The Old Testament reading is Exodus 2:1-10 and this is the word of the Lord. “Now a man from the house of Levi went and took as his wife a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son and when she saw that he was a fine child she hid him three months. When she could hide him no longer she took for him a basket made of bulrushes and daubed it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child in it and placed it among the reeds by the riverbank. And his sister stood at a distance to know what would be done to him.

Now the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river while her young women walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her servant woman, and she took it. When she opened it, she saw the child, and behold, the baby was crying. She took pity on him and said, this is one of the Hebrews children. Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, shall I go and call you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you? And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, go. So the girl went and called the child’s mother.

And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, take this child away and nurse him for me, and I will give you your wages. So the woman took the child and nursed him. When the child grew older, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter and he became her son. She named him Moses because, she said, I drew him out of the water.” 

And now let’s turn to Hebrews 1:23-28 for the New Testament reading. Hebrews 11:23-28, but keep your place there in Exodus. So as you know, Hebrews 11 is the hall of fame of faith, a list of all of the saints who walked by faith and who were obedient to the Lord by faith.

And verses 23 through 28 concern Moses and his faith, which really began with his parents. The first part of this is really talking about his parents’ faith. So I’ll read verses 23 through 28. “By faith, Moses, when he was born, was hidden for three months by his parents because they saw that the child was beautiful and they were not afraid of the king’s edict. By faith, Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin.

He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward. By faith, he left Egypt, not being afraid of the anger of the king, for he endured as seeing him who is invisible. By faith, he kept the Passover and sprinkled the blood so that the destroyer of the firstborn might not touch them.’

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

When we left off a couple of weeks ago in Exodus, at the end of chapter one, at that point, the people of Israel in Egypt, they were in dire straits. They had grown so numerous that they became a threat to Pharaoh, and so he began a series of steps in order to decimate the population of Israel and we considered those a couple of weeks ago and all of that culminated in Pharaoh’s edict to all the people of Egypt that they were to drown all the Hebrew baby boys that were born to the Israelites and so in that way he would control the population, control the people of Israel, that they could remain his slaves. 

So at the beginning of Chapter 2 here, the circumstances for the people of Israel are very bleak. Pharaoh, the enemy of God’s people, really the enemy of God, he seems to be on the brink here of destroying the nation of Israel. But it’s right now at this time that in the wisdom of God, the perfect wisdom of God, and under his sovereign lordship over the whole world, it was just at that time that the low point, the nadir of the sufferings of the people of Israel, that the Lord acts. When things were at their darkest, when all hope seemed to be lost, God was at work to raise up a man who would bring salvation to his people.

And that’s what this passage is all about. It’s about the birth of Moses, the great leader of Israel, who would lead his people out of Egypt, out of their bondage to Pharaoh, and bring them into freedom. And ultimately, not Moses, of course, but Joshua, would bring them into the promised land. But this is the account of his birth.

I said a few weeks ago that the Exodus is the gospel of the Old Testament. The exodus of Israel out of Egypt this is the great salvation event that the Old Covenant Israelites that they celebrated as the the preeminent act of God in bringing deliverance to them and if the gospel of the New Testament begins with the birth of the Savior Jesus then the gospel of the Old Testament begins with the birth of Moses And as we consider this account of the birth of Moses, we learn some things about the way in which God works out his saving purposes for us in Christ.

And so we’ll take three lessons from this passage about God’s saving work for us. First of all, as we’ll see, salvation is entirely the work of God. Secondly, salvation is deliverance from the judgment of God And thirdly, salvation is yours by faith in God. So those are the three lessons that we’ll take from this passage this morning. First of all, salvation is entirely the work of the Lord, not our work, but God’s work. And one way we can see how that is true from this passage is to consider the condition of the Israelites, the position that they were in.

They were hopeless. As chapter 2 begins, the Israelites are in bondage to Pharaoh, and humanly speaking, they have no hope of deliverance. There is nothing in their situation to make us think that even though they are a numerous people, that they have any real possibility of freeing themselves from the bitter yoke of Pharaoh. They were hopelessly enslaved to the Egyptians. And their bondage here is meant to be for us a picture of the bondage that we are in by nature because of our sin. As sinners, you and I are born into a situation in which, like the Israelites, we are hopelessly enslaved.

But of course, our enslavement is not to some Egyptian taskmasters, but our enslavement is to the sin that indwells in us. that reigns over us apart from the grace of God. Jesus said as much. He said, truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits a sin, and that is, of course, everyone, everyone who commits a sin is a slave to sin. Now, as slaves to sin, we are willing slaves. We have sold ourselves into slavery, but nevertheless, we are helplessly, hopelessly in bondage One of the reasons why we so often don’t have a greater appreciation, a greater love of the gospel, of the truth, of what God has done for us in Christ, there’s the reason why we don’t appreciate that or understand it as we should is because we don’t truly comprehend just how helpless just how hopeless our condition is as those who are enslaved to sin we choose to sin to be sure but because we are sinful by nature because from the moment we are born our hearts are corrupt We have inherited that original depravity, that corruption from our first parents, Adam and Eve, and for that reason, although we choose to sin, we will always choose to sin.

Again, apart from the grace of God, the only course we will take is to rebel against God, to pursue our own sinful desires, to hate Him, and to flee from Him, and to have nothing to do with Him. that is bondage, that is slavery. It is just as a miserable helpless condition as the Israelites were here in Egypt. Not only are we enslaved to sin, but we are dead in sin. There is no life in us. It is against the background of that truth of what we are apart from Christ, before the grace of God, it’s only then that we can begin to appreciating, to give thanks to God for how marvelous, how wonderful His grace is to us, that He has set us free from that sin, that He has made us alive in Christ.

And this is the sovereign work of God in our salvation. This is the truth that we are saved by God’s work, by His action, by His initiative and power and not by our own, not even by helping God a little bit. It’s not as though God saw that we had stumbled and fell and he lends us a helping hand if we will only reach up to him to grab that hand. You’ve all heard the saying, God helps those who help themselves. That’s actually one of the most popular Bible verses that’s really actually not even in the Bible.

I just read the other day that apparently 75% of Americans believe that that is a Bible verse. God helps those who help themselves. But that is not in the scripture and it’s certainly not true when it comes to our salvation. God doesn’t help those who help themselves because there’s no one who helps themselves to free themselves out of their bondage to sin. Just as a corpse does not help himself to become alive, we cannot help ourselves to free ourselves from this bondage, that God in his sovereign power, looking upon us in mercy and pity, he delivers us from our bondage.

He makes us alive together with Christ. And so that’s one way in which we have a picture here of this truth that for you and me as Christians, salvation, we always need to remember that salvation is the sovereign work of God. But there’s another way in which this passage shows us that salvation is entirely God’s work, and that is the amazing providence of God. This passage just is a wonderful testimony to God’s providence, that is, His rule over all things that take place in all creation. In verses one and two, we read this. “Now a man from the house of Levi went and took as his wife a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son. And when she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him three months.” By the way, we learn later in the Old Testament the names of Moses’ parents. His mother’s name was Jochebed. His father’s name was Amram. And for some reason, Jochebed, Moses’ mother, she was able to keep it a secret that she had given birth to a baby boy for about three months. And so she was able to somehow keep his crying from alerting The Egyptians that there was a child, an infant in this house, possibly a boy that they of course would be commanded to drown. She was able to do this for three months. Probably after that time as babies do, they grow, their cries become louder it became impossible to hide him any longer.

 And so it says in verse 3 that she “took for him a basket made of bulrushes, endowed it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child in it and placed it among the reeds by the river bank.”

A bulrush is apparently a kind of a grassy plant that grows in the water. Another name for it would be a papyrus reed. And the bitumen and pitch, they were either tar or some kind of a tar product that was used to seal this basket to make it waterproof so that it would float. and we’ll have more to say about this so-called basket later, but probably the idea here was that Moses’ mother would put Moses, the infant, in the basket and set it on the Nile River to hide it during the day, then at night she could go to her son in the basket, take him out, hold him and nurse him, and in that way she would be able to keep him alive.

And so God used the craftiness of Moses’ mother to keep him alive at least for a time. But then something happens here that was completely out of the control of the parents of Moses. God intervenes in the most remarkable way. One day, as Moses is floating in his little basket on the Nile River, it just so happened, quote, unquote, coincidentally, that the daughter of Pharaoh went to that very place that day to take a bath. This was the daughter of the very king who had decreed that every baby boy of the Hebrews should be murdered.

But God had given this girl a different spirit. A different spirit than that of her father. She had a sense of humanity, of compassion. And so rather than carrying out her own father’s decree that this baby should be drowned in the Nile, she took pity on this baby boy in the basket and she saved his life. If you think about it, this is the providence of God because there was probably only one person of all the Egyptians who could get away with disobeying Pharaoh’s decree. That would be his own daughter. She would be the one person that he would not put to death for disobeying his commands.

But she is the one who comes and happens upon this basket with Moses inside of it. And not only that, but God used the sister of Moses as well to save him from death. Again, we know elsewhere from the Bible that the sister of Moses, her name is Miriam, and Miriam’s part in all of this was to stand at a distance and to see what would happen. And it wasn’t the case that she was just standing there to watch him if he dies, but she was standing there in case there was a situation in which she could protect her baby brother.

And indeed she can. And Miriam, She had the intelligence and the courage to go up to Pharaoh’s daughter and she says to Pharaoh’s daughter, “shall I find a Hebrew woman to nurse her for you?” We might fill in the lines a little bit. Maybe she said something like, I know just the perfect woman to nurse this baby boy. She would be ideal for the job. Of course, she’s thinking about the baby’s mother, her own mother too. And so Miriam brings her baby brother, or she brings Moses’s mother to Pharaoh’s daughter, and then Moses’s mother is able to take Moses, her son, home to care for him, to nurse him in perfect safety.

And she even gets paid for it. And I’m sorry to say this, moms, but probably in the history of the world, this is the first and only time that a mother ever got paid to take care of her child. But the point here is the way in which this all worked out so providentially. Moses was kept alive through these extraordinary events and under the lordship, the rule of God over all these things. And the Lord not only preserved the life of Moses, but in his absolute control of all things, he saw to it that Moses would be perfectly equipped to be the one who would lead the people of Egypt or the people of Israel out of Egypt.

First of all, Moses, the baby, would be taken care of. He would be nursed and loved by his own mother and father. And so he was with his parents during the most formidable or the most formidable or formative rather. He was with his parents during the most formative, the most impressionable years of his life. He would have been nursed in that day and age probably until he was three or four years old. And by that time, a love of his family, a love for his people would have been indelibly impressed upon his heart because of the love that he received from his mother and his father and his family.

And so already he has been by the providence of God to identify with the people of Israel as his people. These are his people. This is his family. And then later, of course, again, in God’s providence, Moses is raised up in Pharaoh’s household. And there he received what would have been a world-class education, world-class training. He would have studied linguistics, mathematics, astronomy, architecture, music, medicine, law, and diplomacy. And all of that education and training would have formed the bind of Moses to be the perfect person to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt and to lead the people of Israel in their wilderness wandering for 40 years.

And of course, that very education in Pharaoh’s court was also what enabled him to write the first five books of the Bible. But all of that is in the future. For the present, at this time, in this passage, the parents of Moses, all they knew was the suffering, the anguish that they were enduring Knowing that despite their best efforts to preserve the life of their son, he very likely could have died in the waters of the Nile. He could have been discovered by any other Egyptian who would have drowned him. And no doubt at this time, the parents of Moses were wondering, thinking to themselves, why?

Why did God allow this? Why are we living under these circumstances? Why is our son, our precious son, our baby boy, why is he living under a death sentence? But of course, as we’ve seen, God had a purpose, even in this desperate situation. He was preparing Moses to be the deliverer of Israel. My parents and sister and I, we once knew a young lady who had to have a bone marrow transplant. Actually, she was going through a bone marrow transplant at the same time my sister was. And so they got to know each other and we got to know her a little bit. They both had leukemia, so they had to have this transplant. and sadly she did not live very long this, my sister’s friend, this young girl that she met she didn’t live very long after the transplant but at some point during her treatment she came to saving faith in Christ she was probably in her late teens, early twenties and she said to my sister something that sounded pretty amazing at the time or maybe even perplexing to someone who didn’t understand what she meant. But she said to my sister, I can see now how all of the pieces of my life are starting to fall into place for me.

Now, on the surface of that, from a human perspective, that sounds just absurd. Here she was, a young woman, again, probably in her early 20s. She’s been diagnosed with this deadly disease. She’s dying from this disease. How could it be possible that all of the pieces of her life are starting to fall into place? But of course she was speaking of her life, not in terms of whatever life she would have in this world, but she was speaking of her life in terms of eternity, in terms of salvation, in terms of her standing with God.

And she came to understand, after she came to faith in Christ, that this also was in the providence of God. that he allowed her to be diagnosed with this cancer that he was pleased to use this disease in her life to bring her to faith in Christ and that’s how all the pieces were falling into place for her that God in his providence was using even this terrible disease, this terrible circumstance to bring her to that salvation that he had appointed for her and chose her for even from before the foundation of the world and I believe that she is in glory with Christ now.

But what if she hadn’t gotten sick? What if she had lived a healthy life? She would still be alive now, probably. But would she know Christ? This was the way in which he brought this beloved soul to himself. So God works even through suffering to bring about his redemptive loving, saving purposes for his people. And there are times when you and I suffer. And we have no idea why this is taking place. Why are we in these circumstances? Why is this happening to me? And when God has allowed you to experience that, to suffer in that way, some loss, some affliction, some inexplicable, some incomprehensible turn in your life, You don’t see how it all fits together, but one day you’ll see how all the pieces are falling into place according to God’s ordering all things for your good, for your salvation.

Even those things that afflict us, the painful things, the grievous things, the suffering, he uses that too to bring about that salvation that he has given you in Christ. So salvation is entirely the work of God. 

The second lesson is salvation is being saved from the judgment of God. So in verse three, when it says that Moses’s mother built him a basket, the word that is used there for basket in the original Hebrew, the word in Hebrew is the word that is translated ark. and the only other place in the Bible where this particular Hebrew word for ark appears is in the story in Genesis of Noah and his ark.

And that’s significant because what that means is we are supposed to read this passage in the light of what we read back in Genesis of Noah and his ark. And they are both stories of God’s salvation, his saving work for his people. With Noah, God saved a tiny remnant of humanity from drowning in the floodwaters by preserving their lives in the ark. And here in Exodus chapter 2, God saves Moses from drowning in the Nile, or from being drowned in the Nile, with an ark. And if Noah’s Ark was the means of salvation from the floodwaters of God’s judgment, then the Ark of Moses was also pointing to a salvation that would be a salvation from the judgment of God.

In this case, it is that Moses was saved by an ark so that he could later save God’s people from God’s judgment. As we’ll eventually get there, but as we look ahead in Exodus, you’ll recall that The Lord brought ten plagues upon the people of Egypt, and that tenth and final plague, the worst of them, was the death of every firstborn in all the land of Egypt. And that’s when the angel of the Lord passed over the entire land of Egypt. He struck down every firstborn of man and beast. And the reason why the Israelites were saved from that awful judgment was because God had commanded the Israelites to sacrifice a lamb that very evening, to smear the blood of that lamb on the doorposts of their home, on the lintels of their doors.

And when the Lord saw the blood of the lamb on the house of the Israelite families, He would spare those families from the judgment of the death of the firstborn in that home. And so in this indirect way then, even here in the infancy of Moses as he’s placed in an ark, the Holy Spirit is indicating in this way that God is going to bring salvation to his people Israel, a salvation from the judgment of God that would fall upon the entire land of Egypt. Now as Christians, part of our Christian vocabulary, the language that we use is we talk about how we are saved.

We might talk about, I remember the year or the day, maybe, when I was saved. Or we might talk about a friend. I don’t know if he’s saved. But how often do we consider exactly what are we saved from? What did Jesus come to deliver us from? What is our salvation all about? Well, Jesus didn’t come to save us from suffering. We would love that, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t we? Jesus had come to save us from all suffering, but that’s certainly not true. He didn’t come to save us from poverty or illness or physical death. He didn’t come to save us from unpleasant, uncomfortable circumstances, but he came to save you and me from the wrath of God.

He came to save you and me from that judgment that we have brought upon ourselves because of our guilt and sin before God. He saves us from everlasting condemnation, from everlasting death, from the penalty of hell. That is the salvation that Christ has worked for you and me. And, there are so many blessings that we receive from the hand of God through Jesus Christ and we rejoice in them, we give thanks to every spiritual blessing that He gives to us. But the question we want to ask ourselves is this, do I rejoice, do I give thanks to God most of all for the greatest gift that He has given me?

Not for the I mean, yes, I give thanks to God, I rejoice in the blessings He gives me, these blessings I enjoy in this life of health and family and friends and pleasant experiences and so on, but do you rejoice and give thanks to the Lord for His greatest gift of all, that He has given you His Son, the true Passover Lamb, to rescue you from the judgment that was rightfully yours, to deliver you from that condemnation that was upon you because of your sin and guilts? is that what causes your heart to be filled with the most thanksgiving and gratitude to the Lord to praise Him for this gift that He has delivered you from that wrath, from that judgment.

So salvation is being saved from the judgment of God. 

The third lesson is this, salvation is yours by faith in God. We’ve already seen in this passage how God’s saving work is a work that belongs entirely to Him. That was true for the Israelites in their deliverance from bondage to Pharaoh. That is true for you and me in our deliverance from sin and guilt. The work of salvation is the work of God, the triune God. The Father planned it, the Son accomplished it, the Spirit applies it, and so we give Him all credit for our salvation.

But for that same reason, salvation is yours and mine only by faith. We don’t contribute to our salvation by our works, but it’s by faith. Faith alone. Trusting in Christ. Resting in Him. Not leaning upon your own works or goodness or righteousness, but by faith alone. And yet the faith that saves you and me is never alone. It is never isolated from a life that is bearing fruits of obedience to the Lord for this gift of salvation. And so the person who has true saving faith in Christ will, by the grace of God, show forth his faith or her faith in works of love and righteousness.

James says in James 2:18, ”show me your faith apart from your works and I will show you my faith by my works.” My faith is demonstrated, it is manifested in the works that God enables me to do. And part of the story here in Exodus Chapter 2 is the, it’s not only the sovereign work of God in bringing salvation to the Israelites, delivering them from their slavery, but it’s also about the actions of people whom God used as instruments in preserving the life of Moses. This passage tells us about the boldness, the faithfulness of the mother of Moses, how she built this basket for him to ensure that he would not be killed by being drowned in the Nile.

And as we heard from our New Testament reading in Hebrews, that was an act of faith. So Hebrews 11:23, by faith, Moses, and really it’s referring to parents of Moses, their faith, “but by faith Moses when he was born was hidden for three months by his parents because they saw that the child was beautiful and they were not afraid of the king’s edict”. 

Now let’s ask the question, why was it that Moses’ parents, why did they go to these lengths to protect their child, to save his life? Now obviously they had a natural love for their son and so any parent would do whatever it took in order to save him from death. But according to both Exodus and Hebrews there was something more here even beyond their natural love for their child. There was something about the appearance of Moses that was extraordinary, remarkable. The Hebrew is vague as to exactly what it says, or means, different translations say that he was a fine child. That’s the English Standard Version. The King James Version says he was a “goodly child”. That’s not a typo in the bulletin, but that’s a phrase taken from the King James Bible. He was a “goodly child” or a beautiful child. Probably the sense that is meant here is best expressed by the New International Version.

It says that they saw he was no ordinary child. He was no ordinary child. There was something different, remarkable about this baby boy. Now, I’m sure there isn’t a mother or father in the whole world who, when he first laid eyes upon his son or her son, did not say, this is no ordinary child. This is a fine child, a beautiful child. But again, it wasn’t just the natural bias of the parents at work here. There was something special and unique about this baby boy that somehow suggested that he was set apart for God’s service.

And for that reason, because of their faith in God, not just because of their love for their son, but because of their faith in God, they hid him at home and then they hid him in the basket among the reeds of the Nile. Their faith was in the Lord, but more specifically their faith was in the Lord who had made promises to their forefather Abraham. And those were his covenant promises, the promises that God made to Abraham and to his descendants, which would have included the parents of Moses. And that is, that Israel would become a great nation, that they would inherit the promised land, the land of Canaan, that through a descendant of Abraham all the world would be blessed, Of course, it’s impossible to say for sure exactly how much of these promises the parents of Moses were familiar with.

But at the very least, they knew that they were the people of God. They knew that they belonged to the Lord. And they knew, at the very least, that the promises of God were promises of salvation, of redemption. And it was out of that hope in God’s promised redemption that the parents of Moses hid their son from the Egyptians. They had a hope of something greater for themselves, for their people, for the people of God. Hebrews 11.1 describes faith in this way. It is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

Somehow by faith, the parents of Moses knew that this child was part of God’s plan to bring about the things hoped for. Perhaps they even had a sense, they knew somehow that he would be a deliverer for Israel. And so by faith in the promises of God and the salvation of God, their faith in the Lord, they hid him. And that faith is yours as well, as a believer in Jesus Christ. That is the faith that God has given you. The assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Again, We receive many blessings, many gifts of God’s grace in this world, but those are not the things hoped for or the things not seen.

But as a Christian, your hope is in what is to come. It is in the blessings of the resurrection of your body from the dead, the entrance into eternal glory, the new heavens and the new earth. the ultimate banishment of sin, of death, of sorrow, of pain forever in a new creation. All of these are part of your hope. This is what your hope consists of, things not seen. And if that is your hope by faith in Christ, if you are convicted by the grace of God of the reality of the things not seen, then you also will walk by faith, you will live by faith.

For Moses’ parents, this meant that they would hide this child in this basket in the Nile. For you and me, to walk by faith means obedience to the Word of God, obedience to God’s commandments, living faithfully the life that God wills us to live, seeking to grow in holiness, seeking to grow in righteousness, conformity to Christ and His character. It means worshiping Christ on the Lord’s day with the people of God. It means loving others in the body of Christ. It means all kinds of things, but the bottom line is this, that if you have faith in Christ, if you possess in your heart that hope that you are longing to be realized, that in Christ, All things will be made new that you will have eternal life and glory in Christ.

If that is your faith, if that is your hope, you will show forth the reality of that faith by your obedience to the Word of God. It will bear fruit in your life by obedience. Again, here, James, James 2:18, “show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works”. So salvation is yours by faith in God, namely, faith in Christ. And like with Moses’ parents, you demonstrate that faith by obedience to the word of God or the will of God. So salvation is entirely the work of God.

Salvation is being saved from the judgment of God, and salvation is yours by faith in God. And as we reflect on this passage, just a final thought, God works in remarkable ways in accomplishing his purposes in the world. Who would have thought at this time that this baby boy floating in this little basket among the reeds of the Nile, that one day he would become the great deliverer of Israel, who would bring his people out from their bondage to Egypt. But even more amazing, even more remarkable, who would have thought that 1500 years later, in some obscure corner in the world, a baby would be born to a young girl that no one had ever heard of, that he would be born, that the baby would be born, rather he would be placed in a manger, in some sort of animal stable, that this baby, that this child, would be God’s Son.

That He would be the one that He would raise up, not just to deliver a nation from bondage to another nation, but to deliver sinners from bondage to slavery. That He would be the Savior of the world. That He would be the King and Lord of all creation. And that’s how God works. He works in remarkable ways. And He does so, so that all praise and glory Go to Him for accomplishing that salvation, accomplishing His purposes in a way that magnifies who He is, His power, His glory. And so put your hope in Jesus Christ as your Savior and praise Him and thank Him always for the great work of salvation that He has done for you.

Let’s pray.

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