GYC 2015: Called. Chosen. Faithful.

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Egypt, the Exodus & Moses' Quest for God's Destiny

Michael Hasel

1. The Big Question: Who are You?

This message was presented at the GYC 2015 conference called Chosen Faithful in Louisville, Kentucky.

For other resources like this, visit us online at www.gycweb.org.

Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for your presence here today.

We thank you for your love for each 1 of us, and we thank you for the opportunity to be here at GYC this year.

It's a time to draw closer to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

And so we pray, Lord, that Your Holy Spirit would be present in this place, not only in this room, but in all the rooms where the seminars are taking place and where interactions are taking place in the hallway, that we might leave this place reinvigorated, refocused with a mission to finish the work that you have called us to.

I want to go over with you what we're going to be doing during the next 6 presentations.

And I'm going to be doing that in a kind of systematic way here.

I've divided, of course, this seminar up into 6 parts.

Recently, about a half a year ago or so, I finished a commentary on the book of Exodus.

For those of you who don't know what a commentary is, it's when you delve into a book very deeply and you write about it passage by passage by passage all the way through.

I did this for the Andrews Study Commentary that will be a companion to the Andrews Study Bible.

Some of you may have an Andrews Study Bible already and this is the companion 1 volume commentary that will be going with that and I wrote on the book of Exodus and it was a wonderful experience to delve deeply into a book of the Bible to read what many others have written about it over the centuries and to be able to have that kind of intense study which hopefully will benefit the church for years to come.

And it was also a humbling experience to go through the life of Moses and to simply experience what the Israelites went through during that exodus.

And of course, the exodus only begins in the book of Exodus, and it continues to be narrated and dealt with all the way through the book of Deuteronomy.

So we're going to touch during this seminar on Exodus, on Genesis, and the books of Moses, the Torah, the first 5 books of the Bible.

And we're going to look at that event in history.

I'm a trained archaeologist and an Egyptologist.

I tell students sometimes that I work in 3 worlds.

And that's kind of a very unusual combination.

But I studied ancient Near Eastern archaeology at the University of Arizona for my PhD.

And so this is an area that I've worked at for many years.

I've worked in the Middle East for 30 years now.

I have excavated about 10 different sites, 11 actually, in the Middle East, in Cyprus, in Jordan, in Israel primarily.

But my other major focus is Egyptology, and in my doctoral dissertation I worked on the interaction between Egypt and Canaan during the Late Bronze Age, which is the time period that the Exodus took place.

I didn't focus specifically on the Exodus, but I looked at the background of all of that and looked at biblical texts and primarily Egyptian texts and how they related to that period.

So you're going to hear some of that information today, and I've expanded off of that over the last 20 years in other publications on Egyptology as well.

And then the third area that I'm passionate, most passionate about is the Bible and biblical studies.

I teach Hebrew at Southern Adventist University.

We have an Institute of Archaeology there.

And these are areas that I think the Bible can be so greatly enriched when we look at the history that that has been placed in.

I also want to say that last year at GYC in Phoenix, I gave a three-part series, a seminar or breakout on biblical interpretation and modernism and post-modernism and the impact on the historical reliability of the Bible.

And that is kind of a backdrop to what I'm going to be presenting during this seminar this year.

So if you want to hear the foundation for what I'm going to be presenting here, listen to those recordings.

All of these are going to be recorded along here as well, and you'll have them available to you through the GYC website in the future.

I may make reference sometimes to some interpretations of Exodus that are out there, modernist and postmodernist interpretations, but the background to all of that was presented last year.

So with that, let me just go into the subject matter for today.

Today, this morning, our first topic is the big question, who are you?

And it's the question that Moses was asking himself on a regular basis.

We're going to look at prophecy because I believe that prophecy and history are uniquely and importantly intertwined.

And we as Seventh-day Adventists have a unique understanding, not a unique understanding, but have expanded on the Protestant Reformation understanding of a historicist interpretation of prophecy where we look at prophecy in relationship to history.

And those 2 elements are very, very important.

And I believe today, and I spoke on this last year, today those 2 areas of prophecy and history, as it relates to the Bible, are under increasing attack in our world.

And we need to know where we stand in the big picture, not only of Christianity, but of global history and politics today.

I'm not going to get into politics, of course, here, but we're going to look at prophecy.

We're going to look at the history of Egypt and we're going to look at the destiny that God had planned for Moses and the destiny that others had planned for Moses and the conflict that that caused, that must have caused, in Moses' mind as he grew up in ancient Egypt.

So we're going to look this morning at the setting for the Exodus in history.

Then our next presentation this morning is a fascinating study on the origin of evil, and we're going to look at the biblical understanding of that, and then look at the ancient Egyptian understanding of the origin of evil, of the origin of their ideology, their religion, their religious practices, which was highly spiritualistic, which was steeped in a philosophy that is still very much persistent today.

I believe that the religion of the serpent that we find in Genesis chapter 3, when he appears to Eve at the tree of knowledge of good and evil, that that persists even today.

And the roots of many of the philosophical ideas in the world religions that we have today and in the popular culture can be traced all the way back to ancient Egypt.

And we're going to look at that in connection.

So that's the next presentation that we will have.

That's from a lintel stone at the most ancient pyramid at Saqqara, the first pyramid ever built in Egypt in the first part of Egypt's history.

So the choice for Moses, would he be an Egyptian god or God's servant?

The third presentation this afternoon will be on the wilderness and the burning bush, how Moses had to retrain himself in the great scope of things.

And God actually had to retrain him during that wilderness experience of 40 years, and we're gonna gain some important lessons.

We're gonna go into the book of Genesis and look at how Moses combated the concept of creation or the concept of the cosmology idea of the ancient Egyptians when he wrote under inspiration the book of Genesis during that period in the wilderness as Ellen White tells us.

And how Moses in exile was retrained and equipped for the greatest task that he would ever encounter in his life, not to be Pharaoh of Egypt, but to be a leader of God's people.

And there's going to be important lessons for us there as well.

The fourth presentation this afternoon is the making of an empire.

Because you see, when we make decisions for God, Satan doesn't give up in pursuing us.

In fact, many times he persists even more deeply in his pursuit of us.

And we're going to talk about how the pharaoh of Egypt, I believe, went after Moses in a major way, even during that wilderness experience that God had for him and how he built up an empire.

And I just am in the process of writing a book about that military expansion and will share some insights into that experience.

Finally, the deliverance and the exodus, of course, that's where it's all leading towards.

We're going to look at the plagues, which was a decreation of ancient Egypt.

These were literal plagues that God placed there and what the meanings of those plagues were, how they were directed against the gods of ancient Egypt, the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea, the retraining of Israel, and their dependence on the God of Heaven.

Because I believe that these are lessons that we can gain for our journey to the Promised Land.

We're all heading there and the book of Exodus through the book of Deuteronomy shares with us important insights in how God wants to train this generation to meet Jesus when He comes in the clouds of heaven.

Finally we're going to focus in our last presentation on Sabbath afternoon on the sanctuary and worship.

This is the crucial element that we as a church are to focus on and to proclaim to the world.

What does it mean to have Jesus in the heavenly sanctuary today pleading on our behalf.

How is that rooted in the sanctuary, the wilderness sanctuary in Exodus and God's plan for our future.

So we're going to look during this six-part series on astonishing discoveries and that unlock mysteries centuries old in Egypt.

And hopefully we will gain some important insights for our lives as we go into that.

I'm going to try this again and see if it works.

When we think about the land of the Nile, we have to think about Egypt because it was called by Herodotus, the great Greek historian who lived during the time of Esther.

If you don't have the Nile, you don't have Egypt.

The Nile is the longest river in the world.

I was there just a year and a half ago in Tanzania, in Rwanda, in Burundi.

2. The Seduction of Power, the Serpent’s Force, & Egypt

So, we're going to get started because we ran out of time.

I was almost done with the last presentation and you know this is what happens when preachers preach.

Sometimes they get carried away a little bit in some details.

We could spend so much more details on some of the things that I'm talking about here.

I mean, there could be a whole lecture on the pyramids, a whole lecture on many of the things that we're talking about.

Online through GYC's website, and I don't know the exact address and everything, but there are resources there for you for this seminar.

I'm not passing them out here, but I have a number of publications that I have worked on over the years.

If you want more detail and other publications that other scholars have written on this, if you want more detail on what we're talking about here and want to have the scientific evidence and all the footnotes and everything to go along with it, please go to those resources online.

Some of them will be pretty technical, to be honest with you.

I've got some scientific articles in there, others, But many of you are very educated and I think that you can do well in looking through that.

Let's have a word of prayer before we begin this second seminar.

Heavenly Father, we are tracing the history of Moses and the Israelites as they have been in Egypt as slaves, as they leave Egypt, at the environment that they're in.

And Lord, what we're interested in this seminar is this, not only to ground the Bible in history as your Word, but also to understand the challenges that Moses and the Israelites were up against by understanding the ancient world of the Egyptians and to understand those challenges in the light of what we're facing today because they have not changed.

The same religious intensity that Moses faced, the same deceptions that Satan has for us, has not changed over time.

So what we're wanting to do is glean insights from the world of the Bible, from the world of ancient Egypt, from those first 5 books of Moses and to apply those to our lives today.

And we ask your Holy Spirit to be present here as we do that in Jesus' name.

So we had just gotten through a bit of the, if you've joined us, we're tracing the history of Moses and how he might have fit into Egyptian history.

And we're doing that by looking at the 18th dynasty, by looking at biblical chronology, and then trying to figure out from biblical chronology where Moses fits in to that.

Because as we mentioned in the previous seminar, there is no extra biblical evidence from Egypt or any...

And somebody asked me in the break, what about other countries?

There's no extra biblical evidence that we know of currently for the Exodus outside of the Bible.

The Egyptians don't record it, and I explained why in the previous seminar.

There's another explanation I want to share here with you.

We have only been working in the Middle East for 150 years.

I say only because we're dealing with histories here that are thousands of years long.

Egypt is 1 of the most excavated countries in the world.

Israel's 1 of the most excavated countries in the world.

But I can tell you this, having worked there for 30 years, We have barely scratched the surface.

I wish I had time to talk about some of the excavations that we're conducting right now with Southern Adventist University.

We're only barely scratching the surface.

We spend thousands of dollars a year going over there.

We have the largest excavation, by the way, right now.

Southern and the Hebrew University have teamed up for the largest excavation in the Middle East.

We've been conducting it for the last several years.

If you guys are interested in going, see me.

Julie went just a few years ago, and it is an amazing experience.

Talk to her if you want to know what it's like.

You can talk to them, too, if you want to know what life on a dig is like.

So anyway, there's some seats in the front here if some of you still need seats, I think.

There's a couple here in the very front row if you want to get up close.

I tell my students the front row seats are the A student seats, okay?

Yeah, there's some hands raised over here for more seats as well.

So we've barely scratched the surface, so we don't know when something is going to turn up.

Now the other thing that's frustrating for me as a historian and archaeologist is that Moses in the Bible doesn't give us the name of the Pharaoh.

He doesn't give us the name of the princess that rescued Moses, that rescued him.

So what we're doing is we're going back in history, looking at how Egyptian history lines up with the biblical history, and then we're making suggestions today as to who the pharaoh of the Exodus might have been, who the queen.

And we started by saying that there was a huge dynastic crisis, a huge dynastic crisis that festered over 3 generations, from Thutmose I, who did not have a male heir, to had Shepsut and her husband Thutmose II did not produce a male heir, so he had to marry a secondary wife, Iset, who produced Thutmose III.

But when Thutmose II died, remember we had the picture of his mummy up there, when Thutmose II died, the big question was who was going to be king?

Because Thutmose III was 2 or 3 years old.

Because his father only was 2 or 3 years in office.

And you don't want a three-year-old to be king of the greatest empire in the world at that time.

Hatshepsut asserts her dominance and becomes the first female pharaoh of Egypt.

Unheard of in Egyptian history, but she does it carefully.

She goes into a co-regency, you know what that is, where she and Thutmose III are equally king over Egypt.

She's running the country with who is Thutmose III to her.

If she's the half-brother to Thutmose II, what is she to him?

In Egypt, it was not unusual for people to marry their brothers to maintain the dynasty.

By the way, this happened in Europe too in the Middle Ages, right?

And later on, what did they do to solidify power and to maintain power?

3. The Wilderness, the Training, & the Eternally Burning Bush

So let's begin with a word of prayer and ask the Lord to be with us.

Thank you for the opportunity we have at the end of a year and the beginning of a new year to learn about you, to learn about your plan for our lives, to learn about just the amazing, amazing destiny that You have for each 1 of us.

We've been exploring the destiny of Moses, the destiny that his adoptive parents in Egypt wanted for him, and what God wanted for him, and the decisions that He was facing.

And today we're going to continue that this afternoon as we look at His life and the decisions that He made.

And so Lord, I just pray that You would be with each attendee here and those that will be listening later, that we find God's destiny for us in our lives, because You have a destiny for each 1 of us.

So our topic this afternoon for this seminar breakout is the wilderness training and the eternally burning bush.

I don't know if it was quite eternal, but at least it was burning.

We're going to focus on Moses and relying on self and how God had to retrain him in the wilderness.

We're going to talk a bit about the pursuit, although that's going to be more in the next session, and Moses in exile.

And we're focusing on how God used the wilderness experience to retrain Moses for the greatest task that he could ever imagine.

And I think that there's some good insights for us today as we move into that as well.

The glories of ancient Egypt surrounded Moses throughout his upbringing.

The first 12 years, as we mentioned, according to the spirit of prophecy, he spent at home with his biological parents.

And his mother, Jacobet, raised him faithfully, teaching him the principles of the Lord.

Now, we have to remind ourselves sometimes that the Scriptures, the written Scriptures that we rely on today were not present then.

Because Moses was the first writer of the first 5 books of the Bible.

And when He was growing up until the age, until those books were written.

And we're going to talk about that specifically today in this seminar.

So where did this teaching of the God of heaven come from?

It came from oral tradition that was handed down and taught to the children generation by generation by generation.

And by the way, even though we have the Bible today, that is still our obligation as parents, and it is still our obligation as a church today, so that every generation can understand the plan of salvation, can understand God's destiny for His people, and not only for His people, but the people of the whole world that He died for.

Moses was surrounded after the age of 12 until the age of 40.

As he grew up, actually as he was instituted into the world of the palace, he grew up with the glories of Egypt.

He was surrounded with the wealth of Egypt.

And I don't think we quite understand the enormity of that wealth.

I didn't get into the treasures of King Tut and tell the story of that discovery, but we have to remind ourselves that the tomb of King Tut, when it was discovered in 1922, was the smallest tomb in the Valley of the Kings.

The tomb of Thutmose III that I shared with you that the lights went out, that is 1 of the larger tombs but it's not the largest tomb.

These tombs were filled with the treasures of Egypt.

They were filled with the treasures of Egypt.

He was surrounded by incredible monuments, incredible architecture.

And all of this had an influence on his mind.

You see, no matter what situation we're in, that situation, that environment has an influence on our mind.

And we need to be cognizant of that and make wise decisions.

Sometimes we can't help what situation we're in.

Moses was destined by God to be in the situation in Egypt, wasn't he?

God arranged for him to be rescued from the Nile River by the princess that is unnamed but which we believe might have been Hatshepsut.

Let me read to you what Patriarchs and Prophets on page 248 says.

Moses had been learning much that he must, what?

Unlearn the influences that had surrounded him in Egypt, the love of his foster mother, his own high position as the king's grandson, the dissipation on every hand, " you know what that means.

He had servants to serve every want and every desire that he might have had.

The refinement, the subtlety, and the mysticism of false religion, the splendor of idolatrous worship, as we discussed in our last hour together.

The solemn grandeur of architecture and sculpture all had left deep impressions upon his developing mind.

Remember, he went there when he was 12 years of age and had molded to some extent his habits and character.

We don't think about that sometimes when we think about Moses, but he was influenced by his environment.

Great Controversy, page 555 says this, it is a law both of the intellect and the spiritual nature that by beholding, we become what?

Do you know how many times Ellen White in her writings says, this by beholding we become changed?

I just was interested in that the other day when I was working on this.

According to what I found on the database from the Ellen G.

When somebody repeats something that many times, when a prophet repeats something that many times, you think it has some importance for us?

That means that what we behold, let's put it in vernacular today, what we look at, what we watch, what we surround ourselves with has a huge influence on who we become.

The mind gradually adapts itself to the subjects upon which it is allowed to dwell.

It becomes assimilated to that which it is accustomed to love and reverence.

The grace of God alone has power to exalt man.

Left to himself, his course must inevitably be, " what?

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Series

Egypt, the Exodus & Moses' Quest for God's Destiny

6. The Last Word from Moses

Transcript

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