Are You Breaking Stones?

50 Days to Freedom: Day Seven

Exodus 1

Notes on this chapter for Bible Reading

In the opening words of the Bible’s second book, observe that God is fulfilling His promise to bless Israel’s children; growing their number exceedingly over 400 years, bringing brings a sense of threat and a violent reaction from Pharaoh. This is an important chapter for it lays the ground work for the entire book as well as Numbers and Deuteronomy. To understand its importance, we need to go back to the key verses of the Old Testament found in Genesis 12.

“And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.  

I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and through you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (ESV)

The promise laid out here Genesis 12 is the driving theme of the Old Testament and is as follows:

1. God will Bless Abraham and his family
   
2. God will make Abraham’s family into a great nation—Israel
   
3. God will give Abraham and his family Israel a promised land—Palestine
   
4. Those who bless this family will be blessed and those who dishonor it will be cursed
   
5. Through this family (ultimately Christ) the entire world will be blessed.
   

These promises are being fulfilled as God is making Israel into a great nation, adding to their numbers.  The promise is being fulfilled as God blesses the midwives who bless the Hebrews.  Yet, the promise is being threatened.  Even a reader who is marginally familiar with the protagonist (Moses) of Exodus recognizes that the small time genocide attempt of the Hebrew male infants could very well be the hand of Satan opposing the rise of a deliverer for God’s people, for in this chapter Moses was yet to be born.  God was preparing to move and Satan was making a counter move.  For a parallel, remember the birth of Christ (Matthew 2).  This lays the groundwork for a curse to those who dishonor God’s family.  The coming plagues as a result of this curse looms in the coming pages like debris that has fallen onto train tracks around a bend.  Nothing will get in the way of God blessing the world through Israel.  

Application

Some of the problems we face are from our own hands; some we inherit.  What is seen from the beginning is that sin and brokenness build on each other.  Sin breaks things, leaving people in its wake broken and prone to sin more, and break more.  The people of Israel were in slavery and had been so for a very long time.  Their king is attempting to wipe out a generation of their children. Their lives, at least on paper, are quite miserable, yet God is on the move, keeping His promises, aligning the nations, using Egypt as a womb to mature a family into a nation that will burst upon the world with the promise of nothing short of salvation for all nations.  

Tell that to the guy breaking stones for Pharoah.

You may be breaking stones and you may feel spiritual threats on your family, yet we get to see that God is always at work to bring salvation and to work in and through even the most broken of situations in order to bring freedom, salvation and hope to you and this world.  Believe it.

Let us know if you can see this.  We would love to hear your stories of how God is at work in ways we not always see.

Posted by Marc