Exodus 11:1-10

01/25/12 Exodus 11:1-10 GUMC Youth

Over the last few weeks we have been looking at some of the overarching, super-important stories in the Old Testament. We looked at the calling of Abraham and saw that, when God calls people, he often calls the people we would least expect to do the things we would least expect, when we would least expect it. We looked at the story of Abraham nearly sacrificing his son, Isaac and saw that it isn't up to us to decide the best way to worship God or the best sacrifice to give. God takes the very best we have to give and substitutes something else, something that he gives, in its place. Last week, we looked at the selling of Joseph into slavery and saw that, though God does not in any way cause suffering, tragedy and evil, he enters into the midst of it and brings good out of the things that we would least expect could have anything good come out of. Tonight, we are looking at another story. Though all the stories we've looked at so far have come from the book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, tonight's story comes from the book of Exodus, the second book of the Bible.

Because we are switching books, I want to take just a moment to remind you all of the timeline that we are dealing with. First, of course, you have Adam and Eve, then after a long time you get Noah and his ark, then after another long time, we get Abraham, which is where we started getting really interested in the story. Abraham had two sons, Ishmael and Isaac, Isaac had two sons, Esau and Jacob, also known as Israel. Jacob had twelve sons, one of which was Joseph, who we talked about last week. Tonight, we pick up the story over four hundred years later than what we talked about last week.

In the years between the nation of Israel coming to Egypt and the story of the Exodus, the Israelites have become a large nation of about two million people. They have become so numerous that the Egyptians have started to be afraid of them. After all, if Egypt were to be attacked, if they wanted to, the Israelites could join the other side and be a real threat to the Egyptians. They were scared to death that this might happen, so they decided that the best thing to do was to enslave the Israelites and put them to hard labor. Now, you might say, "Why would you do that? If you are afraid they are going to join forces with your enemies, making them slaves is only going to make them more likely to try to overthrow you." That might be, but if you enslave a people and if you teach them over the course of generations that they are less than human, that they are worthless and weak, it is possible to so destroy their hope that things could be different, that they never dare to stand up to the people who are treating them that way.

The point is that, though this evil thing was happening to the people, God had not ignored them, but was waiting for just the right time to liberate his people. Eventually, the time came. Egypt was so worried that the Israelites might become strong and fight back that they decided that every newborn male needed to be killed upon birth. The Hebrew midwives, who were the ones who were helping out at the births, didn't want to do this, so they lied to Pharaoh, saying that the Israelite women were so hearty that they gave birth before they could get there. Realizing that he wasn't going to win this way, Pharaoh gave the order that all the male babies must be thrown into the Nile to drown. There was a woman who had a boy and wanted to protect him, but she couldn't hide him forever. She put him into a basket that was sealed up with pitch so it wouldn't sink and put him in the river. Notice that her son was "thrown into the Nile" but in a very different sense than the Pharaoh wanted.

Anyway, this baby is floating down the Nile and happens to go by Pharaoh's daughter who has compassion on him and adopts him for her own, naming him Moses and raising him in the royal household. Remember this, Moses, who ends up delivering the Israelites from slavery to the Egyptians, grew up as a kind of adopted child of Pharaoh's daughter. That means that he must have seemed a bit like a traitor to his own people since he was an Israelite but he was living in luxury in the Pharaoh's house while all the rest of the Israelites were working hard as slaves. Also, it means that, when he goes before Pharaoh with all the demands from God, he isn't just going in front of a powerful ruler, but before someone who is either his step-brother, or some kind of nephew. We need to remember that Moses is not just having to chose whether or not he will be a hero of God's people, he is quite literally having to choose between his family that he was born into, the family of the people of God, or the family that raised him, the family who used their wealth and power to oppress that other family. In a sense, Moses really had to choose between his God and his family. Whenever you think about Moses, always remember that this is a very personal issue for him.

Anyway, you all know the story. Moses finds himself in trouble so he runs away from Egypt, settles down and raises a family. Eventually, when he is growing old, about eighty years old, he sees the burning bush and is told that he needs to go back to Egypt and be the vehicle by which God liberates his people. You know, its kind of amazing that Moses was actually called even later in his life than Abraham, who was seventy-five years old when God called him. There were a bunch of plagues unleashed upon the land of Egypt, though the Israelites were spared from them. After many chances to do the right thing, Pharaoh refused to let the people go, so there was one more plague to come. God was going to kill the firstborn children of every house.

Now, I want to make sure I point something out because it is important. Most of the plagues were only directed at the Egyptians. For example, when frogs came out of the Nile, they didn't invade the areas where the Israelites lived but only bothered the Egyptians. When God was going to kill the firstborns, though, Israel was not exempt, but God hadn't abandoned them. God gave the people something very specific that they needed to do in order to be delivered from the disaster that was coming. They had to take a lamb, kill it, wipe its blood on the doorframe of the house, and eat it with bitter herbs and unleavened bread. They were to do all this expecting that they were going to be driven out the next day. They had to have this feast with their bags packed, as it were.

Now, we need to understand that not all of the Egyptians were hardhearted and refused to listen to Moses. We know, for example, that there were some of Pharaoh's officials who listened when Moses warned them of hail and saved their animals by taking precautions. It is entirely possible that there were a few Egyptians who followed through with the things Moses told the Israelites to do and so saved their children. But at that point, there is a crucial sense in which they stopped being Egyptians and became Israelites themselves, since they had taken sides in this conflict and the Egyptians were certainly not going to be friendly to them anymore.

The main point, the main thing we need to learn from this story, is about the nature of redemption. When God's people were in trouble, God redeemed them, but we need to realize that the redemption didn't come like we might think it should. God doesn't say "I am just going to kill the firstborn children of the Egyptians" but "I am going to kill all the firstborn children in the land, but here is a way to be redeemed." This act of divine redemption was so important because through it, God rescued a whole nation from captivity. Because of this, there are two things that we need to understand about redemption in general and our redemption in particular.

First, we need to see that redemption is not automatic, it requires obedience. We have to actually do something in order to be redeemed. Now, I want to make sure I am absolutely clear so you don't misunderstand what I am getting at. It is not as though, when we are saved, it is because we have saved ourselves. God is the one who does the saving. It also isn't like we do some of the work and God does some of the work, as if our salvation and redemption were some kind of partnership where we are saved because of some kind of team effort. God does everything, but he doesn't do everything in a way where God somehow sets himself against us, where he somehow saves us against our will, where he somehow does what he does in a way that we are saved without it actually impacting who we actually are. Rather, God does everything for our salvation and redemption in and through us. Paul says this in Galatians 2:20, one of the more famous verses in the Bible. "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me."

You see, according to Paul, the Christian life is a life that is crucified with Christ. It is a life that, in a very real sense, is Christ's life lived in and through him. And yet, though the life that Paul lives in his flesh is Christ's life, it isn't as though Paul has been set aside, has he? He is still Paul, he still does the kinds of things that Paul does, he is still prone to make the same mistakes that Paul has made. Though Christ is living his life in and through Paul, Paul is still there; he is not merely an empty shell. The same is true for us. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus lives his life in and through us. This doesn't make us any less who we are, but ever more who we were meant to be than we would ever have been on our own.

Another great example of what I'm trying to get at comes from Jesus himself. He says, in a famous passage, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me." Sometimes, when we hear that verse, we think that Jesus is just telling his disciples that following him can be hard sometimes, so they should get themselves ready for what can be a difficult time. First, Jesus is not just saying that the Christian life will be hard from time to time, he is saying that, at the end of the day, the Christian life will kill us. After all, to take up your cross is to be on your way to execution. By that, I don't mean that all Christians will be killed for their faith. What I mean is that we are not done living as Christians until we are done living in general. To be a Christian and to follow Jesus is to make a lifelong commitment; a commitment that lasts as long as we do.

But that is not all of what Jesus says. The most important part of what he says here is "take up your cross and follow me." The point is not just to take up our cross, as though hardship for hardship's sake was a goal in itself. The point is that we take up our crosses and follow Jesus, that we do what he does, that we go where he goes, that we say the things that he says, that we become the kind of people who are like him. Jesus takes up his cross and dies for us, on our behalf and in our place. We take up our own crosses and follow, not because bearing our cross contributes even the slightest bit to our salvation, but because it is us doing what Jesus was doing and participating in the salvation that God has worked out and is working out in our lives. Whatever else it might be, it is not salvation unless it is changing our lives, not just on Wednesday nights or on Sunday mornings, but every day of the week.

The other thing we need to make sure we notice and remember is that redemption is costly. Remember, it is not that God was going to punish the Egyptians and spare the Israelites, but that he was going to kill all the firstborn children. The difference is not that God treated the Israelites fundamentally differently than the Egyptians, but that God provided a way to be saved and the Israelites took it, trusting that God would actually substitute their lambs in the place of their children and take them instead. Think about what this means, though. God's redemption didn't make itself seen in the lives of the people until they actually became participants in it. They had to actually kill the lamb, rub its blood on their doorposts, cook it, and eat it. There was no shortcut to salvation that allowed them to bypass actually responding in faith to what God was doing.

Also, we need to remember that, though the children of the Israelites were spared, things still died. One of the things we read about in the New Testament is, "Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins." There is something about the seriousness of sin that means it cannot be done away with just with a wave of the hand, even a wave of God's hand. Sin is such a serious thing that it can't be forgiven unless something dies. When God delivers people, they aren't just given a kind of "Get out hell free" card, like some seem to think, but when someone is forgiven, something has to die.

That is exactly what God himself has done on our behalf and in our place. The celebration that came into existence because of God's delivering his people from this final plague is called Passover, because the angel of death passed over the homes of the Israelites. It is no coincidence that, when Jesus had his last supper with his disciples, it was in the context of a Passover celebration. Jesus was saying to his disciples, "Do you remember that when God brought you up out of Egypt, your salvation was brought about through the eating of the sacrificial lamb? In the same way, your salvation from sin will be brought about through your eating of my body and blood. This bread is my body, this cup is my blood. Every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, do it in remembrance of me, just like you remember your deliverance from Egypt every time you celebrate the Passover meal."

Whenever you participate in Communion at church, as you eat the bread and drink the juice, remember that Jesus is your Passover lamb. Just like the lambs at Passover died so that the people of Israel could live, Jesus died for you so that you can live, so that you can live the life of joy that God has promised you. Always remember that you have been bought with a price, that Christ died for you and that you have been made a child of God to be a witness to God's love in this world that can be so dark. Let us pray.

AMEN