How Exodus 1 to 18, from slavery in Egypt to the Red Sea, reveals a God who hears the cry of the oppressed and comes down to save.

It’s a birthing room in the Nile Delta, and two midwives are kneeling beside a Hebrew woman in labour. They’ve been ordered by the king of Egypt himself to kill every baby boy they deliver, and the baby that arrives is a boy. They wrap him up, put him in his mother’s arms, and go home, and when Pharaoh demands to know why the Hebrew boys are still alive, they look the most powerful man on earth in the eye and spin him a story. Exodus gives us their names, Shiphrah and Puah, and never once tells us the name of the Pharaoh. Does God hear the cry of people crushed under someone else’s power, and if he does, what does he do about it?

In this episode, Graham walks through Exodus 1 to 18, from slavery in Egypt to the edge of Mount Sinai, picking up where the Genesis episodes left off, with Joseph’s coffin in Egypt. He traces the story through the women who outwit Pharaoh, God’s name revealed at the burning bush, the plagues, the Passover, the crossing of the sea and the Song of Miriam, and bread from heaven in the wilderness. He shows how the book is built around one word, “know,” running from Pharaoh’s “I do not know the Lord” to a God who makes himself known. He faces the hardest questions directly: the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, the death of the firstborn, and whether the exodus really happened, weighing Israel Finkelstein against James Hoffmeier and the Merneptah Stele. He engages voices like Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Jon Levenson, Terence Fretheim, and Robert Allen Warrior, alongside the spirituals of enslaved Africans, Harriet Tubman, and the blackbirding of Pacific Islanders to Queensland. Reading Exodus against an age that tells every story as liberation while fifty million people live in modern slavery, he shows that freedom in Exodus means being set free from Pharaoh to serve God. He also offers a three-week reading plan and practical steps on modern slavery, Sabbath, and courage. And he asks what it means that the God who heard Israel’s groaning still hears ours.

This is the first of two episodes on Exodus, part of a series on the podcast that takes whole books of the Bible one at a time, following three episodes on Genesis. If you’d like to go through Scripture this way day by day, the companion devotional series, Dwelling in God’s Word, walks book by book from Genesis to Revelation. You can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HHWR9FRX

Book recommendations: “The Message of Exodus” by Alec Motyer, “The Book of Exodus” by Brevard S. Childs, “The Mission of God” by Christopher J. H. Wright, and ”Digital Monasticism” by Graham Joseph Hill..

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