Where is God?

Our scripture this morning for our sermon is Exodus chapter one. Since you folks are so kind to invite me to come preach periodically, I thought we would start a new series out of the Book of Exodus. And I think it's wonderful that you just sang a psalm that jumped ahead just a few chapters and talked about the plagues, which I will briefly allude to in the sermon. And the sermon is on chapter 1, but there's certainly a connection. But let's hear the word of God. But as we hear God's word from Exodus, reading the first chapter, Exodus chapter 1.

These are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob, each with his household, Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin, Dan, and Naphtali, Gad, and Asher. All the descendants of Jacob were seventy persons. Joseph was already in Egypt. Then Joseph died and his brothers and all that generation.

But the people of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly. They multiplied and grew exceedingly strong so that the land was filled with them. Now there arose a new king over Egypt who did not know Joseph. And he said to his people, Behold, the people of Israel are too many and too mighty for us. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and if war breaks out, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land. Therefore they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with heavy burdens. They built for Pharaoh store cities, Pithom and Ramses, but the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad.

And the Egyptians were in dread of the people of Israel. So they ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in all kinds of work in the field. In all their work they ruthlessly made them work as slaves.

Then the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shipra and the other Pua, When you serve as a midwife to the Hebrew women and see them on the birthstool, if it is a son, you should kill him, but if it is a daughter, she shall live.

But the midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live. So the king of Egypt called the midwives and said to them, Why have you done this and let the male children live? The midwives said to Pharaoh, Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are rigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them. So God dealt well with the midwives, and the people multiplied and grew very strong. And because the midwives feared God, He gave them families. Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live.

Father, we come today as people who want to hear your word. It speaks to us and we pray that we would have ears to hear and hearts and minds to understand and hearts to obey. Help me as I proclaim it that I would be bold and careful and yet recognizing at all times it's your very word. Help us to be people who worship you in the hearing of your word, for in Christ's name we pray, amen.

A question every one of us has probably asked in our own mind at one point or another in our lives is, where is God? Where is God? Especially if we've experienced something that has gone badly. I remember after 9-11, English Reformed evangelist John Blanchard wrote a little pamphlet, Where was God on 9-11? That was a question that was asked. Where was God on 9-11? This is not a new question.

As a congregation that's very familiar with the Psalter, you're obviously aware that in places like Psalm 22, Psalm 10, Psalm 41, Psalm 42, Psalm 60, Psalm 88, Psalm 119, that very question, where is God, is asked. So it's not that it's an illegitimate question, but the question is how we approach it.

Now the presence of God is an important theme throughout key portions of the biblical narrative. Matter of fact, there was one Old Testament scholar who wrote what we call Old Testament biblical theology. That's where you trace the working of God chronologically. And unlike systematic theology, where you go topically, biblical theology traces it chronologically. He wrote a Old Testament biblical theology with the central theme. He said the central theme of the Old Testament was the presence of God. It's a good way of bringing the Old Testament together. God is there.

But yet, when we start this series out of the book of Exodus, one of the things that should jump out at us is that in a book such as Exodus, where the presence of God is very prominent, God is only mentioned a couple of times in this first chapter. Much of the chapter doesn't even mention God. And this is really in stark contrast with the rest of the book where God is the central character. After all, the book of Exodus, just a couple of chapters later, we get the revelation of the name of God, Moses of the burning bush.

And he hears God say, I am who I am. Tell them I am sent you, or Yahweh sent you. That's probably how we think that name is pronounced in Hebrew. I am, Yahweh sent me, sent you. That's profound teaching on the presence of God. The battle with Pharaoh. We just sang that psalm that talked about the plagues. And remember what brought the plagues along anyway. Because when Moses walked into the presence of Pharaoh and he said, I am. Yahweh says let my people go. What did Pharaoh respond?

Who is this Yahweh you're talking about? Now, if you read it, isn't that what he said? Who is Yahweh? I don't know that god. I know these other gods that we have, but Yahweh, I don't pay any attention to him. And those plagues were a wake-up call for Pharaoh to say, okay, you want to know who Yahweh is? You'll see who Yahweh is. And we just sang about those plagues. He learned quickly who Yahweh was.

So the presence of God is seen there. He's seen in the pillar of cloud and the cloud by night. God's presence is very clear in the book of Exodus. And you kind of look and say, OK, where is he here? Don't see him so much. Yet, I'm convinced it's just this absence that sends us looking to find, well, it looks like absence anyway, to find his presence. But it's a kind of under the table kind of presence.

And that's what we're going to look at this morning, to see how God is here in the first chapter But you have to look under the table. And when you look under the table, his presence just shines through. So there are going to be four ways we're going to see that God is present in this chapter. So let's follow along and see what the scriptures teach us about the presence of God. But before we do that, let's get a little background because we're starting a new series.

And this is the second book of the Pentateuch. The first five books are a unity in the scripture. We call them the Pentateuch. It's simply a fancy word for saying the five books. Five books of Moses, traditionally seen as written by Moses, although we know there was some final editing because we have the account in Deuteronomy of Moses' death, and none of us can really write about our own death.

So obviously, there was a little bit of final editing. And it's interesting. Exodus, the book of Exodus, is all about the Exodus, the leaving from Egypt, going back to the promised land. Now, just a little quick comment here on the date of the Exodus, because if you study this, you will find that scholars have proposed two different dates. There's an earlier date of 1444, or another date about 1280, and during the reign of Ramses II. There are a couple other minor suggestions, but those are the two most prominent ones. Now, either is a possibility.

Most conservative reform scholars have picked the earlier date, claiming it fits better with the genealogies found in the rest of the Bible, like 1 Kings 6.1. However, people have pointed out that that could be a stylized way of saying 40 generations. They've argued that the later date, the 1280 date, fits better with some of the archaeological evidence, although it's not conclusive.

And especially people have pointed out that the fact that it talks about the cities of Pithom and Ramses. Now, here's what the problem comes from for the earlier date is those cities weren't called Pithom and Ramses then. But some people have responded back and said, well, that's just a historical anachronism.

Like, we would talk about colonial New York. Well, if you know anything about the history, you know it wasn't called New York originally. It was called New Amsterdam because it was founded by Dutch immigrants, not English immigrants, and so they called it. But historians sometimes say New York.

And this is a thing where you have good, solid biblical scholars that go on both sides, while the majority maybe take the older date. For example, a scholar that I knew, I knew him years ago when we were both in graduate school, Dr. Willem van Gummeren, who taught at Geneva for a number of years, and then he went to Reformed Theological Seminary and finished up at my alma mater, Trinity Divinity School, he argued for the later date on the basis of the archaeological material. So bottom line is you'll find good scholars on both sides, majority probably on one date.

I'm going to toss my hands up in the air, so I don't know for sure. That's not my specialty. But you'll see people on both sides, just so you'll know that because someone takes the later date doesn't mean he's a heretic. Just wanted to let you know that. If you see somebody that takes that. But what's interesting about this is an even bigger question.

And that is that certain skeptics have pointed out, if you go to the Egyptian records, we don't find anything about the people of Israel or the exodus in Egyptian records. And so there are those who tried to say, well, this is all just invented then. You can go out there and you can find skeptical scholars who will say this is all invented. If it was true, we'd find it in the historical records.

But in response to that is this, we do find clear references to Semitic speaking slaves and the Hebrew people spoke a Semitic language. Hebrew is a Semitic language. And there's one other important factor. One of the things that we will see here is it said there was this new king. We're going to make a little comment about this new king in a way who did not know about Joseph. Well, I don't think it's that he didn't know about Joseph. I think it's a case he didn't want to know about Joseph.

Why? Because we had a dynasty change. And one thing Egyptians tended to do is if there were bad things in your historical record, you know what they told the historians? Get rid of that. I don't like bad things in my historical record. So there's a very good explanation for why the exodus is not explicitly mentioned. Because after all, think of the pharaoh, that particular pharaoh. He didn't come out exactly smelling like a rose. He ended up being drowned in the Red Sea.

So there are good reasons for that. And the book itself does show a high level of awareness of Egyptian customs and dynastic changes. The new king who arose who did not know Joseph And these, as I said, not only did they expunge things from the record, but they were often violent. And that's lying in the background of this text.

Why in the world is this pharaoh so worried about the people of Israel multiplying? Well, his dynasty had just kicked out the other people. And they were afraid, as we'll explain, that those people would join them in a counter-revolution. Now, another interesting, by the way, The NIV translates that verse as, a new king to whom Joseph meant nothing came to power.

I think that's a good way of understanding it. Now, one other interesting thing in background, before we jump into the text, is none of our English translations pick this up, because it ends up being an awkward way to start a book in English. But in Hebrew, this particular book begins with a Hebrew word we call vav, which really means and or but. Now, can you imagine if you started a book with the word and or but? What was the first thing somebody would say?

Oh, wait a minute. You're connecting to something that goes before. And that is just the point. This book is continuing the narrative that had been there in Genesis. It's saying, when it says, these are the names, you could translate that as, and these are the names, or but these are the names of the people who went down there. It's clearly letting you see that it's a continuation of the last chapter of Genesis. Genesis. There are a lot of interesting themes in the book of Exodus.

The God who controls history. The God whose name is Yahweh. The God who is holy. The God who remembers. The God who acts in judgment and salvation. The God whose wrath is averted by atonement. The God who speaks and reveals himself in written revelation. The God who is transcendent, high and above, yet lives among his people. and the covenant God.

But what's fascinating about that last theme is while it's clearly all about God's covenant working, did you know that the actual word covenant only appears three times in the book of Exodus? And yet it's full of the doctrine of the covenant, which reminds us that you don't have to have the word necessarily to have the doctrine.

It's half narrative and half law. There's a certain flow, and the flow is redemption, law, worship. And that's significant. Redemption, law, worship. That's not accidental. It emphasizes the saving acts of God as much as any Old Testament book. Now, oftentimes people will say Moses is the real hero of the book. Well, not exactly. Moses is not exactly a heroic figure in some ways. Some ways he is, but other ways he's not. He's a prominent figure, but God is the real hero.

And I'm reminded of, I wouldn't recommend the book, because it's not a particularly good book, but it was a little book for women's Bible studies years and years ago. And it had this picture of Moses pointing at his brother. And the title of the book is, Here am I, Lord, but send Aaron. And I think that's a good picture of what Moses was like. Lord, I'm here, but I'd really rather you send my brother instead of me. I don't want to do this job. Remember all those excuses Moses had? I don't talk very well. I can't do this. I can't do that.

And I'm much happier out here tending the sheep than being sent for the task you want me to do. Here am I. Send Moses, my brother. He's got the gift of gab. You send him instead. That's Moses. So Moses is not the hero, per se. He's the instrument God uses. God is the hero.

Well, let's look at the text itself, the four ways in which we see the presence of God in this text. The first way we see this is God is fulfilling his covenant promises. That's why I mentioned about the beginning, that conjunction that's translated and or but. It's connecting with Genesis. Well, what is Genesis dealing with? God calling his people. And the opening of this book is saying there were 70 people who went down into Egypt, all ancestors of the people of Israel. The book of Genesis, remember, had started with the fall.

Immediately after it, in Genesis 3.15, God says, I'm going to bruise the head of the serpent, but he's going to bruise the seed's heel.

God says he's got a plan of redemption, Genesis 3.15. Then we have the Noah accounts, God rescuing people.

Then we have the beginning of the narrowing down of the covenant people, the promises to Abraham, Isaac, And then Jacob, God making those promises to Abraham, you're going to have descendants like the sands of the sea and the stars in the sky. I'm going to bring through you my plan of redemption so that the whole world will be blessed through you. But how's God going to do that? He's got to do that through a specific people.

And this text says, the people of Israel were fruitful, in verse 7, and increased greatly, they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong. It literally says in the Hebrew text that the land swarmed with them. That's what it says. It's like when you go someplace and the place is swarming with flies. you know, get out of here, I can't stand it in here, bugs everywhere. That's what it says, that the land swarmed with the people of Israel.

This is a direct sign that God is fulfilling His covenant promises. Now you'll notice it doesn't mention the name God in that particular set portion of the text at all. But why in the world were they fruitful and multiplying? Because God was saying, I'm working through these people. This is the plan of redemption through this particular people. I'm bringing them out of the famine situation. That's what they were in, in the promised land. I'm taking them down to Egypt. They're going to take a detour in Egypt for 400 years so that I can mold them into the people that I want them to be, so I can preserve this covenant line. Chapter two has an interesting phrase. It says that God, at the end of chapter two, God remembered his covenant.

Now, we have to be careful about that, because it's like well-known pastor Doug Wilson said, it's not like God one day said, oh rats, I forgot about the covenant. I better remember that now. That's not the way God operates. He doesn't all of a sudden wake up one day and say, oops, almost forgot about that covenant I made many generations ago. God had forgotten his covenant. He was remembering his covenant. God remembering his covenant is just a way for us humans to understand this. Because we think in terms of remembering. God never forgets.

But the covenant promises of God are seen in this chapter. The Egyptians, after all, were part of a satanically inspired plan to stop God's plan of redemption. Satan, we're going to comment on that a little bit more later on in the sermon this morning, but remember Satan along the way would like nothing better than to stop God's plan of redemption. And what's God saying? No, I've got a people and through those people is going to come that seed.

He had actually narrowed it down, or we already knew that, from the end of Genesis to the tribe of Judah. And then we know the rest of the plan in the Old Testament. The plan through David and his family, all the way down. You get in Ruth and you see the genealogies.

Why are those genealogies important? Because they're tracing the plan of redemption. We're gonna look at the personal aspect toward us a little bit later in the sermon, but we need to forget, never forget the big picture here. And the big picture is that God's plan of redemption will never fail.

And even when we don't see it, do you think the people of Israel were sitting around and they're being fruitful and multiplying that every day they're thinking, There's another potential, a little baby born, another potential Messiah. It may be this one, maybe this one. I don't think so always. I mean, some of them probably thought that.

But what we see, what we can see, we can step back and we can see that God is at work here. He's preserving his people. He's bringing the covenant line through. He's making sure that it would come all the way to Christ, so that Christ would come. It required a covenant people, no matter how difficult and unfaithful they may be.

When you read the Old Testament, we sometimes have a tendency to read it this way. Well, you got good kings and bad kings. Be like the good king, don't be like the bad king. Yeah, that's one way to read it, but it's not the best way to read it. The best way to read the Old Testament is God is preserving his people in spite of their botching and flaws and everything else because he has a plan of redemption and nothing is going to stop God's plan of redemption.

Ever since Christ came, Christ, remember, said, OK, I've dealt Satan the death blow. I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. But it's the first stages of that and the final wrap up is at the second coming of Christ. But Jesus said in that interim he's going to build his church. And the gates of hell will not prevail against it. So no matter how much we look at the sin and chaos in the world. And sometimes we look at that. And we say, what's going on here? How in the world is God working in this chaos, in this sin?

In the history of the church, for example, people have pointed out that North Africa, in the late 19th century, there were more missionary graves than there were converts. And yet at one time in the early church period, North Africa was a stronghold of the Christian faith. It looks like Satan had won there. But he hadn't, because the gospel had spread to other places.

God's covenant promises are real, and he will never leave or forsake his church. God's presence is there in his fulfilling of his covenant promises. But the second way we see God's presence is he's fulfilling his creational plans. Because the language of being fruitful and multiplied that we see here has overtones about the multiplication of that the original creation plan was. This mirrors the creation account. Now, sin has indeed entered into the warp and woof of human existence.

But the very covenantal plan of God to redeem humanity is God's response to the fact that he doesn't Go like this after creation and say, well, you guys had your chance. You had your chance. I'm starting all over again. I'm going to get somebody like this. These Adam and Eve characters here who botched everything. Let's start all over. God says no. I've made this creation. I gave them a job to do. I told them to be fruitful and multiply. And I'm not going to abandon my creation. Redemption. The plan of salvation flows from the fact that God does not want to let his creation go. Now, it's very interesting, and we need to talk about this briefly here, the account of the midwives here. Now, an interesting question here is, are these midwives telling justifiable lies, or are they not?

Because they say the people of Israel are so fertile and have such easy pregnancies that they don't need us, the midwives. Now, there have been a number of theologians, I can point to some great ones, Calvin and Augustine, who said the midwives are lying. And another theologian who argued for that, Charles Hodge, said, well, this is one of these so-called justifiable lies, because the pharaoh and the Egyptian authorities had no right to that truth, because they intended evil from it. And you can make a good case for that. However, there are others who have said, maybe they're not lying. Maybe they're telling the truth.

Maybe God was blessing the Hebrew women in such a way that they didn't need the midwives. We don't know exactly for sure. You can draw material out of the text. The text doesn't explicitly answer that question. But what we do know is that they were being fruitful. and multiplying so much so that the land was swarming like a bunch of insects with them.

If they're telling the truth, the midwives, then maybe God is ameliorating in some way some of the effects of the curse so that the Hebrew women are having easier childbirth. And remember, if God has told people to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, I believe one of Satan's modus operandi is to say, okay, let's limit the population. Let's kill them. I think, for example, that the devil loves abortion because it limits the population of a people. It kills creatures made in the image of God. The rest of the book of Exodus is loaded with creational images. showing that the Exodus may be a kind of a symbol of a new creation, or at least a foretaste of the ultimate goal that God has of restoring creation.

So when we are tempted to ask, where is God? We must always be reminded that after the fall, Adam and Eve did not ask the question, where is God? It was God who asked the question of them, where are you, Adam and Eve? And that's really the more fundamental question. Not where is God, but where are we? God hasn't abandoned his creation.

He has a plan of redemption. And that plan of redemption, I love it that we read Romans 8 today, because it talks about the creation is groaning. The creation is groaning. You ever feel like you just want to groan sometimes when you see the struggles in this world? The whole creation, the Apostle Paul says, is groaning. But that one day when the children of God are revealed, the creation stops groaning.

Now that's when the end, when Christ returns. He makes all things new. But it's absolutely fitting that God says, I'm just not going to snatch out a few people and take them to heaven someday. Some people think of redemption that way. That's not God's plan of redemption. God's plan of redemption is to take this earth that we stand on.

This beautiful Iowa farmland is growing such wonderful corn this year. And as good and fruitful as it is, you read the last two chapters of the book of Revelation, it's going to make your 250 bush, you know, bin-busting yields look like nothing. Ever seen fruit trees that bear fruit every month? You know, I'm just speaking a little crazy here, but yeah, you may have 5,000 bushel and acre corn. I don't know.

But it's, God is saying, Creation is going to be restored and bountiful. God isn't done with creation. And them being fruitful and multiplying is a sign that God has not abandoned His creation. If you're an unbeliever today, that's the fundamental question for you is not where is God, but where do you stand in relation to Him? Even though the creation is groaning, we see God's commitment to his creation. Death is a constant reminder that the creation is broken, but we see God's handiwork.

We were on vacation just recently, and we came back through Missouri. And as you travel through Missouri, those of you who've been down there, you get in on the Ozark territory. And then you start driving north and pretty soon you get just all around Moberly, Macon, those towns as you're coming up there.

And all of a sudden you find yourself, Jenny and I looked at each other, we looked around and we said, starting to look like Iowa. Starting to look like Iowa because you're in the Corn Belt territory. You look out and there are those corn and bean fields. Only, I suppose, a Midwesterner whose grandparents farmed can look out. And some people, I think, the Colorado and other people think we're crazy sometimes. But we look at it and we can say, there's beauty in that. I love those cornfields. I like looking at that. And I like seeing the beauty of the tall corn. We can look at God's creation and we can say, these are signs that God hasn't abandoned us.

But one of the most potent signs is every little baby that's born. Every little one that's born is a way of God saying, I haven't abandoned my creation. The mother who goes through that excruciating pain of labor, every account I've ever heard from a mother is that all of a sudden that's gone when they put that little one on your tummy. The ladies forget all about the struggles.

And they say, another sign of God's blessing. That's what the people of Israel were experiencing here. God was present. When we're tempted to say, where is God? We look around us in creation. We look at them, especially at the new birth. Those of her grandparents could look at our grandkids. And we can say, God is blessing this creation.

But the third way. is that in spite of the strongest opposition we can see, God is there. Now we must not lose sight of the terrible opposition the people of Israel were facing. Verse 13 in most of our translations talks about made their work hard with hard service. One translation says it brutally compelled them to slave labor. And it's Fascinating in this text, why in the world are they being brutally compelled to slave labor? It's because they're having lots of kids. And you said, wait, wait, wait a minute, wait a minute. Just a minute ago, you told me that was God's blessing. Yeah, it was.

But it was the very blessing of God that made the Egyptians mad. And the Egyptians said, OK, we've got to be brutal with these people. It says here that there was this new king that did not know Joseph and that the Egyptians said we need to be careful because they might join our enemies. What we need to understand here is that there has been a serious change of dynasty because from what we can gather piecing the history together, the biblical history with the secular history of that time, is that under Joseph, the people of Israel went into Egypt when there was a group of kings known as the Hyksos kings, who were Semitic-speaking kings who had conquered Egypt and ruled it for a couple of centuries. Why is that significant? Because they were like cousins to the Hebrew people. and they had invited Hebrews and other Semitic-speaking people into Egypt. Now you've had a dynastic change, you've had a revolution, and native Egyptian dynasties had gone back.

So, these native Egyptian dynasties are looking out and they're saying, uh-oh, We still got a bunch of these Semitic speaking people here. What if those Hyksos guys that we kicked out try to come back? They got like a fifth column living here. They got cousins who are living here who might rise up and revolt because they don't like native Egyptians.

You know, today Egypt is all Arabic speaking and it's considered part of the Arab world. But there was a big distinction in this time in the ancient world between the so-called Hamidic people who spoke native Egyptian dialects and the Semitic speaking people from like Syrians and Hebrews and Aramaeans and others. And this is all behind this.

So, they decide that they're going to have to get rid of these people. First of all, they say in verse 10, we need to deal shrewdly. That's a fancy way of saying, we got to be smart about this. We got to be smart about this. These people here are going to do us in if we have another revolution, if they join forces, if the Hyksos kings try to come back and encounter a revolution. So we will try to work them literally to death so they won't want to do that.

They think they're being smart. Ever notice that sometimes the wisdom of the world, as the Apostle Paul says, is foolishness, really? Here are these people thinking they're being smart. And they're being dumb as rocks. Because when you try to outsmart the living, sovereign God, you're being stupid. But they think they're being smart. And it says the more they try to oppress the people of God, the more God blesses them.

Now, as I said, that reminds us of what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1.19 or Isaiah 29.14, where the foolishness of worldly wisdom is seen. So they decide to up the ante. And they say, we're going to kill all the males. Well, what was that? Well, males can become soldiers. And you kill the males, and you can absorb the females into the Egyptian population. The Egyptian men could take second and third wives, and they could absorb the females.

The language of this text is very severe. And there's no doubt the incredible harshness that the people of Israel were facing. There's interesting language in verse 12 that talks about their heavy burdens. In verse 11, it talks about the fact that they had hard service. In verse 14 it said they had bitter lives. The whole text is just loaded with language that they had a horrible life. And as the beginning of the Moses narrative, and you see this already being discussed here, the midwives are supposed to be people who execute male children.

This is an incredible opposition. And when we get into the rest of the narrative in chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, you see, the more they work, and God sends Moses, who says to Pharaoh, let my people go, what's their response? You're just lazy. You're just crabby. You're complaining. You're belly aching. Go make it with the bricks, but no straw. Get your own straw. All along, the events keep getting worse. The situation is growing really pretty desperate.

The Israelites were facing severe hatred from the Egyptians, even though Pharaoh would call them a people. And he was actually the first one in the scriptures to call the people of God by that phrase, a people. So what should we think about this? First of all, we should never be surprised at the opposition that we face. Because after all, Ephesians 6 reminds us, we don't wrestle against flesh and blood. Ultimately, the devil himself was behind all of this. We don't always see it. Pharaoh was certain that he was the boss and he was acting on his own. But he was acting, he was a dupe of Satan.

Yet, I think we need to understand that what this text is telling us is, the stronger the opposition, the more we can look and see God is at work. God is using that opposition to mold his people, both individually and corporately, into the people that he intends.

And we should never forget that sometimes God's greatest blessings might bring opposition, really nasty opposition, on the heels of that. We shouldn't forget that. Why in the world are they getting opposition? Because God is blessing them. Now, that leads us to shake our heads sometimes. Well, wait a minute.

When God blesses, shouldn't that mean there's no opposition? No. The pagans in this world, I'm convinced, don't like to see the blessing of God on His people. Yet the more God blessed them, the more there was opposition. He was blessing them with children.

He may have been ameliorating the worst effects of childbirth. He was confounding the plans of satanic opposition to stop the plan of redemption, just as he tried to do that in many other times. You had the exiles. You have the remnant that came back. Going into the New Testament, you have the temptation of Jesus where Satan says, hey, just bow down and worship me and I'll give you all the kingdoms of this world. You feel like you're almost starving. You got the power to make these stones into bread. Satanic opposition.

Mocking of Jesus on the cross. There's the soldiers mocking him, but there's also the two thieves. One of them obviously repents, and Jesus says to him, today you will be with me in paradise, but there he is on the cross, and he's being mocked. One of them says to him, if you're really the Christ, save us, yourself, and us too, save us too.

But the ultimate way we see God, realizing that God hasn't abandoned us, is in the plan of redemption, because Jesus goes to the cross, for us. He cries out the cry of dereliction. Now we need to be very careful here. Because the cry of dereliction, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me, is very real. And he did it for us.

Yet, we need to understand that that's the first verses, as those of you who have sung Psalm 22 of course realize, is the first verses of Psalm 22. I had a professor in seminary and he was speaking to him speaking people and he said just as people would sing just as I am and they would immediately know without one plea but that my blood was shed for me you sing you say one phrase and everybody knows the rest well Hebrews if another example if I said the Lord is my shepherd all of you would probably say I shall not want he leaves me besides you know you could finish Psalm 23 So when Jesus said, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He was quoting Psalm, Dr. Kaiser reminded us, quoting Psalm 22. And when you look at that psalm, when you realize that when you get to the end of the psalm, that psalm circles back and the psalmist says, you won't abandon me. We sang Psalm 16 today. And what does Psalm 16 say?

And we read it. You will not abandon your holy one to see corruption. So, is the cry of dereliction real? Yes. But I myself have been guilty and so have, I think, a few other Bible-believing Reformed scholars of pushing the cry of dereliction as somehow that the Trinity was disrupted or some way it was not. The Trinity is never disrupted. God is one triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, with perfect fellowship.

In the mystery of what's happening here, Jesus was experiencing the curse, and he was experiencing it for us. But he also had the assurance, like Psalm 22 and Psalm 16 tells us, that he comes around and God ultimately does not abandon his chosen one. And that's what the people of God are experiencing here. incredible opposition. But God ultimately is there and doesn't abandon them. Why can we have that assurance He doesn't abandon us? Because He took the curse for us, but God raised Him from the dead. And He was not ultimately abandoned to see corruption. That is the hope for each one of us.

By going to the cross and crying out, Jesus reminds us that He bore our sins But that assures us that we will not be abandoned by the Father. In spite of, no matter how horrible the situation, and these were horrible, I mean the text goes out of its way to talk about how horrible these situations were, the situation was. Hard labor, nastiness, mothers supposed to hand over their sons to be killed. Talk about bad situations.

God is still there. He's still their blessing. He's upholding them. And Jesus going to the cross assures us that God will never abandon us. The last way in which this is demonstrated is in the ordinary and faithful acts of his people. What should be obvious to us in this narrative is that God is present in the very ordinariness of life.

Now, I know that their working conditions were horrible. But they're working, and they're bearing children. Those two things, working and bearing children, are very ordinary things in life. And who foils the plans of Pharaoh? The midwives. What was their job? To oversee the births of children. Now, people have wrestled with this biblical scholars, how can two midwives serve thousands of Hebrew women? The best solution that I know of is they were probably the head of Local 102, the United Guild of Midwives in Egypt or something like that. They were probably the head midwives and they were the spokesmen for the organization of Hebrew midwives and so when God called them in, he spoke directly to them. But did you notice that how God is at work here? He's not at work as he would be later in miracles, the plagues. He's not at work by Moses striking the rock and water comes out. How is he working? Very ordinary actions of these ordinary women, the heads of the midwives.

Now, one interesting thing that we should also notice here is that Pharaoh is only noted by his title. Pharaoh was not a name. Pharaoh was a title. It's like president. We talk about President Trump, President Obama, President Bush, the first Bush, and then the second Bush, and then President, all the various presidents as you go back. But if we just say the president, we know we're talking in a kind of, who was ever president at that time or in a generic way. These pharaohs had names. Ramses and Thutmoses and all these other names. This guy didn't have any name. He's just the pharaoh. The pharaoh.

But what did you notice about these two midwives? They get their names in here. Going about their ordinary task, they get their names there. One of the most powerful men in the world at that time is defeated effectively by two ordinary women who believed God went about their job and spoke boldly. I'm reminded here the way they talked. to Pharaoh. They spoke boldly.

One of my favorite theologians, J.I. Packer, talks about the Hebrew Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego who get thrown in the fiery furnace. And he said, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego looked at King Nebuchadnezzar and said, well, you do what you got to do. If you throw us in the fiery furnace, so be it. And he said, Packer says, they smilingly washed their hands of the consequences.

I think that's what these Hebrew midwives are doing. They're saying, OK, our job is to do this. God has told us what to do in their own minds and they did it. They feared God and it totally affected what they did. We don't see them making a big deal about their actions. They're simply saying God is the one who is at work here.

They did what was right and God blessed them. But did you notice how God blessed them? He blessed them by giving families. There's a certain irony of this. Why in the world were they in such trouble in the first place? Everybody was having families. And God is saying to them, I'm going to bless you. I'm going to give you a family, too. And they saw the blessing of God in this, I'm sure. But I'm sure they also scratched their head a little bit and said, OK, what kind of blessing?

This is not the blessing I really needed right now. Because getting more kids, that just gets us in more trouble. But they feared God. This is one of the hardest things for us to do, yet it's the way God usually operates. We look at a book such as Exodus with all of its miracles and what we see here is an emphasis on faithful obedience by some ordinary people. And each of us must be prepared to do the same. As we faithfully serve the Lord in the ordinary areas of life, Sometimes we might be called to show our trust in God in some very severe way. But in other ways, other parts of our life, we may just go on our callings, bearing children, having families, going through our calling, working, doing the very ordinary things of life. And when God does call upon us to serve him in a big pressure point, we will be able to serve him in the pressure points because we believe that he has been blessing us throughout the whole way. And each pressure point will be tempted to say, where is God? We will be tempted. That comes for all of us.

But if we have been faithful and obedient, we will know he is there, and after the fact, we may very well see and recognize his presence, just as the midwives probably did here. They are the more important figures in this narrative than the mighty Pharaoh, who he with his Egyptian advisors think they are going to be shrewd and outwit the holy God, the powerful God, who is watching over his people. So to summarize what we've seen here today, the Lord may seem absent to us sometimes, but He was really there for His people here. And He's always there for us today.

We need to trust Him and go about our lives faithfully believing that. He will bless us, but sometimes those very blessings will lead to further opposition. You know, when the Church prospers, opposition comes. The devil doesn't like it when the Church prospers. And he stirs up, sometimes he stirs up opposition within the very church itself, divisions and struggles. But God is still blessing. You can have the absolute assurance he's never abandoned, he won't abandon his covenant people. We read Romans 8, that beautiful chapter, and it says, who can separate us from the love of God? Did you notice that long list? That long list says nothing.

The late Jim Boyce, pastor of the PCA Church in Philadelphia, the 10th Presbyterian Church, was dying of cancer. He was, I think, in his early 60s. He died a relatively young man, at least now, being in my mid-70s, that looks like a relatively young man. And he was on his deathbed, and he was collaborating and writing a hymn with the music director at his church. And he wrote it on Romans 8, and it had a chorus.

The chorus was, it would ask all the questions, who will separate us from the love of God? And the chorus went, nothing, hallelujah. And they said, Dr. Boyce, dying in his hospital bed with cancer, doubled up his fist and went, nothing, nothing, hallelujah.

Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. That's the main point of this text. Nothing can separate us from God's love. We may look at the situation around us and say, God, where are you? He's there. He's blessing. Sometimes he's blessing us in the very ordinary things of life. Sometimes they're the tough times, but he is there. He's not only not abandoned his covenant people, but he's not abandoned his creation. It's groaning, but one day the groaning will stop and he will make all things new.

Closing Prayer

Praise be to God. And like Dr. Boyce said, nothing. Hallelujah. Well, let's pray. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you that you are there, that you sent your son to the cross to guarantee that we would never be separated from you. If you gave us Christ, you remind us you will give us all things. We thank you for that wonderful truth, for in Christ's name we pray, amen.