“A Long, Long Time!” – FBC Morning Light (2/2/2024)

Well, a good Friday morning to you. We're wrapping up this another week, looking forward to the weekend, and I trust you are looking forward to gathering with God's people on the Lord's Day. I hope you'll make that a priority, and that you will gather with God's people, worship the Lord together, and grow in grace and knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Today in our Bible reading plan, we're reading Exodus chapters 12 through 15, and we're finally going to get the people of Israel, the Hebrew people, out of the land of Egypt. But what I want to focus on is a couple of verses in chapter 12, where it says this.

The sojourn of the children of Israel who lived in Egypt was 430 years, and it came to pass at the end of 430 years, on that very same day, it came to pass that all the armies of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt.

We read that, and the words roll off our tongues, and they process through our brains, and then we move on to what happens next. We're caught up in the excitement of this Exodus experience. But there's a lot to those couple of verses.

God's Promise to Abraham and Jacob Across Centuries

All the way back in Genesis chapter 46, when Jacob had found out that his son Joseph was still alive, and that he was second in command in Egypt, Joseph had invited Jacob and all his family to come and move to Egypt, and he would take care of them.

That was a promise Jacob was glad to accept, but he was also a little bit reluctant. He was reluctant because God had promised to Abraham's descendants the land of Canaan. Should he leave the land of Canaan?

Should he go and sojourn to Egypt? The Lord appeared to Jacob in Genesis 46, and the Lord says to Jacob, don't be afraid to go. Go on to Egypt. I will be with you as you go, as you sojourn there, and I will bring you back up out of Egypt.

When he says, I'll bring you back up, he's talking about his descendants, his offspring. I'll bring you up from the land of Egypt, and your son Joseph will close your eyes in death. Well, Joseph did close Jacob's eyes in death.

But this business of coming up out of the land of Egypt, that promise was made 430 years ago. Four hundred and thirty years. Let that sink in about just how long that is, 430 years ago. What was 430 years ago from right now?

Four hundred and thirty years ago from right now was prior to 1600. There was no King James Version of the Bible yet, and there was no United States of America. There was hardly any European population in this new world.

This new world was just early discovered. It was hardly even on anybody's map or radar screen. Think all of this happened in the last 430 years in world history, and even in our nation's history. We can't even process what it was like to live 200 years ago, or at the birth of our nation in 1776.

We can't fathom life in that time. Four hundred and thirty years. That's an incredibly long time. Here's the thing. All during that time, there were some who held on to the promise that God had made. God said he was going to deliver us from this.

God said he was going to bring us out of Egypt. God said that he would give us the land of Canaan. Some would even hearken all the way back to the promise made to Abraham in Genesis 15. In Genesis 15, God told Abraham, this would have been roughly 600 years ago now, God told Abraham, your offspring are going to end up in a land in which they sojourn, and they're going to be there for 400 years, and then I will bring them into this land of Canaan, and I'm going to give your offspring this land, and so forth.

Here it is, six centuries later that the Hebrew people are finally delivered from the land of Egypt. Why do I keep emphasizing that length of time? I want you to think about how many people over those centuries, God's people, Hebrew people, who were people of that promise, were born, lived their lives, and died, and did not see the fulfillment of that promise.

Hundreds of thousands of them, to be sure. Let's bring this into the 21st century, into the lives of New Testament Christians as you and I are, I trust, and understand this simple truth, that just because God doesn't fulfill his promise in my lifetime, it doesn't mean he's not going to, and it doesn't mean that he's not faithful.

It just means I'm not operating on his timetable. He will bring his promises to pass, but not on my timetable, on his own, and we can trust him for that, and I hope you do. Our Father and our God, we thank you today for who you are.

We thank you for your trustworthiness. We thank you that we can count on you always to keep your word, even though we may not see the fulfillment of it in our own lifetime. Give us faith to trust you more, we pray in Jesus' name, amen.

Trusting God's Timing for His Promises

All right, again, have a good Friday, rest of your Friday, and a wonderful weekend, and may the Lord bless you in it. Good day.