Exodus

One

Slavery

Jacob, whom God renamed Israel, and his eleven sons went down to Egypt during the time of Joseph, because Egypt alone had grain during the great famine. Over the next 430 years, the descendants of Israel multiplied so greatly that the Egyptians grew afraid of them. To maintain control, they enslaved the Israelites and forced them into harsh manual labor. Fear turned into brutality, and Pharaoh commanded that all Hebrew male children be cast into the Nile and destroyed.

The mother of Moses took a little poetic license with this law. She cast her son into the Nile, but placed him in a basket designed to float. Pharaoh’s daughter was bathing in the Nile at that very moment. She saw the child, had mercy on him, and through the quick thinking of his sister Miriam, who offered to find a Hebrew woman to nurse the baby, Moses was given back to his own mother. His name, Moses, means “to draw out of the water.”

Once Moses was weaned, he was brought to live in the palace of Pharaoh. Forty years passed. Thinking he was the Savior of his people, Moses struck an Egyptian and killed him. When Pharaoh sought to kill him in return, Moses fled Egypt and became an exile in the land of Midian. Forty more years went by. Moses was now eighty years old, finally emptied of illusions about his own strength, and ready to be used by God.

Two

The Burning Bush

Moses was tending the flock of Jethro, the priest of Midian. That detail matters. The Midianites were a religious people, but they worshiped many gods. Moses himself had been raised as an Egyptian, in a culture that worshiped almost everything that moved. The sun and the moon, the Nile River, cattle and sheep, even frogs, these were all treated as deities. Moses grew up in a thoroughly polytheistic world. At this point, he is not yet a monotheist.

While leading the flock, God brought Moses to Mount Horeb, the mountain of the burning bush, known in Hebrew as Sinai. It is here that God reveals Himself and gives Moses his mission: “I send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the sons of Israel, out of Egypt.” Moses immediately asks the most honest and necessary question. “If I go to the sons of Israel and say, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me,’ and they ask me his name, what am I to tell them?” In other words: Which god are you?"

Remember where Moses came from, and where he is living now. There were many gods, and every one of them had a name. Moses is not yet monotheistic, and neither are the Israelites. That is the real problem. They do not know who God is. They are addicted to false worship, trying to find identity, happiness, and security in the wrong place.

Then God speaks the decisive word, “I Am who I Am.” I am the One who is, the one true God. There is no other.

Three

The Mission 

In Exodus 3:16–18, God gives Moses a surprising mission. The initial request is modest: Moses is to ask Pharaoh to allow Israel to go three days into the wilderness to worship Yahweh, celebrate a feast, and then return to Egypt to resume their lives. God already knows Pharaoh will be obstinate and refuse. This request is not the end of the story; it is the beginning. God’s deeper intention is freedom. Israel will ultimately be set free because God desires to give them rest so that they may worship.

This becomes clear in Exodus 4:21–22, when God gives Moses the message Pharaoh must hear, “Let my son go, that he may serve me.” That word serve is the key theme of the entire book of Exodus. In Hebrew, the word is avad. To serve means to work. Avad is later translated into Greek as leitourgia, liturgy. The liturgy is the work of the people, the worship of the people.

The meaning is unmistakable. Israel has been serving Pharaoh, serving the world, the flesh, and the devil. But they were created to serve, avad, to worship Yahweh. The whole drama of Exodus turns on one question: Whom will you serve?

Joshua will later give the answer in chapter 24: “Choose this day whom you will serve…as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” This is the same choice placed before Lucifer, Adam, and Eve, and it is the same choice placed before us today. The way you answer determines whether you will be free.

Four

How Pharaoh Fights Back 

When Moses and Aaron first go to Pharaoh in Exodus 5, their request is simple and precise: “Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness.” Moses deliberately uses the word feast, a liturgical word. This is not a political demand or an economic negotiation. It is a request to worship.

Pharaoh immediately fights back. He does not argue theology. Instead, he increases the workload. He makes the Israelites so busy and so exhausted that they have no time for rest, and therefore no time to worship the Lord. Pharaoh understands something crucial: if the people never stop working, they will never be free.

When God finally delivers Israel, He commands them to keep the Sabbath. “Six days you shall work, but on the seventh day you shall not work.” Why? Because true freedom requires true leisure. Time to wonder. Time to ask the big questions. Time to turn the mind and heart back to God.

This reveals the plan of Satan. Not always to make us wicked, but to make us busy. To burden us with so much work, noise, and distraction that we lose sight of God and neglect human relationships. We are all too busy. But God never commands us to be busy. He commands us to rest. He commands us to lay aside our work and give time to Him, to our spouse, to our family, and friends.

So the question becomes unavoidable: what takes all of your time, attention, and energy? This is how we begin to identify our attachments, the things we want more than God.

Five

The Slavery of Self-Reliance

My first Job in the Church was as a youth minister. I was married, had twin babies, and worked for two workaholic priests. Most days, I was in the office by eight am and many nights not home until 10:30 p.m., which included almost every weekend. I was so busy that I neglected Jesus. I gave up my time with Him in friendship in prayer. That is the trap of the devil: get busy. 

We lived fourteen miles from the church in a small rural town surrounded by corn fields. One night, as I drove home, I came to a four-way stop, I pushed in the clutch and the brake, and kind of rolled through the intersection when a voice said to me, “You don’t worship me.” I pushed the clutch and brake all the way down and stopped, right there in the middle of the intersection, and argued back, “Yes, I do. I work for you.” The voice came back saying, “You don’t worship Me, you worship yourself, you chase success in your ministry, and you rely on yourself, not on Me.” I continued to argue my case, but the voice (it was the Lord) said, “I wait for you twenty-four hours, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and you never spend time with me anymore because you are too busy with your programs trying to save the world. You think you are the Savior, you worship and rely on yourself.” 

God was right. I recommitted the first hour of each day to spending time with Jesus in friendship.