Biblical Framework
Charles Clough
Lesson 46
We’re
on the event of the Exodus now, and we are going to expand a little bit into
some historical matters. We’ve spent a
lot of time talking about civilizations as we know it, how it came to pass,
Biblically speaking, how that radically differs from what you learn in the
average history course. And as last
year we found out, we disagreed in the area of physics, we disagreed in the
area of chemistry, as far as those sciences pertain to writing history, i.e.,
geology, anthropology, biology, psychology and when we get into the Exodus
we’re going to find we also disagree with ancient historians. That’s sort of the way our faith is, and
it’s not a commentary that we are stupid, it’s rather a commentary that the
world’s a very dark place, and that there are spiritual forces that have an
agenda behind the scenes that do deeply affect how we think. That’s why we’ve emphasized again and again
in this course that there’s no such thing as being neutral. There’s no such thing as a neutral piece of
truth, because everything we state, everything we believe, carries with it an
agenda, it carries with it a faith, it carries with it a starting point. As Christians we have to be sensitive to
that or we just don’t see what the Bible’s telling us. The Bible is telling us that, when man fell,
he fell all the way. He didn’t fall
from the neck down. He fell from here
down. And that means, as sinners, we
are affected in our reasoning. This is
why God has given us Scripture, to give us a calibration point, a correction in
faulty reasoning, else we cannot know who God is, and we cannot interpret the
gospel correctly.
In
the notes we had some Egyptian art forms.
On page 43 I’m trying to give you some background of the Exodus, so that
this event doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
There were certain precursors in that society and in that point in time
in history that were going on. God
didn’t throw dice and say, gee, it’d be nice to have an Exodus or two. The Exodus happened at precisely the right
time in history to accomplish God’s purpose.
So that means that we have to think about what was going on. This is not a Bible class on a verse by
verse approach; it’s more of an apologetics Bible and historical theology
approach, so we’re tying all of these together. We want to look at two aspects of what was happening prior to the
Exodus. First, on page 43, we mention
Abraham’s family problem. It’s vital to
see that the reason the Jews were in Egypt in the first place was because of a
dysfunctional family. It was put there
so to speak, as a disciplinary move to preserve them.
Egyptian
society discriminated against the people who would be doing things like
Jews. They were basically a pastoral
people and a shepherding people, and Egyptians apparently didn’t like
this. Discrimination is said, right in
the Joseph narratives, when Joseph invites the people together, they say that
the Egyptians will not eat with the Jews, Jews can eat over there, we’ll eat
over here. So it was a discriminatory
society. This is not to approve it;
it’s simply to say God used that, because the Canaanites were not
discriminatory. And the danger we saw
last time, was that if you read the narrative, particularly the one I quote on
page 43, if you read in Gen. 37-38, in that section of Scripture, you’ll see
that the family was in very, very serious shape. The family was totally absorbing itself in Canaanite culture. The
Canaanites were not segregationists at all; the Canaanites were very
eclectic. They welcomed you aboard and
seduced you. And that is a more
dangerous situation than an overtly segregationist society, like the Egyptians. So God moved that dysfunctional family out
of an eclectic society into a segregationist society.
That’s
the first thing we have to realize is that they’re down there for less than
spiritual purposes, not because they’re so righteous. They’re getting down there because it’s trying to make them
survive in history. Why is God interested
in making that family survive in history?
Because He made a promise; the promise was in the Abrahamic
Covenant. We had three promises: promise to seed, a land, and a worldwide
blessing. And we said, once a contract
is established, that becomes the yardstick for measuring behavior against the
words of the contract. God already made
the contract, now God has to live up to the contract. And here’s this family falling apart, so the only way He can
gather up the pieces and keep them reasonably together, is to move them down
here into a sort of like a historical womb, to give birth to His nation. Egypt can be considered as a historic womb
of Israel.
Then
we said on page 44, we mentioned the structure of Egyptian society, and I think
this bears review, because there are certain elements of Egyptian society that
are necessary as you read through Exodus and read through those dialogues of
Moses versus Pharaoh and the conflict that comes on again and again, chapter
after chapter. We want to understand
what Moses faced, and into what kind of a society those people were. Because remember, when the Exodus occurs,
it’s not like all the Jews are just rushing to go out with Moses. That’s not true. The Jews reluctantly went out with Moses, reluctantly! And we have to understand why they were so
reluctant, I mean, here they were—slaves.
They were crying to God for the bad situation they were facing. They were in really bad shape, economically,
bad shape, physically, had no hope, saw no reason to live. And in the middle of that, here comes a guy
that says you’re going to be free, and they don’t want to be free.
So
there’s some things going on here and they’re important. And here’s why it’s important. Christians have known for centuries, you
read devotional literature and you’ll see this, Christians have intuitively
understood that Egypt is a picture of the world, and the Exodus is a picture of
the Christian coming out of the world.
There’s an analogy there. So we
want to look at Egypt a little bit. The
Holy Spirit picked that particular society from which to have an Exodus. And that means we better look at that, and
see if there’s certain traits in that society that we need to check out a
little bit. Apparently, these traits
are very opposite to the way God wants us to live, because obviously, when He
gets his nation set up, He moves it out of there, because they can’t live that
way in that society. They have to leave
the society in order to live to the Lord.
That’s
what we’re looking at: “The structure of Egyptian society.” And I quote on page
44, the University of Chicago Egyptologist, Dr. Henry Frankfort, now dead, but
an author of some really neat stuff on Egypt.
If you ever see an old book store, and you see some stuff by Henry
Frankfort, another author to look for in a used book store is William F.
Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity,
it’s a neat book to get. These books
are largely out of print, because nobody reads them, nobody’s interested
anymore so you can’t sell them. But
Henry Frankfort’s written a book, The
Kingship of the Gods, and there’s another one, Ancient Egyptian Religion, tremendous
pieces of work, because they’re quite objective in the sense that he uses a lot
of source material. You may differ with
his interpretation, but at least he got the text there, so you can see what
he’s looking at. Frankfort says this, this is a sum-up of years and years of
study of Egyptian literature of this period, so we want to pay attention to
this. This guy’s good. “The Egyptian belief [was] that the universe
is changeless and that all apparent opposites must, therefore, hold each other
in equilibrium. Such a belief has
definite consequences in the field of moral philosophy. It puts a premium,” notice this, and
underline or check this, “it puts a premium on whatever exists with a semblance
of permanence.” Today, it’s very
analogous to that; our society is very chaotic, always endlessly
reorganizing. I mean, you wonder if the
whole world’s going into chaos-mode.
And in this kind of a situation, you start to reach out for God, and you
know, is two plus two still four, or are we going to reorganize that
tomorrow? What’s going on, here? So our generation tends to have a lusting
for permanence. And I think we can
psychologically identify here. The
Egyptians wanted order, they hated chaos.
They did not want change, they did not want reorganization, they did not
want any progress. They had it, and
this was the way society was, and they weren’t interested in improving it. Now that’s the psychology, that’s the mental
state of the Egyptians, and the Jews were inside that.
Frankfort
continues, “It excludes,” notice,
“It excludes ideas of progress, utopias of any kind, revolutions, and any other
radical changes in existing conditions….
In this way the belief in a static universe enhances, for instance, the
significance of established authority.”
Check that one out. Who is Moses
going to come up against? Established
authority. The peon of established
authority. We want to sense what’s
going on, here. The challenge of Moses
to Pharaoh is not just Charlton Heston against Yul Brynner. This is a collision of two world views, two
tremendous principles. And for Moses to
dare even to walk into the presence of Pharaoh, and of course, he did, because
he was in the royal family and so he had access, but for a Jew to walk into an
Egyptian ruler’s presence is one thing, to tell him how he’s going to run his
country is another thing. We are dealing with radical things in
the Exodus conflict.
We
said last time this shows up in certain art forms, so if you’ll turn to the
page where I have the picture, we’ll review what some of this is, because these
are things to pile up in your imagination.
Think of these when you read the Exodus, in your mind’s eye,
visualize. Try to put yourself as you
read Exodus, into the shoes or the sandals of a Jew. You’re a slave, but guess what?
As a slave, you’re guaranteed a job, you’re guaranteed meals, you’re not
living a chaotic existence. It’s a
hard, grueling existence, but it’s not chaotic existence. It’s a regimen, it’s a routine. Every day you get up at the same time, every
day you go to bed at the same time.
You’ve got a job every day, you’re building pyramids, or you’re doing
something. There’s no doubt about
tomorrow, or what tomorrow’s going to bring.
Everything’s pre-planned, everything’s laid out. No chaos, everything’s orderly.
This
picture that we site, picture A, comes from a comb, apparently an Egyptian
woman of notability had this comb, it was found in a tomb, and it has some art
structure to it. Particularly, what we
want to look at is the number of times that the divine principle of the falcon
god, shows up here. He shows up here in
the boat, he shows up with the wings, and he shows up here over this box. I
mentioned this point last time, that when you interpret Egyptian art, here’s a
little trick, otherwise, your eyeball looks at this, and wonders, gee are these
little five-year-old kids drawing drawings?
When the Egyptians, drew say, a pharaoh, or a human being with a falcon
head, they were normal people, they didn’t believe that literally there was a
pharaoh walking around with a falcon head.
What they were drawing corresponds in our culture to what you would see
say, on the editorial page of the Baltimore
Sun for a political caricature.
For example, I kept one for years during one of the conflicts we had
with the Soviet Union, it showed Kruschev in a suit coat, and then it had a
missile for his head. Now the artist
didn’t literally say that Kruschev has a missile head, but he was caricaturing
character.
So
when you see these art forms, in Egypt, that’s what they’re saying. This is their way of expressing a certain
quality. In this case, the universe is
saturated with this falcon deity. Notice this boat that appears here, is actually he’s pictured as
the sun going across the sky. His wings
correspond to the sky, and he himself perches on top of this box, where
Pharaoh’s name is. And what that’s
saying is, remember we’ve been talking about Continuity of Being, that all the
universe is tied together? What that’s
saying is that the same principle that animates the sun, that the physics of
the sky is also operative in the office of Pharaoh. Pharaoh is linked with the universe in this sort of physical
way. Then we have other art forms. Here’s one of Pharaoh actually drawn with a
falcon head. There again, notice that he has the nature of that which is in the
falcon. This is the great pyramid, one
of the columns, and the thing that you want to understand about that is, as
Frankfort points out in his text, that these lines that go up and down aren’t
lines. If you look very carefully with
your eye, you’ll see they stop right there, and if you look carefully, they
don’t touch up there. That’s a defined
line. It’s a vertical scepter. And it has a particular meaning. In fact, that scepter there, is the same
thing that you see on the woman’s comb.
In the woman’s comb it’s painted very crudely. There’s the scepter symbol right there. There’s the other one.
And by the way, that little thing there is the Egyptian principle of
eternal life; you’ll see it on jewelry today, New Age. Actually, its old age, it’s the Egyptian
life symbol. Nothing new under the
sun! Then inside this, this name is a
Pharaoh’s name. So what it’s saying
with the sun symbol at the top, and the earth symbol below, is that Pharaoh, in
his person, and in his office, he integrates and preserves order for the whole
universe.
So
you can see with Pharaoh, you may not like the guy personally, but the problem
is that you knock him off, and there’s danger, the universe gets out of
discord, that’s the problem. And that’s
the guy that Moses goes up against. If
that wasn’t enough, one artist drew this drawing, where you’ll notice that
Pharaoh is the same height, in the picture, as the gods. Notice there’s a god on his left, and
there’s a god on his right. In fact, if
you draw a line from the top of that head over to that head, you’ll see
Pharaoh’s head is a little higher. So
they pictured figures by their importance by height instead of
perspective. They didn’t use
perspective. And what is this poster
saying? This is a political/religious
poster. It’s saying that Pharaoh dwells
with gods, not with men.
That’s
the background for Egypt. Now we want
to look at the catastrophe itself; we want to look at what happened. Let’s start with Exodus 3. This is one of the dramatic Theophonies of
the Scripture; that’s a word you should know because it’s a description of a
portion of the Bible, a Theophany, and that means something which is seen, and
that’s God. Wherever you have a
Theophany in the Bible, God Himself is appearing. This is a Theophany in Exodus 3.
Moses was pasturing the flock, verse 2 “And the angel of the LORD appeared
to him in a blazing fire from the midst of a bush.” If we had time we could develop the difference between the Lord,
the angel of the Lord, and the spirit of the Lord, because that’s the Trinity
in the Old Testament. Actually the
angel of the Lord that shows up is the pre-incarnate Jesus Christ. “The angel of the LORD appeared to him in a
blazing fire from the midst of a bush.”
I want you to look at a characteristic of this. This we come back to later, because we’re
going to talk about the name of God.
Notice that last clause in verse 2.
That reports something that Moses observed. As he looked into this bush, what caught his eye, I’m sure he’s
seen grass fires before, but what was strange about this was that the bush was
burning, but the bush wasn’t consumed.
So something strange is here.
This catches his eye, I mean, this guy’s not stupid, he’s been out there
seeing grass fires for decades. It’s
dry desert out there, grass fires can happen.
Maybe they didn’t have cigarettes to start them, but they had some grass
fires, anyway. You can see them in the
art forms. Moses is curious, so he goes
over to this thing that he sees. It’s
not being consumed, but the fire is there.
And he meets God. And there’s
this famous scene and the first words out of the mouth of God in verse 6… why
does God say verse 6? Why do you
suppose, on the eve of this momentous, historic occasion, God’s first words to
Moses are these? What does this harp
back to? What is God trying to focus in
on by saying what He’s saying here? Why
does He say He’s the God of Abraham, why not the God of Adam, or the God of
Noah? Why does He say I am the God of
Abraham? What did He do with
Abraham? He made a covenant. So what He is saying is, it’s covenant time
Moses, you are in line for My covenant business. I promised I was going to do something.
By
the way, how many years have transpired?
At least four or five centuries maybe have gone on? This would be like God doesn’t speak from
the time of Martin Luther to the time of us and the last time anybody ever had
a Theophany was in Martin Luther’s day and all of a sudden God speaks today and
says, Okay, I’m the God of Martin Luther.
Now, if He came that way, what would you think? You’d say, gee, this has something to do
with the Reformation. That’s what’s
going on here, there’s a long time interval here, and suddenly He shows up and
He starts talking about He is the God of three men. These are the three men to whom the covenant was ratified:
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
And
then He says, verse 7, “I have surely seen the affliction of My people who are
Egypt, have given heed to their cry because of their task masters, for I am
aware of their sufferings.” Notice that
in the end of verse 7, God says that “I have observed their sufferings.” Notice in verse 3, the bush is not
consumed. We’ll see how those are
related later. Verse 8, “I have come
down to deliver them from the power of the Egyptians, and to bring them up from
that land to a good and spacious land….”
Verse 9, “And now, behold, the cry of the sons of Israel has come to Me;
furthermore, I have seen the oppression with which the Egyptians are oppressing
them. [10] Therefore, come now, and I will send you to Pharaoh, so you may
bring my people, the sons of Israel out of Egypt.” And you have the famous dialogue of Moses and God.
Let’s
look at some details of the Exodus issue.
Let’s go to chapter 7, we’re going to skip a little bit through here,
but from Exodus 7:14 on things get worse and worse, much more of a conflict
that goes on with each plague. We want
to look at how this sets up, we want to skim through this section, from chapter
7:14 to 10:29, and I want to point out highlights of these plagues. We won’t have time to go into all of them
and so forth, but just to look at highlights.
The reason I’m doing this is because after we get done with this, and
you’ve observed the text, forget what you know about ancient history. If you’ve studied ancient history and the
Egyptian kingdom, the new kingdom, middle kingdom, forget that for a
minute. Just look at what the text is
telling us. Then we’ll come back to
ancient history and we’ll see we’ve got a problem. Let’s look at the text.
In
verse 14, “Then the LORD said to Moses, Pharaoh’s heart is stubborn; he refuses
to let the people go. [15] Go to Pharaoh in the morning as he is going out to
the water and station yourself to meet him on the bank of the Nile.” And that’s the famous time when He turned
the Nile into blood. And then you have
this little play that goes on, because verse 22, “the magicians of Egypt did
the same with their secret arts; and Pharaoh’s heart was hardened.” Now don’t misread that, pay attention to
that area about the magicians, what these guys are doing. Can you imagine? These guys have the power to change water. Now what does that tell you about the
principalities and powers around Pharaoh?
Profoundly demonic! Probably in
history, these guys had the strongest demonic linkage of anybody since…
probably in our day the only people that correspond would be the red-hooded
monks of Tibet, or something. But apart
from them, this is a rather unusually powerful thing. You’ll see that just as God does a miracle, they counter it, up
to a point and then God’s miracles can’t be counterfeited anymore, showing you
who is in charge. Satan is strong, but
he’s not as strong as Jehovah, God.
So
that’s the conflict that happens. And
it’s to show us the strength, the embedded spiritual structure in all this
stuff that we just looked at in the art.
This was a society that was extremely powerful in its structure. The Egyptians, in all their history, never
experienced a revolution. Now you name
one other society that lived for over a thousand years and never had a
revolt. I think you’d be hard pressed
to find any civilization that ever endured those many centuries without an
internal uprising and a revolt, somewhere along the line. And we have only lived 300 years and have
already had a civil war. Not
Egypt. So the Exodus is going to be a
very remarkable event, because it took place in the most unlikely political,
social milieu that it could possibly have taken.
Let’s
look at some more things. We get to the point where, in Exodus 8:8, “Then
Pharaoh called for Moses and Aaron, and said, ‘Entreat the Lord to remove the
frogs from me and from my people,’” so the frogs were all over the place. Verse 15, “But when Pharaoh saw that there
was relief, he hardened his heart and did not listen to them, as the LORD had
said.” Now watch what happens
here. Verse 16, “Then the LORD said to
Moses, Say to Aaron, Stretch out your staff and strike the dust of the earth,
that it may become gnats through all the land of Egypt.” And they did. By the way, notice through all the land of Egypt. I want you to look at the dimensions of the
plagues.
Forget
what we know about history, just look at the textual dimensions of these
plagues. In verse 18, here’s the end of
the little train, one of these guys is going to get off the train, because his
train stops. “And the magicians tried
with their secret arts to bring forth gnats, but they could not; so there were
gnats on man and beast. [19] Then the magicians said to Pharaoh” now watch
this, this is cute. Here the demonical
empowered magicians, mighty in class, bear witness to the gospel to
Pharaoh. Look at what they tell
him. They say, “This is the finger of
Elohim,” using the Jewish name for God, “This is the finger of God.” So here they are confessing to this God,
against this comb, this pillar, all this art, where Pharaoh is the
integrator. And here they were,
committed all their life to the idea that there was just this Continuity of
Being and that everything was part of God.
Then they get confronted with this miracle that they can’t handle. And what do they do? All of a sudden, they get God-conscious
again. Why? Because they were God-conscious all along, what does Rom. 1
say? Everybody’s God-conscious, it’s
just that they suppress it. And all of
the sudden, it spurts out in the middle of some sort of mess, or crisis? Well, here it is, God-consciousness in these
demonically-inspired people.
So
they confess now that they can’t do it, so this must be God. Then in verse 22, something else
happens. “But on that day, I will set
apart the land of Goshen, where My people are living, so that no swarms of
insects will be there, in order that you may know that I, the LORD, am in the
midst of the land. [23] I will put a division between My people and your
people. Tomorrow this sign will occur.”
So now, not only have the plagues escalated to the point they can’t be
counterfeited, but now they become surgical tools. They’re administrated, not in a broad, statistical profile;
rather they are razor-sharp in their dimensions. They distinguish between Egyptian and Jew. So it goes on, and we want to look at a few
other things.
We
come to Exodus 9:4, now we have a plague on the livestock, and a
pestilence. Keep in mind, every time
you see a destruction of crops or livestock, what are you really seeing? What ramification is that going to have on
any society in that day? If you destroy
the crops and you destroy the cattle, what have you destroyed? Their economy. Put everybody out of work.
It’s gone, it’s devastated for at least a year and with the livestock,
if you lose your livestock, now you’ve got breeding problems. We’re witnessing something that happened to
the most powerful nation on earth here.
This is not some little thing that happened in the corner. This was a massive destruction of the
Egyptian economy like they’d never seen.
In verse 6, God “did this thing.”
All the cattle, “all the livestock of the Egyptians died; but of the
livestock of the sons of Israel, not one died.” Do you think that sort of communicates a message? Isn’t that’s
amazing? What’s happening economically here?
Whose assets are getting erased?
This is something a lot of preachers come into this passage and they
always talk about the spiritual side, but there are other things going on here
that I want you to see. There’s an
economic shift of power going on. The
world system is being devastated in its economy and the believers are being
blessed economically. Not because
materialism is the whole point, it’s just that God reigns, and that’s the way
He’s redistributing things. That
happens to be a recurrent theme in the kingdom of God in the future.
We
have more conflict going on. In verse
11, the magicians could not stand before Moses, because of the boils. The boils were on the magicians, as well as
on the Egyptians. These guys are
totally wiped out, so now Moses has triumphed over all opposition except the
Pharaoh. In verse 18, just observe what
the text is telling us about this plague.
“Behold, about this time tomorrow, I will send a very heavy hail, such
has not been seen in Egypt from the day it was founded, until now.” You know how many years that is? The day it was founded until now? 1,000 years. This is a [once in a] thousand year hail storm that happens
here. These are highly unusual, crazy
events. They are surgically precise,
they are national in scope, and they are utterly devastating and miraculous
in dimension an amazing series of pestilences.
We read this in too much of a trivial way.
Verse
23, “…and the LORD sent thunder and hail, and fire ran down to the earth. And
the LORD rained hail on the land of Egypt” [24] So there was hail, and fire
flashing continually in the midst of the hail, very severe, such as had not
been in all the land of Egypt since it became a nation.” The text repeats this thing. This text is stressing the uniqueness of
these events. [25] “And the hail struck all that was in the field through all
the land of Egypt, both man and beast; the hail also struck every plant of the
field shattered every tree of the field.
[26] Only in the land of Goshen, where the sons of Israel were, was
there no hail.”
We
could go on, by the way, there’s another little observation. Look back at the little clever word in verse
21, in the midst of all this fire and hail, there’s another little neat
observation. Verses 20-21, “The one
among the servants of Pharaoh who feared the word of the LORD…” Now does that suggest there are believers
among the Egyptians? Yes, it does. Were they won to Christ in the Old
Testament? Yes they were. There were believers in the Egyptian society. They had somehow gotten a hold of the gospel
truth of what it was known at that level of time. “The one among the servants of Pharaoh who feared the word of the
LORD made his servants and his livestock flee into the houses; [21] but he who
paid no regard to the word of the LORD left his servants and his livestock in
the field.” So they were listening to
Moses and they were starting to get the message. That little verse like that,
that’s a neat observation, because it shows you that as these plagues escalate,
God always does five or six things at once, never just one thing. So He’s winning Egyptians to Himself prior
to this great divergence that’s going to take place.
Then
we go on, and look further at the dimensions of this thing. It keeps on going, Exodus 10:2, this gives
you the theology behind it, “That you may tell in the hearing of your son, and
of your grandson, how I made a mockery of the Egyptians, and how I performed My
signs among them; that you may know
that I am the LORD.” We use the
expression in our everyday speech about so and so put the fear of God into
them. You know where it comes
from? This kind of stuff. These people were getting the fear of God
put into them. And how was it? Because they were observing not just an
ordinary storm, see this can’t be interpreted like it’s just, oh, well gee, a
thunder storm happened one day. This
isn’t talking about a thunder storm.
This is talking about a major catastrophe that was so obviously
supernatural, that people either said this is God who I will defy to my last
breath, or this is the God and I bow to Him and I surrender. But whatever it is, it forces a decision;
nobody’s neutral here. You’re going to
go down in defiance, or you’re going to go down in submission, but down you go,
because these are the works and power of God.
So
he goes on and describes what’s going to happen, and about the hail, and notice
in Exodus 10:15 the damage report, “…Thus nothing green was left on tree or
plant of the field through all the land of Egypt.” What is the text telling us?
This is a historically unique time, something utterly devastated the
land. Now the spooky one, verse 21, can
you imagine this one. “Then the LORD said to Moses, Stretch out your hand
toward the sky, that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, a darkness
which may be felt. [22] And so Moses stretched out his hand toward the sky, and
there was thick darkness in all the land of Egypt for three days. [23] They did
not see one another, nor did anyone rise from his place for three days, but all
the sons of Israel had light in their dwellings.” Whatever this was, it suppressed candles, it suppressed ordinary systems
of light, artificial lights were suppressed, they were turned off. What was this thick darkness that could be
felt? We don’t know, but it wasn’t
regular darkness, it wasn’t an eclipse of the moon that lasted three days. That’s three times twenty-four hours, that’s
no eclipse. This can’t be explained as
natural sequence of events, folks, unless the Bible’s a myth. This is a myth, or it’s explaining something
fantastically devastating.
It
goes on to describe what happened, etc. and finally, we come to the famous
passage in Exodus 11:1, “[Now the LORD said to Moses,] ‘One more plague I will
bring on Pharaoh and on Egypt, after that he will let you go.” He says in verse 2, “Speak now in the
hearing of people that each man asks from his neighbor and each woman from her
neighbor for articles of silver and articles of gold.” There’s an economic irony to this. Who built the pyramids? This is a controversial item, so I’ll have
to cover this later. But for those of
you who know history the idea here is that the Jewish slaves worked for nothing
for many, many years. Guess who owed
them? Now all of the sudden, the Jews, when they walk out of Israel, have the
assets. They’ve got the cattle, they’ve
got the silver, and they’ve got the gold.
Where did the Jewish economy start?
Where did the economic engine get initialized? Right here. They took
plunder from the world, and He used that plunder of the world system to build
their mighty nation. How did Israel
start? You have to have money, and
gold, and land to start with. And they
started by plundering the world system.
This is a little bit more aggressive, isn’t it, than this little picture
of believers walking around like this, and lying down and being doormats for
everybody. Here we have a mighty
working of God in which an economic transfer of wealth takes place between
corruption and incorruption.
Now
He gets down to the nitty-gritty. Verse
4, “And Moses said, Thus says the LORD, ‘About midnight I am going out into the
midst of Egypt.” We have to come back
to this because of the doctrine involved but notice in verse 4 the subject of
the verb is God Himself, not an angel, but “at midnight I am going out into the land of Egypt. [5] And all the first-born in the land of
Egypt shall die, from the first-born of the Pharaoh who sits on the throne,
even to the first-born of the slave girl who is behind the millstones; all the
firstborn of the cattle as well. [6]
Moreover there shall be a great cry in all the land of Egypt such as,” again,
note the text, “such as there has not been before and such as shall never be
again.” This is an unforgettable
historic occasion, every place that had death.
You say, God’s kind of nasty here, and we’re going to deal with that. This is tough stuff. It is hated by the world system, because it
represents a tremendous interference into a society that had geared its whole
reason for living to keep down chaos and have some sort of order here, order
that is ordained by man, order decreed and legislated by man’s plans and by
man’s organizations. And you can see the
tremendous devastation.
Exodus
10:9, God knows, “Then the LORD said to Moses, Pharaoh will not listen to you,
so that My wonders will be multiplied in the land of Egypt.” And we will go back through, but in
chapter14 we have a fantastic picture of the famous scene by the Red Sea. The Jews have left, they’ve cut to the Red
Sea, now they’re stuck, because they’re walking along and here they are with a
great body of water. They have no
flanking defenses, they have no armies, they have no defense on their right
flank, no defense on their left flank, ahead of them is water and behind them
there’s Pharaoh. Now this is neat. They’re about ready to say let’s reconsider
here, I think we’ve got a little problem.
Because guess who has the assets?
Pharaoh’s not just interested in going out and killing Jews, he’s going
out and wants to get his gold and silver back, wants to get some cattle back,
wants to restart the economy. So
there’s material reasons why Pharaoh’s going after them. Plus the fact that nobody does this to
Pharaoh, he’s got his historic reputation on the line.
Here’s
one of the great, great promises of Scripture.
Exodus 14:13, “Moses said to the people, ‘Do not fear! Stand by and see the salvation of the Lord,
which He will accomplish for you today; for the Egyptians whom you have seen
today, you will never see them again forever. [14] The LORD will fight for you
while you keep silent.” Now is this the
picture of an aggressive minority overthrowing their tyrannical rulers in a
great human revolution to bring in a new society? Not at all, these people didn’t even want to revolt, they had to
be dragged out of there. And when they
got to the thing, they weren’t fighting Pharaoh, they were passive. They were people who pictured and rested on
God’s promises. It’s a picture of
faith, right here. The whole Exodus is
a faith.
If
some of you are music lovers, chapter 15, Handel has a neat piece called Israel in Egypt. This is a song, and it was sung by the women of Israel. And these women were pretty active,
warrior-type women. They weren’t just
nice, sweet, little ladies. I mean,
look at the lyrics of this song. [blank spot]
[Exodus 15:1, “Then Moses and the sons of Israel sang this song to the LORD,
and said, I will sing] unto the Lord for He is highly exalted.” It is antiphonal music, the men would sing
and the women would sing’ the men would sing and the women would sing, and it
was back and forth. And Handel, in this
piece, does it really nice. But, “I
will sing to the LORD, for He is highly exalted. The horse and its rider He has hurled into the sea.” Just think of the power of that kind of
music. This is not something
dainty. This is mighty, it is powerful,
and it’s people who worship a very, very big God. “The horse and its rider He’s thrown into the sea,” and guess who
that’s a picture of? What were the
magicians around Pharaoh locked into?
Demonism. Demonic. This is an utterly satanic picture of the
world system, and the rejoicing is that it’s overthrown. And who in particular is overthrown, but the
very power, the central power that we’ve seen in the art. Pharaoh is overthrown. “The horse and his rider He’s thrown into
the sea.”
All
of that is the mighty picture of the text.
As Christians, we have to think.
We do live in this world, and if we go out and we start talking about
the mighty Exodus, people are going to say, wait a minute, now that’s not what
history tells me. So we want to warn
you about a little problem here. Just
like when we teach Genesis, the Bible can’t be taught in a vacuum. This is the way Egyptian history looks like
if you learn it in university or college.
There are three kingdoms in Egypt:
old, middle, new, and that takes a Ph.D. to do that one, with two
intermittent periods. By the classic
dating scheme, the Exodus had to have occurred here. Big problem! The new
kingdom was the most powerful time of Egyptian history. There’s not a record whatsoever that their
economy any time, during the new kingdom, was affected.
Moreover,
they controlled all of Palestine in this new kingdom period. And where did the Jews go after they
wandered around the wilderness 40 years?
Where did they conquer?
Palestine. Do you read any case
in the book of Joshua where they were fighting? They’re fighting Canaanites, Perrizites, Hittites, do you ever
read they fight any Egyptians? Where do
you read they’re fighting Egyptians in Joshua?
Not one notice. You know
why? Take a concordance and look up the
word Egyptian and try to find it between the time of Moses and the time of
Solomon. Now you’ll find the word
“Egypt” but you’ll always see it’s referenced back to Exodus, the memory of
Exodus. But find one, from any
concordance you pick, you try to find an occurrence of the word “Egypt” as a
contemporary power anytime between the time of Moses and Solomon. Five centuries go by and there’s not a shred
of evidence of Egypt’s existence. Where
the Jews come walking into a land, they destroy all the inhabitants, take it
over and make it their homeland, and it’s a province of the new kingdom of
Egypt? Excuse me? Got a problem here, big problem!
Several
years back, actually, several decades ago, a Jewish atheist by the name of
Immanuel Velikovsky came up with a startling find. Now this is a guy who’s not out to prove that God exists,
obviously, but Velikovsky, being a Jew, had tremendous respect for the
historicity of the Old Testament.
Velikovsky made this startling find.
He did a lot of research in literature, and he discovered something
right here, at the end of that middle kingdom.
And I’ve reproduced part of it on page 48. He found a papyrus by an Egyptian poet by the name of
Ipuwer. Look at that text on page
48. On the left side, the verses from
the papyri; on the right side are texts from Exodus which, for all the world,
look identical.
------------------------------------
Papyrus Ref. Text
Exodus Ref.
2:5-6 "Plague is throughout the land. Blood is everywhere" 7:21
2:10 "The river is blood. . .Men shrink
from tasting it" 7:20,24
2:10 "Gates, columns, and walls are
consumed by fire" 9:23-24
2:13 "He who places his brother in the
ground is everywhere" 12:30
3:14 "It is groaning that is throughout the
land, mingled with
lamentations" 12:30
4:14 "Trees are destroyed" 9:25
5:5 "All animals, their hearts
weep." 9:3
6:3 "Grain has perished on every
side." 10:15
7:1 "The fire has mounted up on
high." 13:21
9:3 "Each man fetches for himself those
that are branded with
his name." 9:19,21
9:11 "The land is not light." 10:22
-----------------------------------------
This
Egyptian poet is writing about plagues throughout the land, blood is
everywhere. The river is blood. Men shrink from tasting it. Gates, columns, and walls are consumed by
fire. He who places his brother in the
ground is everywhere. It is groaning
that is throughout the land, mingled with lamentations. Trees are destroyed. All animals, their hearts weep. Grain is perished on every side. The first mounts up on high. Each man fetches for himself those that are
branded with his name. The land is not
light.
I
don’t know about you, but that has a strange sound to it. Velikovsky said that what must have happened
is that what the Exodus did is end the middle kingdom. And ironically, if you take that date and
you notice Egyptian history, there are four centuries between the end of the
middle kingdom and the beginning of the new kingdom. So Velikovsky said what we must have, since the Exodus is dated
on the basis of Scripture at 1440 BC, thereabouts, and this kingdom supposedly,
was probably about 2000 BC, what we have done is we’ve made Egyptian history
too old. So he moved the date of the
middle kingdom up, but when he did that, he had to move the new kingdom
up. It was just preposterous, and
historians say, this can’t be, this means we’ve got a 500 year error in our
histories. Velikovsky says that’s right, you do. There was a lot of debate and they wound up in the end saying
this can’t be; the Bible’s wrong. I
think Velikovsky might not be right in all of his details, but he was later
looked at by a Seventh Day Adventist Old Testament scholar by the name of Donovan
Courville said, with Velikovsky, if you re-date the Egyptian kingdoms, and move
them forward, something else begins to happen that falls into place.
Now
right about in that point in the new kingdom of Egypt, there was a famous
queen. Unknown, and a very strange situation, because this was a very
patriarchal, masculine society, but all the sudden we have this queen, and she
becomes very powerful. Her name is
Queen Hatshepsut, she rules over Egypt.
And somewhere during her reign, something happened, and she began to
import, into Egypt, she went in and she completely changed the priesthood of
Egypt, made changes in the temples. So
much so, that when her son, Thutmose III ascended the throne he was so angry at
what his mother had done to all the temples and the religion of Egypt, that he
went to every single place where Hatshepsut’s picture was inscribed, and he
plastered over it and put a picture of himself. So nobody, for years, even knew Hatshepsut existed, until
somebody banged into some plaster and it fell off, and all of the sudden, oh
gee, look at that. Hatshepsut, during
her reign as the queen, made a trip eastward, to a land called God’s land. There she met some people, and she brought
back a series of trees. Those trees,
Velikovsky points out, are the same trees that Solomon gave a queen called “The
Queen of Sheba,” and her trees are listed in 2 Kings. You compare Hatshepsut’s journey to this mysterious land called
God’s land, and look at the trees she brought back to Egypt, and then you look
at what Solomon gave this mysterious queen that comes out of nowhere and
disappears, we call her Queen of Sheba because they think it’s some little Arab
province someplace. And we have this
constant correlation, so you can correlate that point and that point. Then her
son, Thutmose, because remember this is in the Solomon era, after Solomon, his
son, Rehoboam, is sort of an idiot and he loses the kingdom because he’s so
foolish in the way he listens to his advisers, and now he is invaded by an
Egyptian Pharaoh. The first time Egypt
begins to become active again, in history.
And the man that Velikovsky says invaded him was Hatshepsut’s son,
because when you look at Thutmose III, he made a campaign into Palestine, and
he brought back things out of a temple that he had there. And if you look in the art of what he
brought back, lo and behold, for all the world, it meets the same description
as the garments of the high priest in the book of Leviticus. And what does Kings tell us? “They looted the temple.” Rehoboam had to loot the temple to pay off
the Egyptian army.
So
the point is that we must have here, apparently, an ancient history. We are as screwed up there as we are in
geology, and the other areas of climatology, and paleoclimatolgy, etc. I just throw that out, be careful, don’t be
like a lot of Christians, even in Bible school, they accept this whole scheme
and then they try desperately to fit the Exodus and make it sort of a quiet
little event that happened and nobody remembered inside the new kingdom. And I don’t think it can be done, for
reasons which we’ve gone through tonight.
The Exodus is too big not to have been recognized.
The
other thing that Donovan Courville points out is that when you make this
realignment of history, and you make this the end, you discover there’s a wicked
group of people that come in here out of nowhere. They’re called the Hyksos, and the Hyksos have a king by the name
of Apop. Now it turns out, because of
phonetic rules, that Apop can be also Agog.
And the Hyksos, Velikovsky believes, answer to what the Scriptures talk
about the Amalekites, whose king was Agag, who was slain by Saul. So now, all of the sudden, we begin to get
connections. Now the Bible is reporting
history, ah-ha, this is what was going on.
So there’s some tremendous linkages there, and I just want you to be
alert that here again, we come to the principle, we’ve got to let the text
speak for itself, and use the text to set up our understanding of history, not
the other way around, get our history all from secular sources, and then
wonder, gee, we got a problem fitting the Exodus in. Well, maybe the problem is the way we totally misinterpreted
history to begin with.
Other
fascinating things emerge. Courville
thinks he’s identified the Pharaoh of the Exodus, because if you look at the
king list, you find these guys on the throne 25 years, their throne reign is 25
maybe 31, 19, and then all of the sudden he finds a Pharaoh right in the same
period and he was on the throne only 5 years, and then the rest of them go on,
and on, and on. He also points out that
if this is done, the old kingdom had a man here who was a stranger to Egyptian
society, who attained a tremendous rank in Egyptian society, utterly unknown in
Egyptian history. His name was
Mantuhotep. And he was not an Egyptian,
but he lived, and was the administrator of Pharaoh during a famine. So again, I point out that here we have
these identifications that are impossible by classic chronology. Mantuhotep can’t be Joseph, because he lived
at the wrong time. This Ipuwer and this
piece of papyri we’re looking at on page 48 can’t be talking about the Exodus,
because it’s too early. So this is the
tension we find as Christians. I think
it’s kind of interesting that we…. it’s the same argument we’ve seen again and
again in Genesis and elsewhere.
If
you’ll follow the notes on page 49 I want to conclude by pointing to a quote in
Josephus, and then we’ll quote Moses.
I’m going to have an appendix on these course notes, like I had
appendices last year on geology and biology, and I’ll go into this, the little
details of how do you date ancient history.
It’s not, by the way, by Carbon 14, it’s by something called [not sure
of word, sounds like: sophic] dating, and there’s other kind of dates that go
on, kingdom reigns, and so forth. If
you look at the first paragraph, halfway through it, I have a reference to
Josephus. Josephus lived at the time of
Jesus. “It resolves the report by the Jewish historian, Josephus. (Antiquities
of the Jews, Bk 2, Chap. 9, para. 1) that Jewish,” Josephus wrote this book and
he had sources out of a library in Alexandria.
The Alexandrian library was one of the saddest cases in history, we lost
that library, it was burned. But that
library at Alexandria had history books on it that probably, if we had had
those, we could reconstruct ancient history with very little problem, but it
was all burned. But Josephus had access
to that library, and he writes in his book, where he’s trying to supplement the
Scriptures, he says that “Jewish slaves built pyramids.” Remember what I said about the pyramids that
was controversial? Here’s why. Most of the pyramids were built back here. Courville feels that the old and the middle
kingdoms are the same kingdom, that what we’ve done is we’ve taken two
different king lists, with two different sets of names, and confused them. But he would say that the old kingdom is the
middle kingdom. That would put the
pyramids right in here, and that would make the Jews as the ones who finished
off the last of the pyramids which were made of brick, not of stone, as the
earlier ones.
So
it’s one of these little correlations that fits. “Since the standard chronology insists that pyramids were no
longer built when the Jews were in Egypt, this report is seen as a figment of
Josephus’ imagination.” I conclude with
this paragraph, “Notice that to do this re-interpretation, we have had to
challenge completely, modern reconstruction of Ancient Near Eastern history,
just as earlier we ‘offended’ the modern historical sciences. This is just more evidence of what I mention
in Part I of the series that the world suffers from global deception and lies
in profound darkness. The Exodus event
was a public judgment that revealed God’s holiness and omnipotence to the
world, not a minor hiccup barely noticeable in Egyptian history!”
Turn
to Deut. 4, just one verse that shows this.
Moses goes back, he summarizes the era.
This is 40 years later, and he asks the rhetorical question. Deut. 4:33, “Has any people heard the voice
of God speaking from the fire, as you have heard it?” That’s Mount Sinai. In
verse 34 he says, “Or has a god tried to go to take for himself a nation from
within another nation by trials [plagues], by signs and wonders and by war and
by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm, and by great terrors, as the LORD
your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes? [35] To you it was shown that
you might know that He is the LORD. He
is God, there is no other beside Him.” You see how the text of the Old
Testament honors God’s immensity, His power, and His size? That’s why the Old Testament is so
critical. We’ve got to learn the Old
Testament, or we come into the New, and we have a little God, and we get this
little wimp of a Jesus running around, looks like a fossil left over from the
1960’s hippie movement. And this is
what happens, because we haven’t filled our soul with the preparatory work out
of the Old Testament the Holy Spirit gave us to prepare us to read the New
Testament.
----------------------------------
Question
asked: Clough answers: Mantuhotep? It’s
M-a-n-t-u-h-o-t-e-p. And that’s if
Donovan Courville’s reconstruction of Egyptian history is correct. And the reason he says that… see, this
involves, if you’re a person into ancient history, this is as earth shattering
to your whole viewpoint as me walking into a biologist friend of mine and
talking creation. I mean, this doesn’t
go over very easily. But the point is,
that Mantuhotep has this strange background, he appears at a time of a famine,
and he’s next to Pharaoh. Now, if that
doesn’t look like Joseph, I don’t know who does. And the thing that we have to remember is that the great people
in history had many names. They called…
particularly if a king had many names, they call it a tutelary, i.e., a title
list, and he might have 20 different names.
You can see this, it occurs in the book of Kings a lot. If you look… it may be better to look in a
Bible dictionary, and you look up, say, Solomon, or you look up Rehoboam, you
look up one of these kings, and you’ll notice that he has these other
names. He has not just one, he has
several names. And Jesus also follows
that same tradition. I mean, we call
Him Jesus Christ, but Christ wasn’t his last name. He was Jesus Ben Joseph.
That was one name He had, Emmanuel was another name He had, The Son of
Man was another name He had, The Son of God was another name He had. Well, you can’t argue there were five
Jesuses because there was five names.
So the logic here is that these men of history went by different titles. And that’s the problem, because the Egyptian
documents give you the Egyptian name that they gave him. And this is a Jewish name. They don’t match phonetically, or
anything. So that’s a problem, we don’t
know who these guys were. There’s been
any number of guys propose to be the Pharaoh of the Exodus, and you can see by
what I showed you tonight, good grief, if you have one view of history, you’ve
got to locate the Exodus over in here, and you’ve only got about two or three
Pharaohs that qualify. The problem with
that is, is that not one of them died.
But
if you look at Exodus 14, it says, “Pharaoh and his army went into the Red
Sea.” Well, the way the conservative scholars in our camp, and I’m talking
about our own people, haven’t been aggressive, I don’t believe, in rethinking
and leading in taking up where Velikovsky left off. Velikovsky gave us, I think, an open door. I think it was a major discovery the man made,
and everybody just kind of passes by and ignores the guy, because it’s not respectable
when you’re a professional historian, because this guy’s considered to be a
kook. So that’s why they don’t touch
him with a ten-foot pole. The problem
with that is, is that then when you read a conservative historian, I just got
through reading the guy that teaches the Old Testament at Dallas Seminary, he’s
a great guy. But his history of Egypt
says right in smack dab in the preface of the book, “We accept all the dates of
the Cambridge ancient history.” Well,
once you’ve accepted those dates, you lock yourself into the new kingdom. Now he’s got to… and so I was looking
through, gee, I wonder what he does with Pharaoh? Well, Pharaoh really didn’t die, because he could have sat on the
shore and watched his army disintegrate.
Well, every other picture in Egyptian art always has the Pharaoh in the
lead. I mean, that was part of his… and
that’s why several of them were killed, because they were in the lead. When they invaded, they were point men, or,
if they weren’t the point men, they were certainly the second or third
guy. And it was considered honor that
the king lead his men. And the idea of
this Pharaoh chasing after these Jews, and he parks his chariot here and says,
Hi, guys, and they go in and get drowned, it doesn’t quite fit.
So
there are all these accommodations. And
I don’t pretend to solve the thing, all I’m pointing out in this class is just
be aware that history is a fluid thing, and it’s not quite as air tight as
everybody thinks it is. And just have
the faith that some day, maybe some godly scholar will come along and help us
out. And I mean, this work cut like
this, you could spend your whole your whole life just on one reign of one
Pharaoh, there’s so much material out there to do this. And we’re in desperate need of some godly
Christian scholars that will take the lead in these areas. When we preach the gospel, it comes off
like, oh, that’s your opinion. I think
the reason that happens is because we’re living in a generation that doesn’t
really believe its history. This is
just a nice little religious storybook, oh, that’s great for Sunday school, but
boy, in school we read the real history, that’s just Sunday school stuff.” We
don’t bring it together, and then we wonder, after about 15 years of this kind
of education, why is the faith over there and everything else over here? Well, because they were taught that
way. They were taught that the Bible is
not connected, whatsoever. And that’s
what I’m trying to break down, here, is point out you can’t read the Bible that
way. You saw in all those textual
notices tonight of the Exodus, I mean, how much more can the Holy Spirit tell
us in the text, than that this was a national disaster? It was supernatural in its dimensions, it
was a thing that people who observed it said there never had been before, and
never since? That speaks to me of a
catastrophe. Well, what you have to do, if you don’t want to, or if you don’t
have the energy, and you’re just tired, intellectually, is to lie down and let
the world roll over you, and then say, well, gee, we got to kind of compress
that little note out of our attention, and we’ve compressed this, and if we can
get the x’s just small enough and inconspicuous enough, we can fit it
there. I don’t think you can do
that. So once again, we’re back to the
Bible versus the world.
Question
asked: Clough replies: It takes schools
and schools of people to do that work.
It takes experts in it. Experts!
I mean, and then dedicate their life just to learn Egyptian hieroglyphics. It’s a community thing. It can’t be done by two or three
people. We can thank God for a few
people that broke the ice, but I think it’s a tragic…I feel like it’s almost a
betrayal of a lot of Christian universities, like Wheaton College, in
Illinois. Wheaton College, for those of
you who know a little bit about church history, was the college where Billy
Graham went. And it was started by
Fundamentalists in the 1920, started on a godly basis, and today we have the
head of the theology department in Wheaton writing a book saying, the scandal
of Christianity is creationism. This is
what happens. It seems like every time
we get a school, we finance it, we get a library started, and then the whole
thing goes down the drain, and here we go, let’s start another school somewhere
else. I mean, we’ve wasted millions of
dollars on schools. And you wonder what
comes out of these things? And that’s
why you heard me say several times, if I want to learn unbelief, I’ll go to an
unbelieving school. I might as well
learn good unbelief, not some half-baked stuff. If I want to learn atheism, I’ll learn under an atheist. I’m not going to go to hear it from a
Christian. And if I want to learn
biblical Christianity, God knows where I’m going to go for that. That’s not to say there aren’t godly
scholars here and there in the school systems, but it’s really pathetic in our
time, that we’re not taking this material, taking the bull by the horns and
doing something with it. We don’t. And I think we’re paying a price. And I think that’s why the gospel’s sort of
looked upon as a little harmless religious story by most people, because it’s
not credible. The whole thing’s not
credible. You can talk about Jesus all
you want to, but if Jesus is testified through the Scriptures, and the Scriptures
aren’t historic, what does that do to Jesus?
The
modern person, the modern theologian, when you talk about Jesus Christ, let’s
not forget, what they’re going to counter us with is, that’s what the early
church thought Jesus was. You ever
notice around Christmas time, Time
magazine, Newsweek, “Can we find
the real Jesus?” They always have some
article like that. And what it amounts
to is that, well, we think kind of there was a guy that had the name Jesus,
that lived, you know, there, and he might have taught a few classes, and that’s
about all we know. All the rest of the
stuff, dying on the cross, rising from the dead, being virgin born, that’s just
fluff that people wanted to believe, that he was a great savior, so they puffed
up his bio. And what we’ve got here is
a puffery. And that’s the modern view
of the Bible. So now you go out and you
try to talk about Jesus Christ, and if the person you were talking to happens
to think that way, you see he’s already sucked you into his viewpoint. So now you’re sitting there, you’ve got to
disassemble that mess before you can even get to the Gospel. And it’s not easy. A guy who’s a preacher today, or an evangelist today, has really
got his work cut out for him. It’s a
difficult thing. What we may be doing
is, a lot of our evangelism preaching is just preaching to the choir. It’s very difficult to go out there and
communicate. And we get false
professions. Why do we get false
professions? People don’t understand
this first place. They understand
there’s something here, something gooey, so let’s go for it. But we really don’t understand it, and if we
don’t understand it, we can’t believe it, and if we don’t believe it, we’re not
born again. It’s that simple.
You’ll
see this happen again and again when we get into the conquest. We’re going to deal with the Jericho
issue. That’s been a sore point in
archeology for a generation. What about
the walls of Jericho? Turns out that
the walls of Jericho did fall out, just like the Bible says, but they’re in the
wrong strata. They’re about 500 years
too early. So by the time that you date
the strata of Jericho when the Jews are coming in, nothing’s there, it’s a
little shanty town. But that’s not the
Jericho you’re reading about in Joshua, for crying out loud. So there’s this dating, you keep running
into this, over and over again, in Old Testament history. We’ve got the material, it seems like, but
we’ve got the wrong number on it. Just
be aware of that.
But
on the other hand, the positive side of this is, if you will be aware of that,
when you read the text, let the text be unleashed in your heart. And let the Holy Spirit take that text, like
that powerful text tonight. Read
through Miriam and the people singing that hymn. Imagine a million people, a million
people singing this as dead bodies are floating around in the water. I mean, this is mess; this is a mess, here. Dead, smelly corpses floating all over the Red Sea and these
people are singing, praising God and dancing.
That’s the scene of Exodus 15.
Let’s put on a church musical about that one. So anyway, that’s the neat
stuff, I think, in the text. We’ll see
more of that. It gets bloodier and
messier as we go on, so you know, be prepared.
Question
asked Clough answers: Cindy comes to
our class, she’s an English teacher.
And Cindy’s been under the pile because, as a Christian, she’s
struggling with the fact… a very interesting point, here’s Cindy’s
problem. She teaches senior English and
in senior English you’re supposed to teach American history in the 20th
century. Cindy’s problem is, she can’t
find an American great writer in the 20th century that expresses a
Christian viewpoint. She can’t use C.S.
Lewis, because he’s English. Who does
she use? Hemmingway? He blows his brains out with a shotgun. So all she’s got is despair literature. So that’s the whole class, talking despair
literature. So Cindy’s struggling, gee,
how do I do that? And so she’s trying
to get the kids at least to realize, okay, this guy believes this, then here’s
where it leads, to try to show them that.
Well, because she’s the new girl on the block, she got saddled with this
goof-off class, half of them on crack or something, and every, you know, two or
three days they are still alive and well and understand something that she
teaches.
Last
Tuesday she gets in there and she was able to get into the Bible. She’s going to teach the Bible as
literature, now, very careful, public school.
So she’s going to teach the Bible as literature. Well, all of a sudden the whole class comes
unglued because these kids start asking questions about dinosaurs, and what
about evolution, and so on. She says,
well, I’ve got somebody that we are going to bring into class. So tomorrow I’m supposed to go in and talk
to her class and let the kids ask questions where they want to. She warned me tonight, they may be cracked
out somewhere, because she says they come in and look real nice, then they’re
kind of, you know, starry-eyed. But
those who don’t have scrambled eggs for brains yet from the drugs, can at least
follow. And she hopes that there are a
couple of kids in that class that really want answers. And she’s toying with them, because she’s
got to be careful. And so you might
pray that we can speak to the issue so that there’s a matching between what I
say, that I’ll be sensitive to what their real questions are. Because often times the real question isn’t
the one that you hear. And the second
thing we’re going to do is, we’re going to video tape it, because if any parent
objects to, oh, gee, we talked about creation yesterday in a public
classroom. Well, I’m going to present
both sides, so if anybody complains, there’s a video tape here, look at it. So we’ll see how it comes off. But I’d appreciate your prayer.