The Third Objection

In Chapter 10 we get the third objection.  Pharaoh says “Go, you that are men.”  If he can’t keep the parents, he’ll keep the children—and he’ll split the parents and undermine the sanctity of marriage and family wherever possible.

Current studies that track the loss of our youth from the church are staggering.  Somewhere between 75 and 95% of our young people leave the church within a year of graduation from high school!  And truthfully, it probably shouldn’t be surprising because for a long time, too many Christian parents—particularly the fathers—have abdicated responsibility for bringing our children up “in the training and admonition of the Lord.”

What are your our children being taught?

I think we may have only a small idea of the extent to which the neglect of Christian parents for the teaching of our children has swelled the tide of infidelity rising up around us.  We have left them to the schools and to their overloaded youth pastor.  The problem is that our schools have become schools of humanism—almost pagan seminaries—in far too many cases.  And it has been an intentional scheme of the enemy.  Let me read you a couple of quotes from some prominent humanists who, like too many of their friends, have become influential members of the education establishment.

John J. Dunphy, in his award winning essay, The Humanist (1983), illustrates the strategic focus on our children.  He says, and I quote:

“The battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith:  A religion of humanity—utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to carry humanist values into whatever they teach.  The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new—the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism.”

As Humanist Charles F. Potter predicted in Humanism: A New Religion, 1930, “Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every American school is a school of humanism.  What can theistic Sunday school’s meeting for an hour once a week and teaching only a fraction of the children do to stem the tide of the five-day program of humanistic teaching?”

The Last Christian generation?

My friend Josh McDowell wrote a book about three years ago entitled “The Last Christian Generation.” He got a lot of push back on the title from his publisher, but maintained that if we don’t do something—and I mean something radical and right now—we may be looking at just that.

God views the man and his wife as “one flesh” and the man and “his house” are often addressed as one when God speaks.  We need men to be leaders like Joshua who said:

“Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you dwell.  But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”  Joshua 24:15

Mr. Overholt joined Strongtower Financial in 2006, bringing with him more than 25 years of experience in the financial services industry. During his career, he has served as the chief executive for some of the largest and most successful companies in the financial industry. In addition to his extensive investment, insurance and capital management experience, he has always been active in ministry including most recently serving as the Executive Director of Mission America Coalition.

*Disclosure – Strongtower Financial is the fund manager for our current sponsor.

The Israelites were wanting to leave Egypt but they first had to answer a number of objections from Pharoah.

The First Objection

Pharaoh’s first objection was in chapter 8 verse 25, when he says “Go and sacrifice to your God, but in the land.”  In effect, “believe what you want to about your God, but stay immersed in our culture.”

We could camp on this point for quite a while, but for today let’s just say this was a question of obedience versus expedience.  It would be tempting for the people to say:  look, we’ve already got all the benefits.  We’ve been saved from certain death and now we’re free from bondage.  God wants the best for us, so let’s just rest in His finished work and make ourselves comfortable here.

Not all bondage seems oppressive

But God knows what’s really good for us, and He has a very different view of Egypt than we do.  He wants us free not only from its brick kilns and taskmasters—the oppressive part—but also from its beautiful temples and alters, its gardens and palaces, its principles and customs, its religion and politics, and so on and so forth.  He knows the even greater danger of these things—all the things of the world, the things that deceived Eve in the garden, the same things that Jesus was tempted with in the desert—but we so often miss it.

Expedience versus faithfulness

And it’s easy to rationalize expedience, isn’t it?  Go with what works.  Listen to what’s easiest to hear, preach whatever draws the largest crowd, etc. etc.  Moses, happily, had already learned this lesson.  How easy would it have been for him to say:  you know what, I’m a prince of Egypt and heir to the throne. Think of what I could do for God’s people from that position!  I could make them prosperous, even wealthy.  I could command the worship of our God by all of the Egyptians.  We would be in their midst as a witness for the glory of our God, and have credibility because we would be seen to be like them in their society.  They didn’t stop to think that their worship—to the extent that it was faithful—would be offensive to the Egyptians (verse 8:26) and they might be tempted to tone it down so as not to be offensive to the culture.  Sound familiar?

But the point is, God had spoken.  And He had said in connection with His judgments earlier in the chapter that He wanted to “make a difference between” His people and the Egyptians, and that to properly serve Him, they needed to put a distance between themselves and the culture.  There needed to be a distinctive change to be an effective witness, and it’s the same today.  Especially in our post-modern culture, people are tired of hearing from us about a life-changing God when they don’t see our lives changed.  God’s word says that just a little leaven leavens the whole lump, and that we should beware of the leaven of the Pharisees—which is hypocrisy.  I fear that in far too many ways we have become the Pharisees of the 21^st Century.

Click here for Part 3

Mr. Overholt joined Strongtower Financial in 2006, bringing with him more than 25 years of experience in the financial services industry. During his career, he has served as the chief executive for some of the largest and most successful companies in the financial industry. In addition to his extensive investment, insurance and capital management experience, he has always been active in ministry including most recently serving as the Executive Director of Mission America Coalition.

*Disclosure : Strongtower Financial is the fund manger for our primary sponsor.

A transcript of a message given by Jim Overholt, President of Strongtower Financial* to a staff chapel service at the California Southern Baptist Convention offices in Fresno, CA. We have broken it into 5 parts for ease of reading and to provide a better way to allow comments on different parts of the message.

At first glance some may be wondering what the Exodus has to do with stewardship. This will become clearer as we go through the message.

Learning from the Old Testament

I was a pretty new believer when I discovered the Old Testament, and particularly how those wonderful old stories were written not merely as recorded history, but as recorded messages that are expressly intended to apply to our lives today.  In reference to the history of God’s people in the Old Testament, Paul says (in 1^st Corinthians 10) that “all those things happened to them as examples, and were written for our admonition,” so all of a sudden the New Testament had opened the Old Testament up for me in wonderful new ways, and I learned that we have not only the license to apply those lessons to our lives today, but the absolute mandate to do so.

More than just deliverance

Most of you I’m sure have seen that classic movie “The Ten Commandments”with Charlton Heston and Yule Brinner in what has become an epic film that is still broadcast every Easter.  It’s a story that every Sunday school teaches at a very early age, but generally speaking, what people learned as a child about that wonderful story is too often all they ever learn about it, and that’s a shame, because the fact is, that story is a beautiful allegory of the gospel message…  and not just the salvation part depicted in the Passover, but the second half of the message—the part we too often neglect these days—the deliverance of God’s people from the bondage of sin so that we can worship and serve Him.  That’s the part depicted by the passage through the Red Sea and eventually, the journey of not just one day, not just two days, but “three days” into the wilderness.

If you look at Exodus 8-10 there are many things we could talk about that are very relevant to us today:

Imitations of truth

We could talk about Jannes and Jambres, the magicians of Egypt who Paul tells us in Second Timothy “withstood the truth.”  How?  “With their enchantments.”  Remember what they did?  When Moses asked God for a miraculous display, they imitated it.  From that we learn that we have to guard the truth very carefully, and that sometimes those things that come closest to it—that imitate it well—are the most subtly deceptive, and the most potentially destructive.  I’m afraid that we have a lot of Jannes and Jambres these days.  Those who only imitate the truth to avoid teaching some of its hard lessons, those who use emotional gratification to satisfy spiritual needs—treating the symptoms rather than the causes of the problems we have in these last days.

We could also look at the successive judgments of God following Pharaoh’s series of refusals to let the people go, and see that they are all aimed directly at the idolatrous gods of Egypt:  the god of the Nile River, the god of fertility, the sun god Ra, and the several others.  The many and diverse gods of this world all have a role in resisting the will of the one true God, and in keeping His people in “Egypt,” in various kinds of idolatry.

Facing resistance

But rather than drill down on these, I thought we’d step back a bit and talk a little about what was really going on here, and flesh out this notion that the enemy will resist God’s people every single inch of their way to deliverance—deliverance not only from the penalty of sin, but from the continuing power of sin in our lives.  Being saved from the consequences of sin as depicted in the Passover is one thing.  Leaving it behind us so that we can effectively serve Him—getting out of Egypt—is quite another.

And it is little wonder that Satan will resist every inch of movement of God’s people towards deliverance.  He knows from painful experience that when God’s people come together in obedience, there is no more powerful force on earth.  So he directs all of his schemes and plans to prevent it.

Israel’s bondage as a metaphor

As I mentioned earlier, the Apostle Paul uses Israel’s bondage in Egypt to illustrate the Christian’s bondage to the world, and he talks a lot in his epistles about the dangers of not escaping the bondage, or even worse, returning to it.  He emphasizes over and over that God wants us delivered from it because it is only when the things of the world are thoroughly out of our hearts that we can

• Properly serve Him

• Properly worship Him

• And ultimately find our way to that land of milk and honey that He so earnestly desires for us.

Now, the King of Egypt obviously didn’t want that to happen, and when he finally realized that he had no power to keep them there, he decided he would use his more subtle, deceptive ways—as he always does—to keep God’s people as entangled as possible with the things of the world, and as I look around, I find that it’s the same with us today.   Satan will seek to spoil what he has no power to hinder, and he has quite an arsenal of fallback positions to resist every step the Christian takes in obedience to God’s call.  So in our text, he makes a series of objections to the movement of God’s people, and they serve to illustrate for us what to be wary of.

Click here for Part 2

Mr. Overholt joined Strongtower Financial in 2006, bringing with him more than 25 years of experience in the financial services industry. During his career, he has served as the chief executive for some of the largest and most successful companies in the financial industry. In addition to his extensive investment, insurance and capital management experience, he has always been active in ministry including most recently serving as the Executive Director of Mission America Coalition.

*Disclosure : Strongtower Financial is the fund manger for our primary sponsor.