We are in chapter six of Exodus. If you remember God is answering Moses who is struggling with why things are worse instead of better all because they did what God told them to do. We’ve looked at the three things God says he will be doing: bringing them up out of the burdens of the Egyptians, delivering them from slavery, and redeeming them. Our word for today is one of the two ways God is going to do these three things. Let’s look at our word for today. שֶׁ֫פֶט judgment, punishments, act of judgment, penalty. It is used 16 times in the Old Testament. We find our word used the most in the book of Ezekiel 10 out of the 16 times. Ezekiel 5:15 You will be a reproach and a taunt, a warning and an object of horror to the nations around you when I שְׁפָטִ֜ים inflict punishment on you in anger and in wrath and with stinging rebuke. I the Lord have spoken. Ezekiel 14:21 For this is what the Sovereign Lord says: How much worse will it be when I send against Jerusalem my four dreadful שְׁפָטַ֣י judgments —sword and famine and wild beasts and plague—to kill its men and their animals!
These and other passages from Ezekiel show God’s punishment on his people because of their refusal to repent of their sin. God is absolutely slow to anger and full of mercy. But as we have seen there is a point where God’s patience runs out and all that is left is his anger and punishment for sin. This is where God is with Egypt in our chapter today. After 430 years of patiently waiting for Egypt to bless His people God had had enough. So we see our word used to describe how he freed his people from the Egyptians namely by punishing their oppressors. Exodus 6:6 Say therefore to the people of Israel, ‘I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from slavery to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great וּבִשְׁפָטִ֖ים acts of judgment. Exodus 7:4 he will not listen to you. Then I will lay my hand on Egypt and with mighty בִּשְׁפָטִ֖ים acts of judgment I will bring out my divisions, my people the Israelites. Exodus 12:12 On that same night I will pass through Egypt and strike down every firstborn of both people and animals, and I will שְׁפָטִ֖ים bring judgment on all the gods of Egypt. I am the Lord. Numbers 33:3-4 The Israelites set out from Rameses on the fifteenth day of the first month, the day after the Passover. They marched out defiantly in full view of all the Egyptians, who were burying all their firstborn, whom the Lord had struck down among them; for the Lord had שְׁפָטִֽים brought judgment on their gods.
I’ll close with this warning so that we don’t try God’s patience but rather continue to stay close to him through the access that we have through Jesus our savior. Hebrews 10:26-31, 39 If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God. Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much more severely do you think someone deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified them, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace? For we know him who said, “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” and again, “The Lord will judge his people.” It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God… But we do not belong to those who shrink back and are destroyed, but to those who have faith and are saved.
