10 Quick Ironies in Exodus (1 & 2)

 

  1. What Pharaoh intends as a source of water (the Nile) to kill the Hebrews boys is used by God to save Moses.

 

  1. Jochebed and Amram attempt to save their baby from Pharaoh and in doing so their baby is saved by living in Pharaoh’s house.

 

  1. God uses an ark to deliver His deliverer. The Hebrew word for “ark” is used in only one other place in the OT and that is in the story of Noah (Genesis 6-8).

 

  1. After Moses is found by Pharaoh’s daughter she sends him back to his mother and unwittingly even pays her for nursing her own baby.

 

  1. The presence of Yahweh God is not primary in the first chapter of Exodus. However, we discover that His perceived absence was really no absence at all. By the end of the second chapter we know that God “heard” “remembered” and “saw” His people all along (2:23-25).

 

  1. The Hebrews ask a striking question (2:14) of Moses, “Who made you ruler and judge over us?” The answer of course is that Yahweh God would make him their leader. This question would be in their heart of rebellion throughout his years of leadership.

 

  1. Moses claimed to be “slow of speech and tongue” and yet we know (from the New Testament) that He was trained in the best of education in the royal court. He was “powerful in speech” according to Stephen (Acts 7:22). Moses had access to this because he became the son of Pharaoh’s daughter (2:10).

 

  1. The Midianites (Ishmaelite’s) carried Joseph into slavery in Egypt (Genesis 37:28). Moses marries a Midianite woman in his flight out of Egypt. He would lead the Hebrews out of Egyptian slavery.

 

  1. Moses has access to all that royalty can afford and yet turns away from it and identifies himself with “his brothers” (2:11). Why? The New Testament says because “he regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt . . .” (Hebrews 11:26).

 

  1. Moses was Israel’s protector (2:11, 17), shepherd (2:17-19) and yet an outcast (2:15, 22) and rejected by His own people (2:14). His life foreshadowed the life and ministry of Israel’s ultimate Deliverer, Christ, of whom was rejected by His own people (John 1:11, Acts 7:39, 51-53).

 

© 2015, Phillip L. Dunn