Exodus 6 | Luke 9 | Job 23 | 1 Corinthians 10

In Exodus 5, we saw that the pressure of leadership was beginning to get to Moses. In frustration, Moses asks why Yahweh has done evil to Israel by sending him, since Pharaoh had only increased his cruelty since Moses had come. While Yahweh’s response in Exodus 6 doesn’t immediately resolve the conflict with Pharaoh, Yahweh nevertheless answers Moses’s prayer by giving him all the assurance that he was seeking—and more.

Yahweh insists that he will absolutely send his people out of the land of Pharaoh with a strong hand (Ex. 6:1). Yahweh hasn’t gotten distracted or changed his mind. He proclaims his perfect resolve to do exactly what he said he would do. Really, this was all Moses was asking to know.

But the second thing we see in Exodus 6 is that Yahweh says more. In fact, Yahweh gives an insight that he had not given anyone before—not Abraham, not Isaac, and not Jacob. Specifically, Yahweh tells Moses his name.

Now to be clear, it isn’t as though none of the patriarchs who went before Moses had heard the name Yahweh. There are many reasons to believe that all the people of God knew the name of Yahweh, including the fact that the name of Moses’s own mother was Jochebed (Ex. 6:20), which means “Yahweh [Yah] is glory [chebed].”1 All the patriarchs knew that God’s name was Yahweh.

More importantly, however, we should see that Yahweh doesn’t say, “I did not make my name known.” Instead, he says, “by my name Yahweh I did not make myself known to them” (Ex. 6:3). In other words, Yahweh didn’t reveal the significance of his name in practical terms. In the Bible, “name” is more than what someone is called. Instead, “name” refers to someone’s character. We say the same thing when we talk about “clearing my name.”

Moses was going to see the character of Yahweh in action. He was going to see Yahweh’s outstretched arm redeem Israel out of Egypt with signs, wonders, and “great acts of judgment” (Ex. 6:6). Even more, Yahweh would take Israel as his people and be God to Israel. The word “take” in Exodus 6:7 is the word that would describe the way a man “takes” a woman to be his wife—Yahweh is entering into an intimate, covenantal relationship with Israel.

But while Moses saw Yahweh’s covenantal love partially through the redemption of Israel out of Egypt, we have a better vision. We get to see that Yahweh, out of covenantal love for his people, took on flesh, died on a cross, and rose from the dead, redeeming his people from sin, death, and the devil.

And so it is that through the great acts of God’s redemption in Jesus we come to know the significance of Yahweh’s covenant—keeping name—until he returns to reveal himself to us fully, face to face.

1 Allen P. Ross, “Did the Patriarchs Know the Name of the LORD?” in Giving the Sense: Understanding and Using Old Testament Historical Texts, ed. David M. Howard and Michael A. Grisanti (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 2003), 323–39.

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Exodus 5 | Luke 8 | Job 22 | 1 Corinthians 9

When Moses proclaims to Israel all that Yahweh has called him to do to lead Israel out of Egypt, we read that “the people believed; and when they heard that the LORD had visited the people of Israel and that he had seen their affliction, they bowed their heads and worshiped” (Ex. 4:31). Moses had accomplished the hardest part of his task by getting the people of Israel on board with the mission, right?

Not quite.

Moses, you see, did know that Pharaoh would refuse to let Israel go (Ex. 3:19), and Moses even knew that God would harden Pharaoh’s heart against letting Israel go (Ex. 4:21). What Moses didn’t know, however, is that Pharaoh would turn the tables on Moses by making the Israelites’ work harder by requiring them to gather their own stubble instead of providing them straw, arguing that the people of Israel were idle. And in fact, it is very possible that the people may have stopped working as hard (or perhaps they might have even stopped working completely) as they waited to be liberated.1

So, the Israelites attacked Moses and Aaron with harsh words after they had emerged from a disappointing conversation with Pharaoh: “The LORD look on you and judge, because you have made us stink in the sight of Pharaoh and his servants, and have put a sword in their hand to kill us” (Ex. 5:21). Moses and Aaron had done everything God had asked them to do, and they faced opposition not only from Pharaoh himself but now also from the people who had been so encouraged the night before.

What do you do, then, when you have sought to obey Jesus, but you find yourself in a worse set of circumstances than before? Moses’s response to this situation is instructive: he prays. In fact, we don’t read that he prayed the sweet, sappy, angelic prayer of a saint who is troubled by nothing in this world—instead, we see one of the angriest prayers against God in the whole Bible in Exodus 5:22–23: “O Lord, why have you done evil to this people? Why did you ever send me? For since I came to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has done evil to this people, and you have not delivered your people at all.”

What we must see in this story (which we will pick up tomorrow) is that God doesn’t rebuke Moses for this prayer—quite the opposite, actually. Instead, God responds right away to Moses’s angry prayer by assuring him that now (Ex. 6:1) is when God would act to save his people.

God hears our angry prayers, and he answers them. The question isn’t whether God can handle your venting to him—the question is whether you trust him enough to pray to him what you are actually feeling.

1 Douglas K. Stuart, Exodus, TNAC, vol. 2 (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 2006), 162–63.

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Exodus 4 | Luke 7 | Job 21 | 1 Corinthians 8

We should not judge Moses too harshly for his fear of confronting Pharaoh to declare God’s word. Moses makes up a variety of excuses in Exodus 4:10 about being less than eloquent and slow of speech, but even when Yahweh reminds Moses that he himself is the one who created the mouth in the first place, Moses finally pleads simply, “Oh, my Lord, please send someone else” (Ex. 4:13).

Yahweh refuses Moses’s request, but we should recognize from this story that the fear of inadequacy is a real experience for those called to serve the living God. What, then, can we learn about our fear from Exodus 4?

First, we should recognize there are good reasons for us to be frightened when God calls us to follow him. In this story, Moses is called to do nothing less than to rebuke the most powerful king on the planet by demanding that he free thousands of his enslaved workforce. What person wouldn’t be afraid of undertaking a mission like that?

Second, we should also keep in mind that, while the world may threaten us to some degree, we face the greatest danger by disobeying God, not by defying the world. In this passage, God holds Moses to a higher standard because of Moses’s call to be the leader of God’s people.

So, even after Moses begins to obey and starts his journey toward Egypt, we read that Yahweh meets “him” to put “him” to death (Ex. 4:24). The language is ambiguous, so that the “him” being put to death could refer to either Moses or a son whom Moses had not circumcised. God had commanded that every male in Israel be circumcised, and when God’s leader failed to circumcise his son, God actually comes to put him (Moses or Moses’s son) to death, and he does not relent until Moses’s wife, Zipporah, circumcises the child (Ex. 4:25–26).

Shouldn’t the people of God be terrified, then, when God calls us to serve him? Yes and no. On the one hand, it is a serious and weighty thing to serve the living God, and we should not take such a calling lightly.

But on the other hand, we should notice in this story the way that God graciously provides a helper and a companion to Moses in Aaron. God is compassionate toward us to meet us where we are even when we struggle to believe that we can do what he asks of us.

More than that, God promises to walk with us every step of the way, providing for us everything needed for what he requires us to do—even when he sends us straight into danger and persecution. Meditate on the words of Jesus: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me….And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:18, 20).

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Exodus 3 | Luke 6 | Job 20 | 1 Corinthians 7

Exodus 3 is a critical passage for understanding how God’s holiness and his love fit together. In this encounter, God both approaches Moses and tells Moses to keep his distance. So, when Moses turns aside to see how a bush could burn but yet not be consumed, God calls out to Moses, warning him, “Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are a standing is holy ground” (Ex. 3:5).

This scene raises a question: If God’s presence is too holy for Moses to come near, then why does God come near to Moses in the first place?

The answer to this question comes as soon as God begins to speak—quite simply, Yahweh approaches Moses because of his love for his people. God explains that he has heard the outcry of Israel and that he will surely rescue them from out of Egypt. This will not be a simple mission, since Pharaoh will not let Israel go unless he is “compelled by a mighty hand” (Ex. 3:19). God therefore promises he will do exactly that: “So I will stretch out my hand and strike Egypt with all the wonders that I will do in it; after that he will let you go” (Ex. 3:20).

It is important that the way we think about God captures both sides of what God does here—on the one hand God comes near to Moses out of love for his people, but on the other hand God instructs Moses not to come near, since God is holy.

First, we need to recognize the seriousness and severity of God’s holiness—that is, we need to honor the do not come near nature of God’s holiness. The holiness of God is a blazing, consuming fire (Heb. 12:29), the kind of consuming fire that melts mountains like wax before him (Ps. 97:5). If we are the people of God, then we should not trifle with his furious holiness.

But second, we should also recognize that God’s deep love for his people compels him to pursue them and redeem them. God’s holiness and his love, then, fit together. In fact, the goal of God’s love is to make us holy precisely so that we may come near to him to dwell with him in holiness—so that we can become his holy people and so that he can be our holy God.

To make his people holy, however, will require far more than for God simply to lead his people out of Egypt. In fact, our holiness will require nothing less than the crucifixion of God’s own Son, so that in Christ, we might become holy, just as God is holy (1 Pet. 1:13–16), and so that we may with all confidence come near to God in the holy places (Heb. 10:19–22).

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Exodus 2 | Luke 5 | Job 19 | 1 Corinthians 6

The early life of Moses includes both high drama during his first forty years and then quiet obscurity for the next forty. He escapes being executed as a male Hebrew infant through a basket (literally, an “ark,” the same word that is used for the ark that had rescued Noah) floating in the Nile River. When Pharaoh’s daughter discovers him, she adopts him and pays Moses’s mother to nurse him (Ex. 2:6–10).

But we also aren’t given an idealized, sanitized version of Moses’s story. When Moses is older, he murders an Egyptian to protect an Israelite and then spends forty years of his life, from age 40 (Acts 7:23) to age 80 (Ex. 7:7), as a simple shepherd with a family in Midian.

Despite the fact that Moses distanced himself from the suffering of Israel for decades while they were groaning under the burden of their slavery, here’s the important thing to remember: “God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel—and God knew” (Ex. 2:24–25).

The reason for Moses’s unconventional rise to leadership, then, is simple: God was raising Moses up to rescue his people out of Egypt by leading them as a shepherd. God had heard their groaning, he remembered his covenant, he saw his people, and God knew. And well in advance of actually calling Moses to be the shepherd of Israel, God had been preparing Moses for precisely this role—to know something of how to approach Pharaoh through childhood familiarity with Pharaoh’s courts, to gain experience defending the people of Israel against their Egyptian oppressors, and to learn how to lead the flock of Israel in the wilderness after leaving Egypt through time spent shepherding actual sheep.

God works in our lives in the same way, even if he doesn’t ever call us to be great leaders. God takes the seemingly disconnected threads of our stories and weaves them together into a tapestry for his overarching purposes in the world, and he does so in ways that we do not understand—in fact, that we cannot understand—this side of glory. Make no mistake, however: God is causing everything to work together for good for those who love him and who are called according to his purposes (Rom. 8:28).

And if our God can redeem the broken life of Moses to stage an extraordinary redemption out of Egypt—and especially if he can redeem the brutal execution of Jesus Christ on the cross to stage our redemption—then God can use even your life and mine to further his purposes in this world. Even when our lives are quiet and seemingly insignificant, God is at work.

Your life is not a mistake. If you are in Christ, then you are a strategic piece of God’s mission in this world.

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Exodus 1 | Luke 4 | Job 18 | 1 Corinthians 5

Exodus 1 explains the transition between the story of Joseph and the story of Moses. When Joseph died at the end of Genesis 50, he was the second most powerful man on the planet, a man seated at the right hand of the pharaoh of Egypt himself. As such, Joseph’s brothers and their families (the entire nation of Israel at the time) received preferential treatment in the Egyptian kingdom.

But Exodus 1:8 tells the story of how this special place in Egypt fell apart: “Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph”—and worse, a king who hated Joseph’s family. With that change of guard, Israel was quickly demoted from a position of power and privilege to one of great weakness and vulnerability.

Making matters worse (humanly speaking) is the fact that the population of Israel has begun to explode, so that we read five times in the first chapter of Exodus (v. 7, 9, 10, 12, and 20) about the rapid increase of Israel—an increase that only exacerbates the new pharaoh’s hatred of Israel and his desire to subjugate them. In fact, Pharaoh’s revulsion toward Israel grows so great that he orders all male Hebrew children to be cast into the Nile River to die (Ex. 1:22).

So in Exodus 1, we see the fulfillment of two sides of the promises that God has been making to his people since the days of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. On the one hand, it is here in Egypt where God begins to multiply his people and to make them a great nation. And yet, it is also here in Egypt where God causes his people to pass through a cauldron of suffering, just as he had sworn to Abraham in Genesis 15:13: “Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years.”

But why does it have to be both? Couldn’t God have multiplied his people, making them into a great nation, without handing them over to suffering?

In fact, Israel’s multiplication and their suffering must necessarily go together. Through this entire story, God will protect and preserve his people, growing them numerically even as they pass through the valley of the shadow of death. And in the fullness of time, God himself will redeem his people out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, displaying his power in the sight of all the nations and taking Israel to be his special people in all the earth.

And in doing so, God foreshadows the way he will ultimately redeem his people through Christ, conquering sin, death, and the devil—not only through Jesus’ own suffering on the cross but also through raising Jesus up from the dead on the third day.

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Genesis 50 | Luke 3 | Job 16–17 | 1 Corinthians 4

As we talked about in the meditation for Genesis 45, Joseph evaluates the suffering he endured in his lifetime in a surprising way. Rather than seeing himself as a victim of thoroughly unfair treatment (which he certainly was), Joseph understood that God had sovereignly orchestrated the events in his life in order to put Joseph in charge of helping Egypt to survive through the seven-year famine, going so far as to say to his brothers, “So it was not you who sent me here, but God” (Gen. 45:8).

And in today’s reading from Genesis 50, Joseph articulates the same perspective. When his brothers begin to worry about whether the death of Jacob might have removed the only protection that was keeping Joseph from seeking revenge against them, they make up a story that Jacob had asked on his deathbed for Joseph to forgive his brothers. When they throw themselves before Joseph, begging for his mercy, he assures them he has no intention of harming them, saying, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today” (Gen. 50:20).

This is astonishing faith, but Joseph is bearing witness to the complicated relationship between God’s sovereignty and our responsibility. Joseph doesn’t ignore what his brothers have done, but he holds them accountable as having committed evil (Gen. 50:20). He certainly forgives his brothers, but he doesn’t downplay the significance of their treachery.

Joseph simply refuses to label his entire life’s experience as evil. Rather, he looks at what has happened and sees the sovereign hand of God—and he evaluates God’s sovereign decrees as good.

While the Bible never fully untangles this mystery of how God’s sovereignty fits in with our responsibility, we do see a rich understanding of this problem that helps us to avoid two opposite errors. On the one hand, the Bible takes evil very seriously—so seriously, in fact, that God’s own Son had to die to confront all the furious powers of hell at the cross—but on the other hand, the Bible also insists that God is sovereign over the affairs of this earth.

He himself never commits evil, even when people like Joseph have to undergo significant evil in their lives. In his sovereignty, he causes all things to work together for good for those who love him (Rom. 8:28), even if each of the specific events along the way are not necessarily the result of good in this world.

The pressing question from this story is not so much to figure out how exactly God’s sovereignty works for good in and through human evil. Instead, the pressing question is this: Will you and I trust God like Joseph did through all the evil that we will face?

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Genesis 49 | Luke 2 | Job 15 | 1 Corinthians 3

Genesis 49 records the final words of Jacob before the patriarch is gathered to his people in death, buried in the same cave as Jacob’s grandparents Abraham and Sarah, Jacob’s parents, Isaac and Rebekah, and Jacob’s wife Leah (Gen. 49:29–33). The bulk of Genesis 49, however, focuses on the blessing Jacob gives to each of his sons in verses 1 to 27.

Now, remember that this kind of blessing on his deathbed is more than kind wishes for the future success of his sons. When Isaac blessed Jacob instead of Esau as he had intended back in Genesis 27, Isaac had no blessing of value left over for Esau. These are actual prophetic declarations from the men with whom God had made his covenant, and the most important promise comes to Jacob’s son Judah.

Here’s the crucial verse of what Jacob says concerning Judah: “The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until tribute comes to him; and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples” (Gen. 49:10). This vivid verse conveys one idea in many ways: out of Judah, God would eventually raise up kings, and the scepter will never depart from these kings from the line of Judah. Someone from the line of Judah will reign as king, and not only will he rule over his brothers (Gen. 49:8) but Judah will even command “the obedience of the peoples”—that is, the peoples of the whole world.

For a long time after this scene, Israel will have no king at all. God himself will rule over his people directly, first through the leadership of Moses, then through the leadership of Joshua, Moses’s assistant, and then finally through the leadership of various judges. Not until we get to 1 Samuel will we see any kind of king reigning over Israel, and, strangely enough, the first king, Saul, comes not from the line of Judah but from the tribe of Benjamin (1 Sam. 9).

But as it happens, God will eventually reject Saul and instead select a boy named David from the tribe of Judah to anoint as his king (1 Sam. 16). And to David, God will make this promise: “When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever” (2 Sam. 7:12–13).

Accordingly, when Jesus Christ was resurrected from the dead in glory, he was exalted and given an everlasting kingdom, to receive glory and honor and praise forever—not only from Israel, but from all peoples.

And in this way Jesus became the Lion of the Tribe of Judah who has conquered (Rev. 5:5), just as Jacob had prophesied.

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Genesis 48 | Luke 1:39–80 | Job 14 | 1 Corinthians 2

In Genesis 48:5–7, Jacob formally adopts Joseph’s sons, Ephraim and Manasseh. There is a solid, practical reason for Jacob to do so: by adopting Ephraim and Manasseh, Jacob gives those sons direct portions of his own inheritance.

So, rather than giving Joseph’s family only one portion of Jacob’s inheritance (which would then be split in two for Ephraim and Manasseh), now both Ephraim and Manasseh command an equal share of the inheritance along with all the other brothers of Joseph. From this point forward, Ephraim and Manasseh are considered tribal heads in Israel along with Jacob’s immediate sons like Judah, Levi, and the others.

Additionally, Jacob insists upon blessing the children of Joseph—his own, adopted children—before he dies. But strangely, Jacob crosses his arms to lay his right hand on Ephraim rather than on Manasseh, the firstborn (Gen. 48:13–14). When Joseph realizes what is happening, he tries to stop his father, but Jacob replies, “I know, my son, I know. He [Manasseh] also shall become a people, and he also shall be great. Nevertheless, his younger brother [Ephraim] shall be greater than he, and his offspring shall become a multitude of nations” (Gen. 48:19). And indeed, when the census is taken in the beginning of the book of Numbers, Ephraim commands over 25 percent more people than Manasseh, 40,500 to 32,200 (Num. 1:32–35).

In the Scriptures, God nearly always chooses for his purposes the people who are most undervalued for whatever reason, whether they are weak, foolish, poor, or barren. For example, God often favors the younger son over the older son, just as he does here in Genesis 48. In addition to choosing Ephraim over Manasseh, Isaac was chosen over Ishmael (Gen. 17:18–21), Jacob was chosen over Esau (Gen. 25:23), and Joseph was favored over the rest of his brothers(Gen. 37:3). Eventually, God will even choose David as his anointed king instead of David’s seven older brothers (1 Sam. 16:6–13), and it is from the line of David that God would later raise up Jesus to reign forever as King.

In choosing the weak instead of the strong, God magnifies his own power, so that the strong cannot boast in their own strength. As Paul reminds the church at Corinth (a group of people who were obsessed with displays of their own strength and power), “God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong…so that no human being might boast in the presence of God” (1 Cor. 1:27, 29).

And why would God do that? So that we recognize that God “is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom and our righteousness and sanctification and redemption. Therefore, as it is written, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord’” (1 Cor. 1:30–31).

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Genesis 47 | Luke 1:1–38 | Job 13 | 1 Corinthians 1

As we discussed yesterday, the last few chapters of Genesis are setting up the story we will read in Exodus—a story of God’s redemption of his people that lives at the heart of the rest of the Scriptures. Genesis 47 charts three key events that establish the foundation for the storyline we will encounter in Exodus.

First, God establishes his people in Goshen. Joseph displays his characteristic wisdom in leading Pharaoh to settle the nation of Israel into the land of Goshen, which was decent land for shepherds. Goshen is a good land, although it’s no Canaan.

Second, God uses Joseph’s administrative leadership to put an incredible amount of power and wealth in the hands of Egypt, making Egypt the most powerful nation in the known world. Given the choice of starving or giving up their lands, the people of Egypt (and even the people who live throughout Canaan) willingly trade away their livestock and their lands to Pharaoh in exchange for food (Gen. 47:13–19). In the process, all these people become the servants of Pharaoh, plowing Pharaoh’s fields and paying Pharaoh a heavy tax from their crops (Gen. 47:21, 23–26).

There is significant irony in this plot wrinkle. In Exodus, Pharaoh will boast as though he himself had built his empire, his power, and his wealth. So, when Moses comes to Pharaoh, claiming that the God of the poor, oppressed Hebrew people has told him to let Israel go, Pharaoh scoffs at their request.

But in Genesis 47, we realize that the source of Pharaoh’s wealth and power is actually Joseph, a son of Israel and a servant of the Living God. Everything Pharaoh had was a gift from God, despite the fact that Pharaoh saw it as clear evidence of his own power and glory.

In the same way, it can be a convicting exercise for us to audit the blessings we have received from the hand of God in order to discover the places where we have misattributed God’s gifts as evidence of our own abilities, goodness, and hard work.

Third, when Jacob asks for his bones to be buried in Canaan, God establishes hope that the people of Israel will only live temporarily in the land of Egypt. Although they will dwell in Egypt for a time, Jacob trusts that God will be faithful to keep his promise and to bring the whole nation of Israel back to the inheritance that God had promised to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.

So as you yourself dwell as a sojourner in this current world, here’s a question for you to consider: Is your hope set on the blessings of your Goshen, or, like Jacob, is your hope set on the fact that one day God will bring you to the eternal inheritance he has promised you in Christ Jesus?

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.