Year 1, Day 50: Exodus 1

New Beginnings

We begin a new book today.  I’m actually very excited about it.  Fifty days of reading into a new year, and we are actually beginning our second book of the Bible!  And what a book it is. 

This is the book that gives us Moses – one of the four biggest names in the Old Testament (Abraham, Elijah, and David being the other three).  This is the book that gives us the greatest spiritual conflict ever recorded: the God of the Hebrews versus the gods of the Egyptians.  This is the book that gives us the 10 Commandments.  This is the book that reaffirms God’s covenant with the people.  So many good things are in this book that it will be a great read.

Oh, and for the record the name Exodus is a Greek word that means “The way out.”  As we talked yesterday, little has changed in the last 2,000 years.  People are still being oppressed in this world by the world.  Having a book that is written under the purpose of knowing “the way out” is an important tool in this age!

Main Themes of Exodus

As we look through this book, let me introduce you to seven main themes for which we can keep a look-out.

• The first theme is seeing Egypt as a stereotype for the world as the world tries to keep God and God’s people in bondage.
• The second is that Pharaoh, or any leader of the world, is a form of Satan’s minion – people who seek worship of themselves and who willingly go forth to oppress whatever God is trying to do in the world.
• The third is to see Israel as a type of Godly community, or assembly or church, that God delivers out of the world, leads on a pilgrim journey, and protects.
• The fourth is to see Moses as a precursor of Christ.  This does not mean at all that salvation comes through Moses.  Of course not!  Rather this implies that Moses is one of the standards to which God’s Messiah will be compared so that we can know when God’s great Messiah comes on the scene.
• The fifth theme is to envision the crossing of the Red Sea as a type of resurrection, a deliverance out of the world of bandage and into a true relationship with God as the authority figure.
• The sixth theme is to see the manna as the precursor to the crucifixion much like we see Moses as the precursor to Christ.
• The last theme is to see the smitten rock as a precursor to Pentecost and even the smitten Christ.  Just as the rock was smitten and water came forth, so when Christ was smitten living water, the Holy Spirit, came forth.

Keep these images in mind as we go through this story and see how God uses the story of the Hebrew people to prepare them for the coming of Christ 1,500 years later.

The People Grow in Number

Let’s move on to the actual story, shall we?  The first comment that I would like to revisit from the end of Genesis is that the Hebrew people become more and more numerous.  In fact, the Hebrew grew so numerous that they become a threat to the Egyptians.  Of course, this is God’s plan.

God prospers the Hebrew people so that they will be forced to leave Egypt and head back to His promise.  The prospering of the Hebrew people brings about pain in the short-term, as we hear about in Exodus 1; but in the long term it brings about their emancipation, their freedom, and their fulfillment in relationship with God.  As we saw with Joseph yesterday, the prospering of the Hebrew people wasn’t so much because God loved them more but that God was at work within them to bring about His ultimate plan.

Slavery

In fact, let’s talk about slavery for just a moment.  Have you ever been backed into a corner and found yourself entrenching so deeply into that which you believed that you came out swinging?  Often, that is precisely what being made a slave, being bullied, or any other form of oppression does.  Oppression forces us to focus on what is important, make us tough, and propel us to stand up for that which we believe and for which there can be no compromise.

Pharaoh intended for the slavery to crush the will of the Hebrew people.  The slavery just made them tough, willing to stand up and be led out of Egypt by God, and able to survive the journey to God’s promise.  The same can be true of us.  It is often that when we look back upon those moments of oppression and being bullied that we actually see the moments where God was hardest at work making us the spiritual leaders that we are called to be.

Egyptian Midwives

The last point that I wish to bring up is this discussion about the midwives – and specifically their account to the Pharaoh.  As I read up on this passage in various commentaries, I found a question that every author desires to point out.  I will bring it out as well.  Understand that there is great contradiction among the teachers that I use to inform my own spiritual understanding of the scripture.  The question is: were the midwives lying to Pharaoh?

On one hand, the Bible tells us that lying is absolutely wrong and it always represents a path that leads away from the godly life.  If these women were indeed lying, then their action is wrong.  It is possible to take a black and white approach to this passage.

A few commentaries that I read tried to justify the lying because we “cannot always choose between pure good and pure evil.”  Sometimes the world is gray and we are forced to choose between the lesser of two evils.  Certainly that is true.  I think of Bonheoffer in WWII Germany as he participated in a plot to kill Hitler.  Murder is wrong in whatever form it takes, but Bonheoffer nonetheless participated in a plot to kill Hitler. 

This opens an interesting ethical debate.  I believe that the justification of choosing the lesser of two evils still implies choosing and evil path and still requires repentance.  Evil is evil, even if God uses it to bring around a good result.  Take Joseph’s brothers at the end of Genesis as proof of this.  Even though God used the selling of Joseph into slavery to save Israel and his children, the brothers still had to repent of their action because the act was fundamentally wrong.  Whenever we compromise “right” by arguing the “lesser of two evils” we are compromising true faith.  That doesn’t mean reality doesn’t force us into those situations.  But it does mean that we usually need to repent even if we are choosing the best of a horrible situation.

Other commentaries argue that the midwives may have been telling the truth.  The women might have intentionally been slow in doing their tasks or inviting other midwives to go to help the births along.  God might have also blessed the Hebrew women with unusually short periods of labor in the child-bearing process.  So it is certainly possible that the midwives could have been telling the truth to Pharaoh.

However, I find this argument distasteful.  It seems willing to use human rationality in order to intentionally ignore scripture in order to sidestep the moral dilemma raised about the lying of the midwives.  Exodus 1:17 is very clear in that the midwives “did not do as Pharaoh asked and let the male children live.”  I think this verse shows a conscious choice on behalf of the midwives.  For the record, I think it is a great conscious choice to value human life by not killing the Hebrew boys.  But I believe it is a conscious choice and that implies we must go down the ethical discussion above regarding the option of choosing the lesser of two evils.

In the end, I like this chapter because this chapter is applicable to real life.  Here we have women facing a difficult choice.  Do they obey the Pharaoh and violate ethics?  Do they disobey the king and then be forced to choose between lying about it and being honest?  These are difficult choices the midwives make. 

But that is life, is it not?  We are often making difficult choices in life.  While ethics are black and white, living in this world is not as easy.  The book of Exodus will constantly confront us with these kinds of stories that invite us to realize that life gets messy sometimes.  Ultimately that is okay.  So long as we follow God’s ways and repent when we stray down the path of wrong-doing God is there to forgive and love.

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