Session 3 - The Exodus

Q1 What was the importance of the Exodus at the time?

What is its importance now?

(See Appendix)

To the common people, the events must have been bewildering. Any information would have come through the grapevine, not the BBC website. But to the elders who were aware of Moses’ mission, the events would have been a mixture of exhilaration and intense frustration. It is easy for us to look back and judge them, knowing the whole story, but for them it was unfolding, and they had no certainty of a positive outcome.

Theologically, what it meant at the time was

in the first instance, God’s answer to prayer for deliverance, and his compassion and care for his people.

The next layer of meaning is that the God of Abraham is the best god. He is stronger than all of the might of Egypt and all of its sophisticated pantheon.

Thirdly, and most importantly, Exodus is about covenant - affirming and keeping the covenant with Abraham and developing its detail in the Sinai covenant.

These meanings are still in place today - God delivers us from life’s troubles (albeit not immediately), God is better than the alternative religions and irreligion around us, and God continued to affirm and keep his covenants and develop the detail. But this last point is the most important for us, because in Christ we have the Spiritual realisation of the Covenants, and we can now see that all of the stuff in the ’old covenant’ is a shadow of the real thing. The old shows us the new. The old is a silhouette of the three dimensional new covenant.

Q2 What are the dominant themes in the story?

The deliverance that comes from God - deliverance from slavery and adversity in life, and deliverance on a spiritual level from slavery to sin.

The supremacy of God above all other powers, and his lordship over the creation and the political scene.

The development of Covenant, and the fulfilment of Covenant promises.

Abraham to be the father of a great nation

Abraham’s seed to receive the promised land

(Blessings and Curses on those who Bless and Curse ‘Abraham’ respectively

Q3 Who are the story’s main characters?

The Story’s main characters are:

Moses - the adopted son of Pharaoh’s daughter. Multi-racial adoptions are always risky! Moses seems to have identified more with his biological family than his legal family, despite common sense suggesting that on a personal level he would have been better off in the palace NOT identifying himself with slaves. Moses knows his remarkable life places him well to be the deliverer, but he tries to take things into his own hands, murdering the Egyptian. But this is not God’s way or God’s time. Yet God uses the incident to drive Moses into the desert for the second phase of his training.

Once that is complete, God calls him. Yet even while faced with the miracle of the burning bush, Moses doubts his God and doubts himself, and so loses the chance to be even greater than he was. Eventually he sets out to do his task. But his disobedience in not circumcising his sons - scorning the covenant - nearly ends his life. His wife Zipporah, also a descendant of Abraham, knows what to do (why didn’t she do this before?) and circumcises the sons.

Strengthened, Moses reaches Egypt and enlists the support of the elders and Aaron. After more bouts of doubt he loses even more responsibility. He then starts the ’negotiations’ with Pharaoh. He knows that Pharaoh’s heart will be hardened, but continues in God’s plan and brings the people out of Egypt. Gaining competence through his experiences in the court, in the desert, and in the Exodus itself, he becomes the powerful leader that God intends.

Pharaoh - Possibly two pharaohs; one Moses’ adoptive father, one his uncle. Pharaoh is the top of the tree in Egypt - he is divine. He is an incarnation of a god. (This is an anti-type, a counterfeit, of the true incarnation of the real god in Jesus.) But seen as divine, no one will challenge him, and he is accustomed to getting his way. He has no conscience about the Israelite slaves, and has no compassion on their babies. He has lived in Egypt for his whole life, and is accustomed to natural disasters and plagues, natural swarms of frogs, natural swarms of frogs, locusts and gnats - natural discolouration of the water. So when Moses comes along with more of the same - if rather extreme and ‘coincidentally’ well-timed - he does not feel afraid. But we need to realise that for Moses to come suggesting that this divine lord of mighty Egypt should bow to the wishes of the ragged slaves’ desert god would have seemed highly impertinent. Theologians will always debate about what it means when it says ‘God hardened Pharaoh’s heart’.

Aaron - Moses’ older brother. I have always overlooked the fact that he went out of Egypt to meet Moses, so he must have had substantial faith of his own. How did he get out of Egypt? He ends up doing all of the hard work so that his younger brother can get all the glory!

Jethro - Moses’ father in law, priest of God in Midian. As a descendant of Abraham himself, it is likely that he had a great spiritual input into the life of Moses, a counterbalance to the paganism thrust on him in the court of Pharaoh I his childhood. It is significant that he reappears at Sinai, possibly so that the law and covenant blessings would apply to him as well.

God - God appears in his Shekinah glory at the burning bush and again in the pillar of cloud/fire. He converses constantly with Moses, and allows Moses to see him. These are unprecedented divine revelations, and show that these events are of critical importance to him, and we can surmise from this that these events are of critical importance to the unfolding plan of salvation. God is at the core of what happens, and it is really his story, rather than that of Moses his servant. It is God that allows the slavery to develop, because it will bring about the fulfilment of the covenant promises. It is God that hardens Pharaoh’s heart, so that he can bring on the plagues and punish Egypt for its abuse of his people. And this is also to establish his own position as being higher than all the other alleged gods. It is God who brings the people of Israel out of the slavery of Egypt - into the blazing heat of the desert. Again it all has its purpose. We should take note of this, because so often in hard times we convince ourselves that God has abandoned us and treated us unfairly, not realising that this is part of his plan to bring about blessings for us in the future, and that the hard times are times of training that will equip us for the tasks necessary to gain those blessings.

Q4 For whom was the account written?

This question is wrapped up the question of who wrote it, and when. The Documentary Hypothesis⁴ and its successors have taken the view that these stories were finally collated after the exile, and that they were written for the returning exiles to regain their sense of identity, nationhood and communal faith. You will have guessed from my contributions to the tutor group that I find these ideas of date and collation unconvincing, unnecessary, and unhelpful. The Hypothesis assumes that this bunch of escaped slaves would have been largely illiterate and would have relied on oral tradition. Yet we know that the Hebrews emerged originally from Sumeria, which had well developed writing, and that Moses had been brought up in the Egyptian court where writing would have been commonplace. The literary styles of the Pentateuch can be compared to other literature of the times. So I find no reason to start thinking that the books were not written by Moses himself (albeit through dictation or recording by scribes accompanying him). This is supported by the words of Jesus - “If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me, but since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say?” John 5 v46-47. So it is clear here and throughout the use of the old testament by Jesus that he himself believed that the words were written by Moses.

So if written by Moses himself, let us return to the question - who was it written for? At the time of putting pen to paper it would likely have been simply a diary or record of events, but as the content became increasingly legal, it would have formed the basic law code, presumably the basis of the courts established in chapter 18. (NIV text notes¹ indicate that this chapter may be chronologically after the next few, but placed here to keep a topical arrangement.) So it was written for the people of Israel at the time, to guide their lives and to show them how to live during their travels, the invasion, and once settled in the land. But behind that level of address, we find that God has inspired the writing so that it has had a much deeper meaning, speaking to all generations right down to ours about the path of salvation.

Q5 Five minute Presentation on The Exodus as a Witness to Christ, with background notes max 400 words

2 Timothy 3:16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.¹

2 Peter 1:20-21 You must understand that no prophecy of scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origins in the will for man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. (cf Carried along by wind in Shipwreck Acts 27)¹

Talk based on Christ in all the Scriptures²

I AM

Passover Lamb - 1 Cor 5 v 7,8

Living Bread and Living Water - John 6 48-51

Moses

Delivers from slavery

Delivers new law and covenant

The Tabernacle

The Great high Priest

References

1 NIV Study Bible, Hodder and Stoughton, 1987

2 A M Hodgkin, Christ in All the Scriptures, Pickering, Basingstoke, UK, 1985

3 J Rogerson, Chronicles of the Bible Lands

4 G Wenham, Exploring the Old Testament vol 1 The Pentateuch, SPCK, London, 2003

Appendix

To understand what the Exodus meant at the time, one can put oneself in the shoes of a Hebrew Slave. You are in a condition of forced labour, as your parents and grandparents have been. This is the only life you know, and it has little pleasure. You have some belief in the god of your fathers, and legends that he will one day come and deliver you. Meanwhile, some upstart who has got into favour with the slave masters starts throwing his weight around and acting like a judge, as if he would be the deliverer! You soon see the back of him! But then 40 years later things start to change. You hear that he is back and causing trouble! The first sign of it is new demand to obtain straw and maintain quotas is even worse. Next all sorts of weird things happen - the water is polluted, there’s frogs everywhere, boils break out - the only good thing is that some of the disasters seem to miss your area. But then you start getting really strange instructions about a special sacrifice, and painting blood on your doorframe! Everyone is doing it so you follow along. And then you have to start walking, walking, walking, in the heat of the sun, with children crying, dust everywhere, no meal breaks. Everyone is frightened because there’s an army chasing you, with chariots and spears. You start to think that the slavery was better! There is a huge cloud-thing, that glows in the dark, up ahead - it fills you with dread but you get carried along towards it by the crowd and the fear of the pursuing army. Then you find yourself trapped - the biggest lake you have ever seen is ahead, and the army behind. There is some commotion - the cloud-thing moves round behind you and you run forwards. A powerful wind whips up the dust as you fight against it. The ground becomes unusually damp, and you realise that you are walking on the lake bed, with waves towering each side. The crowd rushes on until the ground becomes desert like again. A pause for breath, as the wind eases off, but there is still the sound of rushing water, and then cheering! You look back and see bodies floating in the water, and people are dancing and singing! At last you start to feel free. But already people are moving on, and over the next few days you move on into the desert. The rations run out, and you get more and more hungry and thirsty. At least in Egypt you has onions to eat! Finally an oasis. You can’t get to the water at first and everyone is complaining. But when you finally get there it is good sweet water. A story circulates that it had been bitter until the leaders chucked some stick into it. Next you are told to eat the fluffy white stuff on the ground - even though you don’t know what it is. It tastes good - but there are all sorts of silly rules about when to collect it. Some days you start to catch a few birds as well, which make you feel a bit better. But still people won’t settle - they say they are going to some “promised land“, but they just seem to be wondering aimlessly in the desert. Then you come to a huge mountain with some scary clouds on it. That trouble-causer climbs up, but disappears for days. Everyone is hankering after their old homes in Egypt, rather than his dusty desert, and they ask Aaron to make a golden calf to remind them of home and make things better. Just when the mood is starting to lift a bit - that trouble causer comes down, right in the middle of it all, and throws a right wobbly and smashes the tablets he is carrying. There is a big row and he storms off back up the mountain. Next time you see him there are loads more rules, some of them really stupid and impractical, but everyone is really strict about them. You chafe against the rules, but can‘t help noticing that things are starting to get more organised. While you are sitting thinking about this, you notice that the sandals you have been wearing since you left Egypt are still in good nick, despite all that scuffing on bare rocks. Perhaps there is someone looking after you all after all!