Exodus Overview– Four themes drive the book of Exodus: (1) Liberation (chps 1-15), Law (19-23:19, 34:11-36), Covenant (32-34), and Presence (25:1-40:38). This lesson falls in the liberation section and the concern is with transformation of a social situation from oppression to freedom. [1]  Social politics and God-economics are forces to be reckoned with as we listen to the text. This mighty transformation is known that assumes revolutionary proportions are initiated by a God now known by a new name revealed to a new leader, Moses.

• New King with a Short Memory – The text abruptly and deliberately moves us from the celebration of Jewish fecundity to the potential of suffering and death. The short-term memory of the new king simply means that he is not going to commit to any policies of his predecessors. Forgetting Joseph means all state commitments are abandoned—along with all privileges. [2]
• Death Birth Death Birth – State policy decreed that all male babies be thrown into the Nile. Oppressively speaking, Pharaoh seems to be throwing out the baby with the bath water—the very help he’s relied on through slave labor he’s going to throw into the Nile. But this decree to stop the natural processes of life (1:22), contrasts with a birth (2:1). This birth—a new act of creation which is "good" (triggering memories of Genesis 1)—emerges from the chaos that the new king has decreed. [3]

 

Can you recall . . . anything unusual about your birth—time, place, weight, circumstances surrounding your birth?

Where is God in the story? No mention of God, but clearly the unseen presence just below the level of the rhetoric. Where is the unseen, yet fully present God in your life? In the life of your community of faith? What evidence might corroborate such a presence?

 

See God’s Ungallant Heroes in Abingdon’s Preaching Annual 2002. [4]

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[1] New Interpreter’s Bible I (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), page 678.
[2] Ibid., page 694.
[3] Ibid., page 695.
[4] The Abingdon Preaching Annual 2002, Charles Bugg, ed. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001), pp. 295-297.