You’ve said it in the middle of the pain: there has to be more to this life than this. Israel lived that distance in Egypt—promised milk and honey yet making bricks from dawn to night, their cries seemingly unheard. Exodus 1–15 traces that groan toward a sea no one can part alone, and asks who can carry a captive people across it.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Where did we lose our way? Our story. Born in the light. It was perfect. But we wanted more. Separated from the light. Surrounded by darkness. From a garden of intimacy to the fiery kilns of Egypt. But he remembers the promise. The voice in the fire. The nation born in chains. The plagues. The blood. The exodus. Stand still and watch the sea part.
Good morning, Harvester. It’s great to be with you this morning. Welcome to everyone here. Great to be here. Welcome to everyone who’s watching online, too. Great to be with you this morning. If you’ve got your Bibles, go ahead and get those out. And let’s see. Hold it up. Let’s make sure you’ve got it. Your phone works, too. It’s harder to write on your phone, but that’s okay. Whatever you need to do this morning, right?
Hey, we are finishing up this first section of this sermon series that we’re in from Eden to Eternity. This first season, if you will. And the season is four weeks long. So we’re on episode number four today, which is called Out of Slavery. And it’s going to be fantastic this morning. We’ve got a lot to cover. So as we think about this, one of the things I want to tell you about, before we get into this, is that a lot of the stories that we’re going to be covering today from Exodus chapter 1 to 15—and go ahead and open up to Exodus chapter 1 in your Bibles—a lot of these stories are familiar. And even if you don’t really know much about the Bible, you probably have heard some of these stories that we’re going to talk about today. And so it’s going to be a little more familiar to you. But also, these are some of the most theologically significant parts of the Old Testament. So this is some really important stuff that we’re looking at here today.
But before we jump into it, I want to set the stage. Sort of a previously on, you know, when you watch a show and like, this is what you missed if you didn’t watch the last episodes. So if you’re just jumping in, here’s what I sort of want to set the scene for you. We started off in the Garden of Eden with creation. And you remember that everything was fantastic in the Garden of Eden. God created it. He looked at it. He said it was good. Creation was perfect. Creation was beautiful. And creation was great. Until it wasn’t beautiful or great or good. And Adam and Eve doubted God’s goodness. And as soon as they did that, sin entered into the world.
And the good creation that God had created all of a sudden became broken. Everything was broken when sin entered into the world. Nature became broken. Our relationships became broken. Even life itself became broken. But in the midst of all of this sort of bad news of everything getting messed up, there was this glimmer of hope in Genesis chapter 3. There was this little drop of what was to come. And God made the promise. He said, I know that it seems ruined right now, but I am going to redeem all of this. One day I will make all of this whole again.
And sin continued to grow. God started over with Noah. And then God started over with a man named Abraham. And he called Abraham to go into a new country. And God made a promise to Abraham. He said, I’m going to make your name great. I’m going to bless those who bless you. I’ll curse those who curse you. I’m going to give you this land of Canaan. I’m going to make you a great family. And in your family, all the other families of the world will be blessed.
And so the rest, honestly, of the Bible, but specifically of the New Testament, is the story of God fulfilling that promise to Abraham. And always keep that promise—it’s Genesis 12, 1 through 3. Keep that promise in your mind as you read all of this, because that’s the lens that we need to view it through. And so Abraham’s family continued to grow. We saw that sometimes his family succeeded, and sometimes they didn’t. And sometimes they had faith, and sometimes they didn’t have faith. But despite all of their shortcomings, God was always faithful to them.
And at the end of the book of Genesis, we see Abraham’s family through his son Isaac, and then his son Jacob, and then Jacob’s 12 sons. They have all grown into about 70 people. And now they are living in the land of Egypt. And God had promised Abraham, I’m going to give you this land, but they had to leave because there was a famine. And so when the book of Genesis ends, if you remember, we’ve got Joseph and the other brothers, the sons of Jacob, are all living in the land of Egypt, and they are favored. They are in a good position because Joseph was faithful, and because of his faith, God saved them through the famine that was in Egypt. And so we end there.
Now let’s think about—remember we talked about that the Bible is made up of sort of these three levels of stories. The top level is what God is doing in all of creation, in all of humanity. And God is moving forward to save all of humanity from the imperfection of sin. He has this remedy of sin that he’s working on. Eventually that leads to Jesus. That middle, what we call the middle story, is how he’s working in specifically what we’re going to see today through the nation of Israel in order to bring the Messiah into the world. And then that lower story is all of those individual little bitty stories that you read about how they did this, and then they did this, and sometimes they were great, and sometimes they weren’t great, and sometimes they were faithful, and sometimes they failed, and they had heartbreak, and all of those sort of things.
And so as we look at this, we see that at the end of Genesis, God, Israel is in the land of Egypt, and they’re favored. But when we pick up in Exodus, for episode 4, Out of Slavery, here’s what we’re going to see today. And I just want to sort of give you this truth that’s going to set everything that we’re talking about here.
What we’re going to see is that as God rescues Israel from slavery, he reveals the pattern for rescuing humanity from sin. Let me say that again. As we see God rescuing Israel from slavery in Egypt, that process, the way in which he does that, reveals the pattern for how he is going to save humanity from sin. So buckle in, hold on, you ready to go? We got a lot of ground to cover, so let’s do it.
We’re going to start off. Now, we’re going to look at all of this in what I would just call three scenes. We’re kind of doing, you know, the movie vibe in all of this, right? The TV episode vibe. This is scene number one. And in scene number one, we see the oppression of slavery.
So as we turn the page from Genesis to Exodus, here are a couple things you need to know. That when you turn that page, two important things. One is about 350 years pass when you turn that page. The story doesn’t go right from one end to the other. There’s about 350 years where we see that the nation of Israel has grown from about 70 or 72 people into a full-blown nation. So there’s a lot that has gone on there.
The second thing that you have to know is that the political landscape in Egypt has shifted significantly. When Genesis ends, Abraham’s family is in a favored position. They are held in high regard because Joseph had saved Egypt from the famine. But when we open the page of Exodus and turn that page, we see that Israel is in a completely different situation. Israel has gone from being a favored people to being a threat. They’ve gone from being a people who were honored to people who were held captive as slaves by the Egyptians.
Now, you may ask, how did that happen? I’m glad you asked because we want to read Scripture to say that. Exodus 1, starting in verse 8, says: “Now there arose a new king over Egypt who did not know Joseph. And he said to the people, ‘Behold, the people of Israel are too many and too mighty for us. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply. And if war breaks out, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape the land.’ And therefore they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with heavy burdens. They built for Pharaoh store cities, Pithom and Ramses. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad. The Egyptians were in dread of the people of Israel. So they ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves and made their lives bitter by hard service and mortar and brick. And in all the kinds of works in the field, in all their work, they ruthlessly made them work as slaves.”
So God had promised this land of milk and honey, right? He’s like, I’m going to give you this fantastic land. And where is Egypt? They’re in a different land and they’re held as slaves. And we literally see Israel living out the curse that God had given in Genesis chapter three. Remember he told Adam, it’s like, curse it are you because you’re going to work, and now the ground is going to resist you. Your work is going to be hard. And Israel is living that out. They are slaves. They work every day from morning till night working for Pharaoh in hard labor, and they never get a rest.
Each day that goes by, the people lose more and more hope because God is silent to their pain and to their struggle.
Now here’s the truth that we see in this scene. Here’s the truth that we see is that the oppression of slavery keeps the life that God designed for you at a distance. Let’s think about that. The oppression of slavery keeps the life that God designed for you at a distance. God had promised Israel a land flowing with milk and honey but yet they were stuck in the land of Egypt.
Now when we look at this, we see that the apostle Paul saw the story of Israel’s physical slavery as a pattern for our own spiritual oppression under sin. When we become slaves to sin, we suffer the effects of a life that is far from what God designed for us to be. Our spiritual oppression of sin mirrors the physical oppression that Israel suffered.
Romans chapter six, verse 16. This is how the apostle Paul said it: “Do you not know that if you present your bodies or you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves to the one that you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness.”
So just as Israel’s slavery kept them from the promised land, kept them from the life that God designed for them, our own sin keeps us from the life that God desires for us. And you can identify with that, right? Because we all suffer the effect of sin. We suffer it physically, right? We have disease, we have damage, and eventually all of us experience death. That’s the effect of sin in our lives.
We suffer the effects of sin relationally as well too. I mean, we have broken relationships. We have isolation, we have depression. We are hurt by the broken relationships that we all have. And we also suffer spiritually. We suffer separation, we suffer addiction, we suffer emptiness and all of these things.
I mean, have you ever really said to yourself, like there has to be more to this life than just what this life is? Have you ever thought that to yourselves in the middle of a pain, in the middle of suffering, in the middle of disappointment, in the middle of brokenness? You’ve thought to yourself, there has to be more to this life than this life. I’ve thought that, there has to be.
Now here’s, let me tell you, here’s the reason why we say to ourselves there has to be more than this life. Because that’s true. We say that because that is absolutely true. There is more to this life than the life that we live that is marred by sin. Because God designed a better life for us. God designed a life that is full of the Spirit and a life that is perfect. But the oppression of sin keeps us from that.
And Israel felt that. They felt that in that they cried out to God. In the middle of their misery though, in the middle of their pain, I love that the Bible tells us that there was hope. I love these verses. Exodus 2, 23 to 25: “During those many days, the king of Egypt died. And the people of Israel groaned because of the slavery and they cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God and God heard their groaning and God remembered his covenant with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. And God saw the people of Israel. And here’s the best phrase, and God knew. God knew the pain and the suffering that they were experiencing. Their cries to God did not fall on deaf ears.
God heard them and then God acted.
And now we come to scene number two, which is judgment and salvation. So just as Israel suffers under the oppression of Egypt, God raises up a deliverer, a man that you’ve probably heard of, Moses. And we learn through this story of Moses. And unfortunately, we’re not gonna be able to tell all the interesting details, but I just want to summarize a couple of things for you.
Is that during this time that Israel was being oppressed—and by the way, God was being faithful to Israel—because Egypt tried everything in their world to stop Israel from growing. They made life harder. They made their work harder. They even decided that they were going to kill all the baby boys to keep them from growing. And they murdered all the baby boys.
And despite that, Israel continued to grow. That was God’s faithfulness because God was fulfilling that promise to Abraham saying, I’m gonna make you into a great nation. Even when Egypt tries to keep you from that. And so in the middle of all that—that Egypt was trying to do to stop them from growing—somehow, through God’s providence and God’s faithfulness, Moses is spared. And Moses actually is raised in the palace by Pharaoh’s daughter.
And as Moses grew up, he decided that he wanted to bring justice to his own people. So he knew he was a Hebrew, but yet he lived as an Egyptian. And one day he decided that he was going to do that, and it failed and Moses had to flee Egypt.
And Moses flees after 40 years in Egypt and never looks back. Moses leaves until he is 80 years old. So for 40 years, Moses worked as a shepherd in the wilderness. And God called him one day and said, Moses, I want you to go back to the land of Egypt. I want you to go to Pharaoh and I want you to tell him to let my people go and bring my people into the promised land.
And Moses said, I don’t think so. I think you have the wrong person. You’re confusing me with my brother who’s really, really good at these things. And God and Moses go back and forth. And finally, Moses understands that this is what God wants him to do. And then these are the instructions that God gave to Moses when he sent him back to Pharaoh.
Listen to these. Exodus chapter six, starting in verse one: “But the Lord said to Moses, now you will see what I will do to Pharaoh. For with a strong hand, he will send them out, and with a strong hand, he will drive them out of the land.” God spoke to Moses and said to him, “I am the Lord. I am the Lord. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as God almighty. But by my name, the Lord, I did not make myself known to them. I also established my covenant to give them the land of Canaan, the land in which they lived as sojourners.
Moreover, I’ve heard the groaning of the people of Israel, whom the Egyptians hold as slaves. And I’ve remembered my covenant. Say therefore to the people of Israel, I am the Lord. I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians and I will deliver you from the slavery to them. And I will redeem you and I will be your God. And you shall know that I am the Lord, your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. I’ll bring you into the land that I swore to give to Isaac or to Abraham and to Isaac and to Jacob. I will give it to you for a possession. I am the Lord.”
And so Moses spoke these words to the people of Israel, but they didn’t listen to Moses because of their broken spirit and harsh slavery. So God tells Moses, I want you to go back because I am going to fulfill my promise to Abraham and I’m gonna bring you out and bring you into the promised land.
And Moses went into Pharaoh and Pharaoh said, I don’t think so. No, let me consider that request. No, I will not let you go.
And so God brought judgment upon the Egyptians because of Pharaoh’s stubbornness. And this happens specifically in the form of miraculous yet devastating plagues that God sent on the Egyptians.
Now, when you look at this and you hear the stories of these plagues, there’s a lot of interesting details. But what I want to tell you is how to understand the plagues because when we see that we go, well, it seems kind of mean or it seems kind of harsh or devastating. But what we see is that these plagues were a form of judgment upon Egypt for the oppression and the suffering that they had caused Israel.
And God brought it on Egypt because that was God fulfilling his promise to Abraham. Remember what he said to Abraham? I will bless those who bless you and I will curse those who curse you.
And if God did not judge Israel or did not judge Egypt for this, he would not have been faithful to his word. And so through Moses, God brought judgment that devastated every aspect of the Egyptian life: their religious life, their economic life, and even their national identity.
I mean, imagine just how the Egyptians felt when they suffered these plagues, that the water in all the land turned to blood. There was the plague of frogs, of gnats, of flies, of the death of their livestock, of boils all over their bodies, of hail that turned to fire, of locusts that ate all the crops, of darkness so deep that you couldn’t see in front of your face. And finally, the most devastating plague of all, the death of the firstborn of every family.
And that final plague is the most devastating because it is judgment upon the Egyptians for killing the Hebrew babies.
Now here’s the truth that we see in all of this. Is that as God prepared to unleash the final plague and stay faithful to his promise to Abraham, he also prepared a path of salvation through that sacrifice. And God said, here’s the way that I’m going to save you from the judgment of the plagues.
And he gave them the instructions for the Passover. And here are those instructions. He said, then Moses called all the elders of Israel and said to them, go and select lambs for yourselves according to your clans and kill the Passover lamb. Take a bunch of hyssop and dip it in the blood that is in the basin and touch the lintel and the two doorposts with the blood from that is in that basin.
None of you shall go out of the door of your house until morning, for the Lord will pass through and strike the Egyptians. And when he sees the blood on the lintel and the two doorposts, the Lord will pass over and will not allow the destroyer to enter your house or to strike you.
You shall observe this rite as a statute for you and your sons forever. And when you come into the land that the Lord will give you, as he has promised, you shall keep this service. For when your children say to you, “What does this mean? Why do we do this?” you shall say, “It is the sacrifice of the Lord’s Passover. He passed over the houses of the people of Israel in Egypt when he struck the Egyptians but spared our houses.”
And the people bowed and worshiped.
You see the only escape from slavery is through judgment. And the only escape from judgment is through salvation. As the horror of the final plague overshadows the land. And can you imagine being at a time when maybe a grandfather and a father and a son are dying all in the same night of the houses of the Egyptians, that the Israelites are celebrating the feast of Passover. And they are celebrating the fact that God is sparing them from the judgment on the Egyptians.
And this feast became an important part of Israel’s identity as they were commanded to celebrate this feast every single year. And centuries later, even when we get to the time of Jesus, He celebrated the Passover with His disciples and He taught them that this Passover is a pattern for how God would save humanity, how he would free all of us from the effects of sin as well too.
Matthew 26, starting in verse 26: “Now as they were eating, Jesus took the bread and after he blessed it, he broke it and gave to his disciples. He said, ‘Take and eat. This is my body.’ He’s referring to the Passover meal. This is my body.”
And he took the cup and he gave thanks and he gave it to them saying, “Drink it, all of you, for this is the blood of my covenant, which is poured out for the forgiveness of many. I tell you, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it with you new in my father’s kingdom.”
See, there’s judgment, but God provides a way through the judgment, which is salvation.
As the horror of the final plague overshadows the land. And can you imagine being at a time when maybe a grandfather and a father and a son are dying all in the same night of the houses of the Egyptians, that the Israelites are celebrating the feast of Passover. And they are celebrating the fact that God is sparing them from the judgment on the Egyptians.
And this feast became an important part of Israel’s identity as they were commanded to celebrate this feast every single year.
And then we have the very last scene.
Scene three, deliverance from Egypt.
It wasn’t enough for God just to tell the Israelites, you know what? I’m going to free you as slaves, but you’re going to stay in Egypt. Remember, God had promised them to go back to Canaan, to the land flowing with milk and honey. And so Israel packed up and marched out of Egypt. And this event is called the Exodus. The way out is what it literally means.
And the Bible itself views the Exodus as the birth of the nation of Israel. And it is sort of that stake in the ground for Israel’s relationship with God. And God will refer back to the Exodus many, many, many times throughout the rest of the Old Testament.
Exodus chapter 12, verse 40: “The time that the people of Israel lived in Egypt was 430 years. At the end of 430 years, on that very day, all the hosts of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt.”
Now it sounds easy, right? It sounds like they just packed up and moved out. But Pharaoh had one more card to play. Pharaoh was not done trying to keep them there. And so Pharaoh ordered his army, horses and chariots, to pursue Israel. And they caught up to them, and they trapped the nation of Israel between their army and the banks of the Red Sea.
And as Israel ran out of options, God stepped in to save his people in the most miraculous way. God commanded Moses to raise up the staff of God and stretch it out over the water. And as Moses did that, the waters began to pile up and the Red Sea divided and they saw dry ground all the way across.
Can you imagine seeing the waters pile up higher and higher and higher, and Israel walks across on dry land? But in the midst of that, Pharaoh said, well, we’re just gonna pursue you into that.
And so Pharaoh orders his army to chase them into the dry ground that is between the walls of water. And this is what happened.
Exodus 14, verse 27: “So Moses stretched out his hand over the sea and the sea returned to its normal course when the morning appeared. And as the Egyptians fled into it, the Lord threw the Egyptians into the midst of the sea and the water returned and covered the chariots and the horsemen and all of the host of Pharaoh that had followed them in the sea, not one of them remained.
But the people of Israel walked on dry ground through the sea, the water being a wall to them on the right and the left. Thus the Lord saved Israel that day from the hand of the Egyptians. And Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore.”
Israel saw the great power that the Lord used against the Egyptians. And so the people feared the Lord and they believed in the Lord and in his servant Moses. Wow, what an amazing scene.
And we learn from this that deliverance from slavery only comes through the power of God. And once again, the apostle Paul sees this event as a pattern for how we are saved today. He wrote this in 1 Corinthians 10, verse 1: “For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud and they all passed through the sea and they were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.
And they all ate the same spiritual food and drank from the same spiritual rock—drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.”
And just as the Israelites experienced a new birth when they walked through the waters of the Red Sea and God delivered them from being slaves in Egypt, they entered the Red Sea as slaves and they came out on the other side as children of God.
What an amazing, amazing scene to see God save them through the water. And the apostle Paul tells us that that is an example of what baptism is for us.
You see, God doesn’t want us to stay in our sin. God doesn’t save us so that we can still live in Egypt. He desires for each and every one of us to live the life that he’s designed for us. But too often we wanna be saved but we wanna still live in our sin. Or too often we wanna be saved but we try to acquire salvation by our own strength, by our own willpower, by our own intelligence.
And too often we want to be delivered by anyone except God’s power. But I wanna tell you today that if Egypt had kept Israel in the land, if Israel had stayed in the land of Egypt, they would have remained slaves forever.
You see, God not only judges the sin, but he gives us a way to escape the sin, and he wants us to be delivered into the promised land. And for us, that is through the waters of baptism. And it’s a beautiful, beautiful thing to walk into the waters as a slave to sin but to walk out of the waters as a child of God, just as Israel did.
Now, after God rescued Israel in a miraculous fashion, Israel celebrated in a spectacular way. I mean, Israel had the party of all parties after this. Like they danced and sang. And what we see is that Miriam, Miriam who was Moses’ and Aaron’s sister, she led the women in song and dance and praising God for his salvation.
And the song that they sang began with these words in Exodus 15, verse 20: “Then Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a tambourine in her hand and all the women went out after her with tambourines and dancing. And Miriam sang to them, ‘Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed. He has triumphed gloriously. The horse and his rider have thrown into the sea.’”
They sang of God’s deliverance from the land of slavery. And here’s my question for you: If you were going to write a song and you were going to celebrate what God has delivered you from, what would your song sound like? What would it say?
Sing it: “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously. For he has delivered me from the bondage of sin. For he has delivered me from the power of addiction. He has delivered me from broken relationships. He has delivered me from my own self-importance. He has delivered me from—I don’t know what yours is—but you do.”
And here’s my question for you: Can you sing that song this morning? Are you waiting to be delivered from the sin that is keeping you a slave? If so, that can happen through the waters of baptism this morning.
Or if you wanted to be saved, but you’re still trying to live in that sin, don’t stay in Egypt. Let God deliver you. Let God deliver you from the sin that is holding you hostage.
We see what we learn most in this passage. What we see more than anything else is that God the Creator is also God our saving rescuer.
Amen. Let’s pray.
Father, the stories that we read about your faithfulness, sometimes they’re just overwhelming. Sometimes we don’t know how to understand them. Sometimes they’re just so overwhelming. For me, they’re so awe-inspiring. And Father, I don’t know how you did it. I don’t know how you performed those miracles, but I believe in my heart that you did.
And I believe that you saved Israel from the hand of slavery and that they walked through that Red Sea and became children of God.
And Father, I know you did the same for me. That when I entered the waters of baptism, I entered a slave to sin, and I came out as a child of God.
And Father, I know that there are people here today who are struggling with that, who are desperately crying out to you to be saved. Father, give them the courage to step forward. Give them the desire to live the life that you designed for them, knowing that it can be today.
It’s in your Son’s name we pray, amen.
Amen.
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