Genesis ended with a dying man asking to carry his bones home. Four hundred years have passed since then. The family of seventy that walked into Egypt has become a nation of millions and Pharaoh is terrified of them. Exodus opens not with triumph but with chains. The people of the promise are making bricks in the heat, their backs bent, their cries rising.

It is one of the most important things the Bible does: it does not skip the suffering. It sits in it. It lets the groaning be heard. And then it shows us what God does when He hears it.

God heard the groaning. He remembered His covenant. He looked. He was concerned. Four verbs in two verses and every one of them is God moving toward His people before they even knew He was listening. He was always listening.

Exodus 1 begins with a new king who did not know Joseph. Four words that explain four centuries of suffering. The history was forgotten. The gratitude was gone. And fear filled the vacuum. Pharaoh’s fear of the Israelites is the engine of everything that follows he tries to slow them with hard labour, then with murder. Neither works.

Two women stand in the way of Pharaoh’s genocide. Shiphrah and Puah midwives, whose names are recorded in Scripture while Pharaoh’s is not. They fear God. They lie to Pharaoh’s face. And God gives them families of their own.

The names of the midwives are in the Bible. Pharaoh’s name is not. God has a long history of recording the names of the faithful and forgetting the names of the powerful. History belongs to those who fear God, not those who fear no one.

Two women with no army, no title, no platform standing between an empire’s decree and the lives of a generation. And they held the line. Do not underestimate what one person who fears God can do.

Exodus 2 introduces Moses in the most ordinary of ways: a woman hides her baby. She sees that he is fine that’s the whole description, just that he is fine and she cannot hide him any longer. So she makes a basket of bulrushes, waterproofs it with tar and pitch, and places her son in the Nile. The river that Pharaoh intended as a grave becomes the road to the palace.

Pharaoh’s own daughter finds the basket. Hears the baby cry. Has compassion on him. And when Moses’ sister watching from a distance offers to find a Hebrew woman to nurse the child, Pharaoh’s daughter says yes. Moses is nursed by his own mother, paid by Pharaoh’s household, and raised in the palace of the man who ordered his death.

God used the enemy’s system to preserve the one who would dismantle it. What Pharaoh built to destroy, God turned into a nursery. He does that. The very institution designed to crush what God is raising will sometimes be the thing that funds it.

Moses grows up, goes out to his people, sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, looks around, and kills the Egyptian. He buries him in the sand. The next day, two Hebrews are fighting. He tries to intervene. One of them says: who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you going to kill me as you killed the Egyptian? Moses is afraid. The thing he hid is not hidden. And he runs.

He runs to Midian. He sits down by a well. Seven daughters come to water their father’s flock. Shepherds try to drive them away. Moses stands up and helps them. He is given a home. He marries Zipporah. He tends sheep in the wilderness for forty years.

The man who will lead a nation out of Egypt spends forty years alone with sheep and silence. The palace taught him Egyptian power. The wilderness will teach him something that the palace never could.

And then the burning bush.

Moses is doing his ordinary work leading the flock to the far side of the wilderness, to Horeb, the mountain of God. And he sees a bush that is on fire and not burning up. He turns to look. And God calls his name.

“Moses! Moses!”

And Moses said, “Here I am.”

— Exodus 3:4