EXODUS - Series Introduction

In this series we’re taking you through ‘Exodus’. Why? It’s an epic story in history, for sure. But it’s the formative story of an obscure people from thousands of years ago, in a distant struggle foreign to our own, on a journey to the other side of the world, and found deep in the bowels of the Old Testament. Why bother? What would ‘Exodus’ have to do with any of us, here and now

This term we’re going through Exodus, in our churches. Why? Because deep down, we all feel we need a ‘way out’, somehow. An epic journey. A deliverance from the place we find ourselves, to the place we find God. Even Taylor Swift has a sense of this need, although she doesn’t know it yet. In ‘A Place in this World’, she sings:

I don't know what I want
So don't ask me
'Cause I'm still trying, to figure it out
Don't know what's down, this road
I'm just walking
Trying to see through the rain coming down
Even though I'm not the only one, who feels the way I do

Now, ‘swifties’ are hardly singing something new. Teenagers, teachers and poets and have been wondering about our shared need for deliverance, for millennia. Dante Alighieri, an Italian guy in the Middle Ages, famously asked on behalf of young men:

“Who was your guide or who your lantern
To lead you forth from that deep night
Which steeps the vale of hell in darkness?” ¹

Exodus means ‘way out’. A guided journey. A deliverance from that deep night of the soul, that enslaves all of us. Exodus means the ‘road out’ of a place of slavery, and into a place of promise. So, this term we’re taking you through Exodus because we believe, as your pastors and teachers, that God has provided a ‘way out’ for all of us: in Jesus.

Exodus is the epic journey of the family of Abraham, who found themselves in a place of slavery for hundreds of years. Through death and danger God not only delivers this family, but forges them into a nation. A people. His people. A people called out within a world of darkness to become a beacon of light and hope for the rest of us. So, we’re starting with Abraham’s family, because God promised to use that family to bless all the families of the earth – including ours!

We’ll see God in Exodus, calling His people to become a radical new community. He’ll forge them in the furnace of their shared journey together, and bind them in love, to belong to Him. For these reasons - and more that will be revealed - we’ve called our series ‘Exodus: God’s Dangerous Deliverance’.

(Unfortunately there is no recording of Study 01, which was given during a church camp.)

1 Purgatorio, translated by Jean Hollander and Robert Hollander (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 7.