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GOD IS KEEPING HIS PROMISES
TO AND THROUGH ORDINARY PEOPLE
Exodus 6:13—27
INTRODUCTION
Put up overhead of old woman and ask, “What do you see?” Most see the old woman. Point out the young, stylish woman’s profile. Most people only see the young woman when someone reveals her to them. To see what is really there requires an explanation so you will look beyond what appears to be. What appears to be an ugly peasant woman is revealed an elegant young woman when someone points it out. That is the function of God’s word in our lives. The Bible is God’s explanation of the meaning of this world we live in and of our existence. The word of God explains what is going on “behind the scenes.” Every human is regularly assigning meaning to the facts of existence. We are looking for and adopting a wide variety of explanations. The facts of our existence are not in dispute. What is in dispute is the explanation for the facts of our existence.
Let me give you some examples. Everyone acknowledges that on Sept. 11, 2001 19 men hijacked four U.S. airliners. Two were flown into the World Trade Center in New York, one was flown into the Pentagon and another crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. We now know a lot about the facts of these hijackers lives. The question that is being argued about all over the globe is what do the facts mean? Why did this happen? What does it mean that these sorts of things take place in this world? There are millions of people in the world who would say that these events took place because of Allah’s hatred of U.S. culture and government. We are infidels, unbelievers and under the wrath of Allah. The hijackers were martyrs who right now are living in Paradise, enjoying the favor of Allah. They carried out the will of Allah and are now reaping the rewards of his faithful people. Others would argue that no deity had anything to do with Sept. 11. It happened due to U.S. support of corrupt Arabic governments and a vicious Israeli regime. This is simply how oppressed people respond to their oppressors. It is an entirely human response to unjust conditions. Others would argue that these events were ordained by the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ for the glory of his own name and the good of his people. Others would argue that God didn’t want this to happen but he couldn’t do anything about it because he either didn’t know it was going to happen or he can’t interfere with the free wills of human beings. This is only a small sample of the myriad explanations for the events of Sept. 11.
Let’s consider something closer to our own lives. I become impatient and irritable with my family every time I work on projects or chores in my home. Why am I like this? It could be the reason I am like this is because my dad was always impatient and irritable when I worked with him as a child, which I often did. Therefore, I am simply acting like my dad because we all know that we become like what we see when we are children. Or, I am like this because I have a perfectionist mother who was never satisfied with my work and so I’m afraid I’ll make mistakes and never get the job done right and this makes me irritable. Or I’m angry with my perfectionist mother for never approving of my work and so I take it out on my own children as a result. Or, I believe that I have a right to not have to work around the house as I work all week. My heart loves laying in the hammock and listening to the Brewers while I drink lemonade. It is my just reward for a hard week of work. Therefore, I resent having to spend time I ought to be relaxing, working on the house. In fact, I believe the children ought to have this work done already and so it is their fault that I’m working and not relaxing and I’m going to make them pay for what they’ve done to me. In short, my anger is merely an expression of my idolatrous heart that loves things other than the God who made me and saved me.
The fact is that we all can “see” the circumstances of our lives and the lives of others but we don’t really “see” what these events and circumstances mean without God’s explanation. God has given us this book to explain what is going on in our lives and in the world. The Bible does this in many different ways. One of the most common ways is by telling us the stories of regular human beings and then giving us a “behind the scenes” look at what is really going on. The point of this is so that we can see our lives in the lives of the Biblical characters and so when we understand what is going on behind the scenes of their lives, we can understand what is going on in our lives. If we did not have the Bible but were merely observers of the events recorded from Genesis 12 through Exodus 5 we would be hard pressed to see any overarching, divine work going on.
Just think about the circumstances described in Exodus 1-5. If we had lived in Egypt during the time recorded in the opening chapters of Exodus, we would have simply observed a very common human experience. A powerful people, filled with racial hatred and fear of enemies, have subjected another people to slavery. The most powerful nation on earth at the time has used its power to keep another nation in its power in order to profit from their free labor. Then, we would have seen a couple of crackpots show up and command the leader of the nation to let the slaves go free. We would have marveled at their superstitious and outlandish claim that the God of the slave people had shown up and was ordering the king of this most powerful nation to let the people go. Not surprisingly, the leader of the enslaving power is incensed by this insubordination and to squelch any thoughts of rebellion he has increased the level of oppression to intolerable levels. Naturally, the enslaved people are completely despondent, hopeless, and angry at the two crackpots who opened their mouths and made matters worse for them. As you would expect, the “prophets” are completely disheartened and have no interest in talking to the king again.
If it wasn’t for the Bible’s explanation of what is going on, then we would presume that we are only observing natural, human forces at work. But God has given us this book as his commentary on what is going on behind the scenes of these very human occurrences. As we read this story we see our story lived out and so we discover that there is far more going on in our lives than we can observe on the surface. The Bible reveals to us that there is a beautiful woman in the picture we thought was of an ugly old woman.
That is the main point that we are to derive from the text before us this morning. Right in the midst of telling us the story of Israel’s enslavement and deliverance we are given a genealogy, a list of names. Just when Israel and Israel’s prophets are in their darkest hour and just before we are told of their spectacular deliverance, Moses inserts this list of names. And it is a very strange list at that. If you look at vv. 14-16 it appears as if he is going to list the names of the sons of Jacob and their sons whose descendants form the clans that make up the millions of Israelites. It actually begins very similarly to the list we are given in Genesis 46:8-24. Look back there with me to see what I mean. However, right after listing the first three sons of Jacob and their sons, Moses lists the grandsons of Levi. Then he picks out three of the grandsons, all sons of Kohath and precedes to give us details about their wives and children and some of their grandchildren. The point is that Moses is very selective about who he tells us about. His listing of names and ancestry is incomplete and highly selective.
Why does Moses put this genealogy in the story of Israel’s deliverance at this point? Why does he list the people that he lists while leaving out the many he could have listed? The main point that Moses is trying to make here is that God’s spectacular salvation comes to and through very unspectacular people. Moses is seeking to emphasize the ordinariness of these people even while he seeks to highlight the extraordinary work of God in saving them. If it were not for God’s revelation in his word, we would have no idea that anything amazing has been going on. When we remember that the first readers of this story were the descendants of the people listed here we can see how it is that Moses is attempting to assure them that even though their lives appear very ordinary, just like the lives of their ancestors listed in this genealogy, yet there is a great work of salvation going on. It is the same point we are to see.
MAIN POINT
God’s word continually explains reality by reminding us that…
I. God’s salvation is spectacular (vv. 13 & 26-27)
Once at the beginning and twice at the end of this genealogy we are told that the goal of God for Israel is to bring them out of Egypt. Once at the beginning and twice at the end we are told that Moses and Aaron are the agents God will use to accomplish this goal. The salvation that God is preparing for Israel is infinitely beyond their wildest imagination. How can it be possible that they can escape this great and powerful king and his armies? What would it be like to be a free people? They have lived in slavery for centuries. Generations of Hebrews have been born into slavery and died while in slavery. The only life they have ever known is a life of serving their masters. This is all they know and so how can they imagine what it will be like to be free, to live in their own country, owning their own property, rather than being property? The nature of God’s promise is staggering. It would be hard to imagine a greater, more impossible deliverance than this one.
If you were Moses and Aaron, it would be beyond your wildest imagination for this fierce Pharaoh to willingly let the people of Israel go and that by your command. Moses had to run for his life from Pharaoh. He’s just finished telling him to let the people go and he has stubbornly refused and has increased the suffering of God’s people as a result. It would be virtually impossible to imagine Pharaoh obeying the word of Moses and Aaron. What amazing things must happen in order for the hardhearted Pharaoh to release Israel from their slavery? The point of these three verses is this: God is going to do this most impossible thing. He is going to deliver Israel from the enslavement of the most powerful nation on earth and he is going to do it by the word of Moses and Aaron.
The deliverance of Israel out of its slavery by the hand of Moses and Aaron is but a picture of that greater and more impossible to imagine salvation that God is accomplishing through Jesus Christ. The Bible continually strains to get us to understand and to fix our attention upon this one fact. The God who made the world and who drove humanity from the garden is working right now to bring humanity back to that garden. The life that he has planned for all his people is beyond our wildest imaginations. In spite of our slavery to sin and the misery of sin, God is going to rescue us and bring us into a world of perfection beyond our wildest dreams. How can we who have lived our whole life long in sin and under the guilt of sin, imagine a life free from sin and guilt? How can we who have lived our whole life under the shroud of sickness and death imagine a world where there is no death, no sickness, and no physical weakness at all? How can we who rarely feel close to human beings, let alone close to God, imagine a world where our hearts burst with joy out of love for God and others?
It is God’s goal through his word to convince us of the glory and joy that awaits us. It is his goal to daily remind us that he has promised us in Christ a spectacular salvation. There is a day coming when we will have no interest in sin but will be only interested in obeying God. Obedience to God will be our highest joy and we will not have to fight with ourselves to obey. There will be no jealousy, no anger, no disputing, no suspicion, no hatred no enslaving lust in heaven. There will be nothing and no one to harm us. There will be no forgetting the greatness of Christ or of his saving work as we will see him and marvel at him. We will see his nail scarred hands, feet and side and we will, every moment for eternity be completely conscious of the fact that the only reason we are not dead and in hell is due to his willing death and his ongoing intercession for us. The pleasures of creation will no longer be the occasion for our sinning but will always be occasions for our praising God. It will be a world of endless delight as God displays his pleasure in us through Christ.
This spectacular salvation includes the present work of God giving us faith and love for Christ. He brings us out of our sin and persuades us of his love and enables us to flee from the evil desires of youth and to pursue righteousness, faith, peace and love along with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart. The spectacular nature of our salvation is not just in how it ends but in how we make it to the end. God has delivered us from the captivity of sin and Satan and maintains us in our freedom by his word, his Spirit and his people. Then there is a day coming when Christ returns and the earth will give up its dead. The bodies of every dead Christian from throughout the centuries will be resurrected with an imperishable, glorified body just like the body in which Jesus was resurrected. The bodies of all those who are alive when he returns will be transformed in the twinkling of the eye to be like his glorified body.
It really is true, what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2, “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him.” Behind and beyond the ugliness of this world and the ugliness of your life, God is preparing this salvation for all those who belong to Christ through faith. God wants us to be consumed with a vision of this glory that is coming. He aims, through his word, to persuade you and I that there is not greater hope, no greater purpose to live for than the purpose of attaining to the resurrection from the dead.
God’s word continually explains reality by reminding us that…
- God’s salvation is spectacular
- And…
II. The agents and recipients of his salvation are not spectacular (vv. 14-25)
I know that for most people, when they come to these lists of names in the Bible they usually skip over them. I usually do also. However, they form part of the Scripture and if we believe that “all Scripture is God breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness,” then we need to give attention to them. This genealogy is somewhat easier to figure out because of how uniquely it is placed in the story. The story that Moses is telling us is completely interrupted by this genealogy. It is very intentionally placed in the story at this point in the story. We are at the bottom of the misery chart for Israel and Moses and we are about to begin tracing the way up out of misery and out of Egypt by the mighty hand of God through Moses and Aaron. This is the turning point in the story.
In v. 13 we were told that God sent Aaron and Moses to lead out the sons of Israel from Egypt. Then in v. 14 we are told “these are the heads of their families.” The word for families really means a group larger than the nuclear family. It is better translated “clan” and refers to very large extended family units. Remember that at this time Israel numbers well over a million people. The way that the nation was organized was by twelve tribes, named after each of the sons of Jacob and these tribes were subdivided into these families or clans. The clans were named after the grandsons and great-grandsons of the sons of Jacob. Moses is giving the names of the men after whom the various clans of Israel are named. I’m not going to go through every name listed here and every detail given. I want to highlight enough of these people and these details for you to see how clearly Moses points out the less than spectacular nature of these people. His point in doing this at this juncture is to emphasize the grace of God in the salvation of God’s people. God is saving sinners and he is using sinners to save sinners. Let’s look at a few of these details.
When he mentions Reuben, Simeon and Levi we immediately remember how these brothers behaved in the book of Genesis. They betrayed Joseph into slavery and deceived their father for 23 years about what actually happened to Joseph. Additionally, Reuben had sex with, perhaps through rape, Bilhah, one of the four wives of his father, Jacob. Simeon and Levi murdered all the men of the city of Shechem in retaliation for the rape of their sister Dinah. Notice in v. 15 one of the sons of Simeon, Shaul, was born of a Canaanite wife. This is a detail that Moses didn’t have to record but he did in order to show that one of the clans of Israel is descended from the wicked Canaanites. Right from the start, by simply listing the names of these sons of Jacob and the facts surrounding the birth of one grandson, Moses points out the unspectacular nature of the people whom God is saving.
After listing the names of Levi’s three sons in v. 16 he lists the names of Levi’s grandsons. Thus he breaks the pattern of listing all the sons of Jacob with their sons and heads in a different direction. Why does he do this? We find out in v. 20. Amram, son of Kohath, son of Levi, son of Jacob marries his aunt, named Jochebed, and she bears him two sons, Aaron and Moses. Aaron and Moses are the offspring of an incestuous relationship. Moses writes down this law from God in Leviticus 20:19, “Do not have sexual relations with the sister of either your mother or your father, for that would dishonor a close relative, they will both bear their iniquity.” In other words, it is a sin to do what Moses’ mom and dad did and if they did it after Lev. 20:19 was written they would be subject to the death penalty. When Moses writes down Lev. 20:19 at about the age of 80 he condemns his mom and dad. Why does Moses record this sordid detail from his life? The people of Israel are no better than any other people in the world. In Lev. 18:2, which is the beginning of God’s decrees regarding sexual immorality, he forbids Israel from behaving in the sexually perverted ways that the people of Egypt and the Canaanites behave. Yet, we see that Israelites are acting just like the people whom God is saving them from, the Egyptians and just like the people God is going to destroy so they can have their land, the Canaanites. How shocking is this? The parents of the savior of Israel are as perverted as the pagan people God is going to judge! You think your family reunions are weird? Think about what it would have been like for Moses’ family getting together for a family celebration! God is not saving them because of who they are. In addition, Moses does not have a claim to any high pedigree. He can’t claim the reason God chose him is because he came from such a godly home. God didn’t choose Moses because of his godly heritage but in spite of his ungodly heritage.
In v. 21 Moses records the sons of Izhar, another of Kohath’s sons. The three sons are Korah, Nepheg and Zicri. The reason he records these sons is because of Korah. In Numbers 16 we are told how Korah along with 250 other men rose up against Moses and Aaron in rebellion. This is what they said to Moses and Aaron: “You have gone too far! The whole community is holy, every one of them, and the Lord is with them. Why then do you set yourselves above the Lord’s assembly?” They said a bunch of other things and were on the verge of starting a mutiny when God told Moses that he was going to wipe out the entire assembly of the Israelites and start over with just him and Aaron. Moses interceded and so God just killed Korah and his followers. This is how he did it: “Moses warned the assembly, ‘Move back from the tents of these wicked men! Do not touch anything belonging tot them, or you will be swept away because of all their sins.’ So they moved away from the tents of Korah, Dathan and Abiram.” Then Moses gives a speech followed by, “As soon as he finished saying all this, the ground under them split apart and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them, with their households and all Korah’s men and all their possessions.. They went down alive into the grave, with everything they owned; the earth closed over them, and they perished and were gone from the community. At their cries, all the Israelites around them fled, shouting, ‘The earth is going to swallow us too!’” Remember the first readers lived through this and so they are reminded by naming Korah of this great wickedness that was carried out by large numbers of Israelites.
Next notice that the sons of Uzzeil are listed and then Aaron’s four sons. Again, in naming Mishael, Elzaphan, Nadab and Abihu we are reminded of another sinful episode in the later history of Israel. As you may remember Aaron and all of his descendants are designated as the priests of God to work in the tabernacle. Aaron’s two oldest sons, Nadab and Abihu disobeyed a direct command of God and carried burning incense not made as God required into the tabernacle. Fire came out from the altar and burned up both of these young men. It was Aaron’s cousins, Mishael and Elzaphan who carried their charred bodies out of the tabernacle and buried them. Moses names these people on purpose to remind Israel and us of the nature of these people whom God is saving.
Finally, let me point out one more thing from this list. At the end of v. 25 we are again told that this is the list of the “heads of the Levite families, clan by clan.” What I want you to notice is that there are no clans named for Moses or any of his sons. All of these people, even the descendants of wicked Korah, have clans in Israel named after them except for Moses. In fact, the only time any descendant of Moses is mentioned in the rest of the OT is in the book of Judges. In chapter 18 we discover that one of the Moses descendants leads the entire tribe of Dan in worshipping an idol. In other words, Moses is nobody special. God is not choosing him or using him because of who he is. He uses Moses to lead Israel out and to give Israel the law of God but he does not give Moses any lasting memory in Israel as leader of a clan.
This list of names is a remarkable testimony to the less than stellar character of the people God is saving and the people he is using to accomplish that salvation. By showing us the ugliness of these human beings and the misery of their lives and yet the beauty of God’s magnificent salvation we are also shown the ugliness of our lives but the beauty of God’s saving work in and through us. This is the ongoing work of the Bible. God is fully aware of our sin and the misery of our sin. Yet, he is working out a great salvation. He is saving us from our sin and the misery of sin through the suffering, death, resurrection and intercession of Jesus Christ. We are not spectacular. He and his salvation are spectacular. When all you can see is the ugliness in you and around you, read this book for an explanation of the beautiful God and of his glorious salvation so that you can rejoice.
© Copyright
2004 John Swanson.
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