Moses leads Israel out of Egypt
In order for the Israelites to become a sovereign nation as prophesied, God first had to free them from Egyptian slavery, which He accomplished through Moses. Through a series of remarkable miracles, God prepared Moses to be Israel’s deliverer. When he was a baby, his mother placed him in a basket and set it in the Nile River, hoping to save his life from an Egyptian edict to kill all male Israelite infants (Exodus 2:1-4). An Egyptian princess drew Moses from the water, and he was adopted into the Egyptian royal family as a prince (verses 5-10). Despite rising to prominence as an Egyptian, Moses came to identify with the suffering of his people, and when one day he saw an Egyptian beating an Israelite, he killed the Egyptian and was forced to flee to the wilderness (verses 11-15). Moses survived in the wilderness for 40 long years, until God one day spoke to him from a burning bush and appointed him to return to Egypt to lead Israel out of slavery. Though it took 10 devastating plagues to convince Pharaoh to release the Israelite slaves, God prevailed. The small family that totaled about 70 when they entered Egypt, left as a nation of some estimated 2 million (Exodus 12:37)! Moses led the children of Israel to Mount Sinai where a momentous event occurred—God and the people of Israel entered into a covenant, a separate covenant from the unconditional Abrahamic covenant. Known as the Old Covenant, this agreement between God and the burgeoning nation of Israel included God’s essential moral law—the 10 Commandments (Exodus 20). It promised physical blessings for continued obedience and curses for disobedience (Leviticus 26). Though the fulfillment of the promises to Abraham was assured, within this covenant God decreed that if the physical nation of Israel refused to obey His law, they would be punished, including losing their land temporarily (verses 18, 33-35).
The Sabbath sign
An important element of God’s covenant with Israel was the seventh-day Sabbath, which God designated as holy time on the seventh day of creation (Genesis 2:1-3). It was now codified as the fourth of the 10 Commandments (Exodus 20:8-11). God ended His instructions with a strong statement to Israel: “Speak also to the children of Israel, saying: ‘Surely My Sabbaths you shall keep, for it is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I am the Lord who sanctifies you” (Exodus 31:13). God clearly declared that keeping the Sabbath would be a distinctive, iden28 THE UNITED STATES, BRITAIN AND THE COMMONWEALTH IN PROPHECY