Well, good morning, everybody. Last week we did a overview, or I guess an introduction to the book of Exodus. And so today we're actually gonna dive into the text itself. So we're gonna begin with Exodus 1, and God willing, we will do the entire chapter. I'm thinking back, I've been teaching Sunday schools for about, I think 13 years now. I don't think I've ever made it through a whole chapter before. So if we make it today, it's gonna be a miracle, that's for sure. Randy, can you do me a favor? Can you look at the screen and tell me how far I can go that way without going off? So just maybe raise a hand or something when I walk off. We have some folks that are stuck at home today. They're unable to come to church. We wanted to make sure that we had a Sunday school for them. So I can walk that way now. Right there. OK, cool. Well, we'll just stick with that. All right. So let's pray and then we'll get started with Exodus chapter one. Father. Once again, thank you for this morning, a time to come together to study your word, to study your word as a congregation and as a as a family of your children. Father, I ask that you be with us as we go through the text, help us to discern only truth, and to understand what it is that you'll have us take out of the text here today. Father, be with the folks who couldn't be here today, and of course, be with everybody here as well. Father, we love you, we trust you, help us to glorify you in everything that we do. We pray all these things in Jesus' name, amen. Yes. Gotcha. I can say between the solas. I'm good with that. All right. So we talked last week quite a bit about the idea that Exodus is like a continuation of Genesis. And so if we're going to open up our Bibles to Exodus 1, I actually want to roll back just a couple of verses and start with kind of the last few phrases of Genesis. chapter 50 So Genesis 50 25 says then Joseph made the sons of Israel swear saying God will surely visit you and you shall carry up Carry up my bones from here. So Joseph died being 110 years old. They embalmed him and he was put in a coffin in Egypt Now these are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob and each with his own household, Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Zebelin, and Benjamin, Dan, and Naphtali, Gad, and Asher. All the descendants of Jacob were 70 persons. Joseph was already in Egypt, and Joseph died, and all his brothers, and all that generation. But the people of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly. They multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them. All right, so let's go back to those first five verses. Now, these are the names of Israel. So verses one through five, like we said, solidify the connection to Genesis and point back to God's promises, mostly in chapter 12, verses one through three. Who is God speaking to in Genesis 12, those first few verses? Abraham, okay, and we call that the Abrahamic Covenant, correct? It's laying the foundation of the Abrahamic Covenant. And there were promises associated with the Abrahamic Covenant. Can somebody tell me what some of those promises were? Okay, an offspring? Just an offspring? Okay. Okay, good. Okay, good. So we're looking, and both of those are 100% correct, but it's the first one that we're really looking for that I think is relevant to this one. Anything else? Yes, ma'am. Land, that there would be a special land that they would possess. Okay, anything else? Blessing? Can you be more specific? What's that look like? Nations of the earth will be blessed. Okay, cool. All right, so let's go through them. I need a bigger font. I'm too blind to read what I have down there, so I'm sorry if I keep turning my back on you. There's a great population increase for his descendants, which is what Hannah mentioned. A long and important family lineage. So this is the make your name great, which Tom brought up. A worldwide blessing through his offspring, which I guess would go back to Hannah as well. So two for Hannah and one for Tom. And the unearned possession of a special land of God's choosing, which Sharon brought up. So those are kind of the blessings. And if you look at, as we're moving into Exodus, the first few verses, This is hearkening back to that. It's saying, okay, God is actually bringing, you know, delivering on those promises. All right. So how would a person understand this passage if they weren't familiar with Genesis? Like try to do your best to wipe Genesis out of your mind and then read that and tell me, I mean, what can you possibly get out of that? It's a bunch of names, right? And you know, there's something about 70 people in Egypt and that's really about it. So, and then think of the significance of that last sentence. Joseph was already in Egypt. What's the, we talk about text and subtext, what's a subtext there? Joseph was already in Egypt. What's the big deal about that? How did Joseph end up in Egypt? He was sold. Right? By his brothers. And his brothers meant to do what? Harm. They meant to do evil. And God meant to do good. So we have this idea, this dual idea of human sinfulness doing harm, and then God's faithfulness and God's goodness, God using people's evil in order to accomplish his will. Does it make sense? to bring about what's good for, to prosper Israel. Because there was a famine in the land, and so they went to Egypt, and God took them there, and now he's bringing them back. So verse six continues the story, so now new stuff. So consider the emphasis of the multiplying in verse seven. Even in the English it says, you know, the people were fruitful, Okay, so fruitful, increased greatly, multiplied, grew exceedingly strong so that the land was filled with them. It's telling us basically in five different ways that the population was exploding. The Hebrew, which I don't know Hebrew, would be more literally interpreted. As for the Israelites, they grew, they were fruitful, they swarmed, they increased, they got powerful more and more, and the land was filled with them. So there's a serious emphasis here as to the increase in numbers. So why so emphatic? Where is the command to be fruitful and multiply first found in the Old Testament? And how many times is it given? Where's the first time? Just this one what? You know, honestly, that's what I thought then it's given to who Yeah Good than Adam and Eve, right? That's not the first time God bless the birds and the fish Saying be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas and let the birds multiply in the earth Granted that's not Israel. That's not people but it was it was given to the birds and the fish Then in Genesis 128 it was given to Adam and Eve And God blessed them and God said to them be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and so do it and have dominion over the fish Of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth Where else does it get? Good, Noah, Noah and his sons actually got it twice, okay? And then there's one more and it's Jacob. So it's given in Genesis nine twice, both to Noah, and then it's given to Jacob in Genesis 35. Now here's the thing, the reason I'm mentioning this is I find it really odd that there's a command given like five times to several different people, it's all found in Genesis, but then it's never given again after that. Elsewhere in the Bible, it talks about being fruitful and multiplying, but it's never actually a command, okay? At least not using that terminology. So then Joseph died and all his brothers and all the generation. So what is the New Testament analog to be fruitful and multiply? What's that? In other words, go and make disciples. Very good. So the idea of making disciples is more of a New Testament analog to the Old Testament, be fruitful and multiply. So who ultimately caused the fruitfulness and the multiplication? Ultimately, it would be God, exactly. Who ultimately causes a new disciple to become, I'm sorry, who ultimately causes a new disciple to become a new disciple? Again, it's God, right? So the idea is, actually I'll get to that in just a second, sorry, dumped the gun. And Jacob said to Joseph, this is after God had given Jacob the, He said, and Jacob said to Joseph, God Almighty appeared to me at Luz in the land of Canaan and blessed me and said to me, behold, I will make you fruitful and multiply you. And I will make of you a company of peoples and will give this land to your offspring after you for an everlasting possession. So God is the one that's actually causing the fruitfulness and the multiplication. So God gives us commands, but he is the one who carries them out. Now, what do you call that? There's a word for that. It's not the typical definition of the word, but, huh? Monergism? That's related. Tell me what, you know, it's not what I'm looking for, but I don't think you're too far off. So what's, tell me what monergism is. Okay. Right. Okay, good. So yeah, so monergism and it's so it's, it's, I think it's related to monitor. What I'm looking for is, is grace. Okay. God's giving us commands that we're not capable of carrying out. He gives us command to, to, to believe him, to trust him, to have faith in him. But in our fallen nature and our rebellious nature, we can't actually carry that out. So what he does is he penetrates our hearts and he, he carries that out for us. Okay. And that's called grace. And it's really not all that different in the old Testament. He told, um, He told Jacob, he told Noah and his sons, be fruitful and multiply. But they don't really have the ability to be fruitful and multiply, right? There's too many variables going on. And so God arranged things so that they would be fruitful and multiply. He's actually the one doing the work. And it's the blessings that come out of that are for the nations, as we see in Genesis 12. All right. How is what is happening with Israel and Egypt different than the command in the garden? So the be full and multiply in the garden. How is that qualitatively different than what's actually happening in Egypt? Well, what's that? Well, what was the state of the people, of the two people? They were sinless, they were righteous, right? And the folks, so essentially what we're talking about, I'm looking for there is pre-fall and post-fall, okay? So when God said, be fruitful and multiply, you have these people that are created in the image of God. And then at the fall, that image became corrupted. So we can be fruitful and multiply, But unless somehow that image is fixed, as it is in Christ, then that multiplication of going out and glorifying God by spreading his image throughout the world is never fully established, realized, there's a word, fulfilled, fulfilled. So is the overall tone of this passage generally positive or negative? Negative. They're being fruitful and multiplying, right? So far, I think things are looking very positive because it's demonstrating God's faithfulness, God's hand in growing the nation of Israel in Egypt. Okay. Yes. Yes. Well, and that's exactly, that's exactly why. Yes. So then you have, if, if, if we have a soundtrack for, for this, this chapter, you'd have done at this point, right? Okay. That's kind of where I'm going because it's set up in a very positive way. And then, um, and now you have, Pharaoh and then enter the villain basically is is what we're doing here. Yeah All right any questions so far No, okay a New king so now there arose a new king over Egypt who did not know Joseph and he said to his people Behold the people of Israel are too many and too mighty for us Come let us deal shrewdly with them lest they multiply and if war breaks out they join our enemies and fight against us and and escape from the land. Therefore, they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with heavy burdens. They built for Pharaoh store cities, Pithom and Ramses, but the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad. And the Egyptians were in dread of the people of Israel. So they ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves and made their lives bitter with hard service, in mortar and brick and in all kinds of work in the field. and all their work, they ruthlessly made them work as slaves. So, actually, I thought I did that in both places. Now, you can see here in chapter, I'm sorry, verse 10, down at the bottom, I kind of marked out where it says, escape from the land, okay? And when I was first studying this, I'm like, what in the world does that mean? I mean, if you're in a situation where you're worried about being overrun by a group of people, and that people want to escape from your land, then why not let them? What would be wrong with that? And again, I want to emphasize, I don't know Hebrew, so I'm kind of dependent on commentators and that sort of thing. But this word, the Hebrew word behind escape from, It's talking about like water coming over something. So you have the concept of movement. And so the idea is overcoming. And so it's actually translated elsewhere, I think, in Hosea as take possession of. So I think the idea would be fight against us and take possession of the land. In other words, conquer us. I hope that's faithful to the original text. Again, I don't know, but I can't make sense of escape from the land without that. So, there's this idea of a new king over Egypt that did not know Joseph, okay? Who's ever heard of the Hyksos? H-Y-K-S-O-S, Hyksos, okay? It either means mountain people, or it means something to do with foreign lands, that sort of thing. But the idea is, there was a group of people established in Egyptian history. There was a group of people that are referred to as the Hyksos, and they were Semitic. They were from Asia, kind of the area of Canaan, that sort of thing. And they came in, and for a period of time, they actually ruled over Egypt. And so we had a Hyksos, Hyksosian, I don't know, Hyksos pharaoh sitting on the throne in Egypt. And so this would have been a foreign ruler, okay? So the idea is that, and to be honest, I'm unclear as to whether when Joseph came in, if he became an advisor to a Hyksos ruler, Or if he was an advisor to a Hyksos ruler, and then when an Egyptian was restored to the throne, that is the pharaoh that he didn't know or that know him. Or the opposite. He was actually serving an Egyptian pharaoh, and then the Hyksos ruler came in, and that would be the different pharaoh. It's one or the other. Again, commentators and historians kind of dispute with one another over that. But Acts 17, 7 says, until there arose over Egypt another king who did not know Joseph. Now in Greek, there's a couple of different words for another. One is alos. It means another of the same kind. And heteros, which means another of a different kind. So that lends credence to the idea, well, and typically, alas would be used in this case, but for some reason, Luke used heteros, and that lends credence to the idea that maybe that this is a ruler of a different kind, so a different nationality, okay? So what we're doing here is we're kind of merging biblical history and secular Egyptian history. An interesting aside is in this phrase, therefore they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with heavy burdens. They built pharaoh cities, Pithom and Ramses. Who can tell me about when the exodus occurred? Which century? Following a biblical chronology, going from 1 Kings 6 and going back to following 480 years, as it says in 1 Kings 6, going back to that, we would land on 1446 BC as the date of the Exodus. Now, many biblical scholars agree with that date. Other ones shift it to about the 1200s, so about 200 years later. So you kind of have an early and a late. OK, now put a pin in that. Hold on. Hold on to it for just a second. What's interesting is, according to secular sources, Ramses was not built until about 1250 BC. OK, which would accord with a with that later that later timeline, I'm sorry, the reason I bring this up is this is a point of attack from skeptics where they look at Genesis and they open it up and they say, well, you're saying that Ramses was built in the 1400s when in reality it didn't even exist until the 1200s, okay? And so what I'm doing is looking at this and saying, how do we respond to something like that? Did the air conditioner just kick on? Are y'all cold? No? Hot or cold? Cold? You're fine? I guess we're good. Yeah, just listen to what Mallory says. Yeah, we're good. Sorry, I lost my train of thought there. Possible, possible. I've got three possible reconciliations. We'll make that number four. I like that, very good. All right, so I'm sorry. And so prior to Ramses, that area was known as Avarice. So it'd been Avarice and then Ramses was built on top of Avarice. So how can we reconcile this? So let's assume for a second that we have a 1400s, that early exodus. How can we reconcile that with Ramses being built like 200 years later? The first one, the first thought is, could the name have been changed by an editor? And so the idea would be that there's a person copying the text of Exodus, and let's just say it's 500 years before Christ. And they look back and they're like, you know what? Nobody knows what Avarice is. So let's just put in, I'm going to substitute Ramses. Okay. Now, That may freak some people out that somebody actually changed the text, the Bible. But honestly, that sort of thing happens. It did happen. But there's no material change. There's no doctrinal change. There's just a name change, but it's still pointing to the same place. So we have examples of this in the New Testament. It's happened. So the idea of an editor coming in and just changing a name to a more modern name should not present a problem for inerrancy or anything like that. Does that make sense? An example from American history would be what if I was telling you the story, I'm writing down a story, and I'm talking about say the 1630s, And I mention a city called Trimount. And I talk about everything that happened in Trimount. Would that mean anything to you? No? What if I said Boston? Okay, now all of a sudden I'm getting some nods. Okay, so now you know what I mean. And so I would not write something in the 1630s about Trimount. I would write about Boston. And so it's a similar sort of idea. So that's a possibility. Second possibility is, okay, maybe it really was a 13th century exodus. There are conservative scholars that agree with that. And then possibly, you know what, maybe it's a different Ramses. We're kind of assuming that the city was named, it's the one named after the pharaoh, but you have all kinds of problems when you go between Egyptian and Hebrew and Greek and all of this stuff, and so you get into all kinds of transliterations. And so it's possible that there could be a different word that it's trying to interpret, and we're taking it as the king. So it could be a completely different city altogether. And it's just worth noting that Avarice was the Hyksos capital. So that would have been a couple hundred years before the Exodus. Sorry, I didn't mean to get bogged down that long in that detail, but I'm very sensitive to people looking at the text and saying that there's something that's an anachronism, saying that there's something that's out of place and trying to use that in order to attack the Bible. So anytime that I have the chance to to talk about defending the Bible from a rational perspective, then I'm happy to do that, and I wanna try to do that. Yes, sir? There's a documentary called Patterns of Evidence. So there's a documentary called Patterns of Evidence. Is that on YouTube or DVD? I watched it, sir. OK. Is it mostly about the exodus? OK. OK, cool. OK, good. What's that? OK. OK, Tom liked it too. Good. Patterns of evidence. All right, cool. All right, so now in terms of, let's see, now I'm getting cold. Steve, would you mind? Yeah, well not. Okay, well, you know. Yeah. Yes, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I gotta get my steps in. Okay, so in terms of this oppression, You know, so we talked about in the verse seven verses, it's God is clearly blessing Israel in Egypt, but now all of a sudden you have Pharaoh coming in and now they're being oppressed. So how does that happen? They're apparently carrying out God's plan by multiplying, but they end up in severe oppression. How does that happen? Because that's never happened before, has it? That was a facetious question, by the way. Okay, good. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So the exception proves the rule. Yeah. So, well, good, good. Yeah, those are outstanding answers. So the short answer is the fallen world is opposed to God's will. So things are not the way they're supposed to be. And so people set themselves up. Well, let me rephrase that. We set ourselves up in direct opposition to the Lord. That said, do we think that this was outside of God's plan? No, absolutely not. So again, I wanna go back to the passage where Joseph is talking to his brothers and he says, what you meant for evil, God meant for good. We have this idea of these dual intentions. It's not like God looked at God looked at Joseph's brothers selling him into slavery and he's like, what am I going to do about this? I got to figure something out. No, it was God's plan all along. However, Joseph's brothers were still accountable for what they did. They still volitionally did something evil to their little brother. Now, what is the supreme example of the world opposing God's will. Absolutely. Cross. Christ. Okay? Again, you have a situation where it was God's plan all along, going back to the beginning of time, or before the beginning of time, if there is such a thing, And Christ was going to die on the cross, but it was those individuals within Jerusalem that actually killed him, that actually murdered him. They're the ones that put him there. They put themselves up against God and found themselves actually fulfilling his plan. So it's a fascinating dynamic between God's sovereignty and human responsibility. And I always think of the Philippians passage that says, work out your own salvation in fear and trembling. Why? It's God that works in you. Absolutely. I mean, that seems like a contradiction, but I know Paul was no dummy. He wasn't contradicting himself. What he's doing is demonstrating a mystery. So again, going back, humanity, the world, we oppose God's will. All right, now we're getting to the heroic midwives. So, then the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shipra, and the other was named Pua, When you serve as midwife to the Hebrew women and see them on the birthstool, if it is a son, you shall kill him, but if it is a daughter, she shall live. But the midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live. So the king of Egypt called the midwives and said to them, why have you done this? And let the male children live. The midwives said to Pharaoh, because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them. So God dwelt well with the midwives and the people multiplied and grew very strong. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families. Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, every son that is born to the Hebrews, you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live." So what were the names of the midwives? Sorry? Shipra and Pua. What's the name of the Pharaoh? He's called Pharaoh, or a new king. They don't even name him, okay? Their names, the midwives' names, are forever associated with the heroes of the Exodus, or as heroes of the Exodus. Pharaoh is not even named. And what this does, again, it takes me back to Genesis 1, where Ken talked about this a few weeks ago, You have where God created the greater light and the lesser light, otherwise known as the sun and the moon. Do we think that the Hebrews didn't have a word for sun or a word for moon? Why wouldn't he use them? Why wouldn't he say sun and moon? Those were names of gods that people worshiped. He wasn't even going to refer, he wasn't even going to give them the dignity of referring to them by name. He just said the greater light and the lesser light, not the sun and the moon, because again, these were gods that people bowed down to. And you can, again, you can look in Genesis one and there's all sorts of ambiguous names, ambiguous words that are meant to communicate something specific. But Moses intentionally did not use those words because he did not want to give them the dignity of being named. Okay. And it's a similar sort of thing here with Pharaoh. He's not going to give Pharaoh the dignity of even having a name. Um, but again, the, the midwives, um, are forever associated with as heroes of the Exodus. It's similar to going back, um, or going forward to the new Testament when Mary, um, anointed Jesus, right? The disciples were telling her, hey, why are you wasting this expensive oil or ointment when we could sell it and help out the poor? Jesus says, in pouring this ointment on my body, she has done it to prepare me for burial. Truly I say to you, wherever this gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her. So deeds that people have done throughout God's redemptive history can be documented and look back upon and look back in honor, right? Without stealing God's glory. So later in Exodus, I find this interesting. So we have the midwives, right? Later in Exodus in chapter two, who watched over Moses in the water? His sister, exactly. Who pulled Moses from the water? Pharaoh's daughter, right? Who went to go get the nurse? Again, it was Moses's sister. And then I think Exodus 4, who saved Moses when he failed to circumcise his son? Exactly, Zipporah and his wife. See, in the first several chapters of Exodus, multiple times you have women in heroic roles, helping Moses, saving Moses, that sort of thing. So God, again, I want to emphasize here, God uses women as much as he uses men in glorifying, bringing glory to himself, okay? And I think that the Old Testament gets unfairly labeled as being, you know, what's the modern word, misogynistic. The Old Testament gets nailed as being misogynistic, when in reality, if we open our eyes and we look, women are held in very high esteem. And that's actually very unusual in the ancient world. All right, so why kill just the boys? Why not kill the girls too? This is just a pragmatic question, so what do you guys got? Good, you have, the boys are generally gonna grow up and be soldiers, right? So they're the ones you're gonna have to physically confront and battle. What else? Their seed, what do you mean by that? Well, okay. So that we don't go in a weird direction. That's a great answer. So what happens is when a male, when he gets married, or a man when he gets married, generally the wife will take on the man's heritage, identity, kind of that sort of thing, right? And so if you have, Israelites that are being born or Jews that are being born and then they're either marrying other Jews or they're marrying even Egyptians then they take on that that That Jewish identity. Okay, but if you kill all the boys and now you have Egyptian men that are now probably marrying Jewish women now these Jewish women are becoming Egyptian rather than Jewish and Okay, so by and large so it's kind of a double whammy you're getting rid of the fighting force and then you're also just really watering down and Destroying the the population as a whole or the identity of the population. Yes, ma'am Yeah Yeah Yeah, so the The temple prostitution, that's a probability, I would say. So let's see. So sequence of events. God blesses the Israelites. He makes them multiply, fruitful and multiply. Pharaoh responds with oppression and covert murder. What's covert mean? Hidden. Hidden good. Yeah, so hidden murder. He's kind of he's he's he's killing babies We're trying to kill babies, but it's kind of kind of kept under wraps, right? And then God increases his blessing of the Israelites And then Pharaoh responds with more more oppression and then overt murder Okay overt meaning visible obvious that sort of thing So So clearly Pharaoh is setting himself up against God. He's setting himself up as being the antagonist to Yahweh. So now let's talk about Old Testament blessings versus New Testament blessings. So the midwives were, it says that they were, how were they rewarded? They were given families. So, it's not explicit in the text, but what is the probable, what can we probably know about them, given the fact that they were given families as a reward? They were probably what? Okay, a spiritual sense as opposed to a physical one. Where I was going with, I think the idea is, I'm forgetting the word, but I think the inference is that they were probably older and they probably didn't have families. And the idea would be that they would come along, they would be like Sarah and the Genesis matriarchs where they were given a family later in life as kind of a miracle sort of thing. And then that would be, again, that would be a witness to God, okay? So they were given this temporal material prosperity in addition to being named in the Old Testament. How cool is that, right? So again, temporal material blessing came from being obedient to God. How does that carry over to the New Testament? Are we materially, temporally blessed? Well, she's saying no, but camera can't hear you, yeah. Maybe, yeah. But what's the general rule? The general rule is we're gonna be persecuted, and we're gonna get more oppression, just like the Israelites did, okay? God does not promise us anything materially in this life for being obedient to him, being faithful to him. Our rewards come when? In eternity, okay? And I think eternal rewards that last for eternity are way better than temporal rewards, material rewards that last for a few decades at best, right? So, but there's a shift when you go from the Old Testament to the New Testament, there's a shift between, I mean, there's still very spiritual aspects in the Old Testament, but a lot of the times the blessings do tend to be a little bit more material. You look at Job, you look, you know, at the end of Job, you look at Abraham, God blessed them. And a lot of times that means that they had families, they had, Again, material prosperity, that sort of thing. New Testament, it's their spiritual blessings. And I think it's just a shift in the way things work. And you can look at redemption. So what does it mean that God redeemed Israel out of Egypt? Is there anything eternal there? No. It means he redeemed them, he bought them, he purchased them out of slavery of Egypt, right? Again, we're talking a physical, material thing, but what does it mean that you and I are redeemed? That's not temporal, that's not material, right? That is a, it's a, it's a spiritual thing. So again, there's a shift. Now, so I talked about the midwives, Old Testament blessings, New Testament blessings, So why do you suppose that? Well, first of all, do you guys see the pattern? You're following me on the pattern? Yeah. I wouldn't want it any other way. It's a small issue, but what about this idea of the character of unity? So we follow everyone. We also mandate people to multiply, to repeat it after, So if it's attached to the proto-evangelion of from your seed, isn't Moses the same author? Isn't he marking the reality of the hope of Israel in a future hope? And so when even the lines of say like the barren women who are blessed and having a family is is certainly a temporal blessing, but isn't it looking forward to the possibility of something greater? And even the killing of the boys. It's more than, I think, just that the Hebrew women can become Egyptians. If you kill all of the Israelite boys, after a generation, there is no seed now to which this future blessing can come from. It doesn't exist anymore. So even then, even the Old Testament legends, I'm agreeing primarily to the people receiving it physical in nature. I think that it's still Moses is still pointing to that, that desire or that need for this one who would come from the seat of the woman. And I think people would agree with you. Why women are emphasized in these ways throughout most, right? I just think that I think yes, it's physical. But looking forward to something that isn't difficult in its entirety. Good. The one thing, I don't disagree with anything that you said. The one point I want to highlight, though, that you said that I didn't highlight was the cutting off the seed of kill all the boys. I think that's what Sharon was actually alluding to. If you kill all the boys, now you don't have the offspring. And so it shuts down that, I guess, that branch of the family tree, you could say. The rest of... Hey, go for it. Yeah. of the killing of the boys as it relates to the New Testament and Herod and once again the Hebrew boy being sentenced to death because he murdered a king where in the same kind of manner though now you kind of see this event as a foreshadow or a shadow Matthew will quote Hosea, out of Israel I'll call my son, all that kind of stuff. It's also, I think, wildly incredible how it immediately calls your mind to Right absolutely looking forward to Matthew 2. Yeah with the the killing of the killing of the children Again pointing to Christ and we could probably uncover a bunch more Pointers going forward as well But to the substance of everything that you're saying, I talked about kind of the way I was introducing it was partial versus complete revelation, right? So the idea is in the Old Testament, you have partial revelation. Like Ken said, you have types and shadows and things like that. You have pointers pointing forward to ultimately to Christ. With Christ coming into the New Testament, with the advent of Christ, you have the complete revelation. You know, like Hebrews 1 says in, you know, but Hebrews 1 says, God made himself, now I'm paraphrasing, God made himself known at many times in different ways, many times in many ways, different things like that. But in these last days, he revealed himself in his son is really what he's saying. And so, so you have a partial types and shadows revelation pointing forward to this complete revelation in Christ at the end. And so I think that's where these, again, agreeing with Ken, that's where all of these more physical aspects of redemption, of blessings, and things of that nature are pointing forward to Christ. Even things like the law, you know, is pointing forward to Christ, the sacrifices, all these different aspects of Israel. It's very difficult to find any aspect in the Old Testament that is not ultimately pointing forward pointing forward to Christ. All right. Questions, comments? Besides Ken? No? Okay. So, you didn't read that, did you? So how would you, if you had to come up with a summary statement or a thesis statement for Exodus 1, what would it be? Summarize the whole chapter. One or two sentences. They multiply. OK. We can go bigger picture than that, I think. Yes, ma'am. In the midst of the oppression of evil people, God provides a plan for hope or hope for a plan. OK, good. Good. In the midst of evil oppression, God provides a plan of hope, a plan of hope. OK, good. Excellent. All right. Here's my shot at it. God demonstrates his faithfulness to promises made in Genesis as he prepares to bring his people out of Egypt and into the land. And Pharaoh resists God's will, setting himself up as God's enemy. So by and large. So we're setting the stage for the introduction to Moses next week. So Stephen, do you mind closing us in prayer? Dear Lord, we thank you for this time we've had to come and hear your word. Father, we just ask that you would soften our heart with it. Help us to take it into our lives. We just ask that you would help us to be mindful of our sin. Father, to be repentant of it. Thank you again for time and your word. We just thank you. Amen. Amen. Thank you.