Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Exodus 2
Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Please turn to Exodus chapter 2. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Exodus chapter 2. And a man of the house of Levi went and took as wife a daughter of Levi. So the woman conceived and bore a son. And when she saw that he was a beautiful child, she hid him three months. But when she could no longer hide him, she took an ark of bulrushes for him, dotted with asphalt and pitch, put the child in it, and laid it in the reeds by the river’s bank.

And his sister stood afar off to know what would be done to him. Then the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river. And her maidens walked along the riverside. And when she saw the ark among the reeds, she sent her maid to get it. And when she had opened it, she saw the child, and behold, the baby wept. So she had compassion on him, and said, “This is one of the Hebrews’ children.” Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and call a nurse for you from the Hebrew women, that she may nurse the child for you?” And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Go.” So the maiden went and called the child’s mother.

Then Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child away and nurse him for me, and I will give you your wages.” So the woman took the child and nursed him. And the child grew, and she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. So she called his name Moses, saying, “Because I drew him out of the water.” Now it came to pass in those days, when Moses was grown, that he went out to his brethren, and looked at their burdens, and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his brethren.

So he looked this way and that way. And when he saw no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. And when he went out the second day, behold, two Hebrew men were fighting. And he said to the one who did the wrong, “Why are you striking your companion?” Then he said, “Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you intend to kill us or me rather as you killed the Egyptian?” So Moses feared and said, “Surely this thing is known.” When Pharaoh heard of this matter, he sought to kill Moses.

But Moses fled from the face of Pharaoh and dwelt in the land of Midian. And he sat down by a well. Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters, and they came and drew water, and they filled the troughs to water their father’s flock. Then the shepherds came and drove them away. But Moses stood up and helped them and watered their flock. When they came to their father, he said, “How is it you have come so soon today?” And they said, “An Egyptian delivered us from the hand of the shepherds. And he also drew enough water for us and watered the flock.” So he said to his daughters, “And where is he? Why is it that you have left the man? Call him that he may eat bread.” Then Moses was content to live with the man. And he gave Zipporah his daughter to Moses. And she bore him a son and called his name Gershom, for he said, “I have been a stranger in a foreign land.” Now it happened in the process of time that the king of Egypt died.

Then the children of Israel groaned because of the bondage and they cried out and their cry came up to God because of the bondage. So God heard their groaning and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob and God looked upon the children of Israel and God acknowledged them.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you that you look upon us today and acknowledge us. We thank you that your ear is ever attentive to our prayer, that you are more quick and ready to hear prayer than we are usually to offer it. Forgive us this, Father. But we do pray now that you would help us to understand this text of holy scripture. May your Spirit illuminate to our understandings. Open our hearts and our minds to understand it. But not simply to understand it, but to apply it. Help us, Lord God, then to attend to your word. And may your Spirit do his work in us today, transforming us from glory to glory as we exhibit the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.

Please be seated. Younger children may be dismissed to go to the nursery provided for little ones.

We nearly completed our sermons on Genesis that we began about a year ago. We were preparing for family camp a year ago and I decided to take up the theme of husband-wife relationships specifically from the creation of man and his fall in Genesis 2 and 3, and then we looked through the book of Genesis at various accounts of male-female relationships in various portions of the book. God led us into a beautiful unfolding of the recovery from the fall that occurred in the opening chapters of Genesis, worked out through the patriarchs.

We said last week that Genesis really is sort of a complete picture of the whole Bible. It shows man’s creation, his fall, his redemption through the coming one, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the effects of that turning back of the curse is found in the lives of the patriarchs. And then finally, what appears to be the salvation of Egypt and the whole world, as it were—Joseph, a picture of the Lord Jesus Christ, giving bread to all the world because of the famine that God had brought about.

So there was this nice complete unit. And when I do come back in a month, I’m going to go back for one more talk. I didn’t talk about Dinah and Shechem, and I thought it would be good to complete those narratives in the book of Genesis about significant male-female relationships. So we’ll do that. But we pretty much covered it.

But this section of course now—we know what’s happened as we move from Genesis on. A Pharaoh arises that knows not Joseph nor the God of Joseph. And so difficulties have come. That’s the setup for this story of Moses.

The connection of course is that, and some of you may not see it yet, but those of you who have been listening to the sermons for the last couple of months will see again here we have this theme of the well. Moses comes sitting down at a well, and it’s at that well again that he meets his wife, one of the seven daughters of Jethro—another name given for him is Reuel—and then he marries Zipporah. So we have another love story, as it were, another marriage at a well.

And remember, we’ve talked about this: the well is a picture of the waters that were to flow out of the Garden of Eden to transform the world as the people of God take the sanctuary privileges they have into all the world and transform the world from glory to glory and make a garden of the whole earth—Adam’s original calling. So we’ve had a reversal of the fall of man.

Remember, we said that Adam fell and he fell by reaching for the determination of good and evil, authority, before God was ready to let him eat of that particular tree or to exercise authority. He impatiently grasped it in a wicked way, using his wife, failing to give her leadership. And the blame is clearly placed on Adam in that opening section of scripture. And in contrast to that, we saw Abraham, the patient one. While promised everything like Adam, he did not seize after authority in the land before God was willing to grant it to him. He’d wait forever, as it were. He’d wait 130 years just for a small piece of land, and really it would be many years before the full promises were to come to pass. So he’s the picture of the reversal of the sin of Adam.

Then we saw in his sons—Isaac’s son, and then Jacob—that Jacob’s sort of a reversal of the sin of Cain and Abel. You know, Cain strikes out against his brother, hates him, kills him. Jacob had reason to hate Esau, which Cain did not have to hate Abel. Esau was a wicked man. And by that time Isaac was acting very poorly as well, wanting to completely disinherit God’s promised one, Jacob, from receiving the blessings. So Jacob wrestles first with his father, then his brother, and then Laban. And then finally, the text shows us that he’s been wrestling with God all those years as he wrestles with him as he’s about to enter the promised land. But he does that, and as a result, he’s reconciled to Esau. They don’t kill each other when he crosses over the border to go back to the promised land. And so he shows a reversal of the horrible sins against humanity that come forth from the fall, where people kill other people, where people strike out at the image of God in their brother. Ultimately, the picture of that is the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And then we said the third fall in those opening chapters of Genesis was the Sethites. The sons of God saw the daughters of men and they married them. They intermarried with the daughters of men, as it were. In other words, the ungodly line coming out from Adam and Eve. We had two lines: the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, taking human form. You know, angels can’t reproduce. The devil can’t reproduce. So what he does is he tempts the woman and she, in her sin, produces both the godly line and also the ungodly line of the devil in her sin and rebellion, and in Adam’s sin and rebellion.

And so those two lines—the Sethites were to keep themselves away from them. They weren’t to intermarry with the people that didn’t worship God, and yet they didn’t do that. They intermarried. They sinned against God’s commandment to keep themselves separate, and as a result, the whole world was flooded. So marriage is very significantly tied into the fall and then the reversal of the fall. And in each of those stories—with Isaac, with Jacob, and even in the story of Judah and Tamar—we saw meetings at wells, and God’s moving in the context of taking that Adenic sanctuary into where the patriarchs would go, with these pictures of wells. And we could also talk about the altars that are built, holy places to worship, a picture of the Garden of Eden. So as God’s people go out, they take the blessings of Eden with them.

And here we come to a significant text that brings continuity with what’s gone before because Moses and Zipporah meet at this well again. And this picture is happening. But now, of course, there’s a different dimension added to it. Now the people of God are in captivity in Egypt, having been brought there at first for the purposes of being preserved from the Canaanite sin and then for being fed—and becoming the priest, really, to the whole world through the feeding, through Joseph, of food or bread to the whole world. In any event, what we’re going to do then is look at Moses and Zipporah first here in Midian, where Moses goes to seek refuge from Pharaoh.

Then we’ll look at Moses and Zipporah, the only other place where an action of theirs is recorded, and that’s in the circumcision of Gershom in Exodus 4. And then we’ll go to John 4 and try to tie up, in very summary fashion, all of these marriages and meetings at wells being fulfilled in Jesus going to the Samaritan woman at the well in John chapter 4. So those will be the three portions of scripture.

Remember, we used three place names with Joseph. We saw Joseph in Potiphar’s house. We saw Joseph in Potiphar’s prison. And so we saw these different places where Joseph was. And then in the middle of that, we looked at Joseph with Potiphar’s wife and how Joseph successfully resisted that temptation—that the world, the lust of the world, and specifically intermarriage with the daughters of men, so to speak. How he specifically resisted that, and so rolled back the effects of the fall through the grace of God of that first fall, the Sethites and the Canaanites intermarrying.

Okay, so let’s look first then at Moses and Zipporah in Midian. And we’re just going to walk through this text we just read, making some comments as we go. And we do have a little bit of an outline for you here, but basically we’ll just walk through the text.

We do see first of all the deliverance of the deliverer. Moses is going to be the deliverer of God’s people, but he needs to be delivered first. And that’s real important for us to see. Obviously, we know this story, but let’s look at it again. In verse 2, his mother hides him for three months. Now, that’s kind of miraculous already. He gets deliverance by being hid for three months because Pharaoh’s men are out there making sure that all the Hebrews kill off all the boy babies. Remember, they’re going to throw their bodies in the Nile. The Nile will later become filled with blood and retribution from God for the death of the Hebrews. So Moses is already pictured to us here, in terms of his birth. He comes forth from a Levite couple and he is miraculously delivered for three months from the attacks of Pharaoh’s troops. It’s the grace of God in light of Pharaoh’s men.

But this deliverance theme goes on because then when she could no longer hide him, she took an ark of bulrushes. Now, that word “ark” is only used as far as I can determine here and when speaking in the book of Genesis about Noah’s ark. So it seems like God wants us to draw a correlation to Moses being saved in this ark of bulrushes and the people of God being saved as well. So Moses is kind of the man here who represents God’s people who will survive the judgment upon Egypt.

So we have another deliverance thing given for us here. The ark is daubed with asphalt. Now this asphalt is another term that’s interesting because at the Tower of Babel the men had bricks. They made bricks and they used this same Hebrew substance, which was translated in the New King James Version as asphalt. They used it to build their tower to try to reach up to God. And you’ll remember one of the things we talked about from the early chapters of Genesis about the two different lines of men that come down from Adam and Eve, the ungodly line and the godly line.

The ungodly line tends to get to technology first. It was the Canaanite line and Enoch that developed cities and cultures. They developed musical instruments. The ungodly line. But by the time the end of the Bible is reached in Revelation, God’s people are dwelling in cities and in a culture, and they’re using those musical instruments to the glory of God in worship. And here it’s the same thing. The ungodly men developed asphalt and bricks so they could try to use an idolatrous structure to reach God. But God’s people redeem the inherents of the ungodly—they’re stored up for the godly. And God’s people are here using that same substance to bring about deliverance from a wicked Pharaoh, another tower-of-God-builder, as it were, with his ziggurat and his pyramid structures that he would construct.

So she puts the child in the ark and lays it in the reeds by the river’s bank, and his sister stood afar off to know what would be done to him. Now we’re talking about how the deliverer is being delivered in these early verses of this chapter. And the significant thing here is that Moses will become a picture, a representation, of the people of Israel in general. They’re all going to be brought out in an ark, as it were, out of Egypt through the Passover, right? They’re going to be preserved in the midst of God’s destruction of Egypt’s firstborn.

So Moses himself, in being delivered, is a picture of what’s going to happen to the people of Israel. And it’s miraculous that God has delivered Moses in this way. But also, in addition to God’s providence and God’s miraculous workings in our lives, we also always want to remember to make use of secondary means. Remember the two pictures for that when we went through the book of Joshua: Jericho and Ai. Jericho—God miraculously does a thing. They march around, walls fall down. It’s all God’s sovereignty at work. But he doesn’t want them to rest in that. By the time they get to Ai, and some sin starts to take place, they now have to do a complicated army maneuver to take Ai. And God’s people move from miraculous deliverances to proper use of secondary means. To always rely on secondary means is to deny the providence and sovereignty of God. To not do anything is to deny the fact that God has made us in his image and he wants us to use the appropriate secondary means to affect what he’s going to do for us.

I mean, the point here is that we’re going to read in the text is that when Pharaoh’s daughter finds Moses and draws him out of the water, it’s going to be because of the secondary means of the sister watching all of this happening, that Moses is reunited to his mother—miraculously, through the use of secondary means.

Okay. Verse 5. The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river and her maidens walked along the riverside. When she saw the ark among the reeds, she sent her maid to get it. And when she had opened it, she saw the child, and behold, the baby wept. So she had compassion on him. And what’s going to happen here in Egypt? The people of God are going to cry out to God because of the affliction of Pharaoh. They’re going to weep. And God is going to look at them and acknowledge them. By the end of this chapter, he’s going to have compassion on his people and he’s going to draw them out of the affliction that the Nile represents to his people.

And so again, here Moses is seen as kind of a model or a prototype of the deliverance of all the people of God. God’s people later cry out. He sees. He has compassion. He draws them out of the sea, and the seas are the nations round about Israel. That’s another model here—remember, ultimately they’ve been given a promised land. The end of this chapter goes back to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and talks about them. That’s to remind us that the people of Israel aren’t supposed to stay in Egypt. It’s nice they were there. The purpose for it has been fulfilled. They’re supposed to go home. Probably should have gone home before now. So God is going to drive them out by means of affliction. He’s going to draw them out of the Gentile seas, which are not, you know, the Gentiles were supposed to be God-fearers, at least Pharaoh, as Pharaoh had become under Joseph’s evangelism. But still, God’s people at this point in time, before Christ comes, are a priestly nation separate from the Gentile nations to minister to them.

And so they’re going to be drawn out of the sea, out of the water, and placed back onto the land where they serve as a priestly nation to all the world.

Okay? And she says, “This is one of the Hebrews’ children.” Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and call a nurse for you from the Hebrew women, that she may nurse the child for you?” And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Go.” So the maiden went and called the child’s mother.

See, so this is the proper use of secondary means to effect a beautiful deliverance, back into Moses’ own mother’s arms. Then Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child away and nurse him for me, and I will give you your wages.” Now, this is blessing upon blessing. You know, the Bible says that instead of your enemies overtaking you, there’ll be times in your life when you’re walking with the Savior when God decides to bless you in super abundant ways—where the blessings will overtake you like enemies overtake you. The blessings will just keep flowing to where you can’t even handle it all, so to speak. Well, here, not only is the mother—her child has been saved for three months by God—and then her child has been rescued in the ark and rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter. And now the child actually comes back to the mother to nurse. And not only that, but the mother gets paid to do it. And this is just, you know, blessing upon blessing, I think.

But it’s also more than that. It’s again a picture that in the life of Moses, we see the life of the Israel nation. What’s going to happen to God’s people as they come out of Egypt. Well, they’re going to be repaid. They’re going to be given wages for the years of slavery that Pharaoh had used them to build bricks and mistreated them. They’re going to plunder the Egyptians. And as they come out of Egypt, they’ll be given gifts by the Egyptians that represents their lost wages for the years of servitude that Pharaoh had given to them. They’re going to get their wages just like Moses’ mom got her wages, so to speak. It’s a picture of that.

Those wages are going to be used only later in significant fashion to build the tabernacle of God. And so again, the wealth of the ungodly is saved up and reserved for the godly and put into the worship of God. The streams that went out from Eden were to take the Edenic culture out, but they were also to take the gold back to build worship structures in the context of worshiping God.

So we see here the mother blessing upon blessing receiving wages. So the woman took the child and nursed him. The child grew and she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. So she called his name Moses, saying, “Because I drew him out of the water.” So, as I said, that’s a picture of Israel that’s going to be drawn out of the water as well.

So in this first section of chapter 2, the deliverer is delivered, and he’s delivered several times in the providence of God.

But now the deliverer delivers. He comes through, as it were, but he’s rejected. That’s the second section of chapter 2 beginning at verse 11.

Now it came to pass in those days, when Moses was grown, that he went out to his brethren and looked at their burdens. Now again, here we should think about the fact that God is going to do the same thing by the end of the passage. He’s going to look at the groanings. He’s going to hear the cries of his people and he’s going to have compassion. It’s already beginning through the work of Moses.

Remember, we said that one of the pictures of who we are in Christ is the watcher, the lampstand in the holy place. Remember, the lampstand is a stylized almond tree. And an almond tree—there’s no Hebrew word for almond. It means to watch or to look over. So Jeremiah is asked by God, “What do you see?” He says, “I see an almond tree.” And God says, “That’s right, because I’m overseeing Israel.” It doesn’t make sense unless you recognize that almond trees were seers or watchers. Maybe because they came first in the spring. We don’t know why, but the point is we’re watchers over the world for God, as it were. He sees it all, but he wants us to watch over the world as well, to shine our light over the world, to observe and to pray to him, and to affect what Moses is going to try to affect here.

Okay, Moses watches over. He does his lampstand work and he sees the burdens of his brothers and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his brethren. So he looked this way and that, and when he saw no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.

And when he went out the second day, behold, two Hebrew men were fighting. And he said to the one who did the wrong, “Why are you striking your companion?” Then he said, “Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you intend to kill me as you killed the Egyptians?” Now, what does this remind us of here? He’s got a man who, in the providence of God, is being raised up as a deliverer. And he begins to do that work in Egypt. He strikes. And remember, he’s one of Pharaoh’s household. He is part of the civil government. That’s the way to think about it. He’s one of the cops on the block, and he’s a captain. He’s a prince of Egypt. And so it’s not as if he’s a private citizen taking vengeance into his own hands here. He’s a prince in Egypt. He’s been raised up by God, and he strikes at the Egyptian beating the Hebrew and kills him. And then he attempts to make peace in the context of the Hebrew brethren. But they reject him.

The same way that Joseph’s brothers rejected Joseph. And the same way, when Jesus comes to effect the deliverance of his people, he came to his own, but his own knew him not. They rejected him. And being moved with envy against Jesus, they killed him. And being moved with envy against Joseph, his brothers strike out at him. And Potiphar, even the world, Potiphar’s wife, even the world is moved with envy at who Christians are, and strike out at them.

Providence of God—there was a Christian martyr, at least one in that school in Colorado this last week who answered the question, “Are there any Christians here?” “Yes, I’m a Christian, a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ,” and received a lethal shot, killed for her faith. That’s what the world does. But God uses that as he used Joseph’s trials to mature his people, and he uses martyrdom to bring people to a consciousness of what’s going on. Properly understood, there was a very anti-Christian theme to those shootings in Colorado. And there may have been other very ungodly themes at play as well. Research is still going on.

Well, properly understood, if the media would portray it that way, if they would focus on the fact that what we have here is the ungodly striking out at professors of the Lord Jesus Christ, it brings people to a recognition of what’s going on. Remember, in Revelation, evangelism happens when the martyrs fall and the people look at the dead bodies and they begin to think, “Wait a minute, what are we doing here?” So deliverance comes out of these sorts of things.

But at any event, the point here is he’s being rejected by his people, the same way Joseph was rejected by his brothers, and the same way that Jesus would be rejected by his brothers at Nazareth.

So Moses feared and said, “Surely this thing is known.” When Pharaoh heard of this matter, he sought to kill Moses. But we don’t know what matter that was. I don’t know that it was the killing of the Egyptian. It might have been, but it might have been the other incident of trying to bring peace between the Hebrews. Overall, I think the idea is, when Pharaoh sees—this ungodly Pharaoh—sees Moses acting as a deliverer for God, he seeks to kill him. It’s the two seeds that we saw coming from Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, all over again here.

But Moses fled from the face of Pharaoh and dwelt in the land of Midian. And he sat down by a well. Nothing wrong with strategic retreats. Nothing wrong with strategic retreats. Our job is to affect the work God has given us to do. Moses didn’t deny the faith, but he did make a strategic retreat. And where does he go? He goes to Eden. He goes to a picture of the Garden of Eden again. He sits down at a well.

Now, it’s interesting. We’ll look at this later, but Eleazar didn’t sit down by the well. I don’t think Jacob sat down by the well. But Moses here sits down at the well. And so the deliverer starts to deliver, but he’s rejected by his brothers.

And I just want to have you turn now to Acts chapter 7 for a little bit of New Testament commentary on these events. Acts chapter 7. We’ll begin reading at verse 17. And this is Stephen’s sermon before he is going to be martyred, being used by God to affect evangelism in that way. And he’s recounting the history of the Old Testament for the Jews who are now persecuting the church.

So this is part of Stephen’s sermon. Verse 17. “But when the time of the promise drew near, which God had sworn to Abraham, the people grew and multiplied in Egypt till another king arose who didn’t know Joseph. This man dealt treacherously with our people and oppressed our forefathers, making them expose their babies that they might not live. At this time Moses was born and was well pleasing to God. And was well pleasing to God and man. Our Jesus, Lord Jesus Christ, grew in stature and in favor with God and man. And Moses is favorable looking to his mother and he’s well pleasing to God. A picture of Jesus. He was brought up in his father’s house for three months.

But when he was set out, Pharaoh’s daughter took him away and brought him up as her own son. And Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was mighty in words and in deeds. Now when he was forty years old, it came into his heart to visit his brethren, the children of Israel. And seeing one of them suffer wrong, he defended and avenged him who was oppressed, and struck down the Egyptian. For he supposed his brethren would have understood that God would deliver them by his hand. But they did not understand.

And the next day he appeared to two of them as they were fighting and tried to reconcile them, saying, “Man, you are brethren. Why do you wrong one another?” But he who did his neighbor wrong pushed him away, saying, “Who made you a ruler and a judge over us? Do you want to kill me as you did the Egyptian yesterday?” Then at this saying, Moses fled and became a dweller in the land of Midian where he had two sons.

Now drop down to verse 35. “This Moses whom they rejected, saying, ‘Who made you a ruler and a judge?’ is the one God sent to be a ruler and a deliverer by the hand of the angel who appeared to him in the bush. He brought them out after he had shown wonders and signs in the land of Egypt and in the Red Sea and in the wilderness forty years. This is that Moses who said to the children of Israel, ‘The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brethren. Him you shall hear.’”

Now, the point of this is that in the inspired commentary in Acts of what we’ve just read about in Exodus chapter 2, there are no negative statements given about Moses killing the Egyptian or trying to settle the differences between the Hebrews. And in fact, Stephen’s whole point is that Moses is a type of Christ. Christ came to effect the death of the enemy and the deliverance and peace of God’s people, and you rejected him.

Now, he’s going to he uses the theme of forty years. Moses is forty now. Moses goes into the wilderness, so to speak, for forty years, and then he comes out to do the deliverance. And Pharaoh himself, by means of his firstborn son, will be cut off by God. And Stephen, I think, is rather pointedly pointing to these Jews and saying, “You think you’ve killed him now, but in forty years he’s coming back and the full deliverance will be affected. Jerusalem would be destroyed, and you Egyptians”—which is what you are. “You’re not children of Abraham. You’re children of the devil. You Egyptians will be killed and destroyed by the Lord Jesus Christ unless you repent from your sins.”

So the point here is that Moses in doing this deliverance work is not condemned by the Bible. He is condemned by a lot of scholars, Bible commentaries, and other people who read the text, but the text itself in Acts seems to commend the work to us as a picture of the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So the deliverer delivers, and he is rejected, and that’s what brings him to Midian. That’s what brings him to the well. And so let’s pick up the account, going back now to Exodus chapter 2, of what occurs at the well.

Verse 16 of chapter 2, Exodus. Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters, and they came and drew water, and they filled the troughs to water their father’s flock. Now, right away, what do we see here? We see Rebekah coming out to water her dad’s flocks. We see Rachel coming out to take care of her dad’s flocks. We see the sons—the daughters—of Jethro, who is a prince and priest in Midian. Now, remember, Midian was the son of Abraham, the fourth son of Abraham by Keturah. So this is like family nations. They’re not going to be the chosen people, but they will be the core of the Gentile God-fearing people in the context. They’re good guys, is what they’re supposed to be seen as at this point in time.

Jethro will later advise Moses properly in the wilderness in terms of governmental structure. Moses spends forty years here in Midian with Jethro, learning from him and taking that skill back to lead God’s people out of Egypt and toward the promised land. So the point here is that we’re seeing a recapitulation here of the other well stories. And like we said, then, by way of application here—children of the King, children of the great Prince, children of the great Priest, the Lord Jesus Christ, should be busy doing their father’s work.

Okay, these seven daughters were not seven princely daughters or priest’s daughters that just sat around and did nothing because of their status. They were out watering their dad’s flocks. They were working in a most menial way to accomplish tasks. And children, you’re children of the King. You have that high calling, and that high calling should equip you and prepare you to do menial tasks for the Lord Jesus Christ and for your Father in Heaven and for your father and mother on earth.

This is why you children submissively do things like cleaning bathrooms and cleaning cars and taking care of menial sort of work around the house when you’re young. You’re being trained by God so that you might be faithful in small things. You might be faithful in more. And so Midian’s Jethro’s daughters here are a picture to us of again the ideal kind of girl that we should be looking for our sons to marry—somebody who loves their father, serving their father, actively involved in the business of doing that. Right in line with Rebekah and Rachel.

Now, really, what’s going on here, and we’ll see this in John 4 a little more, but what’s being recapitulated is the sin of Eve is being rolled back. Eve didn’t serve her father in heaven. She was distracted from the things she should have been doing by the temptation to eat the forbidden fruit. Now, Adam was chiefly responsible. He put her in that position. But you see, Eve is being recovered. As well as Adam being recovered, the women that go through these stories is a picture of the reversal of the fall of Eve.

So what we end up with when we get to the Samaritan woman at the well is Adam and Eve again, in essence. And what we’ve got here is Adam and Eve—the greater Adam being portrayed, the Lord Jesus Christ, through Moses, the type—and then the recovered womanhood of Zipporah and her six sisters. That’s going to be kind of important when we get to another passage here in a minute.

Then the shepherds came and drove them away, and Moses stood up and helped them and watered their flock. So he’s like Jacob. Remember, Jacob rolls the stone away, waters the flock. Eleazar didn’t do that. Eleazar wanted the woman that was supposed to be Isaac’s daughter to water his camels. That’s okay. But the picture of the groom here jumping into action—the right bridegroom, Moses—he demonstrates his abilities, his worthiness, his desirability as a groom by jumping into service to those girls, by watering their flocks.

Now, it also, when we read that Moses stood up and helped them, that word “helped them” is a lot stronger than that. “Delivered them” is more the idea. Moses has this strong sense of justice, and that’s probably the distinctive thing that we see in this story at a well from the other stories at the well. The emphasis here seems to be on Moses overseeing and wanting justice. He wanted justice for that Hebrew slave who was being beaten by the Egyptian. He wanted justice for the Hebrew brothers to be at one with one another. And here he sees girls oppressed by shepherds, and he wants justice for them and leaps into action, fights off or chases off the shepherds, and then feeds the daughters’ flocks, Jethro’s flocks.

They then go to their father, and he says, “This is Jethro. How is it that you have come so soon today?” And they said, “An Egyptian delivered us from the hand of the shepherds, and he also drew enough water for us and watered the flock.” Water for us and he waters the flock.

Well, what’s he the picture here of? The reversal of Adam. What was Adam’s job relative to his wife and to the garden? That’s what I’m going to talk about in Poland this weekend. His job was twofold. He was supposed to guard the garden and he was supposed to improve the garden, to till it and to keep it, to nourish it, to make it more beautiful, and to keep it, to guard it from attack from without, from attacks from Satan.

And what is Moses doing? He’s guarding his future bride by beating off the shepherds that are bugging him. And he’s nurturing her as well. He’s giving her water from the well. See, Jesus is victor, and Jesus is also King. The King in the Old Testament is the shepherd. You know, we think of shepherds and pastors. That’s true in the New Testament. Old Testament—the shepherds were the kings. We discussed a section of book two of the Psalms today. At the center of a Levitical section of book two, there are two Psalms that declare that Christ is the Lord of Hosts and Christ is the great King.

Well, as Lord of Hosts, he defeats our enemies. He beats off the shepherds. And as King, he shepherds us and he gives us water from the wells. So Moses is a picture of that. It’s an ironic picture, is it not? Did you hear the way that they recite this? I don’t know why they thought he was an Egyptian, how they knew that, but the text wants us to put this together and see the irony of it.

An Egyptian delivered us from the shepherds. Now, what’s he going to do? He’s going to go back identifying with his brethren, who are the shepherds in Egypt. Remember, Egypt doesn’t like shepherds. So he’s going to go back as the shepherds, and they’re going to be delivered from the Egyptians. But here, it’s an Egyptian delivering us from the shepherds. So it’s kind of an irony here, but again, it portrays his deliverance role as God’s anointed man.

He’s the new Adam, guarding and nurturing his soon-to-be bride, as well as all women. And let me just make a point there of application for the young men. And I know that you do this, but I want you to continue to do this and to improve at it more and more, men. A man doesn’t have a guarding and nurturing responsibility just to his wife. He has it in all of his work, and he has it relative to women as a class as well.

And so, young men, you should be training yourselves not just in terms of your wife guarding and nurturing her, but all women. You should exhibit a guarding function toward women as Moses did here. He’s a picture of a good bridegroom. He’s a picture of a guy chosen by Jethro to give his daughter to. And he’s a picture, by way of service, both in ending off attacks upon the woman, being courteous to her, and then nurturing her by watering her and her flocks.

So he said to his daughters, “Where is he? Why is it that you have left the man? Call him that he may eat bread.” Moses was content to live with the man. And he gave Zipporah his daughter to Moses. And on your outline, I’ve kind of talked about this section as “Preparation in the Wilderness.” Moses is being prepared here by being given a wife, and it says that he’s contenting himself to live in the context of Jethro and Midian for this period of time. It’ll be forty years.

Again, here it’s sort of a recapitulation of Joseph. You know, are we content to serve where God has placed us in his providence, whether it’s Potiphar’s house, Potiphar’s prison, or out in the wilderness, so to speak, away from Egypt with all its culture and refinement, and where Moses was a big guy? Moses contents himself, and the idea here is he adjusts to the situation. He becomes at home with it because it’s the providence of God for him, and he then spends forty years in the wilderness preparing himself for the deliverance that God will have him be.

Then his son is born and he calls his name Gershom, for he said, “I have been a stranger in a foreign land.” I have a note on my outline here in my own notes which strange land. You know, this text is kind of filled with ironies, and there’s kind of an ironic cast to this, is there not?

Certainly, he’s most commentators would see him referring here to the fact that he’s now in a strange land for him, that he has to content himself to. But see what’s really going on behind the scenes is that Moses, representing the people of God, are coming to a lack of contentment in Egypt. They have to realize that in Egypt, they are strangers in a strange land. Good to have been there for a while, but God wants them to go back to the promised land. That then is referenced in the next few verses in this text where he speaks of the promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

It’s good to content ourselves in service where God providentially places us. But it’s also good to press toward the mark—to press toward the mark, recognizing that when we have to, as an example, a contemporary example for us, fill in the blanks on your own examples. But as us as a church, we want to be content in the physical surroundings God has given us. But we must press toward the mark and not be content here forever. We must desire a facility over which we exercise control, which we’re the head and not the tail, and use whatever appropriate, prudent, God-given steps are useful in his wisdom and providence to that end.

So there’s contentment and service, but there’s moving ahead. Moses was a stranger in a strange land in Egypt, and he would come to lead his people out. So we see here the provision here for a wife for Moses. Moses and Zipporah in Midian—from refuge at a well to fruitfulness at his new home, at least his home until his acts of deliverance come. And we’ll see in a couple of minutes in John 4 how this sort of relates to all the other well incidents as well.

But let’s briefly look at the other account of Moses and Zipporah in Exodus 4:18-27. Please turn there. This is a very difficult text of scripture. And I’m not going to clear up all the difficulties for you today. But I want you to see the big picture.

The big picture, I think, is that God has equipped Moses and given him family. Notice that all the patriarchs have these families. Wives are exceedingly important in terms of the reversal of the curse. It’s not good for man to be alone. But at the heart of the recovery that we have from Adam’s fall is the work of the Lord Jesus Christ in shedding his blood for us. That work and the obedience of the bride is in focus in Exodus 4. In fact, Moses is potentially completely absent from Exodus 4:18-27—well, not in 18, but in the critical instant we’ll talk about here in a minute.

Okay, let’s start reading. Moses went and returned to Jethro. God has come to Moses at the burning bush. “You’re going to go deliver my people.” Okay, so Moses goes back. He turns to Jethro, his father-in-law, and said to him, “Please let me go and return to my brethren who are in Egypt. See whether they are still alive.” Jethro said to Moses, “Go in peace.” And the Lord said to Moses in Midian, “Go return to Egypt, for all the men who sought your life are dead.”

See how he’s a picture of Christ? Remember, we talked during Advent season about the one who sought Christ. Like Christ, had to flee to Egypt for protection. Moses has to go to Midian. You can go back when the one who sought your life is dead. Jesus goes back after Herod dies. Then Moses took his wife and his sons and set them on a donkey and he returned to the land of Egypt. And Moses took the rod of God in his hand.

The Lord said to Moses, “When you go back to Egypt, see that you do all these wonders before Pharaoh which I have put in your hand. But I will harden his heart so he will not let the people go. Then you shall say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus says the Lord: Israel is my son, my firstborn.’ See, that’s Jesus ultimately, right? Jesus. All this is picturing Christ’s work. So I say to you, let my son go that he may serve me. But if you refuse to let him go, indeed I will kill your son, your firstborn.”

That’s the introduction to this text involving Moses, Gershom, and circumcision that we’ll now look at. Very important to see the context for the story that we’re about to look at.

Verse 24. “It came to pass on the way at the encampment.” We don’t know where the encampment was, but the designation that it’s on the way seems to place it somewhere close to the border perhaps of Egypt. The point is Moses is now sojourning at an encampment, getting next to, as it were, Egypt, where the deliverance will occur. “The Lord met him and sought to kill him.”

Now, the text doesn’t tell us who “him” is. It just uses the word “him,” not Moses. Who is he seeking to kill here? Well, it could be Moses because God was addressing Moses a little bit ahead of this, but the immediate reference seems to be the son. When Moses goes back to Pharaoh and Pharaoh doesn’t let him go, doesn’t let his people go, God is going to kill his son, his firstborn. And here we’ve got the Lord meeting somebody and seeking to kill him. And it seems that the immediate reference would have us look at Gershom here—that he’s seeking to kill Gershom, not Moses.

Or maybe because the reference is unclear, he simply wants us to think of neither Pharaoh nor his firstborn. I mean, Pharaoh and firstborn are both cut off. The reference to firstborn is to all of Egypt really. And whether you call him Pharaoh or the firstborn, all of Egypt is going to be cut off. And it seems like Moses/Gershom is going to be killed by God unless something happens.

Verse 25. “Then Zipporah took a sharp stone and cut off the foreskin of her son and cast it at Moses’ feet. Bad translation. Moses isn’t in the text there. So it’s cast it at his feet. And actually, cast is not the right word. The word is put or placed. It doesn’t mean she threw it. There’s no throwing. The word here does not mean throw. It means to touch.”

Okay, she touches the foreskin to the feet.