Isaac did something similar; David committed adultery, he gets the woman pregnant, decides to kill her husband to cover it up. He kills 17 men in one day trying to cover up one thing. God said: you'll do. If David was available to preach here next Sunday, would you let him, or would you talk about what he did? If CNN and the internet would have been around back then how would you have responded to a man who already had 700 women at his disposal, taking the one that wasn't his? What would you say about him? Would you say: mm, there's a man after God's own heart; or would we say something else?
Samson was sleeping with prostitutes on his wedding night, because he got depressed, because his best man stole his wife. Those are the kinds of people God chose, so God is not in a hurry with us. So Abraham ends up with Isaac, and Isaac ends up with Jacob, and Jacob has 12 children, so now we finally are getting some multiplication here. Those children sell one of their brothers to Egypt, and then there's a famine. They end up in front of him, because they need food, and so they come down; and Joseph is now a powerful person. He gives his family the best land in Egypt, and then they multiply, because there was no prescription birth control back then.
They multiply and multiply and multiply and multiply, until the point where they intimidated Pharaoh. So Pharaoh decides to do something horrible. He decides to kill all the baby boys, and he decides to enslave them; so for 430 years, they were enslaved to this man named Pharaoh.
They were just living where their brother had given them the land; so they cry out to God, because all of them were in a covenant with this God named ‘God Almighty’. His name was ‘El Shaddai’, God Almighty. He was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
The problem with ‘God Almighty’ was, He wasn't doing anything about it. Finally in Exodus 3 He says: “I'm hearing the suffering of My children in slavery in Egypt. I'm going to come down and save them”- but in this story it's just the beginning. It's not the end.
For us to get saved, to get moved out of slavery and into freedom; it's not the end of the story. It's just the beginning.
In this story, which is about us, it isn't just about people who were slaves, and now they're free. This is about the start of our journey from slavery to freedom. Our journey from slavery to freedom only starts with an encounter with God; it ends with something far, far broader than that.
Exodus 19:3-6, the same group of people, and God is talking to them. He says: “then Moses went up to God, and the Lord called him from the mountain and said: this is what you are to say to the house of Jacob, and you're to tell the people of Israel: you yourselves have seen what I did in Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles' wings and brought you to Myself. Now if you obey Me fully, and keep My covenant, then out of all the nations you will be My treasured possession. Although the whole earth is Mine, you will be for Me a kingdom of priests”.
In other words, you're not just going to be saved. You are going to be a kingdom of people who shows the rest of the world what God looks like.
Isaiah 49:6 – “It is a light thing that I have forgiven You. I will go one step further and make You a light to the Gentiles”. God's biggest idea was to have me and to have you be replications of Him to the whole world.
In Romans 12:1-2 it says: “I beseech you therefore brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, which is holy and acceptable unto Him.”