Views of Morality and Justice
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· 3 viewsThe circumstances in which God chose a people for himself
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
This morning we are going to dive into our series in the book of Exodus. I gave an introduction a couple of weeks ago on why we decided to study this particular book and that is primarily to have this text shape the way we think about the world and our views on reality. What was readily apparent over the last couple of years was that our views on exactly the same events were being interpreted through wildly different perspectives, different definitions, and ultimately different worldviews. From the subject of masks, to the rights of churches to assemble, to the struggle for racial justice, and the on-going debate over abortion, we have proven ourselves to be a nation that is deeply divided, not only in two camps but an ever increasing number of fissures that are inevitably created by tribalism. Unfortunately, the fractures in our society have shown themselves to be present within the church and what was hidden has been now been revealed. We are far more divided than anyone could have ever guessed. But where do we go from here? Do we continue to allow all these hot button topics to create further divisions among us or do we need to have a level set and revisit those biblical principles that have united Christians for generations even as the world found itself splitting apart.
The purpose of this series isn’t necessarily to tackle these subjects head on because that would only lead to endless debate but I believe it is far more helpful to unpack the Biblical worldview that allows us to think, pray, discuss, and then act on these events with a unity of spirit that can only come from the One God, who is the Lord over all things. I believe it is significant that the first people that God called to himself was first divided into 12 tribes, identified by their original patriarch, and in so many different ways this experiment of forming a nation out of 12 tribes could have gone bad but somehow their shared experience of God along with the truth that was revealed to them, has kept this ancient nation together even to this very day. In the course of nearly 4000 years, while more powerful kingdoms have come and gone, this seemingly insignificant people whose only advantage in this world was the hand of God and the truth of His Scriptures, has stood the test of time. They are living proof that what is created by the Word of God will last forever. With that, turn with me to Exodus 1:15 and we will eventually read all the way to chapter 2:10.
Bible Passage
Bible Passage
Then the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, “When you serve as midwife to the Hebrew women and see them on the birthstool, if it is a son, you shall kill him, but if it is a daughter, she shall live.” But the midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live. So the king of Egypt called the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this, and let the male children live?” The midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.” So God dealt well with the midwives. And the people multiplied and grew very strong. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families. Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, “Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live.”
Now a man from the house of Levi went and took as his wife a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son, and when she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him three months. When she could hide him no longer, she took for him a basket made of bulrushes and daubed it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child in it and placed it among the reeds by the river bank. And his sister stood at a distance to know what would be done to him. Now the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her young women walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her servant woman, and she took it. When she opened it, she saw the child, and behold, the baby was crying. She took pity on him and said, “This is one of the Hebrews’ children.” Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and call you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?” And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Go.” So the girl went and called the child’s mother. And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child away and nurse him for me, and I will give you your wages.” So the woman took the child and nursed him. When the child grew older, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. She named him Moses, “Because,” she said, “I drew him out of the water.”
There are two principles that I want to look at in our message this morning
1. God is the only real basis for absolute morals
2. Morality creates the framework for human rights
3. Practical teaching on how to develop the right view of good and evil.
The book of Exodus reveals the truth of God in the form of a historic narrative and as we all know, stories tend to deliver truth more powerfully because it’s meant to engage both our mind and our hearts. There are things that seem so oppressive that there can be no debate about how evil those actions are. Slavery is evil just on its own but when you compound that with the selective murder of babies, forcibly taking them from their mothers, and selecting which ones will live based on gender, that is another level of wickedness all together. Could you imagine, especially if you are a parent in this room, the scenario that must have played itself out over and over again. A couple finds out that they are with child but instead of being filled with joy, the entire pregnancy is filled with fear because if this is a baby boy, he has to be thrown into the Nile to die. Imagine the pain and suffering caused by this unimaginable violation of the most basic of human rights.
What is clear is that in this scenario, God has rightfully chosen a side not based on race or culture preference but based on a moral criteria. You’ll notice right away that there are exceptions to the evil that has filled the land of Egypt and blinded the people. First, there are these two midwives, who we have to assume are Egyptians that have been commissioned to kill every baby boy that they delivered. But we see that they openly disobey the commands of Pharoah based on one main reason, their fear of God. There is good reason to believe that they may be Egyptian proselytes to the Jewish faith. They are described as heroes who find themselves blessed by God because of their courage. Secondly, we see the same degree of heroic compassion even within Pharoah’s own family. His own daughter sees the evil that is being committed and saves one of the Hebrew babies and then adopts him as her own son. This is a reminder for us to not vilify people based on their racial origin nor their status in life. We cannot discard the good that individuals do based on their race nor the level of privilege they may be born into. I would hope that none of us would judge what the daughter of Pharoah did and call that a form of Egyptian supremacy. God always gives people a chance to rise above the circumstances they may find themselves in.
And just like these heroic women, I would assume that most of us in this room would agree that these Egyptian polices are evil. But let’s do a quick though experiment. Based on what criteria is this actually wrong? In fact, we are given clear reasons why Pharaoh and the Egyptians did what they did.
Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and, if war breaks out, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.”
This policy is simply a matter of national security and ensuring that the people of Egypt would continue to flourish. Seen from that perspective, Pharoah could be seen as a good leader, who is just trying to take care of the well-being of his own people and creating a politically and financially stable society. Is that so wrong? And that’s the thing, the Pharoahs, Hitlers, and Stalins of this world, not to mention the countless followers that executed their inhumane orders didn’t think to themselves, “Wait a minute, what I am doing is evil but I am going to do it anyways.” No, they found good reasons to do what they wanted to do. They simply made themselves the final arbiters of what is good and evil. And here is the bottome line: apart from a transcendent God, there can be no talk about absolute morals that we are all obligated to follow no matter your culture, race, or nationality. In his book Brother’s Karamazov, Dostoyevsky explored the idea that “Without God and immortal life…everything is permitted, one can do anything.”
Now this doesn’t mean that atheists and non-Christians will live however they please without a sense of morality because unless you’re a sociopath, we all have a conscience and we have to live by some set of rules but if we wanted to do something like kill babies, we could always find a way around the moral dilemma and give ourselves permission to do so. So going back to the situation in Exodus, killing babies based on gender seems like a clear matter of right and wrong but what if you simply did this while the baby is in the womb with the consent of the mother. Is it okay for a society to selectively abort babies based on gender? (I don’t want to insert myself into the debate on abortion because I beleive P. Andy did a great job of stating the biblical position but I do want to bring up this case in point as a real life illustration of what is going on in the world we live in.)
In our society, we have become so desensitized to the idea of abortion that we don’t realize that one of the great evils of our time is the systematic abortion of baby girls in places like China and India. In India alone, they are projecting an imbalance of nearly 7 million girls in the ratio of babies that will be born. God only knows how many girls have been aborted in China when it was under the one child law. The irony is that this right that women around the world are fighting for has been used to decimate the female population even before they are born. If I remember correctly, you can find out the gender of a baby by about week 18, about halfway through a human pregnancy. I don’t recommend this but if you watch a video of an abortion at this stage of life, it leaves a lasting imprint on your psyche and I would argue that ethically, it is not that much different than throwing a baby into the Nile to drown.
But the thing is if abortion is considered a human right, (the protection of a necessary human good) you have no moral high ground to denounce these types of practices. As a Christian, I consider abortion a concession due to the fallenness of our world where evil like rape and incest do exist and women should be given the choice to end those pregnancies. I also understand that sometimes, it is a medical necessity to carry out an abortion to save the life of the mother but that is not what we are talking about in the vast majority of cases. Some of the reasons to abort are as arbitrary as the gender of the baby. Furthermore, I believe that much of the rhetoric around this topic is largely for political gain both on the left and the right, most of them don’t really care about the women nor the babies involved. (You cannot turn to politicians to help guide your moral compass. There is just too much room for ulterior motives namely the human desire for power! Political leaders that prioritize what is good before the pursuit of power are rare.)
Now here is the bottom line and what I hope you take away from this example: when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, it wasn’t just some small act of disobedience, it released untold evil into our lives disguised in the form of good. Dietrich Bonhoeffer explains this concept beautifully in his book on Christian ethics:
Herein lies the serpent’s deceit. Man knows good and evil, but because he is not the origin, because he acquires this knowledge only at the price of estrangement from the origin, the good and evil that he knows are not the good and evil of God but good and evil against God. They are good and evil of man’s own choosing, in opposition to the eternal election of God. In becoming like God man has become a god against God.
Instead of knowing himself solely in the reality of being chosen and loved by God, he must now know himself in the possibility of choosing and of being the origin of good and evil. He has become like God, but against God.
I believe Bonhoeffer hit it on the dot, he explains our problem and reveals the difficult journey of returning back to God, we have to let go of our own personal definitions of good and evil and humbly recieve the standards given to us by God, no matter how contrary they may seem to the norms of our society. All of this to say: everyone of us needs to be careful about the causes we fight for and to be sure that we find ourselves aligned to God’s definition of what is good versus what is evil lest we find ourselves fighting against God and under the curse of sin.
As God warns us through the prophet Isaiah:
Woe to those who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter!
I hope that we would all agree that there is a whole lot at stake in seeing the world through the eyes of God! But what are the barriers that keep us from having the eyes to see clearly?
And what we see here in our passage is the setting up of the scenario in which God is compelled to enter into human history in a way that was never seen prior to this point. The Jewish rabbi Jonathan Sacks notes a clear difference in God’s involvement in human affairs from the book of Genesis to what we read in Exodus. More specifically, we see miracles that bend the forces of nature so that it creates a favorable outcome for His own people. In the book of Genesis, God’s interaction was mainly in the form of visitations, communication through angels, and general judgment of sin but He did not go out of his way to supernaturally rescue His followers. But we see this shift in God’s relationship to His people in response to the ever increasing presence of evil in their world of which they are now a victim of.