Why You Should Study Exodus | An Introduction

Hey, everybody.
Welcome back.
As we start today,
new series.
Good to be with you as
we move into the fall.
We spent the last time we were together looking at some New Testament.
Previous to that, we had been in the book of Genesis.
Well, a lot of people felt that they
had experienced a kind of traction with that book,
and a lot of people felt engaged by
looking at a big,
significant book and working through it a little bit at a time.
And so, we thought having done Genesis with some of you participating,
we would go back and we would
kind of pick up where we left off and move back to the Old Testament and move into the book of
Exodus, which is not only the next book,
but the next version,
the next part of the story,
the next piece of the kind of narrative that frames the early part of the Old Testament.
And Michael,
obviously,
Genesis is a significant book.
It’s the creation narrative.
It’s the foundation of the family line that will become Israel.
It’s the beginning of the covenant.
But Exodus, I would argue, is no less weighty.
This is a vitally important
part of the Old Testament,
not just for the Old Testament’s sake,
but surprisingly, maybe to some people,
really foundational for the New Testament also.
Yeah, so that’s exactly right.
In fact, we talked a little bit about this before.
We kicked off today that it’s important that you know that the earliest Christians found in Exodus a deep,
deep well of resonance with their experience of the faith in light of Jesus Christ.
And some of these
themes we’re going to see come back up again.
But there are substantial themes of typology,
which is a theological word for when the earliest Christians found images or reflections or even in some ways,
forebearers of Jesus in the Old Testament stories.
And so what we discover in
Moses is one of those,
a person who leads the people through the Red Sea,
out of slavery,
out of bondage,
into freedom.
This, of course,
the earliest church sees as an image for the very one
who leads us through death from the bondage to the physical decaying world into the perfect
eternal bliss of heaven.
The promise that what God has done in Jesus in many ways,
both physically and spiritually,
is the culmination of the work that God began to do with Moses.
Exodus has some absolutely pivotal moments,
Clint, moments like the revelation of God
at the burning bush.
There are moments where God both meets the people’s needs
as they are wandering in the wilderness and also a God who brings judgment upon the people for
failing to live into their faith and to trust him in the midst of their wanderings.
It’s a book
that is both a rich well for preaching,
but it’s also a deeply,
deeply sourced
set of spiritual and theological resources for the earliest church as they came to understand
themselves as people who are bound up
with the people of Israel and yet also living through
Jesus Christ into a new reality.
So there’s an old and new in the earliest church experience of this book,
and because of that,
the transition from Genesis with the founders of the faith to the
movement into Exodus, which is really the foundational book to the understanding of who
the people of Israel are and what God has committed to do for them,
it will later become
just this absolutely essential piece to understand who God is and what God is doing for the Christian
who has been grafted in to use Paul’s language into the people of God.
So it’s an incredibly rich book.
Yeah, and I think obviously as a part of those first five books,
the sort of so-called books of Moses,
the idea of
Exodus as history is vitally important in the lineage of the faith and
in the framework of the faith,
both Judaism and Christianity.
You could make the case for
that being true for Islam as well.
Having said that, though,
the themes of this book
are spiritually rich.
You have captivity,
you have freedom,
you have complaining,
you have patience, you have obedience and disobedience,
you have this question hanging over,
“Can God be trusted and can the people be faithful?” You have this rich tapestry of kind of interior
dialogue and internal questions and themes that I think really make this book stand out.
And similarly to our reading of Genesis,
and I would encourage you if you haven’t done
Genesis, we’ve got that posted on our website.
You could go and easily find that.
And you may want
to work your way through Genesis before or alongside this study.
But I think,
interestingly enough, Michael,
Exodus has not been sort of plagued with the same kind of church battles
that Genesis has.
Arguing over,
is creation literal or not?
Is it seven days or not?
Is there evolution or not?
Exodus has really been kind of exempt from that sort of scrutiny,
for the most part.
I mean, obviously people ask questions about all kinds of biblical
texts and biblical stories.
But for the most part,
Exodus has stood apart from the kind of arguments
that Genesis has generated.
And I think the upside of that is that it’s a little more for
most of us a blank slate.
We probably have a little better chance of experiencing Exodus as
a fresh story because we haven’t been drawn into or at least been aware of all of those other kind
of arguments like Genesis.
I think Genesis, you have to sort of work to back up from some of what
you have inherited about it.
And I don’t find that as true in the book of Exodus.
And I think that
makes it an opportune book to study for most people.
I don’t think I’m just restating this
in my own words,
though.
This is a very similar sentiment to that,
Clint.
I do think that Genesis,
as you go through it,
will almost always surprise you in some way.
There’s almost always something
there that you didn’t remember that was there that was dark or incredibly broken or some detail that
you think, oh, my goodness, I never really collected the idea that there were so many different
Abraham trying to sell his wife’s stories or whatever that particular thing that’s going to
hit you in Genesis.
There’s a sense in which Genesis seems to get the bulk of our attention
in its first chapters.
And the stuff that follows,
I think, may surprise us.
I think with Exodus,
and maybe you push back on me on this,
Clint.
I’m not sure.
But Exodus maybe won’t surprise you at so many turns.
Exodus is, in many ways, what you remember from your children’s Sunday school days,
of course, the plagues.
And of course, you have the Passover,
God rescuing the people.
You have maybe some wilderness stories that might surprise you.
I doubt you’re going to be surprised
by the Ten Commandments stories.
So there’s some things sprinkled in there.
But the point is,
I think what’s beautiful about Exodus is there tends to be just layer upon layer underneath
those stories.
So the narrative, the thing that happened,
you probably remember that relatively decently,
the way it’s been interpreted and understood to apply not just in that moment,
but to the people of Israel writ large,
then layer to Christians,
the understanding of how
that story of God’s intervention fits into the larger story of God’s intervention.
It really moves beyond the kind of biographies we had in the previous book of Genesis,
and it moves it into
a historical cultural people kind of framework.
And that, I think, is what makes the book
so pregnant with opportunity and meaning is because of the fact that it does zoom out of
that microcosmic focus on that one family.
And it immediately pulls us into the whole community’s
plight.
I mean, the Pharaoh who before remembered Joseph and had treated the people kindly was
really treating Pharaoh’s family kindly.
The Pharaoh that we meet right away in Exodus has forgotten Joseph,
and we discover that now the whole people of Israel,
this whole family is now a nation,
and this nation lives in servitude and in slavery.
And I think that subtle shift
is a concrete and purposeful shift in the way that the story is told because we’re now changing
into a very different pace than we were before.
Pete: Yeah, I think that’s true,
Michael, and I think in some ways that makes,
and there may be people who wouldn’t agree with this.
For me, I will say I find Exodus
a little more readable,
a little more coherent,
at least in the sense that
it jumps around less.
There are sections where there are lots of laws introduced,
and I think everybody is
likely to feel that it bogs down in those places.
But because we’re really focused on
a particular story, and we don’t stray too far from it really,
I think that gives Exodus a sense of
readability that
in Genesis you can get a little whiplash sometimes from this person to
that person, and then this person became,
and you get the list of names, and that’s,
there’s troubling moments in Exodus,
and there are those small detours.
But I think on the whole,
this hangs together in a way that
is more obvious
than it is in Genesis.
I’m not saying that Genesis
doesn’t have a through line and doesn’t hold together,
but I think this does so more clearly
and I think more noticeably.
So this is a wonderful book.
There’s some wonderful and
deep stuff in it.
There’s some other stuff we may kind of chunk together,
but I hope that if this
is new to you,
that you’ll be intrigued by it.
I hope you’ll be moved by it.
If it’s not new to you,
I hope you’ll find some things in it that maybe you hadn’t thought about or hadn’t remembered
or hadn’t seen before.
And I do think,
again,
remarkably,
the ancient stories of a people
are able to feel very modern and very instructional in an age very different and
a time very different from which they were written.
Clint,
I know I’ve heard this.
I wonder if you have.
I’ve heard some people express that they
struggle to read the Old Testament because it feels so disconnected from the life of a Christian.
It feels both really separated by time,
but also by culture.
And I think Exodus is an incredible
Old Testament story in how it introduces themes that the Christian will immediately realize
and recognize from our own stories.
In other words,
without Exodus,
we don’t understand what’s
happening at the Lord’s table,
right?
Or without Exodus,
we don’t understand how significant it is
when God introduces Jesus,
his son, at the baptism.
There’s just so many references,
even in the New Testament text itself,
to,
let me say, allusions.
But I think references are also defensible.
There’s just so many in the New Testament that you’re going to be going through
what is an Old Testament book.
That’s in scare quotes,
if you’re in the podcast,
that we’re going to go going through this Old Testament book and we’re going to find it
unbelievably connected at so many places to our New Testament faith,
and that alone makes it worth studying.
Yeah, this has been a deep well.
Exodus has been a deep well of Christian preaching
and for good reason.
I mean,
without Exodus, we don’t have a nuanced understanding of
Jesus as the Lamb.
We don’t have a nuanced understanding of people being rebellious
of manna,
of daily bread.
I mean, there’s rich and multiple allusions that,
as we go through this,
you will find yourself thinking, “Oh,
that sounds familiar to me.
I get that.” And many of those
are going to be rooted in this book.
So,
I hope you’re ready to get started.
I think tomorrow we’ll do some kind of background stuff.
We’ll get in,
probably dip our toes into the text, but
make sure that we’re ready with some kind of bridge work between Genesis and Exodus and
how to read this book,
how to move through it,
how to understand it and be comfortable in it.
And I look forward to this study.
I think this will be,
I know it will be helpful to me.
I hope it will be helpful to others, Michael.
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It’s just,
as we get started,
friends,
thanks for jumping back in with
us and we look forward to seeing you tomorrow.
Thanks, everybody.