The bitterness of the Hebrews’ slavery echoes the bitter meaninglessness of life without God. Though we are cushioned in the West by material prosperity the godless can never fully escape the lash of finity and godless purposelessness.

In our bible lecture this week we looked back to the Western church at the beginning of the sixteenth century: crippled by ignorant, greedy, and absent leaders; wracked by heresy and superstition; the strong oppressing the weak; the Gospel smothered almost to invisibility.

How will historians in 2526 describe the church today? Will they observe that worldliness, wrong-thinking, and superstition had abated? That the strong had learned to serve the weak? That the light of the Gospel blazed from a lampstand?

Whatever your analysis of our present condition, the church at the beginning of the book of Exodus was in a terrible place. Yet the LORD was at work and we have vital doctrines to learn from these verses.

The Book of Exodus

Exodus is the second book of the Torah, or Pentateuch: the first five books of the Bible. Though written by Moses in Hebrew the English title derives from an ancient Greek translation: ex hodos (ἐξ ὁδος) means “the road out.”

In Exodus the LORD powerfully redeems his people from slavery in Egypt and carries them on the road out to the Promised Land.

Exodus presents many crucial events, including: the defining of God’s personal name, the first Passover, passing through the Red Sea, the provision of manna, the pillar of cloud and fire, the writing of the Ten Commandments, the design and building of the Tabernacle, and the establishment of the Levitical priesthood.

Exodus also establishes some of the Bible’s most basic doctrines: God’s power, supremacy, holiness, and grace; human depravity, slavery, and inability; sacrifice, redemption, law, priesthood, and the Land of God’s presence.

The opening fourteen verses of Exodus establish a connection back to Genesis and set the scene for the forty chapters to follow. They are packed with vital truths and doctrines.

Exodus 1:1–14

Exodus 1:1–5

These are the names of the sons of Israel who went to Egypt with Jacob, each with his family: ²Reuben, Simeon, Levi and Judah; ³Issachar, Zebulun and Benjamin; ⁴Dan and Naphtali; Gad and Asher. ⁵The descendants of Jacob numbered seventy in all; Joseph was already in Egypt.

Exodus picks up where Genesis ends. Abraham had sojourned briefly in Egypt (Gen. 12). Joseph’s brothers had sold him into bondage but God was with him so he rose, after years of slavery and imprisonment, to become the prime minister and saviour of Egypt. Jacob and his twelve sons and their wives and children, seventy in all, fled from Israel to Egypt to find deliverance from a deadly famine.

Moses names Jacob’s twelve sons up front because in Exodus God deals with the twelve tribes who are descended from these sons. That they are in Egypt and not in the Land that God promised to Abraham and his descendants means something is fundamentally awry.

The Egyptians are the pagan descendants of Ham (Gen. 10:6). They worship created things – the sun, the Nile, Pharaoh, the falcon, the crocodile, the jackal, and so on – rather than the Creator who is forever to be praised.

Just as Genesis opens with physical chaos, darkness, and lifelessness, Exodus opens with God’s people in a state of spiritual chaos, blindness, and slavery. In Genesis God brought order, light, and life to the chaos. In Exodus we will see him do the same.

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