In His Time — Part One

I invite you to turn to Exodus and to chapter 1 and follow along as I read from beginning at verse 15 of chapter 1:

“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 … 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. [And] 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.’”

Amen.

Our Father, we thank you that the entrance of your Word brings light into our darkness—that when the Bible is opened up and taught, it is your voice for which we listen. And so to this end we seek you as we turn to the Scriptures now. And we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Well, if you were present last time, you know that I’ve launched into a series that will never end in the book of Exodus. It will end somewhere, but not here. And I want to begin this morning by just saying to you: It is vitally important what we believe or don’t believe about God. You say to yourself, “Well, that seems to make perfect sense.” But it is of fundamental importance that when we come to the Bible as a church family, that we come to the Bible with certain convictions about the Bible—that it is the very Word of God, that it is the infallible Word of God, that God exists, that God has spoken, and that we listen for his voice.

Now, I say that because in introducing us to this passage again this morning, I come to it, as you do, out of the background of the last week, the last two weeks, whatever it might be—so that when we come to the Bible, we don’t come to it in a vacuum. We don’t come to it whereby we have been closeted away, and then once again we reappear, and we study the Bible. But you have been places. You’ve listened to various things. You’ve sung various songs. You’ve engaged in business and family life and so on. And all of those elements of life are part and parcel of who and what we are when we come to the Scriptures.

Now, I say that because ten days ago—about ten days ago (it might be eleven now)—I was in a waiting room, to wait. And when I sat down on the seat, I realized I left my phone in the car. And so I had to make an immediate decision: “If I go get it, then I’ll be able to be like everybody else and pretend that there’s many very important things in this little thing.” And then I said, “No, I won’t do that.” And then I thought, “Oh, well, goodness, then I might have to talk to somebody. That would be… I don’t fancy that.” And so… Actually, there was nobody there to talk to. I was in the seats by myself.

And so I reached forward to take any reading material that was available to me. And I don’t want to recommend this to you at all. In fact, I don’t even want to tell you where you can get it, because I don’t want you to have it. Because as I turned to it, I said, “Wow!” The piece that I read in this thing called Living the Journey is a piece on the “fallen goddess.” The “fallen goddess.” And I was absolutely mystified by it. I don’t want to tell you much about it except just to point this out to you, because here, in a waiting room that is populated by many people, presumably—although I was the only one there—I’m introduced in this article to the myth of the wisdom goddess Sophia, who is Mother Earth, embodied in the planet herself. Okay? So I’m saying to myself, “Wait a minute…”

The true creation story on earth points to the planet as the divine source, immediate and obvious. Unlike religion, this myth has got an explanation: the wisdom goddess Sophia, revealing herself through animal powers such as the epiphany of Snake Woman. Her revelations come principally as snake and tree.

I said, “Well, there’s no surprise in that.” Because this is absolutely antithetical to what we believe and what we discover in our Bibles.

This is a New Age mythology. Those of you who’ve come out of that background are familiar with this kind of material. You know this. You may have actually believed this for a while, until your eyes were opened up to the truth. You believed the notion that somehow or another, God was contained in the universe, that God was co-equal with the universe, and so, as a result of that, the way to find God was to find ourselves and to look into ourselves. And then, as perhaps you were going down that kind of avenue, you perhaps were introduced to somebody who read the Bible and said to you, “You know, in the beginning, before there was time and before there was anything, there was God, who created the heavens and the earth.” And then the person told you, “And there is an invisible boundary between ourselves and God. He is the Creator. We are the creation. We can’t access God in our own way and in our own time. Only he is able to cross that boundary that exists between he in his holiness and we in our sin. And that is exactly what he has done in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ: He has stepped across, as it were, that boundary. He has stepped down into time.”

And then, as I sat and thought about that, I thought, “Well, what about other people? We’re doing Exodus. What do they think? What about the people out in the congregation who are materialists? What about the people in the congregation who do not believe that you can know God by way of revelation, but you know God as a result of rationale?” In other words, you’re an Enlightenment thinker: “We can figure this out. We can work it out.” And so the idea is that we’re just molecules in suspension.

I wonder: Did you ever have that stuff at school? We did, in the science class. We said, you know, “What is the chemical makeup of humanity?” And they put it in very childish terms:
“Well, you know, in you there is enough carbon to make nine hundred lead pencils.” I said, “Wow, that’s impressive!” “There’s enough sulfur to kill all the fleas on a dog, there’s enough lime to whitewash a small chicken coop, and there’s enough potassium to explode a toy canon.” Wow! Is that it? Is that it?

Some are deists—Paley’s watchmaker. They believe that there was a God who started it off, but as soon as he wound up the watch, he laid it down, and the watch had been ticking on its own ever since.

Now, I say all of that because when we affirm certain things in the Bible here, in saying what the Bible says, we’re saying that other things are wrong. We’re not saying that they’re alternative ways to actually engage truth. We’re actually discovering that truth is what we have in Scripture and that error stands on the other side of it. Because the idea that the world is spinning like an apple in space—the idea that simply God got it going, and we’re left to our own devices—is completely contrary to how we began last Sunday, saying that God is the God of history; that God is the providential God; that in all things God works; that he is not only the creator of the universe, but he is the sustainer of the universe. We are created by him, the universe is sustained by him, and the universe is entirely accountable to him. That’s vastly different, isn’t it?

God’s works of providence, says the Larger Catechism—God’s works of providence are “his most holy, wise, and powerful preserving, and governing all his creatures; ordering them, and all their actions, to his own glory.”[1] Now, with that said, you then come to the record of what is happening here at the end of Genesis and recorded for us at the beginning. And what we’re discovering is that God is at work in the pushes and in the pulls of everyday life—that God’s plan and God’s purpose from all of eternity is worked out in time.

God is at work in the pushes and in the pulls of everyday life.

And here, at this juncture, we have considered this initial engagement with the sons of Israel, who have now found themselves in Egypt. I don’t want to rehash last week or even just rehearse it, but essentially, we could say that, given what we considered up to verse 7, the story was “So far, so good.” “So far, so good.” The same group that was mentioned back in Genesis has now found themselves in Egypt, and it’s been going, really, very, very well.

Saying “So far, so good” reminds me of the story of the fellow who was an optimist who had fallen out of a forty-story window, and as he passed the eighteenth floor, somebody heard him saying, “So far, so good!” Well, that’s the story here. It’s “So far, so good.”

They have arrived. They are there as guests. The pharaoh in the initial instance, which is years and years before, has made sure that they are well provided for, and the promise of God has undergirded all that they are now enjoying—46 (that’s Genesis 46):

And God spoke to Israel in visions of the night and said, “Jacob, Jacob.” And he said, “Here I am.” [And] then he said, “I am God, the God of your father. Do not be afraid to go down to Egypt, for there I will make you into a great nation. I myself will go down with you to Egypt, and I will also bring you up again, and Joseph’s hand shall close your eyes.”[2]

Now, that promise that God makes to Jacob is an echo of the promise that God had made to Abraham way back in Genesis 12, when he had called Abram out of the Ur of the Chaldees and made a unilateral covenant with him. It was entirely on the side of God, what he was going to do. And the promise that he made was in keeping, actually, with the very beginnings of life, when, having made Adam and Eve in the garden, he says to them, “Be fruitful and multiply.”[3] And so the multiplicatory plan of God for humanity and for his people within that context is plain for us to see. All we need is a Bible: “I will make of you a great nation.”[4]

And so you will notice that the people—verse 7—“were fruitful,” they “increased greatly,” they “multiplied,” and they “grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them.” So I wrote down in my notes first of all, “So far, so good.” And then I wrote down in my notes, “I see a bad moon rising”[5]—which is a testimony to my indolent teenage years and means very little to most of you who are well educated. “I see a bad moon rising.”

Where’s this moon rising? Verse 8: Their multiplication had become for them an occasion of opposition. The pharaoh, who had no knowledge of the background of Joseph and so on, decides that he’s going to have to take it in hand to deal with what he has as an essential immigration program and problem, because these people are increasing at a rate of knots. And so he determines that they should be enslaved, they should be oppressed, that their lives should be bitter, that they should be filled with hard service. And yet, as you read the record, you discover that “the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad”—even though he had sent them into the fields, making them work “hard service, in mortar and [in] brick, and … all kinds of work in the field. In all their work they ruthlessly made them work as slaves.”[6]

You see them putting the bricks in place, singing, “In his time, in his time, he makes all things beautiful in his time.”[7] But they’re saying, “I wish he would hurry up! Because this is lasting a very long time. And this is not what we bargained for when the story was given to us about our great process into this region.”

Verse 15: “Then the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives…” We’re so used to this now, I can’t stay away from it myself. I want to suggest that here I am, reporting live from Raamses. Here I am, reporting live from Raamses. You imagine that we’ve just cut to channel whatever-it-is news, and we’re back in that environment, and I am the reporter. This is what I’d say: “Pharaoh has just announced new measures are to be taken in seeking to curb the immigration crisis. He has enlisted the help of the Hebrew midwives, demanding that they kill every newborn son. Apparently, the pharaoh’s plan is for annihilation. It is for destruction. Now Now I’m going to hand it back to the studio.” That was it.

Now, what stood in the way of the completion of the evil plan? Actually, who stood in the way of the completion of the Egyptian plan? You notice: “Then the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah…” So they got their names in the Bible. That is good. Incidentally, the pharaoh hasn’t his name in the Bible! Anybody would say, “You know, if somebody should have their name in the Bible, that’s the king. The king gets his name in the Bible.” But no, these nondescript Hebrew midwives, they’re ten a penny. Presumably, the two that are mentioned are, like, the leaders of the Hebrew midwives, or they’re representative of them—whatever it might be.

And they’re the ones who have received this very direct instruction: “When you serve as [a] midwife to the Hebrew women and see them on the birthstool, if it is a son”—listen to this—“you shall kill him.” There’s nothing nice about this. There’s nothing humane about this. This is actually genocide—the idea that “if we let the women live, we can marry them, turn them into slaves, and if we get rid of the sons, then we get rid of the future.” That’s the plan.

Now, let me just say something: Any time we come to issues like this in the Bible, keep in mind Genesis 3:15. Because that is, if you like, the beginning of the great gospel message: that the conflict that is going to ensue between the serpent and the seed of the woman is a conflict which will run now through the entirety of human history. By the time you get to [Revelation] 12, you remember the dragon—the dragon—is going to devour the child.[8] And that is the picture which runs through the Bible. And you’ve got Pharaoh here trying to do it, and years later, you have Herod doing the very same thing.[9] Why is that? Why did Pharaoh do this? Why did Herod decide that “this is the best thing we can do: We can obliterate these children, all these little ones”? Because all hell is let loose against the plans and purposes of Almighty God. This is not some trivial little sideline.

What a wonderful thing it is that we then read that these Hebrew midwives were prepared to take a stand! Why? Because they “feared God.” They “feared God.” “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,”[10] right? To fear God is to love God. It is to obey God. It is to serve God. They “feared God.” And they knew about the sanctity of human life, and they knew that it could never be right for them to do what was demanded of them within that political context. They were unprepared to act contrary to their consciences. To their consciences.

Now, at this point in my studies, I went looking for a clip from Chariots of Fire. I’m nothing if not predictable. Because as soon as I said to myself, “Now here’s an example of principled action in the face of a royal demand; where have I seen that in the past?” I go back to Chariots of Fire, 1981, and the amazing encounter that takes place between the Prince of Wales, who is Edward VIII—Prince of Wales, who proves himself to be prepared to juggle things a little bit, right? Because he was only the king for a very short period of time before he abdicated so that he could then marry a divorcée, which, deep down inside, he knew wasn’t really the thing to do. But it is he who in that encounter puts the pressure on Eric Liddell. And I can’t remember it all, but when they confront Liddell about the nature of country and king and so on, Liddell, at least in the movie, says, “God makes countries, and God makes kings and establishes the rules by which they govern.” And then Lord Cadogan in the movie says to him, “Stop your nonsense,” he says. “You’re in the presence of the future king. Do you have no loyalty? Do you have no loyalty to your king and to your country?” “Sir, God knows I love my country. But I can’t make that sacrifice.”[11]

If a man will not stand for something, he will fall for anything. If I’m allowed to quote Thatcher, the late Iron Lady: “If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would,” as a result, “achieve nothing.” The reason that we have the story as we have it is because these Hebrew women took a stand.

But look: It then goes from bad to worse. It goes from bad to worse: “The midwives feared God … did[n’t] do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but [they] let the male children live.” So, here I am, reporting once again from the palace: “Pharaoh, in the last day or so, summoned the Hebrew midwives, seeking answers as to why it was that they were not doing what he had told them to do.” And the answer, of course, is there. And it’s quite fascinating. Those of you who have had babies can think about it. I don’t really know much. But they were giving an answer as to why the extermination strategy had been failing. And apparently, the pharaoh has now extended it beyond the Hebrew midwives—verse 22: “Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile.” And that is an address to “all his people.”

Now, here’s what we need to understand: God is at work behind the scenes. God is always at work behind the scenes. And the answer, of course, comes from unexpected places. Power and influence would appear to reside in Pharaoh. But no, here we have an illustration of part of our reading this morning in 1 John 4: that “greater is he that is in you, than he [who] is in the world.”[12] Who is the “he”? Almighty God in the person of the Spirit. And God is once again doing what he does all the way through the Bible, and he chooses weak things in order to shame the strong. Pharaoh is very strong. He is a significant figure. But now he’s encountered a force that is greater than his. And something’s got to give.

Now, the promise, you see, at the beginning—Genesis 46 (“This is going to be a great time; you’re going to have a wonderful time; it will go well”)—that promise has actually now been overshadowed. The promise hasn’t been rescinded, but the experience is not in line with the promise. “God, you promised, and we’re enslaved! You promised, and our lives are bitter! You promised, and look at us!” What’s going on? Or, if you like: What in heaven’s name is happening? Because the voice of heaven is now silent, and the experience of earth is terrifying. That’s why we said last time, what you have in these opening chapters here is experience without explanation. Isn’t that our Christian life, so much of it? You get a phone call, and in a moment, your father has been taken from you, with no immediate explanation. It doesn’t come with a special promise. It just comes, and there you have it.

If we do not struggle with the moral problem of suffering, it is probably because we have actually given up the notion of believing in a moral universe.

A couple of weeks ago, somebody sent a text to me—goes along these lines: “I have a question for you: How to find a God plan? Last Friday, my thirty-year-old niece died suddenly, leaving her two children, three and six years of age, behind.” So the person wrote to me, “Where’s your God’s plan in this story?”

Now, without sidestepping into a great discussion on the nature of suffering: If we do not struggle—if we do not struggle with the moral problem of suffering—it is probably because we have actually given up the notion of believing in a moral universe. You see, if our lives are random, speculative pieces in the vastness of the solar system, then there is no reason for this kind of question. The world is just a random universe. But we know that it isn’t. And that’s why pain is real pain.

You see, when hard providences come to rub up against our experience—when, if you like, the wind and the waves crash on our lives, when it seems that the things that are happening are so random and apparently pointless—then, when we go to Romans 8:28 (“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who [are] called according to his purpose”),[13] for me, that doesn’t… I don’t go to there and go, “Well, there you go. It’s fine. It’s over.” No. Because now we have to wrestle with it.

This is the question: Where? How? Haven’t you, in the midst of your own personal trials, ever wondered once, “Where is God in all of this?” Have you ever found yourself saying, “What possible good can come out of this?” It’s the inevitability of experiences minus explanations.

“Oh,” you say, “you’d better get to chapter 2, because we’re getting depressed.” Okay! Let’s go. Let’s go.

Learning to bring, as I said last time, what I do not know or understand into all that I know of the character and kingdom of God. Something’s got to give. Something needs to happen. What happens? You’ve got the multiplication of the people, you’ve got the opposition of the Egyptians, and you’ve got the intervention of God: the arrival of no ordinary child. We read from Hebrews 11. I think we did, and if we didn’t, you can. But there in Hebrews we have this picture.

It’s wonderful, the way it starts, isn’t it? “Now a man from the house of Levi went and took as his wife a Levite woman. The woman conceived and [she] bore a son.” Yeah. It happens. Yeah! We know that. Is this really very significant? “Now a man from the house of Levi…” Well, read on: “And when she saw that he was a fine child,” a beautiful child, no ordinary child… Incidentally, I never knew a mother who didn’t think their child was “a fine child,” a beautiful child, no ordinary child. You ever seen somebody: “Would you like to see the photographs of my extra ordinary child?” No. But this obviously meant something, right? It means something more than he was cute. It means that she had a sense, if you like, that this is just no ordinary experience. The childbirth is ordinary, but this child…

Now, remember the context. You’re supposed to… The Nile was regarded as a river god. The Egyptians had all kinds of gods. The Nile was a river god. And so he says, “What I want you to do is take these sons and throw them in to the river god, and the river god will eat them up, and we’ll be done with them.” That’s the context. “And when she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him [for] three months.” I don’t know how she did that, but she did.

You see, as we sang last week in that hymn, “The protection of his child and treasure is a charge [which] on himself he laid.”[14] You see, the wonderful reality of this is that God was planning for the redemption of his people. And here you have a wonderful illustration of what I might like to refer to as women’s ministry. You wonder about women’s ministry? Look at the women here!

Number one: his mother. She put herself at risk by hiding him until she had to come up with another option. She was an enterprising lady, wasn’t she? And in some senses, she obeyed the spirit of the direction, because she does put him in the river, but not the letter of the direction. He wasn’t supposed to be in there in his own special little ark. Incidentally, the word that is used for “basket” and “ark” is the same word. So God provides an ark for Noah, and he provides a basket for Moses. Why? Because behind the scenes, he’s working his eternal purpose according to all of his plans for the whole universe. This is a moment in time that affects all of time.

And what about the sister, Miriam? “And his sister stood at a distance to know what would be done to him.” That’s good! That’s what you would expect from your big sister. His mother said, “Well, what do you want to do?” She said, “Well, I’ll just go stand nearby, see what happens.”

So you’ve got the mom, you’ve got the sister, and then you’ve got Pharaoh’s daughter. You see that God is in the details? I mean, I don’t know how big the space was, but she had to show up at the exact spot where she would go, “What is that thing?” And the servant girl brings it. She says, “Oh! Oh,” she says, “look at that!” It moves her to tears. And she says, “This has got to be one of those Hebrew children.” Yeah, but what are we going to do now? Well, we need a lady with enterprise.

“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 [Hebrew] children.’” And then the sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Hey, I’ve got an idea! Why not go and call one of the Hebrew women, and maybe the Hebrew woman can nurse him for you?”

See, so the pharaoh’s daughter goes: Reaction is pity; conclusion (“This is a Hebrew child”); adoption (which you see in verse 10). She adopts him. And in the midst of all of that, in these tiny details, God is at work. You see, because God’s plan was for a Hebrew child to be the redeemer of his people. And that’s what was happening.

We need to stop.

Up from that potential grave rises Moses. That’s the grave. That’s where he’ll die. Does he die? No. He arises. Up from the basket he arose! That’s exactly what happened. The same power that was at work in all of the machinations of the bits and pieces of those women and where it was going and when it happened and what time it was in the afternoon and so on is under the divine control of God.

Do you believe that, or do you want to go back to this stuff? I mean, do you believe that, or are you a deist like Benjamin Franklin—that while, yeah, there is a God, but he’s not in charge of anything; we’ve got no idea what’s going on at all. The difference, loved ones, is vast and significant, and it will affect every decision you make in your life. It will affect all of your life, and it will affect your death, without any question at all. That’s the vastness of what is taking place here.

Think about the irony in this: that Pharaoh’s house… It was out of the palace that the edict for extinction came, and out of the same palace the pharaoh’s daughter comes as the one who delivers Moses! Moses’s mother didn’t know how the story would end. But we do. And we also know the part that Moses played in the redemption of the people from Egypt, from slavery to freedom. And we also know that this building block at the very heart of the Old Testament is the great prefiguring of the redemption provided by Jesus—that he is the Passover Lamb. Eventually, they’re going to be set free. They’re going to go through the desert. They’re going to go all on their way until finally they arrive at God’s planned place.

Now, let me end in this way. Let me end in this way: by quoting Yoko Ono. In “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” for me, the most significant verse is this: “Saving all our money for a rainy day, giving all our clothes to charity.” So in other words: “This is how we’re going to live our lives. We’ll make sure that we put things by, and then we’re going to make sure that we’re actually good, altruistic people, and therefore, we will give things away.” So that’s John:

Saving up [our] money for a rainy day,
Giving all [our] clothes to charity.
Last night the wife said…

That’s Yoko.

Last night the wife said,
“Oh boy, when you’re dead,
You don’t take nothing with you but your soul.”[15]

“But your soul.”

You see, the redemption that was provided through Moses in this context was a necessary redemption. The redemption that is provided through Jesus is a necessary redemption. If we simply believe that sin is ignorance, then all you need is more information. If you actually believe that you’re the product of a random, biologically evolutionary process—if you believe that—then I can understand why you will say that “sin has got nothing to do with me at all. This is just part of my animal nature. I’ve got no responsibility in this.” But you know that’s not true.

If sin is ignorance, you can fix it with information. If sin is simply the random reality of our strange biological construction, in both cases, the work of Jesus on the cross is unnecessary. Unnecessary! Because if all you need is more information about how to be a better person, then why do we have redemption by the blood of Jesus Christ on a cross? If we are not responsible for our actions, then why would Jesus go to the extent that he did in order that he would make it clear that since we’re all like sheep that have gone astray and we’ve all turned up our own avenues and so on, and “the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all”?[16]

You see, the story of Exodus is the story of redemption. The story of the Bible is the story of redemption. And the real $64,000 question that I want to leave you with now is this: How about your soul? How about your soul? Is it well with your soul?

“God so loved that world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him”—not whoever comes to church, not whoever saves his money for a rainy day, not who gives all his clothes to charity, but “whoever believes in him”—“should not perish but have [everlasting] life.”[17]

God, open our eyes to see our need of Jesus, and grant us grace, even in these closing moments of this service, personally, individually, to trust ourselves unreservedly to your work of grace.

May the grace of the Lord Jesus, the love of God the Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit rest upon and remain with each of us, now and forevermore. Amen.

[1] Westminster Larger Catechism, Q. 18.

[2] Genesis 46:2–4 (ESV).

[3] Genesis 1:28 (ESV).

[4] Genesis 12:2 (ESV).

[5] John Fogerty, “Bad Moon Rising” (1969).

[6] Exodus 1:12, 14 (ESV).

[7] Diane Ball, “In His Time” (1978).

[8] See Revelation 12:4.

[9] See Matthew 2:16.

[10] Psalm 111:10; Proverbs 9:10 (ESV).

[11] Chariots of Fire, directed by Hugh Hudson, written by ColinWelland(Warner Bros.,1981). Paraphrased.

[12] 1 John 4:4 (KJV).

[13] Romans 8:28 (NIV).

[14] Karolina Wilhelmina Sandell-Berg, trans. Andrew L. Skoog, “Day by Day” (1865).

[15] John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “The Ballad of John and Yoko” (1969).

[16] Isaiah 53:6 (ESV).

[17] John 3:16 (ESV).