God has chosen to save his people by working with one particular nation—the Jews—it was to that nation that Jesus was born.
Most of the Bible is taken up with the story of how God dealt with that nation.
Now, just because Jesus was born to the Jews, that does not mean that they were a flawless people, sadly they—like every human—failed on numerous occasions. And we’re going to be talking this morning about two particular individualfailures.
But before we get there, let me remind you of where we’re at in the story…
God created everything at the beginning, the first two people were Adam and Eve and from them come everyone else.
But the one man that God set aside from the human race came a good couple of thousand years after Adam… he was a guy who eventually became known as Abraham—the Jewish race are genetically related to Abraham.
– Abraham’s wife Sarah gave birth to a boy called Isaac.
– Isaac’s wife Rebekah gave birth to twins called Jacob and Esau.
– From Jacob came twelve sons.
– And from those twelve sons, we have the nationof Israel, which is divided into twelve tribes, from the twelve sons.
Now, due to a famine in their land—which was at this point called Canaan but did eventually become known as Israel—the twelve sons and their families all moved to Egypt. However—and you’ll get to hear more about this if you come along on Sunday evenings as we’re reading through the book of Exodus on Sunday evenings at the moment—the nation of Israel grew and grew, which felt threatening to the Egyptian authorities, so they were made slaves by the King of Egypt, which was an excruciating time for the people of God….
But God rescued them from Egypt in a very dramatic way.
And now they were on their way back to the land of Canaan, under God’s leadership through a man called Moses.
