This is one of my favourite subjects and themes in the Word of God. It's a bit sad that when you get older you do a lot of looking back I suppose. I reflect a man of God sent a message through to my grandfather who was picking grapes I think at the time. We lived on a vineyard seven miles south of the GPO, 100 acres there in Adelaide. I went down there after work, I think it was, and he says, oh I said, Bart Manning wants you to preach for him. Now I had never preached in church before and I said okay. I was 17 years of age and I thought I don't know what I'm going to preach and I went to the subject Egypt to Canaan and went far too long in this little old Church of Christ and probably went for about an hour and they were all graciously listened. I say that to say this has been a very choice part of the Word of God for me. Without these truths and many others like them through the Word of God, I wouldn't be standing here today. I'd be one of the many wreckages of Christians living today, just existing. These truths will help you immensely to live a life which is in for the long haul as a Christian. It'll help you to finish well. It'll help you to win souls. It'll help you to live right. It'll help your marriage and do everything which is not happening around the world today amongst Christian people. So this booklet has been put together. It's not inspired. There are some typos coming up in it at the moment, but it's all right. But I'm hoping it'll be something you can take home and say, well, now, what did that guy say? And look through it and maybe get a clue there. It might be that for you the important part is the bibliography at the back on page 51. I just sort of looked around my library and wrote down some books I have that helped me on this whole subject. I know that your pastor's getting you to read the Green Letters or Myles Stanford, they're a blessing, they really are. I'm so pleased to know that most of you've read... I've got to turn my mic on, sorry. I'm in trouble already. Okay, you're technology. Born Crucified is a wonderful book too. The same sort of truths there. So let's go to the Lord in prayer as we commence tonight on an overview. And that's why this schematic, I'm really good at doing stick figures. My son is an artist, but that's about my capacity. But it just gives us an overview. I thought, well, I've prayed about it very much as I'll tell you where we're going, and then we'll try and get there through the other lessons, okay? So let's come to the Lord in prayer. Lord Jesus, we thank you for your word, which amazes us that a people like your people, the Jews, could live out over a period of decades, Lord, almost a picture book of the Christian life. And Lord, we know we're not Jews, we're Gentiles, and we thank you for saving us and bringing us into the body of Christ, but we thank you that so much of your dealings with Israel in the wilderness, from Egypt to Canaan, is such a picture of the Christian life and is such a fertile soil for the Holy Spirit to bring so many types and illustrations in the New Testament. Help us to be careful and not to exceed the warrant of the Spirit in applying these. But help us, Lord, not to miss the truths which are so vividly portrayed before us in the lives of these people. For we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. Now I'm going to read some of this and I'm going to deviate from it. Somehow we've got to put nine lessons into seven periods. That's all right. They're different lengths. So we'll see how we go. I'm going to read a little reading. Sometimes I'll be less verbal if I do that. The account of Israel's journey from Egypt to Canaan is sober history that occurred in real time. Perhaps you're wondering how the descendants of Abraham ended up as slaves in Egypt. You remember Joseph was sold by his brothers as a slave, was eventually exalted over all Egypt in charge of famine relief. Due to the severe famine, Jacob, the 11 brothers, the women and their servants and their cattle migrated to a region in Egypt called Goshen. And by the way, there's a map at the back on page 52, and that should help you to see where we're going to. They lived in relative peace and grew in number until a new Pharaoh, a whole series of them, Ramesses II is a key one in history, arose who knew not Joseph. In order to suppress Israel's growing power, Pharaoh put them under rigorous forced labour and commanded the midwives to kill, first typo, their newborn male children. While building the treasure cities of Python and Ramses, some of their male infants were removed by force and thrown into the Nile. The life of Moses, Moses having been placed in a little floating ark among the flags as a baby there was, was rescued from the Nile by Pharaoh's daughter, who adopted him as her son. Moses spent his first 40 years among royalty. At age 40, Moses made the great choice of his life. He refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing to suffer affliction with the people of God rather than enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season, Hebrews 11, 25. At about the same time, Moses, in an effort to free his people, killed an Egyptian who was beating up on a Jew and then fled to the desert as a fugitive. For 40 years, he underwent God's detox program. He'd been a university graduate from Egypt University. At about 80 years of age, Moses, being called and commissioned by God, returned to Egypt and commanded Pharaoh, in God's name, to release the Jewish people from their hard bondage. For the last 40 years of his life, Moses led, sorry, Moses led the people to their wilderness wanderings to the border of Canaan, but could not lead them into their inheritance. Now having said that, I want to read for you just a few scriptures as we now go into some of the details of this schematic. Turn with me please to Hebrews chapter three. Hebrews chapter three. The history of Israel here is over large portions of scripture, but the New Testament very often summarizes or gives us some high points. So Hebrews three, seven to 19 written to Christians. It says, in referring to an incident we will be spending more time on, on the Day of Temptation, where they refused to go into the land. Wherefore as the Holy Ghost saith today, if you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts as in the provocation. It's written to Christians. In the Day of Temptation in the wilderness, when your fathers tempted me, proved me and saw my works 40 years. Wherefore I was grieved with that generation and said, they do all way err in their heart, they have not known my ways. So I swear in my wrath, it's serious words, they shall not enter into my rest. So that's interesting about the Jews. No, take heed brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God. But exhort one another daily while it is called today, lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. For we are made partakers of Christ if we hold fast the beginning of our confidence steadfast unto the end. Why it is said today, if you will hear his voice, harden not your heart as in the provocation, For some which, when they heard, did provoke, howbeit not all, that came out of Egypt by Moses. But with whom was he grieved forty years? Was it not with them that had sinned, whose carcasses fell in the wilderness? And to whom he swear that they should not enter into his rest, but to them that believed not. So we see they could not enter in because of unbelief. Chapter 4.1, let us therefore fear. lest a promise being left us of entering into his rest, any of you should seem to come short of it. Now that's a very sobering passage of scripture and I need to say right at the start that I believe the Bible teaches the eternal security of the believer. John 10, 27, 28, my sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me and I give unto them eternal life and they shall never perish. Neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. hand. Now at the same time we see here the hymn writers very often have the idea in your books of seeking of going over Jordan as a Christian in going into death and going to heaven. Now if Jordan crossing Jordan is a picture of a Christian passing from this life and passing into heaven then Moses never went to heaven and Miriam never got to heaven and Aaron never got to heaven and a whole lot of others didn't get to heaven. And the problem is it's not a picture of heaven because heaven, according to this, is a place where they went and fought battles and enjoyed the fruit and tended the fruit and lived a very productive life as a nation. So we have to part with most of the hymn writers there and say that crossing the Jordan is not going into heaven. It is something of a spiritual nature. And so it's not unsurprising to find also in, I think, Psalm 95, where again, the writer in David's time, and he was the writer there, under the Holy Spirit, now hundreds and hundreds of years after this, said the same thing. Today, if you will hear his voice, harden not your heart, as in the provocation, to whom he swear in his wrath they will not enter into his rest. So whatever this entering into rest is, it's something that was current also in David's time. And according to the Hebrew writers, current in the church age. What is this entering into rest? These are the things we got to look at there. It's certainly not entering into inactivity. We'll talk about that later. Now, just to parallel this now, I've got to read another scripture, 1 Corinthians 2.12. These are laying down scriptures for the period of our sessions. 1 Corinthians 2 and 12 to 3.3 says this, Paul is writing to the young church at Corinth. And he says here, now you have not received, received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God, that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in words which man's wisdom teaches, but which the Holy Ghost teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man receives not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judges or discerns all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. For who has known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ, three, one. And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ. I fed you with milk and not with meat, for hitherto you are not able to bear it, neither yet now are you able, for you are yet carnal, whereas there is among you envying and strife and divisions, are you not carnal and walk as men? So there's a parallel here. In our diagram we see here, three distinct divisions in the journeyings of the children of Israel from Egypt to Canaan. And I'm going to give you what I'm going to tend to prove from scripture. Egypt is a picture, a type of the world. Now types are, they're like illustrations. I'm just going to give a definition from page five. I'm going to jump here a bit concerning this, that's the wrong one. Types, page six. Paul E. Tan defines a type. A type is an Old Testament institution, event, person, top of six, object or ceremony which has reality and purpose in biblical history, it's not in fairyland, but which also by divine design foreshadows something yet to be revealed. Now, we've got to be careful we don't make these pictures, as they say, walk on all fours or to strain them. They'll be simple, obvious things which the Spirit of God, to be safe, will draw to the attention of the reader. So when the Spirit of God draws attention to something in the Old Testament as a two-pass or a tripe, then you're on safe ground. There are many different types in the Bible. For instance, in Romans 5.14, Adam is a tupos of him that was to come, the type. The Hebrew writer says that failure of the children of Israel to enter Canaan is a type of the carnal Christian who fails to enter into the advanced state of rest and fruitfulness. Paul in 1 Corinthians 5-7 identifies the Passover as a type of the Lord Jesus, Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us. In the same passage, he identifies leaven as a type of sin. In 1 Corinthians 10-2, Paul parallels the Red Sea Crossing with Christian baptism. Our Lord in John 6 identifies the manna as a type of the true bread come down from heaven, a reference to himself. In 1 Corinthians 10.4, Paul identified the rock in the wilderness, smitten rock, with our Lord, that rock was Christ, he says. In John 7.35, the rock which should have been spoken to, but was smitten, our Lord identifies with the streams of the rock as the type of the Holy Spirit flowing out of his innermost belly. From general Old Testament usage, oil is a type of the Holy Spirit. coming upon prophet, priest, and king. Now let's look at a number of things. You see these three phases here. Egypt is a picture of the world. The wilderness is a picture of the carnal believer. Canaan is a picture of the spiritual man that Paul talks about. So let's follow that through now on page three. Moses' life consisted of three periods of 40 years, which is interesting, isn't it? The first 40 years of his life, for the first 40 years, he was the darling of Egypt. And Josephus and other writers would tell you that. He was a very handsome man, a highly intelligent man, and a greatly acclaimed man, possibly even heir to the throne because of his adoption. The second 40 years, he made the great decision of his life, and he fled to Midian and was there for the second 40 years as a shepherd minding sheep for his father-in-law. The second period of Moses' life commenced with the great renunciation of Egypt and his commitment to the living God. The third period of his life is a period of powerful service for God. First year, 40 years in Egypt. Second 40 in Midian as a shepherd. The third 40 years in powerful service for God. The third period of his life commenced with God's revelation to him at the burning bush and his call to service. For the last 40 years of his life, it was mightily used by God in bringing Israel out of Egypt through the Red Sea to the borders of Canaan. J. N. Darby says of this, makes this insightful observations about his life. He said, there's God's way to set people aside after their first start. that self-confidence may die down. This might be something you don't want to hear as a young Christian. Did you get what he was saying here? In relation to Moses, he's now applying to the church. It is God's way to set people aside after their first start, maybe first start in ministry, first start in anything really as a Christian, that self-confidence may die down. Thus Moses was 40 years. On his first start, he had to run away. Paul was three years also after his first testimony. Not that God did not approve the first earnest testimony, we must get to know ourselves and that we have no strength. Thus we must learn and then leaning on the Lord, we can with more maturity and more experientially deal with souls. Did you get hold of that? So don't give up just yet if you're only two years old in the Lord or three or five or 10. You say, well, I tried the ministry and I just failed. Well, that's okay. It doesn't mean to say that you're not called. Churches go through their Gethsemanes too sometimes. We've just had Brother Hester speak to us on Sunday. He's virtually deaf and blind, but handles himself amazingly. He can hear with a cochlear implant. And we were reminded he was 17 years in Lebanon as a young married missionary. And I remember him saying when he first came back, came to Australia, that he felt really much of a failure over there. And he said, I used to go back to my supporting church in America and hear men stand up and say they won 200, 300, 500 people to the Christ in that year. And he said, I wonder what I would say. He did see some souls saved. And then the civil war came and he had to escape for his life. And he described how the bullets went through the car he was being driven in. And he said, Lord, I'm coming home. But he said, when that fire was over, he said, I had a nick on my hand and I was untouched. Got out of there, came to Australia where there are 100,000 Lebanese people waiting for him. Most amazing miracle. He said, some of the young men that I used to dig out of the sand pit in Lebanon try to drag to Sunday school are now being saved and they're in my church. And the most amazing work of God came out of that. You see that principle, you see. Not that the early days, says Darby, aren't important or valuable. Don't stop witnessing while you study holiness, please. Be obedient to the Lord. But in that obedience and in that early service, remember that God is probably working with you more than through you at this stage. to bring you to a place of not only just fruit, but also more fruit and much fruit. And in between those, there's purging and more purging and set aside and things that you thought were so prosperous there and your life's been cut away. So Israel's history also took them through three spiritual phases, like Moses' life went through three physical phases. And in Hebrews 3, we read about it, those that came out of Egypt, in verse 17 through 17, and went into the wilderness, and in this statement of his rest. So from that, we can identify three geographical locations, Egypt, the wilderness, and Canaan. And these three Locations also typify men in three states. And we go to 1 Corinthians 2.14 through to 3.1 there. We have the natural man, 1 Corinthians 2.14, the psychikos man, it's a Greek word, from where we get our words psychiatry and psychology and all the psyche things, mind, will and emotion. But very much absent is the spirit of God. That's how you're born into Egypt. Carnal man is psychikos, which is fleshly. Babe in Christ being regenerated but not really come to terms or doesn't know what to do with indwelling sin with two natures. The new nature of Christ in you and the fallen nature of sin will be there until the day you die and when the Lord gives you a new body, it'll be a great hurrah. No more battle with the flesh, no more battle with Amalek. Spiritual man is the pneumatikos man. 1 Corinthians 2.14. He's the man, or the woman, we say man, ladies, we mean man generically, who's been Spirit-empowered and controlled, has learned to let the Spirit of God live through him or her and produce the fruit of the Spirit and be in a mature state. So, let's follow Egypt now. The people are gonna come out of this Egypt. We're gonna see that through two bodies of water. Looking at our diagram up here before us, we've got three streams. The first two vertical ones, the first one represents the crossing of the Red Sea. You can write Red Sea on there if you want, it doesn't matter. The second vertical blue line on the right-hand side of the page, after the two stick figures carrying the grapes, is the Jordan River. And they're gonna be very significant in our study of what those two crossings mean in the life of God's people. But when they came out of Egypt, we're going to look at that in a later lesson tonight, through the Passover and the parting of the waters, they came out into Egypt, out of Egypt into the wilderness. But in the wilderness, we find the wilderness wandering is marked by two distinct stages, bottom of page four. Firstly, from Egypt to Kadesh Barnea. I've called this the elementary school of faith. And it lasted, from what I can gather from looking up the years and months that they traveled in the book of Deuteronomy, one year and two months from the Exodus to the very borders of Canaan. Get hold of that. One year, two months, God said, you're ready? Now go in and possess the land. Not 40 years. not 30 or 20 years, one year, two months. This is a message to young Christians. You don't have to spend 20, 30 years in the wilderness there. In fact, it's not God's will that you do that. The nation failed at that point their elementary school exam at Kadish. They couldn't even enter. As a result of their unbelief, they trudged the wilderness for another, get it, 38 plus years. They didn't have to be there. They're out there. You've found them all over the place. Some of them have been saved in this church. And they're just as wild and as woolly and as disgruntled. And as Brother Sidney was saying today, in his quiet time, he's come to this section. And every time you open the Bible most, the children of Israel in the wilderness are murmuring and complaining. And they're complaining about the church where they got saved, and they're complaining about the church where they met their last partner, and all the most wonderful things happened to them, and they were complaining that's where God called them to the mission field. It's not God's fault he didn't go. What are you gonna do with a young man? He says, God's called me to the Pacific to be a missionary and follow in the footsteps of John Patton, and give a testimony from the pulpit, this pulpit. We rejoice with him. We get behind him, help him whatever way we could. He goes and talks to his little wife and says, so we're going to the Pacific. She said, oh no, we're not. She said, we're not? No, we're not going to the Pacific. Oh. griping and complaining and bitterness and year after year of defeatedness and sourness and looking back on your spiritual, one of the high points of your life. God's called the ministry and now it is bitter. What should he do? I said, well, at least do a field trip. Let's put your feet in Jordan a little bit and see if God will open the ways. It wouldn't be the first time a wife said, oh, I'm frightened about going over there. There's cannibals over there. OK, I understand that. But why give up? Say, well, that's it. God said go, and she said no, and that's it. And years of consequences. That's just one very concrete example, but it nevertheless illustrates here, and I don't want to say any names because I really love him as a brother. These wilderness believers did not lose their salvation, by the way, but they persisted in babyhood. They typify the New Testament carnal Christian, Hebrews 5.12. The writer of the Hebrew says, when the times come when you should be on meat, you should be off milk. And he said, we've had to come back and give you more milk. You're a babe, you shouldn't be. You see, carnality, there's nothing wrong with being a baby. And someone asked me the other day, do you think every newborn Christian is carnal? I said, well, they certainly are self-possessed in a most lovely way. And like children are. I mean, I love that song. For me, he died. For me, he cried. It was for me, for me, for me. It's true, it's wonderful. And rejoice in it, brothers and sister. And I hope you never get tired of that. But the Lord says, well, hang on, there's a little more to it than this. And you're not paying it off on time or anything like that, but there's a whole lot of things I want to teach you now, and there's a lot of other people out there that need you to go, as for them, he died too, you see. So little babies, it's a lot about me, isn't it? And it's lovely that the Lord has saved you and forgiven your sins, and you've got a home in heaven, and really the Lord can't do much with anybody or really anything until you get to that point of trusting Christ as your saviour. that the carnal problem we have in the Bible is more than just a Christian in their early infancy learning to walk and to fall and to get things right and to start into the Christian life there. That is perfectly normal. And sometimes Christians, baby Christians fall back into terrible sins. And they have to be dragged out of the pub and put back on the track again. And then they're going fine. Those things do happen. And, but what we're talking about here is a state of protracted infancy. That's a tragedy, a state of protracted extended infancy. And that's the first, that's the pilgrimage within the marching of these people before they got established in the land there, there's marked by two, the first were Egypt and Kadesh Barnea, one year, two months, another 38 plus years of wilderness wandering. And then the second generation went in, the crossing of the Jordan and onward was what I call the advanced school of faith. And anybody knows that you have to do the elementary ticket before you can do the advanced one. They had done the elementary one. God said, go in. They said, we can't. We'll talk about that later. We won't. Crossing the Jordan, they entered into the land of fight and fruit. This crossing was a reenactment of the Red Sea crossing and therefore reflects on the Passover lamb and what he did. In the New Testament language, the Jordan crossing portrays again the basic propositional truth of our death, burial, and resurrection in Christ. We'll cover this again. This time we not only die to sin with its penalty, but we die to sin as a ruling power. Thus we enter into a deeper trust of faith, described as entering into rest. Rest is not a state of listless inactivity, but a deep trust in the one who works in us mightily. Paul said in Colossians 129, I work according to his mighty workings in me. It's interesting, isn't it? So on page five, Andrew Murray notes these two stages in the Christian's life. He says, I cannot, with too much earnestness, urge every Christian reader to learn well the two stages of the Christian. There are the carnal and there are the spiritual. There are those who remain babes and those who are full grown men. There are those who come up out of Egypt, but then remain in the wilderness of a worldly life, There are those who follow the Lord fully and enter the life of rest and victory. He says again in another passage in his book, there are two stages in the Christian life. The one in which after conversion, get this, a believer seeks to work what God would have him or her do. The second in which after many a painful failure, he ceases from his works and enters the rest of God there to find the power for work in allowing God to work in him. Read it sometime when you get home, read that, it's a very important statement. Two stages, the one, he says, with after conversion, after you say the believer seeks to work what God would have him do. I'm ready to work, God, I'm going to do it. And you want my commitment, all the Lord commands we will do, they said at the Mount Sinai. The second, in which after many a painful failure, young Christian, he ceases from his works, enters the rest of God, there to find the power for work in allowing God to work in him. Now, I want to just cover this last bit here. I think we're going to be running short on time. God always works from position to practice, and that's important. You see that? We're probably going to have to skip down here. The illustration of this, Ian Thomas gives the bottom of 5, Galatians 5, 16. This, I say then, walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lusts of the flesh. And he said, now the devil loves to invert that truth and turn it into a lie. And probably what he's been saying to you is this, try not to fulfill the lusts of the flesh. and then you will walk in the spirit. As though the latter were a reward for the former. He knows that in this way he will keep you preoccupied with yourself instead of being preoccupied with Christ. So Satan will seek to persuade you that walking in the spirit is simply the consequence of your pious endeavor not to fulfill the lust of the flesh, of which he himself is the author, and thus by subtle confusing the means for the end, He will rob you of what he knows to be our only possibility of victory. Now we're going to go to page 8 and look at life in Egypt. If someone would like to put the next picture up it would be good. Could you put that Sphinx up? I'm going to try and squeeze a little more in here because I got on late. There we go, life in Egypt, page eight. It's important you know what you're leaving when you get saved. Many Christians go back into the world and seem very at home in it. We've already seen really how Israel got into Egypt and how that God had prophesied in Genesis 15, 12 to 16, that they would be severely treated by the nation that took them in. So at a time of severe famine, this prophecy began to be fulfilled and in the migration of Jacob, et cetera. So let's move down quickly to page eight. The bottom of Egypt is a type of the world in three ways. Now the first verse we read out of 1 Corinthians 2 was this. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God, that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Egypt is like the world in its threefold attraction. In 1 John 2, 15 and 16, which I'll need to read for you, 1 John 2, 15 and 16. Moses, according to Hebrews 11.24 and the notes there, 8, by faith Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter. There goes the pride of life. He had all the pedigree he wanted. They reckon heads were turned when he rode through town on a chariot. 25, verse 25 of Hebrews, and choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season, that's the lust of the flesh. Esteeming their approach of Christ's greater riches than the treasures of Egypt, that's the lust of the eyes. Egypt is like the world in its threefold attraction and secondly in its spiritual atmosphere. And the word cosmos, according to Kenneth Wurst, means simply an ordered system. Now, when it's talking about the things that God has made, it's beautiful. The world and the stars, when I consider these things, what is man? But that's an ordered system. So whether it's a good ordered system or a bad ordered system will be determined by the context. The cosmos here is a satanic order. organisation. Here is the ordered system of which Satan is the head, his fallen angels and demons are his emissaries, and the unsaved of the human race are his subjects, together with those purposes, pursuits, pleasures, practices and places where God is not wanted. Much in the world system is religious, don't forget that, cultured and refined and intellectual, but it is anti-God and anti-Christ. This world of unsafe humanity is inspired by the spirit of the age, and Trench defines the cosmos as all that floating mass of thoughts, opinions, maxims, speculations, hopes, impulses, aims, aspirations at any time current in the world, which it may be impossible to seize and accurately define, but which constitutes a most real and effective power, being the moral or immoral atmosphere which every moment of our lives we inhale and exhale, inevitably exhale. Now right now we're trying not to inhale viruses, but we're inhaling every time we go down the street some of this stuff of the world. And according to 1 Corinthians 2.12, we have not received the Spirit of the world, but we have received the Spirit of God, who might know the things which are freely given to us of God. So as a believer, you are indwelt by the Holy Spirit. And the question for you now is, which Spirit is winning? I'm not saying you're being possessed, but I'm saying we're dealing with this all around us. The only way you will deal with the Spirit of the world is by yielding to and cooperating with the Spirit of God. He's the only one who can deal with that fog. Duncan Campbell was fighting against the Germans in the First World War. And he ended up a great missionary, great minister of the gospel in Scotland, saw revival in the Hebrides. But he gives this story, one of his sermons, how he said, we were there in trench warfare. And he said, the Germans sent over this gas coming for, they're gonna kill them. And I guess they were praying, I'm sure he was a Christian at that stage, and he said, God, send a little wind and blew that gas right back over the German trenches. And some people laughed. It's a bit of a warped sense of humor, isn't it? But I can understand that. If they're trying to kill you and it stops them, well, you've got to do it, I suppose. Now he said, that gas, he said, how will you handle it? He said, we've got a fixed bonus, we're going to charge it like this, and we're going to shoot the bullets into it. You can't fight a spiritual force, he said. But God can send a wind. The Holy Spirit is the only one who can defeat the spirit of the world. Egypt's also like the world in being the home of the natural man. I don't know what he's talking about that. The soul man is born into the fallen race of Adam, in its satanic strongholds, 2 Corinthians 10.20, and in its danger to the believer. Now wherever there's idolatry, point D, there's a facade there ready for demon activity. Paul says, I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and I would not that you should have fellowship with demons. In its danger to the believer The world is a very dangerous place for the believer. For Joshua, 40 years after, Joshua revealed that their fathers, when Joshua gave his farewell address to the nation, he said, choose you this day whom you will serve, remember that, as for me and my house. Well, at the same time he said, now therefore fear the Lord and serve him in sincerity and truth and put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the flood, that's where Abraham's hometown, that's the flood being the Euphrates, and in Egypt, and serve thee the Lord. The pilgrims going out, the Jewish pilgrims going out of Egypt, with God's help there in the Passover land, some of them had fallen into idol worship. And when you look at your map, you'll find that Memphis and on, which is Heliopolis, in close proximity to Goshen. Albert Barnes cites two centers where the worship of Apis, the bull, was celebrated, namely in those two places. Jameson Fawcett and Brown commentary describes these festivities. This idol seems to have been the god Apis, the chief deity of the Egyptians, the bull, worshipped at Memphis under the form of a live ox, three years old. It was distinguished by a regular triangle spot on its forehead and other peculiar marks. Images of it in the form of a whole ox or a calf's head on the end of a pole were very common. It makes a great figure on the monuments where it is represented in the van of all processions as born aloft on men's shoulders. Now, I put that in there for a reason, because you know about the golden calf, probably. Where did they get that idea from? And finally, Egypt is like the world in its totalitarian government. In the pharaoh, we see concentrated power in one man. who was unaccountable to anyone but himself, it appears. This is Satan's preferred model of human government. See the man of sin coming up in the last days in 2 Thessalonians 2. And Pharaoh himself, according to the International Standard Bible Contributor, was accounted divine. and had the power of life and death over all his subjects. Not a nice place to live as a believer in the true and living God. Application, the New Testament believer is not removed physically from this present world until the rapture of the church. However, in his high priestly prayer, our Lord prayed, I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but thou shouldest keep them from the evil. The New Testament believers called to be separated in spirit, soul, and body from this world in the same absolute way in which the Israelites were called. God calls us to make the same renunciation of the cosmos that Moses did in his day. And listen to our Lord's words in John 15, 19. If you were of the world, the world would love his own. But because you are not of the world and I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you. We come to our break time and you know what to do.