Christ in Exodus

Exodus 1 sets a pattern that runs straight through Scripture to the cross and beyond: the people of God multiply the more they are crushed. A new king fears Israel’s numbers and answers with taskmasters and hard bondage, but the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew (v. 12). It is the deep law by which the kingdom flourishes under persecution - the seed that bears much fruit only as it fall into the ground and die (John 12:24), the church that grows b…

Exodus 2 sets a deliverer’s whole life in motion, and the New Testament returns to it again and again. A son is born under a king’s standing decree that every Hebrew boy be drowned in the river (Ex. 1:22); his mother hides him, then sets him in an ark of bulrushes among the very reeds of that river, and Pharaoh’s own daughter draws him out and keeps him alive - the marked infant deliverer preserved through the waters meant to destroy him. The pattern returns when another d…

Christ Connection - God Who Comes Down

Paul writes of Christ, “Who, though he was in the form of God… made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men… he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Phil. 2:6-8). But that pattern - I see, I hear, I come down - is not new in the New Testament. It is old. It is what the God of Moses did at the burning bush. It is the pattern of all God’s rescue. He hears the cry, He come…

Christ Connection - The Serpent Lifted Up

Jesus later says, "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up" (John 3:14). The serpent on the rod, a symbol of death and judgment, becomes the very means of healing in Numbers 21 when the people are bitten. Just as Moses’s staff transformed the serpent from a thing of terror into a sign of authority, Christ’s cross transforms the symbol of death into the instrument of salvation. What brought judgment brings redemption.

Exodus 5 is the chapter where deliverance is announced and everything gets worse. Moses and Aaron carry God’s word into Pharaoh’s court - Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Let my people go - and Pharaoh throws back the question that the rest of the book will answer in fire and sea: Who is the LORD, that I should obey his voice to let Israel go? I know not the LORD (v. 2). It is the defiance of the world against God spoken to His face - and by Exodus 14 Pharaoh will know,…

Christ Connection - The Self-Existent God

When Jesus stood before the Pharisees in John 8, they demanded to know His authority. He answered, “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). The exact name. The exact claim. The revealed name of Exodus becomes the claim of the one walking through the grain fields of Judea. “I am the bread of life,” “I am the light of the world,” “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Every "I am" echoes back to this: the self-existent One, present, keeping covenant.

Exodus 7 opens the long contest between the living God and the gods of Egypt, and it sets the terms in one sentence the rest of the book will spell out in plagues: the Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD (v. 5). The whole campaign of signs is a self-revelation - through judgment and deliverance God makes His name known, the same purpose carried to its end in the One of whom it is written that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow … and that every tongue sho…

Christ Connection - The Finger of God at Work

Jesus takes this very phrase in Luke 11:20: "If I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you." Jesus’s exorcisms - His power to command what is possessed, to free the captive - are the act of the finger of God. The demons scatter before Him the way the magicians scatter here. They know a power they cannot match when they see it. The separation of God’s kingdom from the kingdom of this age is not a gentle disagreement. It is an act…

Christ Connection - True and False Repentance

Jesus will later teach that not everyone who says “Lord, Lord” enters the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 7:21). Pharaoh’s confession shows us the difference between what you say when judgment is on you and who you actually are. John describes the test: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). But that confession leads to “cleansing,” not just words. Real repentance bears fruit.

Christ Connection - Three Days of Light Hidden

In Matthew 27:45, the same darkness falls at Calvary: "from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour." Jesus, the Light of the world, is hidden for three days in death - and the whole cosmos sits in that darkness. But notice what the text says about Israel: they had light in their dwellings. While the rest of Egypt cannot move, cannot see, cannot function, God’s people are lit. And three days later, He rises. The Light breaks through. The wor…

Exodus 11 is the last word before the Passover, and every line of it leans toward the night of the lamb. The LORD announces that about midnight He will go out into Egypt and all the firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die (vv. 4-5) - and the very next chapter answers how anyone survives that night: a lamb without blemish, its blood struck on the door, so that when I see the blood, I will pass over you (Ex. 12:13). The New Testament names that lamb without flinching: Chris…

The Passover lamb is Christ. A spotless male lamb, slain at twilight, its blood marking the doorpost so the angel of death passes over the household - every detail Paul names of Jesus in 1 Corinthians 5: "Christ our passover is sacrificed for us." The first sign of the new covenant in the upper room is Jesus reframing this very meal around Himself.

The Passover is past, and the first word the LORD speaks on the far side of that door is a claim: Sanctify unto me all the firstborn, whatsoever openeth the womb… it is mine (vv. 1-2). The firstborn whom death passed over now belong wholly to the One who spared them - and the law immediately provides for their rescue: all the firstborn of my children I redeem (v. 15), the firstling of an ass redeem with a lamb (v. 13). A firstborn claimed by God and bought back by t…

Israel is hemmed in by sea and pursued by the army of death; God parts the waters and brings them through. Paul reads it as baptism (1 Cor 10) - the death-and-resurrection pattern lived out by every believer who passes through the waters into Christ. The same God who said "stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord" tore open the heavens at Calvary.

Exodus 15 is the first hymn in the Bible, and the New Testament hears it sung again at the end of all things. On the far shore of the sea a redeemed people break into song: The LORD is my strength and song, and he is become my salvation (v. 2) - and at the close of the Revelation the redeemed of every nation stand by another sea and sing the song of Moses the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb (Rev. 15:3). The word the song reaches for is yeshuah , “salvation” - the…

Christ Connection - The Bread from Heaven

In John 6, Jesus stands in a synagogue and says, "Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead. This is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever" (John 6:49-51). The manna was a sign pointing to Him - bread that sustains life but does not prevent death. Jesus is the bread that does. Every time Israel gathered manna,…

Christ Connection - The Rock Struck Once

In 1 Corinthians 10:4, Paul writes: "they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ." The rock at Horeb, struck by the rod of Moses, becomes in Paul’s reading a foreshadowing of Christ, struck once for the sins of all. When Moses later comes to another rock at Meribah (Numbers 20) and strikes it twice instead of speaking to it as God commanded, the pattern breaks - and Moses is barred from entering the land. The typology is precise: Christ i…

Exodus 18 sets a Gentile at the center of the camp. Jethro, the priest of Midian, hears what the LORD has done, rejoices, and makes the great confession of the chapter - Now I know that the LORD is greater than all gods: for in the thing wherein they dealt proudly he was above them (v. 11) - then takes a burnt offering and sacrifices for God while Aaron and all the elders of Israel eat bread with him before God (v. 12). A foreigner who once served other gods hears, believe…

Sinai trembles, smokes, and burns; the people are kept at distance. Hebrews 12 sets that mountain beside Mount Zion: Christ has brought us not to the trembling mountain but to the city of the living God. The Christ Connection in Exodus 19 is the access His blood opens to a holiness that once meant immediate death to approach.

The Ten Words come not as a means of becoming God’s people but as the shape of life inside that covenant. Christ keeps every command in our place and absorbs every penalty we earned by breaking them; He hands them back to us not as a ladder but as a description of the freedom His Spirit grows in us.

Christ Connection - The Willing Servant

Paul draws the line from this doorpost directly to Jesus: "Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men" (Phil. 2:6-7). Christ is the eved who could have been free. He is the firstborn who could have been exempt. But He says, in effect: "I love them. I will not go out free." His hands are bored through - not at a doorpost, but on a…

Christ Connection - The Welcome of the Foreigner

Jesus embodies Israel’s entire law of mercy toward the outsider. He was born far from home, fled as a refugee to Egypt. He was called “the friend of sinners,” the one who ate with tax collectors and touched lepers - the strangers of His day. Matthew 25 makes it explicit: “I was a stranger, and ye took me in… Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matt. 25:35, 40). Every refugee, every outsider, every person without…

Christ Connection - The True Witness

Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). He is called “the faithful and true witness” (Rev. 3:14). He never spoke falsehood and never bowed to the crowd, even when the multitude cried for His blood. His testimony was always for the vulnerable - the woman caught in adultery, the demoniac, the widow, the child. He stands as the only one whose justice and mercy never contradict each other.

Exodus 24 is where the covenant given at Sinai is sealed, and the New Testament reaches for its language at the most solemn moment it records. Moses takes the blood of the offerings, sprinkles half on the altar, reads the book of the covenant in the people’s hearing, and sprinkles the rest on them with words that will echo for ages: Behold the blood of the covenant, which the LORD hath made with you concerning all these words (v. 8). On the night He was betrayed, the Lord…

Christ Connection - God Dwells Among Us

John opens his Gospel with a statement that echoes this verse: "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth" (John 1:14). The word for "dwelt" in the Greek is skenoo - to pitch a tent, to tabernacle. Jesus is God tabernacling among us. He is the sanctuary made flesh. Not distant. Not hidden in heaven. Here. Touchable. Visible. Calling us into the same kind of willingnes…

Christ Connection - The Bars That Hold All Things

Paul writes, “By him all things consist” (Col. 1:17). Jesus is the bar running through creation, holding it all together. In the tabernacle, the bars are overlaid with gold and hidden inside the structure. But without them, the whole thing collapses. He is the invisible binding force, the bars through the boards, the thing holding the whole house of God together.

Exodus 27 lays out the first things a worshipper met on coming to the tabernacle, and the New Testament reads them as a drawn-beforehand pattern of the way to God. Just inside the one gate stood the altar of burnt offering - five cubits long, and five cubits broad… foursquare (v. 1) - the place where the sacrifice was made and the blood applied, so that approach to God always began at the place of atonement. The Gospel says the same of the cross: no man cometh unto…

Christ Connection - Bearing Our Names in Strength

Jesus is described as the great High Priest who bore our sins "in his own body on the tree" (1 Peter 2:24). But notice where Aaron bore the names of the tribes: on his shoulders, in strength. The prophet Isaiah foresaw this: "For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder" (Isaiah 9:6). The one who carries the government of God’s kingdom on his shoulders is also the one who bears our names - every one of us - lifted up in…

Christ Connection - Bearing Away the Sin

The priests lay their hands on the bull, and the bull dies for their sin. Hebrews builds this directly to Jesus: "He is the sacrifice for our sins" and "He suffered without the gate" (Heb. 13:12). Jesus is the sin offering who dies outside the camp, carrying away what we cannot carry into God’s presence. But there is more: He rises. The bullock is wholly consumed and gone. Jesus is consumed and rises, opening a way for the priests - for us - to actually come near.

Christ Connection - Perpetual Intercession

Revelation 8:3-4 tells us: “Another angel came and stood at the altar, having a golden censer; and there was given unto him much incense, that he should offer it with the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar which was before the throne of God. And the smoke of the incense, which came with the prayers of the saints, ascended up before God.” Hebrews 7:25 makes the connection explicit: Jesus “ever liveth to make intercession for them.” The perpetual incense on the alta…

Exodus 31 holds the first people in Scripture said to be filled with the Spirit of God - and the filling is for craft. I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship, to devise cunning works (vv. 3-4); and into the hearts of all that are wise hearted the LORD puts wisdom to build His dwelling (v. 6). The New Testament speaks the same way of the gifts that build God’s house now: one Spirit dividi…

Christ Connection - The Substitute’s Love

Moses’s intercession is beautiful, but notice what it stops short of. He asks for mercy; he doesn’t offer himself. Yet what he offers foreshadows something deeper. Paul, centuries later, echoes this prayer almost exactly: “I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren” (Rom. 9:3). What Moses only offered , Christ actually did . He didn’t just stand between God and sinners and pray. He became the curse for them (Gal. 3:13), took the wrath they deserved…

Christ Connection - The Face Becomes Bearable

Moses asked for God’s glory and could not bear the face. But Paul writes: "the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ" (2 Cor. 4:6). What Moses could not bear became bearable in Christ. God’s glory is now mediated through a human face. The cleft of the rock becomes unnecessary because Jesus is the rock (1 Cor. 10:4), and in Him, "your life is hid with Christ in God" (Col. 3:3). We are hidden in Him the way Moses was hidden in the rock - and…

Christ Connection - Grace and Truth Made Flesh

John 1:14 echoes Exodus 34:6 directly. The apostle writes of Jesus: "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth " (John 1:14). The Greek words charis kai aletheia are the LXX translation of chesed and emet - the very pair God proclaimed to Moses. When God became flesh in Christ, He became the living embodiment of merciful covenant love and perfect faithfulness. And He made…

Exodus 35 turns the page from the golden calf to a house being built for God, and what it shows about giving and about gifting both point forward. The offering for the tabernacle is asked for and received from only one kind of person - whosoever is of a willing heart (v. 5); every one whose heart stirred him up, and every one whom his spirit made willing (v. 21); every man and woman, whose heart made them willing (v. 29). Nothing is taken; everything is brought, and brough…

Christ Connection - The Fullness of Giving

Paul writes to the Corinthians about the Macedonian churches: “their deep poverty abounded unto the riches of their liberality; for to their power, I bear record, yea, and beyond their power they were willing of themselves” (2 Cor. 8:2-3). He is describing the exact same phenomenon Moses encountered: a people whose hearts have been so healed by grace that they overflow in giving. Paul goes on to apply it to Jesus: “ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though h…

Christ Connection - The Place of Mercy

"Now of the things which we have spoken this is the sum: We have such an high priest, who is set on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens; a minister of the sanctuary, and of the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man... For Christ is not entered into the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of the true; but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us" (Heb. 9:1, 11, 24). The ark on earth was a picture -…

Exodus 38 builds the open court of the tabernacle, and two things stand in it that belong together. First the altar of burnt offering (v. 1), the place where the sacrifice is killed and burned - and just past it the laver of brass (v. 8), the place where the priests wash their hands and their feet before they draw near. The altar and the laver, the blood and the water: a man who would come to God needs both. The New Testament joins the very pair - the blood of Jesus Christ…

Exodus 39 dresses the high priest for his work, and every garment turns out to be a portrait. The robes are made for glory and for beauty (Exod. 28:2, 40), and the New Testament names the One they foreshadow: such an high priest became us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners (Heb. 7:26), the great high priest, that is passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God (Heb. 4:14). The two onyx stones on the shoulders and the twelve stones on the breastplate…

Exodus 40 is the destination of the whole book. It opened in the brick-pits of Egypt with a people in bondage; it closes with God Himself come down to dwell in their midst - a cloud covered the tent of the congregation, and the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle (v. 34). The deliverance from Pharaoh was never the goal; the dwelling was. And the New Testament hears that final scene as a promise waiting to be kept. John opens his Gospel where Exodus closes - the Word wa…