Gooding, David: 1 - What it Means to be Free

A pleasure to be with you on this first occasion, the first of thirteen occasions when we shall be studying together the book of Exodus. Let me warn you that these will be serious studies in the sense that we shall be trying to follow the actual chapters of Exodus and some of their leading themes. Therefore, we shall not always be able to preach on any one occasion a neat and rounded sermon with three or appropriately four points thereto. We shall be taking the message of Exodus as it comes, and if in some nights it comes in bigger lumps than others, we shall have to digest the lumps as they come. It will be a help if you can, by any means, squeeze ten minutes in the course of a week to read ahead and acquaint yourself with the content of the book of Exodus. Some of the chapters are, of course, very well known, others not so well known. It will be therefore a help if, uh, uh, you can find the time to read ahead a little bit in the story of Exodus. It will certainly comfort my heart if you at least are familiar with the text upon which I am trying to comment. I understand the Daily Telegraph, the Belfast Telegraph, uh, got things, uh, a little bit the wrong way round this evening. The general title, uh, that I have attached to our t- our subject is No Longer Bond Men. No Longer Bond Men. We are going to trace the story of Israel's journey from slavery into freedom. Now, as I say, we have thirteen nights together, if the Lord wills. Therefore, perhaps we can afford the time this evening to take a bird's eye view of the general message of this book. I have entitled it tonight, What It Means to Be Free. Shall we therefore read from the book of Exodus, first of all, chapter two and at verse twenty three. Book of Exodus, chapter two and verse twenty three. And it came to pass in the course of those many days that the king of Egypt died, and the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage, and they cried, and their cry came up unto God by reason of the bondage. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. And God saw the children of Israel, and God took knowledge of them. Now Moses was keeping the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian. And he led the flock to the back of the wilderness and came to the mountain of God unto Horeb. And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. And he looked, and behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. And Moses said, I will turn aside now and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt. And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, here am I. And he said, draw not nigh hither, put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground. Moreover, he said, I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look upon God. And the Lord said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters. For I know their sorrows, and I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey, unto the place of the Canaanite, and the Hittite, and the Amorite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite. And now, behold, the cry of the children of Israel is come unto me. Moreover, I have seen the oppression wherewith the Egyptians oppressed them. Come now, therefore, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh, that thou mayest bring forth my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt. And so that we may put this story into its larger context, let us just take time to read certain verses from the New Testament. And first of all, the first epistle by Peter and chapter one. First epistle by Peter and chapter one, beginning at verse three. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to his great mercy begat us again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, unto an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you, who by the power of God are guarded through faith unto a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. And then from the book of the Revelation, please, and chapter fifteen. The Book of the Revelation, chapter fifteen. m And I saw another sign in heaven, great and marvelous, seven angels having seven plagues, which are the last, for in them is finished the wrath of God. And I saw, as it were, a glassy sea mingled with fire, and them that come victorious from the beast and from his image and from the number of his name, standing by the glassy sea, having hearts of God. And they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying, Great and marvelous are thy works, O Lord God, the Almighty. Righteous and true are thy ways, thou King of the ages. Who shall not fear, O Lord, and glorify thy name? For thou only art holy. For all the nations shall come and worship before thee, for thy righteous acts have been made manifest. And after these things I saw, and the temple of the tabernacle of the testimony in heaven was opened. God give us good understanding of his holy word. It is always a wise and helpful thing to do when one commences the study of a book of holy scripture, to ask oneself, what is the gospel according to this book? There are very few books in all Holy Scripture, I imagine, that are not concerned to preach us the gospel message in one form or another. Certainly there are no books of Scripture that are not intended to be practical. In fact, I defy you to find a comma in Holy Scripture that isn't geared to being practical. But most books are not only practical, they preach us the glorious message of God's saving gospel, and it is therefore a wise thing if at the beginning of a book we ask ourselves, what is the gospel according to this particular book? And if we ask what is the gospel according to the book of Exodus, there is no doubt what the answer should be. The gospel of the book of Exodus is a message of freedom and liberation and liberty. And along with the gospel of freedom and liberation, there comes the added gospel message of hope. In the first place, this book, you see, preaches us the story of freedom. The freedom of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt, from slavery to Pharaoh. It tells us that glorious story of how God came down to deliver them from slavery and to lead them into freedom by means of his redemption. But you will notice it is not only the story of deliverance from slavery into freedom. For what use, you might ask, would be freedom from slavery if it merely moved the Israelites out from Egypt into the barren wastes of the wilderness, and there left them to wander as best they might, to make what they could of the barren sands and rocks and the pitiless heat of that desert. Just to be put into a desert, to be left without a future, without any map, without any purpose, to wander uncertainly for the rest of one's life in a barren wilderness. Why, there were people even in Moses' day that would have thought it were preferable to have remained in Egypt rather than to get lost in the wilderness. Slavery indeed is a bad and can be a cruel and painful thing, but slavery with cucumbers and onions, the Israelites thought, was better than the mere desert without anything else. We ought to be thankful, therefore, that our ancient story does not merely preach to us that God gave his people freedom from bondage i- in Egypt, but it preaches to us how God set before them a glorious hope that gave meaning to life and dimension to life. It preached them a future, radiant and joyful, that made it a meaningful thing to go out into the desert and to travel across that desert, because ahead lay a wonderful inheritance. Traveling across the desert was sometimes fun. It wasn't all dreary and hard work and painful. There was many a delightful oasis, and traveling could be, uh, challenging and new and fresh and interesting and thrilling. Traveling across a desert can be painful, torturously painful. But whether the traveling was good or whether it was bad, it was all given a greater meaning and dimension by the fact that at the end of the journey, according to God's promise, there lay a future worth traveling towards. So then this book preaches us the gospel of freedom from slavery, and preaches us likewise the gospel of hope in the future. From those two aspects, we shall apply its message to our own hearts. Exodus is a book that comes to all who are suffering under any bondage or slavery whatsoever, and assures them that there is deliverance, there is liberty. And Exodus is a book that comes along to anybody who has lost hope in life. And there are many such. There are folks for whom the future is nothing but the gray monotony of joyless existence. Women from whom their partner in life has been taken. What joys are left are not sufficient to transform the future for them now into anything more than a dreary monotony that is joyless and hopeless. And there are men who in middle life have become disillusioned, and what hitherto they strove for as glittering prizes have turned to dust in their hands, and life has become a drudgery, and it offers no hope. And there are young men and one young women who were brought up beneath the lovely sound of God's gospel and faith in Christ and believe in God. And their education hitherto has shattered their faith and left them without any ultimate hope or meaning in life. Nothing but the passing excitement of the years, leading, as far as they know, to the nothingness and hopelessness of the grave. Exodus is a book, I say, that comes along to us, whether we be in bondage or whether we have reached a stage of hopelessness, and offers us freedom and offers us hope. There are many kinds of of slavery, of course. Some are obvious and clear to see, and others are not quite so obvious, and therefore they are the more dangerous. Therefore, it will be the task of our book of Exodus to expose the various kinds of slavery that can hold people in their grip. We shall find, for instance, with Israel, that they were under an very obvious slavery. They were bond servants to Pharaoh in Egypt, and God broke that bondage and brought them out. But the story of the book of Exodus and the bringing of the Israelites out of Egypt is told us by the time the book reaches chapter fourteen and fifteen. And there is still much of the book to follow, and for this reason, among others, that bondage to Pharaoh and Egypt was not the only slavery that kept its grip upon these people's hearts. There was another slavery, a slavery in their own breasts and hearts and in their mental attitudes, so that the book tells us how that God was obliged not only to deliver Israel out of the slavery in Egypt, how that he was obliged to get the slavery out of Israel. Not only to stop them being servants to Pharaoh and slaves in the brick kilns of Egypt, by removing them physically from the land of Egypt. But how God was obliged to spend patient time working on these people, to eradicate the slave mentality that gr- had grown up in their own hearts. For Israel, for hundreds of years, had been used to being slaves, and merely taking them out of Egypt would have changed that very little, as presently we shall see as we read their story. Literally and physically free from bondage to Egypt, they were nevertheless for going on acting like slaves and behaving like slaves and thinking like slaves and talking like slaves, and would have gone on till now acting as slaves. Hadn't God brought them through experiences that were designed to get the slavish mentality out of their hearts and to train them to live as free men and women. But I repeat, the lovely thing about our book is how it shows us that God did those two things. We shall watch God with Israel then releasing them from their bondages, we shall find that that release is in two parts. There is, first of all, a sudden release, a once and for all release. Israel's slaves in Egypt were one night delivered, and they never needed to be delivered again. The bondage was broken, and they were free. That side of the story will appeal to us immensely. We shall find in our own spiritual experience that there is a something that answers to that. A deliverance, a liberation that is immediate and needs never to be repeated. On the other hand, we shall find that there is another side to this liberation, a liberation that took God years to accomplish and was only achieved gradually and bit by bit. And we shall take encouragement from that as well. There are those who tell us that the moment a man trusts our blessed Lord and Redeemer, that moment he is freed from his bondage, and they tell us truly. Sometimes they forget to add that there are other slaverys, and to deliver us from them, it will take even God himself some long process, really to set us free. And if we know it's going to be a long process, we shall not be discouraged when we find by actual experience that it does take a long time. And now I suspect you are all agog, and if you aren't, you ought to be, to know just how I propose to go about interpreting this book. And I, for my part, would be wise to explain to you just how I propose to proceed. For one never knows, and in a strange church there might lurk a theolog- a theologian in a pew here or a pew there, and theologians are much to be respected, if not feared. How then am I going to take this ancient book of history and make it meaningful for us in this present day? Am I going to indulge in orgies of typology? Who knows? Come along and see. But anyway, I shall not start there. We shall start our study down with two feet on earth and face this book literally and historically, and that will comfort even the theologian's heart. We shall start with Israel in their physical and literal bondage in Egypt. Their bondage, you need not me tell you, that was hard and grinding and oppressive slavery. In which their bodies, their labor, their lives were exploited by a series of tyrannical pharaohs. Who used the Israelites and their sweated labor in order to build their treasure cities. And God sets his people free from this physical bondage. And the book of Exodus remains not only the record of it, but as the divine protest at all forms of man's exploitation of man. God's protest against sweat and labor. God's protest at men who use other men as though they were mere machines, paying them miserable pittancees or nothing at all, and using their bodies until those bodies break, and then throwing them aside as mere chapels, in the cause of building their industry and their art museums. God's protest then against all cultures that are built on sweated labor and man's exploitation of man. But even at that level, I would have you notice, if you will, what Israel's bondage in Egypt consisted in. We must not think that slavery in Egypt for the Israelites meant simply that they had to work for nothing, or virtually nothing. And that therefore liberty meant getting paid good wages for the work you do. It meant far more than that. We should not think that slavery for the Israelites in Egypt meant working for somebody else, and that freedom therefore meant that God set them free to work for themselves so that all the profit of their labor went into their own pockets. And we should not think that slavery for the Israelites in Egypt meant hard, hard work. And that freedom then meant either easy work or early retirement, with no work to do at all. What a lovely message it would be, think some, if Christianity meant that you could give up your daily work, and it's a more holy thing not to work rather than to work. And there have been some who have thought it. No doubt that all these three things were elements in slavery and therefore elements in freedom. But pray consider what, according to the book of Exodus, was the most serious element in Israel's bondage. It was this. That Pharaoh so organized their work, that there was no opportunity or very little opportunity for them to serve and worship God. You will remember the early demand that God made to Pharaoh through Moses. It wasn't simply stop beating my servants black and blue. It wasn't simply let my servants go to an early retirement, they've worked long enough. It was let my people go that they may worship me. And it was the lack of freedom to do precisely that, to worship God, to serve God, that made Israel's bondage in Egypt so hard and intolerable. Oh, pray consider how Pharaoh had organized their day. It was work, and more work, and still more work, and work, and a little food, and work again, and then sleep. And sleep, and work, and food, and food and work and sleep, and sleep and work and food. And if they managed an occasional game of football, then the record hasn't told us. Can you not see how that spells a grinding slavery? Who knows, you may have been through some experience like that yourself, when life has become to be little else than work and eating and sleeping and sleeping and eating and working and working and eating and sleeping, with an odd game of table tennis thrown in. And if that is all life is, then sooner or later it becomes an intolerable slavery to the human spirit. God set Israel free, as you will observe, not in order that they might go out into the wilderness for one glorious holiday and never work again. He set them free from work in Egypt under Pharaoh, so that they might work in the wilderness for God. For you will observe, will you not, that in the wilderness they worked and worked quite hard. If I have judged the record right, some of them worked overtime. Busy women's fingers wore themselves down to the nails by stitching and embroidery work. And carpenters flexed their hardened muscles and chiseled and sawed and carved at their woodwork. And smiths and foundry men got hot and sweated, dealing with their brass and copper and silver and gold. And they toiled and they worked and they wa- marched, and they sweated, and they grew tired. Then you say, pray, what was the difference? The difference. Why that in Egypt they were just doing it under duress, merely to build treasure cities and pile up gold and silver and objets d'art for Pharaoh. Working just for things. Producing bricks and ornaments. And that was that. And in the wilderness, they worked. Ah, but this time they worked willingly. For they worked for God. And all they did, even if it was embroidery and stitchery, or sweating hard in the foundry, it was done for God, gladly and willingly and meaningfully. So the very stitches that the women stitched, hour after hour, hour after hour in the desert. Each very stitch had an eternal significance. For every blend of color that their artistic sense embroidered into those tabernacle curtains was done as a sacrifice of praise to God, that they had reason to believe meant something for God. And it gave all they did an eternal dimension, and in turn became a thing of unequaled satisfaction for their human spirits. I have three or four brothers, three I think to be accurate. And if you will now promise never to tell any one of them, I will tell you something about one. He, like the rest of us, and like a good many Irishmen, didn't always go too readily to the washing up or the drying up of dishes. It is a chore, isn't it? I find it so, still. But this particular brother of mine, having a great deal of sense, fell in love with a young lady. And you know, there came times in that process when he even went to the washing up with alacrity, for the young lady was drying the dishes. And the doing of it together, I don't know, I cannot tell you how or by what alchemy such experiences change ordinary humdrum things, but apparently they do, for a while at any rate. But I know, uh, for a few hours at least, that friendship cast a golden glow even over our cheap Woolworth China. Happy is the man and woman whose spirit has found God and is in love with God. It means, my good sir, that while you twist those old nuts and bolts in Mackie's foundry, mother, as you prepare the bottle for the infant, sir, as you have to deal with those stocks and shares and negotiate with the union leaders, so be it in spirit you're doing it for God. Toilsome as it may be, and monotonous in itself. It acquires an eternal significance. It liberates the spirit from all thought and feeling of bondage. It transmutes ordinary humdrum daily work into a something that makes God's heart glad now and shall adorn heaven with its eternal embroideries forever. Ah, what a slavery life becomes, however high the pay. However beautiful the homes and the cars that we get from the work, if when it's all finished, then our work has brought us nothing but the satisfaction of food in our stomach, a sausage or two here, a red brick house there, and an amethyst ring upon our fingers, and nothing else. And nothing for eternity. So we shall be applying this lesson to ourselves from time to time at this level. We shall be asking ourselves as Christian people what our attitude to our daily work is. And we shall be helped to see that as Christians, our ideal is not that we shall give up daily work, but that we shall go about our daily work to seek God's kingdom, to seek to please him, to do it as for him. Finding therein a liberation for the spirit and an enrichment of the soul now, and a sure promise of reward. 'Twas thus that Paul comforted the slaves among the early Christians, did he not? Slaves who, when they got converted, remained slaves still, for they had no choice. And it's a difficult thing, isn't it, for a free man to come along the side of a slave and try and comfort him in his slavery. But writing to these men and women for whom the future held nothing but literal slavery, Paul says that they are to do it unto the Lord, serving the Lord. The moment I do anything unto the Lord, then am I free because I want to do it. And says Paul, serve the Lord not with thy service as men pleases, but from the heart, knowing that from the Lord you shall receive the recompense of the inheritance, for you serve in your slavery the Lord Christ. Oh, my brother, my sister, haven't I often heard you say, and haven't I often heard you sing it, and haven't other people heard you as well? Saying that you would willingly s- be a slave to the Lord Jesus? You meant it, didn't you? What kind of slavery were you thinking of? If he should ask you to slave for him at bringing up a half a dozen children? If he should ask you to stay at the carpenter's bench for the rest of your life? If he asked you to go on something that typewriter till the keys are worn out, or you, would you do it for his sake? Or is the only kind of slavery that you would like to be a preacher on tour? But when we have sorted out from time to time, uh, lessons at that level, we shall turn to a second level of interpretation of this ancient book. We shall apply, theologians now be warned, we shall now apply these lessons as types, or if you prefer the term, prototypes of spiritual experience. For that, therefore, allow me to quote my New Testament authority. In the book of Exodus, we read how that God delivered Israel in part by the sacrifice of the Passover lamb. And also how that having delivered them, he led them on to an inheritance that, if not incorruptible, yet one that flowed with milk and honey. And you will well remember how that the Apostle Peter in the New Testament takes up these terms and applies them at a much higher level. He tells us that we have been redeemed, not with silver and gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot. And he tells us that being thus redeemed, we have been begotten again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, unto an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for us. I don't really mind how you, uh, account for that kind of language. If you are one of those that says, now that's not typology, that is, uh, Peter just using a few metaphors drawn from the Old Testament. Carry on, my dear friend, and call them metaphors. I shall not quarrel with you. For there are some folks that have a holy horror of the word typology. Or if you prefer to call them prototypes or types or fashions or shadows, call them what you will. It remains the fact that Peter is taking this Old Testament history and using it as a kind of a pattern of a spiritual bondage and a spiritual deliverance and a spiritual inheritance far greater than Israel knew. Let us turn our attention on it for a moment. Israel, as I say, set out delivered from Egypt and were promised this glowing inheritance in the future. What a gospel it was. And how it kept their feet plodding and plodding as they walked across that wilderness, as the old stones got in their sandals and made it hurt, as on occasions they ran short of water and they thirsted. On those occasions when they got so disheartened that they thought about giving it all up and going back to Egypt, I say how that glorious gospel glittered in front of them and nerved them to the fight and made it feel worthwhile carrying on. There was a future. Life wasn't just going round in circles and getting lost in the wilderness. There was a future. And the New Testament uses that picture to remind us of the glorious inheritance that lies ahead of us. Oh, let us not be ashamed or silent about it. It is a glorious gospel message that we preach. And I, for one, am not going to be frightened into silence by simple-minded agnostics and atheists who come alongside and tell me, but my good chap, that's all pie in the sky. Suppose it's pie in the sky. I'd rather have some pie in the sky than mere worms in the grave. Or ponder the poor atheist for the moment, if you will, and find some compassion in your heart for him. There's no hope. No hope. No hope. According to him, there is no inheritance. There's nothing but this world. Nothing at the end but a grave and dust and ashes. And all his ambitions and all his politics and all his plans and all his purposes and all his improvements and all his attainments, according to him, are bound by definition to lead him nowhere else, but to the nothingness of the grave. Now hear, if you will, the comfort with which he tries to comfort himself. Atheists are no new invention, of course, are they? There were many in the ancient world, and they used to try and comfort themselves this way round, they used to say, but suppose there isn't any he- any future, suppose there is no heaven. Why should we complain at that? Let's enjoy life while it lasts. I mean, the man that has gone along to the good hotel, Caledon, or whatever it be, and he's had a rip-roaring, delightful banquet of a meal, and he's stuffed so full that he couldn't possibly get any more caviar down his throat. He is happy to leave the table. He doesn't say, look here, I'm not going to this dinner. I've lost all interest in this dinner because at half past nine it will come to an end. He says, dinners come to an end. That's no reason why you shouldn't enjoy them while they last. Life comes to an end, well, let's enjoy it while it lasts, and we can't complain if it comes to an end. And I think that that's good enough. That's all there is. It's poor comfort for the man for whom life isn't a banquet, isn't it? That man or woman born mentally retarded. The men and women that have minds and imaginations enough to see what life could have been. Oh, if only they had had their health. If only they hadn't always been stalked by grinding poverty and short of cash. They have the imagination to see what life could have been. They've never realized it. The disability may be, or other people's sinfulness and cruelty and selfishness. Life has been a long frustration full of pain, and will you tell them at the end to go gracefully from the banquet table and be content with it? Talking of minds brings us to the central point, does it not? We sit here this evening as human beings with minds, feelings, emotions, imaginations. Why, I know that we are only tiny specks in this universe. Verse. Compared with the old Divis mountain, or an elephant or two, let alone a star like Betelgeuse or something of the sort, what tiny little things we are. But then I tell you something about elephants and about Betelgeuse in particular, and they haven't got much sense in their heads and very little imagination. And man has, hasn't he? I'm not flattering you when I talk about your intelligence, your aesthetic sense, your imagination, your art, your talent, all those lovely creative things that you have, that make you so infinitely superior to mere things or to animals, however delightful they may be. Now, atheist, let me tell you straight. According to you, one of these days, some little virus that you can scarce see without the aid of a microscope, uh, with not a millimeter or an ounce of sense in its head, if it's got one, will invade your body and tear it apart bit by bit. Some mindless cancer cell. Not even knowing what a beautiful thing it destroys will wrap itself round your insides and your brain and strangle your art and strangle your life and strangle your intelligence. What a prison house it is to be in, isn't it? To have a mind that can think and an imagination that can feel, and to find yourself being destroyed by something that has neither. There was a form of punishment and torture in the Middle Ages where they put a man in a room, and the walls of the prison gradually, little by little, came in upon him. And even while he lived, he could see that presently he was going to be crushed to nothing by a mindless wall. And if there be no inheritance, my dear good atheist, you are precisely there. A human intelligence in a world that is sheer material, mindless and purposeless, that one day will crush you. And all the lovely things that you stood for and were and once enjoyed, and when it's done it, it won't know it's done it. In a word, you are a prisoner. An intelligence trapped in the prison house of a universe that, according to you, is only mere matter. Well, if that's how things are, I should keep it dark if I were you. I shouldn't gloat over it. It's not a message of freedom that you have. It's a message of torturous bondage. Oh, let's break from it. Let's warm our hearts again in the glow of the glorious and certain gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. Our world has been visited by that glorious second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ our Lord, born into this world, a real man with bodies as we have and mind and imagination in addition. He has faced death and the coldness of the tomb and the irrationality of men's hatred and the tangle of men's iniquity and suffered under it even to death, and God had raised him from the dead and set him at his own right hand, and there is hope. There is hope beyond this temporary planet. There is an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away. And unashamedly we shall rejoice in it as we study this Old Testament book and use its lessons as a prototype of bigger things. And finally, and very briefly, there is yet another level at which we shall read the lessons of this ancient book. We shall find, as we progress, that Israel's history, ever and again, is shot through with foresights into the future, and becomes for us not merely history, but prophecy. For For that that reason, I read you those stirring verses from the book of the Revelation, chapter fifteen. Those chapters tell us of dark days that lie ahead at the end of this age. When men shall have to fight, if fight they can, against the crass, crude materialism of the ultimate dictator and the totalitarian state. But in chapter fifteen, the New Testament seer, John the Divine, turns aside from the battle for a moment as he sees it coming, to picture us some of those people of that day who remain faithful to God and come through triumphant. He pictures them by the glassy sea, and as they stand before God, they are found singing the song of their glorious triumph. They sing the song of Moses and of the Lamb. They sing a song that had been started ages before. The song of men who have known the iron of slavery in their very souls, have suffered under dictators, have felt their whip, and have dared to stand for God, and have been delivered. So Israel, in a day to come, must face yet much suffering. So multitudes of men and women at the end of this age shall have to reap the harvest of current materialism, as they fall willingly or unwillingly under the domination of the ultimate totalitarian dictator, who shall deny that there is a God out there at all. Why, Pharaoh was some king, was he not? And when Moses came to him with the divine demand, saying in the name of God, let my people go, thus saith Jehovah, let my people go. Pharaoh, all six feet of clay that Pharaoh was, turned round and said, and Jehovah, who is Jehovah? We don't recognize Jehovah round here. But there shall come a dictator far more brilliant, far more powerful, and more infamous than the pharaohs knew ever how to be. There shall come the man of sin sitting in the very temple of God, exalting himself above all that is called God, all that is worshipped. And he shall demand in the name of the state, and in the name of deified manhood, he shall demand absolute devotion of man to the state and to himself. In those days, men will worship the true God of heaven, if they worship him at all. They will worship him at the cost of their very lives. And men will have to find out. Men and women who have thought that getting rid of God, the notion of God, and the claims of religion would lead them to freedom, they will have to discover the hard way that getting rid of God from their thoughts and from our world will lead, as it must lead, to the biggest slavery that ever the human spirit suffered. In order to describe it, the last book of the New Testament uses the language and the experiences of Moses and the Israelites under the pharaohs of Egypt. And we shall be wise men and women if from time to time we allow the ancient message of Exodus to warn us about what lies ahead. I have not forgotten that lovely promise in the New Testament, whereby believers are th- are promised by our Lord that they shall be kept from the hour of temptation that is coming upon the earth. But I do observe this, that while the Pharaoh from whom God eventually delivered the Israelites was an exceedingly cruel Pharaoh to Israel, he wasn't the only Pharaoh thus to enslave them. There was a Pharaoh before him. It was the Pharaoh before the Pharaoh of the Passover that began the slavery. And the Israelites didn't have to wait until that last Pharaoh of the Exodus to make their stand. Some of them, far-seeing enough, found they had to begin to make their stand against these trends, even under that earlier Pharaoh. Why? Let me tell you briefly about those two midwives, and more of them are on and in coming weeks. But under that penultimate Pharaoh, the one before the final Pharaoh of the Passover, under that earlier Pharaoh, the decree went out, did it not, that all the male children in Israel, when born, should be destroyed. And the two midwives dared to stand against that trend, even in their own day. And if they hadn't have stood in that day under that Pharaoh, when things got really bad under the next Pharaoh, there wouldn't have been any males to bring out of Egypt anyway. And the dark days of the man of sin are not on us yet, thank God. But the mystery of iniquity already works. And there are trends around us, already begun, that shall come to their climax in those dark days. Let us not say that will be for other people to strive against. Let us be warned. When we find ourselves up against the trends that shall eventually lead to that final apostasy, when we find ourselves up against their beginnings now, like those midwives, we may stand now and stand for God and stand for freedom. And stand for spirituality. In a world that is fast going down the slope into the slavery of a totalitarian materialism. To that end, God bless his word and our studies together in these coming weeks.