This sermon is from the Rev. Charles G. Dennison sermon archive, part of “The History of Salvation” series, and was preached at Grace Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Sewickley, PA, during a worship service on Sunday, March 18, 1990.

I will be reading sections from the first fifteen chapters of that book. First of all, chapter one, verses one through fourteen. Now these are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob. They came each one with his household, Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah. Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin, Dan, and Naphtali, Gad, and Asher. And all the persons who came from the loins of Jacob were seventy in number, but Joseph was already in Egypt. And Joseph died, and all his brothers, and all that generation.

But the sons of Israel were fruitful, and increased greatly, and multiplied, and became exceedingly mighty, so that the land was filled with them. Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. And he said to his people, Behold, the people of the sons of Israel are more and mightier than we. Come, let us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply, and in the event of war, they also join themselves to those who hate us, and fight against us, and depart from the land. So he appointed taskmasters over them to afflict them with hard labor. And they built for Pharaoh storage cities, pythons and ramses. But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied, and the more they spread out, so that they were in dread of the sons of Israel. And the Egyptians compelled the sons of Israel to labor rigorously, and they made their lives bitter with hard labor in mortar and bricks, and in all kinds of labor in the field, all their labors which were rigorously imposed on them.”

Then turning over to the twelfth chapter, and beginning at verse twenty-nine. Now, it came about at midnight that the Lord struck all the firstborn in the land of Egypt from the firstborn of Pharaoh, who sat on his throne, to the firstborn of the captive, who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of cattle. And Pharaoh arose in the night, he and all his servants, and all the Egyptians, and there was a great cry in Egypt, for there was no home where there was not someone dead. Then he called for Moses and Aaron at night and said, get you get out from among my people both you and the sons of Israel and go worship the Lord as you have said take both your flock and your herds as you have said and go and bless me also and the Egyptians urged the people and sent them out of the land in haste for they said we shall all be dead so the people took their dough before it was leavened with their kneading bowls bound up in the clothes on their shoulders.

Now the sons of Israel have done according to the word of Moses. For they had requested from the Egyptians articles of silver and articles of gold and clothing. And the Lord had given the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians so that they let them have their request. Thus they plundered the Egyptians. I’m turning over to chapter 14, beginning at verse 10. And as Pharaoh drew not near, the sons of Israel looked, and behold, the Egyptians were marching after them, and they became frightened, so the sons of Israel cried out to the Lord.

Then they said to Moses, Is it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? Why have you dealt with us in this way, bringing us out of Egypt? Is this not the word that we spoke to you in Egypt, saying, Leave us alone, that we may serve the Egyptians? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.

But Moses said to the people, Do not fear. stand by and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will accomplish for you today. For the Egyptians, whom you have seen today, you will never see them again forever. The Lord will fight for you while you keep silent.”

And then down to verse 21, “‘Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the Lord swept the sea back by a strong east wind all night. and turned the sea into dry land, so that the waters were divided. And the sons of Israel went through the midst of the sea on the dry land, and the waters were like a wall to them on the right hand and on their left.

Then the Egyptians took up the pursuit, and all Pharaoh’s horses, his chariots, and his horsemen went in after them into the midst of the sea. And it came about at the morning watch that the Lord looked down on the army of the Egyptians through the pillar of fire and cloud, and brought the army of the Egyptians into confusion. And he caused their chariot wheels to swerve, and he made them drive with difficulty. So the Egyptians said, Let us flee from Israel, for the Lord is fighting for them against the Egyptians.”

Then the Lord said to Moses, stretch out your hand over the sea so that the waters may come back over the Egyptians, over their chariots and their horsemen. So Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the sea returned to its normal state at daybreak, while the Egyptians were fleeing right into it. Then the Lord overthrew the Egyptians in the midst of the sea, and the waters returned and covered the chariots and the horsemen, even Pharaoh’s entire army that had gone into the sea after them, not even one of them remained. But the sons of Israel walked on dry land through the midst of the sea, and the waters were like a wall to them on their right hand and on their left. Thus the Lord saved Israel that day from the hand of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore. And when Israel saw the great power which the Lord had used against the Egyptians, the people feared the Lord, and they believed in the Lord and in his servant Moses.

Let’s pray together. Dear Father, we are mindful of your purpose to bring glory to yourself. So you have called your own, not because of goodness in them, but because of your great and inexplicable love. We pray, Lord, that we may be appreciative to the depths of our hearts and love you with all that is in us. But truly, as you have had compassion upon us, may our compassion be directed towards those who are yet uncalled, those who remain in darkness and in their sin.

We pray, our Lord, that you might see your call effective for the sake of your elect to the ends of the earth. And to that end, we pray that you will raise up preachers of righteousness who will proclaim the glad tidings to the nations. Lord, we yearn to see your churches full. And thus we pray, and thus we have our expectation, that the full complement of your elect shall be gathered from the east and west, from the north and south, They shall be congregated in assembly and brought to sit at table in the great banquet feast of our Christ, when in fact He shall return on the clouds of glory. We ask, Lord, that we would even prepare ourselves for that day, as all your people are beckoned. And Lord, we ask that when that day arrives, we would not be found wanting. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

I think it goes without saying that the book of Exodus fires up the imagination. There is the emergence in this book of a hero truly larger than life. You might say a hero on the order of the great heroes we read of in the literature of the world. Here then is the emergence of a hero larger than life. We also read in this book about an odyssey. An odyssey of a once oppressed but now liberated people. We read as well about the overturning of the world’s greatest power, the world’s greatest empire to date in the history of the world, the Egyptians.

And all these elements add up to a story of epic proportions. Now, it’s true that the Bible does not relate the story in typical epic fashion, but nevertheless, Exodus does fire up the imagination and the story presented for us here definitely has epic possibilities. And those epic possibilities were not lost on the filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille. He played it for all that it was worth.

Believe me, and I think that those of you who have seen the movie, The Ten Commandments know that well. Thinking of DeMille’s treatment of the story, we also are aware of what men are capable of when they take up biblical material. Maybe you saw the Ten Commandments and there was a certain sense of disappointment in you after having seen that film. And possibly that could be tied to the fact that DeMille was translating the story into something of an epic.

An epic designed to place before you something that would register well upon the consciousness and the hearts of men and women living today. Supremely, a tale symbolic of man’s perpetual quest for freedom. the incomparable spirit of man, as man is in quest for personal freedom. Sadly, too many have seen little more in the Exodus story than a semi-mythical, semi-historical account filled with stuff suggestive of the traditional pagan ethics. God and men on stage together battling it out so that the course of history and the destinies of peoples would be irrevocably settled.

To be sure, those who approach The Book of Exodus along these lines admit to certain value for the history that is recorded here, seeing in it something that is at least partially reliable. They recognize something here that is of historical significance. Laying aside the mythical, laying aside the dimension that brings into play the interplay of gods and men, they then proceed to interpret the story of the Exodus along purely historical lines. The general features then, they say, are accurate.

There was actually a group of Semites that fled Egypt about 1300 years before the birth of Christ. These people were led by an extraordinary figure, identified in the story as one Moses, who had been trained in Egypt’s courts as well as in the rigors of desert life, who then led this motley crew of Semites to newfound organizational heights and never before realized tribal cohesiveness. These Semites, or Hebrews, thus became a people, a nation, of political consequence, of world significance, marking in themselves and in their history a significant advance for civilization as they moved from being but a band of Bedouin slaves into an estate of remarkable kingdom proportion.

Now, I think it is obvious to you, as we move through this description, the interesting feature of it, namely, that it is possible to give an account of the exodus, of the historic events behind it, without making a single mention of the person of God.

You’re not to think, however, that those who would engage in this kind of approach to the book of Exodus, almost a purely historical, purely sociological, purely cultural approach to the book, are disinterested in the subject of God, in the subject of theology.

They have, however, a distinct way of introducing it. Actually, as is in the case of the great epic poems from paganism, there is an attempt here to ground the present claims of a people when divine design. This is the way it works itself out. There are people presently who are suggesting that the book of Exodus is overlaid with mythology, filled full of legend. Beneath this mythology, behind these legends, is a foundation of historical fact. The historical fact is something that is there irrespective of any theology whatsoever. one need not make reference to God at all in explaining what happened when this group of Hebrews came out of the land of Egypt. But in a later day, say 800 years after the actual event of the Exodus, these people who now live in the land of Canaan have to come up with explanations that satisfy the people with respect to themselves as a nation, their constitution as a nation, and with respect to the legitimacy of the various institutions that are well in place within their society. They do this by the route of appealing to divine design. Is this any different than any other people?

We look at the Greeks, we look at the Romans, we look at the justifications for their state, for their institutions, and the appeal that they make to the gods themselves in vindicating their own position. Thus it is with the Hebrews. They too have progressed now to the point where they call upon the heavens to justify present activities and present institutions, later established within their community and within their society. Therefore, the people of a latter day, during the kingdom of Israel, are responsible for formulating the account as we have it before us here. That is what some are saying.

These latter-day Hebrews, from the 7th century possibly, then read back into their ancient history and tradition and legends their view of God, as he, through the long process of the evolution of their own religious consciousness, now appears to them. That God, some 800 years after the actual exodus, provides the theological and legal foundations that justify Israel’s national institutions, its courts, its cult, and its kingdom claims. I hope you recognize the position of the liberals. I also hope that you realize, that you recognize just how backward these people have been. In fact, those who approach the book of Exodus on this basis, from this point of view, have so twisted things that the question now exists whether there is truly any link between them and the people they claim to describe.

In what sense can these critics, can these liberals claim to be of the same faith with the Hebrews about whom they write. How can they claim to be of the same faith with these Hebrews who wrote or heard the Exodus story? Is it not obvious that whoever wrote the story believed that he was writing the truth? Is it not clear that subsequent generations of Hebrews accepted the account as truth?

Is it not clear that in the mind of these Hebrews, God had literally, literally intervened in space and time? He had intervened in history. He had revealed himself. Is it not clear that according to these Hebrews and the faith that they held dear, the best of them, that it is the true God, the living God, who has asserted himself and introduced himself really, substantively, into the life of these people? And so they believed, and so they confessed. It wasn’t a matter of debate for them. Their faith was such that they held fast to the fact that God, this God whom they worshipped and served, had in fact revealed himself specifically and personally to Moses.

And he had commissioned Moses to be his instrument through whom he would visit Egypt with judgments and bring salvation to Israel. This God, then, so these Israelites confessed and believed, had actually worked. There was a pillar of fire. There was a cloud. He had actually worked.

He had led Israel out by his powerful hand. He actually did superintend the slaying of Egypt’s firstborn, the chief of all their strength. He had actually led them through the sea as through the wilderness, and he had provided for them in the way of the wilderness. He had triumphed gloriously, the horse and his rider had he thrown into the sea, and they sank as lead into the deep.”

And thus, you see, in the mind of these Hebrews, it was not the movement of culture. It was not the transformations of civilization as a people moved from a Bedouin existence to a urban form of life. In view was not some sort of natural process, an evolution of peoples and society. In view was not an evolution of religious consciousness. and that through the natural processings that take place as you move historically from one epoch to another. No, not movements of cultures, transformations of society, not natural forces of history and sociology at work. No, not the natural powers and forces of religious consciousness going through some sort of evolutionary process itself. None of these things stand at the center of the book of Exodus.

Rather, what happens is an incomparable act of God and event. An event that stands over against the predictable movements of culture, the scientifically observable transformations of civilizations, what you might expect sociologically, psychologically to take place, what is observable anywhere else in the world. At the center of what is transpiring here is the incomparable act of God, an event. A free act of divine self-revelation in word and deed that stands indelibly etched upon the consciousness of these people. God’s direct word and deed does in fact demand response as one generation passes and another arises. But the substance of the faith, you see, remains intact It remains always the same, seemingly, as it recalls that event that stands center stage for these people. And this is what then binds generation to generation, as there goes out from God’s spokesman that demand for a like faith in the word and work of God by which he has formed for himself a people by his sovereign, gracious, loving power. Thus to bring to himself a people of his election and choice that they might inherit the blessing that he has promised for them.

Will you try to explain this by simply reviewing the ebb and flow of cultures and civilizations? Will you try to explain this by studying the history of the religious consciousness of man as he moves from point to point? To approach things that way, is to miss the point altogether. The Bible then, in the Exodus story, does not put before us some sort of theologizing, theologized rendering of ancient social history. You know, the sort of history that on the basis of the normal course and development of social institutions and the course of history is perfectly reasonable and possible. Given the canons of historical development, something that is perfectly reasonable and possible. The point of Exodus is not to convince you that what you read here is possible.

In fact, it is to convince you of just the opposite. That what you read here is utterly impossible. It is utterly impossible. What we face then, in reading Exodus 1-15, is the inconceivable. The inconceivable. The point being that these Hebrew slaves could not possibly be salvaged, given the particulars of the situation. being in bondage under the rule of the world’s greatest power of its day. This is simply not something naturally possible, achievable. It is certainly not attributable to the normal course, the natural course, of historical, societal, cultural pressures.

No. God acted. God spoke. And by His word and by His will, by His word and by His deed, the inconceivable, the impossible, happens. Is this not then what that glorious verse, maybe as glorious a verse as there is in the first fourteen chapters of Exodus, that glorious verse Exodus 14, 13 conveys that Moses said to the people, do not fear. Stand by and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will accomplish for you today.

Here were the Israelites. Before them was the sea. How are they going to get across the sea? Coming down upon them are the chariots of the world’s greatest military force of the time. How are they possibly going to escape? The point is not to place before you that which is conceivable, that which is possible, that which is explainable historically in terms of the development of societies as we would consider that. Their situation is utterly hopeless. They cannot be delivered. But the command comes, stand and see the salvation of God. God intervenes. He acts. He makes a way. All right. We establish the fact then that what transpires here is not to be explained by the natural course of the ebb and flow of civilization and society.

But is it to be explained along another level? Possibly along the level of the Hebrews themselves, looking at them now, as if there were something within them that would make this then intelligible to us. conceivable possible, as if they had some resource within themselves that then would lead us to conclude that, yes, it’s conceivable, it’s possible that they would be delivered.

Did they have some sort of hidden device, some sort of hidden resource that they could use, utilize, Was there some sort of power inherent to them? Were they mentally superior to even the Egyptians? Were they spiritually superior to them? Was there an integrity to them that somehow, in the situation, would prove them to be of infinite more worth than those who were now coming down upon them? Did they have some kind of moral recourse by which they could confound those who set themselves against them.

But not even this is a possible explanation, for they are not set apart because they have some hidden resource that condemns them then in the face of this situation. They are without any resource at all. They are powerless. They are slave people. They have no military might on their side. They do not prove themselves to be mentally, spiritually, morally superior to those who are their enemies. In this regard, then, The explanation does not lie within them, but within God, who has chosen them, because they are weak, because they are nothing, because in fact they do have nothing with which to commend themselves.

This is demonstrated in the Passover. What is it in the Passover that distinguishes the Israelite from the Egyptian? Something in the Hebrew? Something in that Israelite? It’s a lamb, provided by whom? God himself, in his command, has made provision for Israel by way of that lamb. The Lamb’s blood then smeared upon the doorposts and the lintels of the people of Israel. And God passing over, not destroying their firstborn, because sacrifice has been made, substitution has been rendered.

The conclusions that we come to with respect to the Old Testament exodus are precisely the conclusions we come to when we deal with the New Testament exodus. Have you thought of the New Testament exodus? If you turn, for instance, to Luke chapter 9, you can read about the New Testament exodus beginning with verse 28.

And some eight days after these sayings, it came about that he took along Peter and John and James, this is Luke 9, verse 28, and went up to the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face became different and his clothing became white and gleaming. And behold, two men were talking with him. they were Moses and Elijah, who, appearing in glory, were speaking of his… the word there is translated departure.

In the Greek, it is exodus. They’re speaking of his exodus, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. The New Exodus bears great and intentional similarity to the Old Exodus. But as we take stock of the similarities between the Old and the New Exoduses, none speak greater to us than these. The New Exodus, no less than the old, demands a faith in the word and work of God.

How is it possible for those to say that they are the friend of the gospel, the friend of a biblical faith, who deny that God was actually, really, substantively at work in Jesus Christ, in his death and in his resurrection. That these events, so-called, are overlaid with myth and legend, and therefore are not to be taken at face value by us. How is it possible for people who speak like that to claim any affinity to biblical faith? It is utterly impossible, and such attitudes are to be Such attitudes are not to be tolerated in the Church of Jesus Christ.

The second great similarity is this. The New Exodus, no less than the Old, is explained only on the basis of the supernatural intervention and power of God, which is at work beyond and even contrary to the forces of culture, society, and the evolutions of world government and world consciousness. What you are face-to-face with here in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the impossible, not the possible. Explainable only on the basis of the intervention of the God who is capable of such things.

And finally, the New Exodus, no less than the old, depends upon the recognition of the utter resourcelessness of the people destined to be saved, and the introduction on their behalf of a substitute, a sacrifice, a lamb slain for them, because they lack all inner resources They have no moral, spiritual, or mental capability that distinguishes them one whit from anybody else on the face of the earth. They cannot commend themselves to God. God, therefore, must make substitution for them, which he willingly does through the sacrifice of the new Passover Lamb, the Lamb of God, destined to take away their sin. Well, that gives us an introduction to the Book of Exodus, and we’ll have one more message on material…

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