Tuesday, April 5, 2016

GENESIS AND EXODUS (16)


EXODUS 1-2
BIRTH of MOSES

Key Passage: Exodus 2:11-22

      CHAPTER
1
   
CHAPTER 2

Israel’s
Multiplication
Pharaoh’s
Mistreatment
Faith of
Parents
Failure
Of Moses
Faithfulness
of God
People Prepared
for Deliverance
Deliverer          
   Prepared
for People






OVERVIEW  Exodus opens where Genesis leaves off: with Jacob’s descendants multiplying in Egypt. A new ruler emerges who respects neither Joseph’s memory nor the Israelites’ human rights. Though Pharaoh attempts to kill all newborn Hebrew males, the infant Moses is providentially spared and raised in the very palace of the one who sought his death. At the age of 40, Moses seeks to bring about the right thing (deliverance) in the wrong way (murder) and spends the next four decades of his life in exile, tending sheep in the Midian wilderness.


Our God has a big eraser.


OUR DAILY WALK   The man sitting by the desert well was lost in his thoughts. With dejection on every line of his face, he felt much older than his 40 years. Moses was miserable – and with good reason.

He was the one man in all of Egypt who might have had a chance to bring relief to his people. He had position, training, natural ability, and the desire to help. But in one foolish act, he killed a man and forfeited all the advantages he had hoped to use.

Satan delights in convincing believers that they are of no use to God. And God delights in building cathedrals out of rubble. Moses’ life needed reconstruction, to be sure. But when that rebuilding process was complete, he was a monument to God’s grace.


Where in your life have you nearly given up hope that God could ever salvage the situation? First, walk a mile in Moses’ sandals. Study his failures. Learn about God’s patience in his life. Then find your own “desert well” to sit by and meditate on the encouraging words for discourage disciples found in Exodus 3:10-14.


INSIGHT   The Ark Revisited

The same Hebrew word for ark (as in Noah’s) describes the vessel used by Moses’ mother to hide him in the bulrushes. Once again we see God delivering His chosen from destruction by water after an obedient act of the faithful (Noah, and Moses’ mother, who was of Levi’s lineage; see Exodus 2:1).






Playwright Janet Irene Thomas
Founder/CEO
Bible Stories Theatre of
Fine & Performing Arts






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