“Out of Egypt I Have Called My Son,” Exodus 14, Lenten Midweek #4

           

1. Please pray with me.  May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be pleasing in Your sight, O Lord, our Rock, and our Redeemer.  Amen.  The message from God’s Word as we continue our Lenten sermon series, “Coming Home from Exile: The Exoduses of the Scriptures,” is taken from Exodus 14 and is entitled, “Out of Egypt I Have Called My Son,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.

2. Thus says the Lord to you, O Egypt: “7 years of famine were barreling toward you, 7 years in which your men would be reduced to bags of bones, your weeping infants would suffer with little milk, and mothers would rip out their hair in agony. But I pitied you, a nation that didn’t even acknowledge me, much less worship me. I sent you a savior, Joseph, through whom I warned you of the famine to come, planned for your deliverance, and made you the hope of all the nations around you. When the famine began, your storehouses were spilling over with grain. And that food lasted you all seven years of famine. Neighboring countries emptied their pockets into your treasury to feed their starving families. I exalted you, Egypt, as the breadbasket of the world.

3. “But, you, O forgetful nation, how have you shown your thankfulness? What kind of thankoffering have you sacrificed to me? The people who were your freedom from famine—my people, the descendants of Joseph—these people you shackle in the chains of slavery. The nation by which your infants were fed, the infants of that nation you rip from their mothers to feed them to the Nile like food to an alligator. Is this how you thank the God of heaven for saving you, by making the stench of your evil drift heavenward? O ungrateful nation! O thankless Egypt!”

4. Isn’t it easy to sit here in America, over 3,000 years and 5,000 miles from Egypt, and wag our fingers at that bad, bad nation? All the while we raise a toast to our piety: “Why, if I were there, I’ll have you know, I’d have been thankful for what God did! Why, I wouldn’t have laid a finger on the Hebrews! In fact, I’d have done everything I could to save the Hebrew children from cruel Pharaoh!” So we boast. We need to stop kidding ourselves. Nobody believes us, least of all God. It’s the old, worn-out “If I were you” thinking, by which we delude ourselves into thinking we’re better than others. It’s the self-trickery we love to indulge in. That’s because the truth cuts us so deeply we’ll do anything to evade it.

5. The truth is that the blood coursing through our veins is Egyptian red. We’ve met the Egyptians, and they are us. Not a smidgen of difference. Even though none of us would be so crass as to say, “God didn’t give me this food, this home, this career—I earned it!” in our thoughts and by our actions we reveal what we really believe. If we survive a famine—in whatever form that may come—it’s because our work ethic or our good planning pulled us through, right? We think we would rescue the Hebrew children, but we’re citizens of a land that has butchered millions of children in those Nile Rivers disguised as, “women’s health clinics.”  By the sinful act of abortion. And what seriously have we done to try and stop the bloodshed? We have no excuse. We’ve gone the way of Egypt—ungrateful, thankless Egypt.

6. And that’s also the way many in Israel had gone, even while enslaved within that country. Though they lamented their bondage, they were, in many ways, happy with life under Pharaoh. Their later words and actions unmask them. No more than a few days after they left their chains behind, they were already bellyaching to Moses about bringing them out of Egypt (Ex 14:11–12). If they weren’t complaining about the water, they were bickering about the manna. And if they weren’t bickering about the manna, they were whining about the land. And it they weren’t whining about the land, they were criticizing Moses himself. That man probably felt as if he was taking care of a nursery of bawling, dirty-diapered babies most of the time. But, so it goes with those with Egyptians hearts.

7. Repent, O Christian, O Egypt, O Israel! Stop evading that sharp blade of truth, no matter how deep it cuts, no matter how much you bleed. For it’s only in facing the truth of who you are as a sinner that you also come to know who God is as your only hope, your only Savior.

8. What God has accomplished for Israel, he’s also accomplished for you. Down into Egypt the Lord sent Moses, staff in hand, as his chosen man. But no Moses did the Lord send down to save you. If you want something done right, do it yourself. So down into this world the Lord himself came, not just to do things right, but to do them perfectly. He came not as an 80 year-old man, as did Moses, but as the Babe of Mary, our own flesh and blood.

9. 10 plagues the Lord leveled against the Egyptians before Pharaoh finally let the Israelites go. But the Lord Jesus came not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. The only one plagued by Christ was the pharaoh of hell, whom Jesus attacked time and again, not with locusts or hail, but with his living words. In the 9^th plague against Egypt, 3 days of darkness overwhelmed Egypt (Ex 10:22), followed by the 10^th plague, when all Egyptian firstborn sons died. But when our Lord Jesus came to free you, he endured the 3 hours of darkness on the cross (Lk 23:44), followed by his own death—he, the firstborn of the Father.

10.               The Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, let the sin of Egypt, the sin of America, your very own sin, take him away as the final Passover Lamb. His blood now marks not a doorpost but you. For that blood of Jesus has been baptized onto you. The blood of that Lamb has been drunk by you, into you. The destroying angel puts away his sword when he sees that blood, for it is the blood that shields you from eternal destruction, the blessed crimson light that halts his destroying hand.

11.               Not out of Egypt has the Lord led you, but out of a captivity to the grave of death, a bondage to sin. Jesus has shoveled back the 6 feet of soil that covered your corpse, smashed open the coffin in which you lay, bent over you, and, with lungs filled with the life-giving Spirit of God, he’s emptied those lungs into your own. He’s made you not merely alive but full of life. He’s reduced your coffin to ashes, dumped the dirt back into your grave, and erased the date of your death from that tombstone. For you live. And those who live and believe in Jesus will never die. Egypt’s chains are reduced to threads. Pharaoh’s hands grow limp. You are free.

12.               Our fathers, the Israelites, were all under the cloud, and all passed through the Red Sea; all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea; all ate the same spiritual food and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they were all drinking from the spiritual rock that followed them, and that rock was Christ.

13.               But you, the new Israel of God, how much greater are the gifts the Father has heaped upon you! For all of you were baptized into Jesus in the Holy Spirit and in the baptismal font. All of you eat the food of the Spirit, the body of the Son of God; all drink the same drink of the Spirit, the blood of that Son, for you all open your lips to consume what gushes from the rock struck not by the staff of Moses but the sword of Rome. And that rock is your Savior.

14.               Out of Egypt God called Israel. Out of Egypt God has called you. Out of Egypt and into his kingdom. You are God’s special treasure among all the peoples of the earth. You are a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. The dark days of exile have come to an end. The day of salvation has dawned, a day that never shall end.  Though you were ungrateful, the Lord called you out of exile. 
Amen.