On Stories
Everyone loves a good story. Stories have an enduring place in the human experience. They’ve been told and retold for millennia, around campfires, in dorm rooms, classrooms, living rooms, books, plays, and streaming services. Storytelling is part of what it means to be human.
Why do we love stories? Because they connect us to something deep and basic about the world and our lives. They touch a part of us that nothing else can. C. S. Lewis says good stories are like a “secret thread” holding things together.
Stories move us because they get us in touch with the underlying reality of what God created the universe to be. What do I mean? I mean that on a deeper level we all know that we shouldn’t die, that losing loved ones is tragic, that good should triumph over evil, that nature is infused with power and beauty, even that we should be able to communicate with other creatures.
Good stories move us because they touch that part of us that knows that we live in a supernatural world. Skeptics want these things to be true, so while their heads are against the Christian faith, their hearts are with us, in a sense, even while they suppress the truth of God in unrighteousness. Many people deny God intellectually but in a good story they sense deeper meaning in the world.
The Story of the Bible is about Exodus
Lewis talks about Jesus as the one myth that became fact, the “true myth.” Jesus’ story, the Bible’s story, is the story under all other stories. What is the story of the Bible about? It’s about exodus, about deliverance from death, about a community’s journey to a better future. It’s about death and resurrection.
One of the clearest and most important places we see the shape of the whole Bible’s story is in the Old Testament book of Exodus. Today we’re beginning a study of Exodus that’ll take us through most of this year.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of Exodus for our understanding of the story of the Bible. One book on Exodus says, “Whatever book of the Bible you are reading, and whichever Christian practices you are involved in, echoes of the exodus are in there somewhere.”[1]
The main plot line of Exodus is the main plot line of the Bible. Old Testament scholar Michael Morales says that, in Israel’s exodus out of Egypt through Moses, God establishes “a paradigm, the pattern, for understanding the salvation of his people.” He says that we can only fully comprehend Jesus’ work by studying Old Testament scriptures like Exodus.[2]
So what’s the plot of Exodus? If you’ve read Exodus before, you know that the story is about a people, Israel, who’re in slavery/misery/despair/death, but then a hero/redeemer/savior/leader steps forward (Moses) and deliverance/salvation/rescue comes. Then these people set off on a journey through a wilderness headed toward a new world/place/life. Exodus tells a story about death and resurrection, and isn’t this the plot of every good story?
The Author Writes Himself In
But here’s what’s unique about Exodus, and the whole story of the Bible. In most stories, you don’t meet the author in the story. You meet the characters, not the author. The Bible is different. In the Bible, in Exodus, the Author writes himself into the story.
Some people think that God is “the man upstairs.” When Russian cosmonauts first entered space, they came back and said they didn’t find God there. Lewis was still alive at the time and pointed out how silly this way of thinking was. He said if there is a God and he wanted to be known he would have to write himself into the story of the world, just as the only way Hamlet can know Shakespeare is if Shakespeare writes himself into the story.
God has indeed written himself into the story of the world! Why? Because he wants to be known. This is perhaps the main point of Exodus. The reason why God delivers Israel from Egypt and brings them through the Red Sea and gives them his word and leads them through the wilderness toward the Promised Land is because he wants to be known.
God’s salvation isn’t an end in itself. The point of salvation is revelation. God wants his people and all the peoples to know him for who he is. Anglican scholar Ross Blackburn says, “The Lord’s missionary commitment to make himself known to the nations is the central theological concern of Exodus.”[3]
God wants to be known for who he is and not for who he is not. He wants the world to know that he’s a particular kind of God, a God who is both supreme and good, merciful and mighty, Ruler and Redeemer, Lord and Savior.
The Writer of the story of the Bible wants you to know him, so he wrote himself into the story of the world. Have you met the Author of the story? Do you know God as an abstraction or as a reality?
Why Study Exodus?
That we’d know God truly and deeply is the main reason we’re studying Exodus. But there are a couple secondary benefits to studying a book like this. In their book Echoes of Exodus, British theologians Alastair Roberts and Andrew Wilson talk about how studying Exodus can be particularly helpful for the church in this given cultural moment.
They point out the rootlessness many of us feel.[4] Despite the drive to find and live out our identity, many of us feel like we don’t know who we are. In this context, Roberts and Wilson say that there’s no better way to find our moorings than by reading the Old Testament. As Paul says, these things were “written for our sake” (1 Cor. 9:10), so the Old Testament in general and Exodus in particular isn’t just Israel’s story, it’s our story. Just as the D-Day landings were a defining moment in our history that explains who we are, so “the exodus is our family story.” The exodus tells us that our lives are caught up in something so much bigger than self-expression.
Roberts and Wilson also point out that a book like Exodus can help us think through the nature of true freedom. Many of us feel like we’re in some form of bondage, oppression, or limitation. Roberts and Wilson describe our condition like this:
“We get free from boredom, and fall into slavery to distraction. We pursue liberty from prohibitions, and fall into bondage to addictions. We escape repression, and become enslaved to lust. We are released from isolation, and fall captive to peer pressure and the power of the online mob…in the imagery of The Hunger Games, we get free from fences and guns in the districts, only to find ourselves trapped by slavish banality in the Capitol. True freedom is more complicated than it looks.”[5]
The exodus story, however, says that God’s people have a “freedom from” and a “freedom to.” As exodus people, we know we’re free from serving Pharaoh and free to serve the Lord.[6] So we pursue true freedom found only in a life devoted to God.
Genesis Sets the Stage
If Exodus is the main drama of the biblical story, Genesis sets the stage. Exodus continues the story begun in Genesis.[7]
The story of the Bible begins with a creator God who makes the world. Humans are his crowning work. We’re made in his image and given special tasks to perform on behalf of the Creator. Adam and Eve are priests in the garden sanctuary of God, where they live with God and learn his ways in order to exercise the rule of God as God himself would.
But the first humans rebelled against God and brought chaos and disharmony and death into the world. The destruction spiraled downward until God intervened and judged the human race with a flood and started over with Noah and his family. Noah is a new Adam and is told to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth (Gen. 9:1).
Unfortunately, the second Adam is a lot like the first Adam and Noah’s family ends up in the same chaos and corruption as the family of the first Adam. After God scatters the nations at the Tower of Babel, he makes another start with Abraham. Abraham and his family are another Adam and will be God’s true humanity.
God makes big promises to Abraham, promising to give him descendants as numerous as the sand on the seashore and a land that will be a center of blessing to the whole world. As Old Testament scholar Peter Gentry points out, “Since Israel is located geographically on the one and only communications link between the great superpowers of the ancient world (Egypt and Mesopotamia), she will, in this position, show the nations how to have a right relationship to God, how to treat each other in a truly human way, and how to faithfully steward the earth’s resources.”[8]
Abraham’s family was to be the vehicle of God’s blessing to a cursed world. God would make this family a great nation and put them in a strategic land, the land of Canaan, so that they could mediate God’s truth and blessing to the nations. But when Exodus begins, we find them in Egypt, hundreds of miles from their promised land (1:1).
How did they get there? God’s promise to Abraham was passed to his sons Isaac and Jacob, but Jacob’s family actually leaves the land they were promised! Long story short, they go to Egypt to get food because of a severe famine in the land of Canaan. In Egypt, they meet Joseph, one of Jacob’s sons who’d been sold into slavery by his brothers, taken to Egypt, but rose to be second in command over Egypt.
In this unlikely turn of events, Joseph recognizes his brothers, provides for them, and asks them to bring his father Jacob to Egypt. Pharaoh lets Joseph give his family the best part of the land, the land of Goshen. So Jacob brings his sons and grandchildren to live in Egypt, seventy people in all (1:1-5).
God’s Promises Are Materializing
Eventually Joseph and all his brothers die (1:6). But verse 7 says that death doesn’t stop the promises of God. This verse takes us back to two important passages in Genesis that help us understand what’s happening here.
The first is God’s command to humanity in Genesis 1:28, “And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.’” God wants himself to be known throughout the earth so he tells his image-bearers to multiply and rule over the earth.
The second is God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 12:1-3, “Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’”
The connections between 1:7 and Genesis 1:28 and 12:1-3 are Moses’ way of telling us that Israel is living under the blessing of God and that his purposes for Israel are going forward in Egypt. God’s promises were materializing in Goshen.
Be Grateful in Goshen
God’s promises to Abraham focused on two things: descendants and land. The promise was for a people in a place. At the beginning of Exodus, the people are growing, but in the wrong place!
But is it the wrong place? Some may wonder why God took his people from the land of Canaan to Egypt for 400 years. But think about it. What do you think would’ve happened to Jacob’s small family in Canaan? They would’ve been swallowed up by the pagan culture around them. Judah had already taken a Canaanite wife before they went to Egypt (Gen. 38:2).
Egypt, and Goshen in particular, served as an incubator for God’s people, a place where God’s “son” Israel could be kept safe and grow strong. Goshen functioned as a sort of theological cocoon for the Israelites so that they could get away from the pagan influences of the Canaanites. Goshen was God’s gracious means of growing his people.
God often takes us to places we don’t expect to prepare us for the things he called us to. What’s your Goshen? Our whole lives are in a sense lived in “Goshen,” the place God puts us until he takes us home. Be grateful in Goshen. It’s not home, but it’s a good land.
Exodus Is About Resurrection
The opening of Exodus tells us that God’s promises are starting to materialize. His promise was to make a people and give them a place. They were multiplying, but they were stuck in Egypt.
God told Jacob on his way to Egypt that Egypt wasn’t the end, only the beginning (Gen. 46:2-4). God told him he’d “go down” to Egypt, but that he’d bring him “up again” into a promised land. God promised him a resurrection, just like he did for the true Israel, the last Adam, Jesus Christ.
Do you see how the exodus gives us a paradigm for the gospel? We, like Jacob, have descended into Egypt where we wait in Goshen for our resurrection. Jesus, the true and better Israel, descended into death for us, taking our punishment so that we could be brought “up again” into new life with God. God sent Jesus to do this work for you because a dead person can’t raise themselves.
All or Nothing
Why does God do this? God resurrects his Son and his people in order to reveal himself. Exodus, indeed the whole Bible, is about God wanting to be known for who he is, not who we imagine him to be.
In Exodus, God makes himself known as both supreme and good, as Ruler and Redeemer, as Lord and Savior. He’s both. We can’t have half of him. We must take all of him or we get none of him.
If you invite me to your house and say, “Come in John, but stay out Sypert,” I wouldn’t know what to do because I’m John Sypert. I couldn’t even say, “This half is John and this half is Sypert” because I’m all John and all Sypert. I’m both so you either get all of me or none of me.
Sometimes we come to Jesus and we want the loving and helping Jesus, not the holy and powerful Jesus. If you come to him wanting the part of him that wants to help you through hard times but not the part that wants to correct how you think or live, you get no Jesus at all.[9]
Exodus shows us a God who is supreme and good, ruler and Redeemer, Lord and Savior. He’s the great “I am” who has no beginning or end and can bring the most powerful nation on earth to its knees, and the one who has so much compassion that he wants his people to have their coats back before night so they don’t get cold (22:26-27).
This God, the God who created you and who sent Jesus to deliver you from death, wants to be known. He’s written himself into the story so that he can be known. Do you know him? The story of your life won’t make sense until you do.
[1]Alastair J. Roberts and Andrew Wilson, Echoes of Exodus: Tracing Themes of Redemption through Scripture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), 13.
[2]L. Michael Morales, Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption, Essential Studies in Biblical Theology, ed. Benjamin L. Gladd (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2020), 5.
[3]W. Ross Blackburn, The God Who Makes Himself Known: The Missionary Heart of the Book of Exodus, New Studies in Biblical Theology, ed. D. A. Carson (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012), 15.
[4]Roberts and Wilson, 14.
[5]Ibid., 15.
[6]Ibid., 16.
[7]Peter Enns, Exodus, The NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), 40.
[8]Peter J. Gentry and Stephen J. Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant: A Biblical-Theological Understanding of the Covenants, 2nd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), 341.
[9]This illustration comes from Collin Hansen, Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2023), 32.