Exodus 5:22–6:13

Hey, hey, good morning, good morning. Welcome to Coffee and Devotions. That's where every day you and I, we get together. We have a little bit of coffee. We get into God's word and we grow in our love for the Lord together. And this year, 2023, Lord willing, we'll make it from Genesis to Leviticus. We're at Exodus chapter, let's see, Exodus chapter five, verse 22. We're going to get into chapter six, not too far.
Well, why don't we start with some coffee prayer and we'll get into God's word. Let's pray. Father, it is a tremendous privilege to get to come to your word this morning. What a great joy it is to hear from you. Lord, we pray that you would please help us to understand it. We pray that you would apply what we read here this morning to our lives and that your Holy Spirit would be our teacher in Jesus's name. Amen. OK, we are at Exodus chapter five, beginning at verse 22, and we'll go to, I think, 613. Yes, 613. Here we go. So Moses returned to the Lord and said, Lord.
Why have you brought trouble on this people? Why is it you have sent me? For since I came to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has done evil to this people. Neither have you delivered your people at all. Then Jehovah said to Moses, Now you shall see what I will do to Pharaoh, for with a strong hand he will let them go, and with a strong hand he will drive them out of his land.
And God spoke to Moses and said to him, I am Jehovah. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El Shaddai. But by my name Jehovah, I was not known to them. I have also established my covenant with them to give them the land of Canaan, the land of their pilgrimage in which they were strangers. And I have also heard the groaning of the children of Israel whom the Egyptians kept in bondage. And I have remembered my covenant.
Therefore, Say to the children of Israel, I am Jehovah, will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. I will rescue you from their bondage and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments. I will take you as my people and I will be your God. Then you shall know that I am Jehovah your God, who brings you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will bring you into the land which I swore to give Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I will give it to you as a heritage. I am Jehovah.
So Moses spoke thus to the children of Israel, but they did not heed Moses because of anguish of spirit and cruel bondage. The Lord spoke to Moses saying, go in, tell Pharaoh king of Egypt to let the children of Israel go out of his land. And Moses spoke to the Lord, saying, The children of Israel have not heeded me. How then shall Pharaoh heed me? For I am of uncircumcised lips. Then the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron and gave them a command for the children of Israel and for Pharaoh, king of Egypt, to bring the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt.
Well, we need to ask ourselves, A, what's this about? B, what's the best verse to summarize this? And C, what are we called to do? Sorry, got stuff flying around in here. A, what is this about? Well, Pharaoh's doubled down. He's made things worse. And this starts off with Moses saying to the Lord, right? Why have you brought trouble on this people? Why is it you sent me right? I've gone and talked to Pharaoh. I did what you told me to do and he didn't listen. Things have gotten worse.
And the Lord says to Moses in verse 1, now you're really going to see. Now you're going to see what I'm going to do to Pharaoh. And he continues and he speaks to him and he says this is an area we need to slow down a little bit because the Lord reveals who he is, the type of God he is, and how it should influence Moses' thoughts. So let's go ahead and work through this together.
In verse 2 he says, I am the Lord. Again, this is the tetragrammaton, the four-letter name. And so he, this is a Yod-Heh-Vav-Heh. You can say Yehovah, or you can say, some people call it Jehovah, or other people will argue about what vowels are here, and they'll say it's Yahweh.
That's fine, right? The point is, God does have a name. I remember I was twenty I think I was 21 years old. I've been raised in the church almost my whole life, and I had never known. I just heard the word Yehovah or Jehovah, and I thought of JWs, and I thought, oh, that's like a cultish name, but that's what it is. It can be Yahweh, that's fine.
We can argue over the vowel pointing. Because it does change from time to time, depending on where it's at. The Jewish people, like I mentioned before, would only call this name Hashim, the name, or a perpetual Quray. They would just read this and they would say Adonai. And while I get the sentiment, I don't think that it warrants us taking his name. out of our lips.
But anyways, Jehovah appeared to Abraham. So you're going to hear that, by the way, as I read through, there's often times when I think that the name Jehovah is being used in a specific way for a reason to let us know that this is the name of God who's doing these things. That's how I read it, even though the New King James doesn't do it that way.
So he says, I am Jehovah. And here he says in verse three, I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob. As God Almighty, El Shaddai. The one who is resplendent in glory and strength and might. That's how I was known to them. But my name, Jehovah, I was not known to them. Now this is interesting.
There's really a few different ways to understand this verse that I think we need to wrestle with. The first one is one that I don't subscribe to. It's this idea that there's different authors of the first five books of Moses. In the Torah, there's really a whole bunch. There's the Yahwehist, and there's the priestly writer, and there's Moses who's writing. This documentation theory really falls on its face, right? There's the Deuteronomist. I don't think that the Bible is hodgepodge together like that. It wasn't a jigsaw puzzle that they were piecing together. But I think there's one of two different options here. The first option is the one that Calvin and many commentators will hold.
It's not that he's saying that God hasn't ever been known to the patriarchs as Jehovah. This name has come up time and time again before this in Exodus chapter six. But the question is, Not have they ever known his name, the syllables of his name, but that they know the depth of who he was. They know him as a God who would do remarkable powers of redemption.
I think that's a compelling way to read this. The other is by a guy named Douglas Stewart, he's a commentator on this, and he says that the translation is actually what grammarians call interrogative. It's not a statement, but it's a question. By my name Jehovah, did I not make myself known? And so he argues on grammatical grounds that God is pushing the point further. Both of those interpretations I think might be valid. Is it pushing something that, look, they knew my name, but you're going to know the depth of my name. You're going to know it experientially at a level that even the patriarchs didn't know. And then he leans in. He leans in in chapter 4 and 5 with not just his name, but what he has said, I have also established my covenant with them.
Again, some people look at Reformed folk and they'll think our covenant theology is like, you know, just laid on top of scripture. No, it's coming up. We can't escape this Bible without seeing covenant, covenant, covenant, covenant all over the place. And so here it's, look, I established my covenant with them.
They knew me as El Shaddai. They knew me as God Almighty, but they didn't know me. in the depths that you're going to know me, but they trusted my covenant. I promised to give them that land. And then in verse five, I heard, he says, I also heard the groaning of the children of Israel. I've heard their crying out to me. And he says, and I have remembered, I remembered them. I remembered Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I remembered my covenant.
When God makes a promise, he keeps it in mind. When God makes a promise, he is going to make it good. Has he not spoken and will he not make it good? He cannot lie, right? This is God who remembers his covenant. So he then tells them, all right, okay, Moses, here's what you're gonna say.
You're gonna tell them, I am the Lord. I'm gonna redeem you. I'm gonna do these things for you. All right, with an outstretched arm and with great judgments, I will take you as my people and I will be your God. Then you will know that I surely am the Lord, your God, who brings you up out of the burdens of Egypt. And I will bring you into the land, which I swore to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and I will give it to you as an inheritance. I am Jehovah. He says, I'm going to keep those promises, guys. I'm going to do it.
But you know, sometimes, sometimes when things are tough, people don't want to hear it. Moses spoke thus to the children of Israel, but they did not heed Moses because of anguish of spirit and cruel bondage. Moses says this to the people. All right, Lord, I'm gonna do it. He goes and he tells them all this and they say, Moses, shut up. We gotta go make bricks. This is worse than when you first came.
And this is disheartening to Moses. He goes to the Lord in verse 10. Verses 10 through 13 is this interchange between God and Moses. The Lord speaks to Moses and he tells him, right, go to Egypt, or go to the Pharaoh now. And he sent him to go talk to the people.
They don't believe him now. He says, go talk to Pharaoh. And Moses says, right, the children of Israel have not heeded me. How then shall Pharaoh heed me? What's a leader if nobody's following? You want me to go to the king? But the people aren't following me. Hold on. How's this gonna work, God?
I'm of uncircumcised lips. Now that's a weird phrase, right? But again, this idea of uncircumcised lips shouldn't be too difficult. Some translations, you might have something like faltering lips, meaning almost like he's got some type of speech impediment. But I think it's more this idea of unacceptable, unprepared, foreign...
I'm not able to do this. So God doesn't really give him much space here, right? So the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron and he gave them a command for the children of Israel and for Pharaoh the king of Egypt to bring the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt. God doesn't give into this. No, you're just gonna go. You're gonna tell Pharaoh the hard stuff. Well, I'm gonna leave it to you for what's the best verse to summarize this. Last see calling, what are we called to do?
You know, sometimes things get better before they get worse. And sometimes in your affliction and sometimes when it's hard for you, sometimes as you struggle to wrestle through things, you might wrestle in your heart with, is God really true to his promises? Is he really who he says he is? But sometimes the Lord allows in his providence disaster and calamity to come upon us because he's refining us, because he's going to teach us, because he's going to show us his great redemptive power.
And so trust in him. He remembers his covenant. He is God Almighty. And he is the one who holds all existence and being in his right hand. Let's pray. Father, we thank you so much that you remember your covenant, that you keep your promises. We pray that we would trust in you. In Jesus's name, amen. May the Lord bless you. May you walk in the joy and peace of Jesus Christ and may you do your calling for his glory. I'll see you tomorrow. Bye.
Thanks for listening to this week's message from God's Word for You, a ministry of Sharon R.P. Church in rural southeast Iowa. We pray that the message would be used by God to transform your faith in your life this week. If you'd like to get more information about us, feel free to go to the website, SharonRPC.org. We'd love to invite you to worship with us. Our worship time is 10 a.m. every Sunday at 25204 160th Avenue. Morning Sun, Iowa, 52640. May God richly bless you this week.