Today's text from the ESV Study Bible: Exodus 1-3.
Here in the book of Exodus we have made the transition from Jacob's family of 70 people, living in the pastures of Egypt's Goshen, to a nation of Israelites living in slavery under a Pharaoh who didn't know Joseph some 400 years later.
As a side note, I found it fascinating to read of the actual archaeological digs in Egypt where evidence of large populations of "Asiatics" (the Israelites) lived during this time.
In these pages, we are again witness to God's sovereign working with the midwives, Pharaoh's daughter raising Moses, Moses running for his life from Pharaoh, his subsequent marriage to Zipporah in Midian, and Moses' encounter with God in the burning bush.
However, it is with great interest that we here find God introducing us to his holiness. We should now have a good idea of God's powerful sovereignty, but now, in the following chapters, we are going to begin to understand that God is perfectly holy, and as such, God will begin to further teach us that we can not approach his holiness, that we are separated from his holy presence, that we need to develop a proper fear of his holiness, and that in spite of his great holiness, and the infinite gulf between himself and us, that he has now initiated his plan of redemption.
God has chosen his people, and he will now begin to teach them who he is, how he desires them to live, and even more amazing, how he will actually dwell with them in a soon to be built tabernacle.
Remember back to Job, and his desperate cry for a mediator? Well, before us is the great mediator Moses, and a foreshadow of God's ultimate mediator, Messiah.
Drive slow in these verses, and drink deep. There is much for us to learn here.
