Exodus Chapters 1 & 2 Israel in Egypt, Birth of Moses, Moses flees to Midian
Jul 3rd, 2009 | By admin | Category: Exodus, Verse by Verse --Studies led by Br. Frank Shallieu (Click on Book name)Back in Genesis 15, God had told Abraham that there would be 400 years of affliction and bondage. (Of the predetermined time period of 430 years, 30 years had already passed.) Now, many years later, the Lord listened to the Israelites’ prayer—at the exact end of the predicted time period. How can such precise timing be explained? The Lord, in seeing certain matters, is intuitively mathematically precise. The very time that the Israelites cried out occurred at the end of the 430 years. How startling that God could spontaneously and emotionally react to their plea yet be mathematically accurate!
For God to “remember” (verse 24) does not mean He had forgotten. The Hebrew vocabulary is limited, so when God responds to the onlooker, He has “remembered.” The same Hebrew word was used where the account states that a Pharaoh arose who “knew not” Joseph (Exod. 1:8). The Pharaoh knew of Joseph but did not recognize him in the sense of dealing with him in a proper way considering how Joseph had helped Egypt.
The last verse of Chapter 1 showed the Nile River was to be a place of death for the Hebrew male babies, so the place of death now became a place of salvation for Moses. A river was similarly significant in Jesus’ life. Not only was Jesus baptized in the Jordan River, a symbol of death, but he was raised out of the river to newness of life. The name Moses means “drawn out [of water]” (Exod. 2:10). Moses was a type of Jesus.
