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Not Ashamed of the Power That Saves,

Part 1:
The Power That Delivers From
Bondage
Exodus 1-15
October 3, 2004

Introduction

Over the course of the last two Sundays I have

encouraged and exhorted you from Romans 1:16, that
we are not to be ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

We should not be ashamed of the gospel of Christ just

because other people will make fun of what we believe,
or ignore us, or give us the evil eye, or think strange
things about us, or give us strange looks. We discovered
that the message of the gospel is foolishness to those
who are unbelievers.

We also discovered that a consequence of this is that we

should not try to change the message of the gospel so
that it will somehow be more palatable to unbelievers. If
God says that they think it’s foolishness anyway, then
there’s no real need to change it. If we do, then we run
the risk of preaching a message that no longer has the
cross as the centerpiece. And that, as I pointed out last
week, is the pit many churches have fallen into today.

The result of all this is that Christianity is powerless.

Without the cross as the centerpiece of its message, sin
is not defeated. That’s why people still struggle with
their sinful habits, sinful thinking styles, and sinful
speech. Inside, many of them really long to be free, but
they just don’t know how. Yet that same group sits in
church Sunday after Sunday, listening to the very men
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who can help them. But because they are more
concerned with not offending than with destroying the
power of sin and freeing captive lives, they preach
gospel without the cross, which makes the Jesus they
preach a fake Jesus with no power to do anything to help
anyone.

That was my soapbox last week. I thank you for

enduring it, but I also know it is so important for us to
know, even though we live in a little town of only 800
people. Trends are important because if they get big
enough, more people catch on to them, and this church
growth strategy has caught on big time outside our little
world here. And it will continue to advance itself
anywhere it can find an outlet. I just wanted to lay the
groundwork for protecting us in the future.

Now from the truth that we must not be ashamed of the

gospel comes the question, “why?”. Paul tells us why.
The gospel is the power of God to save anyone who
believes. That’s why we must not be ashamed of it. I
described it for you last week in terms of a stick of
dynamite that you hold, that has the power to blow apart
a mountain of any size, freeing those who are encased
within. The gospel message destroys the mountain of
sin and frees those who are in bondage.

So I thought it best, in order to strengthen this hope and

give you more courage, to illustrate this power of God to
save. I truly believe that if you can catch the vision of
this power of God that you possess in the gospel
message, then you will be less and less ashamed or
afraid to proclaim it to others. I guess I figure that if I
can accurately and faithfully paint a few pictures for you
of this power of God to save that you will grow in your
love of that power and your desire to use it to free those
who are in bondage to sin, and free yourself as well.

Transition
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Over the next five weeks, then, I’m going to attempt to

do just this. I want to paint five illustrations for you of
this power of God to save using narratives and stories
from the OT and NT so that your grip on the gospel
message will get tighter and tighter. As your grip
tightens, your teeth will begin to clinch, and your eyes
become more focused. The war will not seem
overwhelming any longer. You will experience a slow
charge of spiritual energy as you recapture once again a
vision of this God you say you love and want to serve.
You will become like the soldier who has his hands glued
tightly to his weapon, ready for battle. Fear will
disappear, and excitement will rush to your heart and
mind. You will realize that nothing can stop the power of
God to save, not even the gates of hell itself, as Jesus
promised in Matthew 16.

But not only will there be this teeth-gritting, weapon-

gripping spiritual sort of attitude that you will have
toward the enemy and toward sin and those held captive
by them, but you will also experience a deeper heart of
love, compassion, sympathy, and hurt for those who are
being pained under the suffering of sin and Satan. To
these wounded souls you will desire to go with love,
mercy, grace, forgiveness, peace, patience, forbearance,
and gentleness to guide them out of the pit. You will be
merciless with the enemy – which is their sin and the
Devil who inspires it. But you will be merciful with the
victim – the sinner who, although loves his sin, needs to
be freed from it through forgiveness.

The Story: Exodus 1-15

Now, every story has a beginning, and the stories I will

tell you over the next five weeks all have the same
beginning. In fact, each story is just another chapter in
the same book.
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The story begins before the foundation of the world
when God decreed, for His own wise and good reasons,
to create a world, create Adam and Eve, permit the fall
and entrance of sin, and provide a way of redeeming
mankind from the fall. God was interested one primary
thing – a people whom He had gathered to Himself, for
Himself, who would be His representatives on earth to
the rest of mankind. So throughout the big picture, you
will find that God working consistently through the
instrument of a person or a group of people to bring
about His purpose.

So when God put it all into action in the book of Genesis,

we find God gloriously setting out to start redeeming
mankind. He began with Adam and Eve in the garden.
It only makes sense to us now, after having read
Genesis, that if God is going to redeem, save, deliver
and rescue man from sin, that those He redeems and
delivers will become His instruments to deliver others.
And this was His vision when He chose the family line of
Seth to represent His redemption.

Through Seth’s family we find Enoch, who walked with

God. Then we find Noah who, along with his family,
were the only favored ones throughout the entire earth
whom God desired to rescue when He destroyed
everything on earth with a flood.

After Noah’s family we find a denigration of this

redemptive purpose in mankind. We know this because
we find God choosing Abraham, a descendant of Noah,
to be the one God would use to bring about the Messiah
and save God’s elect. But we find God choosing Abram,
as he was called at that time, out from among his idol
worshiping family.

Nevertheless, God calls Abraham out, promises to bless

him, and promises to make a great nation of him. The
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promise also involved all the families of the earth being
blessed through Abraham.

Over the course of the next three generations, God

continued to fulfill His purpose through Isaac and Jacob,
and then Joseph, whom God used to bring, by that time,
the thousands of descendants of Abraham to the land of
Goshen, in Egypt, to protect them during the seven
years of famine in the land at that time.

This was the history of the first 1,800 plus years of world
history, then. Wow! We covered almost two millennia in
only a matter of minutes. How’s that for a history
lesson!

What happens next, is another interesting piece of

history that tends to mirror the calling of Abraham. God
saves Noah, and then over the course of several
hundred years sovereignly allows His purpose of
redemption in the world to lay dormant. Then out of the
blue, God calls Abraham who had, in those several
hundred years of dormancy, been held captive to
idolatry.

The same sort of thing happens here, with the

descendants of Abraham, or the Israelites, as we will call
them, after they come to Goshen in Egypt. Joseph dies,
and another Pharaoh comes after him who didn’t know
anything about Joseph. Presumably what happened
during this time was that another Egyptian people called
the Hiksos came and took over the kingdom some time
after Joseph. That is why the new Pharaoh didn’t know
anything about Joseph, which meant he wouldn’t have
known anything about all the Israelites who were in the
land.

So this new rulership got so scared of the Israelites that

he forced them into hard labor, carrying out new
building projects. But the more they oppressed the
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people of Israel, the more numerous they became. It
seemed like the harder the work got, the more babies
they had. Strange as it may seem, that’s the way it
happened. So as Exodus 1:14 records for us, “They
ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves and
made their live bitter with hard service, in mortar and
brick, and in all kinds of work in the field. In all their
work they ruthlessly made them work as slaves.”

So here God’s people are once again held captive by

idolatry. These were a people who worshiped nature,
and saw a deity behind every act of nature – from wind,
to sunshine, to rain, to bugs, to anything else. And the
course of time from Joseph’s death to this point in
Exodus 1 is approximately 350 years. And it is from this
point on Exodus 1 that Israel still has another 80 years
left of this treatment.

You know what happens next. Pharaoh issues a decree

to the midwives that any baby boy who is born should
be killed right after it is born. But God gave the Hebrew
women such strength in their childbearing that they
were able to birth their own children before the
midwives ever got there. Now those are strong women!
And the midwives were actually righteous women who
were simply taking their time getting to the scene of the
birth so that they were purposefully late! There’s some
smart strategizing going on here.

So Pharaoh thought up of another plan. Since the

midwives are late, and the mothers are so strong, just
throw the baby boys into the river so that they will
drown. The purpose was obvious. Eliminate a
generation of boys and the number of Israelites will drop
in a generation. But as to whether or not that worked, I
don’t know because the Scriptures only tell us of one
baby boy who made it out alive – that was Moses.
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Moses was put in a basket and sent down the Nile river
in hopes that someone would find him and take care of
him. That was probably the hardest thing a mother ever
had to do – putting their little baby boy in a basket and
setting him afloat down a river as humongous as the Nile
River. But Moses’ mother did. And it ended up working
out for the best. For who should find Moses than
Pharaoh’s daughter. And Pharaoh, instead of realizing
what was going on and demanding that the baby be
thrown back into the river, gives in to his daughter’s
wishes to keep the baby. And who should be asked by
Pharaoh’s daughter to help take care of the baby than
Moses’ own mother! So Moses ends up being raised by
Pharaoh’s family, in Pharaoh’s house, educated by the
finest teachers and books in the world at that time. Only
a God of power could perform something as providential
as this.

Moses lives in Pharaoh’s house until he is forty years old.

He then witnesses the beating of a fellow Hebrew,
murders the Egyptian who beat the man and buried the
Egyptian in the sand. After being found out, he fled to
the wilderness where he lived for forty years herding
sheep and goats, that is, until God’s power manifests
itself in a talking bush that burns with fire but does not
burn up.

Out of that bush, God spoke, calling Moses to action. It

was time. After 430 years of being in bondage to the
nation of Egypt, it was time to rescue Israel and fulfill the
promise made to Abraham some 500 plus years earlier.

One of the means God gives to Moses in order to

authenticate his message of deliverance is a stick that
can turn into a snake and then turn back into a stick
again. That was God’s power displayed in the
miraculous. Then Moses was to use another miracle of
God to prove his message – he could stick his hand
inside his shirt and then pull it out covered with disease.
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He could then stick it inside his shirt and pull it out and it
was gone. So off Moses goes with his brother Aaron to
deliver the message of good news, the promise of
deliverance to the leaders of Israel.

4:30 tells us what happens. “Aaron spoke all the words

that the Lord has spoken to Moses and did the sign in
the sight of the people. And the people believed; and
when they heard that the Lord had visited the people of
Israel and that he had seen their affliction, they bowed
their heads and worshiped.” God worked through these
signs, these miracles to authenticate Moses and Aaron’s
message so that the people would believe the message.

Then in chapter 5, Moses and Aaron went to deliver the

message to Pharaoh. All they wanted was to let the
people of Israel go into the wilderness to worship for
three days. But Pharaoh thought the reason they
wanted to go worship was because they were lazy. So
he put them to work, making as many bricks as they had
to before, but this time without straw. It’s really, really,
really hard to make bricks at that time without straw. So
instead of letting them go, he made them work harder.

In chapter 6, God promises Moses that Pharaoh would

himself send the people out of the land. In verse 2, we
read, “God spoke to Moses and said to him, ‘I am the
Lord. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as
God Almighty, but by my name the LORD I did not make
myself known to them.” God was saying He had
redeemed those men but had not yet made Himself
known to them as YHWH, Jehovah God.

In verse 6, however, we read that for the first time in

history, God is about to make His name known to His
people. “Say therefore to the people of Israel, ‘I am the
LORD, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of
the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from slavery to
them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm
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and with great acts of judgment. I will take you to be my
people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I
am the Lord your God, who has brought you out from
under the burdens of the Egyptians. I will bring you into
the land that I swore to give to Abraham, to Isaac, and to
Jacob. I will give it to you for a possession. I am the
LORD.”

You know what happens next, don’t you. Over the

course of several weeks, God continues to demand,
through Moses, that the people of Israel be released.
And to authenticate that message, God used a miracle.
Ten times, He did this until Pharaoh was at a breaking
point. Ten times, God displayed His power through
miracles until He made His point.

The point was made by chapter 12, when Pharaoh finally

cried, after losing his oldest son, “Up, go out from
among my people, both you and the people of Israel;
and go, serve the LORD, as you have said. Take your
flocks and your herds, as you have said, and be gone,
and bless me also!” (vv. 31-32).

So Moses leads the people of Israel out to worship the

Lord and offer a sacrifice. Instead of heading north, God
has them head east, away from the land of the
Philistines. He has them head east toward the Red Sea.
The Lord led them by means of another miracle – a pillar
of cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night to give them
light for their travels. These two clouds never left the
people. This was yet another miraculous display of
God’s power to deliver His people from bondage and to
the land where He wanted them to go.

Now, as they were camping, God told Moses that He was

going to harden Pharaoh’s heart so that Pharaoh would
come after Israel and bring them back to their slave
work. God did this for a purpose. He did this so that He
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could, AGAIN, show His power through a miraculous
display.

Pharaoh’s army came after them. God sent them to the

edge of the Red Sea. God parted the Red Sea through
Moses and his stick. And, by my best estimates, about
two million people cross through that sea on dry ground.
14:21 tells us, “The Moses stretched out his hand over
the sea, and the LORD drove the sea back by a strong
east wind all night and made the sea dry land, and the
waters were divided. And the people of Israel went into
the midst of the sea on dry ground, the waters being a
wall to them on their right hand and on their left.”

This act was the single greatest miracle in the OT. For
two million people to cross a major body of water on dry
land, watching the walls of water on their left and right,
in the middle of the night, is simply miraculous.

God’s people cross with awe and wonder, but Pharaoh

and his army think nothing of it, so they simply pursue
Israel using the same path. But once the last Israelite
crossed, we read in verse 26, “Then the LORD said to
Moses, ‘Stretch out your hand over the sea, that the
water may come back upon the Egyptians, upon their
chariots, and upon their horsemen.’ So Moses stretched
out his hand over the sea, and the sea returned to its
normal course when the morning appeared. And as the
Egyptians fled into it, the Lord threw the Egyptians into
the midst of the sea. The waters returned and covered
the chariots and the horsemen; of all the host of Pharaoh
that had followed them into the sea, not one of them
remained. But the people of Israel walked on dry ground
through the sea, the waters being a wall to them on
their right hand and on their left.”

Verse 30 is simply awesome. “Thus the LORD saved

Israel that day from the hand of the Egyptians, and Israel
saw the Egyptians dea on the seashore. Israel saw the
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great power that the LORD used against the Egyptians,
so the people feared the LORD, and they believed in the
LORD…”

Then Moses sings this song under the divine inspiration

of the Holy Spirit, in 15:1. “I will sing to the LORD, for he
has triumphed gloriously; the horse and the rider he has
thrown into the sea. The LORD is my strength and my
song, and he has become my salvation; this is my God,
and I will praise Him, my father’s God and I will exalt
Him.”

Then in verse 6, Moses sings, “Your right hand, O LORD,

glorious in power, your right hand, O LORD, shatters the
enemy.”

Look at verse 11. “Who is like you, O LORD, among the

gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in
glorious deeds, doing wonders? You stretched out your
right hand; the earth swallowed them. You have led in
your steadfast love the people whom you have
redeemed; you have guided them by your strength to
your holy abode.”

Application

Folks, this is just awesome and incredible! This is the

power of God demonstrated right here for you and I in a
factual historical event. I am not ashamed of this power
of God to save. He saved His people, rescuing and
delivering them from bondage. And He is the same
yesterday, today, and forever. He still intends to save
people today through a manifestation of His amazing
power.

He does this in two primary ways, to which I have

already alluded. He displays His power through
providence. Providence is the term we use to describe
God’s interaction in history to accomplish the good of His
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people and the glory of His name. It was manifested in
this story by Moses being found by Pharaoh’s daughter,
and being trained in Pharaoh’s house.

And there is another way. God displays His power

through the miraculous. A miracle is the term we use to
describe God’s interaction in history counteracting the
laws of nature in order to accomplish the good of His
people and the glory of His name. This was by far the
largest manifestation of God’s power in this story, seen
in the ten plagues, the pillar of cloud and fire, and the
cross of the Red Sea.

These are the two manifestations of power that Paul

believed in. He was a Jew, a descendant of Abraham,
and therefore a descendant of these people who were
delivered from bondage in Egypt.

Remember that the word “save” comes from the Hebrew

word yeshua which means to save, deliver, or rescue.
As a Jew Paul is saying that he is not ashamed of the
power of God to deliver, rescue and save anyone who
believes. Undoubtedly, in his mind, the power of God to
which he referred in Romans 1:16 is the kind of
providential and miraculous power that is reflected in
this greatest of all OT stories.

One theologian has commented regarding the Greek

word for power, which was dunamis as we discovered
last week:

“The reason why this [power] is the decisive feature in

religious development is that Israel is determined at the
very beginning of its history by a historical event…by the
Exodus from Egypt and the deliverance at the Red Sea.
The concepts of power constantly recur in this
connexion” (Kitell, TDNT, 2:291).
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I’ve already pointed out some of those connections. We
find it in Exodus 15:6 where it is God’s right hand that is
glorious in power. And then in verse 13 it is God’s
strong right hand that led them out. In Exodus 32:11 it
occurs again, where Moses describes the Lord having
brought the people out of the land of Egypt with great
power and with a might hand.

This same theologian remarks, “This happening at the

beginning of the history of Israel is also the substance of
its religion and leads to its concept of God…The view of
power is interwoven into its concept of God” (p. 292).
Look at Deuteronomy 3:24, for example. Moses says, “O
LORD God, you have only begun to show your servant
your greatness of your mighty hand. For what god is
there in heaven or on earth who can do such works and
mighty acts as yours?”

You see, when God’s people in the OT are reminded of

the power of God, their minds immediately revert to the
act of God at the Red Sea which completed their exodus
from bondage. Continuing, this theologian believes,
“The power of God proved itself at a historically decisive
hour apart from which there would be no worship of
Yahweh and no Israel.”

If this was the greatest single event in OT history

regarding a display of God’s power, the greatest single
event in NT history and indeed in all of history is the
cross of Christ. The birth was miraculous. His ministry
was filled with miraculous displays of power that
authenticated His message of redemption, just like
Moses used to authenticate God’s message of
redemption at that time. Yet the cross is an act of
power that is an opposite reflection of the other
manifestations. That act of power was an act of
weakness in which He gave His own life to complete the
redemption of His people. Yet this act of powerful
weakness, was completed with an act of miraculous
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strength when Christ raised Himself from the dead. It
was further sealed through the additional miraculous
acts Jesus performed during those forty days between
His cross and His miraculous ascension.

Jesus told His disciples in Acts 1:8, right before He

ascended that they would eventually receive power
when the Holy Spirit came upon them. What power do
you suppose He was speaking of? Was it any different
than the power God had shown the Israelites and
Egyptians? Was it any different than the power Jesus
Himself had shown to so many during His earthly
ministry? It was not different at all. It was still the kind
of power that is displayed through miraculous as well as
through providence.

That power was displayed through the miraculous: in

speaking other languages, in healing the sick, in casting
out demons, in prophecies, in dreams and visions, in
angelic visitations, etc.. This happened throughout the
book of Acts. And what happened equally as much was
the power displayed through God’s providence: in
bringing Paul to the right towns at the right times, in
preserving Paul’s life in dangerous times, in bringing him
before the right rulers at the right time.

I am here today to preach to you that we must not be

ashamed or disgraced of this power. This is the kind of
power that God uses to save anyone who believes. That
kind of power is something that belongs to God. It is a
power He works, a power He produces, a miraculous and
providential ability that He displays by His Spirit. And I
am not ashamed of it.

It is through the study of the Scriptures in recent weeks,

and especially these past weeks in coming to grips with
the kind of power Paul was referring to here in Romans 1
that I have come to change my thinking in this area. If
this is the kind of power that saves, why should I be
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ashamed of it as I have in the past. I have been
ashamed of it because I have thought that God doesn’t
do that anymore today. I vigorously held to the power of
providence, but not the power of the miraculous. Yet
throughout Scripture, they are like two equally balanced
scales. I have tipped the scales by my own
presuppositions and theories rather than letting the
Scriptures speak for themselves on the nature of God’s
power. Though I preach the free sovereignty of God, I
have not allowed Him to be freely sovereign in my
thinking on this area.

I do believe now that the power of God to save is that

kind of power that not only reflects itself in amazing
providential acts, but also in amazing miraculous acts.
For these have always been the staple activity of God in
authenticating His gospel message.

The gospel that saves is powerful because it preaches a

message that is miraculous. No other message in the
world has the ability to transform a person spiritually.
No other message has the power to take a stony heart
out and replace it with a loving and teachable heart. No
other message has the power to announce with
authority that sins are forgiven, washed away by Christ’s
blood, never to be remembered by the Father again. No
other message has impacted our world for the last two
thousand years like the gospel message. That is nothing
short of miraculous.

And now I also believe that the gospel that saves is

powerful because it has historically and biblically been a
message often accompanied with miracles. Sometimes
Paul preached the gospel accompanied by miracles,
signs and wonders, as occurred in the church of Corinth.
And sometimes he preached the gospel accompanied
with nothing but the simple convicting power of the Holy
Spirit as in the church of Thessalonica.
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But wherever he went, he was not ashamed of the power
of the gospel that made him look like a fool everywhere
he went. He simply did what he did, waiting on God to
use whatever providential or miraculous means He so
desired in order to authenticate the message or
penetrate a people with that message. And He still does
the same thing today. That must be our theory,
beloved. That is the kind of God we serve. And we must
not be ashamed of it, but boldly proclaim it with our lips,
and passionately love it with our lives.

In the coming weeks, I hope to paint additional pictures

for you of this power in action in other biblical stories in
order to strengthen your hearts. If this is the kind of God
we read of in Scripture, a God who never changes, then
this is the kind of God we have to deal with today,
beloved. He is the same God, spreading the same
message of redemption and deliverance from bondage.
And He will continue to spread it using whatever
providential or miraculous means He desires to use to
get the message across, to the people who need it.

Let’s pray