I’ve been wanting to read this book for a while, so let’s do it. God, draw me nearer to You, help me think and meditate on Your beautiful word, for man cannot live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from You (Deut. 8:4).
Exodus chapter one: our favorite family returns in the sequel to Genesis. God told Abraham in the book of Genesis everything that would happen to his descendents (the nation of Israel) in the book of Exodus and the following books of the Bible:
“Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nations that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions.” (Genesis 15:13-14)
One reason we can know that God is God and trust that He is in control is that He knows the future. At the end of the Bible Jesus says, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Revelation 22:13). There, I just quoted from the beginning of the Bible and the end. God knew the very words that would be in Revelation when He spoke to Abraham in Genesis. He knew the events of the world and the Bible in between, He knew every person that would live, how that person would act, how all those actions would lead to the birth of His Son and He knew how people would react to all these events now, 2,000 years after His Son was born. This is incredible! He also knew every name that would be added to His kingdom, He knew our names before He even spoke to Abraham. In Paul’s words:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundations of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. (Ephesians 1:3-4)
Before God made Mount Everest He knew my name and that Jesus Christ would die in my place, also dying in many others’ places; so that I could stand blameless before Him, so that my heart’s purest desire – to be with my Lord Jesus Christ – may be fulfilled. Praise God! Why does He do this? Paul goes on: “In love.” God does this in love for us, so that we may be blessed and so that He may be glorified. Before the sun was lit, He knew He would save me so that I may delight in Him forever.
Praise be to God! Our God is in heaven, He is in control forever! Never will His throne be shaken, never will He be defeated or overthrown, never will He be anything less of value than He is now, has been, and forever more will be.
In comparison the universe – all of God’s creation – is always expanding, according to astronomers. If the universe, which is simply God’s creation, is always growing, stretching to infinity, how much more infinite is its Creator! How much farther His power and might expands beyond the beyond, beyond the farthest reaches of space.
This reminds me of an old fear I had: What if God isn’t that great? Let me rephrase, I don’t mean to say, “not great at all”, but what if He is only great to a degree, and then it levels off? What if His power does cap off, even if (if God can be “measured”) it is at the millionth zero? Even at that power God would still have a number, a cap that He could not surpass. To me this is extremely unsatisfying – even if God still was the greatest Being in the universe, if He wasn’t infinite, but finite, only powerful and great to a certain degree, that would be disappointing (to say the least!).
Thankfully, this is not true. The Lord is as great as your feeble imagination can imagine, and He is infinitely more so! Our brains can’t even handle how deep and beautiful our God is, how many mysteries of His character have yet to be revealed, how unending He is!
Lord, you have been our dwelling
place
in all generations.
Before the mountains were brought forth,
or even you had formed the earth and
the world,
from everlasting to everlasting you
are God. (Psalm 90:1-2)
From never-beginning to never-ending. This is hard for me to grasp at times simply because I’m human and have a very limited perspective. Everything humanity knows has a beginning and an end, the houses we live in, the food we eat, even our own lives have a start and end date. History has a beginning, time itself has a beginning. And God created it all, so He gave creation its start date. Its hard and unnatural to imagine something without age – but God is! He tells Moses, “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14). He is who He is. He cannot be compared to anything. In fact, that may be why its hard to understand Him sometimes, because He is incomparable.
We often understand something by comparing two things. If, for example, I am looking for new music and find a band that looks interesting, I can get a quick understanding of what they are like if someone tells me, “They are like the Beatles” – a comparison helps me understand. Of course, once in a while you run into a band that is unexplainable, you simple have to listen to the, think about them, study them if you want to understand them. We like this, it is a rare thing to find something that is unique. But ultimately the bands we do think are unique aren’t, somebody else will sound like them (and, if nothing else, they are still playing music, which is not unique for a band). If it is the unique we are looking for, the only truly unique thing that has ever existed is God. Nobody is like Him. Nobody ever will be! If there was anybody else who has been around “from everlasting to everlasting” then they would already exist right now because they’ve always existed. But nothing besides God has existed forever. If somebody were to arise now to compete with God for His uniqueness and character they would automatically be disqualified from such a useless competition because they have a starting date. God does not and never will. And He never will have an ending date.
“I am who I am.” (Exodus 3:14)
So back to Exodus. God, the Lord of history, brings the whole house of Israel to Egypt. Jacob, the father of Israel, knows God and is a believer. At the beginning of Exodus his family has become a part of a foreign culture with different gods and different beliefs. One of the themes of Exodus and one of the reasons I love it is because God uses the country, these people, these events, to show Egypt and the world who the true God is. How many Egyptians came to believe in the Lord at this time? I’ve never thought about that before, but in Exodus God is not only saving His chosen people from physical slavery and oppression He is also saving many Egyptians from slavery to idolatry and paganism by simply revealing Himself for who He is: “I am that I am.”
What we know about Egypt today is that they used to worship many gods. There were gods for the sun, moon, stars, life, death. It is interesting that this belief system has consistently been around in human history. Today people will pray to a stone god who is the patron god of (fill in blank) with sincerity the same way that people did thousands of years ago.
We are made to worship, we are made to glorify our Creator, but when we stop worshipping the Everlasting and start worshipping something with a beginning and an end date we are creating idols. And we do this all the time, whether we are bowing down before a carved statue or we are bowing down to the thing we love the most (like alcohol or sex.) We need to worship the right God, the One, the true God, who exists in three persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the God who frees and redeems lives, as we will see in Exodus.
7/4/09
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