Episode Transcript
Carey Griffel: Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot, where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel and today we are gonna be continuing our theme of refuge. The last two episodes I was talking about refuge as a theme within the Book of Genesis. And I think that really solidly sets up our picture of what refuge is and what it is not, and how complicated the theme of refuge actually can be in Scripture. Now, I'm not saying that the stories in Genesis encapsulate or fully flesh out the frames of refuge, but we get a really solid grounding in the ideas within the stories of Genesis.
[00:00:56] And last week, I ended on talking about six different frames of refuge. Now, this isn't all of the frames of refuge, but I think it is some very cogent ones that we'll see very frequently in Scripture and ones that we'll talk about again today. Those themes were the concealment refuge, the flight refuge, the presence refuge, the providential refuge, the covenant refuge, and the provisional refuge.
[00:01:31] Now, those are not all entirely separate either. There's a lot of crossover in many of those. But I think seeing each one as its own theme is a really good way to look at the theme in Scripture and to see what the biblical authors are doing within these stories, within the idea and the conceptual world of refuge and hiddenness and protection and things of that nature.
[00:01:58] And I think that's really important because for the Christian, you'll hear a lot of sermons about refuge because we have a lot of poetic language in the Psalms that touches on this theme.
[00:02:10] And I think that really digging into the nature of it and the ways that we can see it in Scripture can really help us to apply the text in our lives and understand how God is our refuge, and understand how other things in our lives can actually function as refuge places or even places of anti-refuge.
[00:02:34] So we're gonna get into the first two chapters of the Book of Exodus, primarily the first chapter. And we're gonna talk about how a place of refuge can become anti-refuge when its power turns against the life that it once preserved.
[00:02:53] In this situation here at the beginning of the book of Exodus, before God publicly breaks Pharaoh's power, he is keeping his promised future alive through people who fear God, who protect children, and who refuse to cooperate with death and themes that lead to death.
[00:03:14] We end in the book of Genesis with Joseph and with the promised family being in a state of protection within a very unexpected place in Egypt. But that refuge turns into bondage in the book of Exodus. But we see very quickly that even though God is not necessarily mentioned as an active actor within the first chapter of the book of Exodus, he's definitely there in the background. But God has not forgotten his covenant and his promises, and the deliverance of the people is within the hidden acts of preservation that real people are enacting within the nation of Egypt.
[00:04:01] So the book of Genesis ends in a really unexpected place, and Exodus pretty immediately flips that refuge that they found in Genesis on its head. So the question is no longer only, Where can threatened life be sheltered? But it is now, what happens when a sheltering order becomes a controlling one?
[00:04:26] And every time I read the book of Genesis, it really kind of surprises me, even though I know how it ends and I know what the story is, it surprises me that Egypt is not the villain in the story at the end.
[00:04:40] The promised family came to this nation because Egypt had bread, but Egypt had bread because God had sent Joseph ahead to prepare that way. The refuge that is enacted in that story is provisional. It preserved life, but is not the promised destination, and even the original readers of Genesis would obviously already have had that in mind. So I do think the end of Genesis would surprise them. But now we open up our Bibles to the book of Exodus, and we see that provisional refuge is not ultimate.
[00:05:20] And I also want to note that this is not the first time we've seen this. The promised family itself can be a place of anti-refuge, like with Hagar. But we'll get back to her later in this episode.
[00:05:35] So let's begin with where Exodus itself begins. We have the sons of Israel remembered in the text. And they are listed specifically. And then we have this account where Joseph died and all of his brothers and all of that generation. But the people of Israel stayed in Egypt, and they were fruitful, and they increased greatly.
[00:05:59] Verse seven tells us that they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong so that the land was filled with them. Which is a really interesting description of who the Israelites are, And I actually think it foreshadows what we see when the people are entering back into the promised land, and they see that the Canaanites are strong and that the land is filled with them.
[00:06:24] But here, obviously, Israel is not there as an enemy. They are not there to be against the Egyptians, and they are themselves the promised people. But because as a group, they are strong and the land is filled with them, Israel becomes a threat to Egypt. Now, of course, they're not supposed to be a threat to Egypt, so we have this anti-narrative going on compared to when the people are going into the Promised Land.
[00:06:55] So what we have set up here is not Israel as aggressors. The crisis that Pharaoh is facing is not an Israelite attack or really as Israelites as Egyptian enemies. The Pharaoh's crisis is simply that they are there. And the people's multiplication should be heard against God's blessing and the Abrahamic promise that we've talked about before. Egypt has a choice here. They can participate in that, or at least help to proliferate it, or they can work against God's promises in trying to prevent that.
[00:07:37] as you're reading the Book of Exodus, in the back of your mind, I want to have the connection of the nations who will either be blessed or cursed via their relationship to God's promised people. There is no active threat here, but nonetheless, Pharaoh interprets God's blessing as a security threat, and he begins organizing the state around that fear.
[00:08:02] We have specifically mentioned a new king in Egypt arises who does not know Joseph. And not to spend too much time here, but I do wanna point out that the language of knowing in Scripture is not just about head knowledge, but it is experiential and it is relational. And that matters a lot because it's not just that somebody could bring up Joseph to the new Pharaoh and that Pharaoh would be like,"Oh, yeah, I forgot that that guy exists."
[00:08:37] But the knowing here is more about the attitude that the Pharaoh has towards the Israelites. The hospitality that they once enjoyed now has turned into suspicion, and the reception that they had actually becomes ownership because they become slaves.
[00:08:57] So when previously the Egyptians themselves were dependent on Joseph's wisdom, now they are fearful of Joseph's people, and the reversal is framed in terms of memory. And memory is the key to God's promises and either being in them or helping them come about.
[00:09:19] The theme of memory is a very interesting thread in Scripture and is itself part of the refuge theme. God remembers Noah. God remembers his covenant. And that's not because God needs to have something brought to mind, like God chose to forget it. The language of remembrance is because in biblical parlance, remembering is about faithfulness to the covenant and to the promises that God has actually promised. So it is about life and covenant and relationship. Memory also connects to offspring and continued life through generations, not just within a single lifespan or for a single person.
[00:10:06] So this not knowing Joseph bit is marking a regime that rejects the obligations of remembered preservation. It is not just about memory. It is about choice in the Pharaoh's relationship to the people of Israel. the contrast with the memory will be brought up again at the end of Exodus chapter two, where Pharaoh forgets Joseph and God remembers the covenant.
[00:10:35] All right, so let's talk a little bit about how the fear builds an anti-refuge. Remember that Israel is not being described as actively against Israel as an enemy. Nonetheless, Pharaoh feels like he has to control the situation.
[00:10:53] So he puts into place taskmasters, forced labor, store cities, which is an interesting contrast from Genesis, where Joseph was building storehouses. But this is not storehouses that are going to provide life for the Israelites.
[00:11:11] In short, the place that once supplied food is now extracting labor from the people. There is a difference in economy here. The economy was plentiful, and it provided life for Egyptians as well as Israelites when we had the story of Joseph, but now we have oppression.
[00:11:32] And the language that we have of affliction and bitterness is also important to point out because that is going to later resonate with God seeing Israel's affliction and Egypt making their lives bitter with hard service is not an incidental thing. It is systemic. And that is going to contrast with the bitter water at Marah later when the Israelites are escaping, because Israel is going to leave bitter bondage and they're going to meet bitter water where God provides and heals.
[00:12:08] And that water theme is a really big one throughout the book of Exodus. We have themes of anti-creation, where God is blessing fruitfulness and Pharaoh attacks fruitfulness, and God brings life from the waters and Pharaoh uses water for death. we have a couple of different incidences of that within the book of Exodus.
[00:12:31] I also want to call your mind back to the story of the tower in Genesis 11. Here we have explicitly fear and control producing building projects. And I think that the readers of Genesis would have these stories in mind when they're reading the story of the tower. So I know it's very common to think of the tower in Genesis 11 about being about worship, and I'm not saying that context is not there, but there is a wider context that we might miss if we're only focused on the worship aspect. But importantly, the more Israel is oppressed, the more the people are still multiplying and spreading in the land.
[00:13:17] So the policy that Pharaoh puts into place is failing at its stated goal. But that doesn't soften the situation. It really intensifies the fear that the Egyptians seem to have, and it escalates the situation. So no longer are they being exploited economically, but they are being directly attacked at the source of who they are at the birth of their children.
[00:13:46] Let me go ahead and actually read this passage here, starting in Exodus chapter one, verse eight, which says, quote,"Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. And he said to his people, Behold, the people of Israel are too many and too mighty for us. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply.
[00:14:11] And if war breaks out, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land. Therefore they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with heavy burdens. They built for Pharaoh store cities, Pithom and Raamses. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied, and the more they spread abroad.
[00:14:35] And the Egyptians were in dread of the people of Israel. So they ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves, and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick, and in all kinds of work in the field. In all their work they ruthlessly made them work as slaves."End quote.
[00:14:56] Now, I know that one of the questions a lot of people have here in the first chapter of Exodus is, who is the Pharaoh? What is the timeline? Where are these store cities? And I'm not gonna say that those questions aren't good questions to ask and really interesting ones, but let's focus on the narrative contrast of what's going on here in the first chapter of Exodus with what just happened in the Book of Genesis. The store cities are no longer being built for the sake of helping the Israelites, but rather the Israelites are now being exploited for their labor. Note too that again, there is nothing that says that Israel is acting like a threat here.
[00:15:43] But specifically, it is mentioned that if war breaks out, they're worried that the Israelites are going to join their enemies and fight against them. And not only that, but they will escape. So even before they are made to be slaves, it seems like there's this idea of property in regards to the people of Israel. Like Pharaoh has some sort of claim over them simply by the fact that they are there.
[00:16:10] And it's really interesting too because wouldn't you presume that if you were going to enslave people, that the fact that they're having children, at least to some degree and to some extent, that might actually be helpful to you Because then you actually get more slaves. Now, of course, that will stop at a certain point once those slaves become powerful enough to uprise and revolt. But they were already worried about that. But they didn't seem to be too worried about Israel revolting and escaping, but Israel partnering with an enemy that would come in.
[00:16:49] with the context of this chapter with Genesis eleven, the tower and the building was meant to make a name for themselves, right? And yet here, the Israelites are forced into working and building But that is not causing the Pharaoh to have a name. That's a really interesting contrast, and I think that's part of why we don't know who the Pharaoh is here.
[00:17:17] The Israelites who were writing this down or who passed this down in history, maybe they did know who the Pharaoh was. But the point was that the building that he was exploiting from the Israelites did not cause that Pharaoh to have a name.
[00:17:35] Okay, so we have this problem that the Israelites are now in. Starting in verse fifteen of Exodus one, it says, quote,"Then the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah. When you serve as midwife to the Hebrew women and see them on the birthstool, if it is a son, you shall kill him, but if it is a daughter, she shall live. But the midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live. So the king of Egypt called the midwives and said to them, Why have you done this and let the male children live?
[00:18:23] The midwives said to Pharaoh, Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them. So God dealt well with the midwives, and the people multiplied and grew very strong. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families. Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live. End quote.
[00:18:57] All right, so you wouldn't expect the Pharaoh of Egypt to be speaking directly to a group of Hebrew midwives, would you? Doesn't really matter, but the contrast here is between a king of Egypt who is nameless and two midwives who are named. And these two women are the first named resistors in Exodus.
[00:19:22] And so here again, back to our theme of refuge. Refuge is not always a place. Sometimes it is the actions of individuals who refuse to surrender to the death idea. And instead of fearing the Egyptians or fearing people, the midwives are described as fearing God. Now, that's not the same kind of fear. We shouldn't presume that they are afraid of God. But really, the context here is that they respect God, and there is a faith that God would bring the situation to fruition in a positive sense. And it's not any kind of an accident that the first people we see who are preserving lives are midwives. this is the context of birth and offspring, which is part of the way that covenant is going to be perpetuated, but also the fact that these are women, and named women at that.
[00:20:23] The resistance that they put forward doesn't topple the regime, but it creates space for life to still continue, and it grants them individual blessing as well. So here we have the idea of God working through His promises and providing life and refuge through people who are acting in their normal vocations.
[00:20:47] And so when Pharaoh did not succeed with the midwives in convincing them to do his will, he escalates the situation toward all of his people and tells them that all of the Hebrew sons should be cast into the Nile.
[00:21:02] So the state violence becomes public and socially distributed throughout the entire Egyptian people. The river that is sustaining Egypt as a population is now an instrument for death for the Israelites. Male children are targeted because they form a particular path to lineage and future and strength and continued family provision.
[00:21:31] Because if we have female children who continue to live, then those female children will have no choice but to either die off or be married into Egyptian families. So this isn't a matter of mercy, but the theme is still one of control.
[00:21:48] So there's a few pieces that we could look for within the rest of the story of the Exodus in this tiny picture here. for one thing, the Nile is part of the way that Israel escapes because it is part of the plagues, right, in the future. What's happening here early on in this first chapter is that Pharaoh is setting the stage for his own consequences. So when we are wondering later on why Pharaoh and the rest of the Egyptians are going to lose their firstborn, that pattern has started right here, and it was instigated by Pharaoh himself.
[00:22:25] And Pharaoh himself turned the Nile into a grave. That is flipped about when we get into Exodus 2 with the mother who places her son into that same river, and he is within a vessel that is made for life. And that child will, of course, work to deliver the people.
[00:22:46] Okay, so we get into chapter two of Exodus. And we again have the theme of people not having a name. It kind of makes sense that Pharaoh isn't given a name, but why don't we have the name of Moses' parents here?
[00:23:01] Of course, we get a little more information and a little more confusion about that later, but let's just stick with what chapter two tells us. Beginning in Exodus chapter two, verse one, it says, quote,"Now a man from the house of Levi went and took as his wife a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son, and when she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him three months.
[00:23:28] 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, and his sister stood at a distance to know what would be done to him. Now the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her young women walked beside the river.
[00:23:51] She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her servant woman, and she took it. 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."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?"
[00:24:15] And Pharaoh's daughter said to her,"Go."So the girl went and called the child's mother. 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. 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."End quote.
[00:24:45] All right, so we have a whole bunch of people who are not named, but again, women. The theme of women is very strong in this first part of Exodus. The concealment at first when Moses' mother has him and she hides him for three months, that is again a really potent part of our theme of refuge. But it is provisional.
[00:25:10] And there is obviously a sense of fear that she would be found with the child and that the child would be killed and thrown into the Nile. Before that could happen, she puts him into the Nile herself within a basket. And then we have the daughter of Pharaoh, who we would presume would be an enemy, but she is part of this picture of deliverance.
[00:25:34] Not only the daughter of Pharaoh, but also her servants and her young women. Pharaoh's daughter knew very well who this child was, at least where he had come from, and she saved him anyway. Now, a thing I've mentioned before is that this basket that Moses is in recalls the ark of Noah. It's the same word that we have for Moses' basket and for Noah's ark. Both of these vessels preserve threatened life through waters that are associated with death. Both of them are coated for protection. And both of them are about providing deliverance through suffering, through death. If we contrast Noah and Moses, we have life threatened in water. We have the ark that carries the family or the child.
[00:26:28] We have pitch, we have bitumen that are creating a kind of boundary between the death water and the life boat. And then life is going to emerge after a guarded interval.
[00:26:43] So refuge in both of these cases is material. We have a vessel, sealant, the river, the reeds, people watching over. And in the story of Noah, we have God watching over and providing that safe passage through the water.
[00:27:01] Another really interesting aspect of this is that Pharaoh's daughter gives Moses as a baby back to his mother to nurse him and raise him, and then the mother gives him back to the care of Pharaoh's daughter. That seems to imply the kind of situation that we have many other times in Scripture where a mother would give her child to the care of the temple or a priest or something like that.
[00:27:30] Now, of course, we don't have an exact one-to-one correspondence here. But we do have the context of the Levite family. Of course, this is before the Levites are officially called as priesthood and things like that, but I think that whole picture is going to be called up in the ancient Israelites' mind when they hear this story. Even though we have women involved here and not men and the priestly line. But in a sense, even though Moses is not Aaron, we still have the provision and the protection of that priestly line here.
[00:28:07] And so if we look at Exodus one and Exodus two, and we see these stories of the women, all of the women involved in this story are sources of refuge, but they also provide a kind of a network. They don't just do it by themselves. We have two midwives, not just one mentioned. We have Moses' mother, we have Moses' sister, we have Pharaoh's daughter, and her women slaves. And so within this whole picture, we have both named and unnamed women who form a kind of cross-social network of life protection, because it's also across the social spectrum.
[00:28:50] Another focus we have in this story is a repeated theme that we'll see where the deliverer must first be delivered himself. It's not just this little cute story about Moses' childhood, and it's not just an ancient Near Eastern motif that we see a few times in history. Within the story of Moses, he is hidden from death for his future vocation.
[00:29:16] And that preservation provides and precedes his calling, the confrontation that he has with God, his leadership position, his place of intercession between the people and God, and really, you know, the whole Exodus story. It's kind of a miniature version of the deliverance of Israel as a whole.
[00:29:38] And Moses is preserved inside Egypt, which is now an anti-refuge. But even more than that, Moses is preserved within Pharaoh's own household. So it's kind of like one of those Russian nested doll structures, where we have refuge, we have anti-refuge, then we have refuge, then we have anti-refuge.
[00:30:00] And the center of imperial power is actually containing the hidden beginning of its own defeat, which is kinda cool, right? But within these chapters, God's direct work remains hidden in a narrative fashion. He is mentioned, and people within the story do things on account of fearing God, but we get no divine speech. And so we have this very strong theme of providence that echoes the themes from Joseph.
[00:30:32] And now let's take all of this and go back to the story of Hagar. Hagar is an Egyptian woman who is afflicted within Abraham's household. So remember how I've said a couple of times now that even within the promised household, that does not necessarily create a place of refuge for everyone. Hagar flees into the wilderness where God hears and sees and preserves her child.
[00:30:59] And this is very similar to how Israel is Abraham's family afflicted within Egypt's house. Even though Hagar is an Egyptian in both of those stories, the people are gonna cry out, and God hears, and God remembers, and God sees, and God knows. And in both of the stories, children are preserved. So in these stories with Hagar and the story of Israel in Exodus, they do two things. They both mirror and also reverse one another in these really interesting ways.
[00:31:37] It also deepens the moral complexity of the biblical story as a whole, because Israel's identity as oppressed people does not erase the oppression that is embedded in its own founding household. And that is also itself going to be a theme that goes through the Old Testament very strongly. Israel gets judged and Israel goes through the exile on account of becoming the oppressors.
[00:32:06] But God's attentiveness in all of these situations to vulnerable life crosses ethnic and household boundaries. It doesn't matter the biology of a person. It doesn't matter where they live. It doesn't matter where they come from or where they eventually live later on. The refuge theme is not tribal favoritism because God sees affliction wherever it occurs. He does not promise that everything will be completely hunky dory and that people will not go through suffering.
[00:32:39] But that suffering itself can be part of that salvation and deliverance narrative. I know that doesn't sound super great, and we don't really want that. And I'm not trying to soften the idea of suffering and tell you that you're just gonna have to buck up and take it. Sometimes we need to do things like flee from our suffering or do something about it in the moment if we can.
[00:33:05] I do think a lot of these stories of refuge can be places where we can wrestle with to not come out with exactly a pattern of things that we're supposed to do in our own situation. But these stories can inform the way that we think about our lives and think about the suffering that we go through, the oppression that we personally experience, as well as the oppression we probably put on other people in whatever way we do, often without realizing that we're even doing that.
[00:33:39] But anyway, I do think the themes can help us to kind of work through those things. And this theme of anti-refuge in particular, I'm not gonna tell you how you can possibly use that in your own life or even whether it applies to anything that you're going through.
[00:33:56] But if your mind is triggered in some ways with what I'm saying about a place of refuge becoming a place of anti-refuge and God still working within those situations, and those situations all being very complicated and not just an either/or, then perhaps that can help some of us in the ways that we are dealing with in wondering if we should remain in a place that should seem like a place of refuge or perhaps was in the past and maybe is no longer. That does not have to reflect on everybody associated with that refuge or anti-refuge place.
[00:34:41] But I do think that these stories show that it is not just an either/or, and it is not just a place where we just have to put up with suffering and oppression simply because the people we are around claim that what they're doing is from God, right? And I think there's a lot of situations in the world where that happens, where we have people who try to leverage biblical language, leverage ideas of care and even spiritual guidance in very negative ways. And so just wanna kind of mention that for any of you out there who might be in a situation or thinking through something with a friend.
[00:35:27] The Bible is not always giving us direct action as to do this now. Sometimes the answer to our problems is to run away. Sometimes the answer is to remain and stay in God's provision in that situation in some form. And it ends up very complicated. There's not a single answer to how we find refuge, in other words, except that it all centers on God.
[00:35:58] And so let's go up to Exodus chapter two, verses twenty-three through twenty-five, which say, quote,"During those many days the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel, and God knew."End quote.
[00:36:33] So this is key. It's key to the idea of covenant. It's key to the idea of relationship with God, where deliverance happens in response to Israel crying out. So that also tells us that our complaints to God do not go unnoticed, and they can form this basis for our deliverance. God hears our groaning. God remembers.
[00:37:00] And the verbs here really matter. God hears their groaning. God remembers his covenant. God sees the people, and God knows. Those verbs are doing a lot of work to move toward the divine action that we finally see in Exodus three.
[00:37:20] So let's look at what each of these verbs contributes to the overall picture. When God hears, this means that the groaning is not absorbed or silenced by Pharaoh's visible actions. God remembers. This means that sudden recollection after forgetfulness is not the point, but again, covenant attention moving toward action to deliverance.
[00:37:50] God sees, and this calls directly back to Hagar and her naming of God who sees. Now, this God sees the afflicted people on a national level. And God knows. This is compassionate, covenantal, embodied, experiential knowledge that is relational. It is not just about information that God now has. And the contrast in memory is deliberate.
[00:38:20] Pharaoh forgets Joseph, but God remembers not just Joseph, but Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He remembers the entire covenantal promise. The human regime loses the memory of a preservation of the people and turns against that, but God's covenant purpose remains active and involved in that memory. So again, I do think this connects back to Genesis 15. And we're reaching a point where we have a nation who is not in alignment with Israel, who is not in alignment with the people of Abraham. then that is going to end up a certain way for that people.
[00:39:04] Now, at this point in the story, Pharaoh is still ruling. Of course, we have a death mentioned here. But because Pharaoh is not named, I don't think we're really supposed to see much of a disconnect between this Pharaoh and the next one, because Israel is still enslaved, they're still crying out. But at this point, Moses himself fled Egypt and has to come back.
[00:39:30] And this deliverance of the people hasn't yet begun officially. But children have survived. The one who is going to deliver them has been preserved. The death decree of the children has been repeatedly subverted. And God hears, remembers, sees, and knows.
[00:39:52] Now at that stage, we are not yet at the Passover. We still have a good ways to go, and it can be really kind of hard for us to wrestle with these ideas that God allows time to pass when we're in suffering, when we need deliverance. God isn't just snapping His fingers and causing the deliverance to happen. God isn't just decimating all of the Egyptians, although He certainly could.
[00:40:20] But he allows the situation to play out. And from an apologetics angle, from a personal angle of when we are suffering and we're trying to understand where God is in that, that can be really difficult. The last two episodes, I talked a little bit about the difficult theme of God's hiddenness. Usually in these themes, we're talking about people being hidden and people being protected and whatnot, but there's also the flip side of that, where God is himself hidden from us, or at least it seems to us that he is, because we don't see his action. And people call out to God, and they want some reassurance that he is there, that he exists, and people feel like they often don't get that.
[00:41:09] And I don't wanna put that down. I don't wanna say that there's something against their experience and that, well, you know, if they just paid attention more, they would see God. I don't really think that's the answer to our apologetics problem here. what we do very clearly see in Scripture is that sometimes God does wait to act, and sometimes God is not yet visible.
[00:41:34] But in the first two chapters of the Book of Exodus, even though God is not directly himself acting, we do have people who are there. And so I think, again, this is not a full apologetics answer by any means, but sometimes when we are calling out for God, what we have to look for is not some supernatural miracle or supernatural intervention, but what God is placing in our lives right in front of us to help us with the situation that we have.
[00:42:10] Again, that's not always visible to us. We have to go through some things sometimes to figure it out. Sometimes we don't recognize the refuge that is there for us, and sometimes we have to go through suffering in order to get to that point. And there are people who never seem to get there, and that is very difficult for us to understand.
[00:42:32] And I'm not gonna give you a perfect little answer here, but I am going to point you to the themes of Scripture and say that sometimes what we are expecting and asking of God is just not what He does. And I don't have an explanation as for why that is. I don't, and I don't really think anybody else does either.
[00:42:54] But I do think that studying Scripture in the sense of approaching it in a way where it is telling us the way that God is relating to people in real time, in real history, in real circumstances, and these patterns go through time. There's a reason they are patterns, because they actually are the way that God literally interacts with the world in a real way. I do think that's important.
[00:43:23] All right, so let's go ahead and get back to our frame semantics that I've talked about before, because I hope in this episode you will see how the different frames that I mentioned at the end of last episode and the beginning of this one, that we have a lot of these refuge frames in direct interaction in the text within the first two chapters of Exodus, just like we saw them in the book of Genesis.
[00:43:49] There's probably other refuge themes we could actually pull out from these themes as well, especially with the midwives and refuge in women and things like that. But let's go ahead and turn back to these six frames that I've already talked about. First of all is the provisional refuge. There was a real danger of the famine, and Egypt was the temporary sustaining place where life was preserved for both Jacob's family as well as the nations.
[00:44:22] Egypt was blessed because it treated Joseph well. And I think we're supposed to notice that contrast. And that is why explicitly Egypt becomes an anti-refuge, because it then turned against the people of God. So when the nations are in alignment with the principles that God has put into place and the promises that God has given his people, the nations also will be blessed.
[00:44:50] When the nations turn around and do the opposite, then they are going to get that consequence. Instead of being blessed, they will be cursed. And so the provisional refuge sometimes is a refuge that is just temporary, right? It just cannot last through time because it has a natural endpoint. But sometimes that provisional refuge becomes an anti-refuge. and even within that, we will see layers upon layers, right? Because Pharaoh's daughter was still a refuge for Moses.
[00:45:29] Another very big refuge theme within Exodus is the concealment refuge. We have the threat of Pharaoh's death decree for the sons. The refuge enclosure was the household, then also the basket for Moses. There is an interval where the hiddenness happens.
[00:45:49] At first, it is three months for the very beginning of Moses' life. Then it is being placed in the river and floating in the river with his sister watching. And then Moses emerges from that, he's drawn out, and he's returned back to his original place of refuge, really, is very interesting But that itself becomes temporary, and then he has to be put into Pharaoh's household in order to be concealed, we presume. but Moses has many places of concealment where he hides and he is protected.
[00:46:27] As I've talked about, we also have the providential refuge. In Genesis, God actually told Abraham about what would happen to his offspring. There is a future threat. We have Israel's bondage and the need for deliverance, but we also have hidden preparation with the preservation of Moses. We have proximate actors of the refuge here with the midwives and the other women in the story. We have royal compassion, which again is very surprising to us, just like the end of Genesis was. And Moses is raised with an Egyptian upbringing. And much of this is not recognized until later, where we understand that the preserved child becomes the deliverer of the people as a whole. So lots of providence in all of this.
[00:47:18] Then of course, we have the covenant refuge. This is the promised future that was threatened by the empire. The people were going through forced labor, birth control, and death decree. And historically, the people are passing through affliction and pain and suffering and oppression. But nonetheless, God is going to remember the covenant, and that promise remains alive. Within this theme is the idea that those who are faithful will cry out to God in their suffering.
[00:47:54] And then last but not least, a few things I've already kind of touched on is the presence refuge, and this is often acted through proximate agents. God is ultimately the one who is providing the refuge, who is the shield, who is the presence, but it is often humans who act as his agents.
[00:48:18] There's no overt divine appearance of God in Exodus one and the beginning of Exodus two in particular, but rather his work operates through people fearing him or respecting him or honoring him. It is working through motherhood and midwives. It is working through the attention of siblings, compassion of a royal variety even, through servants, through the timing of what's going on, and even through placing Moses in a high social position.
[00:48:53] So some of that can be really surprising to us. And I think another reason why we want to really deeply get into the context of these kinds of themes is that a lot of times we see things really black and white. Like, oh, we have that oppressive government, and they're all evil, and the institution is evil,.
[00:49:15] However you wanna frame it, It is often the case that we frame something as being the enemy or as being the place that is providing the threat. And in all of these stories, it is far more complicated than that. Even within the promised people, we have threat. Even within the evil institution and the evil state, we have provision and deliverance and refuge.
[00:49:44] And so we don't have one single thing that is always the problem or always the thing that's going to save, except of course, God and covenant and things like that, right? But from an earthly perspective, from the perspective where we're looking at people, institutions, or anything else, sometimes a thing could be a refuge and sometimes it's not.
[00:50:11] And those things can be the same thing at the same time, either for a refuge or for an anti-refuge. It is simply not a really clean, neat picture that we can just divide out and say,"Well, clearly government or politics or the church as an institution,"or whatever you want to insert in that as kind of an enemy.
[00:50:38] Sometimes those things do work against God's purposes, certainly, but not always. And we always have these little parts of the story where even within those places where we presume are places of threat or rebellion against God, they aren't always. We have instances of faithfulness within those, of compassion, of people treating God's people as valued in and of themselves for good reasons, even if they themselves don't have a direct relationship to God as far as we know.
[00:51:17] I think a lot of times we're missing this context that we have that stems from the story of Abraham, where being in good relationship with the people that God is blessing is going to bless you, and being in bad relationship to them is going to cause problems for you. Like, if you explain it in really broad analytical or theological ways as I'm doing, it makes a lot of sense.
[00:51:43] But I want you to take these themes, and part of the reason that I really love frame semantics is because we can see the frames, and we can frame them out within the context of Scripture. And each of those frames can be something that we can then take into our lives and apply them there, and not always as a one-to-one thing where you lift it up from Scripture and you plop it down into your life.
[00:52:11] It does not always work that cleanly for the simple fact that even within Scripture, these frames do not act that cleanly. Egypt is not Mesopotamia. But both Egypt and Mesopotamia are threats to God's people, but also places of refuge to them at times. It's not just an either-or all the time.
[00:52:35] All right, so just to back out for a moment into our theme of refuge and to ask what these stories in the beginning of the Book of Exodus add to our picture and our theme in general of refuge.
[00:52:49] Again, I'm not saying that these things show up first here with Moses, because a lot of the ideas have already shown up. But we do have the idea that hiding can be faithful resistance. Not hiding from God, certainly, but hiding from the oppressors, from the threat of death, from the things that are working against God's purposes.
[00:53:13] Second point, the household refuge can be real, but also temporary. The form of refuge may need to change under pressure or under timing. We have another instance, of the ark refuge, kind of sacred space where life continues. We have the theme of water, which can be both a death place as well as a preservation place, where water can be weaponized or provided as a means for escape and life. We have places, but we also have people who are refuge agents.
[00:53:51] Fascinating context of women being the ones to be the protector. The providence of God is not really clear in the first two chapters, at least as far as words from God and direct action. We also have a strong theme of the deliverer as first being himself delivered. And refuge protects more than a single person or an isolated life, but it is always about a future and other people.
[00:54:23] All right, so I've mentioned a couple of other things here today in this episode that I wasn't really able to dig into, and I'm not gonna take the time to dig into them now. But I'm going to bring them up for you to really be able to go into Scripture and look at these themes yourself throughout Scripture and see where they have some connections. So again, we have the story of Genesis 11 that connects very strongly with the story here at the beginning of Exodus.
[00:54:53] And like I said, we tend to focus on the worship aspect of Genesis 11, even though the words of worship aren't really there. What we have is security, and we have the theme of name. And that suggests a type of vulnerability that people have that leads to fear. So just like we don't have the word for worship in Genesis 11, we also don't have the word fear. But probably those ideas are underlying what's going on.
[00:55:24] We also have Sodom as an anti-refuge. So again, a lot of the themes we're seeing here are not new. They are repeated. And the theme of anti-refuge is still very strong in Genesis. Social orders that are meant to receive the vulnerable will instead exploit and endanger them.
[00:55:46] Lots of places in Scripture we see that. We also see this as an anti-Eden and anti-creation. We have the theme of the dragon or the royal threat pattern of rulers attacking threatened male children. Lots of places we see that in Scripture.
[00:56:05] We have the theme of hiding. We have the theme of being drawn out. And we didn't really get into this specifically so much here, but we do have the theme of flight with Moses because he is encapsulating the entire Exodus narrative in his life in kind of a microcosm. And then of course, we have a typological development that is going to point us towards Christ.
[00:56:31] We will obviously be getting into that more specifically as the refuge series continues, and we start getting further and further into the theme of Scripture as it points toward Christ. Now, my methodology tends to not be so much Christocentric, where we're taking the ideas and the themes that happened in Christ's life, and then we put them back into Scripture.
[00:56:57] But I'm not not reading it Christologically either. Just because I'm not reading Christocentrically in that way where we're going backwards, I still am reading very Christologically, but instead of Christocentrically, where we're putting Christ back into the Old Testament, I tend to read the text as pointing toward Christ as the ultimate end of it all. So both of those ideas are Christological readings of Scripture. But for me, I think it's building a typological pattern in history and in the text that is pointing us toward Christ. So we're not not reading about Christ here in the Old Testament, but we're not reading anachronistically as if the readers and the author of Genesis and Exodus had the idea of Christ in mind.
[00:57:51] Because I don't think they did. But they knew God, and they were pointing toward that reality that is ultimate in Christ.
[00:58:00] I've talked about this kind of Christological reading before. I will no doubt talk about it again, but I do see those two different ways of reading the text as being both faithful reading of the text because as we're reading Scripture, we are to read it in the context of Christ. But I prefer not to presume that the Old Testament is writing in a way that they understand that reality in a way that is going to ultimately come out in fruition in history.
[00:58:30] So it's all pointing that direction, and it's all showing Christ in that way without needing the author and the text to explicitly be about Christ. because first and foremost, we do have Christ involved here because He is God, right? He is the creator. We have the visible and invisible Yahweh, the two powers in heaven, all of those ideas.
[00:58:58] And if you are listening here and you're not familiar with all of that, well, you have some amazing learning ahead of you because I know I have a few new listeners who might not actually be aware of what I'm saying. So if you need a little bit of a refresher or a little bit of a picture on what I'm talking about with Christological readings, Christocentric readings, Christotelic readings, well, one thing you can do is you can go to my website at genesismarksthespot.com.
[00:59:30] You can put those words in the search, and you can find some of the episodes where I've actually talked about those things. If you're not familiar with the two powers in heaven, I've talked about that as well. You can just put that into the search bar on my website. You can find episodes where I go into those kinds of things in depth.
[00:59:51] So I don't wanna leave you out in the lurch without knowing what those are, but I can't repeat all of that every episode that I bring it up either. So that's what you can do if I'm talking about something that you have a question about. It's fine if you also reach out to me and say,"Hey, where can I find more on this topic or that topic?"
[01:00:13] But you can also go right into my website and do a search there and find if I've got resources on those things already. So I hope that is helpful, and I hope that you are enjoying the theme of refuge here. Like I said, I think it matters to us very deeply in an application kind of context.
[01:00:35] And what I think this shows is that we do have some concrete, quote unquote,"answers"that the Bible can give us for our own context. Not in a sense that we pick up the text and plop it down into our lives like God has given some full-on play manual for us, because we each are in individual places where we have different things we're dealing with.
[01:01:01] But these patterns in Scripture and these themes that we see, those should inform the way that we act, the way that we are trying to engage with our problems and the things that we're struggling with, even the apologetics questions that we have that either we have or maybe our friends or our children have. And I genuinely think that understanding Scripture in context, using themes like this, with an understanding that all Scripture points toward Christ and our life in Christ, then I think all of that is how we answer those things.
[01:01:45] Not that it's always easy, because it is not always easy. It is not always straightforward. It does not always erase the difficulties and the things that I think we are meant to struggle with in a lot of these things. We aren't just handed the easy answers. And that's just the reality of human life, and it's the reality of Scripture and theology and our life with God too.
[01:02:13] The thing that we can do is hold fast to God as our refuge and as the one that we are meant to hold fast to, even if we don't always understand it in the moment, even if we don't always see Him acting in the way that we would like to see Him act. But look around you and find what revelation is available to you.
[01:02:36] Where is God reaching out to you, and where is He currently your refuge? Even in those places that are dangerous and that maybe sometimes even turn on us to become anti-refuge places. God is still active in those places. God is still active in that, and He is still pursuing you, and He still wants you with Him.
[01:03:03] So with that, I will end the episode. And again, appreciate all of you for listening. And I love it when you guys share the episodes with other people so that they also can find the content that maybe they're interested in.
[01:03:19] I've really appreciated a lot of people reaching out to me about my current and previous series with additional questions and things along those lines. And I would also welcome you all into my biblical theology community at onthisrock.com. The link to that will be in the show notes.
[01:03:39] And you can look forward to some more refuge themes in the future. But that is it for this week, although I would like to give a really big shout-out to my Patreon and PayPal and community supporters. My community is actually now over a year old, which is really crazy to me.
[01:03:58] So really appreciate all of you who help develop that with your participation and your financial support, because it's not really an inexpensive prospect to do that either. So really deeply appreciate all of you who help me do that. But that is it for this week, and I wish you all a blessed week. And we will see you later.
