Moses’ Parents: Faith to Hide a Child (Hebrews 11:23; Exodus 1-2) | Worship Service

And welcome to Kootenai Church. We're gonna open with a psalm in 117. It says, Praise Yahweh, all nations. Laud Him, all peoples, for His loving-kindness prevails over us, and the truth of Yahweh is everlasting.

Praise YAH. Let's stand.

Together as we sing this morning, Oh What a Day. For the scripture reading this.

Morning, you please turn to the book of Acts chapter 7. Book of Acts chapter 7. And while you're doing that, I just have one announcement for this morning, and that is just a reminder that along the front of our building out there, some of the handicapped parking signs have fallen off and fallen down.

We need to replace those. So just remember, please, to keep everything against the front of the building out there open for those who have handicapped needs. The signs are not there. I think some people kind of pull up there and use those spots, and we have a few people who are elderly and need some of those spots accessible.

So please remember that. Acts chapter 7, and find verse 17. A little bit of context, this is the Deacon Stephen who is giving his address before the Sanhedrin as they are getting ready to stone him. He has been brought in, and he is reviewing the history of the nation of Israel, recounting God's deliverances and God's goodness to them.

And so this is part of that address as he addresses Moses. Acts chapter 7, verse 17. Moses was educated in all the learning of the Egyptians, and he was a man of power in words and deeds. But when he was approaching the age of 40, it entered his mind to visit his brethren, the sons of Israel.

And when he saw one of them being treated unjustly, he defended him and took vengeance for the oppressed by striking down the Egyptian. And he supposed that his brethren understood that God was granting them deliverance through him, but they did not understand.

On the following day, he appeared to them as they were fighting together, and he tried to reconcile them in peace, saying, Man, you're brethren, why do you injure one another? But the one who was injuring his neighbor pushed him away, saying, Who made you a ruler and a judge over us?

You do not mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian yesterday, do you? At this remark, Moses fled and became an alien in the land of Midian, where he became the father of two sons. Will you stand with me as we pray?

Let's bow our heads. Our Father, it is by your great grace and mercy that you have delivered us, your people, for a salvation that is yet to be revealed in the final time. We thank you that we can, by your grace, long for that final redemption and look forward to the day when you will and have promised to redeem us.

We thank you for the salvation that we have. We gather here each Lord's Day to celebrate your great goodness, undeserved grace, and unmerited kindness toward us, that you bestow upon us and your Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.

It is because of that mercy that we are saved and that we look to you, that we trust you, that we wait for you to fulfill your every promise and to come and to deliver us, your people. We thank you for the salvation that we do now possess, that you have set us aside and saved us, and that, by your grace, you continue to sanctify us.

And it is our desire, Lord, that you would, according to your own purposes, secure us everlastingly and bring us to that final state. We can look confidently forward to that, knowing that you will complete the good work that you have begun in us until the day of Christ Jesus.

So we pray your blessing upon our worship and our fellowship, our service to one another, our singing, our preaching, the reading of your word, that you would be honored and glorified through it, for the glory of Christ our Lord, in whose name we pray.

Amen.

In Philippians chapter 2, verses 8 through 11, it says, Being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Join us as we sing, Turn Your Eyes.

Faith in the Hidden Child of Exodus

Will you open your Bibles now, please, to Hebrews chapter 11. Hebrews chapter 11, and.

Find your place at verse 23, and let's begin with prayer. Our Father, we do now turn our eyes to you and into your word, and we pray that our time here would be spent well, and that you would encourage and strengthen our hearts.

We pray that you would increase our faith and strengthen our faith and help us to see you in the pages of the word that you have given, in the revelation that you have provided. We pray that we may see Christ, see your hand of providence, your hand of goodness, and your promises to us.

We ask this and your blessing upon this time, in the name of Christ our Lord. Amen. Beginning in verse 23, by faith Moses when he was born was...because they saw he was a beautiful child and they were not afraid of the king's edict.

By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to endure treatment with the people of God, ill treatment with the people of God, than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin, considering the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward.

By faith he left Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king, for he endured as seeing him who is unseen. By faith he kept the Passover and the sprinkling of the blood, so that he who destroyed the firstborn would not touch them.

By faith they passed through the Red Sea as though they were passing through dry land, and the Egyptians when they attempted it were drowned. You get to verse 28, we have moved now from Joseph to Moses, and we are going from one prince in Egypt to another prince of Egypt, and from one person of royalty to another.

And there are another a number of similarities, and I would just remind you that when we get to the end of verse 22, we're dealing with Joseph. By faith Joseph when he was dying made mention of the exodus of the sons of Israel, and gave orders concerning his bones.

And there are a number of similarities between Joseph and Moses. There are some interesting connections between the two of them. For instance, both of them enjoyed the riches of Egypt. They had those riches at their disposal and for their own use.

They enjoyed high positions of prestige and reputation and honor in the nation of Egypt. They both were loved and respected by their kinsmen and their countrymen. The Jews loved and respected Moses, and the Egyptians loved and respected Moses, and the Jews loved and respected Joseph, and Joseph likewise was loved and respected by the Egyptians.

Both men forsook the privileges of Egypt for the promises of God. Moses ended up doing this in life as he walked away from all the treasures of Egypt and chose instead, as our passage says, to have ill treatment with the people of God rather than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin.

So Moses forsook those in life, and Joseph forsook the treasures of Egypt in death, as he didn't want to be buried and honored in Egypt with the tomb. Instead, he chose to have his bones carried up with him to the promised land when God would fulfill the promise to bring the nation up.

Both of them spent their formative years in Egypt. Joseph, of course, was sold into Egypt, and Moses was born into Egypt. Joseph was dragged into Egypt against his will, and both men worked to preserve the chosen nation of Israel.

Joseph did so by bringing the people down into Egypt to preserve them from a famine. Moses preserved the nation of Israel by taking the Israelites out of Egypt in the Exodus to deliver them from slavery.

Both Moses and Joseph were recipients of divine revelation. Neither of these men, though we can attach them to the Jewish nation, neither of these men suffered under the slavery that was inflicted upon their Jewish kinsmen.

Both of these men enjoyed the treasures and pleasures of a palace and never suffered under that affliction of slavery. Both men knew of God's promises, believed God's promises, anticipated the reward that was to come, and as a result, they chose, both of them, to be identified with the Jewish people rather than the Egyptian people, though each person chose that in a different way.

And the last similarity between the two of them, at least the last that I'm going to bring up today, is the fact that both of these men had parents of faith. They both had the blessing and the privilege of a godly lineage.

And while Moses is mentioned in verse 23, which is our passage for this morning, while Moses is mentioned there, it is really the faith of his parents that is described. So it is not right to consider the faith of Joseph, Jacob, or Isaac without considering the faith of their respective parents.

Similarly, it is almost impossible to understand the faith and the development of Moses apart from the faith of his parents, and that's what verse 23 clues us into. It's his parents' faith that is mentioned.

And though we're focusing on Moses, at least the story of Moses, verse 23 begins with something of his parents describing, at least here, his godly lineage. Verse 23 says, by faith, Moses, when he was born, was hidden for three months by his parents because they saw he was a beautiful child and they were not afraid of the King Zedek.

That is our passage for this morning, though that is not what we're going to address right now. We will do this verse, I promise you, and get through the end of it before our time is over here today. But this story is told back in Exodus chapter 1 and chapter 2, so I want you to turn in your Bibles back to the book of Exodus, to chapter 1, and we're going to catch the context of this, see what incident it is that is being described here by the author of Hebrews.

In Exodus chapter 1, the very beginning of the verse, we're going to catch the story. We're just going to go through chapter 1, about the middle of chapter 2, then we'll flip back to Hebrews chapter 11, and we'll go through the entire verse.

It sounds daunting, but we will get to all of it, I promise you. Verse 1 of Exodus chapter 1, now these are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob. We saw that back when we looked at Jacob's faith.

Each one of them with his household, Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin, Dan, and Naphtali, Gad, and Asher. All the persons who came from the loins of Jacob were 70 in number, but Joseph was already in Egypt.

Verse 6, Joseph died and all his brothers and all that generation. And that's where we left off at the end of the book of Genesis. In fact, just a couple of verses earlier in your Bible, Genesis chapter 50, verse 26, the very last verse of the book of Genesis.

So Joseph died at the age of 110 years, and he was embalmed and placed in a coffin in Egypt. And that's how Genesis ends. So now Moses, in the first six verses, reminds us all the children of Israel come down into Egypt, they're all there, but then that entire generation died off.

Verse 7, 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.

Now there's obviously some time that has passed between Joseph dying and verses 6 and...verses 7 and 8. Verses 7 and 8 say that there's a...the children of Israel have multiplied. How much time has passed between the death of Joseph and the birth of Moses, we don't know exactly.

And that is because there is some difficulty in nailing down the exact date of the Exodus. That is due to the fact that...the dates vary a little bit due to the fact that in Galatians chapter 3, Paul describes for...or speaks of 430 years between the giving of the Abrahamic covenant and the giving of the law.

So if we date that...if we date the Exodus from the time...430 years from the time that God gave the covenant to Abraham in Genesis chapter 15, if that's our...our benchmark for the first of that, then of course you have 430 years later that Moses is at Mount Sinai getting the law.

Paul says the...the law given 430 years does not nullify the first covenant. So he puts...that compresses all of those events into a very short period of time. But if the 430 years or the 400 years describes the time of slavery, then of course you have 200 years from the time that God gave the promise to Abraham to the time of Joseph, 280 some years.

And then after that, you have a period of time that passes where a king arises who does not know Joseph, and the people multiply, and then you have 400 years of slavery after that. So that stretches out that a little bit.

They say, can't you just go into Egypt and read the chronicles of Egypt? Go to the hieroglyphics and see the point where the...the Red Sea is drawn on the cave wall, and it shows millions of people passing through that and date the Exodus from something you find in Egypt?

No, you can't because ancient history doesn't work that way. It's not exactly...not everything that was recorded or happened in Egypt was recorded in Egyptian hieroglyphs, and so our understanding of history is a little sketchy.

So somewhere between Joseph to Moses is somewhere between 60 years to 250 years, depending on how we date that 430 years. Does the 430 years begin at God giving the covenant to Abraham in Genesis 15, or at the birth of Isaac, or at Joseph going down into Egypt, or at Jacob going down into Egypt, or at the beginning of their enslavement?

That's the question. So there's a couple of centuries of leeway there that we have to deal with. And by the way, that's not significant to anything in terms of our understanding of Scripture. And when we come up with things like this, we say, we're not exactly sure how this worked out, or when this starts, or when this ends.

The problem is always with us, never with the text of Scripture. The fact that we don't know exactly when that is to be dated, and how long that that took, and exactly how those things fell out that way, that is because we lack some kind of understanding about the text, or about what the text is describing.

It doesn't say anything about the incompleteness or imperfection of Scripture at all. However it happened, the Exodus begins when Moses...or happens around Moses' 80th year. He's 80 years old at the time of the Exodus.

So Exodus chapter 1 verses 9 through 14. He said to the people, behold, the people of the sons of Israel are more and mightier than we. Come, let us deal wisely with them, or else they will multiply. And in the event of war, they will join themselves to those who hate us, and fight against us, and depart from the land.

Pharaoh began to sit down with some of his advisors and discuss the Jewish problem. Nothing new under the sun, is there? Began to discuss the Jewish problem. These people are multiplying. We have to do something to deal with these people.

And notice that Pharaoh's concern is not that the Jews would multiply to the point where they would be able to overtake them, and possess the land of Egypt. That was not his concern. His concern is that they would overthrow that rule, and get numerous to the point where they would be able to leave on their own.

Pharaoh doesn't want that to happen. It's almost as if the Jews, at least some of the faithful ones, had some idea of what God had promised to them, and Pharaoh understood there are enough crazy people amongst those Jews who think that God's going to give them the land, and they're ready to go back there.

And if they continue to multiply, they just might decide to march out of Egypt someday. So he comes up with a brilliant plan, brilliantly wicked. Verse 11, so they appointed taskmasters over them to afflict them with hard labor.

They built for Pharaoh storage cities, Pithom 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. The Egyptians compelled the sons of Israel to labor rigorously, and they made their lives bitter with hard labor in mortar, and bricks, and all kinds of labor in the field.

All their labors which they rigorously imposed on them. Moses is emphasizing something there, you know what it was? Rigor and labor. The Egyptians set out to make their lives absolutely miserable. By the time of the Exodus, the nation of Israel probably, one of the most conservative numbers that we would, would be around 1 .5 to 2 million people at the time of the Exodus.

Now how long would it take for the 70 mentioned in verse, what is it, five of Exodus chapter one? How long would it take for 70 people to become roughly 1 .5 million? Well back then, they're living longer, having more children, large families, years for that to happen.

In fact, they could reach that number of people in a couple of centuries with a population growth rate of about 2 .5%, which is what we had for most of the 20th century worldwide. So it's not astronomical, it's not unbelievable for that to happen.

Rapid increase in people, and the Egyptians feared that. Verse one, chapter 1 verse 15, then the king of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Sifra, and the other named Pua, and he said, when you're helping the Hebrew women to give birth and see them upon the birthstool, if it is a son, then you shall live.

Population control was Pharaoh's answer. Population control is the answer of the ungodly and the wicked always, because population control is an anti-life perspective, and therefore it is an anti-God perspective.

So Pharaoh comes up with basically a sex-selective postnatal abortion philosophy. What he said was wicked, what he's doing is wicked. There is no difference between the child that is born and the child that is in the womb that would allow, but restrain or refrain from killing the child outside of the womb.

There are only four kinds of differences. Difference in size, difference in level of development, difference in environment, and difference in degree of dependency. And none of those four differences, size, level of development, environment, or degree of dependency, are morally significant as to the question of whether the life in the womb is valuable and worth saving or not.

Just because something's smaller than you doesn't mean you have a right to kill it. Just because something is in a different level of development than you doesn't mean you have a right to kill it. Just because a four-year-old is less developed than a 14-year-old doesn't mean we can kill the four-year-old and not the 14-year-old.

Just because something is in the womb as opposed to out of the womb doesn't mean we have a right to kill it. Just because something has a greater degree of dependency upon its parents does not mean that we have the right to kill it.

A one-year-old has a greater degree of dependency upon its parents than a 10-year-old does, but it doesn't mean we can kill the one-year-old and not kill the 10-year-old. So these four different differences between the person that you are now and the person that you were then does not justify us killing you then, but not now.

So what Pharaoh has advocated here is morally reprehensible, but let's be clear, it is no more morally different, it is no different morally speaking than what the bloodthirsty throngs of Moloch worshipers in our own day are demanding the right to do.

It's evil, it's wicked, they want it enshrined under law, they want to use words like choice and privacy in healthcare to sanitize the imagery in our own mind, but it is the same thing. Pharaoh feared that he had something to lose if these babies lived, they would infringe upon his economic feasibility, his economic viability, it would be very inconvenient to have more Jews in the land, so Pharaoh is just espousing Margaret Sanger's Marthusian ethics in what he is advocating here.

Margaret Sanger is the founder of Planned Parenthood and she once wrote, the most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it. Well, Pharaoh would concur with that, Pharaoh would agree with that.

Population control is an idea that is so anti-life and thus so anti-God that every time you hear it espoused, whether it's by Bill Gates or any occupant of the White House, any time you hear it espoused, you can know that it was belched up out of the deep, dark, demonic bowels of hell itself.

That's what Pharaoh was advocating, verse 17, but the midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt had commanded them, but let the boys live. So the king of Egypt called for the midwives and said to them, why have you done this thing and let the boys live?

The midwives said to Pharaoh, because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife can get to them. So they disobeyed the king, then they lied about what they had done to Pharaoh.

So to preserve their life and the lives of innocent babies, they lied to Pharaoh about the condition of the Hebrew women. Meanwhile, they were allowing the women to give birth to these babies and then they were actively working to preserve the life of these babies.

Verse 20, so God was good to the midwives and the people multiplied and became very mighty because the midwives feared God. He established households for them. Then Pharaoh commanded all his people saying, every son who is born you are to cast into the Nile and now Pharaoh takes his policy from the midwives and makes it a national kill order upon Jewish baby boys.

He made his program national and now all the Egyptians are commanded to execute Hebrew babies whenever they are seen by throwing them into the Nile. They have a license to kill Jewish boys and of course this would in little over one generation wipe out the entire population of the nation of Israel because people are dying and if there are no men to reproduce, it wouldn't take long before you would virtually decimate the entire nation and bring them to extinction.

This is an extinction order, it's going to take a little bit of time to unfold but we don't want to go. We don't want to go on time but if we just kill small bits of them in pieces when they are young, then that would be sufficient.

That is his idea.

Those are dark times, right? We live in dark times, not quite that dark. They are dark. But into that dark period of time, into that dark circumstance, God brings a deliverer. Chapter 2 verse 1, now a man from the house of Levi went and married a daughter of Levi.

This is a reference to the tribe of Levi which would probably be tens of thousands of people so this is not a man marrying his sister of the same household. No, the very fact that you thought I was going to bring up Clark Fork there is enough.

That was enough. So that's not what happened here just in case you were born in Clark Fork and you're thinking, See, it's biblical. It's not at all. Verse 2, the woman conceived and bore a son and when she saw that he was beautiful, she hid him for three months.

Now that's the verse that the author of Hebrews is referring to. I'll just read to you again. Don't turn back there just yet but Hebrews 11, 23, by faith Moses, look at verse 2 of Exodus, by faith Moses when he was born to his parents because they saw he was a beautiful child and they were not afraid of the king's edict.

Now that's the reference that the verse 2 is what the author of Hebrews is referring.

To.

Verse 2, how did all of this work out? Let's just read the rest of the story. Verse 3, but when she could hide him no longer, she got a wicker basket and covered it over with tar and pitch. Then she put the child into it and set it among the reeds by the bank of the Nile.

His sister stood at a distance to find out what would happen to him. The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the Nile with her maidens walking alongside the Nile. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid and she brought it to her.

When she opened it, she saw the child and behold the boy was crying and she had pity 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?

Pharaoh's daughter said to her, go ahead. So the girl went and called the child's mother, that is Moses' 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. The child grew and she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter and he became her son. She named him Moses and said, because I drew him out of the water. Now there's a lot to unpack there that we're not going to unpack, but I just want you to notice how by the providence of God, the faith of Moses' parents ended up preserving him, providentially preserving him, sparing his life and actually restoring Moses back to his mother so that she could have a hand in raising him even though he became the grandson of Pharaoh.

Pharaoh raged against God and his purposes and God had promised to multiply the nation of Israel, but Pharaoh had set to extinguish the nation of Israel and God had promised to take them up out of Egypt and bring them into the promised land and Pharaoh set his heart on keeping them in the land of Egypt.

Now when God's promises and purposes are going one direction and some wicked king's promises and purposes are going another direction and these hit at a cross, when these two meet, guess who wins?

Every single one of them.

God does.

The kings of the earth can plot and scheme and they do. They can conjure up all of their wicked plans and their wicked designs and their wicked legislation and they can set their sights against God and against His people and against the kingdom of heaven.

They can do all of that, but Psalm 2 verse 4 says, he who sits in the heavens laughs. God scoffs at them. That is one of my favorite verses. It should be at the top of whatever news aggregator website you use.

The Lord sits in the heavens and He laughs. He scoffs at the kings of the earth. So read that verse first and then read all of the crazy, insane headlines that follow underneath of that. But keep that verse at the top of your banner.

Pharaoh thought he had a walk on it. He had the power. He had the authority. He had the means. And he thought his wicked plans could end up thwarting what God had promised and purposed for the nation of Israel.

And God ended up using Pharaoh's wicked plans to accomplish primarily two things. Number one, the preservation and deliverance of Israel's Deliverer so that, catch this, by the providence of God, Moses ended up being raised right under Pharaoh's nose in his own house.

The very one whom Pharaoh had ordered his execution, his killing, God worked so that he would be raised right in Pharaoh's own home. God sought to it that the Deliverer for Israel would have the same home and be trained in the same schools and live in the same house as Pharaoh, the Deliverer in his house.

He never saw that coming, did he? Nobody saw that coming. Second, God used the wicked plans to prepare the Hebrews to leave. Several weeks ago, I posed the question, what do you do when you have the entire promised line seed, all of those to whom the promise of the land has been given, and they're all in Egypt and they're enjoying and they're multiplying and they're buying land and they're prosperous there and it's comfortable there, it's more comfortable and luxurious than they have ever enjoyed living out in tents in the promised land, and then they begin to multiply.

How is it that you get those people willing to leave all of the comforts of Egypt? Here's what you do, you take away all of the comforts of Egypt and make them utterly miserable and they will long to leave that situation.

How do you get Christians, by the way, to wish to leave this world and pine for the next? You take away all the comforts of this world and pine for the next. Now turn back to Hebrews chapter 11, I promised you we'd go back there and we will, Hebrews chapter 11.

Now we're going to take a look at how the author of Hebrews uses this story to illustrate the nature of faith. Hebrews chapter 11, let's read verse 23 again, by faith Moses when he was born was hidden for three months by his parents because they saw he was a beautiful child and they were not afraid of the king's edict.

You'll notice that Moses' parents are not named, in fact they weren't named in the passage that we read just in chapter 1 and chapter 2 of Exodus. Anybody know off the top of your head what Moses' parents' names were?

Marian, no, it was his sister, Amram, yes somebody did, I didn't. I had to go back and look at it, Exodus chapter 6 verse 20, Amram married his father's sister Jochebed and she bore him Aaron and Moses and the length of Amram's life was 137 years.

Amram married his father's sister Jochebed. That seems a little odd in our era, in our age and it is by common, it was not uncommon in the ancient world, it was not uncommon in the ancient world. In the ancient world you would marry as far as you could walk, do you understand that?

You would marry as far away as you could walk. In other words, if you lived in a little village with 60, 80, 100 people in it and there were no real marriable people of your age that you kind of liked and then your family decided to take a vacation and walk 12 miles to the next village where 60, 80, 100 people and you see this cute little girl across the courtyard and you ask your mom and dad, hey, do you know who she is, who's that?

And they say, that's your cousin. I'm like, ooh, let's make it work. That's my option, that's my option. If I have to marry as far away as I can walk and that's all I got, then that's what you.

Choose.

So it was not uncommon in the ancient world. You might think that this happened all the time in the nation of Israel. Yeah, it did happen a lot in the nation of Israel. It also happened a lot in every other ancient culture and custom on the face of the planet because that's just how those things happen.

So both parents, though they're not mentioned in Exodus, Exodus 1 and 2, both parents had a role in hiding the child for the three months and putting him in the basket and raising the infant. The New Testament in verse 23 does involve both parents.

So in Exodus 1 and 2, Moses' father really comes up with this idea and does these activities and Moses' father seems absent from the text. But in verse 23, it mentions the faith of both of his parents who were involved in this.

In Acts chapter 7 verse 20, it says, it was at this time that Moses was born and he was lovely in the sight of God and he was nurtured three months in his father's home. So three months is spent in his father's home.

Both Moses' father and his mother are involved in this decision to try and preserve him, to protect him, to keep him hidden, and it really could not have been otherwise. You can't imagine that Moses' mother would have been involved and not his father.

So both of the parents, both parents' faith is on display and is involved in Moses' life in those early stages. And Moses would have been impacted by this and, of course, he had influence from his mother after she got done nursing him.

She would have been a maid with whom he would have been familiar and probably would have grown up his whole life knowing who his kinsmen were, to whom he belonged, and the story of a lot of this would have been revealed to Moses at a young age.

And you see the godly lineage that we've noticed in Hebrews chapter 11 so far as we've talked about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, right? We've noticed the faith that goes from generation to generation to generation there.

And it's something to note just the impact that a godly parent can have upon their kids. That's not to say that every godly parent is going to have only godly children, but it is to say that parents have a significant and important factor in the faith of their children.

And we make the error of assuming that just because we have faith that our children will follow in that, and therefore we don't have anything to do with it. We also make the opposite error of assuming that if we have raised our children in the fear and admonition of the Lord, but they do something to walk away from the faith or make a stupid decision, that we somehow bear the blame for that.

So while parents are an important factor, they are not the sole and determining factor in the faith and the faithfulness of their children. But in Moses' case, as well as the other patriarchs that we've looked at, the faith of previous generations obviously had something to bear, had a salutary impact upon them, and really the recognition of this should serve as a motivation to us as parents to do everything that we can to raise our children in the fear and admonition of the Lord while trusting the Lord to use that to accomplish His purposes in the lives of our children.

Notice their action in verse 23. By faith, they hid Him for three months, tried to conceal Him, and you can, if you've ever had a newborn child, you know that this would become increasingly difficult.

You can imagine the fearful situations that they would have faced when someone, when they know that there was a kill order issued by Pharaoh, and they're living, and Egyptians are walking up and down the streets, and the baby starts to cry or rustle in the other.

Room.

The fear of that would strike into your heart, right? You can imagine the sort of, your heart would skip a beat when there's a knock on the door in the middle of the night, late at night, or early in the morning, or the middle of the day, or after the baby has finally cried and you've got him settled down, and suddenly somebody knocks at the door.