Covenant: Slavery and Deliverance
Exodus 2:23-25, 3:1-12
A Sermon Preached By
Ernest Thompson
First Presbyterian Church
Wilmington, NC
October 19, 2014
We’ve been working our way through the book of Genesis, and we turn now to the second
book of the Bible, the book of Exodus.
Genesis is a kind of prologue - it tells about the beginning of the world and about the beginning
of the nation of Israel.
And now, in Exodus, the main story begins. It’s a story about slavery and deliverance. That’s
the central theme of the Old Testament story, and whether we recognize it or not, it’s also at the
center of our story.
I’d like to look at our lesson in three parts again, and give a little background and reflection on
each.
***
1. Our lesson starts with God’s chosen people living as slaves in Egypt, and crying out for
help. Look at Exodus 2:23-25.
23
After a long time the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned
under their slavery, and cried out. Out of the slavery their cry for help
rose up to God.
24
God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
25
God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them.
The book of Genesis ends with the people of Israel going down to Egypt looking for food
during a famine.
At first they were welcomed because of their brother Joseph who had become a high official in
the Egyptian court.
But then a new king comes who does not know Joseph. They Egyptians begin to resent the
Hebrews and wonder what these foreigners are doing living in their land and eating their food.
So they begin to oppress them, and eventually make them slaves.
And so they people groan and cry out of their slavery.
Our lesson doesn’t say explicitly that they are crying out to God. They may not even remember
who it is they ought to cry out to. They just groan and cry for help - help from whoever might
hear them.
2
And God hears. God is not picky about what we call him or what form our prayers take. The
people groan and cry out. And God hears and takes notice.
God always hears our cries for help, whether we know who we are praying to or not.
And then God remembers. He remembers his covenant with Abraham and with Isaac and with
Jacob. The people may not remember, but God does.
And God looks and sees what is going on.
And God knows. Our translation says, “God took notice of them.” But a better translation is
simply “God knows.” To know here means more than just head knowledge. It’s the deepest
kind of knowing. God hears, and God remembers, and God sees, and God knows.
Unfortunately slavery still persists in the world today, and even in our own country today.
It’s illegal in most places now, but it’s still a reality.
In recent years there’s been more attention to the awful practice of human trafficking where
women and children are kidnapped and abused and treated as slaves.
Last year there was a movie called “Twelve Years A Slave” about slavery in the early days of
our nation.
The movie was very difficult movie for me to watch. It showed the terrible brutality of
slavery. They only way to keep people in slavery is through violence and fear and keeping them
isolated from each other so they don’t rise up and rebel.
The movie also made clear that the masters also lived in fear. And they were also trapped in
this violent and oppressive system.
That was on of Martin Luther King’s great insights in the Civil Rights movement generations
later – that it was not just the blacks who needed to be set free from an unjust system but the
whites also needed to be set from their prejudices and their fears. King insisted that both the
oppressed and the oppressors needed to be set free.
There are also more subtle forms of slavery.
We don’t want to move too quickly to spiritualize this issue. We should not ignore the terrible
problem of those who are literally living as slaves today, or the many ways that those who are
weak continue to be oppressed by the strong.
But there is also a spiritual kind of slavery. In fact the Apostle Paul will argue that all of us are
slaves of something or someone. All of us have a master - the only question is who or what our
master is.
è Exodus begins with God’s chosen people living as slaves in Egypt. In their slavery
they groan and cry out, and there are still many in our world today who are groaning and
crying out. And God still hears, and remembers his covenant, and sees and knows his
people’s suffering.
***
2. And then God acts. God starts by revealing himself to Moses. We read in 3:1-6
3
3Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of
Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the
mountain of God.
2
There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of
a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not
consumed. 3Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great
sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.”
4
When the LORD saw that Moses had turned aside to see, God called
to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And Moses said, “Here I am.”
5
Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet,
for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” 6He said
further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of
Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”
And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
Moses becomes one of the most significant leaders of the Old Testament, but he gifts off to a
surprising start.
He was born a Hebrew, part of the oppressed people. But he was adopted at birth by the
Pharaoh’s daughter, and so he was raised in the Egyptian court.
When Moses grows up he tries to stand up for his people who are being oppressed, and he ends
up killing an Egyptian. But his own people reject him. They ask who gave Moses authority over
them.
Moses is rejected by his own people but he’s also scared that Pharaoh will find out what he has
done, and so Moses runs away.
That’s a fairly common theme in the Bible. People are always hiding and running away.
But God is better at seeking than we are at hiding. And so he finds Moses living away in
Midian tending his father-in-law’s flocks.
God appears to Moses in the form of a burning bush.
God is not very subtle here. But still, we’re given the impression that Moses could have
missed it. Verse 4 says, “When the Lord saw that Moses had turned aside to see, God called out
to him from the bush.”
You get the impression that if Moses had not turned aside to look, if Moses had been too busy
or too distracted and kept on walking, he might have missed the chance to hear from God.
After church last Sunday someone asked me, “Have you ever heard God speaking to you?”
And my answer was “No. And yes.”
I’ve never heard an audible voice. Some people do, but I have not. For me it’s always been
much less direct.
It’s been a conversation with a friend or teacher that opened my eyes. Or it’s been a sign that I
might have missed if I had not been looking. Or maybe a passage of Scripture or a book that
seems to speak directly to me. Sometimes it’s just a longing or a sense of God’s presence.
4
Sometimes God’s speaks in a very direct way. More often he speaks in indirect ways, and so
we have to be listening and paying attention to hear his voice.
For us as Christians the brightest burning bush is Jesus Christ.
In Jesus Christ God comes and enters into human life and history to reveal himself to us and to
speak his word to us.
And so when we want to discover who God is and what God is like and to hear his call on our
lives, we turn to Christ.
è God reveals himself to Moses in a burning bush, and God still reveals himself in many
ways, through sunsets and friends and subtle signs and people in need. God reveals himself
especially in Jesus Christ and in the Bible which points to Christ, and through Christ we
hear God’s call on our lives.
***
3. God’s call to Moses comes in two parts. First God tells Moses what God will do. And
then God tells Moses what Moses will do. And those two things are connected. Look at
verse 7-12:
7
Then the LORD said, “I have observed the misery of my people who
are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters.
Indeed, I know their sufferings, 8and I have come down to deliver
them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a
good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the
country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites,
the Hivites, and the Jebusites. 9The cry of the Israelites has now come
to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them.
10
So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the
Israelites, out of Egypt.”
11
But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and
bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”
12
God said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that
it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt,
you shall worship God on this mountain.”
God doesn’t just hear and remember and see and know – God also comes to deliver.
This becomes the central picture of God in the Old Testament.
God is the one who comes and delivers his people from captivity.
As followers of Christ it’s hard not to see a parallel here with the incarnation.
God comes down once again to deliver his people through Christ.
Through Christ’s teaching and signs and through Christ’s suffering and death and resurrection
through the gift of his Holy Spirit, and once again delivers his people from captivity.
5
The surprise comes in verse 10. God says to Moses, “So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to
bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.”
Moses says, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?”
Moses doesn’t say it, but I would bet that he is thinking, “I thought you said that you were going
to come down and deliver us. So why are you sending me?”
It is still surprising that the way God usually works out his purposes is not by a display of his
power, but rather by sending ordinary, unqualified, frightened people who really wish that he
would send someone else - people like Moses, and people like you and like me.
Moses would like some sign - something to give him the assurance that he really can do this.
And the sign God gives him doesn’t seem very reassuring.
God says “After this is all over, you and the people will gather on this very mountain and you
will worship me.”
I guessing that Moses is looking for something more concrete and practical.
When James Bond accepts a new assignment there is always a scene where someone from the
agency shows him all the cool new tools that he’s getting to take with him - a pen that shoots
poisonous darts, or a car that turns into a submarine, something he can use to save the day.
That’s what I think Moses is looking for, some tricks or gadgets that will help him along the
way.
But here, at the beginning of the journey, the only sign he gets is this - if you’re trust me, when
this is all over you’ll be back in this place with all the nation of Israel and you will all worship
me.
He doesn’t get any gadgets, but he does get a promise. God says, “I will be with you.” And
that’s much better than a car that turns into a submarine.
We might want tools or tricks for our assignments, but what God gives us is a promise. I will
be with you. And, after it’s all over, after you have trusted and obeyed me, you will all gather
and worship me.
God still calls his people to be agents of his deliverance.
It starts with our own deliverance, with being honest about the things that keep us in captivity,
the things that have become cruel taskmasters for us.
It might be an expectation for ourselves that we cannot fulfill, but we are killing ourselves
trying.
It might be an idol, that promises fame and fortune and happiness, but which leads only to
despair.
It might an addiction, an obvious one or a subtle one, that we cannot escape.
It might be a fear that paralyzes us, or an ideology that clouds our vision, or and anger and
bitterness that is slowly destroying us.
We start with our own need for deliverance, from our sins and from our idols and from our
attempts to become our own saviors.
6
But we can’t end there. Once we’ve begun to experience God’s deliverance, God will always
call us in some way to help set other captives free.
It might be by teaching a child to read, which can open up a whole new world. Or helping a
criminal get his record expunged, and giving him a new start.
It might be growing trees in Haiti, or supporting the Christian church in China.
It might be working or praying for healing, or it might be delivering someone from hunger or
from homelessness. It might be sharing our faith, even if it makes us uncomfortable.
è God’s deliverance comes in so many ways, and our call to be agents of that deliverance
can take many different forms.
***
Our lesson from Exodus tells us that God always hears our groans and our cries. God always
remembers his covenant promises. God always sees and God always knows our suffering.
And then God comes.
God comes in burning bushes.
He comes in our friends and in the words of Scripture.
He comes in his son Jesus Christ, and he comes through the power of the Holy Spirit.
God comes to deliver - to set the captives free, to give sight to the blind, to preach good news
to the poor.
And then God calls you and God call me to act - to be a part of his great work of deliverance.
Our job is to notice his presence, and to listen for God’s call.
And then, despite our fears and reasons to say no, to nevertheless obey, trusting God’s promise,
“I will be with you.”
So the question for us this week is, where do we see God’s presence and hear God’s voice?
Where does God want to deliver us from our captivity?
And where does God want us to join him, and to help to set other captives frees?