Speaker 1: How did Israel become a nation, why are they God's
chosen nation, and why did God need a chosen nation
at all. We will talk about that on this week's
episode or the Faith by Reason podcast. Welcome to the podcast.
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So we are starting a new study on a new dispensation,
the fourth dispensation, and this is called the dispensation of
the Patriarchs. So as a bit of a history, the
dispensations are God's contrastive way of showing that his plan
for mankind is the only one that will work that
on his own, man will never choose God's way on
his own. And in order to prove that contrastively, God
comes up with successive scenarios wherein man is given a
choice to either choose God's way or his way, and
if a man, if man chooses his way over God's way,
then the dispensation fails and God has to move on
until again he's exhausted every reasonable opportunity to give man
a way to choose to be like God, to be
always a completely right in jest, by again, by choosing
to do it God's way, thereby earning his way into
heaven and the meaning of life. And once God has
exhausted all of those opportunities for man to do it
on his own, then God can justly implement his plan
for mankind, which of course is heaven. So in the
first dispensation you will find it. Actually, the first threedispensations
has something in common. They were all pretty open ended,
and they all dealt with man we're fairly individually, especially
the first two. In the first dispensation, the dispensation of innocence,
man was given a simple choice as to whether he
would believe in God or not, or choose God's way
or not, by whether or not man and woman would
choose to eat of the Tree of the knowledge of
good and evil or not. And of course they failed
that this sensation. They chose to eat the fruit and
disobey God. And when God confronted them, they chose to
justify themselves over God, and that dispensation failed. So in
the second dispensation, God took an opposite approach. Instead of
man being completely innocent with no knowledge of good and evil,
God gave man hundreds of years of life in order
to gain all the knowledge he could and to then
see if gaining lots of knowledge would cause man to
choose him, to choose God over himself. Of course, as always,
man failed, and by gaining knowledge, it didn't bring him
closer to God. It took him further away from God,
to the point where all of his thoughts were continually evil.
And then, of course we have the incident with the
nepheline and the genetic corruption which we talked about ad
nauseam earlier. Then in the third dispensation, God changed things again.
Instead of giving man a long time to gain knowledge,
God shortens man's life and controlled his life considerably and
gave him a sense of urgency and a sense of
community because because they have such a short time to
accomplish whatever they needed to accomplish and have to do
it fast and do it with intention. And this also
did not lead man closer to God. In fact, it
once again let man further away from God and to
the point where Man and Babel under the leadership of
Nimrod tried to erect a gateway Babel means gate to God,
a gateway to God in order to invade Heaven. So
it seemed that by giving man open ended opportunities to
choose himself or God, man kept getting worse and worse.
So then it would be unjust of God to continue
to do that. God would need to put a fourth
some actual guidance and some form of representation. Instead of
just letting man go on his own and hope that
man came to a sensus the right way and chose
God on his own, it seems that it would only
be fair and jest of God to give man some
type of direction, some type of direct guidance. And that's
and he begins to do that with the Age of
the Patriarchs. And now as a result of Babel, man
was divided into nations. Actually, according to the Bible, and
I'll put the actual chapter in verse into the show notes,
man was divided into seventy nations. And you will see
in some translations where it says that when God divided
men into nations, he had divided them according to the
sons of Israel. Well, that's that's an incorrect interpretation. The
correct interpretation if you look at the original Hebrew, who
says that God divide the nations according to the number
of the Banai hi Alohem, the sons of God, not
the sons of Israel. Because if that were the case,
the Hebrew would have said the Banai Israel. But it doesn't.
It says the Bani high Alohem, the sons of God.
And as we found out several podcasts ago when we
looked at the second dispensation, but ni hih Alohem, the
sons of God are angelic beings. So God divided up
the nation by a number of angelic beings, beings who
he put over the nations. And that's one reason why
we know that it's not the sons of Israel. And
another reason why is because it wouldn't make any sense
because the sons of Israel didn't exist at the time
God divided the nations at the time of Babel. Israel
didn't exist because Israel, the twelve tribes of Israel, are
the sons of Jacob, and Jacob wouldn't even be born
for another couple hundred years. So God cannot divide the
nations by the numbers of the sons of Israel. They
wouldn't even if they weren't even around. So why does
the Bible say that? Why was the Bible translated that way? Unfortunately,
it's because it's one of the same reasons that a
lot of Bible scholars in the ancient Church bothers and
all those folk called the sons of God the sons
of Seth in Genesis chapter chapter six. We talked about
that before. Because they were embarrassed by the supernatural world view.
They didn't have the supernatural world view and about Genesis six.
So instead of just taking it at face value that
these sons of God, the Beniah Eloheim angels had intercourse
with women and produce these odd creatures called nepheline, they
didn't like it. They didn't have that worldview. They were
embarrassed by it. So they inserted this false, ridiculous sons
of Seth theory. And because they also don't in this case,
they don't want to consider the idea of the supernatural
idea that there are angelic beings that are over all
the different nations in the world, they decided to come
up with this idea of translating it as the sons
of Israel. But that's completely false. But we will talk
more about angelic beings being over the nations of a
few podcasts from now, so i'll just let that go there.
So the nations are all under angelic beings. But God
wanted to have his own nation to be an example
to the other nations, and so he wanted to In
order to start that nation, he needed to pick someone
to be the progeniture of it, and he picked a
man named Abrahm, who would later be known as Abraham.
I'm not going to talk a ton about Abraham and
his history because I don't want to go too far
over time in this episode. I went way over almost
an hour in the last podcast, so sorry about that.
I'm going to try to keep this brief. In the
blog post that is attached to this podcast, I go
into quite a bit more detail, and I have reference
links to the entire story of Abraham, But just very briefly.
God goes to Abraham and he gives them a rather
spectacular promise, and i'll just quote it here a Genesis
twelve one to three. Now, God said to Abrahm, who
would become Abraham, get out of your country, from your
family and from your father's house to a land that
I will show you, and I will make you a
great nation, and I will bless you and make your
name great, and you shall be a blessing. And I
will bless those who bless you, and I will curse
those who curse you, and in you, all the families
of the earth shall be blessed. So that is not
only the promise to Abraham that is the parameter of
this dispensation. This is the litmus test for whether or
not the world, whether or not man will pass this dispensation,
is based on how he treats the nation that comes
from Abraham. So if these other nations in the world
they curse Abraham's family, his descendants, this new nation, then
God will curse them and they will this dispensation will
be a failure. If they bless them, then God will
bless those nations. And just you know, it's a little
more than just the blessing. The blessing is is something
that should actually lead these other nations to God. Because
remember the point of the dismissation is not just to
be blessed by God, is to choose God over yourself.
So in order for these nations to choose correctly, they
will have to number one bless God's new nation, and
by receiving the blessings back from God, that should lead
them to want to be a part of God's nation,
to give up their own nationality and join this nation
that God has brought about. So in order for this
dismensation to be successful, the other nations of the world
will have to bless God's nation and they will have
to become a part of God's nation. Okay, got that great,
Let's move on. So Abraham eventually moves to the land
God tells me to go to, which is the land
of Canaan. Again, there's a lot of story. It's an
intrigue that go along with this, and you can read
about it in the blog post. Abraham is very old.
He's one hundred years old. His wife is Sarah is ninety,
so they are both beyond childbearing years. Even though God
promised him a son. Unfortunately, they got impatient and Sarah
Sarah who became Sarah, Abraham's wife, decided to help God
out because she says, Hey, I'm past child bearing years.
I can have a baby. God says, you're going to
have a son. Here's what I'll do. Since I'm beyond
child bearing age. Why don't you go have a baby
with my handmaid in Hagar and Abraham, being the good husband, says, hey, baby,
you want me to have sex with another woman to
have a baby for you, By golly, I'll do it
because I love you so much. Of course, I'm being
a little facetious here, but the bottom line is this
was religion. Religion is when you tried to add to
what God wants to do. Sarah was being religious by
helping God. When you help God, that means that you
must know better than God. And that's pride is contrastive thinking.
I mean, it's comparative thinking, and it's wrong. And not
only was it wrong, but it resulted in disaster in
that Abraham and Hagar had a child named Ishmael, and
Ishmael is the father of many of the Arab tribes
that are Israel's enemies to this day, so for thousands,
So Abraham, by obeying his wife Sarah and her religion,
actually created enemies that Israel has had for millennia. Anyway,
a little later, God performs a miracle, Sarah does get
pregnant has a child named Isaac. We talked about Isaac
before it in the faith chapters and the famous sacrifice
of Isaac. I won't spend too much time on that,
but when Isaac came of age, it was time for
him to get married. And I will spend a little
time on this, on the marriage of Isaac, because I
think it's really cool and that it's a model for
Christ and the cheer. Prophecy is not just pronouncements. It's
not just God saying that X is going to happen
in the future. It's also model and pattern. In fact,
in the Jewish mind, prophecy is more pattern than it
is pronouncement, and this is a great example of it.
The story of how Isaac got his wife Rebecca is
basically Abraham said us to side for my son to
get married. So he sent his servant, who is unnamed,
is an unnamed servant into another land to bring about
to bring to find a bride for Isaac. Now, in
this model, Abraham is a form or a model of God,
the Father. Isaac is a model of Christ, the Son
of God. And this unnamed servant is a model of
the Holy Spirit. And for a couple of reasons. Number one,
because he's unnamed and the Holy Spirit never testifies of himself.
Jesus said that himself in the New Testament, the Holy
Spirit will never testify of himself. He will only testify
of the Son. So this unnamed servant is a model
of the Holy Spirit for that reason, and also even
though he's unnamed in the story which occurs in Genesis sid.
Chapter twenty two, I'll put a link to there in
the show notes, but we do find out what his
name is earlier. The servant's name is actually Eliezer. Eliezer
means comforter, and Comforter is the title that Jesus gives
the Holy Spirit. So Aliazar is definitely a model of
the Holy Spirit. So this unnamed servant, which is Eliezer,
goes to a foreign land and finds a bride for
the Sun, and this bride has the option she and
she the LA's, are testifies of the Sun. He tells
this lady, whose name is Rebecca, all about Isaac and
ask her if she wants to join the family. Now
she doesn't have to, but when she hears about Isaac,
she decides that yes, she wants to join this family,
and the model of the Holy Spirit, the unnamed servant
gives her gifts and then brings her to the sun
and then they consummate the marriage. So this is totally
a a model of Christ in the church, whereas you know,
we've never we in the church have never seen Christ.
We've only heard of Him through the through the Holy Spirit,
and we have the choice of whether or not we're
going to accept that marriage invitation to become a part
of God's family. So I think that's a pretty cool story. Anyway,
Isaac and Rebecca get married. They have two children, twins,
Jacob and Esau. And Jacob's name means usurper or he'll catcher,
and he was named that because even though his brother
Esau was born first, he was a first born. Jacobs,
as an infant reached his hand out from the womb
and grabbed the heel of Esau. So that's how he
got his name, and he of course lives up to that.
Jacob and Esau were very, very different. Esau was a
very manly, masculine type. He was, you know, a hairy guy.
He was a god man of the field, he was
a hunter, and he was just a very manly man.
And Isaac, you know, adored him. Jacob was the opposite.
He was hairless, he was smooth, he was timid, and
he was sort of he was a very upfront or
manly who's sort of conniving and scheming, and he was
a mama's boy. Rebecca loved Jacob, and Jacob ended up
swindling his brother Esau out of his birthright, his blessing,
and his inheritance, and you can read about that. It's
a very famous story. You can read about how that happens.
He basically tricks his father Isaac into giving him the
blessing of the first born by posing as Esau and
whatever this blessing he is. Apparently it's non refundable and
non transferable, because after Esau found that Jacob tricked him,
he asked, is school kin to giving the blessing anyway?
Isaac said, no, I can't. I've already given it to Jacobs,
and it's it's done deal. You know, again, non transferable.
So of course Esau's upset about this and he goes
off to kill Jacob. Jacob runs away to his to
his uncle and Laban in another land where his mother
Rebecca came from, and in Laban, Jacob actually meets his match.
Laban is is a better hustler and conniver than even
Jacob is because Jacob falls in love with one of
Laban's daughters, whose name is Rachel, who's apparently very beautiful,
as the Bible says, she was beautiful and well formed,
which means she not only had a beautiful face, but
she had a rock and body. That's that's the gospel
according to me. That's just how I interpreted, But that's
that's basically what it means to me. She had a
beautiful body and a beautiful face. Jacob fell in love
with her, wanted to marry her, and he offered to
work seven years for Laban to marry her. Laban agrees,
but then he tricks him into actually marrying his older daughter,
who's Leah, who's not anywhere near as attractive as Rachel,
and then he makes Jacob work fourteen years to marry
to get his eventual bride, Rachel, who he loved so much,
so Jacob got hustled and had to work for Laban
for fourteen years. He ends up having twelve sons various
daughters as well, but the twelve sons through Leah and Rachel,
as well as their handmaids. There was another issue where
Apparently in that culture, the most womanly thing you could
do was give your husband's sons. And when the wives
were not able, the sister's wives were not able to
give Jacob enough sons, they would give Jacob their handmaids.
So just the same way as the same way as
as Sarah did with Abraham. And of course, of course
again it turned in disaster, because those those sons turned
out to be some serious characters. But he had four
sons through the handmaids, and he had the rest of
the twelve sons through through his wives. The last two
sons he had from his wife Rachel. The sons were
Joseph and Benjamin, who Jacob loved the most because they were,
you know, they were the sons of his most beloved wife.
So again, as as you can read in the blog post,
these these guys, these twelve sons of Israel. And by
the way, Jacob's name was changed to Israel by God
later on. And it's it's interesting, by the way, if
you go through the Bible, whenever if Jacob is doing well,
God calls him Israel. Whenever he is screwing up, he
goes back to being Jacob. So most of the time
when God changes someone's name, he only calls him by
that new name. But apparently Jacob's naming was conditional for
how he acts. In fact, the end times are called
the Tribulation period. The period which we call the Tribulation
is actually titled the Time of Jacob's Trouble. Is really
the time where Israel's kind of taken to the mat
and persecuted to the point where they finally recognize their Messiah.
So because they rejected their Messiah, they have to go
through this seven year period of harshness, and it is
called the time of Jacob's Trouble. And again they're called Jacob,
not Israel, because they were growing up they rejected their Messiah,
and the tribulation is unfortunately a part of the penalty
for rejecting their Messiah. But I'm getting way way ahead
of myself anyway, These twelve Sons of Israel were again
a pretty rough and tumble bunch of characters. They did
a whole lot of really, really horrible things, and I
talk about them in the in the blog post where
they are murderers, they are genocidal, they commit incests, they
do a lot of really bad things. But the shining
star of those sons is Joseph, one of the eldest
son of Rachel, who, even though he is the eleventh
son that was born to Jacob, Jacob treats him as
a first born, and of course this raises the ire
of the other sons. They hate Joseph and Joseph among
other things, he was a very good He was very intelligent.
He was also very good looking. He was a great administrator,
and he was able to interpret dreams. In fact, one
of the dreams he had was that one day all
of his brothers and his mother and father would bow
down before him and Jacob, and he was Joseph, excuse me,
when he was a kid, tells his brothers this dream,
and that just made them hate him even more, Like
he's bad enough that you're treated better than us, but
you also have a dream that broke and all bow
down to you. So they want to give of them.
They decided first they wanted to kill him, but they
decided against that and says, instead of just killing him,
let's make some money off of him, we'll sell him
into slavery. So they sell Joseph into slavery. Joseph ends
up as a slave in the house of an Egyptian.
He goes down to Egypt and ends up in the
house of an Egyptian man named Potiphar, who's a pretty
important guy in the in the pharaoh's court, the pharaoh
of Egypt, the king of Egypt is called a pharaoh.
But because God was with Joseph, and God blessed Joseph
and gave him favor, and because of Joseph's intelligence and
administrative skills, Potiphar put Joseph over his entire household. He
trusted Joseph to run his entire house. Unfortunately, unfortunately, unfortunately,
excuse me for him. Potterphar's wife was kind of scummy,
and she kept trying to seduce Joseph, and Joseph, being
a man of integrity, kept refusing her her advances, and
she got frustrated and eventually lied and told Potiphar that
Joseph raped her, and so Potter had Joseph thrown into jail. Now,
by the way, as an aside, I don't think that
Potiphar really believed that Joseph raped his wife, because if
he truly believed that, he would have had Joseph killed.
Joseph was just a slave. There would have been no
problem in Egyptian law for him having a slave killed
if that slave actually assaulted his wife in that way.
I think that Potiphar knew Joseph was a man of integrity,
and I think he knew that his wife was sluty,
and he would have just liked to have let it go,
but he couldn't because he had to save face. He
couldn't have his wife running around saying that a slave
raped her and that her husband did nothing about it.
So Potiphar had n't put in jail and Joseph while
he was in jail again, the jailer saw that he
was an excellent person, a man of integrity, a great administrator,
and the jailer put him in charge of the entire prison.
He trusted Joseph enough to make him run the entire prison. Now,
some folks might wonder why, if Joseph was so blessed
by God, why did he keep going through all these
harsh times, being sold into slavery, being falsely accused, being
thrown in jail. Well, what God was doing was preparing
Joseph by giving Joseph more and more responsibility and teaching
him how to be a greater and greater administrator, because,
as we'll find out in a few minutes, he would
actually need all those skills when God finally elevated him.
And it's something for us to keep in mind. When
God gives us a vision of something great that we're
going to do, and then we wonder why we're toiling
in obscurity, Why hasn't this vision that God gave us
come about? Yet, keep in mind that God sometimes keeps
us in that obscurity because he's training us the same
way he traded Joseph, and Joseph would use everything he
learned during these harsh periods of his life to actually
become one of the greatest men of his age. So
Joseph in jail for twelve years. During that time, the Pharaoh,
the king of Egypt, has this dream that disturbs him,
and none of the mystics in his court. And of course,
as I said a few podcasts ago, mystics are always
hanging around the the corridors of power, pretending that they
know more than they do, and in some cases they
do have certain power. We'll talk about that in the
next podcast. But none of the mystics in Pharaoh's court
could decide for the dream. Well, there was one person
who really who remembered that Joseph had this ability. He said, yeah,
there's this guy in jail, this Hebrew, that's what they
call the Israelites. This Hebrew has the ability to interpret dreams.
Maybe he can help you out. So Pharaoh, Joseph brought
up and Pharaoh tells him as the dream and the
dream is this, And between Pharaoh saw fourteen cows. Seven
of the cows were very healthy, very vibrant, beautiful cows,
lovely cattle. Then there were another seven cows that were
ugly and emaciated, just skinny, sickly cows. And then as
Pharaoh watched, these ugly, emaciated, sickly cows devoured the healthy cows,
and he didn't know what they made districting greatly. Well,
Joseph prayed, and God gave him the interpretation of the dream.
And the dream was this, that there was going to
be a fourteen year period coming up, and the first
seven years there's going to be great abundance, a tremendous abundance,
represented by the big, healthy cows. But after those seven
years there's going to be a severe famine in the
entire region. It's going to be so severe that it's
going to basically devour all of the abundance that people
gained in the previous seven years. And Pharaoh was impressed
so much, so wad he said, Hey, you know what
should I do? And Joseph, again, being an administrator, having
spent all his time learning through the trials that God
put him through how to be an administrator, he told Pharaoh, Hey,
here's what you do. During the seven years of abundance,
store up everything extra, keep all the extra and put
it into a storehouse, so that there'll be more than
enough of food and grain when we have the seven
years of famine. And Pharaoh says, hey, I believe you,
and he tells all the people of Egypt, whatever Joseph
tells you to do, do it. And it came to
pass that because of this, Pharaoh basically gave he did
the same thing that the jailer did and that the
Potiphar did, and that he put Joseph over everything. He
gave Joseph all of his authority. So Joseph basically he
ran Egypt. He was second only to the Pharaoh. Joseph
was essentially the prime minister of Egypt, so he in
one day, Joseph goes from being a prisoner to being
the second most powerful man in the powerful Egyptian Empire,
And sure enough, the seven years of abundant comes around. Joseph.
People of Egypt do what Joseph says said, and they
accumulated all of the excess grain and they put it
in the storehouse. And then, as as predicted, seven years
of severe famine came about, and the people of Egypt
went through all of their food and they had no
more food. And they came to Pharaoh saying, hey, we
don't have any food. Pharaoh, what are you gonna do?
You're our leader? What do we do? And Pharaoh said, hey,
do whatever Joseph tells you. And Joseph said, if you
want food from us, you'll have to buy it from us.
They said, okay, we'll buy it. We need food, we'll
buy it. So they bought the food and made Pharaoh
extremely rich, more richer than he was before. Not only that,
but people all over the region because it wasn't just
a local famine, it was regional. It affected the entire
Middle East, and so people came from other nations all
over the world to pay for food from Egypt. Because
Egypt had food and the rest of them didn't. But
it turned out that people ran out of money and
they still needed more food. The famine was so severe
that people gave all of their money and they still
needed more food. And people said, hey, Pharaoh, we don't
have any more money, but we still need food. What
do we do And Pharaoh said, do whatever Joseph tells you.
And Joseph said, hey, you don't have any food, but
you have land, so give me your land and I'll
give you food. And people said, well, that's fine, no
point having land if we're starving to death. So all
the people of Egypt gave up their land to Pharaoh.
So suddenly Pharaoh, through Joseph, owned all of the Egyptian land.
Not only that, but all the other nations surrounding them
did the same thing. They sold their land to the
Pharaoh to get food. So now Egypt went from being
a nation to being an empire. The Pharaoh and Egypt
now owned the entire region. So thanks to Joseph and
the blessing that Pharaoh got through Joseph, the Egypt became
an empire. So, as the narrative goes along, it turns
out that the sons of Israel. You know, Jacob and
his sons, they experienced a famine as well, and they
heard that there was food in Egypt. So Joseph sends
his sons down to buy some food, just like all
the other nations were doing. And when they get there,
they run into Joseph. They don't recognize Joseph, but Joseph
recognizes them, and you know, they It's actually very interesting
and colorful story how they know they come together, but
I'll spare you that because we're running out of time.
Joseph brings the entire family down to Egypt to Pharaoh
and he presents this this new his family, which is,
you know, a bunch of them now, all of his
twelve the twelve sons, all of their wives, all of
Joseph Jacob's daughters, and all of their families. So it's
like a pretty big group of people. And Joseph comes
and presents them before Pharaoh. So now you have this
fledgling nation of Israel standing before all the nations of
the world. Because at this point, Pharaoh is essentially the
king of the entire known world. So what's gonna happen
now here? Is that conjunctive issue where you have the
choice to make, will Pharaoh bless God's nation of Israel
or will he curse them? Well, it turns out that
Pharaoh blessed him. He gave he welcomed them into Egypt.
He gave them land, not just some land in Egypt.
He gave him the best land, an area called Goshen,
which was right at the Nile delta, which was very
fertile land. It's the best land in Egypt. And when
Jacob died, he instituted a empire wide period of mourning
for him and gave him a royal It offered him
a royal burial. So it seemed that the Pharaoh did right,
he blessed the nation. So does that mean the dispensation
was a success. Well no, because remember it's not just
about blessing Israel. It's about blessing them and becoming a
part of God's nation, which Pharaoh didn't do. And I
don't know if that's because he didn't want to give
up his gods, or maybe Pharaoh just you know, died
before he had a chance to do that. Nevertheless, God
did not judge them yet because it was still open ended.
They were they had the Pharaoh had blessed Israel, Egypt
blessed them, and they were doing well. So God was
giving them time to decide if they were going to
join up with his nation, and in God's mercy, was
giving them time. Unfortunately, something happened that changed things. A
new pharaoh came around, a new pharaoh that the Bible
says didn't know Joseph. This was, you know, a couple
hundred years later Joseph. Excuse me, Joseph had already died
by this time, and this pharaoh didn't know Joseph. Now
that excuse me, excuse me. That doesn't mean that the
pharaoh didn't know Joseph existed. Of course he did. He
was legendary. But remember in the knowing means intimacy. It
means that this pharaoh was not intimate with the story
of Joseph, the legend of Joseph. This means that this
pharaoh did not take the story of Joseph to heart.
In fact, it is strongly implied and many Bible scholars
take the tect that this pharaoh was not even Egyptian,
that he was possibly an Assyrian. Now, why would there
be an Assyrian on this throne of Egypt? Probably because of
a royal marriage. This is something that had happened that
happens to this day, but it was very common back
then and then throughout most of time that whenever you
had when you want to join two powerful families together,
you would do it by marrying one of you know,
the son of one family to the daughter of another family.
That way they're they're joined together. And it's quite possible
that the Assyrians were kind of maybe bucking the trend
a little bit, causing some trouble, and there was a
possibility that they would be a rival to Egypt. So
in order to call the rivalry, they married a daughter
of Egypt to a son of Assyria, and that Assyrian
became the new pharaoh. So this pharaoh didn't know Joseph,
and he didn't regard Israel very well. In fact, when
he saw that the Israelites had the best land and
that they were multiplying, they were apparently giving birth, you know,
just pretty rapidly, and they were growing strong and numerically,
he became afraid of them. And he said, well, you know,
they're going to outnumber us, and they might side with
an enemy or try to take over Egypt. So he
decided to put them into bondage and to just work
them hard to build cities in Egypt. So he basically
made the Israelites slaves. Now, at this point God could
have probably judged them. However, the Israelites being slaves was
part of God's plan. In fact, God told Abraham in
a prophecy that the Israelites would serve another nation to
turn off Egypt, obviously for four hundred years, but then
God would bring them out of Egypt as a powerful
nation and a rich nation, into the back to to
the promised land of Canaan. So it's interesting, isn't it
that God instituted a worldwide femine just to bring one
family down to Egypt so that he could so this
prophecy could be fulfilled. Interesting. So anyway, this pharaoh put
them in bondage, and of course that happened again four
hundred years. Finally, after four hundred years, it was time
that people prayed to God, and God said, okay, it's
time for my nation to come out. And God does
this all through Moses, a very familiar story. We hear
it every well. I'm probably aging myself. I don't think
they do it anymore. But when I was a kid,
every Resurrection holiday during the time which we incorrectly called
Easter or Holy Week, they would show the old movie
The Ten Commandments was Charlton, Heston and Moses, and it
was actually even though it's an older movie, it holds
up pretty well. But we all know the familiar story
of how Moses was born during a time when that
the pharaoh of that age, you know, a few hundred
years after the Pharaoh who initially enslaved Egypt. That Pharaoh
wanted to all or ordered rather than all the first
born sons of the of the Israelites be killed because
he was trying to keep their population down. Moses escapes
down the river through his mother's help. He is adopted
by the pharaoh's daughter, who gets some other river and
raises him as her own. He has a falling out
with the Egyptian court. He is driven off into the
land of Midian, where he encounters God and burning bush,
and God commissions him to go to Pharaoh and tell
them to let his people go. Now, keep in mind
exactly what God said. God didn't tell Moses to go
and tell Pharaoh to release them from their bondage. God
actually said to let them go a three day journey
into the wilderness just so that they could worship him.
God basically asked Pharaoh, hey, how about give my people
a weekend pass so that they could they could worship me.
God didn't say I'm going to strip you all your slaves.
I said, just give him a holiday. Now, what did
Pharaoh do? Here is Pharaoh's chance to definitively decide if
he's going to bless or curse the people of God.
So Pharah could have said, okay, fine, you guys can
go there and worship your God. But Pharaoh didn't. Pharaoh
did two things. First of all, he said no, they
can't go. And then Pharaoh made their burden even more
difficult by telling him he wasn't going to give them
straw to make brick. You can't make brick without in
that time without straw. So Pharaoh not only refused to
obey God, he cursed is well. By making their job
not just difficult, but virtually impossible. Pharaoh definitively chose himself
over God, and by doing so, he failed that dispensation
he could have blessed him. He decided not to be
decided to curse them. It was bad enough that they
were already enslaved, but now he made their work virtually impossible.
It was impossible for them to stay on schedule without
the straw that they needed in order to make the brick.
So Pharaoh told him to do the impossible. No one
can do the impossible. That's a contradiction. So Pharaoh was definitive,
and that he was going that he cursed God's nation.
So the dispensation failed, and God could now end the
dispensation start a new one, and of course judge Pharaoh,
which he did through the famous ten plagues we all
know about them. That's turning the Nile to blood and
bringing out frogs and flies and lights and boils and
killing the cattle, and darkness and hail and eventually sorry
and locus and eventually the death of all the first born,
at which time Pharaoh finally let the people go, and
not really did they go, They also took the riches
of Egypt with him with them, and that was what
they were used to build the nation of Israel. And
so that ends that dispensation, And of course it's time
for the next dispensation. But before we do that, as always,
we're going to take a deeper dive into some of
the intricacies and very interesting and relevant parts of what
went on in this dispensation, and we're going to start
doing that next week, and the next week's podcast, we're
going to cover a couple of pretty significant and interesting things.
The first is the hardening of Pharaoh's heart. If you
look at the narrative of the ten plagues, you will
find that after some of them, God, well, first of all,
God says in the beginning to Moses, said, when you
go down there, Pharaoh's not going to obey you, and
I'm going to harden his heart so that he doesn't
obey you, so that I can send these plugs on him.
And then after some of the plagues, Pharaoh first says
he's going to let the Israelites go. Then later his
heart is hardened. And sometimes it says that God hardened
his heart so that he would renig on his offer
and double down on his disobedience, which would allow God
to send yet another plague. But if you look at this,
it kind of seems unfair when you think about it.
God intentionally hardens this man's heart. It's almost like he
takes away his free will and does not allow him
to do what he wants to do, which is let
the Israelites go. No, God hardens his heart, takes a
seemingly taking away his free will so that he doesn't
let the people go, so that God can punish him more.
And again you take a step back in and you
look at that. It doesn't seem right, It doesn't seem fair.
But we know that God is right and just always completely.
So there must be a just and righteous explanation for
God hardening Pharaoh's heart. There is, We will talk about
it in the next podcast. Also, the plagues themselves, those
ten plagues, Why did God choose those specific plagues? They
kind of seem random, but they are not. God is
not random. He did not just pull these things out
of his hat and say, hey, I think I'll do
these things that'll take off the Egyptians and torture them,
you know, and judge them. No, God had a very
intentional reason for choosing those specific ten things, and the
reason behind them you can only understand if you have
the supernatural world view, which we talked about several podcasts ago.
Those ten plagues have every these specific plagues and specific
meetings behind them. I have everything to do with a
supernatural worldview, and I will tell you how in the
next podcast. So thank you for listening. I appreciate it.
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