Week 17 Discussion Guide: Slavery and Deliverance

Opening

Begin by reciting this week’s memory verse together:

“God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM.’ And he said, ‘Say this to the people of Israel: “I AM has sent me to you.”’” – Exodus 3:14 (ESV)

Think about a moment when you were asked to do something you felt completely unqualified for – a task, a conversation, a responsibility that was clearly beyond your ability. What was your first instinct? To resist? To bargain? To run? Now think about what happened when you finally said yes. Hold that memory as we discuss a reluctant shepherd, a burning bush, and a God whose name refuses to be contained.

Review: The Big Picture

This week we crossed from Genesis into Exodus – from a coffin in Egypt to a nation in chains. Four hundred years of silence have passed between the books, and everything has inverted. The seventy souls who descended as honored guests have become slave labor for a Pharaoh “who did not know Joseph” (Exodus 1:8). The more they are oppressed, the more they multiply – the Abrahamic promise operating under impossible conditions. A child is hidden in a basket on the Nile – tevah, the same word used for Noah’s ark – drawn out by the daughter of the very king who ordered his drowning. Moses grows up in the palace, commits a murder, flees to Midian, and spends forty years shepherding someone else’s sheep. Then, at eighty years old, he encounters God in a bush that burns without being consumed and hears a name that shatters every category: ehyeh asher ehyeh – “I AM WHO I AM.” God descends not to explain himself but to deliver his people. And the deliverer he chooses is a man with five objections and no confidence.

The week ends with Moses returning to Egypt, carrying a name and a mission, while the God who spoke from the fire prepares to confront the empire that holds his people captive.

Discussion Questions

Day 1: Slavery – A New Pharaoh and a Multiplying People (Exodus 1:1-22)

1. Oppression and Multiplication. “The more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad” (1:12). Pharaoh’s strategy to suppress Israel produces the opposite of its intended effect. Where have you seen God’s purposes advance precisely through the resistance meant to stop them? What does this pattern suggest about the relationship between human opposition and divine faithfulness?

2. The Courage of the Midwives. Shiphrah and Puah defy Pharaoh’s order to kill Hebrew boys – the first recorded act of civil disobedience in Scripture. “The midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them” (1:17). What does it mean to fear God more than a human authority? When is disobedience to earthly power an act of faithfulness rather than rebellion?

Day 2: Moses – Basket, Palace, Murder, Exile (Exodus 2:1-25)

1. The Tevah on the Nile. Moses’ basket is called a tevah – the same word used for Noah’s ark. Both are instruments of salvation through water, both designed by God’s providence, both preserving the life through whom God’s purposes will advance. What does this deliberate verbal echo reveal about how God works across the centuries? How does it shape the way you understand the “small” providences in your own story?

2. Premature Deliverance. Moses kills an Egyptian and tries to position himself as Israel’s deliverer – and is immediately rejected: “Who made you a prince and a judge over us?” (2:14). His first attempt at rescue fails because the timing is his own, not God’s. How does the difference between God’s timing and our urgency show up in your own life? What did the forty years in Midian accomplish that the palace could not?

Day 3: The Burning Bush – “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:1-22)

1. Fire That Does Not Consume. The bush burns but is not consumed – fire inhabiting the ordinary without destroying it. This is a revelation not merely of power but of how God intends to dwell with his people: present, blazing with holiness, yet not annihilating what he touches. How does this image shape the way you think about God’s presence in your own life? Is his holiness something that destroys or something that transforms?

2. The Name That Refuses Containment. Ehyeh asher ehyeh – “I AM WHO I AM” – is not a title derived from function or relationship. It is an assertion of absolute, self-existent being. God does not say “I am the God who creates” or “I am the God who saves.” He says, simply, “I AM.” What is lost when we reduce God to his benefits – what he does for us – rather than resting in who he simply is? How does this name challenge the way you pray?

3. Four Verbs. God says, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people… and have heard their cry… I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them” (3:7-8). Seen, heard, known, come down. The God who names himself I AM is not a distant observer. He enters the place of suffering. How do these four verbs reshape your understanding of what God does with human pain? How do they anticipate the incarnation?

Day 4: Objections and Signs (Exodus 4:1-17)

1. Five Objections, One Answer. Moses offers five reasons why he cannot go: Who am I? What is your name? They will not believe me. I am not eloquent. Please send someone else. God answers each one – not by building up Moses but by revealing himself. What does this pattern teach us about the nature of calling? Is God interested in our qualifications, or in something else entirely?

2. The Signs and Their Logic. The staff becomes a serpent. The hand turns leprous and is restored. Water from the Nile becomes blood on dry ground. These are not arbitrary miracles – they are credentials of the sender, not the sent. Why does God authenticate his messenger through signs of judgment and restoration rather than through signs of personal power? What do these signs anticipate about the plagues to come?

Day 5: The Return to Egypt (Exodus 4:18-31)

1. The Circumcision Crisis. On the way to Egypt, God “met him and sought to put him to death” (4:24) – a terrifying and mysterious episode resolved only when Zipporah circumcises their son. The God who commissions Moses nearly kills him for neglecting the covenant sign. What does this disturbing scene reveal about the seriousness with which God treats his own covenant requirements? Why must the messenger be obedient before he can confront Pharaoh?

2. The People Believe. When Aaron speaks the words and performs the signs, “the people believed; and when they heard that the LORD had visited the people of Israel and that he had seen their affliction, they bowed their heads and worshiped” (4:31). After four hundred years of silence, the response is not skepticism but worship. What does it take for a suffering people to believe that God has seen them? What sustains faith through centuries of unanswered prayer?

Synthesis

1. Christ in the Bush. Jesus claims the divine name as his own: “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). The response is immediate – they pick up stones. To say ego eimi is to stand in the burning bush and speak with the voice that spoke to Moses. How does the connection between Exodus 3:14 and John 8:58 shape the way you understand who Jesus is? What does it mean that the God who said “I have come down to deliver” eventually came down all the way – to a manger, to a cross, to a grave?

2. The Reluctant Deliverer and the Pattern of Grace. Moses is not chosen for his eloquence or his courage. He is chosen because God’s purposes do not depend on human qualification. The same pattern recurs throughout Scripture: Gideon threshes wheat in hiding, Jeremiah protests that he is too young, Peter denies Christ three times and is still commissioned to feed his sheep. What does this pattern reveal about how God works? How does it free you from the pressure to be “enough” before God can use you?

Going Deeper: Connections Across the Week

• The Tevah Pattern. The word tevah appears only twice in the Hebrew Bible – for Noah’s ark and for Moses’ basket. Both times, God preserves a life through water in a vessel sealed against death. Both times, the one preserved becomes the instrument of a new beginning. Noah carried creation through the flood. Moses will carry Israel through the sea. The pattern is not coincidental. It is architectural – God building a theology of salvation through water that will culminate in the waters of baptism, where death and new life meet in the same moment. Trace this thread from Genesis 6 to Exodus 2 to the Red Sea to Romans 6:3-4. What does water mean in the grammar of God’s saving work?

• Silence and Sovereignty. Four hundred years pass between Genesis 50 and Exodus 1 – four centuries of divine silence during which the promise seems dead and the people are enslaved. Yet the text says God “remembered his covenant” (Exodus 2:24), using the Hebrew zakar, which is never mere recollection but the moment when memory becomes action. The silence was not absence. It was preparation. How does this reframe your understanding of seasons in your own life when God seems silent? What is the difference between a God who has forgotten and a God who has not yet acted?

• Descent as the Shape of Salvation. God’s self-description at the bush – “I have come down to deliver” – establishes a pattern that runs through the entire biblical narrative. God does not save from a distance. He enters. He descends into the darkness, the slavery, the suffering. The incarnation is not a departure from this pattern but its fulfillment: “Though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:6-7). The God who came down to Egypt will come down further still – to a stable, to a cross, to a tomb. What does it mean that the shape of divine salvation is always downward?

Application

• Personal: Moses spent forty years in the wilderness before God called him – forty years of obscurity, tending someone else’s sheep, far from the palace and far from the slaves. If you are in a season of waiting, hiddenness, or preparation that feels purposeless, consider that God may be doing in you what the wilderness did in Moses: stripping away self-reliance so that when the call comes, you know it depends on I AM, not on you. Bring your restlessness to God this week and ask him what he is forming in the silence.

• Relational: Shiphrah and Puah risked their lives to protect the vulnerable. Their courage was quiet, unglamorous, and effective – midwives defying an empire. Is there someone in your life, your community, or your world who is vulnerable and needs someone to act on their behalf? Courage does not require a platform. It requires fearing God more than fearing consequences.

• Formational: Exodus 3:14 is a verse to live inside, not merely to memorize. Write the name “I AM” somewhere you will see it this week. Each time you encounter it, let it interrupt your self-sufficiency. The God who spoke from the fire does not need your qualifications. He needs your availability. Practice responding to the day’s demands not with “I am not enough” but with “I AM is with me.”

Closing Prayer

Close your time together by praying through Exodus 3:14. Praise the God who names himself I AM – the uncaused, self-existent, uncontainable God who needs nothing yet chooses to deliver everything. Thank him that four hundred years of silence did not mean four hundred years of absence. Confess the places where you have resisted his call because you felt unqualified, afraid, or forgotten. Ask him to give you the faith of Moses – not the confidence of a hero but the obedience of a man who said yes despite five reasons to say no. Pray that the God who came down to deliver Israel would come down into whatever bondage holds your heart captive, and that the fire of his presence would transform you without consuming you.

Looking Ahead

Next week the confrontation begins. Moses stands before Pharaoh: “Let my people go.” Pharaoh refuses. And God responds with ten plagues that systematically dismantle the gods of Egypt – blood, frogs, gnats, flies, pestilence, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and the death of every firstborn. But before the final plague falls, God institutes a meal: an unblemished lamb, blood on the doorpost, a family eating in haste. The Passover is coming – and with it, the Old Testament’s most detailed portrait of the sacrifice that will save the world.