Alec Motyer, The Message of Exodus: The Days of Our Pilgrimage
This is a very good book on Exodus.
From the introduction.
Abraham and his ever-expanding family were uniquely favoured people. He had known the call of God (Gen. 12:1), the divine promise of innumerable descendants and of a land to live in (Gen. 17:5, 8). His family, too, enjoyed this favoured spiritual status with its good earthly prospects (Gen. 17:7–8).
At the opening of the book of Exodus, Abraham himself was, of course, long dead (Gen. 25:8), and his family, now organized under the names of the twelve sons of Abraham’s grandson Jacob, was resident in Egypt. Over the years it had expanded considerably and enjoyed the good life under the patronage of Joseph, Pharaoh’s deputy (Gen. 41:39–46). With the death of Joseph and a change of government, however, the good times were over (1:6, 8). The Egyptian authorities had become pathologically nervous about this increase in the immigrant population and determined, first, on a policy of persecution and then ethnic cleansing and genocide (1:9–11, 22).
What had become, then, we might ask ourselves, of Israel’s uniqueness, their favoured position before God, the promises made to Abraham and the prospect of their own land?
1. Abram and the forecast of history (Gen. 15:13)
When the Lord promised the land of Canaan to Abram and his descendants (Gen. 15:7), every part of it was already occupied by other peoples. It would not have been consistent with the righteousness of God if he had simply taken this land from its rightful inhabitants and given it to someone else. We read, therefore, that the Lord proposed to give the Canaanite nations a four-hundred-year probation period, and only if they failed that probation would their land pass out of their possession (Gen. 15:16). In the fullness of time the ousting of the Canaanites was accomplished by Joshua and his troops, and although we recoil, as surely we must, from the horrendous judgment then inflicted on the Canaanites (e.g. Josh. 6:21), we must, nevertheless, be sure to see it in the light of its Genesis background and say that the Judge of all the earth has done right (Gen. 18:25). A genuine, even generous, probation had been allowed, but four hundred years saw only a steady decline into atrocious corruption, until the knife of the divine surgeon was the only recourse. Thus far the providence of God can be seen to be working along the lines of his perfect justice.
Genesis 15:13 also forecasts the future of Israel with, surely to our astonishment, four hundred years of exile, including oppression and servitude. Neither in Genesis nor elsewhere in the Bible is this prolonged adversity explained. There is never any suggestion that this banishment to Egypt was because of sin—indeed, sin does not feature as a factor in Israel’s consciousness until the episode of the golden calf in chapter 32. At a later date the holy anger of the Lord deprived his people of the Promised Land and banished them to Babylon (e.g. 2 Kgs 21:10–15), but nothing like this is said about their sojourn in Egypt.
Was it, then, a case of ‘just the way the cookie crumbles’? Earthly life is, after all, a chancy affair, and although it would indeed have been ‘nice’ if Israel could have awaited its inheritance in security and prosperity, that was not the way it worked out. Without a Bible to teach us, what other view could we take but this? With the Bible, however, the idea that ‘history’ is simply the lucky or unlucky spin of the wheel is ruled out. It is always first and foremost ‘his story’, and what happened in Israel’s case was all deliberate and part of a greater plan. Once before, the Lord had stepped in to rescue Abram from Egypt, where he had gone without permission (Gen. 12:10–20), and on another occasion he had expressly forbidden Isaac to take the Egyptian road (Gen. 26:1–2), but Abraham’s grandson Jacob had been specifically directed to take his whole entourage and move southwards to Egypt, even though what ultimately lay ahead was slavery (Gen. 46:1–4).
2. A real mystery
The Bible will not allow us to say that Jacob ‘got his guidance wrong’, though that might well seem a logical deduction from the way events panned out. The opposite is in fact true, for Jacob went to Egypt by the will and word of God, with loving assurances that he would see his long-lost son Joseph and with promises of coming greatness and future restoration ringing in his ears (Gen. 46:1–4). Furthermore, he went into a situation where the grace of God had anticipated his needs by sending Joseph ahead (Gen. 50:20; Ps. 105:17–23). He had, however, also embarked on a journey that led eventually to slavery, suffering and the attempted extinction of his descendants (Exod. 1:8–14, 22), and during those long, long years of distress heaven above them remained silent. Even when the promise of rescue was finally fulfilled (Exod. 12:40–42), no explanation was ever offered of the years of pain and loss.
This is the mystery of the divine government of history, whether on a national, domestic or individual level: the great and loving God is in control, and because he is truly sovereign he works out his purposes in his way, not ours (Isa. 55:8). He offers no explanations, but grants his people a sufficient insight into his ways, his character, his intentions and his changeless faithfulness so that, however dark the day, they can live by faith and be sustained by hope.
3. The covenant God
The particular revelation of the divine character that spans from Genesis into Exodus is expressed by the idea of the covenant. In its typical biblical use, covenant means ‘promise’ and in particular a promise that does not need to be made but which arises from the free decision and will of the promise-maker and which is bestowed without merit, deserving or bargaining on the part of the recipient.
It was in this way that the Lord made his covenant with Abram (Gen. 17): the promise was personal (v. 5), domestic (v. 6), spiritual (v. 7) and territorial (v. 8). It was ‘sealed’ to Abraham by the sign of circumcision (vv. 10–11) so that ever after he was literally a ‘marked man’, the man to whom the Lord had made his covenanted promises and who carried the sign and proof of it in his own body.
Genesis 17:1–2 needs to be guarded from misunderstanding as it might be taken to mean, ‘If you walk before me and be blameless, then I will make my covenant with you’. This would make the covenant appear as a divine response to Abram’s commitment, even a reward for the perfection of his ‘walk’. This cannot be so because the covenant between God and Abraham had already been formally inaugurated many years before (Gen. 15:18). Also, the wording in Genesis 17:2 does not express the idea of inauguration but rather confirmation. A literal translation would be, ‘and I will place my covenant’, an expression which signifies the covenant coming into active operation as the stated relationship between its maker and its recipient. Abraham’s life of fellowship with the Lord was not the pre-condition of the covenant but rather the response by which he entered into the promised blessings. From beginning to end, God’s covenant relationship with his people is based on his grace and not their merits.
4. The mainspring of Exodus
The covenant is the mainspring from which the action of Exodus flows. In 1:8–22 we enter in various ways into the miseries of Israel in Egypt, but at 2:23 we reach the point where their groaning became praying: (lit.) ‘they groaned because of their slavery and screamed aloud, and their cry for help rose up to God, and God heard and God remembered his covenant with Abraham’.
The whole story of Exodus is a covenant narrative. The God who pledged himself to Abraham and his descendants remained the faithful God. He had made promises and intended to honour them, and when his moment came, honour them he did. He claimed Israel as his own (4:22), brought them out of Egyptian bondage (12:41–42), succoured and cared for them as a loving covenant God would all through the long wilderness years (Deut. 8:2–4) and finally gave them the land which, centuries before, he had pledged to their fathers (Gen. 15:7; 26:3; 28:13; Josh. 21:43–45).
Did the suffering people sustain themselves by remembering these promises through the darkness of slavery? We do not know. That part of their story is not recorded. What we do see, however, from the first chapter of Exodus and the nervousness of the Egyptians, is that the Hebrews had managed somehow to retain their separate identity. We also learn that when Moses came to them in the name of the God of their fathers and of the Lord (3:13–14; 4:31), he was welcomed by them as one speaking of a God they knew.
Alec Motyer, The Message of Exodus: The Days of Our Pilgrimage, ed. Alec Motyer and Derek Tidball, The Bible Speaks Today (Nottingham, England: Inter-Varsity Press, 2005), 17–20.
