Bible Study Lessons 06

Bible Study Lessons 06

Lesson 06


Lesson Objectives
1. To read the Book of Exodus with understanding.
3. To appreciate the key figures and events - Moses and the Passover, - as they are interpreted in the Church's tradition.

Lesson Outline
I. Review and Overview
a. One Down, 72 to Go!
b. The Story So Far

II. Out of Egypt, My Son
a. Moses and Jesus
b. God's First-Born Son
c. Plaguing Pharaoh
d. The Passover and 'Our Paschal Lamb'

III. Study Questions for Lesson 06

I. Review and Overview

a. One Down, 72 to Go!

It has taken us three lessons - half of this beginner's course - to read the Bible's first book. One down, 72 to go! How in the world are we going to finish the Bible in three more lessons?

Remember, we're taking a bird's-eye approach to Scripture in this course. We're trying to show you the broad themes that tie the individual books of the Bible together so that they become, in effect, "chapters" in a single book, a single "Word of God."

We've organized our course around the "peaks" of salvation history - the creation covenant with Adam, the flood and the covenant with Noah, the covenant with Abraham, the covenant with Moses at Sinai, the covenant with David and the New Covenant brought by Jesus Christ. If you understand well these "peaks," you'll be able to see how every book of the Bible "fits."

That's why we've spent so much time on Genesis and that's why we're going to devote this lesson to the experience of the Israelites as recounted in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.

But go back and look at those first five lessons, you'll notice something you may not have noticed the first time through: We have been ranging all over the Bible to help us understand what we've been reading. We've shown how the various stories in Genesis have been understood and interpreted in nearly a dozen other Old Testament books, in each of the Gospels, in the New Testament Epistles and the Book of Revelation.

Be sure to look up the citations and references we make to other books of the Bible. First, it will give you a greater familiarity with the whole Bible. But secondly and more importantly, it will deepen your reading, helping you to read the Old Testament in light of the New and the New Testament in light of the Old.

In this lesson, too, be on the look out for these types of connections, especially in the Book of Exodus, where we're going to find images and ideas that turn up again and again in the Old and New Testaments - the figure of Moses, the idea of "the lamb of God," the Passover, and more.

b. The Story So Far

By way of a quick review, here's how the story has gone so far:

God created the world out of nothing and created man and woman "in His image and likeness," as His children, to be rulers over His divine kingdom on earth. God made a covenant with them, promising to bestow His blessings upon them, and through them, upon the whole world.

But Adam and Eve broke that covenant, rejected their royal birthright as the first-born children of God. Growing up in exile from the original garden sanctuary, their offspring fill the world with blood and all kinds of wickedness.

So God created the world again, in effect, destroying the wicked and saving the just in a great flood. He started His human family again with the family of Noah. But Noah falls, too, and trouble again fills the earth, symbolized by the effort of all the nations of the world to build a tower to the heavens and glorify their name, not the name of God.

At Babel, God scatters the nations to the four corners of the earth, dividing the single human family into a multitude of languages and cultures, confusing their speech and making it impossible for them to understand and work together.

God again raises up a righteous man, through whom He hopes to establish the family of God He intended in the beginning. He makes a covenant with Abraham and promises to Abraham a line of descendants that would last forever, a line through whom God would bestow blessings on all the families and nations of the world.

At the end of Genesis, Abraham's family tree is a large one, consisting of twelve tribes, each headed by a son of Jacob, who was the son of Abraham's beloved son Isaac. Through many twists and turns, the chosen people of the God, the children of Abraham, now identified as the children of Israel (the new name God gave to Jacob), find themselves in Egypt.

In this lesson, we'll see how the family of God grows from a tribal network of patriarchs to a full-fledged nation, under the leadership of a divinely appointed savior and lawgiver, Moses.

II. Out of Egypt, My Son

a. Moses and Jesus

The start of Exodus should sound familiar to you. What other figure in the Bible is born under a threat of death, facing a tyrannical ruler who has decreed that all first-born Hebrew males are to be killed?

In the Christmas story, we see Herod dispatch troops to Bethlehem to kill all the first-born Hebrew boys (see Matthew 2:16). In Exodus Pharaoh hatches a more subtle scheme of forced infanticide - ordering Egypt's midwives to kill every Hebrew first-born male child (see Exodus 1:15-16).

Moses, incidentally, is saved by being placed in an "ark" (that's the literal word for what's translated "papyrus basket" in Exodus 2:3; the same word is used for Noah's ark in Genesis 6:14).

The infant Moses and the infant Jesus are saved by family members - Moses by his mother and sister (see Exodus 2:1-10) and Jesus by his mother and father (Matthew 2:13-15; Exodus 2:5-10). And both remained in exile until those who sought their life were dead (see Matthew 2:20; Exodus 4:19).

There are many more parallels we could trace between the Moses and Jesus - for instance, Jesus fasts for 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness, just as Moses did (see Matthew 4:2; Exodus 34:28) and just like Moses, Jesus goes to a mount and gives a covenant law to His people (see Matthew 5-7; Deuteronomy 5:1-21).

Moses is the prototype for all the men of God that we read about in the rest of the Old Testament and on into the New. The Gospel writers, especially St. Matthew, describe Jesus as a "new Moses," a new leader and king, savior and deliverer, teacher, wonderworker and suffering prophet.

And the story of Moses - especially the Passover, the parting of the waters, the wandering in the desert, the daily bread from heaven - has a deeper, symbolic meaning for Catholic readers of the Bible.

b. God's First-Born Son

Moses is called by God to deliver the Israelites from their bondage in Egypt.

What motivates God to act? He was "mindful of His covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob" (see Exodus 2:24; Psalm 105:8-11). That's why He repeatedly identifies Himself to Moses as "the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob" (see Exodus 3:6, 13,15; 6:2-8).

God had warned Abraham in a dream that they would be enslaved and oppressed for four hundred years, but that God would deliver them (see Genesis 15:13-15). Now the Israelites had been in Egypt for 430 years - the first 30 years as privileged guests, relatives of the prime-minister Joseph, the last 400 years as slaves (see Exodus 12:40).

The time had come for Him to fulfill His promise to Abraham - to make His descendants a great nation and to give them a beautiful and bountiful land of their own (see Genesis 28:13-15).

God sends Moses to tell Pharaoh that "Israel is My son, My first-born" (see Exodus 4:22; Sirach 36:11).

We see God here again trying to establish His holy family. We see this when He renews His promise to Moses: "I will take you as my own people and you shall have me as your God" (see Exodus 6:7). This anticipates the covenant He will make with them later at Sinai (see Exodus 19:5).

Watch the "character" of God throughout Exodus - what He says and does. He's not a detached "Creator."

God in Exodus truly reveals himself to be the divine Father of Israel (see too Deuteronomy 32:6). He saves His children (see Exodus 12:29-31), clothes them (see Exodus 12:35-36), guides them (see Exodus 13:21-22), feeds them (see Exodus 16:1-17:7) protects them (see Exodus 14:10-29; 17:8-16), teaches them (see Exodus 20:1-17; 21:1-23:33), and lives with them (see Exodus 25:8; 40:34-38).

In short, He is a Father to them (see Hosea 11:1).

It's not that He is a Father only to Israel. Israel is His first-born not His only son. God is the God of all the nations - and He wants to be a father to all the other nations, too. But Israel is His first-born, His pride and joy. Israel is called out of Egypt to show the other nations the way to live as His children.

But Israel - and its leader - must be righteous before it can preach righteousness to the other nations. That is what's going on in that strange scene before the showdown with Pharaoh - where God tries to kill Moses (see Exodus 4:24-26).

God is serious about His covenant, no one can be exempt from its provisions. Moses was in violation of the covenant with Abraham. His son, Gershom, hadn't been circumcised as God had commanded (see Genesis 17:9-14). Moses' wife, Zipporah, takes matters into her own hands and performs the circumcision, and Moses' life is again saved.

c. Plaguing Pharaoh

Pharaoh is punished, his nation put under judgment, for failing to respect the rights of God's first-born son.

Pharaoh makes the big mistake of mocking the power of the Moses' God (see Exodus 5:2). In the ten plagues God visits upon him, He both punishes Pharaoh and executes judgment on the Egyptians' many gods (see Exodus 12:12; Numbers 33:4):

* The Egyptian Nile god, Hapi, is rebuked by the plague of blood on the Nile (see Exodus 7:14-25).

* Heket, the frog goddess, is mocked by the plague of frogs (see Exodus 8:1-15).

* The bull god, Apis, and the cow goddess Hathor, are reviled by the plague on the livestock (see Exodus 9:1-7).

* And the plague of darkness is a rebuke to the sun god, Re (see Exodus 10:21-23).

Scholars believe that each of the plagues can be linked to specific Egyptian deities. Even the final plague that strikes the first-born of Egypt can also be seen as an attack on the political gods of Egypt, because Pharaoh was worshipped as divine and his sons were "divinized" in special ceremonies.

By these divine actions, worked through Moses, God was demonstrating His power - establishing that Israel's God is "a deity great beyond any other" (see Exodus 18:11; 9:16; 11:9).

d. The Passover and 'Our Paschal Lamb'

Israel's first-born is "passed over" in the last plague, spared the fate of Egypt's first-born.

We have to read the story of the Passover carefully. This story has a great influence on the shape and the meaning of the rest of the Old Testament. It's also vitally important for understanding Catholic beliefs about the meaning of the Cross, the salvation won for us on the Cross, and the memorial of our salvation that we celebrate in the Mass.

The Passover story is one of the Old Testament's defining dramas. But more than that it points us ahead to the defining drama of all salvation history - the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross.

Since the earliest days, the Church has understood the Crucifixion and Resurrection as "the Lord's Passover" (see The Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 557-559, 1174,1337,1364,1402). The Eucharist, in turn, is the memorial of the Lord's Passover.

That's why during the Mass the priest presents the consecrated Host to us and declares: "This is the Lamb of God...Happy are those who are called to His supper." The Liturgy is yoking together two New Testament passages (see John 1:29; Revelation 19:9). But what made the New Testament writers talk about Jesus this way in the first place? The answer is the Passover story.

The Church's ancient belief is based on the interpretation of the Exodus story that begins with Jesus and the New Testament writers.

Let's read ahead to John's account of the Crucifixion (see John 19). As Christ is condemned, John notes that it was the "preparation day for Passover, and it was about noon." Why this detail? Because that was the precise moment when Israel's priests slaughtered the lambs for the Passover meal (see John 19:14).

Later, the mocking soldiers give Jesus a sponge soaked in wine. They raise it to him on a "hyssop branch." That's the same kind of branch the Israelites are instructed to use to daub their door posts with the blood of the Passover lamb (see John 19:29; Exodus 12:22).

And why don't the soldier's break Jesus' legs (see John 19:33,36)? John explains that with a quote from Exodus, telling us that it was because the legs of the Passover lambs weren't to be broken (see Exodus 12:46; Numbers 9:12; Psalm 34:21).

There are more parallels that we could draw in John's Gospel and in the other Gospel accounts. The Crucifixion is presented in the New Testament as a Passover sacrifice - in which Jesus is both the unblemished Lamb, and the High Priest who offers the Lamb in sacrifice. For the New Testament writers, what we're reading about here in Exodus is a sign that points us to Jesus.

In the Passover, Israel was spared by the blood of an unblemished sacrificial lamb painted on their door posts. The lamb dies instead of the first-born, is sacrificed so that the people could live (see Exodus 12:1-23,27). It is the same with the Lord's Passover, the Cross and Resurrection. The Lamb of God dies so that the people of God might live, saved by "the blood of the Lamb" (see Revelation 7:14; 12:11; 5:12).

"For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed," St. Paul says (see 1 Corinthians 5:7). On the Cross, St. Peter tells us, Jesus was "a spotless unblemished Lamb." By His "Precious Blood" we are "ransomed" from captivity to sin and death (see 1 Peter 1:18-19).

That's what's going on here in Exodus. The first-born sons and daughters of God are being "ransomed" or "redeemed" - bought out of captivity and slavery (see Exodus 6:6; 15:13; Psalm 69:18; Isaiah 44:24; Genesis 48:10).

The Israelites were instructed to remember the first Passover by each year eating the Passover lamb's "roasted flesh with unleavened bread." And in His last supper, eaten during Passover, Jesus instructs His followers to remember His Passover in the Eucharist, where we eat His flesh and drink His blood (see John 6:53-58).


Notes: For significance of “unleavened bread” see 1 Corinthians 5:6-8

III. Study Questions for Lesson 06

1. What are some of the parallels between the life of Moses and the life of Christ?

2. What covenant is God being "mindful" of in delivering Israel from bondage in Egypt?

3. What is the name of God revealed to Moses? Mention scripture verse.

4. How is God portrayed in Exodus as a loving Father of His first-born son, Israel?

5. Why is the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus called "the Lord's Passover"? Why is Lord's Passover like the Passover of Israel in Exodus?

6. Why did God demand that the firstborn be set apart or redeemed?



For prayer and reflection:

Read Our Lord's discourse on the Bread of Life (see John 6:27-59) and then reread the Exodus story of the manna (see Exodus 16:1-5; 9-15). Ask in your prayer to understand more fully the meaning of our Lord's words: "Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this Bread will live forever."




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