We come to the climax of the confrontation between Pharaoh and Moses. It would actually be more accurate to say it was a confrontation between Pharaoh and God; after all, Moses was only God’s spokesman. It was at God’s instigation that Moses had gone to confront Pharaoh with the demand that he let the people of Israel go free from their slavery.

This is the big event, the Jewish people today still remember the Passover. They look back to the time when God brought Judgement on Egypt and the people were freed from slavery and the nation of Israel was born.

God had sent nine plagues on Egypt to demonstrate his power and authority. Still Pharaoh refuses to let the people go. Finally, God Sends Moses to warn Pharaoh of the ultimate price of defying God. Pharaoh refuses to listen.

The Israelites are told to prepare for a meal of lamb. They must use the blood of the lambs to mark the doorframes of their houses. They must stay indoors, but they must be ready to go. On that fateful night God inflicts his judgement on Egypt. The eldest son in every family dies.

There is horror and grief in every Egyptian home. Pharaoh sends for Moses and Aaron and tells them to take the Israelites and their possessions and go. The Israelites ask for goods and valuables from their Egyptian neighbours; the Egyptians give to them and beg them to leave. So at last they are freed from their slavery and begin the journey to the Promised Land.

These events not only mark the birth of the nation of Israel, their calendar will begin from this event; God tells them that from now this will be the first month. But this event also stands for all time as an occasion on which God has revealed something of himself to the world. The event tells us so much about God and his dealings with mankind. People sometimes like to feel that they can make their own decisions about what God is like.

The pharaohs of ancient Egypt had this tendency to think that they could make their rules up about God. This Pharaoh found to his cost that it is God who decides on the rules. As mere mortals, we are wise if we simply listen to and learn from God and worship him for whom he is. So let us look and see what we can learn of God from this event in which he intervened to rescue his people from slavery.

First, we see that God confronts and judges an evil society. Some people get upset about the idea of God as a judge who punishes those who do evil. But there is an insistence right through the bible that God does judge evil. It comes out time and again, in the story of the flood, here in the story of the exodus, God’s judgement even falls on his own people when they turn to evil as is shown on Neduchadnezzar’s conquest of Jerusalem.

The fact that God judges doesn’t end with the New Testament. Jesus warned his hearers that unless they repented they too would perish. His words remind us that as individuals when we meet him we shall all have to go either to the right or the left. To those on the left he will say ‘I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in… depart!’ The event of God’s judgement on the Egyptians is a reminder that in eternity everyone has to answer to God.

The judgement on the Egyptians was not for minor or trivial offences. For a start they were racist. The Hebrews were enslaved for no other reason than that they were Hebrew. On top of that the Egyptians were oppressive. Their treatment of the Hebrews even included the genocide of male children. When Moses had been born, it was only God’s providence that enabled him to survive because most baby boys of his generation were systematically drowned in the Nile.

Justice matters in our society. God’s requirement is that we are actively concerned for our fellow men and women. Egyptian society as a whole had allowed the oppression to go on, and as a result God’s judgement came. Maybe for many it did bring about repentance. The story tells us that as a result of the terrible judgement the Egyptian people certainly did open up their pockets to the Hebrew neighbours whom they had previously oppressed and gave to them virtually anything they asked for. God judges and at the final reckoning there will be justice for all.

Secondly from the story of Exodus we can see something of God’s love and compassion. God is concerned for and cares for those who suffer unjustly. That is a theme that comes over time and again in the bible. Jesus announced his mission as being about good news to the poor and freedom for the oppressed. It was out of love and mercy for the Israelites that God intervened in their situation. They had called out to God in prayer. God answers their prayer.

Yet for this to happen, there had to be a degree of faith among the Heberws. There had been a time when not much could be done for them. Moses had tried to help years before, but had got only cynicism and resentment. Although the people were still far from perfect, they had now come to a point of faith that was willing to obey and respond to God. In verse 27 we are told that when the people were given their instructions for the Passover, they bowed down and worshipped.

The people also together obeyed the instructions that God had given through Moses. They prepared the meal, they marked the doorpost, they gathered in their homes ready to depart. God is still ready to help men and women in their difficulties. But generally before God can help us there has to be a willingness to pay attention to God to co-operate with him by our obedience to him.

God is there, but before we can receive help from him we have to ask. But when we do ask, when we put our faith in God, we will find that God is worthy of our faith. Jesus said ‘ask, and it shall be given to you, seek and you shall find, knock and the door will be opened to you. God will open the door to you and me just as wonderfully as he opened the way to enable Israel to walk to freedom.

God confronts evil human behaviour with judgement, ultimately no one gets away with cruelty, greed, oppression or arrogance. God is just because he is a God of love who has mercy and compassion. God wants all of mankind whom he created in love to share his creation and its blessings; so ultimately he confronts and judges those who by their pride and greed deprive others of a share in the world’s blessings.

But finally, we also discover from the story of Exodus that God intervened in order to fulfil his plan and purpose for mankind and for the world. Exodus is part of a longer story. The story begins with the human race that God created in his own image rebelling against God, and there subsequently being a state of alienation between God and mankind.

The story goes on to a point where God calls a particular man, a man called Abraham to come apart from his society and become a nomad shepherd in a distant land, in fact in the land of Canaan. God made a covenant with Abraham. He promised to make a great nation of Abraham’s descendants. In response, Abraham was required to walk blamelessly before God, to be a man of faith, and to worship God.

Abraham was part of God’s plan to bring blessing to all mankind. God promised Abraham that all people on earth would be blessed through him. (Gen 12v3). Abraham’s son was Isaac, Isaac’s son was Jacob, God gave Jacob the name Israel. Jacob and his 12 sons and their families had gone to live in Egypt, but they were God’s special covenant people. They were the ones whom God had promised would become a great nation.

Pharaoh had made a big mistake when he thought that his purposes and plans took precedence over God’s plans. God is the God of history. I am grateful for the fact that ultimately God has the upper hand in history. Pharaoh’s and their equivalents come, but ultimately they go, while God in his power and love ultimately prevails.

God did not tell Abraham how he would bless all mankind through him. God rescued his people from their slavery in Egypt out of his compassion and faithfulness, and the events of Exodus were part of the basis of God’s relationship with his covenant people. But he also had greater plans and purposes that would be worked out through these events. For a start, what took place in Egypt was a demonstration to mankind of God’s involvement with and care for people both in love and judgement.

But more than that, for over a thousand years God’s faithfulness and grace towards his covenant people would be remembered in the re-enacting of the Passover meal. Until in the fullness of time on another night that changed the world forever, Jesus gathered with his disciples for the Passover.

Jesus was about to fulfil God’s promises to Abraham that the entire world would be blessed through Abraham’s descendants. Israel’s rescue from Egypt was for the purpose that Israel should be a light to the nations. The fulfilment of that purpose came about through the coming of the Messiah. Jesus, the light of the world had come. On that Passover night, Jesus gave to that sacred memorial meal its ultimate meaning.

Just as God had intervened to save his people from slavery in Egypt; so in Jesus, God was intervening to form a new covenant people. God was intervening in judgement. In some profoundly mysterious way, in Jesus God was taking the judgement on human sin upon himself.

God was also intervening in grace and mercy. Those 11 men in that upper room were told by Jesus that from that point on, the bread they ate at that meal, and the wine they drank represented his body broken for them, and his blood shed for them. But that small band was the nucleus of a new covenant people. They were the nucleus of those who through faith would accept the gospel. The nucleus that now has grown to a vast throng that cannot be counted of men and women and children of all nations who love and follow Jesus.

Thank God that he not only intervened to release his people from slavery in Egypt. In Jesus he has intervened to open the gate of heaven that all might be welcomed as his children, that we might be part of his covenant people.
 

Amen.

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