READ: Exodus 1-2
BACKGROUND: Exodus is the incredible story of how the people of Israel were enslaved in Egypt and then delivered from their slavery by God and led on to the Promised Land.
By Verse:
1:8 – This king was possibly Amhose I or Amenhotep I. The king forgot all that Joseph had done in saving the Egyptian people.
16 – This is a vicious practice, but the idea is to eventually breed the Israelites out by eliminating the entire male population.
19 – This may or may not be a true statement. But the midwives are commended here, not for lying but for refusing to kill.
21 – Households = Families
2:3 – The Hebrew word for basket is the same as the word for ark in Genesis 6.
9 – How cool is it the God, in his sovereignty, reunited Moses with his mom!?
11 – He was 40 years old.
12 – Moses, in this act, showed that he self-identified with the people of Israel and not the Egyptians. He also showed his immaturity.
THINK: “Moses went out unto his brethren, and looked on their burdens.” – Exodus 2:11
Moses saw the oppression of his people and felt certain that he was the one to deliver them, and in the righteous indignation of his own spirit he started to right their wrongs. After the first strike for God and for the right, God allowed Moses to be driven into blank discouragement, He sent him into the desert to feed sheep for forty years. At the end of that time, God appeared and told Moses to go and bring forth His people, and Moses said – “Who am I, that I should go?” In the beginning Moses realized that he was the man to deliver the people, but he had to be trained and disciplined by God first. He was right in the individual aspect, but he was not the man for the work until he had learned communion with God.
We may have the vision of God and a very clear understanding of what God wants, and we start to do the thing, then comes something equivalent to the forty years in the wilderness, as if God had ignored the whole thing, and when we are thoroughly discouraged God comes back and revives the call, and we get the quaver in and say – “Oh, who am I?” We have to learn the first great stride of God – “I AM THAT I AM hath sent thee.” We have to learn that our individual effort for God is an impertinence; our individuality is to be rendered incandescent by a personal relationship to God (see Matthew 3:17). We fix on the individual aspect of things; we have the vision – “This is what God wants me to do;” but we have not got into God’s stride. If you are going through a time of discouragement, there is a big personal enlargement ahead.
By: Oswald Chambers in My Utmost for His Highest
PRAY: Ask God to help you get into step with him. Ask him to shape you into the person you need to be to do the work he wants you to do.
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