THE LIVES OF THE PATRIARCHS #20 | THE LIFE OF MOSES #2
Pastor Christopher Choo
Lesson 3701
THE LIVES OF THE PATRIARCHS #20
THE LIFE OF MOSES #2
THE FAITH OF THE TWO MIDWIVES: SHIPHRAH AND PUAH
The birth of Moses was preceded by the testimony of the faith of two midwives who feared God more than Pharoah.
Pharaoh’s plan to weaken the Israelites through harsh rule and forced labor has the opposite of its intended effect; in fact, “the more they were oppressed, the more they increased and spread out so that the [Egyptians] came to dread the Israelites” (Exodus 1:12).
In a desperate attempt to cut off this astonishing capacity to multiply, the pharaoh approaches Shiphra and Puah, two Hebrew midwives...
(16) saying, “When you deliver the Hebrew women, look at the birth stool: if it is a boy, kill him; if it is a girl, let her live.”
(17) The midwives, fearing God, did not do as the king of Egypt had told them; they let the boys live.
(18) So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this thing, letting the boys live?”
(19) The midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women: they are vigorous. Before the midwife can come to them, they have given birth.”
(20) And God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and increased greatly.
(21) And because the midwives feared God, He established households for them.
It may look like a minor event. But in the context of the Exodus, the faith of these two women had major prophetic consequences.
Significantly, the Book of Exodus begins with an overt act of political defiance by there two extraordinary women who are themselves serving the enslaved Israelites.
Yet these women, seemingly in a subservient position to a subservient people, enter into a high-stakes power play with the king of the ruling nation!
This fact, in and of itself, sets the stage for the eventual and ultimate defiance of Pharaoh by the Israelites themselves.
In their refusal to obey Pharaoh, they assume a key role in the collective birthing of the people of Israel.
Fearing God rather than the political authority of the day, Shiphrah and Puah are rewarded for their insistence on life rather than death.
They ushered in the birth of the generation that would leave Egypt after 400 years.
Their faith in God was rewarded with established households during their earthly existence but in the spiritual, their life-or-death faith endures as a lasting memorial to their simple names of Shiphrah and Puah.
