Essentials of Exodus - Lesson 3

I think where the real power of the book of Exodus becomes obvious is in its theological themes. There are just such powerful messages that are woven through the book from beginning to end, and when you read the book over and over again and marinate in it for a long time, you begin to see connections between different passages. So we're going to talk about the key themes of the book of Exodus, and I'm really going to highlight two key themes, and then we'll break each one into four smaller themes.

So the first is encountering the God of Israel, and then discovering Israel's identity and purpose. And we could say this different ways, but overall, the book of Exodus shows us who God is, and it shows us who we are. It shows us who God is and what God's purpose and mission is for the world, and it shows us who we are and how we fit into that purpose and mission so that we can find a sense of purpose as we participate in God's purposes.

This is why this book has become my favorite, because it's so livable. It's not just like, oh, here are some facts that I now know about God that I didn't used to know, or here are some historical pieces of data, but this is all of the stuff we've talked about, about Egyptian context, and even God's call of Moses sets us up to see that we can discover who we are and what God is calling us to do as we encounter him on the pages of this book. And knowing God is really clear from the beginning of the book.

In chapter 5, when Moses and Aaron go to Pharaoh to confront him for the first time, they say, this is what Yahweh, the God of Israel, says, let my people go so that they may hold a festival to me in the wilderness. And Pharaoh says, who is Yahweh that I should obey him and let Israel go? I don't know Yahweh, and I won't let Israel go. And this becomes the sort of throwing down of the gauntlet for the rest of the book.

I don't know Yahweh, who's Yahweh? And Yahweh responds with, all right, let me show you who I am. And it becomes a really dramatic demonstration of his power. And sometimes people feel uncomfortable with the severity of the plagues against Egypt, but we have to remember that it began with Pharaoh saying, who's Yahweh? I shouldn't have to listen to him.

And that's why God has to respond in such a powerful way, because Pharaoh is being completely dismissive of this deity. In his context, it should not have bothered him to hear from another god. There were already lots of gods in the Egyptian pantheon, and he should have responded with, I mean, even from an Egyptian point of view, polytheism and everything, he should have responded with, oh, there's another deity, and he's making claims on my land.

I better make sure I'm in compliance. But he doesn't. He says, who's Yahweh? I shouldn't have to listen to him.

And so that is a kind of challenge that God responds to in a really powerful way. In chapter 7, verse 5, after we've had the genealogy little rabbit trail, and we're back on track again, it says, God says in chapter 7, verse 1, Then Yahweh said to Moses, see, I've made you like God to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron will be your prophet. You are to say everything I command you, and your brother Aaron is to tell Pharaoh to let the Israelites go out of his country.

But I will harden Pharaoh's heart. This one is kashay. I will make his heart firm or resolute, and though I multiply my signs and wonders in Egypt, he will not listen to you.

Then I will lay my hand on Egypt, and with mighty acts of judgment, I will bring out my divisions, my people, the Israelites, and the Egyptians will know that I am Yahweh when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring the Israelites out of it. So we get the stretched out hand again, and we have God specifically answering Pharaoh's claim not to know who Yahweh is. He says, and the Egyptians will know.

Okay, you might not know Yahweh now, but you're gonna know who Yahweh is by the time this whole thing is over. So everything that follows with the signs and wonders is a specific response to this challenge that Pharaoh doesn't know God and shouldn't have to do what he says. And each of the signs and wonders is a demonstration to Pharaoh that Yahweh is a force to be reckoned with, and there's an opportunity every time for him to repent and say, all right, all right, I got it.

I got the message, and I will be happy to comply. But because he doesn't respond that way, with each of the plagues, God turns up the intensity a little bit more. So they start off pretty gentle.

The water to blood is, I mean, it would have looked awful, but they actually didn't die. They just had to go out and dig a hole to find fresh water. They could still survive it.

It would have been a real threat against the whole idea of the Nile was like the lifeblood of the country, and they actually thought of it as the bloodstream of Osiris, one of their gods. Their entire economic system revolved around the flooding of the Nile and the receding of those floods. So there's no rain in Egypt, and there are no other rivers.

They've got the Nile, and that's it. And the Nile every year has a pattern of flooding where the fields get flooded, and then the water recedes, and that flood water brings not only moisture, but also like nutrients in the soil up onto the fields so that they'll be able to grow food. So without the Nile doing what the Nile is supposed to do, they don't have ma'at.

They don't have order and harmony, and things are not as it should be. So God takes aim at the Nile first, and it should have been a really strong warning. Don't mess with me, because I can mess with your one source for water, the thing that you all depend on for survival.

Then it moves into frogs, a plague of frogs. Now frogs are not actually harmful. They don't bite.

They don't sting. You might not want to find one in your bed or in your kitchen, but they're not dangerous. It would have just been more like annoying.

And in Egypt, they had a special reverence for frogs because one of their gods was in the form of a frog, so they weren't allowed to kill them. So it would have been a kind of invasion against which they were powerless, but it wouldn't have actually caused any death or harm. And this is a way again of God saying, hey, see what I can do.

You might have noticed reading through these chapters that Pharaoh's sorcerers are able to replicate the first two signs. Sometimes people are bothered by this, like how are they able to do this? Well, they apparently have some kind of spiritual power. They quickly hit their limit.

By the third sign, they're like, we can't do this. It's the finger of God. But notice even the two that they can replicate, they don't actually do anything useful.

They just make the problem worse. So it would be really amazing if Pharaoh's sorcerers were able to turn the Nile back into plain drinkable water, but all they can do is make more bloody water. And it'd be really great if they could get the frogs to disappear, but all they can do is make more frogs, which reminds me of the story of Balaam.

Balaam is the pagan sorcerer in numbers who's trying to put a curse on Israel, but only blessing can come out of his mouth because that's what God's determined for his people is blessing. Since God has determined plagues against Egypt, that's all they're able to do. They don't have any power outside of what's delegated to them by God.

So we traditionally call these the 10 plagues. I prefer to call them signs and wonders because that's what the book actually refers to them as. Only one is a plague.

The one that comes on livestock is a plague. Everything else is a sign or a wonder and they're demanded by Pharaoh at the beginning of the book. So in chapter 7 verse 8, Yahweh said to Moses and Aaron, when Pharaoh says to you, perform a wonder, then say to Aaron, take your staff and throw it down before Pharaoh and it will become a snake.

So the whole kicking off the series of signs and wonders is also in response to Pharaoh saying, show me what you got. And God says, I would love to show you. And so step by step, they go from the staff to a snake is the first.

I would count that as the first one. And then the traditional 10 plagues and then splitting the sea and letting the Israelites go through would be number 12. So 12 signs and wonders beginning with the staff into snake.

We have blood, frogs, gnats or lice, flies. They're still not super harmful, just annoying. And then we get to the plague on livestock.

And that one is actually beginning to devastate them economically. And then boils is the first time that it's affecting them physically and causing them pain, but still not death. Then the hail comes and the hail wipes out their entire, the fields of flax and barley.

Flax is what they made clothing out of. That's how you get linen. And barley is what you get beer out of.

They did make bread sometimes out of barley. It was kind of a cheap bread, like a low class bread, but mostly they made beer out of it and they made clothing. So the hail destroys their chance for a new set of clothes and it destroys their beer.

And I would think at that point, like, okay, we better repent. We better comply because next thing that could go is our wheat harvest, which is what we're going to eat for the next year. And instead Pharaoh continues to be stubborn.

So God wipes out with the locusts, presumably their wheat and emmer, which is another kind of wheat, so that they would not have food for a year. They would have to live on whatever they still have stored. Then we have the sign of darkness, three days of darkness.

And as you notice that gradual increase in intensity of all the signs and wonders, this one might strike you as being a bit underwhelming. Like, okay, we just turned the lights out for three days. What's the big deal? But if you consider that the chief God in the Egyptian pantheon is the sun God, and that Pharaoh believes himself to be the incarnation of the sun God, to turn out the lights for three days would be a way of saying, you're not legitimate on the throne.

You have failed to maintain ma'at. And the one that you say legitimates your rule has been defeated by Yahweh. So it's the defeat of Ra, the defeat of Pharaoh, and it would have been a really low blow.

Then finally, the death of the firstborn is the 11th sign. The death of the firstborn is the first time we're actually losing lives. So although this is, it's tough for us to wrestle with, why would God put to death the firstborn of Egypt? He has given them so many opportunities to recognize his power and repent.

And in response to Pharaoh's challenge, who's Yahweh, that I should have to listen to him and show me a sign, he's showing him gradually how powerful he is. So all of this, all of these signs point together to help us know Yahweh better. So let's dig in a little bit deeper to who is this God who's showing himself in Egypt.

And we're going to look at just four aspects of God, of God's character or God's being that come to clarity in the book of Exodus. The first one is that he is the God who rescues. In chapter 2, verses 23 to 25, it says the Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God.

And God heard their groaning, and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, so he looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them. If we've grown up in the church or we've been around long enough, maybe we have begun to take for granted that Yahweh is the kind of God who cares about people. That's just kind of obvious, but this is not true of all the gods of Egypt.

And against that background, to have a God who hears the groaning of the underclass, the ones who are being oppressed, he's not hobnobbing with the elites. He's not in there patting Pharaoh on the back and saying, good job, look at all of the labor you have exploited out of these people. Look at the great monuments you have built.

You're really making something of yourself. You're really making something of Egypt. No, Yahweh is with the people groaning out because of their slavery.

He hears it. He's the kind of God who keeps his promises. It says he remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and he looks on them and is concerned about them.

So he is the God who rescues. And in the first message that Moses brings to the elders of Israel in chapter 6, we actually get seven statements about what God is like. So look at Exodus chapter 6, beginning in verse 6. We're going to hear seven different I will statements that indicate God's intentions towards his people.

He says, therefore, say to the Israelites, I am Yahweh, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. Here we go again, the outstretched arm.

Every time we see this, it's going to be in relation to Egypt. He doesn't use this language to talk about defeating the Canaanites or defeating the Babylonians or the Assyrians. It's only the Egyptians who are doing this.

I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God. And then you will know that I am Yahweh, your God, who brought you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. And I will bring you to the land I swore with uplifted hand to give to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, and I will give it to you as a possession.

I am Yahweh. So we have seven affirmations from the Lord of what he will do, and tucked right in between in the middle of it is the covenant formula. I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God.

This is like the betrothal. The two are becoming one. You're only going to have one God, and I'm going to have you as my people, and we're going to belong to each other.

I love the language here of redemption. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and mighty acts of judgment. Redemption is what you do in the Hebrew Bible when someone has fallen on really hard times, and maybe they've had to sell off their family inheritance, their land, and so they don't live on their family land anymore, and they're alienated from that inheritance.

And what you're supposed to do, if you're a close relative of that family that's fallen on hard times, is you're supposed to come and redeem them by buying back the land for them. At cost to yourself, you're restoring the inheritance of your extended family members. So God sees his people in Egypt, and he says, I will redeem you.

That you don't belong there. I'm bringing you back to the land that I planned for you to have, and the place where I planned for you to live. He has sworn to give them the land, and he will give it to them as a possession.

And notice that these seven I will statements are framed at the beginning and the end with, I am Yahweh. So this message is for the Israelites, not for the Egyptians, but it begins to answer the question that Pharaoh has posed. Who's Yahweh? And God is not just answering that question for Egypt.

He's also answering that question for his own people. Who is Yahweh? He's the kind of God who brings you out from under the yoke of those who oppress you. He's the kind of God who frees people from being slaves, who redeems them with strength, who takes them as his own people, and and says he will be their God.

He's the kind of God who will bring you to the land he promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and who will give it to you as a possession. That's the kind of God we're dealing with. There's a sense in chapter three when God tells Moses, I am who I am.

Another way to translate this is, I will be whoever I will be. There's a sense in which God's name is like an empty container. We don't know what it's filled up with yet.

I am who I am is a bit of a cagey response. It doesn't really give you much content. You could say he's the self-existent one.

Okay, well what sort of one is he? What is he like? And the answer to that question comes as we watch and see through the rest of the book how he demonstrates himself. So sometimes people get kind of caught up with trying to figure out the etymology of the name Yahweh. What does this actually mean? And I think what God is actually doing with Moses in chapter three is, Moses wants to know his name and so he says, call me Yahweh.

I will be whatever I will be, which is a way of saying, come and see. Follow me and you'll find out what I'm like. And I think we get a really lovely declaration of what Yahweh is like in that passage in chapter six, verses six through eight, with these seven declarations.

There will of course be more declarations about what Yahweh is like later in the book, but here we're finding out that he's the kind of God who rescues. And that will inform the way that God wants them to live. It's not just like, here's information about God, but it's supposed to transform the way they interact with other people.

So we'll find when we get to the Old Testament law, that they are not allowed to kidnap people or enslave them. If someone is working for them to pay off a debt, they go free after six years. There's none of this permanent lifetime slavery because God is the kind of God who sets slaves free.

So he's not interested in setting the Israelites free and then having them become just the same kind of system as Egypt, where they exploit and oppress other people. He'll say to them over and over again in the law, remember that you were slaves in Egypt. So live this way.

Remember that you were slaves in Egypt. He does not want them to forget this part of their story, because if they do, they might repeat it in ways that will really displease God. One of my favorite places where this becomes evident is in chapter 22.

In chapter 22, verse 21, he says, do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner. For you were foreigners in Egypt. You should know better.

You know what it feels like. Don't repeat that cycle again. We're breaking the cycle.

Do not take advantage of the widow or the fatherless. If you do, and they cry out to me, I will certainly hear their cry. He's the kind of God we've saw earlier in the book who hears the cry of the oppressed.

So if Israel is oppressed, he will hear their cry. If they begin oppressing, God will hear the cries of those who are being oppressed. And they will end up on the wrong side of God's sword.

It says, my anger will be aroused and I will kill you with the sword. Your wives will become widows and your children fatherless. This is a very sobering way of saying, do unto others what you would have them do to you, or I will do to you what you have done to others.

And this is the strongest statement that I've been able to find in any of the Old Testament laws. Normally, God says, here's how I want you to live. Maybe here's the penalty for that.

In this one, God says, here's what I don't want you to do. And I myself will kill you with the sword. He's personally going to roll up his sleeves and take vengeance.

That's how seriously he takes it when we mistreat someone who's vulnerable. And in Hebrew, in verse 23, we have the strongest possible. They really should in our Bibles have it like bold and underlined to get across the idea.

Because in Hebrew, we have three in a row. So there's triple doubles. So in Hebrew, to say something really emphatically, you take the verb and you double the verb.

And so it's like conjugated and then conjugated right next to each other. It's called an infinitive absolute. So it's something like this in Hebrew.

If you do do this, if you actually do this and they cry, cry out to me, I will hear, hear their cry. It's like triple doubles. And I've not found this construction anywhere else where God is like pausing to say, let me make sure you get this one straight.

I am the God who rescues. I rescued you and I will rescue those that you mistreat. So you better not be on the wrong side of my anger.

So we meet in on the pages of Exodus, the God who rescues, we also meet the God who provides. There's a beautiful contrast that emerges in the book between Pharaoh and Yahweh as different kinds of masters. I've already mentioned that in the book of Exodus, God is not setting his people free to do whatever they want.

It's not a get out of jail free card. When Moses shows up in Egypt, it's a switch in masters. They have been serving Pharaoh and they will serve Yahweh instead.

And Yahweh proves himself to be the best kind of master. And there are all kinds of beautiful ways that this is evident as they pass through the wilderness on their way to Mount Sinai. Let me show you a few examples.

As soon as they cross through the sea and they've sung their song, they come to a place called Mara. In chapter 15, verse 23, they could not drink the water because it was bitter. Now there was a moment in Egypt where the people could not drink the water.

That was the sign of blood, water to blood. And here, instead of making the water undrinkable, God is going to take that undrinkable water and make it drinkable for his people. So he's going to flip what he did.

So it says they could not drink the water because it was bitter. That's why the place is called Mara, which means bitter. So the people grumbled against Moses saying, what are we to drink? Moses cried out to the Lord.

The Lord showed him a piece of wood. He threw it into the water and the water became fit to drink. So this is the first hint outside of the land of Egypt that God is going to treat his people with tenderness where he treated the Egyptians with harshness because of their sin.

Now in chapter 16, they are hungry and they are complaining in ways that are really unseemly. If only we had died by Yahweh's hand in Egypt, there we sat around pots of meat, not likely, and ate all the food we wanted, maybe lots of barley, I don't know. But you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.

And Yahweh's response is so gracious. He could have gotten really angry. And if you read the book of Numbers, you note that when the same complaining happens after Sinai, the response actually is quite harsh because they should know better by that point.

But God is treating them like toddlers here. They're throwing a tantrum and he's saying, come on now, let's go get some ice cream. In chapter 16, verse four, God says, I will rain down bread from heaven for you.

In Egypt, he had rained down hail and here he's going to rain down bread. Another beautiful contrast. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day.

This is my favorite. The phrase translated as enough for that day is davar yom b'yomo, which is the stuff day, day for its day in Hebrew. And this phrase is the same phrase that appears in chapter five as Pharaoh is indicating the quota of bricks that they're supposed to make.

He says in chapter five, verse 13, complete the work required of you for each day, just as when you had straw. So in response to the request for deliverance, Pharaoh's like, no, not only am I not going to let you go, but I won't give you straw anymore, which is necessary for making good quality bricks. You're going to have to go get your own stubble to make bricks and you still have to meet your daily quota.

That's the kind of master the Pharaoh is. Davar yom b'yomo, your quota for each day. And we get to chapter 16 and God's like, I've got quotas too.

It's how much I'm going to give you each day. Enough for every mouth to fill their stomachs and have all the calories they need. In this way, I will test them to see whether they follow my instructions.

And then he, uh, he, he tells them how he wants them to gather the manna. And as you know, they gather manna six days in a row, but they're not supposed to gather any manna on the seventh day because God is not only providing enough for each day, but he's giving them a day off. They've never had a day off before.

Pharaoh worked them ruthlessly and endlessly. But Yahweh is the kind of God who says, no, we are not machines. We need a day off.

So he, he organizes his provision in such a way that they can have a day off. There's a lot we could talk about here. We'll probably circle back to Sabbath later, uh, if we have time, but the God who protects, who provides for them in the wilderness provides in a way that contrasts with Pharaoh in Egypt.

And he also protects them. They're attacked by the Amalekites randomly out of the blue, the Amalekites show up and start fighting with them. And the Lord, uh, delivers them in chapter 17 from the Amalekites.

He's the God who protects and provides. He's brought them out of Egypt into what I like to call liminal space, liminal space. This is a word that sociologists use to talk about the in-between places.

They're not in Egypt anymore, and they're not in Canaan yet. They're in between. And when we go through seasons in our life where we're in between where we were or who we were and who we're becoming, where we're going, these are the places where God does some of his most challenging and fruitful work in our lives.

We don't tend to change very much or very easily when we're set in our routines. But if you disrupt all those routines, then we become more open to growing and changing. So a handful of years ago, the entire world was thrust into liminal space all at once when the pandemic hit.

And suddenly we couldn't do any of the things that we used to do in the same ways, not even grocery shopping. And so the, the, the way we got food, the way we connected with each other, the way we accessed healthcare, the, the way we did our jobs, the way we gathered for important events like weddings and funerals, all of it changed. And it's in those spaces, those liminal spaces where God can do his most important work in us.

So God takes his people into the wilderness, a trip that should have only taken 11 days. Deuteronomy chapter one begins by telling us now it's an 11 day journey from, uh, from the mountain to the promised land. And in the 40th year, blah, blah, blah, they arrived.

And it's like, Oh, wow. God had a lot of work to do. And the wilderness is his workshop.

And so he has them there for quite a while trying to remake them because he is the God who protects and provides. The third quality of God that I want to talk about is that God is a God who punishes. He's a God who takes sin seriously.

This is why we have 12 signs and wonders in Egypt. Pharaoh had been striking the people of, of Israel. And so God struck Pharaoh back.

And there's a, there's a, um, a fittingness to the way God, uh, to, to the way that he punishes Pharaoh. It's the, the punishment fits the crime. Think of it.

Uh, the first Pharaoh is throwing Israelite baby boys into the Nile. And so God changes the Nile into blood. Like let me give you what you're asking for and killing their firstborn sons eventually.

So the, the, what they did to the Hebrews gets done back to them because, uh, because God is a God who takes sin seriously. He doesn't just shrug it off or look the other way. Chapter 34 verses six and seven is the moment where God encounters, God reveals himself to Moses who encounters him on the top of Mount Sinai.

Chapter 34 verse four says, Moses chiseled out two stone tablets, like the first ones, and went up Mount Sinai early in the morning as Yahweh had commanded him. And he carried the two stone tablets in his hands. Then Yahweh came down in the cloud and stood there with him and proclaimed his name Yahweh.

As he passed and he passed in front of Moses proclaiming Yahweh, Yahweh is the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin. We love this part. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished.

He punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation. This is good news because this is part of who God is. The God who rescues people who are being oppressed, makes sure that the oppressors are silenced and stopped in their tracks.

So that is the same God that we just heard speak through Moses in chapter 22 saying that if you are oppressors, I will stop you in your tracks. So how does he respond in Exodus chapter 32 when the people build a golden calf? He gets very angry and rightfully so. He says in verse 9, I have seen these people, Yahweh said to Moses, and they are a stiff-necked people.

Now leave me alone so my anger may burn against them and I may destroy them and then I will make you into a great nation. It is within God's rights and within his character to bring judgment against the people who have so quickly turned to idols after he was the one who delivered them from Egypt. And so he says he's going to destroy them.

They've already violated the terms of the covenant that they agreed to in chapter 19. They said everything Yahweh has said we will do. They sign on willingly and the very first command is not to have other gods and not to make idols, but they do it anyway.

And then Moses seeks the favor of Yahweh and appeals to God's reputation. He says why should the Egyptians say it was with evil intent that he brought them out to kill them in the mountains and wipe them off the face of the earth. Turn from your fierce anger.

Relent and do not bring disaster on your people. Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac, and Israel to whom you swore by your own self. I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and I will give your descendants all this land I promised them and it will be their inheritance forever.

So Moses is here appealing to God's own promises and his own character. Is it because God was making the wrong decision? I don't think so. The people had violated the covenant to such a degree that it would have been right for God to destroy them, but Moses identifies the impact to God's reputation and persuades God to take another approach.

It says then Yahweh relented or in Hebrew repented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened. To repent is to change directions. If you're going one way to turn around and go the other way and God says I was going to do this but you've given me another option.

I'm going to do this instead. I'm going to show mercy. By the end of the chapter there are still Israelites who die because of this because of their unfaithfulness with the golden calf, but they don't all die.

God limits his destruction to those who participated in this egregious sin and then he opens up a new path forward with mercy so that they can continue to be his covenant people. We should be sobered by this story because it reminds us God doesn't just shrug off our sin. It affects him and it affects our covenant relationship with him.

So we need to live seriously knowing that God takes sin seriously. We need to live faithfully. The other key theme about God in Exodus is that we discover is that God is present among us.

The second half of the book is devoted largely to the building of the tabernacle and if you've ever tried to do a bible read-through you get to this part of the book and it feels kind of tedious because it's a lot of dimensions and materials and instructions about how to build things we are never going to build and things that we are never even going to encounter because Jesus has become our new temple and we are built together to be a temple in the Lord. So why these chapters? Why spend so much time talking about a building that we don't need anymore? I think it's the amount of time devoted to this building is a signal of how much it matters to God and how much it mattered to the people who first were collecting these stories and keeping them for future generations. The most important thing that happened to them was not getting free from slavery but was coming into the presence of God.

Having God move down the mountain and come into their neighborhood and to be able to do that they had to follow his instructions really carefully and take very seriously what God said mattered. So we have like seven whole chapters describing how to build the tabernacle and then about that many chapters describing them actually building the tabernacle. I think it's six and in between we have the story of the golden calf.

This placement is interesting because what it says is Moses is up on the mountain getting the instructions for building God's tent while Israel is down in the valley violating the covenant and jeopardizing it. But because of God's mercy they go on to actually build it and it works. At the end of Exodus in chapter 40 they finish putting it all together and it says in chapter 40 verse 34 then the cloud covered the tent of meeting and the glory of Yahweh filled the tabernacle.

It worked. This building that they were building at God's instruction that indicated that God doesn't isn't giving up on them. He's coming with them to go with them into the promised land.

It's successful and from then on they have God's presence with them. One of my favorite things to track in the book of Exodus is the way that Moses changes. We've already talked about how when God commissioned Moses to go back to Egypt he says who am I that I should go to Egypt to go to Pharaoh and God's response to him is I will be with you.

And Moses doesn't even seem to connect with that. He's just like well I don't want to go send someone else. This offer of I will be with you doesn't entice him at all.

But if you fast forward to chapter 33 after the golden calf incident the Lord says to Moses leave this place you and the people you brought up out of Egypt and go to the land I promised on oath to Abraham Isaac and Jacob. Go to the land but I'm not going to go with you because you're a stiff-necked people. I might destroy you on the way.

This is the Moses who really didn't care about the presence of God being with him in chapter 3 and when he and the people hear this they are distressed and they begin to mourn and no one puts on any ornaments because he says I'm gonna if I go with you I might destroy you. So Moses goes to the Lord in chapter 33 verse 12. He says you've been telling me lead these people but you haven't let me know whom you will send to go with me.

You've said I know you by name and you've found favor with me. If you're with me teach me your ways so I may know you and continue to find favor with you. This this plays into this theme of knowing God in the book you know we got pharaoh saying who's Yahweh and Moses saying I want to know you.

Remember this nation is your people and Yahweh replies my presence will go with you. You singular and I will give you rest and Moses is like listen if your presence does not go with us collectively don't send us up from here. Like we're actually not interested in the promised land we'll opt out we'll just stay camped here at Mount Sinai for the rest of our lives.

That would be better than leaving and heading to the promised land without you. How will anyone know that you're pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth? And God says all right all right I'll go. Because of Moses intercession because he's so changed that the presence of God has become absolutely essential to his hope for the future and I wonder if we can say the same.

You know as we're deciding between two different life paths between two different jobs or two you know maybe you've got two different options of who to marry. I had a friend who was in that position once two men pursuing her at the same time and she had to make a choice. Okay our question should be Lord don't send us up from here unless you go with us.

Like I'm not interested in any promotion or any move or any marriage or any anything if you're not in it. Because the worst thing imaginable would be to take a step forward without you. Lord show me who you are and so God says I'll cause all my goodness to pass in front of you and I'll proclaim my name Yahweh in your presence and that's what sets us up for hearing this declaration Yahweh Yahweh gracious and compassionate slow to anger and abounding in love.

Moses is finally finding out in chapter 33 and 34 what it means to be Yahweh. I will be whoever I will be and Moses has followed him long enough to go wow I don't want to go anywhere without you. So that's I think one of the most beautiful progressions through the entire book as God makes himself known to the Egyptians to the Israelites and to Moses in particular they come to find out that his presence is the only indispensable condition for a fruitful and flourishing future.

When you talk about how Moses progresses in his understanding of God and his willingness to have faith in him isn't it the same way with us in that like when Moses is doing that he doesn't know what the end is going to be like we read this and we know they make it what the end is what the end is going to be but Moses at any given time doesn't know what that's going to be that's what what the outcome will be and that's where we are yeah in our lives it's true a lot of times is that we don't know what how it's going to work out but like with Moses he can as he goes along he can look back and he has more faith because he has more experience in seeing how God has done things previously which gives him more faith to go on and do the next thing yeah yeah this will be the sign that it is I who am speaking to you when you bring the people out of Egypt you'll worship me on this mountain you know and so once he gets there he can be like oh I get it now I see who you are and I see that you really have called me to this work and I don't want to miss a minute of it and the more we experience God in that way the less fear we need to have going into the next season of uncertainty because God has proved himself to us you may speak to it later on but I'm just curious and it's an age-old question that I hear people discussing but yeah when we hear that Yahweh hardened Pharaoh's heart and I always get confused as to how much free agency Pharaoh had and what that meant and that meant that if Pharaoh because there seems like times where he was like okay I'm gonna relent and then and then God hardens his heart he goes nope changes his mind and gets even more so I'm curious how you comment on that yes so we talked earlier about how the word hardened is a little misleading because in Hebrew there's three different words and so there's kind of two different things that's happening to Pharaoh's heart because two of the words are synonyms so his heart is being made firm or strengthened or it's being made heavy so to strengthen a heart is not something that should cause us too much discomfort the idea of encouraging someone to keep on you know you're cheering them on toward the finish line this is not something that's inherently negative this is actually a I tell my students at Biola University if you want to graduate you have to have a firm heart because there are a lot of classes with a lot of assignments there are tests to show up for there's internships you got to go to enough chapels you got to pay your tuition like you have to have a firm heart so the fact that God makes Pharaoh's heart firm is not very problematic to me and in the context in every place where God's making his heart firm it's very clear that Pharaoh is freely choosing to to rebel against God that he'd refused to listen or he decided not to do something or he said yes and then changed his mind so it's very clear when we slow down and read it carefully that Pharaoh still has free will and almost all the places where it says that God is acting on Pharaoh's heart it's that word those words for making it firm it's the heavy heart that if I'm right about the Egyptian background is actually a bad thing to make his heart heavy means that he's guilty of injustice and usually it's his heart is just either heavy or Pharaoh himself is making it heavy it's not God making his heart heavy there's one place where it says God makes it heavy but it's it's kind of giving an overall view of like okay this is going to be the end result of all of this and all the way along God's giving Pharaoh opportunities to change his mind and opportunities to repent so I don't see any place where God is is like forcing Pharaoh to be sinful or rebellious it just seems to me every time he's got a choice that the gradual intensity of the of the signs and wonders shows me that he's giving Pharaoh every opportunity to say all right I'm tapping out I can't do this anymore you win and Pharaoh just doesn't take that chance.