From the Patriarchs to the Nation

Friends, welcome back.
Thanks for being with us today as we
really get very close to the end of
our study on Genesis.
In fact, so close that we are actually in the book of Exodus today.
We won’t be finishing Exodus.
We will be announcing a new book here probably within the next day or so.
But I think it does help,
as we said yesterday,
having finished the text of Genesis,
I think it does help to see how it fits into the ongoing story that will become the through line
of the Old Testament.
And yesterday we mentioned that the people had settled in the land.
Today we look at what is,
I think, the wonderful bridge between the two books.
We’re
looking at verse 8 here.
“Now a new king arose who did not know Joseph.
And he said to his people,
‘Look, the Israelites are more numerous and more powerful than we are.
Let us deal shrewdly with them,
or they will increase.
And in the event of war,
join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.’
So they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor.
They built supply cities, pithom and ramses for Pharaoh.
But the more they were oppressed,
the more they multiplied and spread.
So the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites.
The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on them and made their lives bitter,
with hard service in mortar and
brick and every kind of field labor.
They were ruthless in all the tasks they imposed on them.”
So this isn’t part of the story of Genesis,
but it is the connection.
As we saw,
it was an Israelite.
It was Joseph who garnered the future of Egypt,
whose wisdom and his ability to interpret
dreams and the guidance of God allowed him to put Egypt in a place to survive and thrive
in the midst of famine and hardship,
to levy that.
If you remember that end of that story,
Joseph actually levied that into additional lands,
to additional revenue for Egypt.
And now,
in this next generation,
the king who does not remember Joseph looks at the Israelites with threat,
looks at the Israelites who, by the way,
are strong and hardy
and sees in them
the possibility of them turning against him.
And so he essentially makes slaves of them.
And it is important to know that this story,
if you just start the book of Exodus,
I think you miss
the depth of this story.
And I think it is best read coming out of the book of Genesis to get the context here.
Yeah, 100% fair.
And I think what we need to note here is how quickly this turns in the narrative.
We may be up to this point in the study.
Like you said, Clint, if we were going
to start in Exodus,
this might to us just feel like here’s the problem.
The problem is this king
comes.
That king doesn’t remember or,
as you said yesterday,
doesn’t honor who Joseph was.
It’s far more than just a mental sort of idea.
It’s that the impact and honor of who Joseph was,
the kind of status that he had in the Egyptian society,
is no longer valid.
And in fact, the Israelites who have always been blessed are now becoming a threat because of that blessing.
And I want to pause here before I go any further.
Check me on this,
Clint, if this is accurate in your estimation.
I believe, at least I can’t remember a single time in Genesis that the
Israelites were called Israelite.
We certainly had the brothers named.
But I can’t think of a
time when they were grouped under that kind of title.
And that happens right away in the book of Exodus.
And fundamentally, what that tells us,
at least this is a rare occurrence,
if not the first,
what that tells us is that now we are looking at this as a nation.
The Genesis story, which gave us the patriarchs,
the fathers and the mothers,
the story of how that group of
people came to be,
is now transitioning into a story of the people,
a story that will encompass
all of those tribes as one.
All of those brothers’ families have now come under this larger umbrella.
And the story that we’ll follow in Exodus,
though it will have the uniqueness of some of those
characters we’ve seen before,
it will also now come under the heading of the people.
There will be a kind of oneness that is inaugurated now.
And that happens because of this king,
because of the oppression,
because of the dealing shrewdly,
as the text says.
Now the people are counted as one,
for they all share the same experience and ultimately the same need for rescue that,
of course, Exodus is concerned about sharing.
I think that’s a helpful insight, Michael.
You know,
in Genesis, we have a family that has land and prosperity.
In Exodus, we have a people that do not have a land and have their prosperity taken
from them.
And it really is two very different contexts,
two very different scenes,
two very different experiences.
These people now living under this heading of Israelite,
which comes directly from the patriarch Jacob, are being oppressed.
They are put into hardship.
And what’s really fascinating is that initially in the story, though briefly,
when they encounter hardship,
they thrive.
The more that the Egyptians put on them,
they still,
the more they multiply.
That’s what it says here.
The more they were oppressed,
the more they multiplied and spread.
Remember that thing hanging out of Genesis,
be fruitful and multiply.
They are doing that.
It is only when the Pharaoh ups this oppression and begins to attack their children
that I think we see in the book of Exodus a broken people.
It is in seeing the death of their
children, the murder of their children,
that they are gutted and that they become something other than strong,
something other than resilient.
It takes from them some core of who they are.
And in that encounter,
the Pharaoh then really makes of them victims and holds them captive
through that threat and through those actions.
And if you’ve ever read the book of Exodus,
we won’t go into this in great detail,
but God is hard on Egypt.
God is hard on the Pharaoh.
And it’s easy to read that and think,
“Whoa, God is really going after them.” It stems from this
opening chapter in which the Pharaoh tells his people,
“Throw their male children into the Nile.”
And it really reads in this text like the Pharaoh declaring war on Israel.
And of course, who stands behind Israel but God.
And so in a sense,
this Pharaoh all traced back to this one line,
he did not remember Joseph,
makes an enemy of God and ultimately moves toward
God acting destructively in his own country and even against his own person.
Yeah, and we don’t have access to the original Hebrew language as English speakers,
but we need to make sure that we see the care that’s been taken here to emphasize the extent of the
harm that’s being done to the people of Israel.
Just some of these word choices we have here in verse 11,
I’ll pull this up here for you,
that their taskmaster said over them,
“Opress them with forced labor.” But then you move down here,
verse 12, “The more that they were oppressed,
the more they multiplied.” Then verse 13,
“They become ruthless.” And then to finish in verse 14,
“They’re ruthless in all the tasks that they impose on them.”
Whenever you see that kind of repetition in Scripture,
you need to know right off the bat, this is important.
This is being laid out.
And I do think the idea of war may be the right metaphor here, Clint.
Fundamentally,
the kind of shrewdness being displayed here does in some ways remind us
of Jacob and Laban.
If you remember where Laban is being blessed because of Jacob’s presence and
Laban is able to sort of keep that on and through some trickery be able to maintain the blessing.
Here in the face of the Egyptians,
it’s not just shrewdness in the idea of economic gain,
but rather militaristic strength,
literal control with the idea of being that the people of Israel
can’t even leave the territory is the exact words we hear quoted from the Pharaoh king who forgets
Joseph.
So that is exactly what’s in field here or what’s in view here is this idea that the people
have been hard oppressed.
They’ve been set upon difficulty and difficulty.
In other words, they’ve been set upon by this great adversary,
which at one place was an ark,
a place of safety, of refuge, right?
They found in Egypt a place of safety from the famine.
Now it has turned
against them and become a place of great adversity, oppression,
difficulty,
and ruthlessness.
And so because of that very quick and very sharp change,
we’ve now already been set up with what is the
major concern of the book of Exodus,
and that is what does the God who’s been faithful to Abraham
and to Isaac and to Jacob,
what is that God going to do for these Israelites in the face of a
geonational power, the place where God had turned something bad into good?
What is God going to do
now that it has turned bad?
So the point I’m trying to make here,
Clint, is just the theme of Genesis,
of God’s faithfulness amidst adversity,
God’s willingness to work even through the people’s choices,
lots of times bad choices.
That theme remains present in Exodus,
but I think we
can see how it has now turned far more national than individual.
The promise now is for all of
the people, as it has been from the beginning,
but this is the first time we’ve seen it fleshed out
in such simple and clear language, I think.
I think that when the Bible does something like
change books, when it skips over a significant amount of time,
as a reader we don’t always take
that into account.
We move from the end of Genesis to the beginning of Exodus without
understanding that there are decades,
perhaps century involved in this transition.
It is telling, if you remember,
there’s nowhere in the late part of Genesis that this tension with Egypt
is kind of portrayed.
In fact,
the Pharaoh blesses the family of Joseph,
gives them the choice of the land,
the first fruits,
puts them to work for him,
even caring for his flocks.
In chapter 47,
Jacob himself blesses the Pharaoh in God’s name.
Maybe it’s too much to speak of it
as an alliance or a friendship,
but there’s certainly an ease and a sort of mutually
beneficial relationship between what we’d call Israel at the time and Egypt,
and that all has
drastically changed halfway through the first chapter of the book of Exodus.
And I think
it helps to know when you encounter those,
Egypt, as we close the book of Genesis,
Egypt is not an enemy.
As we open the book of Exodus,
Egypt stands as the primary enemy,
not only of Israel,
but of the God of Israel.
And that will be the defining conflict of this book,
the Pharaoh versus God,
whereas previously we saw the Pharaoh and Joseph working together
seem to be honoring one another and certainly benefiting one another.
And I think it helps
to just realize that when we make some of those transitions,
whole landscapes have changed.
And we need to be aware of that,
I think, to do justice to the story.
I think what’s really interesting,
Clint, is as Genesis ends in Egypt,
and then Exodus, of course, picks it up there again with a very different vantage,
we, I think, maybe might
really not put enough emphasis in our Bible understanding of how important
Egypt is throughout the entire scriptures.
Of course, we could be aware here at the beginning,
we have Egypt.
Egypt is going to be referenced metaphorically by the prophets,
so that late Old Testament text.
We’re going to have different sort of political impact of
Egypt throughout some of the more historical books.
But all the way even into the New Testament,
you might remember that,
of course, it was Jesus’s parents who found refuge in,
of all places, Egypt.
And that is even in our New Testament account of the story of Jesus.
The fact that Egypt comes into the text in so many different ways,
I think, is a reminder to each of us
that in many ways the story of God’s people is a highlight of a people who in their own time and
place were never the world power.
This is not a story about the nation who was top of the pile
and had all of the military and all of the economic strength.
I mean, ultimately, the people of Israel lived throughout their entire time from Genesis,
and you’ll see this all the way
throughout the rest of the Old Testament,
they lived in the shadow of much larger powers.
And in many ways, they’re trying to make a way in the midst of that very difficult situation.
And yet,
what we know is,
of course, that God doesn’t need military strength.
God doesn’t need an economic powerhouse.
God is under God’s own choice by God’s own power able to lead the people forward
into that promised land and that promised place where God has promised that they would be.
It is, it’s easy maybe for us to miss how substantial that is.
And, you know, I just want to encourage you,
while for many of us reading Genesis is overwhelming,
because it’s not particularly devotional.
It’s not particularly, you know, the word for the day kind of material.
I do feel like when we’re able to look over the breadth of Genesis,
we can see that it is and
always has been an account of how God made a promise and how God has now been faithful to pursue that promise.
And we’re going to,
we’ve seen that in just the earliest chapters of Exodus,
though I would even say magnified,
you’re going to see it in the rest of the Old Testament and
even the New Testament.
It shapes understanding of who Jesus is.
Genesis is substantial.
It’s impactful.
It matters.
And certainly hope that you felt those connections in our time together.
I hope you can join us tomorrow.
We’ll offer some most likely concluding thoughts on the
book of Genesis, not only its content,
but its place in faith,
its place in Scripture.
And that will kind of bring us to a close as we anticipate moving on and looking at another
portion of the Bible.
But if you’ve been with us,
I hope you can be with us tomorrow or at least
catch that online once it’s posted,
because I do think it may be helpful to have a kind of closing word.
Thanks for being with us today.
See you tomorrow.