mountain, and then the gathering of contributions and the construction, erection, and consecration took until the end of the first year (nine months…coincidence?). We glaze over with these timelines and details, but the reward, at the end of the book of Exodus, was God’s constant presence (Exodus 40:34-38). It seems that is a powerful lesson.