Category: BIBLE/SCRIPTURE

Chapter 2-3

Moses went out in the field to see his kinfolk. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave and Scripture says, (2:12) “And he looked this way and that way, when he saw that there was no man, he slew the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand”.

The first conclusion people come to is he didn’t want to be caught killing an Egyptian and so he made sure there was no one to see him do it. But when you think about it, there could be a logical explanation, other than secrecy that he looked about. That explanation is that he was looking for a man’s man, or someone who was man enough to have the courage to do what he was about to do. But seeing no one was willing to risk their own life Moses came to the defense of the Hebrew slave. He killed the Egyptian and buried him in the sand.

Through the years, Moses has been highly criticized for this homicide. But what would you have him do? Should he have walked away turning his back on a terrible injustice? Should he have approached the Egyptian to persuade him to stop? That would have evoked a huge belly laugh on the part of the Egyptian. Should Moses have just walked away? That would have made him complicit in a murder. He would have been turning his back on a terrible injustice.

Should he have tried to persuade the Egyptian overseer to stop? That idea borders on the absurd. Should he have attacked the Egyptian without killing him? The Egyptian surely would have fought back and possibly killed Moses. Or he would have informed the authorities about Moses’s bad act of faith. It also would have resulted in his being accused of subversion.

It has to be, God approved of what Moses did. This was surely a way for God to test Moses and find out exactly what kind of man he was. Killing the Egyptian slave master is one of three stories with that exact purpose: finding out exactly what kind of man Moses was.

The second is, when Moses went out the next day, he found two Hebrews fighting; so he said to the offender, why do you strike your fellow. It’s interesting to know that the word used here for offender literally means, the Evil One. It’s also interesting to realize that when the Jews canonized the Scriptures that they were so truthful about them that they could be offended by it. God did not spare their feelings when he talked about their true nature.

The guilty party responded, (2:14) “Who make you chief and ruler over us. Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” This comment frightened him because now he knew this entire matter was known. Just think how you would feel: Moses was raised at the royal court, killing an Egyptian overseer and identifying with the Hebrews would have branded him a traitor and warranted the death penalty. Well, Pharaoh did learn of the matter and he did seek to kill him, but Moses escaped and fled from Pharaoh.

He went to the land of Midian and sat down beside a well. It just so happened that the priest of Midian had seven daughters. They came to draw water, and to fill the troughs to water their father’s flock. But shepherds came and drove them off. Our hero came to their defense and he filled the troughs.

This is the third time Moses showed his true character. All three times he refuses to tolerate the evil he sees around him. The first time he intervenes when a non-Hebrew oppresses a Hebrew. The Second time he intervenes when one Hebrew wrongs another Hebrew. And the third time he intervenes when non-Hebrew men oppress non-Hebrew women.

It’s obvious to God and man that all injustice infuriates him and prompts him to act. He is truly a man of principle.

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Chapter 2

We remember a baby boy was born in Egypt to two non-descript people. Unfortunately, he was a boy with, as we would say today, a price on his head. The Pharaoh had ordered all baby boys of the Hebrews to be thrown in the Nile. His mother kind of obeyed. She didn’t throw him into the Nile but she did put him in the Nile in a woven, waterproofed basket.

As we know, the boy was found by the Pharaoh’s daughter. Praise the Lord, the Pharaoh’s daughter was not much like her father. She saved that baby. All the while that baby’s sister had been watching all the action and she was brave enough to offer her mother, as a wet nurse, to nourish that boy. Pharaoh’s daughter was very amendable to that plan.

That young sister, Miriam by name, went to retrieve her mother and to bring her to meet the Pharaoh’s daughter. When they met there was no conversation as to the why and how Miriam’s mother would or could be a “wet nurse”. Of course, no Egyptian woman would ever consider nursing a slave’s baby but there were plenty of Hebrew women whose infant boys were killed and they would be able to wet nurse a child.

Upon meeting the Hebrew woman, who was willing to nurse this child she had found, the Pharaoh’s daughter said, (2:10) “Take this child away, and nurse it for me, and I will pay thy wages.” Pharaoh’s daughter was nothing like her father. Not only did she save a Hebrew boy baby but she was paying a slave money to nurse it for her.

Can you even imagine how very caring and generous this young woman was? When that baby boy grew up, we assume somewhere between three and five, his own mother took him to Pharaoh’s daughter, who made him her son. She named him Moses explaining, “I drew him out of the water.” In Hebrew the word Moses is derived for a word that means “I drew him out.” But Moses is also an Egyptian name, the name Moses (Hebrew Moshe) is derived from Egyptian mose (“is born”). We have to assume that even though Moses was raised as an Egyptian he recognized he was also a Hebrew because Scripture says, he went out to his kinfolk and witnessed their labors and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own.

When you consider that Moses had been given the best of both worlds you have to wonder why, he was chosen and even willing to be the exceptional man chosen by God to deliver the Israelites from bondage. Put yourself in his shoes: his younger years were spent with a mother who was willing to break the law to keep him alive and then to give him up to another mother and family where he lived a life of luxury and ease with an adopted mother who gave him every advantage her world had to offer.

Moses was exceptional when you consider: Moses fights evil. He is instinctively intolerant of suffering and injustice. He does whatever he can to stop the evil. Later, Moses will command the respect of the Israelites because he was not raised with them. He was far worldlier than his own people, who were raised as slaves. He actually chose to be a Hebrew when he could have led a completely charmed life as an Egyptian prince. Moses was not demoralized, he does not just cry out, he takes action.

We see his character in action when we go back to the time he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew. Scripture says, “He turned this way and that and, seeing no one about he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.” There are two ways that verse can be interrupted. One is Moses looked around to make sure there was no one to witness that illegal act that he is about to commit.

To determine this, it would require judging his actions: It was a fact of that time that to protect a slave -let alone to kill an Egyptian, was a major transgression of Egyptian law and if he were caught, he would be executed. Or, the other possibility is he checked to see whether there was “a man,” someone who would intercede on behalf of the slave? The Hebrew word that means MAN is ish. Moses’s question was would there be a MAN who would intercede?
We use that word ish in English, also. It means “a morally upstanding individual”. We use that word when we say man-ish, which means acts like a man.

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Chapter 1-2

Because Pharaoh wanted to eliminate all males born to the Hebrews, and because nothing else, to this point, had eliminated boys; the king of Egypt, ordered all babies born boys were to be thrown in the Nile. Once again baby girls could live, boys could not. Remember girls were great! They did not cause uprisings or fight wars. What is surprising is Pharaoh said all boys born from this date forward should be thrown into the Nile River.

The majority of translations of Scripture makes it clear that it was every boy. Quoting from Scripture (1:22) “And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying, every son that is born you shall cast into the river.” There are a few translations that say that it is every boy from the Hebrew tribe that should be thrown in the Nile.

It was confusing because why would Pharaoh kill off his own future army. While searching for that answer it was easy to realize all that is necessary is to go back to Exodus 1:16 where the Midwives were instructed to “kill all baby boys of the Israelites”. The only difference now is Pharaoh is no longer expecting the midwives to commit infanticide on all Israeli baby boys, but he is now instructing ALL the Egyptians to participate in this practice.

Going on to chapter two we are told “A certain man of the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman.” We are not given their names, evidently God wanted us to focus on the result of this union and not on the people. That woman conceived and bore a son and when she saw how beautiful he was she hid him for three months. Moses’s birth was in no way miraculous. Later we learn Amram and Jochebed were the parents of Moses.

God chose Moses to lead the Jews out of Egypt because of his exceptional moral and leadership traits. He was not preordained to lead and he was a normal mortal. It was Moses’s mother who played the critical role in saving him and the whole story plays out like a beautiful fairy tale. We’ve all heard the story before.

When she could hide him no longer, she got a wicker basket and caulked it with bitumen and pitch. The same substances that were used on Noah’s Ark. She placed her child in it and placed it among the reeds, by the bank of the Nile River. His older sister, Miriam, sat nearby so she could see what happened to him.

The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe in the Nile. Her maidens gave her privacy and walked down the Nile. While going in to bathe, Pharaoh’s daughter spied the basket among the reeds and sent her slave girl to retrieve it. She opened it and saw it was a child. Actually, a crying baby boy. She took pity on it and said “This must be a Hebrew child.” It’s rather ironic that we are told she knew it was a Hebrew boy baby and yet she took pity on it. Her own father set out to annihilate the Hebrews and yet she was going to save one of them.

This is a lesson for all of us. It doesn’t matter what your lineage, it matters who and what you are. You can be moral and good even if you are raised by bad people. It doesn’t even matter what your past has been – you can still act moral and good. Another figure in this story who is moral and good is Moses’s sister who was brave enough to speak up and ask, “Shall I go and get you a Hebrew nurse.” Here she was, being bold enough to make herself known and to offer assistance to the daughter of the king when she herself was only a slave girl.
Being moral and good has nothing to do with our station or situation in life. It solely depends on our own character.

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Chapter 1

Exodus opens with the listing of Israel’s sons and then tells us his family numbers seventy in the land of Egypt. We are then told Joseph died along with all his brothers and all of that generation.

Deduct that entire generation and you have a mighty small nation of people that have been the focus of the world ever since their beginning. But the Israelites were fertile and prolific, they multiplied and increased very greatly. In the writing of Exodus, with all it contains, we see God’s great attempt to make a moral world.

God’s first attempt to make a good world was creating human beings with a conscience. We know that didn’t work because Adam and Eve’s first child Cain killed his brother Abel. After that episode, and some following events, God came to regret creating human beings. It was then that God sent the flood, destroying all mankind except for one particular good man and his family. God knew that human conscience did not work, so he set up a few rules in Genesis chapter nine. He then revealed some basic moral laws and principles. The first was to not murder. In fact, they were to take the life of those who deliberately murdered.

Next, they were to have children, and they were not to consume the blood of any creature, and He reminded them every human being is created in the image of GOD. But that didn’t work either. People murdered and plundered and engaged in other evils. Then God made a third effort to morally improve mankind by revealing Himself to one specific group “who would be charged” with spreading ethical monotheism in the world.

That group was first known as the Hebrews. The word which meant to cross over or to pass through. Next, they were known as Israelites. The new name given to Jacob by God which means “to wrestle with God”. And then they got the name Jews, which is retained to this day, from Jacob’s son Judah, the Lion of God.

The question, of why God had to keep trying different ways to make man good, may have crossed your mind. It could make you wonder, “Doesn’t God know the beginning from the end”? Or don’t you even wonder why He didn’t just begin the world with The Ten Commandments or with a Chosen people who would obey?

But as you are led off in that path you have to remember God created the human with free will. We have the freedom to believe God – or not. And then with hindsight we know that God dealt with different people, in different times, and in different ways. That is what we call dispensations.

When the unbeliever stands before God, he cannot blame God for not covering all the angles. God can only say I tried all these different methods to convince mankind and yet “you would not believe in spite of all My efforts”. Scripture continues with “and the world was filled with them.” This statement implies that the Egyptians perceived that the Jews were everywhere. They ignored the fact that the Jews only occupied the land known as Goshen. The Jews evidently made a large impression.

The Jews presence throughout the centuries and throughout the world has always been overstated. Today (2021) there are about fourteen million Jews over all the world and the entire world has approximately 7.9 billion people. But back in Egypt there was a change, a big change. A new king, who did not know Joseph, arose over Egypt. We all tend to have a short memory when it comes to anything good. That new king did not know that Joseph actually saved Egypt from the famine.

But maybe it is not a short memory that plagues us. Maybe it is a lack of gratitude that does the most damage. Human beings tend to much more quickly forget the good others have done.

It is human nature for people to remember vividly the bad that has been done to them but it is so much harder for anyone to remember the good that has been done to them. This is one of the very good reasons why it is so difficult to be a good person. Being good actually is only accomplished by fighting our prominent nature.

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For those of you who have read through the Bible more than once, this may be a great repetition for you. But I have to admit I have never read through the entire Scriptures. I am not a fan of reading. I need a purpose to get my nose into a book. And that purpose is never just satisfaction of reading. My Bible reading has been limited to reading passages on specific subjects about which I am trying to learn or confirm.

The first five books of the Bible, which the Jews refer to as the Torah, reveals the God of the universe to us. Those first five books when translated to English mean ‘teaching’ or ‘law’. The central message we find in just those first five books is that God is good and demands we be good. Those first five books tell us all what we need to know concerning the wisdom that is contained therein.

God’s wisdom that He shares with us far outweighs any wisdom taught in any University or any place of higher learning. It’s sad when we study the occupants of our world and learn that most people value knowledge and intelligence but not wisdom. The Bible is the greatest repository of goodness and wisdom in human history and the greatest book ever written, because it comes directly from God.

In the study of the book of Exodus we will find The Ten Commandments, which is the most important moral code in world history. Exodus is, in equal parts, narrative, laws and theology. Another unique element is the only national history ever written that begins with the creation of the world. It is the story of all mankind and not just the Jews.

Exodus opens with the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob. The total number of that family was seventy. The Israelites are referred to as the “sons of Israel”. We remember that Israel was the name given to Jacob after he wrestled with an angel. We are reminded that the name Israel means “wrestled with God”.

It’s amazing how the story of one of the smallest nations in the world holds such worldwide appeal. The Israelites gave to us the detail of two of the most important events in world history: the Israelites Exodus from Egyptian slavery and the revelation of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai.

Even an atheist who believes neither event occurred would have to acknowledge that the Western world – and those parts of the non-western world influenced in the West – has been largely shaped by the belief that these events did occur.

It’s really interesting to note that Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, two of the founders of the USA, neither of whom believed in a literal reading of Scripture, commissioned a design for the Great Seal of the United States of America which depicted the Israelites leaving Egypt and was surrounded by the words, “Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God”. They also believed the founding of our land was a second Exodus in as much as people were leaving Europe and establishing the United States.

Our country truly had great beginnings when you consider that America (outside of Israel) was the most Bible based country ever founded. At one time the Bible was the best-selling book in our country. When I tried to confirm that it still is, I queried google, asking “what was the number one best-selling book in the USA in 2020” and found it was “A promised Land” by Barack Obama. So I refined my search to how many homes own one or more Bibles. Nine out of ten homes have a Bible BUT they don’t read it!

I don’t think my answers surprised me. The results by a Christian organization were 16% of the Population never read the Bible, and only 14% read it every day. They reference or read portions of the Bible three to four times a week.

Another fact about the creation of our own Nation is: Truth and Liberty are the two pillars of the Bible, as seen especially in the first five books of the Bible, and Truth and Liberty are the two main pillars our Nation was founded on. Our founding fathers gave us a great heritage because they read and believed the Bible. We can see all around us the degeneration of our Nation because the majority of our leaders do not depend on God and so do not read or believe Scripture.

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