We’ve been following God’s plan of salvation through the stories of the Old Testament. We’ve heard the story of Noah and how God chose to find a way other than destruction to deal with the problem of human sin and evil. Last week, we heard the story of Abraham and the birth of a new nation whose purpose would be to bless all people, to be a conduit for God’s salvation upon the world.

Now, if all this is going to happen, if this blessing is going to spread forth from God’s chosen to all the world, God’s going to have to find a way to keep his chosen people around. That’s not always easy in the ancient Middle East. It was a rather volatile land, even more so than today. (I know, hard to believe.) Because not only do you have marauding tribes of various peoples, not only do you have greedy empires looking to score a greater slice of the land, you also have the volatility of nature itself. Famine, floods, and other disasters are rather common.

All this serves to explain the predicament our people find themselves in today’s lessons. Some generations have pasted since Abraham. His son Isaac had two sons, Jacob and Esau. They didn’t get along. Jacob had himself twelve sons by his two wives (Busy man). They didn’t always get along either, but that proved somewhat fortunate for God’s people. You may recall from your Sunday School days a bit about a coat of many colors and some jealousy and being sold into slavery. That would be Joseph, Jacob’s second-to-youngest son.

Well, Joseph ends up in Egypt, gets himself a nice promotion thanks to an uncanny knack at dream interpretation. So he’s in an ideal position to help his less-gracious brothers and their families when one of those famines comes along. Suffice to say, the Hebrew tribe ends up in Egypt. Now once the famine is over, they’re going to be looking for something to do. An ambitious empire like Egypt is always looking for good soldiers, so they hire on. Mercenaries, and they’re good ones too.

A few more generations pass and Egypt finds itself with a problem. You see, when your army and its Hebrew mercenaries are that good, you quickly run out of people to fight. You run out of places to conquer. The Egyptian empire is at its zenith and you’ve got these soldiers-for-hire that you’ve got nothing for them to do. Bored people with sharp swords might be a problem, so the Egyptians put them to work on public works projects. Between treachery and inertia, a few more generations pass and those skilled and powerful mercenaries are now the slave underclass to the Egyptians. A rather unpleasant reversal of fortune for God’s people.

So what’s God to do? His people are in trouble. This new nation that he has created now finds itself under the thumb of the most powerful empire in the world. God needs a liberator, someone who will speak his word and set his people free. So, as he has done before, God goes looking for someone, someone who’s perfect for the job. And what he finds is a court exile named Moses. Raised in the Egyptian palace as an Egyptian, but born a Hebrew, Moses had fled the land of his birth due to an altercation where a fellow Egyptian had been murdered. He’s perfect. He knows the ins-and-outs of Egyptian politics, knows the language. He’s perfect.

Unfortunately, the one person who doesn’t think so is Moses himself. So God has to persuade him. Burning bush time. God appears to Moses and they have a conversation. I need you to be my liberator, God says. Moses balks. You want me to challenge the most powerful man on Earth? More or less, but, God tells him, you won’t be alone in this endeavor. I will go with you and the world will see just how powerful I truly am.

We know the rest of the story well. Moses goes as God has commanded. He goes to Pharaoh, “Let my people go.” Pharaoh refuses. Ten plagues later, he finally relents. The people leave and start their long march back to the promised land.

Now all along, God is with his people. He is with Moses as he stands before the mightiest emperor the world had seen up to that time. It is God’s power that flows through Moses so that he may perform miracles and signs. It is God’s power that strikes the Egyptians with plagues. And then, even still, as the Hebrews depart for home at last, God goes with them, granting them a visible sign of his presence in the form of a pillar of cloud and fire.

And, of course, there is that dramatic scene by the seashore where God defeats the Egyptians once and for all with the power of wind and wave.

God made a covenant with Abraham that his family, his people, would prosper and be a blessing to all the world. And when a threat to that prosperity and blessing emerges, God acts. Here, God sends a liberator; He sends Moses. It’s not the last time this sort of thing happens to God’s chosen, because this is far from the last time they get themselves in a jam. From famines to Philistines, God is always there to protect his own.

No matter how bad it gets, and it does get bad throughout the course of history, there’s always a remnant at least that survives, that God prospers. Because God’s promise, God’s covenant to Abraham is eternal. It cannot and will not be broken.

It must not, because out of that promise will come the one to liberate all the world. Not like Moses, who saved the Hebrews from the Egyptians. Not like Cyrus, the king of Persia, who liberated them from slavery to Babylon. Not like any of these, for this one does not save from mortal enemies, but from the power of sin and death itself. He is the Christ and God is determined to see this blessing come to pass. His people will survive, for through them shall come the one to save the whole world. Amen.