Word of Salvation – January 2026
The God Who Hears And Knows
Sermon by Rev. Ben Fien on Exodus 2
Scripture Reading: Exodus 2:11-25
[Click here for a Podcast (audio file) of this sermon]
Have you ever wondered if God cares about what you’re going through? If you’ve gone through a dark valley or a difficult season, you may have wondered during that time as you’re praying to God, “God, do you hear me? God, do you know my pain? Do you care?” I wonder if you’ve asked questions like that.
Because our passage today is going to answer that very question. By the end of our time together in Exodus 2:11-25, we’re going to find out whether God knows and cares for His people when we’re in pain, when we’re suffering, when we’re crying out to Him.
If you’re not familiar with the book of Exodus, it’s the second book of the Bible. Moses wrote it and it comes after the first book, Genesis. Now in the book of Genesis, we’re introduced to a man called Abraham in Genesis 12, and God entered into a covenant with this man called Abraham.
A covenant is like a heartfelt but binding commitment about how two parties will relate to each other. And God promised Abraham that He would bless him, that He would make him a great nation, that He would give him a land, and that his line would be a blessing to the nations. And so for the rest of the book of Genesis, from Genesis 12, we’re tracing these promises and we’re wondering whether they’re going to work out. And we meet Isaac, we meet Jacob, we meet his 12 sons, including Joseph. And by the end of Genesis, the people of God have favour from the Egyptians.
They’re living in Egypt, not in the Promised Land, because Joseph had favour with Pharaoh. And that’s how the end of the book of Genesis ends. Now as we come into Exodus, we hear that God is indeed blessing His people. They’re growing numerically. They’re becoming a great nation.
But Pharaoh, this next Pharaoh who’s forgotten who Joseph was, is starting to get a little bit concerned, and he actually fears the people. And so he decides to try and control them by oppressing them and enslaving them, and he even implements a policy to kill every Hebrew boy that is born. It’s a horrible, oppressive regime. And it’s in this context in which we come to Exodus chapter two. And in verse two specifically, we’re introduced to Moses, and it tells us that his mother saw that he was a fine child.
Now it’s not just telling us this was a cute boy who could have won a baby pageant. Genesis one, if you remember how that goes, it keeps saying, “And God saw that it was good…. and God saw that it was good.” So Genesis 1:4, “And God saw that the light was good.” That word for good is the Hebrew word tov. And so when Moses’ mother looks at Moses being born, she saw that her son was a tov child.
It’s the same Hebrew word that we translate in English as fine. And so this is the story’s – the narrative’s way – of signalling to us that there may be something special about this child Moses. God is doing a new creative work, and perhaps he will be someone God raises up to deliver His people. And so it’s no surprise then that God’s invisible, providential hand seems to be at work in the story.
We wonder if Moses is going to be killed along with the other baby boys, but he isn’t. He’s put in a reed basket. And Pharaoh’s daughter finds him and has favour on him and actually adopts him into the royal family. So things were going well for this tov child, this fine child. And as we come into our passage today, we’re going to find out how he turns out as an adult. So let’s open up our passage together and we’re going to be looking at it in three scenes or sections.
And in the first scene, we see:
The deliverer rejected.
This is verses 11 to 15: The deliverer rejected.
So when we arrive at that passage, it opens up with “one day when Moses had grown up.” Now to say that he’d grown up, I normally picture someone who’s like, 18 years old, just become an adult.
But in Acts chapter seven, Stephen preaches a sermon. He talks about Moses. It actually says he was 40 years old at this point. Alright! So Moses is 40 years old.
He’s had forty years in the royal Egyptian household. And I guess we’re kind of wondering, after all enjoying all this power and all this wealth and Egyptian education, is he going to care for Israel or identify with them, or is he going to be more Egyptian than Israelite? We quickly find out what he’s like as we look at the passage. It says in verse eleven, “One day when Moses had grown up, he went out to his people.” He identifies with oppressed Israel “and looked on their burdens.”
I love how the scholar Walter Kaiser Junior says that the Hebrew word to look here implies sympathy and real emotional involvement. So when Moses looked out on his people, he was filled with sympathy. He got emotional. He cared for what they were going through. Moses identified with his oppressed people.
In fact Hebrews 11 says, “By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin.” Moses could have chosen to enjoy Egyptian wealth and power, but instead he identified with his oppressed, enslaved people. He chose to move on their behalf. And so he goes out and he looks and what he sees horrifies him. He sees an Egyptian beating one of his Hebrew brothers.
The word for beating in the original Hebrew is the word nakah. It’s a beating that could lead to death. And so when Moses sees that, he looks around and decides to return like for like. So we use lots of different English words in our passage, but it’s the same Hebrew word. He uses nakah.
He strikes the Egyptian and kills him. He goes and buries him in the sand, and the next day he comes out again and he sees something even more shocking. It’s not an Egyptian beating a Hebrew. It’s a Hebrew beating a Hebrew. It’s one of his oppressed brothers oppressing someone else.
And he goes over, he’s shocked. He’s like, “Why are you beating your companion?” Again, it’s that Hebrew word, nakah, so he could have killed his brother. And the response of this Hebrew man is shocking. He says to him in verse 14, “Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?”
Moses figures out quickly that word had gotten out about what he’d done, but Israel didn’t appreciate it. He thought he was helping and saving as God had raised him up to do, and instead they rejected the deliverer that God was raising up. And so Moses fled for his life. He fled to Midian, which was this nomadic land outside of Egyptian control, for safety.
This is how the scene ends. There’s a couple of things that we learn from this first scene.
First, it shows us that the Egyptians weren’t the only oppressors in the story. The Israelites were oppressing each other too. And this reveals an important truth to us.
Even though we can be victims of the sins of others at times, the capacity to oppress others lies within all of us. It’s what the Bible calls sin. This insidious power that turns us away from God and makes us think we can rule ourselves and ends up making us put our hand against others to try and raise ourselves above them. Sin has infected us. It’s a curse that humanity lives under.
Even Christians. We’re saved by grace. We’ve been given God’s Spirit, but we still have a remaining sin nature that is at war with the Spirit in us. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Russian Christian writer who survived years in Soviet prison camps for speaking the truth. He was oppressed. He was brutally victimised.
And yet he wrote this. He said that the line separating good and evil passes right through every human heart and through all human hearts. He was a victim of a Soviet labour camp. He was brutally oppressed, and yet he was courageous enough to admit, actually, there’s evil even in my heart, even though I’m brutally victimised wrongly.
And so my question is, what about you? What about me? I’ve got a secret to let you in on. Your new pastor is a sinner. I’ve got a sin nature that the Lord’s still dealing with in me. I will need your grace and your prayers and your help during my ministry here.
And what about you? Have you been courageous enough to admit that the line between good and evil, it runs through your own heart? Jesus even was honest enough to call us evil in the gospel, not because He hates us, but because He loves us and He’s honest with us. Apart from God’s grace, apart from His Spirit, we are only inclined towards sin. And until we’re ready to admit that, we’re not opening ourselves up to God’s work in our lives. We must confess and admit we are sinners in need of a Saviour.
All of us…! The reason we do bad things is because of our sinful nature. It’s not all out there. It’s in here. Jesus said in John 8:34, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin.”
The reason we sin is because of a sin nature. In the first scene of our passage, we see the power of sin at work and we see how the people of God rejected the deliverer that God had raised up. Moses’ appearance seemed promising for Israel. Remember, he was this tov child, this special child that was protected from Egyptian slaughter and was raised up in the Egyptian household. He seemed perfectly poised to save them, and yet they rejected him.
Stephen preached in his sermon in Acts chapter seven that Moses supposed that his brothers would understand that God was giving them salvation by his hand, but they did not understand. They rejected him, and he ends up fleeing for his life to Midian. Now the reason Stephen refers to that story in the book of Exodus in his sermon is because he was tracing a theme throughout the Old Testament of what God’s people would often do to God’s deliverers. They would often resist them. They would even persecute them and reject them.
We see that happening throughout the Old Testament. And instead of saying, “Well, how horrible are they? At least we’ve accepted God’s great deliverer, Jesus,” I think we should take a moment to pause and ask, is there any way that we are resisting God’s deliverer, Jesus, in our own hearts?
Now I’m sure many of us here today, we would call ourselves Christians. We’d never deny Jesus. But are there subtle ways that we can be resisting Jesus? Resisting His deliverance, resisting His help, fearful to let Him have His way in our hearts? Maybe for you right now, the Holy Spirit is just tapping on your heart and just pointing out a sinful habit or a sinful mindset. Maybe something that you’ve just chosen to live with because it’s too hard to fight or whatever it might be.
And Jesus is just reminding you again, “Let Me in. Let Me work in your heart. I am God’s deliverer. Let Me rescue you.” Maybe it’s something that you want to just confess to a trusted Christian friend.
Maybe you’re going really well with God and there’s nothing that the Spirit’s convicting you of, but it’s good just to take a moment to pause and just to ask, are we welcoming God’s deliverer, Jesus, His work by the Spirit and His word in our lives? We ask these questions because in the first scene we see the deliverer rejected by the very people he came to save.
Now after Moses was rejected, he fled to the wilderness of Midian. And we ask ourselves, well, what will happen to him out there? It’s a difficult place. It’s a fairly barren place. And if his own people rejected him, then surely these foreigners will reject him too.
So let’s find out what happens as we explore the second scene in our passage:
The deliverer welcomed.
Well, I’ve kind of spoiled it already just with the heading that I’ve given you.
But anyway, so Moses ends up as a refugee, an alien with no rights in a foreign land, and he sits down by a well. And while he’s sitting there, these seven daughters from Midian, from the Midianite priest, come out to water the flock. But these shepherds, I’m thinking they’re local shepherds, drive them away so that they can water their flocks first and the daughters have to wait till the end. But Moses sees this, and we have already learned a little bit about him in the passage. He’s got this heart for justice.
And so he sees them being oppressed and he doesn’t sit by idly. He stands up and he delivers them from the hand of these shepherds. Now one guy, 40 years old, he must have been pretty fit – maybe he was at CrossFit or something – managed to do that by himself. But he delivered all these ladies from these shepherds.
And not only that, but he draws water from the well himself and waters their flock. And so they head home early and their dad, Reuel, notices they’re coming home early and he’s like, “Why are you home so quickly?” And they’re like, “Well, this Egyptian,” (Moses probably looked Egyptian still) “this Egyptian saved us from the hand of the shepherds and he even drew water for us and watered our flock.” And in the original Hebrew, they say drew water twice. “He drew water. He drew water.”
Like, they’re just so astonished at this Egyptian man’s kindness to them. And so Reuel is like, “Where is he? Why don’t you just leave him there and come home early? Go back and get him so that he can have something to eat with us.”
And he even gives his daughter Zipporah to Moses in marriage. Now the contrast between this foreign family, the Midianites, and the Israelites is striking. Israel weren’t grateful for Moses’ help, weren’t grateful for his rescue and deliverance. These foreigners, however, welcomed Moses, fed him, took him in, and even gave him one of their daughters in marriage. Can you imagine how much this story would have stung the original audience?
See, Moses wrote this for Israel, and as they’re reading about this, the great Moses, they noticed that their own people rejected him and didn’t want him at first, but foreigners did. This would have been a bruise to their egos. It was God’s reminder that just because they were sons of Abraham doesn’t mean that they deserve salvation more than anyone else. In fact, they were more hard-hearted and resistant to God’s deliverer than foreign Gentiles were. And I think it’s a reminder for us as well.
You see in the New Testament era, the gospel came first to the Jews, and many Jews did believe, but many Jews didn’t, especially the religious leaders. A lot of them rejected and oppressed Jesus and were the ones that crucified Him. And so the gospel kept going out, and many Gentiles, (that’s the Bible word for non-Jews, so Romans and Greeks and all sorts of people), many of them were open to Jesus and believed in the Jewish Messiah. And so Paul said to the Roman Gentiles in his letter, he talks about not becoming proud. He talks to Gentiles about not becoming proud that they’ve been saved by the Jewish Messiah.
He says in Romans 11, “They were broken off,” that’s the Israelites who didn’t believe, “because of their unbelief. But you stand fast through faith..!” Not because you’re special or you’re better than them, but because you trust in Jesus, the Messiah. “So do not become proud, but fear. For if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will He spare you. Note then the kindness and the severity of God, severity towards those who have fallen, but God’s kindness to you, provided you continue in His kindness. Otherwise, you too will be cut off.”
You see, God’s kindness towards us is not earned. It’s a gift. Even our faith in Jesus, even our belief in Jesus, we can’t even take credit for that. We can’t even say, “Well, at least I believed even though those people didn’t.”
Now Ephesians two says that even faith is a gift from God, that the Spirit works in us. We can’t take credit for any of it. So we must never think that others don’t believe just because, you know, they might be more stubborn or they haven’t thought through it as much as we have. No. It’s all a gift of grace.
It’s something to rejoice in. “Thank You, Jesus, for Your grace to me, for by Your Spirit and Your word, for revealing Yourself to me and giving me this gift to know You.” It should humble us and make us hungry to share that gospel and that grace with others. So Moses, the Israelite, had found a new home among the Midianites, but we can see in the text that Moses is still burdened for Israel.
His heart is still to save his people. So even at the birth of his first child in verse 22, and I’ve used the NIV, I think it translates it a little bit better. It says here, Moses named him Gershom, saying, “I have become a foreigner in a foreign land.” Now there’s a play on words here because the word for foreigner is the Hebrew word ger or geer. So Gershom, ger.
His son’s name Gershom means “stranger there” or “foreigner there” because “I have become a foreigner.” You see, he’s saying, “I’m still a foreigner in this strange land. I’m not with my people Israel,” and he wants to save them, but it seems hopeless.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but so far in the passage, God hasn’t been mentioned once. We’ve just heard about the human Moses.
Where was God in the story? Did He care at all about what Israel were going through? Would He reject them after they rejected His deliverer Moses? Well, in our final scene, God is mentioned five times and we get to see His perspective. We get to see His heart for Israel and for all His people who suffer and cry out to Him.
So let’s look at the final scene where we see:
The deliverer remembers.
The deliverer remembers. So now we hear about the true divine deliverer in the story. Moses was a human deliverer that God was using, but God is the true ultimate divine deliverer. And the deliverer remembers, it opens up with verse 23, which says, “During those many days, the king of Egypt died and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help.
Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God.” And I love that word “up.” Their cry went up. Help from above is at hand.
But how would God respond? What would He do with the cries of Israel? We get our answer in the next verses. It says in verse 24, “And God heard their groaning and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob.” Remember that covenant I mentioned earlier about Abraham and God promising to bless him? That covenant was reaffirmed with Isaac and it was reaffirmed with Jacob.
And the text here, when it says that God remembers, it’s not that He forgot. It’s a biblical way of saying that God is about to act on that covenant that He had made, those promises that He had made. He’s remembered. Even though Israel may have felt hopeless and abandoned and forgotten, God had not forgotten them. God had not forgotten His promises.
God will always, always, always be faithful to His word and to His promises to us. Even if we are faithless, He remains faithful. And that’s what we can trust, like in that promise I mentioned earlier. 1John 1:9. “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
God will never break His word. He always remains faithful to it. It’s the darkness of sin and Satan that try to convince us, “Well, no, you’ve sinned too many times now. Jesus doesn’t want anything to do with you. Don’t come this time because this time He’s had enough.”
No. He will always be faithful to His word. But God isn’t faithful, He’s not a promise keeper just because He’s like, “Well, I better keep my word. I don’t want to break my promises. I’m pretty sick of these people, but I’m going to be true to my promises.”
Actually, the text shows us how deeply He cares for His people. He actually identifies with oppressed, enslaved Israel. So we read verse 24, “And God heard their groaning.” And then it says verse 25, “God saw the people of Israel, and God knew.”
I’m fascinated by that, that God knew. God knew their groans, their suffering, their slavery, their pain. The word for ‘know’ in Hebrew is the word yada. It’s this kind of experiential knowing. It’s not just this knowing in the head. Yada is used for how a husband and wife know each other in marriage. It’s experiential. It’s intimate. God knew Israel’s groaning, their suffering and their pain.
But how? Wasn’t He high up in the heavens and far removed? How could the high and holy God, the untouchable God, know something so human? Well, that’s the incredible thing about the gospel, the good news about Jesus that we believe – it’s that the untouchable became touchable. The high and holy one took on a human nature and became like us in every respect except for sin. And He submitted Himself to suffering.
He went to the cross to die in our place under our shame, our burdens, our sufferings to set us free from them. See, this is why we can say that God truly intimately knows what it is to suffer because God the Son suffered. God knew. God knows the suffering of His people because Jesus, the Son of God, suffered. In fact, what I find really profound is that in verse 23 of our passage where it says, “During those many days…” those words and… “crying out for help.”
The Jewish people, a bit before Jesus came, they translated their Hebrew Bible into Greek, and that Bible we call the Septuagint, the LXX. It’s the Greek version of the Old Testament. And that Hebrew word, “cried out,” was translated into a Greek word. And then Jesus came along, and the gospels were written in Greek, and the New Testament was written in Greek. And that Greek word only comes up one time in the whole New Testament.
That Greek word for crying out under pain and suffering. And it comes up when Jesus is at the cross hanging there, crying out under the burdens and the pain of all of His oppressed people. We read about it in Matthew 27. It’s the same Greek word. “Jesus cried out with a loud voice saying, ‘My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?'”
See, Jesus experienced the suffering that Israel deserved for their continual sin and rejection of His help. He experienced the suffering that we deserve for our sin and rebellions because God’s grace is greater than our hard-hearted resistance. He cried out under these sufferings, this pain. He identified Himself with His suffering, sinning people to pay for their sins at the cross, to take the judgment and the wrath of God that we deserved, to set us free, to give us security in God’s love forever, to secure His promises to us. You see, our divine deliverer, Jesus, didn’t wait for us to deserve God’s rescue.
We never would. We never could. He came while we were still sinners and enemies of God. Exodus two teaches us that we have a divine deliverer who keeps His promises. He will never forget His people.
In fact, He takes our pain personally. He knows. He really does. And so those questions I mentioned at the beginning, you know, if you’ve been through dark seasons where you’re asking God, “Do You hear my cry? Do You know? Do You care?” Well, the resounding answer of Exodus two and the cross of Jesus is: yes. He does know. He does hear. He does care for His sinning, suffering people.
And He took it so personally that He chose to suffer in Christ Jesus at the cross. See, Jesus has carried it all. So we don’t need to hold on to these burdens ourselves. We can take them and give them to Him. So let’s do that now together in prayer.
Prayer:
Father, we thank You for Your precious word. We thank You for Your Son, Jesus. Thank You, Jesus, for identifying Yourself with us, for not leaving us to our own devices, but rescuing us even when we didn’t want You, even while we were enemies. You came and You died for us, and we just give You thanks.
We cannot repay You for it. We gratefully receive it. And we pray, Father, that this would humble us, that we would never walk around as if we deserve Your grace. We don’t, but we glory in it. We rejoice in it.
We thank You for it. Father, give us such security in Your love and Your word, and we pray, Father, that we can extend that grace to each other and to all those we meet in our circles. We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.