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Our Christian formation classes are taught by the clergy of Church of the Incarnation (Dallas, TX). Journey with us as each season unfolds.
Okay. We are committed as a church to going through the entire bible in five years and studying it in adult formation classes over the next five years. And for those of you who are here in the fall, we studied the book of Genesis over the course of ten weeks. And then during Advent, during two weeks of Advent, we studied the book of Zechariah. So, we have completed two books, 64 to go.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:We will get there. We do have a plan to make this happen over the course of the next five years. And so this semester, we're going to cover a handful of books. I'll be studying and working through the book of Exodus for the next five weeks or six weeks. We have a gap there during one of the weeks.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Then, Mark Lorette, who you may know, is going to teach the idea of mission through the book of Ruth and he'll be doing that during Lent for four weeks and then, I'll come back and teach Leviticus and Numbers during Eastertide. So, we'll cover several books over the course of this spring and it'll be good. We looked at Genesis this past fall and I wanted to sort of start by kind of reflecting on what we sort of came out of in the book of Genesis. With the book of Genesis, we looked at this idea of that the patriarchs were promised progeny and land coming out of the book of Genesis, that they would be a great nation, that their family would grow into a nation and they would grow as a people. There's this promise in Genesis 12 and beyond of progeny and land, that they would occupy the land of Canaan.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:This land in what is now the Middle East, we call this land that, as we looked at through the book of Genesis, was so hard for them to occupy, was so challenging for them to sort of inhabit. We looked at these patriarchs who were constantly moving about down to Egypt, up to near Assyria, all over the land. And so, when the book of Genesis ends, it ends with sort of a question mark, right? Is the land going to be occupied? Where does the book of Genesis leave off?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Anybody remember? The chapter 50, right? Where does that leave us? They're in Egypt. They're in Egypt, right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:So the big question mark is, are they going to be able to occupy the land? And what about progeny? What did we see in the book of Genesis about this family? Was it easy for them to sort of grow into a great nation? It was a distinct challenge, was it not?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:There was constant challenge along the way. Many of the patriarch's wives were barren, you may recall. Many struggled to have kids. There was all of this kind of tension between the women, husband and wife going down to the country of Abimelech, going down to Egypt, threatening to be killed, and so forth. So there's all these questions that are emerging coming out of the book of Genesis.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Is this going to happen? And yet the book of Exodus leaves us and introduces us ultimately to the fulfillment of this. Did I spell that right? I hate spelling in public. Are there two L's at the second part of fulfillment?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Fulfillment. So, the book of Exodus is about the fulfillment of the promises laid out in Genesis. So we're going to look at that over the next several weeks. The book of Exodus is named obviously because of the great exodus that occurs within the book itself, the middle of the book. And the Exodus event is, I think, the most significant event in all of Israel's history from the promise made to Abraham all the way to the incarnation of our Lord.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And the Exodus event itself is not just significant and not just a big event in the book of Exodus. The event of Exodus, the exodus of the Israelites, the Hebrew people, will echo, will reverberate throughout the Old Testament. Indeed, it'll echo and reverberate throughout the New Testament. And it'll even echo and reverberate throughout our lives today. As you think about the Christian life, as you think about what kind of life our Lord Jesus Christ calls us to, I want you to think back to the book of Exodus.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:We're going to explore that today as well. So what is contained in this book of Exodus? What are we looking at this book? I want to kind of give an overview today of the book of Exodus and show kind of how it fits within the bigger picture of Scripture. So, we have the book of Exodus, you can break it down in different ways, and one way I like to look at it is sort of seeing in terms of cluster of chapters.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Exodus one through two, we find the Israelites in bondage in Egypt. Right? They're in bondage in Egypt in chapters one through two. In chapters three through four, we are introduced to baby Moses, and God reveals himself to Moses. Right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:In chapters three, I'm sorry, five and six, there is increased oppression. Oppression of the Hebrew people. And God promises deliverance. Okay. In seven through 11, you see plagues that are poured out.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Moses and Aaron before the pharaoh before pharaoh. And then you also see plagues. You remember all this, right? 12, you see the Passover. The actual Passover and also the Passover meal introduced.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay. In chapter 13, pillars of cloud and fire, right? Chapters fourteen and fifteen, you see the actual Exodus, the crossing of the Red Sea. Sorry. My handwriting is not great.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay. 16 through 19 is the journey to Sinai. It's only getting worse as I go lower, right? 20 through 23, you see the 10 commandments and other laws, right? And then 24 through 40, you see the introduction of the Ark of the Covenant and the Tabernacle.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:How these are to be built and then the actual construction of the ark and the tabernacle. Okay. As I think about the book of Exodus, if you were raised in the church, which of these stories did you not hear as a kid? Is there any story here you didn't cover in Sunday school? I mean, all of them, right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:You covered every single one probably, right? Before we had these fancy TVs, right? We had the flannel board. Anybody remember the flannel board, you know, and the teacher sticking it on the flannel board? We're still kind of old fashioned here, aren't we?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Yeah, every single one of these stories I probably learned in Sunday school. And why is that? Why did they teach us all these stories in Sunday school? Exciting? Yeah.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Good foundation. Some people aren't going know that reference, but a lot of people do. A true history. A true history. Foreshadow?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Absolutely. So it's very visual, it's very pictorial, you can see it, it's very visual, it plays well for kids, right? Everything here can be seen very clearly and on some level a kid can understand all this, right? These ideas of a leader being raised up, oppression, following God through the pillars of cloud and fire, the actual crossing of the Red Sea. In some sense a kid can follow along in the story.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:But it's also right a foreshadowing and by the way just this morning my daughter drew this okay Moses being rescued out of the water right just this morning in her Sunday school class, she wanted me to show this to you. And so I asked her if I could and she's like, oh, yeah, for sure. She's four years old. She signed it, the top and everything. But yeah, it is a foreshadowing, right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And so when I talk about Exodus being foundational, being sort of something that's going to echo throughout the scriptures, I want to explore what that actually looks like. And so, as we think about this echoing through the Scriptures and echoing through our lives, we can take each part of this story and sort of apply it to the Gospel narrative, right? And so, were we not all in bondage to sin at some point? Is it Moses a precursor or foreshadowing of Christ? Is it Jesus, the new and better Moses, who will lead his people, who will reveal himself, this idea of oppression and the promise of deliverance, the proclamation of the gospel, the herald of the gospel, the gospel goes out and is proclaimed throughout the world, is promised the forgiveness of sins.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay. I can't even read what I wrote here. Oh, that is pharaoh, no wonder, okay. Okay. Okay, so we have a number of different ways of sort of understanding this fulfillment of these, right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:You see this kind of large scale things happening with Moses and Aaron and Pharaoh and the plagues. Is it this some sort of a cosmic battle that's taking place? On a big level? Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Right? Isn't this something bigger than just some sort of local manifestation of tension in a tribe? There's something cosmic about this. There's something beyond even Egypt or Israel or even Moses about this whole thing. When we think about the Passover, the actual Passover where blood was painted on the doorpost, right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:A lamb was sacrificed and blood was painted on the doorpost. Okay, this foreshadows, of course, Jesus' death, right? In the Passover meal, the Eucharist, right? Jesus identifies Himself with the Passover lamb in the Gospels. Okay?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:In chapter 13, the pillars of cloud and fire, we think about in our own lives the idea of following God, God leading us through our lives. And then of course, the Exodus, the crossing of the Red Sea. Is that not conversion? Baptism? New life?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:The journey to Sinai. Did it go well? You're laughing. You know this, right? Those four chapters right there?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Ups and downs, right? Complaining, moaning, the trials of a life, following God, right? There's obedience, there's disobedience. And so, learning to follow God. The 10 commandments.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:A way for us to know what God's heart is in terms of holiness and obedience. Right? So, thinking about obedience. Then, of course, the Ark of the Covenant and the Tabernacle. And the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Jesus fulfills this through the incarnation, John one fourteen, right? And so all of these themes you see in Exodus are going to be fulfilled in the New Testament and are going to stay with us beyond that into our lives beyond the New Testament. There's probably a reason why there's more than one book out there that's called Echoes of Exodus. Okay? This idea that there's this echo that just keeps occurring throughout the Bible.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:You see it in the Psalms, you see it in Isaiah, you see it of course in the New Testament. These themes we're going to lay out in Exodus are going to echo for a number of time. Okay? Notice too, before we leave this part, that obedience comes after conversion, not the other way around. You have to cross the Red Sea before you get to Sinai, the 10 Commandments.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay? And we're going look at this in more depth coming up. But notice too, as we kind of look at this overall chart, don't if you can see it over there, where do the people of Israel begin this journey in Exodus? They're in bondage to Pharaoh. Where do they end?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Bonded to God. Okay, they start in slavery, they end in freedom. Okay? So this idea of bondage, we're going to explore throughout the book. And so the book has two main genres to it.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:One is, of course, narrative, a lot of narrative that occurs over the course of the book, especially in the first half of the book. There's 40 chapters total. The second half is largely law. We're going to look at that law over the course of these weeks as well, especially as you get to chapter 20 and beyond. There are some major themes that are going to emerge in this book of Exodus.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:I want to sort of explore some of these themes as we look at things today and as we go forward. One is this idea of deliverance, obviously. The Exodus is a deliverance of the people, and there is this strong motif running throughout the book of oppression, that the people of Israel are oppressed. Okay? And this idea of deliverance out of oppression.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And this idea of deliverance makes the people of Israel sojourners. And one common motif throughout the book of Exodus, and throughout the Old Testament, and throughout the New Testament, and throughout the best parts of church history is when the people of God understand themselves as sojourners. That is, the people of God are not enculturated in the dominant society and ensconced in the dominant society in such a way that they take on the cues of the dominant society. The people of God throughout history, in its best expressions, are people who are pilgrims and sojourners. And you're going to see this throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Augustine's great work, the City of God, is all about calling the church to a sojourning faith. That the church should not, the church must not be enculturated in Roman society in such a way that it loses its prophetic voice. Okay? And this reminds me many years later of a book written by Walter Brueggemann, which is over 40 years old now, but it feels like it was written yesterday, called The Prophetic Imagination. And Brueggemann argues that at its best in the Old Testament you see this prophetic imagination occurring and you see it largely in the figure of Moses in the Old Testament, obviously Jesus in the New Testament.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:But this idea of this prophetic imagination and what that entails in terms of being able to speak truth into your society, being able to rely on God in faith. And Brighamont, his big argument is that we have struggled in the American church over the last several decades to have a prophetic imagination, to have a prophetic voice, because our perceptual fields have been so given to us by our dominant culture and consumerism and things related to American society that we've lost sight of what the prophetic voice was originally in scripture and having a true prophetic imagination. And he's not yeah. Killed, including Jesus Christ. This is not easy stuff.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Yeah, it's quite an indictment, right? When he said, even our perceptual fields are given to us by the dominant culture. Therefore, we can't even perceive, according to Bergamot, what a true prophetic imagination is because our fields have been so clouded by the dominant culture. So, he's calling the church not just to read the Bible this way, but to live their lives now in this fashion, right? And so, that's something that animates me.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Yeah, yeah, sounds yeah. So that's one big theme we're going to look at is this idea of deliverance and with that sojourning and these ideas of oppression we're going to explore. Another big theme is the theme of covenant, obviously. That God is a covenant making and a covenant keeping God, And he has established a covenant with his people in the book of Genesis, as we saw, and he is going to keep that covenant. And he is going to establish his covenant, and you're going see it sort of unfold or build on each other, however you want to view that, over the course of the Old Testament.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:No matter what Israel does, and they do a lot up and down, he is going to keep his covenant over the course of their lives and ours. And also with this idea of covenant, how God is to be worshipped. We're going to see a lot of liturgy and worship in this book and how He is to be worshipped properly. Okay? Another is, and these are going to carry through the Pentateuch, by the way.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Another is I'm sorry, presence, I can't spell today. Is the presence of God. The presence of God among the people. Okay? Some of the things I've put here really speak clearly to the idea of the presence of God among the people, and we're going see this very clearly in the book of Leviticus as we go forward.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:In fact, I can summarize the book of Leviticus in one sentence: Learning to live in the presence of a holy God. That's the book of Leviticus, basically. Okay, and this is going to unfold out of the book of Exodus. Okay, so these are things you've probably like said, Yeah, I already know that about Exodus, that makes sense and everything. But there's a couple other themes that you may not have thought of that relate to our study here, and one is creation theology.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:The book of Exodus is sort of imbued with this idea of a creation theology and conversely, anti creational forces at work. Is this idea of creation and renewed creation and restored creation are going to be all throughout the book of Exodus, and you'll see this as it unfolds. And then finally, the last big theme I see is the idea of sovereignty. Ultimately, who is sovereign? Yeah.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Well, yeah, right. Yeah. I didn't really mean that as a question so much, but it was more of like a rhetoric question. Like, when we think about the book of Exodus thank you, right answer though. When we think about the book of Exodus, that's one of the animating questions of the book, right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:If you're a first time reader of Exodus, you're looking at it going, well, these Israelites are in bondage to a pharaoh. Is pharaoh sovereign? He thinks so. Yeah. So it's a battle over sovereignty, right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Over the course of this book, it's a battle. And of course, it's gonna come out in very dramatic fashion right here through seven through 11, those chapters. And so as we explore this book, we're going to see this battle over sovereignty, and I'll wrap up here in a couple minutes. The book of Genesis took us through if you take sort of all the genealogies and lives and everything at face value, it took us over the course of two thousand two hundred years, the book of Genesis. So if you're a mathematician, I don't if there's any in the room or not, that's like forty four years per chapter in the book of Genesis.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:The book of Exodus is going to slow down dramatically. The book of Exodus is going to come to a strong deceleration, especially right here in chapter 19. Okay? We're going to slow down dramatically once they get to Sinai. I don't know if you realize this, but the Sinai experience for Israel only lasted one year, and it covers all the way from Exodus 19 through the end of Exodus, all through the book of Leviticus, and through the first 10 chapters of Numbers.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay? So that's 32% of your Pentateuch, right there, your first five books of the Bible. 32% of your Pentateuch occurs over the course of just one year. And so it demands of us that we slow down and really focus on what is happening in this Sinai episode, Israel at Sinai. Okay?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:So very quickly, let's look at the first couple chapters. I'll let you go here in just a couple minutes. I won't make you late if you haven't been to church. The Israelites in chapter one are in bondage to Egypt, and as I see chapter one unfolding, I see a series of sort of setups or anticipations that are occurring in chapter one. It's got a strong narrative motif here throughout chapter one.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:There's like a stage setting that occurs in verse I'm running out of room here, aren't I? In verse seven, in one verse seven, you see the Israelites are being spoken of as the Israelites were fruitful and prolific. They multiplied and grew exceedingly strong so that the land was filled with them. So there's this sort of stage setting of, is Egypt being sort of overwhelmed by the Hebrews? So this idea of being overwhelmed by the Hebrews.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:If you skip down to verses thirteen and fourteen of chapter one, you see a more intensification of this. The Egyptians subjected Israelites to hard servitude and made their lives bitter with hard servitude in mortar and bricks and in every kind of field labor. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them. So the idea of oppression is introduced right here. The idea of overwhelming population wise, then oppression gets introduced.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Same chapter, verse 22, you're introduced to the idea of an anticipation of a deliverer, of someone like Moses who will deliver the people. The pharaoh commanded all his people, Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live. So it's setting up this story of Moses that's going to dominate much of the narrative. And as you skip over to chapter two, you see Moses introduced. Look at two:one-two.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Anybody have a is it on the back of your sheet? Think it is. Exodus two:one-two. Okay, now a man from the house of Levi went and took as his wife a Levi woman. The woman conceived and had a son.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And when she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him three months. That's one of those parts of the narrative that's like easy to skip over. What house was Moses from? Levi, right? And what's the significance of the house of Levi?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Yeah. And so, all priests in the Old Testament were Levites, but not all Levites were priests. Okay, so it's very important to be mindful that Moses is of the house of Levi. Now, who is Moses? What is his title?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Is he a priest? He's in a special vocation by God. Okay, Psalm 99 refers to Moses and Aaron as priests, but the priest Well, that's a different one, that's a different Psalm 110, but he's seen in Psalm 99 as a priest or depending on how you interpret that, but the priesthood that you're going to see from Exodus throughout the Old Testament follows whose line? Yeah. Who ordains Aaron?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Moses, right? So we typically see Moses as a prophet, a prophetic figure, a great leader, a ruler, but also there's kind of a priestly thing we need to be thinking about with Moses too. So kind of a prophet and priest and ruler. So be mindful of these themes as they roll forward in our narrative and I think that's going to be enough for today. I wish I had gotten a little further, but we've at least gotten through chapter one.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:We'll get through several more chapters next week. Thanks for your time. I don't want to hold you up from church, but we're going to cover this I think on your sheet the next three weeks then we'll take a week off. There's an all parish meeting I think on February 8 and then we'll resume the week after that. So, hopefully this kind of gives some context.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:We're going be studying and we'll go forward from there. Thanks for your time.