Preaching Exodus 1

My church has just started preaching through a new series on Exodus, and I heard the first sermon today on Exodus 1. It was a good sermon, with the preacher drawing the main lesson that God is the Lord of history (He is in control of the terrible circumstances of racial genocide in Exodus 1, and repeated throughout the rest of history as seen recently in Auschwitz, Rwanda, Cambodia etc.). But more important than that, God is the Lord of salvation history, and works history towards the fulfillment of His purposes for us in Christ.

That got me thinking. The first 7 verses of Exodus 1 straightaway connects the Exodus story with the earlier story before it - the story of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; and central to that story is the promise made in Gen 12:1-3 (the Abrahamic covenant), which is repeated to Isaac and Jacob. Yet, in Exodus 1, we find the Israelites in slavery. And there was no means the promise could be fulfilled for them if they were in slavery. It wasn't just something that they could 'walk into' - in another words, the people of Israel couldn't just walk into the promise land and form themselves as a nation. They neeed RESCUE. God needed to rescue them in order to fulfill His promises to them.

Could Exodus 1 then serve as a mirror for us NT Christians? In that just as Israel couldn't walk into God's promises on her own but needed a miraculous resuce, we too as the true people of God couldn't have just walked into God's promises on our own too. We need rescue just as much as the Israelites needed rescue. We need rescue from slavery to sin, we need rescue from the forces of evil that work against our lives. And that is precisely what has happened to us. God made us alive with Christ when we were dead in our sins and trangressions, in which we used to live when we followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, while we were gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts (Eph 2:1-5). In another words, could Exodus 1 serve as a passage to lead us to the doctrine of total depravity and all that stands opposed to us in our salvation?