May 12, 2024: Message: Women Who Change the World | Scripture: Exodus 2:1-10 | Speaker: Pastor Stephen Choy
Worship Songs: All Creatures of Our God and King | Christ Our Wisdom
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Introduction
If able, please stand as I read to you from Exodus 2:1-10. TWoL: 1 Now a man from the house of Levi went and took as his wife a Levite woman. 2 The woman conceived and bore a son, and when she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him three months. 3 When she could hide him no longer, she took for him a basket made of bulrushes and daubed it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child in it and placed it among the reeds by the riverbank. 4 And his sister stood at a distance to know what would be done to him. 5 Now the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her young women walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her servant woman, and she took it. 6 When she opened it, she saw the child, and behold, the baby was crying. She took pity on him and said, “This is one of the Hebrews’ children.” 7 Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and call you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?” 8 And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Go.” So, the girl went and called the child’s mother. 9 And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child away and nurse him for me, and I will give you your wages.” So, the woman took the child and nursed him. 10 When the child grew older, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. She named him Moses, “Because,” she said, “I drew him out of the water.”
I know now, as a parent, that decisions are hard. My mom’s a pharmacist, and she questioned whether she should be working every single day of her career (she’s finally retiring) because of how much time she missed from our lives, and yet she did it because my dad, despite being at a very large church, and despite the church having the money for it, was simply not paid enough to sustain our family.
She struggled—should I quit, should I keep going? Should I go back to school to train and become something else—something I’d rather be doing. But she stuck it out for the good of our family—so that I and my siblings could live the life we got to live. And here’s the thing, when I was young, and I wanted to sleep in on the weekends, or watch T.V., or hangout with my friends instead of with my parents, I never understood why my mom would look and act so hurt. I could never see past myself—the immensity of her sacrifice for us—her faithfulness—her service—her love, and I was a fool for it.
And what I want to do today is to make sure that our boys in our midst—our men—our husbands—our sons—our grandsons—our uncles—our grandfathers—if you have XY chromosomes—I want to make sure that we celebrate the gift of godly women who’ve given their lives for sinners like me, and I want to give three reasons why we should (not how). Three reasons that we see in our text—reasons that I’ve witnessed in the life of my own mother, and I imagine in the lives not only of the mothers in this room but of many, if not all, of our women. We are to regularly and vocally celebrate the gift of godly women in our lives—people who exemplify not only God’s character but his gospel to us. We’re to do that, according to Exodus 2:1-10, for three reasons, the first being …
1) Because They Exemplify Sacrificial Faith
Now, I want to make a connection with where we are in Israel’s history. For those of you not as familiar with the story near the end of Genesis, we come to the story of Joseph, which many of you know is a story about a boy who is the favourite son of his father, Jacob (Israel)—a fact that his 10 older brothers don’t like. So, they trap Joseph, tell their father that Joseph is dead, and they sell him to slavers who bring him to Egypt.
But the Lord is with Jospeh, and he causes Joseph to rise in the ranks until Pharaoh makes him second in command over all Egypt because he foresees a great famine is coming and has a plan to save the nations. And it’s during that famine that his brothers come back begging him for food not recognizing it’s him. Eventually Joseph reveals himself to them, and they weep. They reunite Jacob and his whole household with Joseph, and all of Jacob’s great wealth and family are brought to Egypt, and they prosper under Joseph’s protection.
But then Joseph dies, and in subsequent years, as Israel grows in power and number, another Pharaoh rises who does not remember Joseph, and he grows afraid of Israel while also seeing that the Egyptian economy can’t survive without them. So, what does he do? He enslaves them—makes their lives hard, and he issues an edict saying that the Hebrew midwives—Jewish women—are to kill the male born Jews. But they don’t kill them, which leads Pharaoh to a second edict—throw all the Jewish-born males into the Nile (assumedly to drown or to be eaten by crocodiles).
And this leads us to Exodus 2 where we meet a young mother who, although unnamed, gives birth to a beautiful son—a good son. In fact, if you read the Hebrew, directly translated in verse 2b, it says, “And she looked upon it or him—she saw him”—meaning she cherished what she saw—she loved what she saw—she was pleased with what she saw, why? “Because it or he was good.” This means that she knew Moses was a blessing from God. How do we know this? Because these exact words are meant to allude to words Moses, our author, has used before in Genesis: “And God saw it [that is his creation]—meaning he was pleased with it—for it was good.”
Or take what’s said in verse 3, after three months of hiding Moses—assumedly in their home—his mom took for him a basket made of bulrushes and daubed it with bitumen and pitch. Now, this word for basket isn’t your typical Hebrew word for basket. No, this word is better translated as chest or ark. In fact, it’s the exact word used to refer to the thing that Noah built as a means to save his family and two of every creature from the outpouring of God’s wrath.
In other words, in Moses, God was establishing a new covenant—a new creation. This was to be a new Adam and a new Noah. A founder of a new humanity. Where chaos and death reigned in Egypt over the people of God after Joseph’s death—when the situation for the Hebrews having had so much success could not become any worse, Moses was to be the divine answer—the good word—of deliverance from their suffering and from the wrath of God. Moses was to be the mediator between God and his people.
This is why it’s so important that Moses’ father and mother are from the tribe of Levi—they’re a mediating, priestly clan—meant to bring reconciliation to a people who felt God had abandoned them. And this mother of his builds a little ark to allude to how this young baby was to someday grow up and be his people’s Saviour. Do you see where this is going? This is how God works in history. He is sovereignly leading us to something—to someone greater—one meant to save us from the chaos of the world and the chaos of our sin.
Yet, what we must remember is that Moses’ father, and more important to the story—his mother, was no prophet or prophetess. She didn’t know this specifically about Moses, but I can guarantee you, she knew this was how God worked. In fact, it’s because she saw the gift that Moses was—because she saw that he was good—and because she knew how God worked in history, Hebrews 11:23 tells us that she acted by faith: “By faith, Moses, when he was born, was hidden for three months by his parents, because they saw that the child was beautiful, and [the author of Hebrews adds,] they were not afraid of the king’s edict.”
Unfortunately, I don’t get the chance to preach to you from the passage directly preceding ours this morning in Exodus 1:15-22, but there, we find two Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, and they’re commanded by Pharaoh to abort all Jewish-born males. The problem for Pharaoh, though, is that they don’t do it. Do you know why? Because the midwives feared God more than they feared Pharaoh. And there’s supposed to be a parallel here—a picture of the mettle of these Jewish women that we’re supposed to understand, namely, that just like these Hebrew midwives, Moses’ mother, although unnamed for us in this text, fears God or believes in God and his sovereign purposes more than she fears Pharaoh.
See, all of us fear something. Some of us, if not all of us, fear what people might think of us. We fear how governments and people of authority might treat us. We fear not having enough money. We fear never getting to feel pleasure on our terms. We fear that when left to ourselves, we won’t like what we find, and we fill our time with meaningless forms of entertainment. We fear what people are saying behind our backs, so we find a way to say something behind their backs first. We fear being alone, so we seek bad fellowship.
Pharaoh had a fear, but it wasn’t in God. The records of Joseph and the previous Pharaoh would have been there. He could have very easily discovered what the God of heaven intended for Israel, but he doesn’t want to discover it. Why? Because he feared what he could lose in this life more than what God desired to give him, and he couldn’t let go of what he had.
But Moses’ mother, just like the midwives, feared God more than she feared Pharaoh. She believed in God and in the gift of her son more than she believed in preserving her own well-being before Pharaoh. And in her fear of God—in her faith in his character and his direction over history—she not only preserves this baby’s life, but when she could hide him at home no longer, she had faith to entrust him to her Lord—to give him to God.
That’s why she constructs the little ark. That’s why she coats it with bitumen and pitch—to keep the baby from drowning. That’s why she places him specifically in that part of the Nile—by the reeds of the bank—firstly to protect him from the crocodiles and other wildlife, but more importantly, because she knew that is where the daughter of Pharaoh came to bathe in the river. And who could protect her son better from Pharaoh than Pharaoh’s own daughter?
Now, how did Moses’ mom know that Pharaoh’s daughter would protect her son? Maybe she didn’t. I suspect she had no way to be certain. But what she had was a certain faith, and she decided in faith. A faith willing to sacrifice what she probably desired more for herself in keeping Moses. She gives him up for his good, trusting that God would do better than what she wanted for him.
It reminds me of something I read about Charles Spurgeon once in a conversation he had with his mom where she came to him after becoming a preacher in his church, and she said, “Ah, Charles! I often prayed the Lord to make you a Christian, but I never asked that you might become a Baptist.” To which he responds, “Ah, mother! The Lord has answered your prayer with his usual bounty and given you exceeding abundantly above what you asked or thought.”
Mothers, both biological and spiritual, are you willing to give up your children to the Lord—do you pray that he might lead them as he pleases over how you please (to go into ministry, to become pastors or missionaries in unreached places), or do you require them to do what pleases and comforts you? We need to learn from the pattern of faithful sacrifice seen not only in Moses’ and Spurgeon’s mothers, but also in the lives of women throughout the Bible. Moses’ mother likely drew from the example of Rebecca and her giving up Jacob to flee from the wrath of Esau. Hannah was barren, but God gave her Samuel, and she entrusted Samuel to the service of the Lord. Think of Elizabeth who likely had to watch as her son, John, go out into the wilderness and be thought of as a madman by much of Israel’s ruling class. Or, take the most precious example of all, that of Mary as she watched her innocent son convicted, most falsely, for crimes he never committed and hung upon a cross to die our sinner’s death.
The faith of a mother in her care for her child and in her letting go of that child to be used by God in whatever way he sees fit cannot be compared to, I think, any other faith that we see in this world. And it’s one that only women and mothers can really do. It is one I’ve seen my own mother have to do with not just one son but both of her sons as they left Canada to do ministry here where Christ is largely forgotten. It’s one that some of you have had to grapple with or will have to grapple with amongst your own children/grandchildren. In those moments, women/et. al. will you entrust your children to God—to let him lead them over how you want to lead them?
I hope you will, even when you aren’t certain what’s in store for them. Trust him to do what is good not just for them but for you. And, friends, celebrate and rejoice in the example of faith that we’ve received in these mothers, biological and spiritual, for they are, to us, a gift from God through whom the vibrancy, gravity, and sacrifice found in the gospel are given their greatest light. But then, secondly, celebrate the gift of godly women …
2) Because They Provide Sacrificial Service
Let’s consider now the role of Moses’ sister. Just like his mother, his sister isn’t given a name here. Most of us probably assume it’s Mariam and not some other sister who might remain unnamed or who might have passed away before we meet Mariam in Exodus 15, but Moses in recording this story is intentional not to name any of these women. Why? Because big doors swing on small hinges. What was the value of a woman in the ancient near east? It would have been mainly to procreate and raise children.
And here’s the thing, our world has denigrated that purpose—as if it is a calling and purpose too lowly, too humble, too unimportant for the women of today—as if the way to find value or worth is by making sure everyone knows who you are—knows your name—knows your story—knows the difficulties you had to overcome in our oppressive world to make your voice heard. But right here in Exodus, we get a story where the women aren’t concerned about seeing their names displayed in bright lights, and in their insignificance, they are raised up as some of the most important figures in history.
Here’s what one commentator has to say about this, “In these first one and a half chapters of Exodus, the great unfolding story of God’s redemption—the greatest act of redemption in the Old Testament, and the act of redemption that will be the example par excellence of God’s deliverance in all of Scripture, culminating in the cross of Christ—is being moved forward by women. Specifically, it’s moved by women doing one thing: taking care of children […] God uses all of them in mighty ways—ways they could not fully understand at the time. All of that came by faithfully loving and serving children and protecting their little lives.”
Mothers, biological and spiritual—women who take the time to care for others and who seek no fame or notoriety for it—ladies who are doing things that the world thinks is of no considerable value or contribution to broader society—don’t believe the lies that you are unimportant or that you are unnoticed in caring for the little things and our little ones because the God of the universe notices you and is celebrating you and venerating you and holding for you the most special of honours in his house! Your labours are not—they shall never be—and we dare not ever think that they are in vain.
Your name may not become great in this life. You may live and die with only a handful of people knowing who you are. But what you do not see—what even we, who celebrate you, do not see—is what God is doing in incredible ways through you. He is using your compassion and grace. He is using your resourcefulness and creativity. He is using your quiet and genius to do the spectacular, and you need to know that it is everything to us—it is the backbone and the foreground to everything God is planning for his people since before time, in this very moment, and for the eternity that is to come. We value you because you do God’s work. Think of it this way: there is no salvation for us hopeless people without you.
This is what we see and treasure even in little ones like Moses’ sister. How courageous, careful, and ingenious is this little girl? Not only to watch her little brother as he’s placed in the Nile, but when he is found by Pharaoh’s daughter’s servant, Moses’ sister uses all her creative imaginings and intelligence to suggest—hey how about we get the baby a wetnurse, who, whether Pharaoh’s daughter knows it or not, is Moses’ mother. And in doing this, the mother of Moses isn’t relegated to seeing her son for only three months but for another three to four years and probably for years after that as a maidservant in Pharaoh’s daughter’s house, AND she’s paid for it. Your service for God’s children is never in vain!
All of this happens because Moses’ sister uses her brilliance for the safety of her brother. And don’t miss the danger here. This girl is no one standing and talking to the most important of someone’s in Egypt. Her audacity. Her courage. Her shrewdness. It’s all on display and at risk here in service to Moses, and undoubtedly, this little girl—probably no older than 6-8 years old, she’s not acting this way without explanation. No, you know she’s like this because she’s seen it before. She’s emulating someone she knows. I don’t think it’s a far cry to guess that that person for her—the person she’s emulating is her own mother.
Why, church, do we celebrate godly women? Not only because they are worth celebrating in and of themselves but because through them, we know more godly women are on their way. Women who know to do right, even when it’s hard. Look in our own midst—we see the examples, and we rejoice in them for they constantly sacrifice their own well-being for our good—often in ways that go unnoticed by us. And I as your pastor do not want you to be unnoticed—I thank you with the deepest gratitude in my heart not only for your service but for your love for your children. But I hope you know that my thanks—and the thanks of us in this church—is small compared to the joy that the Lord has for you and intends to give you in himself forever and ever.
I am convinced that a godly woman’s reward in heaven will rival the rewards of Paul and the apostles—of Moses and the prophets—why? Because they would be nothing without women like you. I give God the highest praise in this, and I look forward to celebrating it in greater ways when we see him face-to-face. And still, lastly, celebrate the gift of godly women …
3) Because They Magnify Sacrificial Love
The last example we have is very likely not actually godly. Pharaoh’s daughter is likely a worshipper of Egyptian idols, but there are some things we should notice about what’s taking place here. First is that Moses is in severe trouble. Pharaoh’s edict still stands, and without someone to intercede—without someone to save him in his helplessness—he has no chance. And what makes this situation tragic is that no Hebrew family could take him without bringing great danger upon their own households. Hiding Moses would be treason.
But, as we already know, the one who commits the treason isn’t a Hebrew, she’s an Egyptian. In fact, she’s the Egyptian of Egyptians. She’s someone who we entirely do not expect to be the saviour of this baby boy. She had no obligation to Moses or his family. There’s no description of her anywhere else in Scripture as to her past, her affiliations, her religious proclivities, even her name. We know nothing about her other than what’s told to us in these verses.
Still, what is most staggering about our passage is that at the height of it all—after Moses’ mother has displayed great, sacrificial faith, and after his sister has served her brother, putting her own life on the line—the most staggering thing isn’t that this Egyptian woman refuses to kill this Hebrew baby boy, it’s that, despite all the factors that tell us otherwise, she sees this boy, and she is filled with pity for him in her heart. She loves Moses, even though it means making her the shame of her own family, even though all the other Egyptians wouldn’t understand such an action, even though it meant disobeying the orders of her own father.
This royal, significant, Egyptian woman condescends and humiliates herself for the sake of this lowly, unimportant, Hebrew child. Why? Because she pities him. She has compassion upon him. She sees that he needs her. She sees that without her, he has no hope. An Egyptian who has every reason to hate this boy, chooses, at great cost to herself, to love him.
And here’s what I want to leave you with, women of TCCBC, as Christians—as those who know your own sinfulness and your own, prior hopelessness, when you minister to your children—when you minister to our youth—to the people of our church, knowing that you may get no thanks for it or be remembered only as an idea and not by name, I want to encourage you with this: that the name you display in that moment isn’t your own—you don’t represent your own lowly, rebellious image. No, in those moments where you go out to those who need you, who are broken, who are hurting—when you have pity on those who are hopeless in themselves, you magnify for them the love of God.
You show us the glory of the gospel. You show us Christ who came not as we expected but as one lowly and humble, born in Bethlehem to a forgotten, supposed-to-be-divorced, young virgin. He pities and has compassion for us. He condescends and dies for our sins, rises in triumph, beckons us in when all we deserved was death, and by his wounds, we are saved. You, our women, are to be most commended, for by your ministry—by your sacrificial faithfulness, life-risking service, and God-magnifying love, you bring us to our Lord and Saviour, and we give praise to him for you.
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