GYC 2015: Called. Chosen. Faithful.

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

Michael Hasel

Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

4. The Deliverance, the Escape, & the Power of the Word

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.

We've been journeying through the book of Exodus and we're going to take a little hiatus from Exodus itself today, just a little hiatus to talk about the Egyptian empire and what this was about.

And I'm going to throw something out that I'm not the first to do this.

But it's an interesting question because I think that when God calls us into something, Satan doesn't always let up his attacks against us.

In fact, there's good evidence that he can even intensify those attacks as we have committed ourselves to the work of God.

And as Moses is being retrained in the wilderness during these 40 years, and as he's writing the book of Genesis, and of course he's married now, and he has children, God provides incredibly for the life of Moses during that time period and he's out with his sheep and flocks.

So that's our question that we're kind of moving back to Egypt and then we'll move forward to Moses tomorrow morning at 845 and continue on with that journey.

Tomorrow morning will be the Exodus and then on Sabbath we're going to be talking about the sanctuary.

We're going to be talking about the giving of the law and the 10 Commandments and some of the important implications of that for today.

So I'm going to share with you in this presentation some work that I have been involved with for many years now.

And I mentioned in my first seminar, I kind of find myself sometimes in 3 different spheres of scholarship.

1 is in biblical studies, which I'm very passionate about.

And I teach Hebrew at Southern Adventist University and also teach biblical studies classes there, Old Testament classes.

And then I also am involved in archaeology in Israel and have been for many years.

I direct an excavation in Israel currently.

And by the way, if any of you are ever interested in going on an archeological excavation project, we sponsor a project every summer, generally speaking, unless something causes that not to happen, but we haven't been in that situation for a while.

And so if you're interested this coming summer on going on a dig or on being involved in a project like that, see me afterwards or contact me at Southern Adventist University by email.

I'm happy to talk with you further about that.

We are currently directing the largest excavation in the Middle East at the site of Lachish, the second most important city in Judah after Jerusalem.

I spoke about Lachish I think maybe last year a little bit.

I've spoken at a number of different venues on it.

And then my final area that I have spent many years on is in the area of Egyptology, because in my dissertation, I was very interested in the interaction between Egypt and Canaan during the time of the Exodus.

And maybe I'll just share a story with you here.

I went to a very prestigious archaeology program at the University of Arizona.

It was the largest program in Near Eastern Archaeology in North America at that time.

There were 2 major institutions in archaeology in that field, and it's a narrow field, so it's not like medicine where you have medical schools all over the country.

When we get together for professional meetings, there are maybe 600 or 700 people there, and it's pretty much everybody in the field that comes together.

So it's not like when you go to a cardiology conference or you go to a big conference and there's thousands and thousands of people.

But I went to a program which was at a state university, at the University of Arizona, and it was a tough, tough program.

I talked a little bit about that last year in my seminar, some of the challenges that I faced there as a Christian going through a very secular PhD program.

When we are faithful to Him, He is faithful to us.

And I tell you, it was a growing experience for me spiritually, academically.

We just got done talking a little about the Sabbath, didn't we?

My students, my fellow colleagues would come to me and say, Michael, how do you do it not studying?

I mean, Saturday is when we do all the studying to get ready for the rest of the week.

Oh, I would tell them I would go hiking up in the canyons and the mountains there surrounding Tucson, Arizona.

I was involved with Pathfinders and we were doing stuff all the time.

But, you know, so they'd ask me about that and I'd respond to them, I'd say, how do you do it without a day of rest?

The Sabbath was such a blessing to me and has been throughout my life during the course of my life.

The time of rest, the time away with God, the time to be out in nature with God was just such a wonderful respite from all the academic grind that you find during the week.

1 day it came time for my comprehensive exams, and my professors met with me and asked me questions for about 2 hours.

That's what happens orally after you write on specific questions that they give you.

And when I passed those exams, it came time to talk about a dissertation topic.

And my major professor, William Deaver, who is still today the foremost Near Eastern Archaeologist in North America, he turned 82 just last month, He said, Michael, he says the biggest, biggest issue, this was now 1994, he said the biggest issue in our field today is the issue of the Exodus and the issue of where did Israel come from?

Now you have to understand, my professors didn't believe in an Exodus.

They didn't believe that that event took place.

So if you reject the biblical story of this people coming into existence, how?

So Scholars have been trying to reconstruct their origin based on sociological and anthropological models of other people's and their origins.

And it has been, you know, sometimes I think that scholars have a great time because if they come out with new ideas, they can publish a book or an article and become very famous sometimes.

And so you have a lot of discussion about, a lot of ink that has been, and years that have been spent by scholars trying to solve this question when all they need to do is go to the Word of God and see what is there.

And I thought to myself, how am I going to write on the topic of the Exodus in this program?

And it was a crisis for me, a crisis of how I felt a little bit like Moses, you know, not quite the same level, don't get me wrong.

I wasn't destined to be king of anything, okay?

But what was I going to do in this program now?

This is the final step of the process, what was I going to do?

So I remember going home and I remember praying about it.

That's something similar to Moses, isn't it?

Walking out in the Sonora Desert and praying and asking the Lord to give me guidance.

I remember calling my father back at home and asking him what he thought.

You know, my professor was about to retire.

He was kind of old-fashioned and he kind of was in the old school where you wrote on what your professor decided you would write on.

So that was also, I wanted to respect him, I wanted to, you know, so it was a very, but we had a good relationship and in many instances during that experience I had opportunities to share with him about where I came from and he knew where I came from.

He had been to many of our Adventist campuses before he knew other Adventist scholars.

So finally I came into his office, I remember after a long time of prayer, it was only a few days later, but I remember coming to him and I said, you know, Professor Deaver, I said, if I write on the book of the Exodus, There are only 2 outcomes.

I said, either I will write according to what you and my professors here and the scholarly community in general believe to have happened, or at least I'll write about the origin of Israel on sociological anthropological terms.

And I said if I do that conscientiously I will not be able to teach in 1 of my denominations institutions in the future.

Because if I do that and conclude What the scholarly consensus is today in secular scholarship, I didn't use the word secular scholarship, what the scholarly consensus is today, I don't feel conscientiously, I don't think it's possible for me to continue teaching, or I hadn't started teaching at that point yet, but to teach in the church.

And by that point, you know, I had been a pastor and I was very convicted about what God's purpose was and the authority of God's Word.

I shared last year, every single day that I went to school, I had to study as diligently the Bible and the Spirit of Prophecy as I was studying the journal articles and the textbooks that I needed to face and study.

And if you are in a secular university and you're not doing that, you are setting yourself on dangerous ground because the ideas are pervasive.

And if you're not balancing those ideas and sifting them through the Word of God and the spirit of prophecy, it was a daily commitment that I had to make to be faithful to God through His Word and His spirit of prophecy.

So I said to Professor Deaver, I said, you know, either I will do that or I will conclude and write on what the Bible says And I am not sure that will fly here.

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?

Now that's a different concept from the concept of evolution, isn't it?

Moses came to a point in his life where he did something that he probably regretted for many years.

And it came to pass in those days when Moses was grown that he went out unto his brethren and looked on their burdens and spied an Egyptian smiting a Hebrew.

Now I don't know the circumstances of Moses.

Ellen White writes that he witnessed about his faith in the palace and that he resisted many of the temptations that came to him there.

So undoubtedly, he knew who he was, unlike some of the Hollywood renditions that we have of his life.

He had been raised by his mother until the age of 12, which is the age of adulthood in the Hebrew culture, in the biblical culture.

But now, perhaps he felt that with his military training, with his training as the future monarch of Egypt, as the prince of Egypt, Maybe anger filled him in that moment, rage filled him as he saw this individual being mistreated.

We don't know what went all through Moses' mind, but he did something that caused great consequences.

He spied an Egyptian smiting a Hebrew, 1 of his brethren, 1 of his brothers.

And he looked this way and that way and when he saw that there was no man, that's already a hint that he was doing something he probably shouldn't have been doing, right?

When you have to look this way and that way to make sure no one's watching what you're about to do.

And when he saw that there was no man, he slew the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.

Now, when Pharaoh heard this thing, he sought to slay Moses.

I do not believe that the Pharaoh that it's talking about here, based on our reconstruction that we've done so far, was Hatshepsut.

I believe that perhaps it was Thutmose III.

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.

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All Teachings

4. The Deliverance, the Escape, & the Power of the Word

1h

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

1h

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

1h 12m

1. The Big Question: Who are You?

1h

6. Why Can’t We Forgive

1h

5. A Safe Place

1h

4. Never Good Enough

38m

3. My God, Where Were You?

48m

2. Emotional Pain Relievers

54m

1. Soul Searching Our Emotions

52m

6. Summary of 3 and 4

1h

5. Summary of 1 and 2

1h

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