Scripture

“I will claim you as my own people, and I will be your God. Then you will know that I am the Lord your God who has freed you from your oppression in Egypt.”

Observation

The Lord tells Moses that not only will Pharaoh let the people of Israel leave Egypt, he will expel them.

The Lord is Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He is the covenant keeping God, and He has heard the cries of His people.

Moses is to tell the people that the Lord is going to redeem them with a powerful arm and acts of judgement. He will bring them into the land He promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

The Lord tells Moses to go back to Pharaoh and tell him to let the people go. He gives Moses and Aaron directions for the Israelites and for Pharaoh.

Application

The Lord is about claiming people for his own. This is not about slavery or control. It is a voluntary association.

How wonderful it is to know that the God f all creation is the God who claims me as His own. We are His people, the chosen ones.

He frees us from captivity- not the bondage of a national tyranny, but the bondage of sin.

We were made for more than the life most people accept as normal. We were meant for Freedom- the Freedom to love, the Freedom to live abundantly, the Freedom of living without sin.

Jesus died on the cross as the perfect sacrifice that makes this Freedom possible. All we have to do is to receive His forgiveness.

Prayer

Thank you, Lord, for the knowledge that you are my God and that I belong to you, my Creator and Redeemer. Amen.

Scripture

“Is that so?” retorted Pharaoh. “And who is the Lord? Why should I listen to him, and let Israel go? I don;t know the Lord, and I will not let Israel go.”

Observation

Moses and Aaron go to Pharaoh, asking him to let the people go into the wilderness to offer sacrifices to the Lord. Pharaoh refuses, saying he does not know who the Lord is.

Far from letting the people go, Pharaoh orders the oppression of the Hebrews to increase. From now on they are to find their own straw to make bricks with.

When the people protest, Pharaoh tells them they are just being lazy. The Hebrew leaders relay the order to the people, and they condemn Moses and Aaron for bringing this extra hardship upon them.

Application

Pharaoh was quite cynical about the God of Israel, the Lord. He claimed that he did not know who the Lord was, and therefore would not let the people go to offer sacrifices.

During the world- wide lock downs and restrictions of the Covid pandemic, it has been interesting to see the attitudes of politicians to various groups in different places. While rulers everywhere claim to be led purely by “science”, the actual rules imposed often seem to be arbitrary. Often churches have been considered expendable.

While not using the words attributed to Pharaoh here, the political class seemed to have the same attitude. “I don’t know the Lord. No, I will not let your people go.”

So pubs, restaurants, casinos and Black Lives Matter protests are considered less dangerous than churches. Perhaps this is true, in a prophetic sense.

As the Bible story unfolds, the Lord does set His people free, but Pharaoh and the Egyptians suffer greatly for opposing the Lord.

Prayer

Lord, I pray for freedom for your people in every nation where christians are persecuted. Lord set your people free. Amen.

Scripture

Then the people of Israel were convinced that the Lord had sent Moses and Aaron. When they heard that the Lord was concerned about them and had seen their misery, they bowed down and worshipped.

Observation

Moses leaves Jethro, his father-in-law. He takes his wife and sons and heads for Egypt.

Along the way, the Lord confronts Moses. Zipporah, his wife, circumcises their son. Aaron meets up with them along the way, and they travel to Egypt together.

When they call the elders together to tell them all that the Lord has said, Moses also performs the miraculous signs. The people believe and they worship the Lord.

Application

After years of slavery and misery, the Hebrew people finally hear some good news. God is going to rescue them.

It must have been easy to believe that the Lord had abandoned His people and even forgotten about them. But Moses comes along with the message that the Lord has not forgotten them.

When we are feeling discouraged in life, how wonderful it is to remember that God has seen our misery.

This is not just a doctrinal statement. Yes, we know that God sees everything about our lives. Nothing is hidden from Him. More importantly, the Lord sees our misery and has compassion.

God does not just see our suffering- He experiences it and feels it as we do. How awesome is that!

God sees and feels our disappointment, our grief, our suffering, and our failing. He is not looking for things to smite us for, but He looks for reasons to show compassion, and He walks through our difficulties with us.

Prayer

Lord, I thank you that you see my misery, and you turn it into joy. You walk with me in the tough times and turn them into victories of your grace. Thank you. Amen.

Scripture

Then the Lord asked Moses, “Who makes a person’s mouth? Who decides whether people speak or do not speak, hear or do not hear, see or do not see? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go! I will be with you as you speak, and I will instruct you in what to say.”

Observation

Moses asks the Lord, “What if they don’t believe me?” The Lord tells Moses to throw down his staff, and it turns into a snake. When he catches it by the tail it is restored to a staff. Then the Lord tells Moses to put his hand inside his cloak, and it is covered with skin disease. He puts his hand back in, and it is restored.

The Lord tells Moses that if the people don’t believe Moses’ words, they will believe these signs.

Moses then claims he is not very good with words, but the Lord says that He is the one who makes a man’s mouth and who decides whether he should speak. He appoints Moses’ brother, Aaron, to be Moses’ spokesman.

Application

Moses is having a conversation with the Lord who is speaking to him from a bush that burns without being consumed. Yet Moses is reluctant to go as the messenger of this powerful God.

The same Lord calls us to go to our friends and neighbours with the wonderful message that Jesus saves. Yet we have the same objections that Moses had- they will not believe me, they will think I am crazy.

To these objections the Lord says that He designed our mouths and can direct us to speak. It is His problem whether people listen or not.

The Lord gives each of us a message to take to a person or a group of people, perhaps even a whole nation. Whether it is the gospel message, a prophecy or a word of encouragement, we must trust God to speak through us, and leave the results to Him.

Prayer

Lord please give me courage and confidence in you so that I can share your message of salvation to the people I see each day. Amen.

Scripture

There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire form the middle of a bush. Though the bush was engulfed by flames, it did not burn up. “This is amazing,” Moses said to himself.

Observation

One day, while tending his father-in-law’s sheep, the Lord appears to Moses in a burning bush. The Lord identifies Himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

The Lord tells Moses that He is about to set His people free and so Moses is to go to Pharaoh and demand that he let them go. When Moses objects, the Lord says that He will be with him.

Moses then asks the Lord what name will he tell the people is the name of the God who has sent him? The Lord says “Tell them ‘I Am has sent you.’”

The Lord warns Moses that, although the elders of Israel will receive him, Pharaoh will resist until, through a series of miracles, the Lord will strike the Egyptians.

Application

This must have been an awesome sight for Moses to see- a bush that burned without being consumed. It was unusual enough for Moses to stop what he was doing and listen to the voice of the Lord.

One reason that we don’t hear the voice of the Lord is that we don’t make space for that. We live in a noisy world, surrounded by electronically generated voices clamouring for our attention. We live in an “always on” world,

To hear God, we have to silence the other voices. We need to turn our phones, computers and TVs off then learn to turn our anxious brain off as well. Then, as we focus on God, we can start to hear the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit.

It takes time, effort and conscious decision, but we need to do it to connect to the true God, the source of our life.

Prayer

Come Holy Spirit and speak to me in the stillness. Be the burning bush for me today. Amen.

Scripture

God heard their groaning, and he remembered his covenant promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He looked down on the people of Israel and knew it was time to act.

Observation

A woman from the tribe of Levi gives birth to a baby boy, and rather than having him thrown into the Nile River as the law required, she keeps him at home for three months. Then she makes a little basket and floats him in the river.

Pharaoh’s daughter comes to the river to bathe and discovers the baby. She decides to adopt him. The baby’s mother nurses him until he is old enough to be weaned. When it is time for him to go to the palace, the boy is named Moses.

Many years later, Moses sees an Egyptian overseer beating a Hebrew slave. Enraged, Moses kills the Egyptian, but he realises that he has been found out, and so he flees to Midian. There he settles down and marries Zipporah.

Finally, God decides it is time to act to rescue His people,

Application

Sometimes we overlook the time frames in the Bible. Moses was about 40 years old when he killed the Egyptian, and he was in Midian for another 40 years before he was called by God to set His people free.

At the end of this chapter, God is thinking it is time to act on His promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but still, from a human perspective, nothing is happening.

We might feel something similar about promises we have received from God. Maybe we have been praying for decades for a promise to come to pass.

God’s timing is not the same as ours. But His timing is always perfect.

We live in an era where faster is always better and fastest is still not fast enough.

God works on the principle that there is a right time, an appropriate time for everything.

The people of Israel had no idea of what do was about to do for them. It must have appeared that God had forgotten about them. In God’s time, the perfect time, a great rescue was about to be launched.

Prayer

Lord, please help me to be patient as I wait for your plans to unfold. Amen.

Scripture

Because the midwives feared God, they refused to obey the king’s orders. They allowed the boys to live too.

Observation

Generations pass and the descendants of Jacob prosper in Egypt. A king arises who knows noth8ing of what Joseph had done for Egypt. He becomes fearful of the threat that the Hebrews may pose to his reign.

The Egyptians make the Israelites their slaves, hoping to wear them down with crushing labour. The king is ruthless, but still the Hebrews prosper.

The king orders the Hebrew midwives to kill all baby boys that are born. The midwives fear God, so they refuse to obey this order. When questioned later, they say that the Hebrew women give birth too quickly for them to get there in time, and so the baby boys live.

God continues to bless the Hebrew people and the midwives. They continue to grow in number and in strength.

Application

The Hebrew people are in a place of captivity. The Pharaoh tries to reduce their population by ordering the midwives to kill all the baby boys. The midwives fear God and so refuse to obey this order.

The king was an absolute monarch. There were no human rights then. The Hebrews were a feared ethnic minority. The midwives stood in defiance of an absolute ruler who could do what he liked to them.

Because these brave women were faithful to God, God blessed them with children of their own and continued to bless the people of Israel.

The Covid pandemic has forced some churches to ask themselves whether it is right to obey the Government and close their doors for a season, or to obey God’s commandment to meet regardless of what the Government says? The availability of technology and shorter shut downs in some areas made that decision easier for some than for others.

Christians in the medical community sometimes have to make a stance against participating in abortions or euthanasia. Some have lost their jobs or licence to practise over these issues.

Whatever the situation, we must always be prepared to defy human rulers if they require us to go against God’s will.

Prayer

Lord, please hep me to be faithful to you, to follow your ways rather than the ways of people. Amen.