12-16-20 Grace-Tucson Advent Sermon

Exodus 2:1-10

[Midweek Advent]

Pastor Ron Koehler

Grace Lutheran Church

December 2020

Children of the Promise—Moses In the name of our coming Savior, dear friends, We are going back in time quite a long way as we think about the Advent, or the coming, of Jesus. Naturally, to think about Jesus being born into this world as the Savior causes us to go back over 2,000 years. But today/tonight we’re going to consider how Moses fits into God preparing to send his Son. That backs us up another 1500 years or so! However, we really need to back up even farther than that. We can go back to the promise the LORD made to Abraham—that all nations would be blessed through him. That’s getting us back to about 2,000 BC. You realize though that we can trace the promise of God to send a Savior from sin all the way back to Adam and Eve, right after their fall into sin. As God addressed Satan at that moment, the first promise came: I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He will crush your head, and you will crush his heel (Genesis 3:15). After Adam and Eve brought sin to themselves and to the rest of humanity that would flow from them, it was a necessary promise if anyone would ever be saved from eternal separation from God. Sin and Satan would be crushed and forgiveness and life would follow. It was a promise God made in love.

Over time, God used many people to share that promise and expand on that promise in order to prepare God’s people to know the Savior when he arrived.

This season before Christmas—this season of preparation for celebrating the Christ child’s birth—is a time of great interest and wonder for children. You and I likely have precious memories of childhood Christmases. Parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, neighbors and friends, do all sorts of things to try to make this season special for little ones.

It’s interesting to see in Scripture how our heavenly Father had children in mind all along as he prepared them to look forward to the promised Savior. As they grew up, we find that he then used them to point and lead others to the coming Savior. Moses was one of those children. As we consider this Child of the Promise, we’ll see how God Protects and Delivers his People God Protected and Delivered Moses Chapter 1 of Exodus helps us to understand what we read here in chapter 2 about Moses. Think back to what we hear there about how Joseph’s brothers came to him as he was a leader in Egypt…and how he helped them with food in a time of famine…and how the brothers went back for their father and their families and then moved them all there to Egypt. The LORD blessed them there and they became this great nation of people living in a foreign land. But after Joseph died, a new pharaoh came to power.

He did not know Joseph and had no ties to the Hebrew people. He noticed how many of them there were and his irrational fear reasoned that they could turn on the Egyptians in the event of a war and upend the country. So the order was given to work the Israelites mercilessly. They continued to grow as a people, however, so another

order was given—this time to the Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah. They were to abort any male children as they were being born. These are women whose names are worthy of highlighting because of their brave act of putting God’s will before their government’s—they did not do what Pharaoh ordered. When they did not comply, Pharaoh commanded that every son that was born was to be thrown into the Nile river to die.

This sounds a little familiar to us, doesn’t it? A king’s irrational fear leads him to make a decree that baby boys be killed. As we prepare to celebrate Jesus’ birth, we also might think of Herod sending soldiers into Bethlehem to kill all the baby and toddler boys in an effort to kill this so-called King of the Jews who was born there. God protected and delivered Jesus and his parents by telling Joseph to flee…to Egypt of all places!

God intervened in order to bring salvation to sinners.

In the same way, God protected and delivered Moses and the Hebrew people from Pharaoh. When you hear that, your mind might automatically go to the Passover and the parting of the Red Sea. But God’s protection and deliverance began long before that! God used Moses’ parents, (possibly named Amram and Jochebed according to Exodus 6:20), to protect and deliver their infant son. His mom is the one credited with taking action. After hiding him for 3 months, she placed him in a papyrus basket and placed him among the reeds near the bank of the Nile River.

Though it does not say, I think she may have known that the princess, Pharaoh’s daughter, bathed in that spot. She may have been counting on Pharaoh’s daughter to have compassion on her baby boy. She was willing to give her newborn boy up for adoption in order to save his life—at least that’s what she was hoping for. You heard what happened: Pharaoh’s daughter did adopt him. Perhaps at some personal risk, at least at first, she made sure he was cared for as an infant—even by his own mother, thanks to the Moses’ sister Miriam’s boldness for the sake of her baby brother! She named him, raised him in the palace, and provided Moses with the best education, which would prepare him for the work God would call him to.

God Used Moses to Point to Christ Since Moses is the author of the Bible’s first five books, God revealed to him the circumstances surrounding his own birth and the several courageous women he used to protect and deliver him so that he could be a messenger for God and a leader of God’s people. We know how Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt through the Red Sea, during the wandering in the wilderness, and to the Promised Land. In all of that, God used Moses to keep the nation of Israel separate and distinct from other nations in order to preserve the family line of the Savior and to preserve the promise of a Savior so that people would know him when he eventually arrived in this world.

But there is something equally as important that God used Moses for. He used him to point to Christ. In John chapter 5, we read about some Jews who were persecuting Jesus. Part of what he said to them was this: “Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. The one who accuses you is Moses, on whom you have set your

hope. For if you believed Moses, you would believe me, because he wrote about me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe what I say (v.45-47)?”

Now, Moses might not be the first Old Testament person you think of as pointing to Jesus. Isaiah might take that spot, especially for the specifics he provides about Jesus, particularly his sufferings and death, but also the virgin birth. But Moses did write about Jesus! Think of the things Moses recorded in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

He penned the first gospel promise, which I mentioned earlier—that the seed of the woman would crush Satan’s head! That’s Jesus and that’s why he came into the world! (Genesis 3:15) Moses declared that God would raise up a prophet like him, but one that would have a relationship with God unlike any other prophet. He was pointing to Christ!

(Deuteronomy 18:15-19) Or think of the Passover lamb sacrificed as God led Israel out of slavery in Egypt.

Think of the blood of the lamb painted on the doorposts which caused the destroying angel to pass over those homes, sparing their lives. Didn’t John the Baptist point to Jesus and declare that he was the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world?

Jesus is the one who was born in Bethlehem for the purpose of shedding his blood for sinners so that their lives would be spared before the holy God! (Exodus 12) It was through Moses that God gave his law—the law Jesus would keep perfectly in our place. The Jewish religious leaders could find no fault with Jesus, no laws of God broken. Pontius Pilate kept pressing those who wanted Jesus put to death to tell him what Jesus had done wrong because he couldn’t find any fault with him either! He had kept God’s law perfectly. (Exodus 20) We have multiple promises and assurances in the Bible about God protecting and delivering his people, including you and me. But how reassuring it is for us as we get to read the interesting details of how God did that with Moses and the people he used to do that. It was love for Moses as a person that God did that. It was love for all people that he did that too, because he used Moses to point people to Christ.

In this time leading up to Christmas, be assured that God protects and delivers you too. Moses had an interesting welcome into this world, under terrible circumstances, and yet the Lord cared for him. Our lives are filled with difficulties too, and this year certainly has presented new challenges for us. In the midst of all of this, remember Moses and know that the Lord cares for you like he cared for him.

And finally, our most important deliverance is being saved from sin and eternal death

by Jesus, who came, just as Moses said he would. And our most important protection is the gift of the Holy Spirit who lives in us and keeps us in the faith until Jesus comes again, as he has promised to do. And when he does, we will finally be delivered from this world of sin and protected eternally in our heavenly home. Amen.

Now a man from the house of Levi went and took a Levite woman as a wife. 2 The woman became pregnant and bore a son. When she saw that he was a special child, she hid him for three months. 3 When she was no longer able to hide him, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. She put the child into it and placed it in the reeds along the bank of the Nile. 4 His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him.

5 Pharaoh’s daughter came down to bathe in the Nile, and her attendants were walking along the bank of the Nile. Pharaoh’s daughter saw the basket among the reeds and sent her servant girl to get it. 6 She opened it and saw the child. It was a boy, and he was crying. She felt sorry for him and said, “This is one of the Hebrew boys.”

7 Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Should I go and call a wet nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?”

8 Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Yes, go.”

So the young woman went and called the child’s mother to come. 9 Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child and nurse him for me, and I will pay you for doing it.”

So the woman took the child and nursed him. 10 When the child grew up, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. She named him Moses, with the explanation, “Because I drew him up out of the water.”