The Old Testament reading and our sermon text is Exodus, chapter 1, verses 7 through 22. And this is the word of the Lord:

Now there arose a new king over Egypt who did not know Joseph. And he said to his 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 from the land.” 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. And the Egyptians were in dread of the people of Israel. So they ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves and and made their lives bitter with hard service and mortar and brick, and in all kinds of work in the field, in all their work, they ruthlessly made them work as slaves.

Then the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah, and the other Puah, “When you serve as midwives to the Hebrew women and see them on the birth stool, if it is a son, you shall kill him, but if it is a daughter, she shall live”. But the midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live. So the king of Egypt called the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this and let the male children live? The midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them”. So God dealt well with the midwives, and the people multiplied and grew very strong. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families. Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, “Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live.” 

And now let’s turn to the Book of Acts for our New Testament reading. Acts, chapter 5, verses 27 through 32. Acts 5:27-32. And in this passage, the apostles are being interrogated by the Jewish high priest and the council. They had been commanded not to teach in the name of Jesus. And the high priest reminds the apostles that they were forbidden to speak of Jesus. And this is in this passage, we hear these, the apostles’ faithful reply to that. 

So Acts 5:27,32.

And when they had brought them, they set them before the council. And the high priest questioned them, saying, “We strictly charged you not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching, and you intend to bring this man’s blood upon us”. But Peter and the apostles answered, we must obey God rather than men. The God of our fathers raised Jesus, whom you killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him.”

The grass withers, the flower fades. But the word of our God will stand forever.  

Last Lord’s Day we began our study of the Book of Exodus. And The Book of Exodus begins with 70 people–70 Israelite– the children, the grandchildren of Jacob. And of course, they go down to Egypt to escape the famine that was spreading throughout all the land at that time. But over the course of 400 years, these 70 people, they grow to be about a million people– more than a million people. And it’s that fruitfulness–the way that they multiplied, that we considered in part last week. And we saw that that was a blessing from God. It was God who caused the Israelites to grow so numerous and to multiply in the land of Egypt. In fact, it was the fulfillment of his promise, the promise that he had made to Abraham that he should be the father of a great nation, that his descendants should be as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore. 

However, with that blessing came affliction. And this passage today that we are looking at is about the great suffering that the Israelites endured when a new Pharaoh came to the throne. But this passage is also about the great faithfulness of two Hebrew midwives who show us what faith and faithfulness look like in times of affliction. And those are the two themes that we will consider as we look at this passage of Scripture this morning: great suffering and great faithfulness. 

First, let’s consider the great suffering of the Israelites. From one perspective as we consider this passage that we’re looking at this morning. We could look at this as a story of profound ungratefulness, profound unthankfulness on the part of the Egyptians. If you recall, it was Joseph who saved Pharaoh and who saved the Egyptians from a terrible famine. He predicted that this famine would take place when he interpreted the dreams of Pharaoh. He proposed an excellent plan for providing for the people of Egypt for the years of famine that were to come. And Pharaoh appointed him to be the man who would execute this plan for the entire nation of Egypt. And so, if it wasn’t for Joseph, Egypt surely would have been devastated–perhaps destroyed–in the great famine that devastated the whole area of that world at that time. 

But apparently, the Egyptians suffered from a kind of national amnesia. They were forgetful. They didn’t remember that part of their history. Specifically, a Pharaoh came into power who didn’t remember what Joseph and the people of Israel had done for the Egyptians. And so we read in verse 8: “Now there arose a new king over Egypt who did not know Joseph”. And this Pharaoh was not only forgetful or willfully ignorant, but like every other tyrant who has come after him, he was fearful and even paranoid of any potential threat to his power. And so when he saw that the people of Israel, by the blessing of God, that they were numerous, that they had multiplied, that they were filling the land, his heart was being filled with dread. He was filled with fear because this people were so numerous. They were a threat to his own power. They were a threat to the people of Egypt. 

And so what he does then again, like so many kings and rulers who have come after him, is he sows the seeds of fear to the hearts of his people by convincing them that these Israelites are a great threat to their national security. He says in verses 9 and 10, he says, “and he said to his 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 from the land.” 

In verse 10, when Pharaoh says, escape from the land, a better translation of that would be something like “overtake the land”. And so Pharaoh is raising this frightful specter for his people, the Egyptians of the Israelites, becoming strong and mighty, joining with their enemies, fighting against Egypt, overcoming them. And of course, what Pharaoh feared the most, overthrowing his own rule as king of Egypt. 

And so Pharaoh comes, or he suggests he’s, or commands, rather, he is Pharaoh. He commands that they deal shrewdly with the Israelites. And what he means by that is to put them into bondage. And so this is how the Israelites suffered. They were made slaves to the Egyptians. We read in verse 11. “Therefore they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with heavy burdens.” And so they were made slaves. But the more they were impoverished, the more that the Egyptians made life unbearable, intolerable for them, oppressing them, afflicting them, the less likely they were to have large families and lots of babies. Or so that was the thinking. That’s what Pharaoh thought anyway.

And so the Egyptians, not only subjected the Israelites to the physical suffering of hard toil. But in that oppression. They also afflicted them with the psychological suffering of being humiliated. In verse 11, the word that’s translated “afflict”, this involves the idea of humbling or humiliation. And so it was the job of the taskmasters to crush the spirits of the Israelites to break their wills as well as their backs with bondage, with forced labor. And so, so much of the suffering that the Israelites endure in this passage is not just the physical suffering of hard toil, but the abject humiliation and dehumanization that they suffered because of their slavery. Deuteronomy 26:6 says this. “And the Egyptians treated us harshly and humiliated us and laid on us hard labor”.

Several years ago, I read a book called Unbroken, and I know some of you are familiar with that book. After the book came out, they made a movie about the book and the book Unbroken. It’s about an American prisoner of war during World War II, and he was interred in Japanese prison camps. The prisoner’s name, the hero of the book, is Louis Zamperini. And the book details all of the torments, the agony that he had to endure. And by the way, this was not fiction, but this was a true story about his life. And so Louis Zamperini and his other prisoners, they had to. They suffered savage beatings, starvation. 

But in the book, Zamperini says that the very worst thing of all, the torture that nearly destroyed him, shattered him, was that he was forced to clean out a pigsty with his bare hands. Now we think about it, and we might think, if I had to choose between a savage beating and cleaning out a pigsty with bare hands, I think I would choose the latter. But Zamperini said that was the most demoralizing thing, the most soul crushing thing that he had to endure of all that he suffered at the hands of the Japanese. 

There are some tortures that are worse even than physical torments. The loss of dignity, loss of humanity that comes by being oppressed by others. You can see why the slaves of the American south, why they looked to the book of Exodus in the Bible as a paradigm for their own hopes for freedom. Because as a people, they also knew the suffering not only of backbreaking toil, but the dehumanizing, humiliating position that they were put in as slaves to their owners.

And so Pharaoh is trying to crush this people physically and spiritually. But to everyone’s great surprise, Pharaoh’s plan not only fails to reduce the Israelite population, but actually produces a baby boom. Look at verse 12. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied, and the more they spread abroad. And the Egyptians were in dread of the people of Israel.

We might imagine Pharaoh out one day, surveying his realm, inspecting all of the lands over which he ruled. And he sees all these cursed Hebrews with all their kids running around. He thinks to himself, what do I have to do to stop these people from multiplying? What Pharaoh discovered, to his great chagrin, is a principle that history has seen repeated time and time again in the history of the church, and that is this, that the church so often grows as a result of persecution. 

So often the more that a tyrannical ruler, the more that a government seeks to crush the church, to destroy the church, to eliminate the people of God, the more that the church grows. Tertullian put it this way. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. And when God is pleased to grow his church, when she is persecuted, as he does here in this passage, it brings him glory because he shows that he is able to overturn all the purposes of man. 

We read Psalm 2 responsively earlier, and in Psalm 2, here is a picture of the nations raging, the peoples plotting in vain. They set themselves, they are allied together against the Lord and against His Anointed. They are doing everything they can to oppose the Lord. But it says in verse four, “He who sits in the heavens laughs. The Lord holds them in derision”. As Pharaoh and his advisors, as they fumed and sputtered and cursed, as they saw the people of Israel growing more and more numerous as they sought to do all that they could do to crush the people, you could hear in heaven a laugh resounding as the Lord laughed their futile efforts to oppose his purposes to bless his people, to grow his kingdom. 

You’ve heard it said that the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and hoping for different results. And that is essentially what Pharaoh does here. He continues to afflict the Israelites. He continues to stay the course: more oppression, more hardship, more humiliation. “Let’s make them work harder. Surely that will work”. And notice how Moses drives home the intensity of the suffering of the people of Israel. When you read verses 13 and 14, you hear these same words repeated over and over again. He says, “So they ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in all kinds of work in the field. In all their work, they ruthlessly made them work as slaves”. 

Archaeologists have found an ancient Egyptian text that described what happened one day when an Egyptian slave owner went to inspect the work that the slaves were doing. And it gives you a good idea of the kind of cruelty that the Israelites would have suffered. And this is what that text says–this is extra biblical. This is something that was found at some point, but this is what the text says:

“Now, the scribe lands on the shore. That’s the slave owner. He surveys the harvest. Attendants are behind him with staffs, Nubians with clubs. He says to a slave, ‘Give grain’. And the answer of the slave is, ‘there is none’. He is beaten savagely. He is bound, thrown in the well submerged, head down. His wife is bound in his presence. His children are in fetters”. 

That’s the kind of oppression that the Israelites would have suffered as Pharaoh was seeking to gain control over their growth. Well, eventually, Pharaoh realized the futilities of his efforts. He realized it was futile to reduce the number of Israelites through slavery. And so then he decides to go with a more direct and what would surely be a more effective method of population control, and that is mass murder. He tells the midwives of the Hebrews to kill all the baby boys born to the Israelites, but to let the girls live. Now, Pharaoh decided to have the boys murdered, but the girls, they were allowed to live. Pharaoh decided to do that not because he had some kind of soft spot in his heart for little Hebrew girls, but because the Israelites, of all their boys, are being killed. Gradually, they would lose their ability to field an army of fighting men. 

But just as the Lord laughed at Pharaoh’s efforts to reduce the Israelites by slavery, so he laughs at this endeavor as well. And that’s because of the faithfulness of the midwives, which we’ll consider in a minute in more detail, but because of their faithfulness. Not only did the boys survive birth, but Moses says in verse 20, and the people multiplied and grew very strong. And so again, despite Pharaoh’s best efforts, the people keep growing. 

And so, for this reason, Pharaoh took one last step to try to control the Israelite population. You are familiar, of course, with Adolf Hitler’s wicked final solution, which was his plan to murder all the Jews who were living in Europe. Well, this is kind of Pharaoh’s final solution. Now he commands not just the midwives, but he commands all the people of Egypt to kill every baby boy that is born to the Hebrews. And so the people are commanded to take every Israelite baby boy that was born, to throw it into the Nile river to be drowned and so in all of these ways, the people of Israel were suffering. They were suffering from being slaves. The unending brutal toil that they were given, the humiliation that they experienced. Now they are the object of Pharaoh’s murderous designs. And if we were to ask the question, why? Why did this horrible suffering come upon the Israelites? Why is it that this people suffered so in this passage? Well, one answer would be it’s because they happen to live under the reign of a particularly wicked man. 

Speaking of Hitler, I read somewhere, I don’t remember where, that before World War II, before the rise of Hitler, this the name that people would always use whenever they wanted to give an example, kind of the paradigm, the ultimate example of an evil tyrant who does wicked things. The name they came up with or the name that they used was not Hitler, but Pharaoh. Nowadays we speak of Hitler. He is the ultimate example of the wicked ruler. But before Hitler, it was Pharaoh. And as you can see, it was a well earned reputation. 

But there was more to Pharaoh than just the fact that he was an exceedingly cruel despot. There is a deeper spiritual dimension to what Pharaoh was doing here. And to understand this, we need to go back to Genesis, to Genesis, chapter three, just after Adam and Eve fell into sin and their rebellion against God. When the Lord comes to speak to them and to speak to the serpent who tempted them to sin, the Lord says to the serpent that he will put enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. And that is to say, there would be a continual warfare between the people of God and those who are under the sway, under the dominion of the devil. 

And here, of course, it is the Israelites who are the people of God. They are the seed of the woman and Pharaoh. And the Egyptians were the seed of Satan, the seed of the serpent. And therefore the persecution that we read about here, the persecution on the part of the Egyptians and Pharaoh against the Israelites, the people of God, this is just the playing out of that greater cosmic spiritual warfare between the Lord and the devil. 

As powerful as Pharaoh was, not even he could carry out his purpose if God had not permitted him to do all these things that he did under his sovereign rule, that is the sovereign rule of God. In fact, if we go back to Genesis again, we read there that the Lord revealed to Abraham that the Israelites would suffer in Egypt long before it would happen. In Genesis, chapter 15, verses 13 and 14, we read this:

“Then the Lord said to Abram, ‘Now 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 400 years. But I will bring judgment on the nations that they serve. And afterward they shall come out with great possessions”.

Now, when God is telling Abram that his descendants will suffer in the land of Egypt for 400 years, he is not telling Abram that on the basis merely of what he foresaw as happening in the future. But God is telling Abram, “This is my will. This is my decree. This is my purpose for the people of Israel, for your descendants, that they should suffer in the land of Egypt”. 

And so it was God’s purpose. It was God’s plan. As wicked and evil as Pharaoh was, he was raised up by the Lord in order to fulfill his purposes, his will for his people. But that raises the question, why? Why was it God’s purpose for the people that he chose, the people that he loved, that they should suffer in this horrendous way? Why did God allow this? Why was this part of his plan to save his people? 

Now, of course, we cannot give an exhaustive answer to that question. God’s ways are higher than our ways does not reveal to us all of his purposes. But we can give the beginning of an answer to that question, and that is this. That God ordained the suffering of the Israelites in Egypt. Because if their experience in Egypt, if the Israelites, while they were in Egypt, if only they received blessing after blessing, if their experience was only one of pleasure and goodness and prosperity, they would have forgotten all about God’s promise to lead them into the land of Canaan. They would have no hope of that promise. And not only that, they would have never thought about God at all. Their hearts would have been filled with all the good things of this life that they received in Egypt. And God and his salvation, his promises, would have faded quickly from their minds. 

And it’s the same for you and me as Christians. We all suffer in one way or another. And most of the time, it’s impossible to answer the question, why am I suffering so often? It seems so inexplicable. But one reason that God allows you and me to suffer is this. So that we will fix our hopes upon Jesus Christ and on the salvation that he has accomplished for us in his death and resurrection. Just as the Israelites here in Egypt, if they had experienced nothing but blessing, nothing but good times, they would have had no desire for the promised land. 

So in the same way, if everything in your life is perfect, if everything in your life goes exactly according to the way you want it to go, with no suffering, no affliction, you’d have no inclination in your heart at all to seek after God and His saving grace. One author put it this way. He said, “It is hard enough for us to leave aside the treasures of this evil world, even though we suffer in it. How much harder is it for us to desire the new heavens and the new earth when our lives here are so comfortable?” 

So that is one reason that God allows His people to suffer. Perhaps not the only reason or the entire reason. But we can know this, that just as he did with the Israelites, God has a purpose. He has a reason for your suffering. And he says to you today, and whatever it is that you may be experiencing that is very difficult, unpleasant. He says, that is part of my plan for you. That is part of my perfect, my loving, my wise plan for you, for your eternal good. Maybe not for your good in this life, but for your eternal good. 

And so the hope that you have as a Christian, the hope that God gives you as a believer in Jesus Christ, it’s not a promise that your life in this world will be one of uninterrupted blessing and good and. And pleasure, a life free from pain and sorrow. But the promise that God, That God makes to you in Christ is this, that he will use the sorrow and pain that he brings into your life to bring about an eternal blessedness that will far outweigh our light. Momentary afflictions in this life. A blessedness that is for eternity, for your good. And so we can learn then, from the great suffering of the Israelites in this passage. And out of this story of great suffering, Moses shows us an example of great faithfulness. Great faithfulness. And this is the faithfulness of the two Hebrew midwives. Their names are Shipra and Puah, or Shiphrah and Puah. The very fact that Moses gives us their names is very significant. You’ll notice not even Pharaoh is named here. There’s no other Israelites in this passage that are named but these two Hebrew midwives. He gives us their names, and their names are recorded in Holy Scripture for all time to please the Holy Spirit. To do this. Because of their faithfulness to God. Because of their faithfulness to God. 

So Pharaoh commanded that the midwives must kill every single baby that was born to the Israelite women, that is, every single baby boy. And thankfully, these midwives, who most likely were Israelites themselves, thankfully, the. They had no intention whatsoever to go into the business of killing the babies of their own people. They were midwives they probably, no doubt they had a special care and concern for the babies that they delivered. And so Pharaoh’s command to them especially would have been utterly repugnant. And so they simply ignored what Pharaoh told them to do, and they went off and they did their job and they resumed delivering healthy baby girls and baby boys. 

And it could be, perhaps, and this is speculation, but perhaps these midwives said to one another something like the disciples said before the Jewish council, we must obey God rather than men. Perhaps they were the first Israelites to say that. 

Now we could imagine again Pharaoh out surveying his realm, and he notices that despite the clear commands that he gave to the midwives, that they kill every baby boy that is born. He looks around and he sees all these little baby toddlers and their boys, and they’re scampering all over the place. And he thinks to himself, why are they there? Why have these midwives not been putting to death the baby boys as I have commanded them? And so he calls them to the carpet, and he tells the midwives, this in verse 19. Or he asks the midwives, what’s going on? And the midwives say this in verse 19, because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them. 

If that sounds a little fishy to you, it should. But incredibly, Pharaoh accepted this explanation. One author said this Pharaoh may have been a few bricks shy of a full pyramid, but he accepted this, this explanation. We know that he did, because the midwives go on to live. If he knew it was a lie or even suspected it was a lie, he surely would have had him put to death. 

But what the midwives do here raises a very important, a very difficult ethical question for us as Christians, and that is this, is it ever justified to tell a lie? This has been debated in the Church, and some theologians, past and present, have given the answer, no, never. For example, Augustine, John Calvin, two theological titans, they have weighed in and said both. They have both said that the midwives here were guilty of sinning against God when they lied to Pharaoh. But other theologians have said, other scholars have said that in dire circumstances like these here, in circumstances where a life is at stake, then it may be justified to use falsehood to tell a lie. And my own belief on this, and though I confess I do hold it with a bit of discomfort, but my own belief is that the natural reading of this passage from Exodus would support the view that in extreme circumstances a lie may be justified. And the classic example that is always given to illustrate the dilemma that Christians could potentially find themselves in is the example of what if you were living in the Netherlands during World War II and your family was hiding Jews in your house, and the Nazis come knocking on the door and they demand to know if you have Jews in your house? Well, if you tell them the truth, obviously all those people you are trying to protect will be sent off to the concentration camps. But the only way to save them would be to say no, to lie. 

And that is basically the situation that the midwives find themselves here. They lie in order to protect human life. And I believe that that is justified. But I think it’s also important for us to keep in mind that probably none of us will ever be in this kind of extreme circumstance. Most of the time when we are tempted to lie, it is not because someone’s life is at stake, but because we want to save ourselves from embarrassment or shame, or we want ourselves to look good. That is not a justification for using falsehood or exception. We can’t look to the Hebrew midwives as an example for us then. But here the Hebrew midwives were in an extreme situation. They resort to falsehood. And because they did so, they saved the lives of the Israelites. And they were blessed for their faithfulness. They were blessed for what they did. Look at verses 20 and 21. So God dealt well with the midwives, and the people multiplied and grew very strong. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families. 

But let’s ask this question. What was the secret to their faithfulness? How is it the midwives could show such courage, not only in disobeying Pharaoh’s command, but in using this excuse, this lie, really, to risking their own lives and saying that in order to continue to protect Hebrew babies, what was the secret to their faithfulness? Well, it’s what Moses says in verse 17 and verse 21. He says that the midwives feared God. They feared God. 

Not only did they not want to kill babies, but they knew that it would be a sin against the Lord. They knew it would be wicked and evil in the sight of God for them to take part in murder. And they feared the consequences of sinning against God more than they feared the consequences of disobeying Pharaoh, even though that might mean their own death. They feared God more than they feared man. 

And it was out of that fear of God that they were faithful. You could put it this way. They had faith. And faithfulness always starts with faith. And for you, what this means is this, that unless you are convinced in your heart. Unless you are convicted in the reality of the lordship of Jesus Christ that you are accountable to him for all that you think and say and do. Unless you know in your heart that one day you will come before his judgment seat, that you will give an account of your life to the Lord Jesus. Unless you truly believe that, unless you believe that man will always loom larger in your thoughts than God, and you will fear man. And what man can do more than you will fear the Lord. 

And so faithfulness begins with knowing Christ, knowing who he is. And if you sincerely desire to serve and honor Christ in this world, there will be a time, there will come a time when you must choose whether you will please man or whether you will please God. The choice will be stark. You can’t do both. You must choose. 

For you young people, perhaps it will be a situation in which your friends want you to go along to do something with them that you know is wrong. And you feel that pressure. You want to please them, you want to get along, but you know it’s not right. Perhaps for others. At work, your boss pressures you to write a false report to help your company. Or maybe you’ll find yourself in a position someday when you’ll need to take an unpopular stand on the word of God in some issue in which everybody else is taking the opposite stand. 

What will you do then? Will you compromise the integrity of your faith as a Christian? Will you say and do only what will make others happy? What will make your life comfortable? What will enable you to get along with others? Or out of fear of God, love for Christ? Will you risk a job? Will you risk a friendship? Will you risk being despised by saying and doing what will please the Lord? 

Well, how can you say, like the midwives said, like the apostles said, how can you say I must obey God rather than man? How can you be faithful? Well, your faithfulness begins with trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ, believing in him as your Savior and Lord. Is this where your faith is today? By faith in Christ, are you ready to obey God rather than man? 

And so the midwives, they show us what great faithfulness looks like in times of great suffering. It is believing in God’s truth, acting out of that faith in Christ, and not out of fear of man. 

And as we wind up our look at this passage, just a few final thoughts as we consider the Israelites, where they are now, in God’s dealings with them. They are in Egypt. He has promised to bring them into Canaan, the promised land. But the way to that promise was the way of suffering. First they had to experience this affliction in Egypt before they would be brought into the promised land. 

And then the experience of the Israelites, we begin to see in faint outline the experience of Jesus Christ himself. Because before his exaltation, before his enthronement as the Lord of all, as the Savior of his people, he had to suffer. He first had to suffer humiliation. He had to suffer the disgrace, the humiliation, the curse of the cross on behalf of sinners like you and me, before he could be resurrected and brought into his glory. 

And as a Christian, for you, that is the same way, the same path to salvation in life. It is a path that is often filled with sorrow and pain and affliction. The Bible says that through many tribulations, through many tribulations, we must enter the kingdom of God. 

And if you have a right understanding of your suffering, if you understand that it takes place under the sovereign rule of a wise and holy and good God, and not just God, but a Father, a Father who loves you, that it is for your good, and even in suffering, you will be able, like the midwives, to. To show great faithfulness to the Lord. 

And when you do, you give glory and honor to Christ in a way that you couldn’t do if your life was nothing but sweetness and light, if your life was only one blessing after another, never mixed with pain or sorrow and adversity. Imagine that was your life. And you tell somebody, I love God, I love Christ. They would think to themselves, of course you do, because you experience nothing but blessing in this world. 

But when you say you believe in a Savior who loves you, when you honor Christ in the midst of suffering, then your faith really glorifies Christ. And it glorifies Christ because you are telling the watching world this, that the reality of the truth of God, the reality of God’s promises to me and Jesus Christ are far greater than the suffering that I’m enduring now. 

And even though from all appearances it seems that there is no God in heaven who loves me and is caring for me, yet I know there is. I believe there is on the basis of his word, on the basis of his promises. And therefore I will serve my Lord. I will serve and worship my Redeemer even in the midst of my affliction, just as the Hebrew midwives did. 

And that is a powerful testimony to the truth of the Gospel and to the truth that Christ is Lord. And so great faithfulness in times of great suffering brings great glory to Christ. 

Let’s pray.

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