What the Old Testament Means to Us. . . No.5

THE EXODUS AND THE GRACE OF GOD

The story the Old Testament tells really begins with the Exodus, a story that reaches its climax in the exile to Babylon and the return, which is the second exodus. The Exodus and the Exile are thus the two center poles for the canopy of Old Testament study. To change the metaphor, these two events are the linchpins of the unfolding drama of the history of Israel, for they hold the rest of the story together. It is not too much to say that the Exodus in particular is the heart of the Old Testament. All that comes before is prologue, all that comes after is epilogue.

When one grasps the significance of the Exodus, she not only has the key that opens up the rest of the Old Testament, but also the foundation for understanding the grace of God throughout the Bible. One purpose of this series on the Old Testament is to see how it is permeated with the grace of God, and that we do not have to await the New Testament to see the grace of God in the Bible. We thus entitle this installment “The Exodus and the Grace of God,” for it is in the liberation of God’s people from slavery in Egypt that the grace of God is particularly evident. Next to the gift of Christ himself, the Exodus shows us what the grace of God is all about.

It is evident that the interpreters of Israel’s history attached such significance to the Exodus. Abraham may be the father of the Hebrew people and even the father of their faith, but it is the Exodus, not Abraham, that is the real beginning of their history. It is in the Exodus that they became a nation and a covenant people. When their prophets called them to repentance by reminding them of their heritage, it was to the deliverance from Egypt that they appealed.

There is one passage, Dt. 26:5-9, where the entire drama of the Exodus is reduced to a few verses and with striking detail:

You shall answer and say to the Lord your God: “My father was a Syrian, about to perish, and he went down to Egypt and sojourned there, few in number; and there he became a nation, great, mighty, and populous. But the Egyptians mistreated us, afflicted us, and laid hard bondage on us. Then we cried out to the Lord God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice and looked on our affliction and our labor and our oppression. So the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and with an outstretched arm, with great terror and with signs and wonders. He has brought us to this place and has given us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”

This passage overflows with the grace of God, especially in the reference to God’s outstretched arm. God’s hand was not only mighty, but it reached out in mercy to His suffering people. The writer extols only God, not the people. God did it all. The people were afflicted and oppressed, suffering from “hard bondage.” What did they do for themselves? Nothing. All they could do was to cry out to God for help. The terror, signs, and wonders are all God’s. God “looked” upon their affliction and the Exodus became a reality. This is one of the most graceful passages of all Scripture.

This theme runs all through the Old Testament, pointing to the Exodus as the heart of the drama:

Then the Angel of the Lord said, “I led you up from Egypt and brought you to the land of which I swore to your fathers. “ (Judges 2:1)

I sent Moses and Aaron, and I plagued Egypt, according to what I did among them. Afterwards I brought them out. (Joshua 24:5)

The Lord who brought you up from the land of Egypt with great power and an outstretched arm, Him you shall fear. (2 Kgs. 17:36)

I am the Lord your God,

Who brought you out of the land of Egypt;

Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it. (Ps. 81:10)

It was I who brought you up from the land of Egypt, and led you forty years in the wilderness, to possess the land of the Amorite. (Amos 2:10)

When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called My son. (Hosea 11:1)

The prophets were always mindful that Israel’s covenant relationship with God began at the Exodus, as in Haggai 2:5, “According to the word that I covenanted with you when you came out of Egypt, so My spirit remains among you; do not fear!” When Jeremiah prophesied of a new covenant to come, he related it to the Exodus covenant, “I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the Lord” (Jer. 31:31).

Again, the grace of God is evident in all these passages. God was the deliverer at the Exodus, “with his outstretched hand.” The enslaved Hebrews were powerless before the Egyptians. Moreover, the God of Israel is a covenant-making God who never breaks His covenant. God’s grace is seen in His faithfulness. The people broke the covenant, but not God. The covenant given at the Exodus was not “weak” in itself, but only in that the people because of their fallenness could not keep it perfectly. Both the old and new covenants were expressions of God’s grace, but the new covenant was the fuller measure of grace because it was based upon Jesus Christ.

The stirring drama that we call the Exodus is told in the book that bears that name, especially chapters 1-14. The protagonist is Yahweh, Israel’s God, who intervenes on behalf of helpless slaves who are terribly oppressed in a foreign land, a people He has chosen as His own. The antagonist is the Pharaoh of Egypt, the mightiest emperor of his time, who also claims the people as his own property. Yahweh is also challenging the gods of Egypt. The two main characters are thus in a confrontation as to who is in command, the gods of Egypt or the God of the Hebrews. There were two chief sources of divinity to the Egyptians, the Nile river, which was the country’s life blood, and the Pharaoh himself who was believed to be an offspring of Amun-Ra, the sun god. While the Egyptians worshiped nature, the Hebrews believed that Yahweh ruled over all nature.

This helps us to understand the plagues that Yahweh imposed upon the Egyptians. The first plague that turned the Nile into blood contested the divinity of the great river, as did the second plague of frogs that emanated from the river and worked havoc among the people. Other plagues, such as the lice (ticks), boils, flies, and death attacked Pharaoh himself, threatening his bodily well-being. Other plagues, such as the locusts, hail, and the death of livestock, threatened the economy of the land, supposedly protected by the Pharaoh’s divinity.

In reading the book of Exodus we see that the story it tells is more than a series of events leading to the liberation of a band of slaves from bondage. It is interpreted as a divine event. God is at work in human history. It is the beginning of the formation of God’s covenant community. The Exodus was thus an act of God’s grace. The Hebrews were not only freed from their captivity but they became God’s redeemed people. So, the Exodus story is not history as we would write history, for it is a narration of the “mighty acts” of the Lord which he performed “with an outstretched arm.” It is not ordinary history but His-story . Yahweh himself is always the main character. He is always present and always in charge.

God’s grace is especially evident in the summons of Moses to leave his quiet, pastoral life and return to Egypt and confront Pharaoh in behalf of the oppressed Hebrews. The story of the burning bush is one of the great masterpieces of the Bible (Ex. 3). The theologians call it a theophany, an instance of the appearance of God. It should be read, as if on one’s knees, with awe, reverence, and imagination. One should not try to rationalize the burning bush as if to capture it through the objective lens of a camera. It is the poetry of God. God speaks to the curious shepherd leaning upon his staff, “Moses, Moses. . .” It was a moment when all of heaven and earth must have waited in silence. “I am the God of your father—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”

Moses hid his face; he was afraid to look upon God. God had prepared him for such a moment. Though reared and educated as an Egyptian prince and warrior, he was always mindful of the plight of his enslaved kinsmen. He had fled from Egypt after killing a slavedriver for cruelty toward a Hebrew. God knew that the heart of Moses was deeply moved by the distress of his people enslaved in Egypt all those years. God brought the right man and the right time together. He had waited 430 years to act, but now His grace would be abundant.

Notice how the verbs of action are endowed with grace, words that reveal divine intention: “I have seen the affliction of my people … I have heard their cry … I know their sufferings … I have come down to deliver them” (Ex. 3:7-8).

That great line “I have come down to deliver them” is as good a description of grace as one will find. Emanuel! God is with us! Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity. It is a dramatic instance of how God’s revelation is made known. through events, and of how his grace is poured out when His people are the most helpless.

We are not to interpret Moses’ protests to the call to go to Egypt as an unwillingness to do God’s bidding or even as weakness on his part. If anyone knew the power of Egypt it was Moses, and he knew he was incapable of such a task. After all, it must have been the most astonishing commission ever given to mortal man, “Come now, and I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring My people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.” It is understandable that the now aged and lowly shepherd would respond with, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?”

It must have also blown his mind that he was not only to deliver Israel from Egypt, but to bring them to the very mountain where he then stood in the presence of God. It must have been reassuring to Moses when God told him that he would be with him in Egypt, but it was not enough. He wanted God to reveal to him His name. This was his way of trying to penetrate the mystery of God, for the people of antiquity believed that a name, human or divine, revealed the character of the one who bore it.

This is the beginning of the name Yahweh for God (rendered Lord in the KJV), often used in Scripture, drawn from the four consonants YHWH, the name that God gave to Moses when he asked for His name. He was God, the creator of heaven and earth, but his name was YHWH, which meant “I AM WHO I AM” or simply “I AM.” It is staggering in its import; we can hardly begin to comprehend what it means.

Moses is still insecure about his mission. God assures him that “with signs and wonders” the job will be done. He at last grows impatient with Moses when he protests that he does not have the eloquence of speech to stand before Pharaoh. “Who has made man’s mouth? Or who makes the mute, the deaf, the seeing? Is it not I, Yahweh?,” God says to him, now using the newly revealed name. But God continues to be gracious, naming Aaron, Moses’ brother, as his spokesman. It is impressive that God solved the problem in that way, not by giving His envoy a new and powerful tongue, but by naming another to speak for him.

Some of the things that follow are baffling. God warns Moses that Pharaoh will not let the people go, and this is because “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart.” It also says, time and again, as the plagues come and go, that Pharaoh hardened his own heart. This may mean that while Pharaoh was proud, stubborn, and unwilling to yield to any deity beside himself, his hand was forced by Yahweh. It does not mean that Pharaoh was forced to act contrary to his own nature.

Equally baffling is that when Moses began to do the signs and wonders designed to influence Pharaoh, the Egyptian magicians were able to do the same, including the first two plagues. When Moses turned his staff into a serpent, the magicians did the same. When Moses turned the waters into blood or something that looked like blood (the Bible even says the moon will be turned into blood), the magicians did likewise. And when Moses summoned the frogs, so did the magicians. But that was it, for when Moses brought the gnats or lice, the magicians tried but couldn’t, perhaps because they were too small to manipulate. This is when they conceded to Pharaoh, “This is the finger of God” (Ex. 8:19), which was not a confession that they believed in Yahweh, but that it was something supernatural and beyond their own power.

If we think it strange that the magicians would have such power, it is not all that different from stories missionaries tell even today about the miraculous power of witch doctors in places like Indonesia. Call it demonic power or what you will, it is evident that God allows “lying wonders,” a biblical term, as part of the drama between the forces of good and evil. The Exodus story makes it clear that Pharaoh’s magicians had to check out, however impressive they usually were, for they could not only not produce gnats like Moses did, but the flies, disease of the livestock, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and the death of the first born were all too much for them as well as for Pharaoh.

It is interesting to follow Pharaoh’s diminishing rebellion. He was at first fully entrenched in his refusal to let the people go, but plague by plague he weakens. By the fourth plague (flies) he is ready to compromise, but not much. If the people must go and sacrifice, they can do so if they stay within the confines of Egypt (Ex. 8:25). Moses of course rejects this. By the time the locusts begin to devour the land (eighth plague), he compromises further. They can leave the land if they must, but only the men, not the women and children (Ex. 10:7). When Moses rejects this and calls for the plague of darkness, Pharaoh makes a third compromise. All the people may go, but leave the cattle behind (Ex. 10:24). This is when Moses made that great statement that is a lesson all to itself, “Not a hoof shall be left behind.”

One of our old pioneer preachers made that one of his favorite sermons, and with good reason. Pharaoh is the devil who keeps trying to compromise with us in our determination to serve God fully. He is willing for us to be “religious” if we stay “in the land,” within his domain. If we are determined to be more religious than that, then we can go ahead but don’t get the family involved. If the devil can keep the children, he’ll settle for that. If the old Deceiver has to give further ground, he allows us to go ahead and take our families if we must, but don’t take your purse along when you are baptized. “Not a hoof shall be left behind!,” the old preacher would boom forth. And good for him, for he drew upon one of the great lessons of the Exodus. And it was Moses, not Aaron, who said it, not so weak in speech by then. Can’t you just hear Moses nail Pharaoh right between the eyes with, “Not a hoof shall be left behind.” It is one of the great lines of the Bible. No compromises with Satan!

So, every hoof was taken, along with every man, woman and child, as well as much confiscated wealth, as the children of Israel left “the house of bondage” a free people. Pharaoh, proud and obdurate to the end, changed his mind and pursued them as far as the Red Sea. There his army met with catastrophe as “the horse and the rider were cast into the sea.” Yahweh was victorious over the gods of the Nile and the sun god as personified in Pharaoh. The Israelites now had every reason to believe in Him and to follow His plan for them to the end.

If that great Old Testament scholar of bygone days, W. F. Albright, was right, it was Rameses II that Moses went before and made that epoch-making request, “Let my people go.” The date was 1290 B.C. It was a pivotal event in the history of God’s people, and crowned with His grace.

They would wander for a full generation in the wilderness so that God could speak to their hearts tenderly, as one of the prophets put it. But eventually they were brought to the foot of smoking, shaking Mt. Sinai, where God told Moses He would bring them. Sinai was what the Exodus was all about, for it was there that they formally became God’s covenant community. It was there that they received the (old) covenant, to be distinguished from the Old Testament, which were writings that grew out of the covenant community.

And it was that community people, ratified at Sinai by receiving a covenant, expressed in the Ten Commandments written upon tables of stone, that was destined to give the Christ to the world.

There had to be bondage in Egypt before there could be an Exodus; there had to be an Exodus before there could be a Sinai; there had to be a Sinai before there could be a covenant community, selected from among all the nations of the earth. And there had to be a covenant community before there could be Jesus Christ.

So, what does the Exodus mean to us? It was the grace of God at work creating for us the hope that we have in Jesus Christ. He is our Exodus, our liberator. And when he calls, “Let my people go,” our response is always, “Not a hoof shall be left behind!” Praise the name of Yahweh, the great I AM!—the Editor

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