Exodus 2:1-10 (Jochebed's True Freedom)

The Shepherd's Church

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As we were singing, I was just reminded of how when we have the proper orientation towards God, we sing with conviction, we sing with confidence, we sing with clarity, and it was a beautiful thing.

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I felt like the room was just filled with the praise of God, and it was surrounding me, I hope it was surrounding you, and it was just such a beautiful thing to remember.

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When we have the right orientation, I mean, us postured towards the living God, it changes us, and it shapes us.

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I think the same is true when we have the right orientation to the Bible, when we know what the Bible is all about.

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The Bible is not about you and I, the Bible is not about our lives, our story, and how

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God thought we were so special that he came down and just rescued us, because who wouldn't want to rescue us as half -hearted and as rebellious as we are?

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The Bible is the story about God. It's God's story from beginning to end, it's the unfolding of God's majestic story of his gospel from beginning to the very end.

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But if you don't know that, and if you don't understand that, when you read the Bible, you're going to feel disoriented. For instance,

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I've made jokes a lot, when you get to Leviticus, you're going to be like, there's a lot of blood in Leviticus, and I have no idea why.

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Deuteronomy reads like the Wall Street Journal, but worse, and then you get to Ezekiel, and you're like, this guy looks like he's smoking peyote.

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It's all over the place. He's flying in the Spirit here, he's doing this, and you're like, I don't understand this.

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But if you don't understand that there's this arc of redemption that God is teaching us from beginning all the way to the end, then you'll miss the story of the

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Bible. It'll be like that you were dropped into a place, you had no idea where you were, and you're looking left and right, wondering how you got here.

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Understanding the Bible and the big picture story of the Bible is really important for being able to read the

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Bible. For instance, I've shared this with a lot of people before, and I get funny looks whenever I do, but one of the very best things that you can do if you want to understand the

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Bible is buy a very good gospel -centered children's Bible. And adults look at me and say, but I'm not a child.

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That's right, you're not. But what it does is it takes away all of the difficult parts. It takes away and strips it back to just the bare gospel bones, from Genesis all the way to Revelation.

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And there's a good one, if you want to write it down, by Marty Michalski, the Gospel Story Bible. It's excellent.

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But it will help you understand the entire big picture landscape of the Bible so that when you read it, you're not disoriented or lost, you really understand where you are in the midst of God's drama.

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Because we as a church, we have a place in the story of God. We're not at the end, but we are past where Jesus has resurrected and ascended to heaven.

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So we have a place, we have a purpose, we have a job, we have all of these things. Knowing that will actually help us understand what the

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New Testament is all about. So I say that just to give us a little bit of a context, and I also want to take some time to develop the context of how

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Moses was born, and how Moses' wife, a woman named Jochebed, how she came to give birth to this child, because the context of it is incredibly important.

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So if you think about it, two weeks ago we went over how Eve gave birth to a son, and there

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Eve and Adam were commanded to be fruitful and multiply. The central purpose of humanity was to be fruitful, multiply, to rule over the earth, and subdue it.

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So if you want to look at what human beings were created to do, human beings were created to be fruitful, multiplying creatures who rule over the earth, and who spread out to the ends of the earth, spreading out the glory of God.

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That's our five -fold purpose as human beings. That's the beginning of God's grand story, that he installed humans as his vice regents here on earth.

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The problem, as we have detailed now for the last two weeks, is that humans chose idolatry instead of God.

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They chose to worship themselves instead of God. They chose to worship being like God instead of the being who is

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God, and in doing so they fell. They were commanded to be fruitful, they were fruitless.

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They were commanded to multiply, they actually devolved into division. They were commanded to rule, but guess what?

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Satan now had put them under his rule and his authority. They were commanded to spread the glory of God, and all they did was perpetrate more and more sin and more and more idolatry.

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That's the second chapter of God's meta story. God wasn't finished, however, with that as we learned two weeks ago.

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He gave promises to Eve that there would be a son who would come, who would free us from our sin and our brokenness and our failure, and we trace the story all the way down through Eve's genealogy.

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We trace it to the flood. It says that human beings had spread sin all over the world, which is the exact opposite of what we were called to do.

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We were called to multiply the knowledge of God, so God responds with a flood. Afterwards, he gives the same command to Noah, be fruitful, multiply, spread out to the earth.

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Maybe Noah will be the child of Eve who will fix everything that is broken, but yet, just a couple chapters later, we see everyone gathered around a tower thinking that they're going to build their way back to God.

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The exact same temptation, you want to be like God? I want to build something that can make me high as God?

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The same sin infected the human race. The same brokenness was there that caused the rebellion.

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God came down and cast them out of that plane. He caused them to have different languages.

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He confused them. The tower's named Babel, not for accidental purposes because every one of them looked as though they were babbling to one another.

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You get to Abraham, and this great promise is made by God. This is sort of the third chapter of the story.

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That Abraham, I will give you a son, I will give you a seed, and he will bless the nations. And you remember last week, we talked about 25 years passed between the giving of that promise in Genesis 12 to the fulfillment of that promise in Genesis 21.

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25 years that Abraham and Sarah had to wait to see the promises of God, and in their lifetime, they didn't see it fulfilled.

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They didn't see Isaac bless the nations. They didn't see his children bless the nations.

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In fact, his children hated each other, like Cain and Abel. Esau tried to kill

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Isaac, just like Cain tried to kill Abel, and Jacob had to flee in order to save his own life because he was a liar and a manipulator.

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So the story, if we're trying to look at human good, there's not a lot of it.

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Jacob comes back, he eventually has 12 sons, so God is multiplying him.

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God is making him fruitful, even though Jacob is not deserving of it. And eventually, there's a famine that happens that forces this family to go down to the land of Egypt, and there's 70 people at this point.

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So if you think about it, sinners who are being made fruitful and who are being multiplied by God is sort of the theme of the entire

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Old Testament. People who don't deserve to be made fruitful and people who don't deserve to be multiplied, God is in fact doing the work when human beings cannot.

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So they get down to Egypt. And what I think is so funny, and what

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I think is so sad, that so many scholars have missed this theme of fruitful and multiply in the

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Bible. So many scholars, I've read biblical theologies about what the whole Bible is supposed to be about, and none of them have mentioned fruitful and multiply.

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It's the first command in the Bible. I think it's what holds the entire story together.

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Be fruitful and multiply in the beginning, the people in the very end in Revelation are totally fruitful, and they've been totally multiplied.

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So this is what it says. This is how Exodus begins as a book to show us that this theme is there.

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But the sons of Israel were fruitful and they increased greatly and multiplied and became exceedingly mighty so that the land was filled with them.

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So even though at this time in Exodus there's now 400 years have passed, God has been faithful to his promise that he will make this people fruitful and he will multiply them.

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And as you read through the book of Exodus, you'll realize that this people especially did not deserve the blessings and the promise of God.

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This is the generation that makes the golden calf. This is the generation that grumbles against God. This is the generation that God multiple times says that he's going to wipe off the face of the earth and Moses through prayer and through everything else is pleading on their behalf.

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This generation did not deserve the blessings of God and yet God is faithful to his promises. That's the background that we get to the book of Exodus.

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Now the next chapter of this story is the tyrant emerges, the

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Pharaoh. The Pharaoh, interestingly enough, would wear a serpent on the top of his little headdress thing.

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Isn't that interesting? The very first enemy in the Bible was a serpent that tried to kill the fruit of human beings and here we have a

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Pharaoh who's trying to kill the fruit of Israel. All these themes are repeating, not for accidental purposes.

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Let's read in chapter 1 verse 8 for some more context. This is what it says, now a new king arose over Egypt who did not know

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Joseph. If you remember from Genesis, Joseph had brokered a deal with the Pharaoh so that Israel could live there peacefully and they wouldn't be attacked.

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But now a new king has risen up who did not know Joseph and he said to the people, behold the people of the sons of Israel are more mighty, more mightier, oh sorry, more and mightier than we.

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He's like that's not grammatically correct. More and mightier than we. Come let us deal wisely with them or else they will multiply and in the events of war they will also join themselves to those who hate us and fight against us and depart from the land.

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So they appointed taskmasters over them to afflict them with hard labor and they built for Pharaoh's storage cities,

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Pithom and Ramesses. But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and the more they spread out.

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The more they did what God had originally told them to do, fruitful, multiply, spread out to the ends of the earth. So they were in dread of the sons of Israel.

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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 were rigorously imposed upon them.

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By being blessed, the world hated them. By being a blessed people, they were put under tyranny.

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We shouldn't be surprised just as a practical application when God has put his hand on us even though we don't deserve it, even though we didn't earn it, even though we've not been good enough to receive his blessings.

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We should not be surprised when the world looks at us and sees something different in us and hates us because of it.

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We shouldn't be surprised when we experience fiery trials, the Bible says, for these have been given to us for our maturity and for us to grow up in Christ.

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We shouldn't be surprised, Romans 8 18 says, I consider these present sufferings not even worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed to us in the day of Christ.

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When the world sees us, they hate us, but these things are for our good.

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It's a side point, but I think an important one. The people of Israel were being threatened by their taskmasters.

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These taskmasters were beating them. Any picture that you can imagine probably is not gross and vile enough.

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From the moment that they woke up in the morning to the moment that they went to bed, they were being abused in their labors.

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They were being beaten. They were being broken. Even every time when they would go to take a bite of food, their wounds would ache in pain.

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I know a little bit about what this feels like this week. I've been in pain all week from a shoulder not even close to what was happening in Egypt, but I felt like it was, and it was real to me.

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Their children were also being threatened. It says that in verse 15 of chapter 1, then the king of Egypt spoke to the

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Hebrew midwives, one who was named Shepherah and the other was named

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Pua, and he said, when you are helping the Hebrew women to give birth and you see them upon the birthstool, if it is a son, then you shall put him to death, but if it is a daughter, then you shall let him live or let her live.

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Egypt was so terrified that Israel was going to be fruitful, multiply, and rise up against them and defeat them as a nation that they wanted every single male child to be killed, to be thrown into the river.

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Now there's an interesting point of application here that we need to understand. The Pharaoh is not named.

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That's the first thing I want you to see. When the great powers of the world rise up against us, they have so little power that they can't even be named.

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That's sort of the point Moses is getting at. These two little women at the bottom rung of Hebrew society, and Hebrew society was at the bottom rung of the world at this point, they get a name, but the

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Pharaoh himself doesn't get a name. That's a fascinating point of the narrative. In all his power, in all of his might, in all of his arrogance, he's nameless to God, but these two

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Hebrew women get a name. I think that's such a beautiful thing, and I think it's such a beautiful thing because you don't have to be high and mighty to be known by God.

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They will be forgotten, but God reaches down even to the depths to rescue people like you, the

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Puahs and the Shepherahs and everyone in between. He knows you by name, even if you feel like you have the lowest, lowliest state that you can even think of.

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Even if you look around and you say, everyone is better than me, if you're in Christ, God knows your name. There's also a threat against the midwives.

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It says, but the midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt had commanded them, and let the boys live.

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So the king of Egypt called the midwives and said to them, why have you done this thing and let the boys live?

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And 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 go get them.

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So God was good to the midwives, and the people multiplied and became very mighty.

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They multiplied, they were fruitful because the midwives feared God. He also established households for them.

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Another point of interest in this passage, sometimes ethically speaking, there are very difficult situations that we have to navigate.

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For instance, here the Hebrew midwives lied to the Pharaoh. They straight up lied.

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They said the Hebrew women are more vigorous than the Egyptian women. Maybe that's true. I mean, I don't know.

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Same way that the Jewish people who were being hidden by the Germans, the German soldiers would come and knock on Christian's doors and would say, are you harboring

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Jewish people in your home? Now, some Christians I can imagine who just got through studying

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Romans 13 would say, well, we really have to obey our government here. Yeah, I'm hiding them.

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And then 10, 11, 12, 13 people get murdered unjustly and wickedly because of a rigid commitment to something that is probably misunderstood.

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Romans 13's not applying there. There was many faithful Christians who said, no,

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I'm not harboring Jews. They were in their basement, but they saved their life. These are really difficult ethical situations that we're talking about in this passage.

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And it says that God was good to the midwives. God honored the midwives.

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And the reason is because if we think about other passages in the Bible, that God cares more about obedience than sacrifice.

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We see this sort of theme in the Bible where God cares about the heart more than the rigid literalism of the law.

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Yes, they broke the law and it hadn't been written yet, by the way. Exodus 20 says, thou shalt not bear false witness.

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They didn't break that command. They didn't tell the truth, but God loved them and honored them because they valued human life, because they refused to let human beings die on their watch, babies born.

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They were obedient to what God said. All I say this for is just to point out that sometimes we're faced with very difficult situations where it doesn't look like there's a right answer.

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Maybe no one in this room will ever face a situation like this, and I pray to God that it's not so, or that you don't face anything like that.

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But I point it out because they didn't tell the truth to get someone killed. They told the lie and honored

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God by saving human life. Now, the hope in this passage is going to come from a woman named

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Jochebed. She's going to have a little child named Moses. And we see from Exodus 2, chapter 2, verse 1 through 10, how all of these things come to pass.

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It says, now a man from the house of Levi went and married a daughter of Levi. The woman conceived and bore a son.

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And when she saw that he was beautiful, she hid him for three months. But when she could hide him no longer, she got him a wicker basket and covered it with tar and pitch.

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And 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.

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And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the Nile with her maidens walking alongside the

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Nile. And she saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid. And she brought it to her.

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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

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Hebrews' children. Then his sister said to Pharaoh, shall I go and call a nurse for you from the

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Hebrew women, that she may nurse the child for you? Pharaoh's daughter said to her, go ahead.

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So the girl 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.

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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.

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And she named him Moses and said, because I drew him up out of the water. Let's pray.

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Lord God, thank you so much for your word and how beautiful it is and how much it teaches us.

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Lord, we see so much pain and so much tragedy and so much in this passage that can hardly be explained, and yet we see your hand faithfully moving in the circumstances.

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The people were being abused, but yet you made them faithful. The people were being beaten, and yet you made them multiply. Lord, I pray for us today as your people who've been bought by your son, that we would be faithful, fruitful, and that we would multiply in the world, even though the world seeks to beat us down, to enslave us and do all manner of evil against us.

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Lord, let us be the kind of people like these Israelites who are faithful, fruitful, and multiplying.

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In Christ's name, amen. Today we're just going to discover three or four small things, but they're big if you get a hold of them.

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The four things are we're going to discover how Jochebed prepared for her deliverance. This is a mom who's preparing to have this child, and this child is going to look forward to the

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Savior Christ. The next thing we're going to see is we're going to see how she is actually a type of Mary, and when

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I say type, I mean that she's a small example that points to a larger reality. We're going to see how

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Moses is a type of Christ, and then finally we're going to see how Christ alone can bring us true deliverance and true freedom.

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So with that, let's look at how this lady prepared for the deliverance that was coming for her nation.

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Now the first thing I would say that she did is that she faded away. Even before she enters the narrative, she's already fading out of the narrative.

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It says in verse 1 of chapter 2, now a man from the house of Levi went and married a daughter of Levi.

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They don't name them either. It's interesting that the only three people in the narrative who get a name is

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Moses and the two Hebrew midwives. Moses's dad and mom don't get a name. They don't get a name until Exodus 6, when there's a sort of census that happens that tells us that that was

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Moses's mom and dad, Amram and Jochebed. That's probably why you don't know her name, because she's not in the narrative.

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Because she realizes, and God himself and the way that he's telling the story, is showing us that she's not the focus.

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She came to give birth to this deliverer, but in doing so, she had to fade away.

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She had to get out of the way. She had to fade into the background of the narrative, because it's not about her. It's about the child that's going to be born.

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So that's the first thing that she did, is she got out of the way. She faded into the background, because when you're preparing for deliverance, you realize it doesn't come from yourself.

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It's going to have to come from something else. It's going to have to come from God. So she faded away. It's the first thing that she did.

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The second thing that she did, is she honored God. Exodus 2 -2. The woman conceived and bore a son.

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That might not look like honoring God, but if we remember, the first command of the Bible is to be fruitful and multiply and have lots of children.

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She was honoring God by getting pregnant. She knew the law of the land. She knew

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Pharaoh said that you can't have any kids, just like many Chinese couples in the relatively recent past realized that you can only have one child in China, but yet Christians were having children in China, having home births, trying to hide births, because they realized that God had made them to be fruitful and multiply.

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Children are a blessing from the Lord. They're quivers or they're arrows in a quiver, the

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Bible says. Children are a blessing from God. So this woman had a child in the midst of the threat that that child was going to be killed, and she was taking a chance because there was no technology back then to be able to tell if it was a boy or a girl.

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So when it was a boy, it was almost a death sentence because the Pharaohs had said that all male children would be killed.

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So she was ready to honor God even in the midst of awful circumstances. She was ready to honor

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God even in the midst of threat. She was ready to honor God in the midst of the worst possible situation that she could ever find herself in, and she did it not in high and lofty ways.

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She did it in normal human ways. Sometimes we think about honoring God in tough times like these, that we would stand outside of the

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White House and preach the gospel, or that we would start a Bible study in the

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Capitol buildings, or that we would do X, Y, and Z. She was faithful and humble in beautiful ways.

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She had a child. She was faithful in that way. There's other ways that you can be faithful.

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Go to work and be a Christian, or just raise your kids in a way that honors the Lord. Be a single person with purity.

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There's lots of ways that we can honor God in the midst of really awful times, but she honored

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God. That's the second thing she did. The third thing that she did was she defied her government.

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Also in verse 2, it says, when she saw that he was beautiful, she hid him for three months.

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I have to tell the story. It's not really relevant, but I have to. Addison probably would have been opposed to this verse because she knows when we call our male children beautiful, she says, no, no, no, they're handsome.

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That's not what this means. The word beautiful actually is not an effeminate word. That word beautiful means special, set apart.

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Someone who's set apart for the Lord. Someone who's, the word even holy comes to mind, that when you're set apart for something.

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And she realized at this moment that she could not do what her government had asked her to do.

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She realized that she could not obey the tyrant's edict. And there's a sort of way that we need to understand how to obey government.

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We obey government, and we are commanded to obey government. When our government tells us to do things that are biblical, or when our government tells us to do things that are not prohibited in the

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Bible, we can do things that are not prohibited. The Bible doesn't talk about speed limits, but we obey those.

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Everybody say, amen. We obey those because it's not against the

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Bible. But when the government tells us to do something that God hates, or when the government tells us to stop doing something that God loves, we must disobey.

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We must. We must have the courage to do it, just like Moses's mom, Jacobette, had the courage to do it.

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We defy the government when they tell us to stop doing something God loves or to begin doing something God hates.

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No exceptions. And we don't do it with picket signs like activists standing on the street corner yelling and screaming.

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We don't do that. We don't make websites that are filled with hate. We do it humbly, gently, peaceably, and we showcase the gospel of Christ even in our defiance.

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And I think that in the days ahead, there will be opportunities for us to lift some of these things out, maybe corporately, maybe individually, as the government makes laws that defy the word of God.

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For instance, if the government says that we cannot meet as a church, we will defy that rule.

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We will defy that law because the Bible says not to neglect the gathering. If this were black death and 40 % of the population were going to be exterminated, then we would use common sense and we would meet in a different way.

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But this is not the black death and we will continue to meet because God has told us to meet.

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God has told us to gather and nothing shall neglect the gathering. That's just an example. But she defied the government and she honored

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God in doing so. The fourth thing that she did is she clinged to the covenantal expectations of her forefathers.

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That's a lot to say, but it's actually interesting what she did. When she realized that she could not hide the child any longer in her home, she made a wicker basket and she covered it with tar and pitch.

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Have you ever stopped and wondered about the details of that? Why she did that? And you're like, well, wicker baskets don't float when you have a baby in them.

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So she covered it with tar and pitch to make it waterproof so it would float. That's right. But where else do we see tar and pitch in the

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Bible? With Noah. Noah was to make an ark and that ark was to be covered with tar and pitch.

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She's clinging to the idea that her son is going to deliver her people in the same way that Noah delivered the human race.

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The human race wasn't plunged into death because Noah's family was set apart by God to be the type of a savior and then the world be rebuilt through him.

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She's saying that our nation will be rebuilt through this deliverer, this savior -like figure, my little son.

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What amount of faith that she has in that moment to defy her government, to honor

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God in the midst of impossible circumstances, and to reenact a moment of her history by covering this basket with the exact same ingredients that were there with Noah.

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She's pronouncing that she understands that God is going to do something. She doesn't quite fully understand all the details yet, but she understands that God is going to move.

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So she clung, she clinged to the promises of old. The fifth thing that she did was she employed shrewdness.

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She used wisdom. She didn't just set the baby afloat and wish him farewell.

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It says in verse 3 and 4, then she put the child into it and set it among the reeds by the bank of the

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Nile. And his sister stood at a distance to find out what would happen to him. She knew what she was doing.

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The text doesn't tell us this, but I think that she had probably already had the sister pull surveillance.

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She knew that this was Pharaoh's daughter's bathing spot. She knew the days that she normally came down because they didn't bathe every day like we do.

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Can you imagine walking in the markets back in the ancient world with all the spices that they ate and people didn't bathe?

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It would be amazing. It would be like my time in Iraq. But she put the child right there in the midst of the marsh, right where she knew that he would be found.

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And if you think about it, she knew who would find him. She knew that she was sending the deliverer right into the enemy's house.

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It's an interesting thing. So she employed shrewdness. She also rested in God's sovereignty.

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Verses five through six, the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the Nile with her maidens walking alongside the

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Nile. And she saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maids and she brought it to her.

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And 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

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Hebrew's children. When you've done everything that you can do in your human flesh, you have to eventually come to a place where you rest in the sovereignty of God.

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She did everything that she could do. She put the child there. She packed him in a floatable basket.

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She did everything possible, but she still had to come to the end of herself and rest in the sovereignty of God.

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And I think there's a point for you and I, that when we've done everything that we can do in our own human flesh, we have to come to a point where we trust

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God and where we rest in God's sovereignty and where we believe that God is in control and that he can do all things.

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Every moment of our lives is about trusting God and resting in his sufficiency. And the longer you live, the more you realize that you actually can't control anything.

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You actually can't manipulate anything. You actually don't have much strength. You don't have much power. You're weak and frail and you are more dependent on the sovereignty of God than you were.

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You realize the fact that you are more than you were 10 years ago, 20 years ago. Every moment that you wake up, every breath that you breathe, you are dependent on the sovereignty of God.

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So I love the fact that this lady rested in his sovereignty. She put the child there and she walked away.

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Think about how difficult that would have been as a mother to sit, to lay down your,

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I think, first born child, second born child, but your child, to lay him down there and to walk away and to trust that God can bring good out of this awful situation.

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You have to have a high view of the sovereignty of God to live like this because if you don't, you won't.

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Sovereignty just means that God is in control and that theology will be tested in the strangest moments.

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I've told this story before and I don't know if I need to tell it again, but I'll tell it again just in case.

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When I was falling off of the house, I wasn't afraid. I wasn't twisting and turning, trying to figure out how

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I'm going to land like a cat that just got thrown up in the air. No one in my house has ever done that before when

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I was growing up. We never did that to cats, but I didn't do that.

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The week before, God had allowed me to read a book by John Bunyan, and that book is called

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Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. John Bunyan was arrested. He's a Puritan. He was arrested for preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, and he was put into jail.

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And Bunyan is like any man. He loved his wife and he loved his children, and he cried out to God day and night.

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His journal reads like an EKG machine. It's up and down. It's all over the place.

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Some days he's like, God, I know you're in control. Some days he's like, I don't know if you're in control. But as it goes, he gets to this place where he trusts

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God fully, and he says to the Lord, and I remember listening to this while I was working through my earbuds.

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He said, God, I believe that you're a better husband to my wife than I can ever be, and I believe that you're a better father to my children than I can ever be, and if you allow me to die in prison, then

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I could be so lucky because I know that my family is in better hands than I could ever give. And that,

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I listened to that five days before I fell off the house. And as I fell off the house, I was listening to it.

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I didn't have my earbuds in. I wasn't reading an audio book, but that came over my mind and over my heart when

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I was falling, that if I land on my head, then God is in control and he's a better father to my kids than I could ever be.

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And if I break my back and can never move again, he's a better husband to my wife than I could ever possibly be.

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And in that moment, I had such perfect peace because I was trusting that God is sovereign and that everything that he does is for good.

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And it's really difficult when you're in a situation where you're not sure you're going to open your eyes again, or it's really difficult when you've got a debilitating disease and you're not sure that you're ever going to have a pain -free life again.

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It's really difficult when you see all the pain that's in the world and all of the evil and wickedness and you say, is

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God really sovereign there? Yeah. Yes, he is.

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And as soon as you and I understand the depth of his sovereignty, the easier it will be for us to trust that God really is in control.

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I saw it. I think Moses's mom saw it and she was able to leave that child there in the reeds because she knew

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God was in control. She rested in his sovereignty. The final thing that she did was she waited on God's deliverance.

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Pharaoh's daughter said to her, go ahead. So the girl went and called the child's mother. And then

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Pharaoh's daughter said to her, take this child away and nurse him for me and I will give you your wages.

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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.

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And she named him Moses and said, because I drew him out of the water. Now what

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I find so fascinating about this is that she trusted God and she was the mom who got to nurse her own child for the first couple of years of his life.

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She's the mom who got to hand deliver her child to the Pharaoh's house. And she's the mom who got to see him from a distance, grow up and sort of become the man that God was going to have him become.

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And I don't even want to focus on what Moses did right now. I want to focus on what this lady did.

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She faded out of the story because she knew it was God's story, not hers. She honored God. She disobeyed her government.

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She clung to the promises of old. She employed shrewdness. She rested in God's sovereignty and she waited on the deliverance that was going to come.

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All of those things are God -centric things in her life. They're not self -centered things. They're not serving her, but she's doing them because she knows that God is powerful and that God is in control and he is going to work things out for good for those who are called according to his purpose.

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And that is how she is a type of Mary. Because if you think about Mary, Mary fades out of the gospels as soon as she enters into them.

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You hear Mary in the first chapters of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and then Mary's gone. She makes an appearance a couple times here and there, but the story's not about her.

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The story's about her son, Jesus. So she does the exact same thing as Jochebed did. And she fades out of the narrative so that the light of the glory can shine on Christ.

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She's not trying to gain the glory. She's not trying to gain the light of the gospel. She said, look to him.

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It's about my son. It's not about me. So she fades immediately out of the light of the gospel.

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That's why she's a type of this woman in the old Testament. She honors God with her pregnancy. Think about this.

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Jochebed was pregnant during a time where you weren't allowed to be pregnant. She was pregnant when she was a virgin in a time and a place where you would get stoned to death for doing that.

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It wasn't just her son whose life was in danger. Her life was in danger because if they thought that she had committed adultery, they would have pulled her out of town, brought her out to the hills and the byways.

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And then it was stoned Mary to death for the sin of adultery that she did not commit. She trusted God with a pregnancy that by all intents and purposes could have been nothing that she imagined or dreamed of.

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Joseph in his kindness marries her and validates this pregnancy. But the scorn of the region was always upon her.

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There's moments in the gospels where the Pharisees say we weren't born of fornication, were we?

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Which is saying there was a rumor going around that Mary got pregnant by fornication.

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Bad reputation followed this woman all the days of her life for doing nothing other than having the son that God had told her to have.

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She was faithful. She honored God in a pregnancy where the entire world was turned against her just like Jochebed.

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That's why she's a type. That's why Jochebed is a type of Mary. Mary disobeyed her government just like Jochebed did when

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King Herod said that he was going to kill all of the children just like Pharaoh. He's going to come and kill all of the male children two years old and younger and he's going to he's going to murder them and put them to death.

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She defies her government just like Jochebed did and she and Joseph flee to Egypt in order to spare the child's life.

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She disobeyed. She broke the law. She did it because she knew who God is. She also clung to the covenantal expectations and the promises.

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Moses said in Deuteronomy 18 that one better than me greater than me is going to arise and she believed it just like Moses's mom believed the promises and wrapped this wicker basket and made it look like a little floating ark on the water.

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Mary had heard the voice of the angel say that Emmanuel was going to be born with us and she clung to those promises and she tucked those promises away in her heart and she was faithful because of those promises.

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She rested in God's sovereignty for her child. Can you imagine giving her child over to Jerusalem that final day when she saw him walking up the hill?

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When she saw them beating him? When she saw them torturing him? When she saw them nailing him?

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She was there. All the disciples fled away but Mary was there. Can you imagine seeing your one and only son at the hands of the pharaoh of their day crucified, waiting, trusting the most awful circumstance that ever happened in human history, believing that God could somehow turn this for good?

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How can God turn that for good? But yet she stayed and she watched. That's important.

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I think about as a dad, I wouldn't have wanted to stay and watch my son get treated like Jesus was treated.

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I wouldn't want that memory. I would want to look but I wouldn't want to look.

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You can imagine the thoughts that would go on in a mother's heart or in a father's heart but she stayed and I think she stayed because she knew that God was going to turn this for good somehow even though she couldn't imagine how.

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She waited for his deliverance. She waited three days in fact for the deliverance that Christ was going to bring and that's when

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Mary went to the tomb and saw that the tomb was empty. See she's a type of Jacobite just like Moses, her son, was a type of Christ.

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Moses brought momentary freedom to his people. He freed them from Egyptian slavery. He got the taskmasters off their back.

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He brought them into a land that was their own. He gave them temporary freedom but if you know the story of the

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Old Testament, their freedom didn't last very long did it? The Canaanites, the

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Perizzites, the Hittites, the Jebusites, the Philistines, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the

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Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, all of them enslaved this people

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Israel because this people Israel continued to act like they were enslaved. They were enslaved to idolatry so God allowed them to fall into physical captivity time and time and time again.

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The freedom that Moses brought to them was a temporary freedom. It wasn't a permanent freedom but praise be to God that at just the right moment of time he sent his one and only son, the true and better Moses, who marched up to that hill, who had perfectly obeyed the law, who had done everything that God required and he, not us, was the one who was slain.

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Think about the life of Moses. Moses gets angry and he's not allowed to enter the promised land. The people sin.

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They're not allowed to enter the promised land. Jesus did nothing wrong and yet he was the one who was crucified. You and I were not crucified for our sins.

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He died on a cross that bears our name. He died on a cross that bears our shame. He died on a cross that has our guilt.

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He died on a cross with every single sin that we've committed written on the wood and he died for you and for I and for us to give us a permanent freedom, a freedom that can never be taken back.

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If you are today in Jesus Christ, you're not like the Israelites anymore. Yes, you may struggle with sin, but you are permanently free.

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You cannot ever be reclaimed for the kingdom of Satan. You can never ever lose the salvation that God has given you in Christ.

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If you are in Jesus, then his sacrifice and his freedom is permanent and it's forever and you can walk out of here today with your head held high knowing that you are a

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Christian, that you are indwelled by the Spirit of God, that no one can take the freedom that Christ has deposited inside of you and if you're struggling with a particular sin, that sin cannot take the freedom that Christ has given from you.

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You can look at that sin and you can say, you can say, go to hell because I have the freedom of Christ.

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You can look at that thing that you've been struggling with for 20, 30, 40 years and you can say, I am free in Jesus and I no longer have to bow down to that idol.

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You can look at everything in your life and even physically speaking, we're going to deal with pains and sorrows and all kinds of things.

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You can look to the cross and you can say, one day, one day my knees won't hurt. One day my back won't hurt.

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One day my shoulder won't hurt. One day all of these different mental things that I have right now with depression and everything else, all of those things are going to be crucified dead and they're going to be gone when

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Jesus Christ returns. He came to bring a permanent freedom and you and I in this particular situation are just like the

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Israelites in that we are now in his kingdom and we've been called to live as freed people, no longer bowing down to the sin and idol and slavery that we once knew, but free.

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The Bible says it for freedom, for freedom he has set us free, so therefore let us live free.

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Let's pray. Lord, thank you so much for this wonderful, dear woman,

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Jacobin, who did all kinds of things knowing that you were going to move.

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She trusted you, she waited on your sovereignty, she was shrewd, she was wise, she even defied her government.

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Lord, let us as your people be wise in how that we live in this world. Let us be shrewd.

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Let us have the courage if we biblically have to defy our government that we would do it. Let us have humility that we would not do that quickly and that we would make sure that we understand what the

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Bible says. Lord, let us have joy in submission to you.

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Let us have joy in obedience to you. And Lord, more than anything, let us have freedom. Let us not be enslaved to the things that have caught us and captured us.

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Lord, there's so many people even here this morning who may feel like that that resonates, that they feel slavery to something, whether it's food or sex or idols or a career or someone else's opinion over them has enslaved them and captivated them.

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Whatever it is, Lord, you can break those chains. You can give the kind of permanent freedom that all of us are looking for.

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Lord, if it's a Christian here who needs to repent, Lord, I pray that you would give them the courage to repent of those sins.

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And Lord, if it's someone here who does not know who you are and has not experienced your freedom, but wants to,

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Lord, I pray that they would cry out and they would turn their life over to you. And they would call out to you and say,

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Lord, I need you. Would you set me free? Lord, we ask these things as your people, ready to enter into your praise for the freedom that you've given us.

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And Lord, I pray that as we do that, we would do it with joy and with great, great gladness in our hearts for all that you have done.