We’re about to see the greatest escape in history, God landing on the planet at Sinai, and more!
The book of Genesis begins with God’s creation of this amazing world and ends with Joseph’s body “in a coffin in Egypt” (Gen 50:26). Oh, the ravages of sin! Since then, billions have wept at loved ones’ graves. But the trail of tears is only part of the story; God has not given up on the human race! In fact, time and again He has intervened to pull the race back from the brink. After Adam and Eve rebelled, the first thing God did was announce that there would come One mysteriously called the woman’s “Seed.” “He shall bruise your head” (Gen 3:15), He told Satan. Then the Lord found a way around the murder of Abel, the proposed line through which that Seed would come. He again rescued the lineage of the Messiah through the tortured story of Judah and Tamar. And remember how Joseph told his brothers, “God sent me before you to preserve a posterity for you in the earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance” (Gen 45:7)? Now the plan has grown: from God’s covenant with a man, Abraham, to Jacob’s family (outlined in Exodus 1:1-6) to an embryonic nation developing in the womb of Goshen. Perhaps one reason God allowed the move to Egypt was the increasing influence of Canaanite behavior on Jacob’s sons. In Goshen, away from the Egyptian population because their occupation of sheep herding was considered despicable, they were kept somewhat insulated from the evil practices of a pagan world. And there “the children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly, multiplied and grew exceedingly mighty” (v 7). But the Pharaoh of a new dynasty had arisen, unfamiliar with Joseph’s deliverance of his nation, and he did not like this burgeoning population of Hebrews one bit. Trouble ahead!