Exodus 1:1-22 NKJV
1 Now these are the names of the children of Israel who came to Egypt; each man and his household came with Jacob: 2 Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah; 3 Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin; 4 Dan, Naphtali, Gad, and Asher. 5 All those who were descendants of Jacob were seventy persons (for Joseph was in Egypt already). 6 And Joseph died, all his brothers, and all that generation. 7 But the children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly, multiplied and grew exceedingly mighty; and the land was filled with them.
8 Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. 9 And he said to his people, “Look, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we; 10 come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and it happen, in the event of war, that they also join our enemies and fight against us, and so go up out of the land.” 11 Therefore they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with their burdens. And they built for Pharaoh supply cities, Pithom and Raamses. 12 But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew. And they were in dread of the children of Israel. 13 So the Egyptians made the children of Israel serve with rigor. 14 And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage—in mortar, in brick, and in all manner of service in the field. All their service in which they made them serve was with rigor.
15 Then the king of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives, of whom the name of one was Shiphrah and the name of the other Puah; 16 and he said, “When you do the duties of a midwife for the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstools, if it is a son, then you shall kill him; but if it is a daughter, then she shall live.” 17 But the midwives feared God, and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the male children alive. 18 So the king of Egypt called for the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this thing, and saved the male children alive?”
19 And the midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are lively and give birth before the midwives come to them.”
20 Therefore God dealt well with the midwives, and the people multiplied and grew very mighty. 21 And so it was, because the midwives feared God, that He provided households for them.
22 So Pharaoh commanded all his people, saying, “Every son who is born you shall cast into the river, and every daughter you shall save alive.”
God had saved the children of Israel from famine by bringing them down to Egypt. But what began as relief soon degraded into affliction, as God had told Abraham that it would: “Know certainly that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and will serve them, and they will afflict them four hundred years” (Gen. 15:13). Yet God did not abandon them. Even as they were forced into hard labor by the Egyptians, the children of Israel prospered. What began as a family of seventy-five people grew into a nation of roughly two million.
But Pharaoh was frightened by those numbers, leading him to issue the terrible decree to kill any newborn baby boys from then on, not unlike King Herod’s decree to kill the baby boys of Bethlehem after he was told that the Christ had been born. But in this case, God rescued the Hebrew babies through His faithful servants Shiphrah and Puah, who employed what we might call godly deceit with Pharoah by hiding their role in saving the children from death, teaching us that God approves of our disobedience to the governing authorities when those authorities command us to do wicked things (cf. Acts 5:29).
Why would God allow His chosen people to suffer so long at the hands of the godless Egyptians? Here we must remember that God’s ways are not our ways, nor His thoughts our thoughts (Is. 55:8). His good and gracious plans for this nation only became clear at the end, when He stepped in through Moses to bring about their wondrous exodus from Egypt and their redemption from slavery, which all pointed ahead to the still greater redemption that God would accomplish through the death of His Son for sinners long enslaved by sin and death. In the meantime, God used their suffering in the same way He uses it for His New Testament Church, to produce perseverance, which produces character, which produces a hope that will not disappoint us (cf. Rom. 5:3-5). In the end, God’s good and gracious plan for us will also be revealed. Until then, let us be content to trust, and to hope.
Let us pray: Lord, help us to trust in Your ways and to endure affliction with patience, until Your deliverance is finally revealed. Amen.