Egypt - the pyramids, right? I think that's what most folks would think of when you say the word Egypt. But when you live here, it soon becomes obvious that when you say Egypt, you think the Nile. As a river, it's the world's largest river. It runs more than 4,100 miles all the way from South Africa. About September, the Nile begins to flood - the inundation the ancients called it. It floods for about three months and covers miles of land on both sides (some places 20 miles wide and wider) and turns that land into a real paradise.

So why wasn't this the Promised Land? God brought the Hebrew people here. They lived here for more 200 years. Why not leave those Hebrew people here, where they would have a land flowing with milk and honey? Come. Let's see why God decided that this was not the place he wanted his people to be, but he preferred to lead them into the desert.

Isn't that amazing? Wow. So, are you surprised? I couldn't have, in my wildest imagination, put the Hebrews in a place like this. Not even close. And yet, when you look in the Bible, it shouldn't surprise you. I just never read it that carefully. Let me show you what I mean. 

If you look in the story in Genesis, Joseph has come to Egypt and become second in command. And his elderly father, Jacob, has now come down with seventy members of the family. They've been reunited. And here's what the scripture says (Genesis 47). "Pharaoh said to Joseph, 'Your father and your brothers have come to you, and the land of Egypt is before you. Settle your father and your brothers in the best part of the land. Let them live in Goshen.'" So I guess I never thought much of Egypt, to be honest. Because I thought the best of the land probably still wasn't what I was used to. But when you get here, the best of this land is really amazing. So for a considerable period of time, the Hebrews settled in places like this, and slowly but surely, became a part of the Egyptian world. 

And I begin to understand why, throughout the Exodus experience, they come to Moses complaining, saying things like (Numbers 11), "What did you bring us out here for? In Egypt, we had fish." In fact, they even say, "fish that was free, melons, cucumbers, onions, leeks, wheat, bread, and meat pots". The remembered this. In other words, their life was really pretty good here. So the Hebrews didn't start out as slaves. They started out as shepherd farmers in some of the finest farmland in the world.

But someone might say, "Well, yeah. That's true. But four and a half months a year, the Nile floods and all these fields would have been, at that time at least, under water. So what then?"

Ah, let me show you that. Come. Follow me.

We're on a hillside here in the Western Desert of Egypt. But it's not an ordinary hillside. We're in one of the key places of the Middle and New kingdom of Egyptian history. In front of us, the Nile River Valley, and just across, the modern city of Luxor - or Thebes as the Greeks called it. That was more or less the religious center of Egypt at the time of the Exodus. On this side is where the pharaohs and the queens chose to be buried after the period of those pyramids, which was the kingdom before. 

So we're actually very near what everyone knows as the Valley of the Kings. In fact, it's just beyond this hill over here. Right below us is a small village from the time of the Pharaohs, from the time of the Exodus, called the Village of the Truth. I wanted to start here this morning because from here you can really see the contrast that is Egypt. Look at it. You can stand with one foot in a field and one foot in the desert. So what was it like to be an Israelite when that Egyptian story of chaos and order came face to face with the story of this book about chaos and order? Come with me. Let's go see.

Welcome to what's called the Village of Truth or the Place of Truth. In the 1920s, they found this small village, which turns out to be a village where the workers lived, who worked on tombs like the Valley of the Kings just over the hill here or on temples like Medinet Habu. This is where they came to live while they were working on those projects. So it's a fascinating study of ordinary Egyptian life at the time of the Exodus. 

The houses here run east and west. So if you imagine an opening - and it opens into the first room - then there would be a second room, then a third room, and sometimes an unroofed fourth room in the distance. Now, to us, this all looks pretty plain, because it's mud brick with some stones tucked into those mud brick walls. But originally, they were plastered and painted.

The people who lived here were some of the finest artists that Egypt had to offer. So you can imagine what this village looked like originally. Right there in that cliff are their tombs. And inside some of those tombs are wall paintings that show their daily life, and their walls are painted with brilliant colors and garden scenes and palm trees and a husband and wife sitting together in the shade. It's really quite a beautiful thing. So this must have been some kind of a village.

You'll notice occasionally, a broken jug. You'll see it has a point on the bottom, and that was done so you could dig a hole in the sand and it would stand up, which worked better than a flat bottom because the floors weren't always that flat. A couple of intriguing things about this village, because they were literate - many of them are doing the carvings in the tombs - we find many, many small stone shards. When they dug the tombs, they end up with thousands of flakes (chips) off the wall of the cliff as they chisel their way in to build the tomb. And they would write on those. What's intriguing about those letters is in them are several Semitic names. That is, names from the same language base as Hebrew. So they lived here. This is what pharaoh offered four and a half months a year. "Come work for me."

Now, not everybody got to be a tomb carver and a temple builder. Some had to make bricks. "But come work for me. There's a lot of work when you're a pharaoh. So come work for me during those four and a half months." And that was the Egyptian system. 

So you would say, "Well, where would I live?"

And Pharaoh would say, "Do you want this apartment? It's got three rooms." 

To you, it's fairly small, but by their standards, that's pretty nice. "Really? What do I get paid?"

Pay was an upper middle-class amount. Some in currency probably - gold or silver. But mostly in food and other necessities. They were paid in oil and grain and wine and that Egyptian specialty, beer. It was, honestly, by their own description-- and nobody ever thinks they're overpaid obviously-- by their own description, it's a pretty good salary. 

"Really? Where are we going to get water?"

Pharaoh says, "That's no problem. I'll tell you what. There's a big cistern here. I'll have my workers fill it."

"But how much do we have to work? I'll bet this is long hours."

"Well," Pharaoh said, "I'll tell you what." 

Honestly, this is the record. "We have a ten-day week here in Egypt. I'll let you work a ten-day week. You can have a two-day weekend." At one point in Ramesses III, a three-day weekend. "Eight hours a day will be enough." 

Now, if you think about that, when I first heard that, it was pretty startling. Because I had never imagined the Hebrews as being under those conditions. Now, I can't say for sure that what we found here would be exactly what they had. But there are some hints in the Bible that initially, life for the Hebrews was pretty good. And now I understand that what's happening here is the Hebrews are buying into Egypt's story. So maybe I begin to understand why they always want to come back when they're out in the desert. 

In the book of Joshua, chapter 24, he assembles Israel, and he says, "Choose today what god you want if you don't want to worship the God of heaven." Then he says, "Throw away the gods your fathers worshipped in Egypt."

Really? No. Don't tell me the Hebrews were worshipping the Egyptian gods. A tragedy. 

Listen to the prophet, Ezekiel (Ezekiel 20). "I am Adonai." He says this sacred name. "I swore to them," (the people in Israel), "I would bring them out of Egypt. And I said to them, 'Get rid of the vile images you have set your eyes on and stop defiling yourselves. Do not defile yourselves with the idols of Egypt. I am Adonai.' But they rebelled against me and would not listen. They did not get rid of the vile images they had set their eyes on, and they did not forsake the idols of Egypt. Therefore, I brought them out of Egypt and into the desert." 

So he would not and he did not leave them here, part of the Egyptian story.  But I think there was a problem. How do you get them to leave? Seriously. How do you get them to leave those fields? How do you get them to leave this middle class, prosperous world? For what? The desert? A land they've never seen? So what would the God of heaven, Adonai, the Lord, do so his people who were to be his partners in bringing shalom and defeating chaos, what would he do? Come. Let's go see.

We're in the funerary temple of Ramesses III. It would date about the time of King David in the Hebrew Bible if you want to place it that way. We're in the first inner court. This is where the common people came for the ceremonies and the rituals, and this is as close as they're going to get to the god. You see the carvings on the wall, the presentation scenes that we've become so familiar with, where the pharaoh is saying, "I bring order. I maintain order." But there's more. Come.

We're now in the sanctuary. Did you feel how we were rising as we went, as if we're climbing that ancient mound where creation took place, and now we're at the top (the highest point) and we come to the sanctuary where the god himself is dwelling at the marker of the statue. And I'm not sure that these were the exact statues, but you feel the reverence that would have been given - and the care - in order to make sure the god was here. 

So we've got the Hebrews with those beautiful farms and with those relatively nice jobs some of the year, and they're buying into that story. What's going to happen? What is God going to do to get his story again? 

Well, the Bible says it this way (Exodus 1).  "A pharaoh came who didn't remember Joseph." Now, suppose we could interpret that literally and say he had just never heard of him. That's possible. I wouldn't question that. But I think the implication is bigger - that he didn't recall Joseph's contributions, and he didn't have the respect for Joseph that the Egyptian people had. So what do you think would happen to those Hebrews if Pharaoh didn't know Joseph? Come. Let's go see.

Carved on the wall here, a scene of the presentation of human hands to Pharaoh. When you were Pharaoh's enemy, it was a painful thing. So when a pharaoh came that didn't know Joseph and had reason to dislike the Hebrew people, they were in trouble, and the pain soon began. Maybe this kind of pain. Quotas, beatings, maybe starvation. They did that on occasion too. 

The Bible says it this way (Exodus 1), "They put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor. The more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied, so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites and worked them ruthlessly. They made their lives bitter with hard labor. In all their hard labor, the Egyptians used them ruthlessly." 

But because they continued to multiply, Pharaoh said, "Throw the boys (the babies) in the Nile." I know we've all read that. We talk about it. But put yourself in the place of a mother or a dad, and you slide your baby to the first crocodile that arrives and feel the pain of these Hebrews here in this life that formerly, at least for many, probably wasn't all that bad. Maybe it was pretty good. 

I don't want to say God caused their pain. I don't know his mind obviously. But certainly, he allowed it and used it in his story. Because I'm sure it wasn't very long and the Hebrews probably were ready to leave. But they did the human thing, what you and I would do. The text says (Exodus 2), "They cried out." Ze'akah is the Hebrew word. What's sad about that is not only you can hear the pathos in that cry, but they don't cry out to anybody apparently. It doesn't say they cried out to God. They just cried out. You don't suppose that was so distant that they didn't even have someone to cry to. But do you know what? The amazing thing, the God of the Bible, it says, heard their cry (Exodus 2). 

There is a God who hears. And over all the noise in the universe, he heard the cry to no one, apparently, and he acted. Be he did what I think is sort of a strange thing. He picked a partner. You know his name. It's Moses. But think about how you meet Moses in the Bible, in a way. Not his birth but when he's an adult. You meet him at least once. He's here in Egypt and there's an Egyptian beating an Israelite, and Moses defends him and even kills the Egyptian. The next story, he's out in the desert - running obviously because he just killed an Egyptian - and there are some girls who are trying to water their flocks and there are some nasty shepherds that are harassing them. And Moses comes and drives the nasty ones away. 

There's a Moses who will stand before God on Mount Sinai and say, "Don't hurt them. Please, God, don't." Moses was a man with God's heart. Did you ever think about that? He had an intense sympathy and compassion for hurting people. It shows up all over the place. I think God picked a partner, maybe shaped a partner is a better way to say it, who was like him - a man who would hear the cry of someone who was hurt. 

I don't know if you remember his parents' names. But there were Israelites here who hung on to the God of Abraham, because some nameless mothers among the Hebrews named their children Amram and Ya'kaved (Exodus 6). Amram means exalted people. Who among a slave group would name their son exalted people unless you really believed that this destiny was still to come? Ya'kaved means give glory to Adonai, the Creator of the universe. I think I have an idea where Moses got his heart. It was some godly grandparents and godly parents whose names reflect that they never lost faith. But like all of God's partners - all of them - Moses needed to be trained too. Come. Let me show you.

And the story picks up sort of in a scene like this. Notice Pharaoh. We've seen him all over Egypt where we've been. Always with a stick. Those sticks represent the authority, the power of Pharaoh, particularly as it's applied to chaos. The chaos, for example, of anyone who stands in our way. That's Pharaoh's way. Moses was now a grown man, 40 years old, and he'd been brought up in the palace. He retained his Hebrew training. I don't know how long it lasted, but it's pretty amazing. Then one day, he's out at a work site, maybe like this one out in front of the Medinet Habu Temple, and he sees an Egyptian task master beating a fellow Hebrew. And he hits the Egyptian - va'yach the text says - and killed him. And runs away into the desert. He's now an enemy of the crown and spends 40 years there. 

In a sense, what God said was, "Go lead a flock of sheep for about 40 years. Take your stick," (not one fancy one like Pharaoh's but this is a stick like Middle Eastern shepherds often have that I've seen). "Take your shepherd's stick and learn to be like me." 

"Adonai is my shepherd," the Psalm says (Psalm 23). "The Lord led them," Psalm 78, "like a shepherd." But God wants partners who are like him, because after Moses has had the forty years-- he's long forgotten in Egypt, at least in the sense of ever going back-- one day God showed up in a bush on fire. 

After some interesting discussion, God said, "I want you to go into Egypt." Listen to this amazing verse. I have to read it because otherwise, you probably wouldn't believe it (Exodus 4). "The Lord said to Moses, 'I have made you like God to Pharaoh. Moses, your job as my partner is to show Pharaoh what I'm like. Show him me." In a sense, he didn't simply give Moses a message and say, "Bring Pharaoh this message." He had a message. But he said, "Go be the message. Go be like me so when they see you, they will know me." That's always what God wants from his partners - always. 

Later, Israel would stand at the foot of Mount Sinai, and God would say (Exodus 19), "If you obey me, I will make you a Kingdom of priests."

"What's a priest?"

Well, several things, but one of them, a priest shows you God. So all Israel got the mission of being God to the world as Moses got the mission of being God to Pharaoh. 

And Peter writes this Hebrew in the Christian text (1 Peter 2), "If you are in Jesus, you too, are a Kingdom of priests."

Your mission is the same as Moses - to show the world what God is like. So he's still looking for a partner. Interested? It means you will have to give up the ways of Pharaoh. And it may mean those fields and that middle-class workers' village life for a desert. It means you're going to have to let him mold you and shape you for 40 years in some pretty difficult circumstances. 

It seems to me that one of the things that made Moses such a wonderful choice to be God's partner is he hears their cry. Do you? If you're going to partner with God, you've got to be able to hear it. You've got to hear it in the homeless and the AIDS victim. You've got to hear it in the unborn and the old. You've got to hear it. You've got to hear it. And you need to teach your kids to hear it. Do they? Or do you find ways to cover their ears when the cry goes up? He heard their cry, and he picked Moses. 



Last modified: Thursday, August 27, 2020, 12:06 PM