Exodus Week 1

Main Focus: God sees the plight of his people and is faithful to make a way for their deliverance.

Happy New Year! Our year-long theme for 2025 is Follow Me, taken out of Luke 9:23-24. Follow Me is Jesus’s invitation to all to receive the good life he offers. All are welcomed—doubters, seekers, and followers of all backgrounds and cultures—to die to themselves that they might live to God, to learn from Jesus diligently and to adopt his ways, to find in Jesus’s footsteps the path that leads to the fullness of life. This theme is essentially a year-long focus on daily discipleship: being shaped by the Word in community and on mission.

We’ll kick off the year by turning to the book of Exodus, which tells the story of a holy God who saves his people out of slavery and their response to his deliverance. In this 14-week fly-over, we’ll see that God saves his people for a purpose: his glory. God saved Moses for a purpose, to be the vessel by which he would demonstrate his power over Egypt and their gods and save the Hebrew people. God saved his people for a purpose, to demonstrate the holiness, justice, and righteousness of his covenant community and Kingdom. And together, God’s saving power and the holiness of his people show the entire world his glory.

As a heads up, we won’t be preaching through Exodus verse-by-verse, so we’ll be covering large passages each Sunday. You’ll likely hear a shorter passage read in the Sunday service, with the surrounding context taken into account in the sermon. In community group discussion we’ll be reading slightly longer passages than you’re used to, so feel free to assign multiple readers (or take it upon yourself, and maybe grab a sip of water).

This week we’ll be introducing the whole book of Exodus, which begins with the story’s primary problem: Israel’s enslavement in Egypt. However, before we get there, we’ll take a moment to discuss how to read stories in the Bible by asking the group for any tips on how to make sense of biblical narratives in a way that reveals their relevance for our lives today. This is an important thing to know, considering about 66% of the Bible is narrative. And there’s a lot we can say here, but especially take this time to mention (if no one else in your group gets there first) how the Bible most centrally reveals three things: God, us, and Jesus. Old Testament stories 1. Reveal God’s unchanging character, glory, faithfulness, and goodness; 2. Reveal us by showing the human need and sinfulness that we share with the story’s characters, and 3. Reveal Jesus by pointing forward to him.

Along with this, one thing we need to avoid when reading Old Testament stories is only taking the inspirational route, which is perhaps the more common method for reading biblical narratives. For example, the story of David and Goliath is not primarily meant to inspire you to slay the giants in your own life. Instead, it’s a story about a faithful God who saves his people (1. Reveals God) even when they’re too scared to fight on their own (2. Reveals us) by sending an unlikely hero who triumphed with unlikely means (3. Reveals Jesus).

After chatting about this for a bit, we’ll then use those skills to dig into the beginning of Exodus. First, we’ll back up into Genesis 45-46 (another long passage) to get the details on why Joseph’s family ended up in Egypt. You’ll see in that text some language that will be helpful for how God could use horrific circumstances to accomplish glorious things. Then we’ll finally get to Exodus 1:1-2:10 to discuss how God might be at work in this passage and what this must have been like for God’s people to experience.

And don’t skimp on that question. When we read stories in the Bible, it’s all too easy to skip ahead to the resolution instead of sitting with the tension. This period of slavery in Egypt lasted for at least 80 years (Exodus 7:7). Imagine how long the Israelites cried out in suffering; imagine what it was like for Shiphrah and Puah, the two midwives in chapter 1, to defy Pharaoh’s order and pray he wouldn’t punish them for it. Imagine what they all thought about God’s slowness to deliver them.

All this will prep us for our final question, how this story can help us make sense of our own darkest moments. We all have times when it seems like God is absent, taking far too long to act, neglecting or even abandoning us. Letting this story settle into our hearts won’t make us triumph through all of life’s struggles, nor will it make us into some glittering biblical hero (week 3 spoiler: Moses was a scaredy cat). But what it can do is allow us to see how God just might be as faithful to us now as he was to his people then (1. Reveals God), how our tears in dark moments might join the ancient chorus of mankind’s prayer for deliverance (2. Reveals us), and how God might be at work when we least expect it to deliver us home to himself (3. Reveals Jesus).