“For the Earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.”
—The Prophet Isaiah
Who Is the Lord? (Exodus 7:14-18; 10:21-29)
“Perfect power does not absorb, exclude or overwhelm and dispossess other dependent powers and agents, but precisely the opposite: omnipotent power creates and perfects creaturely capacity and movement. … what God in his perfect wisdom, power and goodness causes is creatures who are themselves causes. The idea whose spell must be broken is that God is a supremely forceful agent in the same order of being as creatures, acting upon them and so depriving them of movement.”
—John Webster, “Love is Also a Lover of Life”
The Firstborn Is The LORD’s (Exodus 4:21-26)
“For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.”
—Romans 8:15-17
Moses Meets God (Exodus 3:13-17)
“Draw me from created good,
From self, the world, and sin;
To the fountain of Thy blood,
And make me pure within.
If Thou hast drawn a thousand times (Oh draw me Lord again)
Around me cast the Spirit’s bands (Oh draw me Lord again).”
—“If Thou Hast Drawn a Thousand Times,” John Rippon and Benjamin Beddome
Moses's First Impressions of God (Exodus 3:1-22)
“… the wonder that draws Moses aside, and opens his ear, is not the seeming impossibility of a fire that is not fiery, nor a bush that is not God being yet at once divine. The wonder is that the Lord God draws near and the creature does not die away.”
— Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1: The Doctrine of God, 84
God Is a Giver (Exodus 2:11-25)
“Prayer is not overcoming God’s reluctance. It is laying hold of God’s willingness.”
—Julian of Norwich
God's Pleasure in His Provision (Exodus 2:1-10)
“Though there be no light for us, but in the beams, yet we may by the beams, see the sun, which is the fountain of it. Though all our refreshment actually lies in the streams, yet by them, we are lead up onto the fountain. Jesus Christ, in respect of the love of the Father, is but the beam, the stream; where in, though actually all our light, our refreshment lies. Yet by him we are led to the fountain, the sum of eternal love itself. Would believers exercise themselves here in, they would find it a matter of no small spiritual improvement in their walking with God.”
—John Owen, Communion with God
The Need for Redemption (Exodus 1)
“The conclusion affirmed by the narrative is that wherever YHWH governs as an alternative to Pharaoh, there the restfulness of YHWH effectively counters the restless anxiety of Pharaoh. In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods.”
—Walter Brueggemann
Discerning the Body of Christ (Exodus 24:1-11)
“Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’”
—Genesis 12
On Generosity, Zeal for the Gospel, & Growing in Maturity (1 Corinthians 16)
“When we call the virtue of the saints perfect, to this very perfection also belongs the recognition of imperfection, both in truth and in humility.”
—Augustine of Hippo