The House of Bondage

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Dr. S. Lewis Johnson introduces his series on Israel’s passage “From Egypt to Canaan.” Dr. Johnson comments on the genocide, bondage and suffering that was inflicted upon the Israelites.

Transcript

Tonight, we are turning to the first chapter of the second book of the Old Testament, the Book of Exodus, and beginning a series of studies from Egypt to Canaan, and one can recognize of course by the title “From Egypt to Canaan,” where we are talking about Israel’s journey out of Egypt from the house of bondage and then, Israel’s wilderness wanderings, and finally their entrance into the promised land of Canaan.  The message for tonight is focused entirely on Exodus, chapter 1 and the subject is, “The House of Bondage.”

Israel, as we learn from our studies in the Book of Genesis, came down to Egypt as a family.  It was not really a nation.  There was Jacob and his sons and the sons’ wives and their children, approximately 75 in all, and so when Israel, with his family came into Egypt, Israel was really a family, but they left Egypt approximately 400 years later a nation or a people.  Exodus is the story of Israel’s redemption from Egypt’s bondage and the story is a pageant of the believers’ spiritual pilgrimage from bondage to liberty in Christ, because as you well know from reading the Bible, the experiences of the nation, Israel, are illustrative of the experiences that we have believers.

For example, in 1 Corinthians, chapter 10, the Apostle Paul states in verse 6, in the context of the children of Israel and Exodus, “Now these things were our examples to the intent that we should not lust after evil things, as they also lusted.”  Another word example is the word that we often translate by “types,” but now we should not be misled by that.  There is no such thing as a “technical type.”  The word simply means an example, and so he is saying that the things that happened to Israel were examples for us.  In the 11th verse in 1 Corinthians, Chapter 10, the apostle says, “Now all these things happened unto them for examples,” and he goes onto say that, “and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come.”  So, the things that were written in the Old Testament and specifically, Israel’s experiences are written for us.  Obviously, we should pay a great deal of attention to the scriptures and specially the scriptures concerning the experiences of the nation,Israel.  In the 15th chapter, in the 4th verse of the Epistle to the Romans, Paul writes, “For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.”  So, the journey ofIsrael out of Egypt and on into the wilderness and ultimately into the Promised Land is full of marvelous typological examples for us all.

When the Lord Jesus on the Emmaus road, opened the eyes of the disciples there, so that they understood the things of the Scriptures, and Luke tells us that He began with Moses and the prophets and unfolded unto them the things concerning Himself; it could hardly have been done without some exposition of these events in the Book of Exodus.  And, when we think that in the Book of Exodus, we have the Passover account, we know that that was part of our Lord’s special ministry.  So, when we read the Book of Exodus, and in fact, when we read the Pentateuch, we read it as if it is a kind of picture puzzle.  Now, not a puzzle in the sense that it is a problem to us, but it is a picture puzzle in the sense that when we look at it we often do not see ourselves and do not see Christ, until we pondered it and until we, through the Holy Spirit, been enlightened to see how the experiences of Israel reflect the experiences that we have.  In fact, it is one of the tests of our spirituality to read a book like the Book of Exodus, asking ourselves constantly, now, in what way does this book speak of Christ and in what way does it speak of me and of the church as well as of Israel?

There is a story about some individuals who went into the Tribuna of the Uffizi Gallery in Italy and the individual looking at these magnificent paintings said to the person who is in charge of them, “Are these supposed to be magnificent paintings, are these the things I came to look at?  I don’t see anything unusual in them,” and he was told by the man that these pictures are not pictures that we are called upon to test and examine.  These pictures are pictures that evaluate us.  And, so in the Book of Exodus, if we don’t not see things in the Book of Exodus, it is often not because they are not there, it is because we are blind, spiritually, and we should bear that in mind because Jesus and the New Testament authors refer often to these sections of the Old Testament and they say that Christ was in them.

Now, if we were thinking about the Book of Exodus and we were thinking about its outstanding features, what are the things that you might single out?  Well, I think the first thing you would want to know is what is the meaning of the Book, its title?  What’s the meaning of Exodus?  Now, if you open up the Hebrew text and you read the first words of the Hebrew text, and I have the Hebrew text here before me, in the first verse of the first chapter of the Book of Exodus in Hebrew, we read simply, “And these are the names of the sons of Israel.”  And on the title of the Masoretic text addition which I have, we have “Exodus.”  Now that’s a name that is derived from the Greek translation of the Old Testament.  It is not really in the Hebrew at all.  The Hebrew name is, “And these are the names.”  That is the way it was distinguished, “And these are the names.”  So, you can see it really does not have a name at all.  It is the continuation of the Book of Genesis, and in fact, it begins with an “And.”  “And these are the names.”

So, Exodus is a term that is derived from the second book of the Old Testament in the Greek translation, that which we call the Septuagint, because traditionally, it was supposed to have been made, it was not by 70 men.  So, the term, “Exodus,” then is not really a part of the Hebrew text at all, but it is a very good designation of the Book of Exodus, because, ex hodos means, “a way out.”  Hodos in Greek means, “a way,” ekmeans “out.”  Exodus, a way out.  And so what it is? It is a description of how Israelbecame a nation and how they ultimately were prepared to come out of Egypt and into the wilderness.  You probably have noticed that the Book of Genesis ends with the Words, “So Joseph died, being a hundred and ten years old:  and they embalmedhim, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt.”  So, the Book of Genesis concludes with “in a coffin in Egypt.”

I don’t not know whether you have noticed this or not, perhaps you have, that the Book of Exodus and chapter 40, the last chapter of the Book’ concludes with this expression:  “For the cloud of the Lord was upon the tabernacle by day, and fire wason it by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel, throughout all their journeys.”  And so, Genesis ends in a coffin in Egypt.  That is the nation’s condition.  One thinks of a coffin in Egypt as a people that are dead and spiritually dead is suggested by that, but Exodus concludes with the tabernacle constructed and the pillar of cloud and pillar of fire resting over the Tabernacle or the divine presence in the Tabernacle.

 

So, we move then from a coffin in Egypt to the divine presence over the tabernacle.  And that is designed to illustrate for us that it’s through redemption that we come from death to life and to the experience of communion with the Lord God.

One of the older commentators has said that only by Exodus can there be an eis – odus.  Now, eis in Greek means “into.”  Exodus, a way out; eis-odos a way in.  And, he simply says that it is only by a way out that there can be a way in.  Well, that is in harmony with what Moses says, because in the 6th chapter of this Book of Exodus, we read in verses 7 and 8, and the Lord is talking, and He says, “I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God: and ye shall know that I am the Lord your God, which bringeth you out, from under, the burdens of the Egyptians.  And I will bring you in unto the land, concerning the which I did swear, to give it to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob; and I will give it you for a heritage: I am the Lord.”  So, as Deuteronomy puts it very briefly and much to the point in chapter 6, verse 23 of that Book, He brought us out that he might bring us in.

Now, that is our spiritual experience.  He brings us out of sin and death and condemnation by the blood of the cross, by the redemption that Christ has accomplished in order that He might bring us in to the blessings that are ours by virtue of union with the Lord Jesus Christ.  So, the name of Exodus is very suggestive, a way out; a way out from the burdens and the bondage, and then of course, a way in, in the remainder of the Book.  The story of it then is the story of servitude, Israel in bondage, salvation through the Passover service and through the Power of the Lord God who brought them out from under the dominion of pharaoh and brought them into the land under Moses, the representative of the Lord, and then the chapters of the Book conclude with a great deal on the service of the Lord in the tabernacle and the priesthood and the offerings.  In fact, you can sum up Exodus in the three words:  servitude, salvation, and service.

Exodus’ Passover redemption looks onto the New Testament, because the Apostle Paul, in I Corinthians Chapter 5 and verse 7, in discussing some of the spiritual life of the Corinthians, calls the Lord Jesus Christ, our Passover.  That is I Corinthians 5:7, where he says:  “Purge out therefore the old leaven that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened.  For even Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.”  So, as Israel in the Old Testament saw the power of God and the deliverance of the people and the nation from the power of pharaoh, so the Christian Church has the experience of the deliverance from spiritual bondage through our Passover sacrifice, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Everything in Exodus then is typical and illustrative of what Christ will do.  We know, of course, the reality.  And, I guess you have noticed still in the Old Testament that when God wanted to let the nation Israel know what he could do for them, He always reminded them of what he did in the Exodus.  He always said, “Remember how I brought you out of the Land of Egypt.  Remember how I gave you deliverance then.”  So, when they were in difficulty and trials and when they had doubts about what God could do, He pointed them back to the Exodus.

Now, of course, in our present day, we do not have ourselves by the Holy Spirit pointed back to the Exodus, we have the reality now, and so we are constantly pointed back by the apostles to the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.  That is what He is able to do it for us.  So, just as the Exodus was the measure of the power of God available for the children of Israel, so the Lord Jesus Christ and his resurrection is the measure of the power available to us in the church of Jesus Christ.

One of the commentators that I have been reading on the Book of Exodus has said this, “It’s hard to find a single major topic of the Old or even the New Testament that is not exemplified in the Book of Exodus.”  Sometime, you may try to find one that’s not in the Book of Exodus, somewhere.  We know that many of them, many of the great truths of the Bible are found right here, and they are found here in illustrative form.

Well, with that as a kind of an introduction, let’s notice verses 1 through 6, first of all, and this is really the background of the story that is unfolded by Moses in Exodus,

 

“Now these are the names of the children of Israel which came into Egypt; every man and his household came with Jacob.  Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah, Issachar, Zebulon, and Benjamin, Dan, and Naphtali, Gad, and Asher, and all the souls that came out of the loins of Jacob were seventy souls: for Joseph was in Egypt already.  And Joseph died, and all his brethren, and all that generation.”

 

Now, I commented at the beginning that this little word in my text translated “now” is the simple “and” in the Hebrew text.  And it is designed, I think, by Moses to connect Exodus with the Book of Genesis.  So, Moses instinctively senses the unity that exists between the Book of Genesis and the Book of Exodus, and he just continues the story.  It is a good point of course to stop and we do not complain at all that whoever divided up the Books of Moses into the five books made a good division, because it is a natural stopping place at the end of verse 26 of chapter 50 of Genesis and a beginning place in Exodus chapter 1.

Now, all that is said in these verses is that the children of Jacob are all down in Egypt, Joseph, already being there, and then he adds the comment that Joseph died and all his brethren and all that generation.  We know from reading the Book of Genesis that the Lord told Abraham that the children of Israel were going down into a foreign land and they were going to be there for about 400 years, and so now, the term of the 400 years is drawing to its conclusion, and so in verse 7 through verse 14, the story of the bondage of Israel and their deliverance will begin.  The real story of Exodus begins with verse 7.

 

“And the children of Israel were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and waxed exceeding mighty; and the land was filled with them.”

 

That is the occasion of the bondage.  In fact, the very blessing of the Lord God in the land is the occasion of the deepening of their bondage, the fact that they were enlarged and fruitful and increasing and becoming stronger and stronger, and the land was being filled with them is the reason why the new king over Egypt who didn’t know Joseph is very much concerned.  It is interesting to me that the very word that is used to describe the growth of Israel in the land of Egypt is the word that is used by God in Genesis chapter 1, verse 21, when He says that man, Adam and his seed should be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and then, remember in the 12th chapter when Abraham was given the Abrahamic Covenant, it was said to him that his seed would be as the sand on the seashore and as the stars in heaven.  So, the Lord is in process of fulfilling in precise detail those ancient promises that were made to Abraham.

So, the children of Israel are fruitful, they have increased abundantly and multiplied, and they have waxed exceeding mighty and the land of Egypt is filled with them.  You know, when Israel came out of the land and went into the wilderness, most students believe that they probably were about 2 million Israelites.  They went down a total of 70 and then came out about 2 million.  So, they have been there a pretty good while, and they have been pretty active, too.

But, now Malthus, who studied population, told us that population increase took place something like this; these are the figures that he had set out.  According to him, population tends to double itself if there be no artificial check restraining it every 25 years.  At this rate, 2000 persons would expand into 2,048,000 thousand in 250 years.  One thousand would reach the same amount in 275 years and 500 in 300 years.  So, we have 300 plus years that they were there.  So, it is not surprising that they increased like that.  Because while 70 went down, they probably, as was the custom, had a number of other people who are attached to them, because they were wealthy people.  Abraham and his seed, they had a lot of cattle and they had a lot of people that were involved with them.  So, it is very easy to see how they grew from 70 to several million.

Egypt is a very interesting place, and no doubt, it was designed to be instructive on the Lord’s part that they went to Egypt.  Someone has said, “Egypt is one of the strangest lands on the face of the earth.”  It is, practically speaking, just a tableland of sand, but because the Nile river flows for 500 miles down into the Mediterranean, and because it overflows every year with the water that comes down from the highlands in Central Africa, what happens is, that river overflows and floods and about 7 miles on each side of the Nile is some of the most fertile land in all of the world.  So, you have a land which is largely peopled by people around the Nile River and the rest of it is just sand, red sand.  That is a very strange place, but very blessed because the land is very fertile.

But of course in a land like that, with that much fertility, without having to do anything about it, people tend to take life easy.  We are not surprised that Egypt becomes a type of the world; that is, everything went easy for the Egyptians.  Others have to dig into hard ground, take the rocks out, take away the trees, and then they have to farm the land with a great deal of difficulty.  You can see pictures of Egyptians farming their land and they have a little plough that you can use with one hand.  They did not need any more than that.  The land is marvelously fertile and that is why so many people have gathered down there, through the years.  So, Egypt is a beautiful illustration of the world and material prosperity and all of the things that keep a person from thinking about the Lord God.

And you know when the children of Israel went back into the wilderness, you remember some of the things they said; they began to think about how marvelous it was to be back in the land of Egypt, and so they said, “We remember the fish, well, by the side of the Nile River; the Nile was filled with fish.  We remember the fish which we did eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers and the melons and the leeks and the onions and the garlic.”  There was every kind of inducement therefore to say to the soul, “Eat, drink, and be merry, because you are in Egypt.”  So you can see now that everything is being prepared for the great spiritual lesson that God is going to bring home to them and one of the great spiritual blessings that He is going to bring home to the people of Israel is that when everything is going nice we tend to forget the blessings of the Lord God and that of course is what we see here.

The plan of Pharaoh, when he sees them growing as they are, is to exterminate the nation by infanticide.  So, we read in verse 8 through verse 10 of his plan.  I do not know which Pharaoh this is.  We really do not know.  In fact, even evangelicals debate the century in which the children of Israel came out of the land of Egypt.  Some believe that the children of Israel came out in the 15th Century or 14th Century before our Lord, others in the 12th Century.  So, there is a difference of opinion even among the evangelicals of about 200 years.  All Moses says is, in the 8th verse,

 

“Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph.  And he said unto his people, behold, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we; come on, let us deal wisely with them lest they multiply, and it come to pass, that, when there falleth out any war, they join also unto our enemies, and fight against us, and so get them up out of the land.”  In other words, “They will not be our servants any more and do all of our dirty works for us.”  If this was Ramses II it fits with what we know of him, but how pertinently it illustrates the fact that nations forget the benefits that others render to them.

Just think about the 20th Century.  Do you think Americans are welcome in Francetoday?  Oh, we have saved them in two World Wars and the British too but for a long time, until just recently, so I am told, Americans are very unpopular in France.  Nations tend to forget the things that others have done for them.

People forget individuals too.  The Duke of Wellington, after he won his great victory of Waterloo, 14 years afterwards, he had to put iron bars around his house [indistinct] because of the attitude of the people to him, and then of course, Winston Churchill.  He wasn’t even elected to office afterwards, finally.  The great deliverer of Britain in World War II.  And you can think of many, many other illustrations of that as well.  Nations forget.

And, so here, they have forgotten the fact that it was Joseph, the prime minister, who saved them when the famine came.  It was the wisdom of God through Joseph that had saved the nation, during the 7 years of famine.  So, he did not know anything about Joseph, and he looked around, and he saw the Hebrew people and he thought they are going to be a problem for us because if we get in a war with somebody else, they are liable to turn and fight for them instead of for us.  So, he has devised a little plan and his plan is described in verse 11 through verse 14.

 

“Therefore they did set over them taskmasters, to afflict them with their burdens.  And they built for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and Rameses; (incidentally, these cities have been identified by archaeologists.) “But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew.  And they were grieved because, of the children of Israel.  And the Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with rigor:  And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar, and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field:  all their service, wherein they made them serve, was with rigor.”

 

So, it was labor camps, secret genocide, and finally open genocide; and at the height, a pogrom, and Israel is the object of this.  By the way, in the 12th verse, where we read, “And they were grieved because, of the children of Israel,” that word translated “grieved” is a word that is related to the Greek word for a “thorn.”  And it could be rendered something like they had a horror or they were in dread of the children ofIsrael.  So, they were in dread because of the children of Israel, and so they put the taskmasters over them and made them serve with rigor or with crushing, literally that root means.               What they aimed to do was to reduce the virility of the Hebrew men, and this of course refers to the fact that they were made to draw water for irrigation, they were made to labor naked under to the burning heat of the hot land, and Israel learns a great spiritual lesson, and that is, “You never have any true blessing until you are in right relationship with the Lord God.”  So, they learn the value of suffering.  Suffering turns us from the pursuit of animal enjoyment so that we become pilgrims of the unseen, because this life is a life of suffering, this life is a life of trial, this life is a life of trouble.  Ultimately, we all experience it.

That’s designed to teach us things in our spiritual life.  All of these things are sent by the Lord God, not because He does not love us, but because He does, and because He has certain purposes for us.  And He cannot get our attention except through these things.  C.S.  Lewis says this so beautifully; he says, “God whispers to us in pleasures, He speaks in our conscience, He shouts in our pains.”  And so he shouts when we have difficulty.

Yesterday afternoon, I had someone call, call in the morning, asked for an appointment, and I was a little busy, so I told Emily, may be near the end of the week.  The person said, “But they want to see you today.”  And so, this was in the afternoon about 1 or 2 o’clock I think, and I was back out in my yard, looking at what was left of the garden after a couple of months, and so I said, all right, 5 o’clock, and so the person came to see me, and what had happened was that God had gotten the attention of this individual because of something that had happened in their family, very serious thing.  And often the Lord God has these things, brings them into our lives in order to get our attention, because we do not give him attention often, unless we are in trials, unless we are having difficulties.  It is true.  When everything is going wonderful, I think I hear the Lord speaking every now and then, but I am too busy doing other things.  He whispers; He does not seem to speak loudly at all.  Now, we have got too many sounds going on around about us in which we are more interested.  In our conscience, He is speaking, but we tend to try to push out from us, not pay attention, but when the troubles come, when the pains come, then He gets our attention.  That is the way you treat your children, isn’t it?

Well, He is a father.  He treats us this way.  So, He is going to get Israel’s attention, and He gets their attention, He gets it by virtue of what the Egyptians do to them.  They are in the house of bondage, literally, a house of bondage, that is what it is called later on, the house of bondage, and they have taskmasters who are seeing that they work and that it is hard work and the burdens increase.  Verse 15 through verse 22, we read,

 

“And the king of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives, of which the name of the one was Shiphrah, and the name of the other Puah and he said, When ye do the office of a midwife to the Hebrew women, and see them upon the stools; if it be a son, then ye shall kill him but if it be a daughter, then she shall live.  But the midwives feared God, and did not as the king of Egypt commanded, them, but saved the men children alive.  And the king of Egypt called for the midwives, and said unto them, Why have ye done this thing, and have saved the men children alive?  And the midwives said unto Pharaoh, because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women; for they are lively, and are delivered ere the midwives come in unto them.”

 

And that is a very interesting thing.  You can see how stupid Pharaoh is.  Pharaoh, in most of the typology of the Book of Exodus, is likened to Satan.  Now, we cannot be absolutely certain of some of these things, because we are talking about examples, it is not spelled out for us in every detail.   But Satan is not really smart when it comes to the things that the Lord God is doing.  Oh of course he has great intelligence but when it comes to spiritual things, Satan really does very stupid things, and you can think of Pharaoh now.  He should have replied, “If the Hebrew women deliver before the midwives get there, well, why do they have midwives?”  It is obvious they made up a story and he falls for it.  So, he accepts it, and then we read on, “Therefore God dealt well with the midwives and the people multiplied, and waxed very mighty.  And it came to pass, because the midwives feared God, that he made them houses.”

Now, that expression can be rendered in a couple of ways.  It could be rendered established households for them, that is, give them families, husbands, and children.  The New International Version renders it in a possibly acceptable way, “Gave them families of their own.”  It was the way in which the God rewarded them for their faithfulness to the word of the God.  “And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying, every son that is born ye shall cast into the river, and every daughter ye shall save alive.”  That is most likely, not a reference to the Egyptians, but still a reference to the Hebrews.  In other words, labor camps, secret genocide first directed simply to the midwives, “You kill the little baby boys that are born and save the little baby girls.”  But then when it becomes obvious that that is not working, it’s open genocide and then the word goes out universally, “See that all the Hebrew sons, little baby sons, are slain.”

Now, there is an interesting problem here and that is, how could God bless the midwives when they lied?  You know, when you read the Bible, some of these problems don’t not strike you at first, but this is a problem.  You know, this has been discussed down through the history of the Christian church, and the first person to discuss it in great detail was, as you might expect, one of the great interpreters of the Word of God, Augustine.  In fact, he has a rather lengthy treatment of this and in Augustine’s treatment of it, which is called, De Mendaci” or “concerning lying,” he discusses it and he says it is wrong; furthermore he says it is always wrong to lie.  There is never a time when we should lie.  That speaks very much to situation ethics which has become so popular in certain circles of professing Christianity in the last 25 years.

And still today you will find people who will argue that situation ethics is what we are to practice in the Christian church, and many illustrations have been given of people who are in very desperate circumstances and Christians are asked to do things that are clearly contrary to the word of God and the question is, “Shall they do those things that are clearly contrary to the word of God if other innocent people depend upon their actions?”  And very often you find Christians say, “Yes, they ought to do things that are contrary to the word of God in order to save other individuals whose lives may be affected.”

Well, Augustine discussed those problems, back in the 5th Century.  So many hundreds of years ago, all these questions were discussed and Augustine took the viewpoint that lying is always wrong, and they were wrong to lie.  Then the question will come, “Well then, why did God bless the midwives?”  Well, He did not bless them because they lied; He blessed them because their lying was really an expression, though a faulty expression, of trust in God.  That is very clear.  It says, in that very text, that the midwives feared God.  And so, they did not have the kind of understanding of things that we would like them to have.  What they should have done was to speak the truth, and then God would have delivered the children of Israelin His own way, because He is going to do that, but it so happened their faith was not a perfect faith, but it was an expression of trust in the Lord God.

It is like Rahab.  She did the same thing.  She lied.  She told, when people came to ask about the Hebrews that have been seen in Jericho, she lied about where they were, and God saved Rahab, but He did not bless her because she lied, He blessed her because she had faith and it was the tool of His own activity in saving Israel.  He does use sinful men to accomplish His purposes.  I know that many people find that difficult to understand, but the Bible is plain.  As a matter of fact, he used wicked men to accomplish redemption.  “Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God,” Peter says, “ye have with wicked hands taken nail to a tree and have slain.”  So, even sin can become a tool in the hands of the Holy God.  So, the midwives, well, I admire their faith, I would of course have liked it even more if their faith had even been stronger, because God would have delivered the children of Israel in even, perhaps, some more magnificent way.

Well, let me close, because time is just about up, I want to just mention a few things by way of conclusion.  I know that you sense these truths.  The scene is very illustrative of a number of things.  It is illustrative first of all, of sin and the bondage that sin brings in the world.  Egypt suggests the old life.  Egypt suggests the life of the individual before he knows redemption.  Israel in Egypt is representative of us in bondage to our sin and Pharaoh.  “He who commits sin is the servant of sin,” the Lord Jesus said.  All Christians, sooner or later, confess in their faith in Christ that they were in bondage to sin.  And all of us are afflicted by original sin.  That is one of the great truths of the Bible.  All ours are born in sin and under divine condemnation, in anEgypt, spiritually.

I like that story that D.R Davies tells in one of his books of an experience he had in a badly blitzed town in the west of England after World War II.  Mr. Davies was an Anglican minister who was a socialist and then became a Christian and was delivered from his socialism also and wrote some very, very good books about Christianity before he died, and he had a beautiful way of putting things.  But he came to believe in original sin after he had believed in Marx for a long time.  He said after the war, he was surveying the ruins of a house in this badly blitzed town in the West of England.

And he remarked to the owner, who was a gracious lady of really fine character, that here was original sin in operation.  She turned to him with a look of pain, surprise, and said, “Surely, Mr.  Davies, you don’t believe in that dreadful doctrine?” to which I replied, “Such dreadful happenings as these (I pointed to the ruins) demand some sort of dreadful doctrine and explanation.”  “Here was a woman,” Mr.  Davies says, “one of the best representatives of modern life and way of thinking, staring at death and devastation wrought by deliberate human will who could only see something dreadful in the Christian affirmation of original sin.  Nothing in hard concrete fact could be more terrible than the destruction and mutilation and terror she has witnessed with her own eyes!  Nothing could be more insulting to modern man’s rosewater dreams about human nature than the utterly irrational and horrible bombing of defenseless children.  Nevertheless, you must not utter the liable of original sin.  So profound has become the aversion of modern man to the Christian challenge to human pride with its peacock’s feathers.”  The name of his book is Down Peacock’s Feathers.  Well, this illustrates just that.

Luther, he talks about the fact that he fasted, he was scourged, he made his confessions of his minor sins in prayers and agonizings, and yet he had guilt, and then he said, “If ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery, I should have got there.”  But he did not get there.  Then, Exodus is a picture of God’s love amid the bondage of sin, because God remembers His covenant and He is going to bring Israel out.

I like that statement in the Book of Hosea at this point.  It is Chapter 11 and verse 1; this is what Hosea says: “When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt.”  Now, we usually lay stress upon that last clause “and called my son out of Egypt,” but notice, “when Israel was a child, then I loved him.”  In other words, before they were called out of Egypt, He set his love upon them and called them out, “then I loved him.”  So, this is an expression of the love of God and then of course the picture of Israel’s deliverance from bondage is a picture of the salvation that Jesus Christ provides for us.  He brings us out that He might bring us in.  And the method is the method of trust in God’s operation.  Later on, they will be told, “Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord.”  That is what we do.  We see what Christ has done, we stand still, we see the salvation of the Lord, and we are saved.

There is a story, and I will close with this, about two children who are playing on a hillside, when they notice that the hour was nearing sunset and one said wonderingly, “see how farther sun has gone!  A little while ago, it was right over the tree and now it is low down in the sky.”   “Only it isn’t the sun that moves, it’s the earth,” the other child said, “you know, father told us.”  First one shook his head, “the sun did move,” because he had seen it.  The earth didn’t move, he was standing on it all the time.  The earth didn’t move, the sun moved.  “I know what I see,” he said triumphantly and then his brother said, “And I believe father.”

Well, that’s the illustration of how we as Christians, we believe the word of God.  People tell us all kinds of things, but we believe the word of God.  I received a letter today from a young man who called me some time ago over the phone, I have never looked into his face, we had about an hour’s conversation.  I received about a 8-page letter today in which he blamed, well, indirectly me; he blamed Calvinism, he blamed the Lord God, and a number of other things because he did not have assurance of salvation, though he had been to Bible School — and it was taught improperly there, because he did not understand what Calvinism is or was.  And what it really comes down to is, “I believe, Father.”  It’s the word of God.  It’s what Christ has done and what God says about it, that is the source and resting place and our salvation.  “I believe Father.”  Salvation, assurance of salvation, is found in the word of God.  That is what we trust, what the Scriptures say.  May God help us to treat Scripture as the Father’s word to us.