Exodus 1:15-17

Good to see you on this Monday to be with you as we continue through
Exodus.
And today, I think, Michael, really, as we turn to the next couple days,
the early part of this week, really get into
some of the heart of the story.
And it’s unfortunately the dark part of the story
as well, or it’s a dark part of the story.
Just a quick recap,
the book of
Exodus has gone out of its way in the few verses we’ve covered to tell us in multiple ways that the
people of Israel are hardy,
they’re strong, they’re resilient,
they’re multiplying,
they are such a presence that the Pharaoh,
the king of Egypt,
has seen them as a threat and tried
to curtail them by making them slaves and forcing labor upon them.
And even then,
they have thrived.
And so,
what happens next is,
I think, an interesting exploration in
the nature of power.
Maybe even one could say the nature of evil and the work
of evil and power
when they try to serve
one another.
And so,
we’re going to see,
in some ways, an introduction to the hardest part of the story.
But really, we see the undercurrent of it.
So, let me read a few
verses, and then we will go back to them.
“The king of Egypt said to Hebrew midwives,
one of whom was named Shipra,
and the other was named Pua,
‘When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women
and see them on the birthing stool,
if it is a boy,
kill him.
But if it is a girl,
let her live.’
But the midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them,
but they let the boys live also.” So,
yeah, this moves quickly, this narrative.
The Pharaoh has seen that
the oppression of the people,
the forced labor upon them,
the making their life
more and more difficult,
has not been successful.
And so, now he really turns to what seems to us
kind of unthinkable.
Unfortunately, in the history of the world,
these are the kind of decisions and
calculations that get made
by people of power at times.
And he calls the two Hebrew midwives.
You get the sense that in most instances,
even here, Israel and Egypt aren’t intermixing a lot,
though I’m sure that happened,
but the Hebrews have these two women.
Now, they probably represent, there may be more than two,
with the kind of numbers that are given in this book.
It seems
maybe unlikely that there are only two,
but these two are highlighted,
Shipra and Pua, and the Pharaoh gives them instructions.
And again, very interesting that he believes he can command
Hebrew women to hurt their own people.
These are not Egyptians.
They’re not under the
Pharaoh in a sense of government,
but of power.
The Pharaoh is reigning supreme.
And so, he tells them, “The women can live.
We’re not afraid of the women,
but the boys, if a boy is born to a Hebrew
woman, you are not to let it live.
You are to make sure that it doesn’t survive.”
You know, again,
a horrific kind of detail in the story.
Certainly,
it can’t imagine being in the place of these two women who have to choose between doing something
so atrocious, so horrendous, and answering to what is,
at the time, the most powerful man on the face of the earth.
So,
their choice is really,
as they might see it,
it’s maybe a little
overstated to say it,
but their choice might be death
to the children or death to themselves.
And so,
they find themselves in a
terrible spot between the Pharaoh’s desire for control
and this unthinkable thing they’ve been told to do.
So, some of this is, of course,
a story of Pharaoh exerting control over the Hebrew people,
but this is really, in many ways, an accentuation of a theme that we’ve already talked about,
Clint, in some of our previous days of this study already,
and that is Pharaoh as an adversary to God.
Because here are God’s people who God is blessing.
We’ve already been told that they’re multiplying, that they’re strong,
that they’re virile as people,
and now we come to see that the Pharaoh,
in an effort to undercut that and to essentially make that blessing no longer valid,
he tries to use his human influence and power to undercut the blessing that God has given to the people,
and he does that here in this calculation with these two particular midwives.
It’s interesting, I think, when we look at it from that vantage to see how,
from the very beginning of the story,
Pharaoh first applies pressure.
He works the people hard and tirelessly,
so much so, as we’ve already said,
that this will later in scripture become an example of how not to treat other people.
But then he now,
and very quickly, this is verse 16 of the first chapter,
he’s already moved to
killing the male children coming into the Israelite people.
And so we’re going to see,
later in the story,
we alluded to it last conversation,
some very harsh treatment
as God comes against Pharaoh and the Egyptians.
We’re going to see some really,
really hard punishments being metered out,
and some of that is a reflection of how harsh and inhuman Pharaoh has
already began treating the people of Israel.
And this is at the very front end of the story,
and I think it’s worth noting that the Hebrew people,
they count their generations through
the male line of their genealogies.
And so choosing to kill the male is, in this instance,
a way of trying to wipe out the people,
to try to undercut the very core of that claiming that God
did when he made that promise to Abraham,
Jacob,
and this ongoing legacy that we’ve
seen throughout the Old Testament story.
So, Clay, there’s a lot more happening here,
and that doesn’t even count the New Testament allusions of this,
where we have the infants
being massacred by Herod back in the New Testament and Matthew,
which is not the same as this,
but it certainly has resonances in Jesus’ own story,
that at the beginning of Jesus’ life,
there was the kind of authority against God being used against young children.
There’s so many different layers to a story like this.
It’s not one that you revel in.
It’s not an easy story to
process, but it is essential both to the story that’s being told next to this here and later,
as well as what the New Testament writers imagined as they encountered Jesus and his lordship.
Yeah, I would say, Michael, the Scripture is very aware of and very skeptical of
human power when it serves for its own ends.
And so,
Pharaoh has claimed power over the Hebrew
people.
He’s forced them to work.
He’s tried to make their life difficult.
He has exerted himself
over their lives, and now he takes the next step to exert himself over their death.
And much of what’s going to happen in this book is a kind of battle between the Egyptian deity in
the form of Pharaoh and God,
Yahweh, of the Israelites.
And I think in the book of Exodus’s perspective,
Pharaoh certainly fires the first shots,
and they’re very destructive
and damaging shots.
He’s claimed authority over the people,
now claiming authority over life itself.
And he’s not doing it,
right?
He presumes he can tell these Hebrews to take the lives of their own people,
their friends, their family members,
their nephews, the children of their community,
that Pharaoh believes he has the right,
has the authority, has the power to tell these women
to do this unthinkable thing for no other reason than he’s the Pharaoh and he wants it that way,
that he believes they have to listen.
And really,
in the book of Hebrews,
it’d be interesting.
I don’t know if anyone has ever done some work on the idea of heroism in
the book of Exodus.
I mean, I suppose to some extent Moses is a heroic figure.
But the first act of heroism I think we see in this book is these two women who are named but not known,
who are fairly common.
They’re midwives.
They don’t have a significant place in the rest of the
boys live.
They did not do.
They disobeyed the Pharaoh.
They refused to let power coerce them
into doing something that they knew to be evil.
They wouldn’t join the movement toward evil that
the Pharaoh sets before them.
And I don’t know to what extent these women are celebrated in the
in the evolution of the Jewish faith,
Michael, but certainly in the book of Hebrews,
their act of defiance here is celebrated.
It’s very subtle.
It’s told in a real minimal style,
but that these Hebrew women,
the lowest of the low disregard the Pharaoh is significant in the
story.
I think we’ll see some of that significance tomorrow.
But even here, we get the idea that
these are these are outstanding, uncommon,
uncompromising women.
Yeah, we see here, Clint, the reality that it is in verse 17,
their fear of God that overrides their fear of the king.
And that is ultimately,
as you’ve said in the past already,
this is in many ways a picture of Israel at its best.
I mean, these women are illustrating and exemplifying what it looks like to be courageous
in the middle of an oppressive fear and anxiety laden moment in the life of the people.
And yet as we go into the next part of this text,
we’ll discover that even God blesses them for the sake
of what they have chosen to do.
And there is something very compelling about that,
not just as a historical antidote and not just as a reflection on these two women,
but also as an invitation
to those who are encountering this text to the people of Israel.
And then later, the Christians who will take it up and we’ll see in this a reminder that the kingdom that you now live in
is a kingdom that lives under God.
And the question would then come to each and every one of us,
who is the one that we submit to?
Who is the one who ultimately we fear?
Is it the love of
mammon or money, as Jesus said,
which sets itself against God?
Is it the love of stability and security?
You know, we could all add whatever that thing is for us that tempts us away from the fear
of God.
But Clint,
here in the midst of drastic and dire circumstances,
we have an illustration
of those who have chosen the good and chosen the right and they stand in that firmly.
And that is, I think, to anyone who’s willing to hear it,
an inspiration to our own action.
There’s an old quote that says the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.
And here we have these women who are good people and they refuse to do nothing.
They refuse to go along with evil.
They take a stand.
Now, it’s not a public stand.
It’s not a dramatic stand.
They don’t run a rally.
They don’t campaign against the Pharaoh.
They do what they
can do in the face of evil.
They say no.
They refuse to do it.
They make that choice over and
each time a boy child is born,
they hear again the order of the Pharaoh and rather than go
along and rather than bow down to the power of the world,
they, as we’ll learn tomorrow,
honor their fear of God,
their respect and awe of God,
and they choose life.
They choose faithfulness,
not to the ruler of the earth,
but to the creator,
to the God of Israel.
And so, yeah, these women probably don’t get enough press.
I think there’s lots of sermons,
lots of lessons.
I think they’re fascinating characters in that we don’t know much about them,
but what we do speaks mountains to who they were and how they conducted themselves.
And I think,
they’re fascinating characters in the story.
Well, Clint, this is a good illustration of a fact that we saw all throughout Genesis and maybe
in some ways in Genesis,
it was more tempting than it is here in Exodus thus far.
When we get further
in Exodus, it’s going to seem like Moses is the main character and he’s the one that all hinges on.
That certainly had moments where the characters in Genesis seem the same way,
but we said this
before that needs said again.
Remember that in the Old Testament narratives,
God is the central
character.
God is the one whose story has been threaded throughout.
And so here, yes,
these women,
they are a shipra and pua,
they are named here and their time in the story is short.
But that does not mean that they are in some way insignificant.
It means that their lives pointed
to the God who they feared,
to the God who they trusted.
And ultimately, we’re going to discover the God who is faithful to them.
And that is every character in the book of
Genesis, even Pharaoh, he doesn’t know it yet.
But even Pharaoh’s life will eventually point
to God.
And that is the nature of these stories is they show us that in surprising and mysterious
ways through the acts of brave women defying an order that they can all the way to the Egyptian
women who are strong in their childbearing and they have fortitude,
even in the midst of knowing
that this kind of order has been made.
In the midst of all of this trouble and turmoil,
God is being pointed to as the one who can be trusted.
And we’ll only see that fleshed out
as the story goes.
Yeah, join us tomorrow if you can for the back part of this story
of shipra and pua.
There’s some fascinating themes in it.
And then I think a watershed moment in the
book of Exodus that really has to be understood if you’re going to process the rest of this book.
Thanks for joining us today.
We will see you all tomorrow.