Lathem Postell: Of our students. Well, three who are being confirmed here in this service, and we've got nine across the street at our 11:00 service. It's just incredible to see what God is doing in the life of these young ones. As we get to our our sermon though, man, I I it's crazy how God works. We man, I I it's crazy how God works.
We plan, you know, so many, really, sometimes months in advance, sermons and songs. Usually songs are weeks in advance. We we plan every week for that. And I just as I was sitting there listening to that song, I mean, just a perfect song for confirmation Sunday. Perfect song, I think, for what we're talking about here in Exodus, where we're getting to just this idea of King Jesus.
I'm going to probably throw some folks off, for our slides, people. This is not planned. We're going off rogue. We're going rogue or I'm going rogue, not not Will you put back up and I don't even know what it was. Will you will you just go through the the first part of that song that we just sang?
I wanna I wanna rest for a minute in just a a line of scripture. It was all good. So the moment when the lights went out talking about Jesus dying, keep going. Man, this is powerful. Keep going.
We're gonna come back to that. Death thought it won. Right? Keep going. Keep going.
It's all good, but it's not what I was, thinking about. I know there's more. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Keep going, I think. I thought it was earlier than this.
Keep going. Keep going. Oh, there it is. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, that's it.
Go back. Wow. My goodness, I'm gonna get teary eyed. I don't even know. Where is it at?
Go back. Go back. No, no. The heavens roared. Where's heavens roared?
Right. So it made me think this idea I'm a football guy. We're going to talk football in a little bit. Just briefly. Right.
If you've ever been to a football game, and you hear the, the, the
Lathem Postell: what they call the pop of the crowd. We've got some football folks in here, Coach Foster, you understand. Ramesh,
Lathem Postell: We've got some football folks in here. Coach Foster, you understand that. Ramsey, I think, somewhere videoing things. Are you still here, Ramsey? Oh, there you are.
Yeah. Are you videoing me right now? Hey. You know about a pop of the crowd, don't you? He hit a game winning field goal this past season.
Who do we beat when we when you hit that? Who? Hiram. That was like to win region. Right?
I bet I bet you'll never forget that sound, will you? The pop of the crowd is the the field goal is going through. I mean, as I heard this, I mean, think about that for a moment. A sacrifice was made as the heavens roared and what it's getting at, it's gonna say here in just a minute, as that breath came back. My gosh.
Can you imagine what Evan would have been like to be there for that? As all the saints, as the angels, as God are looking down, God has just died. And then the breath comes. Death thought it had won, it didn't. We're gonna talk about that a little bit.
Man, I I could we could preach a whole another sermon there. Goodness. Goodness. But I don't wanna get ahead of ourselves. We're reading through scripture together this year, and and I want us to stay with the story.
Last week, Pastor Mark led us through the story of Abraham, the father of our faith. There we saw the story of Abraham and his family being blessed by God, called by God to go out into the nations to be a blessing to other people. They were going to be the vessel through which God would now interact with the world. They were going to be the the vessel of God's grace, of God's mercy, and God's love. Right?
So that's where we were at last week in in Genesis. But here, we kind of jump ahead in our story a little bit. See if we can get that taken care of. I'm just getting too excited, and so I probably messed them up at the beginning. Any better?
Alright. I'll quit yelling. No, I won't. No, I won't. So we're here.
That's where we were last week. We were with Abraham there in Genesis, and we said, we kind of jumped forward 400 later. We're still following the people of Abraham, but now we find them not in Canaan, where we found them last week, but instead, now they're in Egypt. And And so if you've got your Bibles, go ahead and open to Exodus. But I want to set the scene for you a little bit of of what happens, how we got from Abraham there in Genesis here to now where we're at in Exodus.
So Mark told you last week. Right? Abraham had a son. He was blessed with Isaac, who was to carry on his blessing. Isaac had a son named Jacob.
Jacob then had 12 sons, the one we know most about being Joseph. Right? Joseph was Jacob's favorite son. And you remember that story, all the other brothers who these were the 12 that would become the 12 tribes of Israel, but but but the other 11, they became jealous of Joseph. Joseph was the favorite.
He got the code of many colors. Right? And so because of that, their jealousy won out, and they plotted to kill Joseph, ultimately deciding to sell him into slavery, where we find that through that, God worked it all out. He ended up in the house of Pharaoh. He ended up becoming the second most powerful person in the most powerful empire of the time, second only to Pharaoh himself.
You know how the story goes? There's a famine. Joseph has prepared the people for that. Egypt has food. And so Joseph's brothers, who had sold him into slavery, had to come to Egypt asking for food so that their family could make it in the famine.
And ultimately, because God had blessed Joseph, God had put them in the right spot. He's able to help his family. And because of his generosity, their relationship is restored, and and Joseph invites the family to come and live with him in Egypt. But where we get to now, and it says this in Exodus chapter one, that by the time we get here, kind of that story has been forgotten. The Israelites are still there in Egypt.
God has blessed them. They've continued to grow in number. But Joseph is a person of history at this point. The king of Egypt, the pharaoh that knew Joseph, he's long gone. And so the new pharaoh, the pharaoh currently in power, all he knows is that there's these foreign people living in his land, and they just continue to be blessed.
They continue to grow in number. He becomes fearful, it says, that they'll rise up with other nations, and if there's war, that they'll fight against the Egyptians. And so out of fear, he enslaves them. He puts them under the task of master workers. And this is where we find them as we get to our scripture today.
We're gonna be reading from Exodus. It says in the bulletin, we're starting in the first verse there, but I I kinda skipped ahead for us, to get to the meat of the story. So we're gonna read from Exodus chapter one verse 15, reading through chapter two verse 10. Let us hear now the story from the book of Exodus, which tells us this. The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah, when you were helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the on the delivery stool, if you see that the baby is a boy, kill him.
But if it's a girl, let her live. The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do. They let the boys live. Then the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and asked them, why have you done this? Why have you let the boys live?' The midwives answered Pharaoh, Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women, and they are vigorous and give birth before the midwives arrive.
So God was kind to the midwives, and the people increased and became even more numerous. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families of their own. Then Pharaoh gave this order to all his people. Every Hebrew boy that is born, you must throw into the Nile, but let every girl live. Now a man of the tribe of Levi married a Levite woman, and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son.
When she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months. But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him. Then Pharaoh's daughter went down to the Nile to bathe, and her attendants were walking along the riverbank.
She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her female slaves to get it. She opened it and saw the baby. He was crying, and she felt sorry for him. This is one of the Hebrew babies, she said. Then his sister asked Pharaoh's daughter, shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you?
Yes. Go, she answered. So the girl went and got the baby's mother. Pharaoh's daughter said to her, Take this baby and nurse him for me, and I will pay you. So the woman took the baby and nursed him.
When the child grew older, she took him to Pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son. She named him Moses, saying, I drew him out of the water. Will you pray with me? Loving and gracious God, we're so thankful for this day of worship. Lord, we thank you most for the gift of your son, Jesus, and for the gift of your holy scriptures.
Lord, we ask this day that you speak to us. Tell us again your story of love and of grace. Use it to mold us, change us, that we might look more like your son, Jesus. For it's in his name that we pray. Amen.
Everybody loves a good championship battle. Right? I said, I'm a fan of football. Everybody likes rivalries, especially around here in the South. We love a good championship.
We love a good battle. We love a long standing tradition of rivalry. I joked with pastor Mark in the first service. I I was gonna say Georgia, Florida, but they haven't won in a while, so I don't know if Florida can be considered our rival anymore. I write a lot of checks that only Kirby Smart can cash, so, I need to be careful about that.
But there's others. Right? Alabama versus Auburn. I'm also a baseball guy, so Braves Mets. Right?
I don't know if there's any Mets fans out there. If so, there's two exits in the back and two on the sides. No. No. Please stay.
You know, Phillies are bad too, but when the Mets are good, it's just worse. I I don't know what it is about Mets fans. But Braves Mets for our NFL guys or or gals, Falcons, Saints. Right? There's so many of those rivalries.
We just we just love them. Right? We love especially when they're good, and and you've got two kind of strong competing forces on either side of each other, and you don't know who's gonna win, but you're hoping that your person is gonna come out on top. Right? It's an attempt to see really who is the strongest, who's the baddest, and who will walk away on top.
We love a good rivalry or a heavy metal fight. Here in Exodus, we're getting what we might call a heavyweight battle. On one side of the ring is the God of the Israelites, Yahweh. We'll learn his name next week. His name is Yahweh.
And on the other side of the ring is the God of the Egyptians, the pharaoh himself. And what we're gonna see over the next several chapters, and hopefully, as you've already seen as you're doing your Bible readings, what we're gonna find, what we're gonna see is that these two are pitted against one another in a heavyweight battle for all time. Right? We're gonna see who comes out on top. Who really is the strongest?
Who's the baddest? Who is worthy of praise? And so Exodus gives us this heavyweight battle, and as we see it, it's Pharaoh that takes the first punch. He fears the Israelites, so much so that he enslaves them. And what he finds is that even as he does this, they continue to be blessed.
They continue to multiply. They grow and and gain influence. And so what he does is he says, I'm gonna take matters even more into my own hands. And he makes that horrible order. He orders that all the midwives that they they kill every Hebrew boy that's born.
Wow. What what a terrible order. Right? It's certainly a power move. Look, if I can't stop them from being blessed, nothing I've done has worked.
They continue to to gain influence. They continue to be blessed almost in a divine way. Right? If I can't stop that, well, then I'll just wipe them off the face of the earth. Pharaoh makes the first punch.
But then we see God respond. And and how does he respond? He doesn't send an army. No. We don't see him strike Pharaoh down.
In fact, God doesn't even yet show up on the scene. He works through others. Instead, God sends to battle not a warrior, not an army, but instead two Hebrew midwives. Two women that were skilled at helping labor. He sends two midwives, but the key thing for them is that they fear God.
Can you imagine that? That they fear God, and what they do in that moment, when Pharaoh gives them the order, they defy the most powerful man in the world. They're slaves themselves. They're midwives, not warriors. The very people that Pharaoh is trying to wipe off the face of the earth are the ones that stop him.
Pharaoh punched first, but he missed. If this were a a boxing match, we'd have to say that round one goes to God. But Pharaoh's strong. He's not deterred, and he decides to punch again in round two. If the midwives won't follow his orders, if he can't get it accomplished through them, will he do it another way?
He's got a whole empire at his disposal. And so he orders not just the midwives, but all of his people. If you see a newborn infant boy, throw him in the Nile. Can you imagine the chaos and the fear at that order? The fear first for the Hebrews.
We see it in Moses' mother, this fear for the the life of their children. I can imagine no worse fear. She has to hide her baby for three months, and she realizes, look, I can't do this forever. Right? The fear that must have been in her mind, in the mind of every mother in that time, that their child was gonna be taken from them and thrown in the Nile and killed.
Imagine the fear on the part of the Egyptians, normal everyday people whose king, whose God had ordered them to commit murder, murder of innocent children. Pharaoh seems to be pretty powerful here. But like any great prized fighter, God uses Pharaoh's punch against him. That's the sign of a good battle, a good fighter. Right?
When you can use your opponent's move against them. And that that's what happens here in in chapter two. We find that it is through this very order, this order of power and of fear to kill all of the Hebrew boys. It's through this order that God places the person of Moses in the household of pharaoh. The order that pharaoh intended to use to defeat the Israelites is actually the order that saves them from slavery.
God used what pharaoh intended for for evil, for good. Round two goes to God again. And we're gonna see this over and over and over as we read through Exodus. This this theme is going to continue of of God versus Pharaoh. Every time there's a plague, right, as Moses comes for as God's representative, it's another round of this battle.
Who's going to win? It's a star studded matchup between the two most powerful people around, the the the powerful empire of the Egyptians and the God of the universe. But what I want you to see this morning is actually what I believe Exodus is telling you. While it's gonna present the story as this classic mono, a mono matchup. Right?
It's it's setting it up as the the top build fight. It's setting it up as a classic good versus evil, who's going to win contest. It sets it up that way, but the true message of Exodus is that there really is no contest. There there actually is not a battle between God and Pharaoh. They aren't in the same league.
In fact, we might say they're not even playing the same game. Pharaoh makes plans, and God uses them to work against him. God takes Pharaoh's intent and uses it for the favor of his people. You see, in our world, which is just full of evil, if we wanna be honest. Right?
In a world like ours, it's easy for us to get sucked up into this idea that all of this is up for grabs. And what I mean by all of this is the world. Right? The fate of us and the world and the earth and God's people. Right?
We get sucked up into this idea that there's this sort of cosmic battle taking place around us, maybe within us, above us, below us, that there's this cosmic battle of good versus evil, and these forces are struggling against one another and we're yet to figure out who comes out on top. Sure. Spiritual warfare is a very real thing, but scripture has been clear from the beginning. It's clear here in Exodus, and it'll be clear all the way through Revelation that there is no thing or no person on heaven or on earth that can compare to God. There is no battle for things up for grabs.
Evil, by definition, cannot overcome good. It never has, and it never will. It's why we go to or we read the words like we do in John's gospel. I know we're skipping ahead here. Right?
John chapter one verse five. I love his gospel. It's why he says, the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. It's because darkness, by definition, cannot overcome light. Overcome it.
It's because darkness, by definition, cannot overcome light. It's the absence of light. Where even just a spark of light exists, there cannot be dark. Evil is the same way. Evil is the absence of good.
It's the absence of God. Where God exists, evil cannot. And so the Exodus story wants us to see a foundational truth, a timeless lesson about God. Nobody's in the same playing field. Not to give the story away, because if you've never read Exodus, maybe you don't know this, but God wins in the end.
Pharaoh loses. The people are delivered from their slavery. But the truth is the outcome was never up for grabs. Pharaoh never stood a chance. But we know in the reality of this, right, we know that God wins.
But the reality is that that doesn't mean Pharaoh stops trying. Pharaoh thinks he's pretty powerful. He continues to try over and over again. It takes 10 plagues for God to get the message through, and even then, it didn't sink in for too long. And while we live thousands of years after the pharaohs, thousands of years after the fall of the Egyptian empire, the truth is there are plenty of pharaohs in our life.
They may not call themselves that, but there are forces of evil that surround us. Bad things and and bad people. People, circumstances, things that want to see us fail. Satan is still here with us, trying to crush us under his feet. Sometimes we get ourselves in situations that are our fault.
Right? We'll be very honest with that. Genesis chapter three, we're sinful people. So sometimes it's our fault, but other times it's not. Remember Job.
Right? There's these forces around us, these things, these people that want to defeat us. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when sin and evil will try to crush you. And maybe some of you stand before a pharaoh today. If you do, if you are, or if you will in the future, know the good news of Exodus.
Pharaoh couldn't beat God thousands of years ago, and he can't beat him today. There's nothing in life or in death that is capable of defeating God. The question actually isn't who's gonna win. That's not the story. The the question isn't whether God will win or not.
The real question is whether we'll be on his side. God always wins. Shipper and Puah, great example. Right? They had a choice, these Hebrew midwives.
They had a choice. They had a direct order from their master. It would not have been hard to choose Pharaoh. Probably would have been the path of least resistance. If I had been put in that situation, praise God, I've not been in a situation like that.
I pray that people reflecting on my life, if they ever did, I pray that I would be described just like them, That because of their fear of God, they defied the orders. They didn't listen to evil in their life. It probably would have been easier. The assumption would be that, hey, if I scratch Pharaoh's back, maybe he scratches mine. Right?
It'd been easier. It would have been better to assume that if they had just done what Pharaoh said, if they had just listened to evil, if they had followed his ways, life would be better. Instead, they proclaimed with their actions what all of Exodus wants to proclaim. That sure, it may be easier. Sure, evil and sin, they may win a battle or two, but at the end of the day, God always wins the war.
Moses shows us, the story of Moses shows us that what the enemy intends for evil, God can use for good. Think about it this way. Pastor Mark and I were talking in between services, and and and he said it in a way that was even more forceful than mine. Right? That God took Moses, literally put him in the house of Pharaoh, and Pharaoh himself trained him so that he could defeat him.
That's how powerful God is. There's no contest. Be convicted of that truth. If you take nothing else away, take this, God always wins. It's why we look in scripture and folks like Paul as he's writing in the New Testament.
I know we're not there yet, but it matters. It's why he can say with confidence things like, Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? Such a bold claim. Where, O death, is your victory?
Well, you don't win, because God does. It's why he can say things like nothing in life or in death can ever separate us from the love of God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Because nothing, neither life nor death can overcome him. The question isn't whether we're going to find out if God wins in the end. God always wins.
The question is, are we gonna follow him? Will we follow God, or will we follow pharaoh? Will we choose to love good, or will we choose to love evil? Ultimately, and that's where everything the crux of life comes down to it. The choice is yours.
The choice is yours, but beware of the warning of Exodus. If you choose pharaoh, if you choose evil, you will be choosing the losing side. You can run the simulation a million times out of a million. Right? You're on the losing side every time.
God never loses. There is no contest. There is no debate. Evil cannot win. So my prayer for myself, my prayer for you, my prayer for our confirmands, right, my prayer for us is that God will create within us hearts like Shiphrah and Puah, two Hebrew midwives.
In any other story, they'd be lost to the annals of history. But instead, they feared God, choosing him over Pharaoh. May God give us hearts like that that we might choose him now and always. Will you pray with me? Loving and gracious God, Lord, we're just in awe of of who you are, what you've done, and that's been on display from the beginning of time until now.
Lord, we're in awe that that you are the God who never loses. That, Lord, we recognize even in a world where where evil seems so strong, where it seems from time to time like it's gonna win, or would we have confidence and trust to know that it never will. And Lord, in in light of who you are, we just ask forgiveness. Always, Lord, we ask forgiveness for times where we haven't feared you and instead feared evil more. Create in us new hearts, Lord, hearts of Shiphrah and Puah, hearts of those two Hebrew midwives who in the face of the worst kind of evil shows you.
Knowing that heartbreak and struggle may come, but in the end you overcome it all. Lord, overcome the pharaohs in our lives. You know those. We name those before you now in our hearts. You know the people, the situations, the circumstances, the struggles, the sins, Lord, that bind us in slavery.
Lord, we just ask that you free us. As we go through the stories of scripture, we're gonna see how you free your people over and over again. We ask you this day, Lord, free us from our slavery to sin and death. Free us from our other master, Lord, that we might serve you and you alone. For you are the only one worthy of praise.
For it's the name of Christ that we offer this prayer. Amen.