Exodus Week 2

Main Focus: God saves Moses from Egypt in spite of his sin. In the same way, Jesus saves us, in spite of our sin.

We’re still introducing our study through Exodus, and this week Moses will leave Egypt for the start of a decades-long sojourn in the land of Midian. In this passage we’ll see how God uses Moses in spite of his sin, and how this points ahead towards God’s coming mercy on his people both in their liberation from Egypt and their salvation from sin through Jesus.

Also this week we announced the Personal Discipleship Plan that we’ll be working through in the next couple weeks. Email your location’s community groups person, or your local pastor, if you have any questions about it.

This week we’ll just be in Exodus 2:11-22, and there we meet a grown Moses (perhaps in his teens or twenties) who sees an Egyptian taskmaster beating a Hebrew slave and, out of the blue, kills the man. The account is short and to the point, but you can imagine this event is an expression of something that had been building in Moses for some time. His life was a bridge between two worlds set against one another; clearly he identifies with the Hebrew being beaten more than the Egyptian doing the beating, yet later in the story he’ll be mistaken as an Egyptian (2:19). The quickness of the story might make us miss Moses’s human dimension, so we’ll discuss what this must’ve been like, taking a moment to imagine the outrage, fear, worry, relief, and homesickness he likely felt.

The brevity of the account also makes it seem like his sin of murder goes unaddressed by God, but in discussion we’ll observe how Moses still had to deal with the consequences of his sin. He was found out and guilty before the law, dislocated from his homeland, on the run, and then lived the next several decades of his life in a foreign country. The Lord provided for Moses despite his sin, but the Lord didn’t erase all consequences for his sin.

In this we see how God works in his people’s life despite their sin—thinking ahead in the story, it’s not as if the Israelites were sinless when God saved them out of Egypt. As we read the rest of Exodus we’ll see over and over how God never leaves his people even when they forsake him. Through all this, God brought Moses out of Egypt and into the wilderness, just as he would with Israel in the decades to come, to reveal his faithfulness and willingness to show mercy on a people who desperately needed it.

In discussion we’ll ask what this story can tell us about God, and along with his faithfulness we see his kindness and mercy in using a sinful man like Moses to accomplish his purposes. It might be easy to miss this in the passage, but another thing it shows is God’s willingness to involve more than just the Israelites in his plan for redemption. God brings Moses to Midian, and the Midianites were neither Egyptians nor Hebrews, yet God will include them in his purposes through Moses’s new, multi-ethnic family.

Finally, and infinitely relatable, we see God subtly orchestrating the seemingly disordered events of Moses’s life to work according to his plans. How often do we feel stuck in the middle, following the looping course of life given to us, all the while hoping that God is bringing us to a meaningful place? Like we discussed last week, Moses’s story gives us a vision for how God might work in our lives even through our hardest, most confusing moments.