Historical Background

The Book of Exodus is a story of freedom from bondage. God is the deliverer who responds to the plight of his enslaved people who could do nothing to rescue themselves.

Within that larger story arc other themes surface: God delivers in a particular style. His modus operandi is to deliver in ways that make it plain that there is no other possible way to explain the deliverance except to say it is the Lord. Related to that theme is the idea that God is sovereign over time, events, and people—an attribute God utilizes to advance his rescue mission. Finally, God’s deliverence unfolds in stages—a process that requires faith and begins moving from bondage to exit to journey to conquer and rest.

Genesis is the appropriate starting point for understanding Exodus. The first promise of deliverence is given in Genesis 3:15—a larger scale bondage. But the Abraham story contains the necessary information to understand what is happening in Exodus. It’s a kind of a portrait of the greater promise of Genesis 3:15. In Genesis 12 we see how this seed-promise relates to Abraham whose lineage will carry it forward, and then in 15:12-14 we see how Abraham’s story projects forward to the Exodus narrative (a picture of the wider gospel promise). Abraham’s own experience is telling, as he himself goes to Egypt due to a famine, and his wife is enslaved in the sense that she is kept by Pharoah to become his own. God rains plagues down on Pharoah until Pharoah angrily sends Abraham away: “take her and go” (12:19).

Sermon Series

As you preach through Exodus you will encounter repeated themes. Mapping the book out into preaching units ahead of time helps you decide which sermons will emphasize which prominent themes overtly and which sermons showcase a subtheme enough to emphasize that instead.

For example, the idea that God rescues a people that are unable to rescue themselves is a theme I might underscore throughout my sermon on 2:11-3:22 (the burning bush episode). But that theme comes up again in obvious ways like in chapters 7-10 (the plagues!). This time though, I can see the connection to how God’s rescue stories serve as teaching tools to pass our faith down to the next generation. I can emphasize that and those two sermons won’t have the same exact focus.

There is not simply one way to map out Exodus. For instance, you can preach each plague one at a time to emphasize the attributes of God on display in Yahweh’s mockery of each false Egyptian deity. I preached them all together to emphasize how they all function to bring home a broader singular point.

You will notice that some of my Big Ideas explicitly reference Jesus while others do not. In my preaching I do subscribe to demonstrating how every passage of the Bible connects to the gospel of Jesus Christ. If a Big Idea does not mention Christ that does not mean the sermon will not. My general rule is that if a passage connects to Christ in a rather overt way, I will include Christ in the Big Idea. This can be through verbal prophecy (more obvious) or through event-prophecy (typology) which might be less obvious but highly defensible given biblical data. If a passage’s connection to Christ is less overt, then I will connect it most often through application (how Jesus provides what we need to repsond to the text faithfully) and this might not show up in the Big Idea which is more text-specific.

Text: Genesis 3:15; 12:1-3, 5, 10, 17; 15:12-14

• Title: God’s Exit Strategy
• Big Idea: God’s holiness demands ours. (This sermon can establish an over-arching theme that prepares the congregation for the message of Leviticus.)
• Preaching Tips: Teach your listeners to approach Exodus not looking for quick “how-to’s” but for a narrative that repeats from Genesis and is fulfilled in Christ. Thus, it speaks to our story of slavery and rescue.

Text: Exodus 1:1-2:10

• Title: The Heroic Trait of Fear
• Big Idea: We should fear God more than man because God always gets his way.
• Preaching Tips: Fear is a unifying theme in this section. There is a fear that Pharoah’s oppression meant God’s abandoning his people. Pharoah feared the Hebrews would grow too strong. He orders infanticide, but the midwives feared God more than Egypt (1:17, 21). Ultimately God is the one to be feared (1:12, 17, 21; 2:1-10).

Text: Exodus 2:11-3:22

• Title: Who Am I That I Should Go?
• Big Idea: We’re not ready to be delivered by God from bondage until we reckon with our complete inability to rescue ourselves.
• Preaching Tips: We see oursleves in Moses who seeks to jumpstart the deliverence plan by his own efforts (Acts 7:25) but it backfires—he’s nothing but an alien (Ex. 2:22). Moses is not the deliverer (“Who am I?”), God is (“I AM”).

Text: Exodus 4:1-17

• Title: The Necessary Ingredient for Obedience
• Big Idea: We will grow in obedience to God when we learn to trust him by faith.
• Preaching Tips: This section focuses on the command for Moses to go and the faith and disbelief at work in Moses. God is building and demanding trust in order to prepare Moses for obedience that follows through.

Text: Exodus 4:18-31

• Title: When God Almost Killed Moses
• Big Idea: We cannot be a part of God’s program for rescue if we are not ourselves covered by his covenant with us.
• Preaching Tips: Since this is a tough portion to understand, it might be wise to give it its own sermon. Recognize the difficulties but work through them with the aim of arrving at the need to be covenantally faithful and true before getting excited about ministering to others.

Text: Exodus 4:21; 5:1-23; 6:1; 7:3

• Title: Does God Overreach?
• Big Idea: God may embolden his opposition in order to demonstrate his absolute sovereignty in victory.
• Preaching Tips: This is another tough knot. But it’s a question even unbelievers ask. How much does God control and why? It won’t feel too pedantic if you can press it into actual questions people wrestle with and show how trust in God’s victory leads to inner peace.

Text: Exodus 7-10

• Title: Behold Our Matchless God
• Big Idea: God’s fierce demonstrations of power are to help us teach our children that God alone is deserving of worship.
• Preaching Tips: 7:1-13 as a set-up for an overview of the plagues that follow. The first nine plauges form three sets of three. The main idea of each set is the same and the rhetorical effect of their rapid succession is preserved when preaching them together. Climax with a focus on 10:1-2 which feeds the Big Idea.

Text: Exodus 11:1-13:16

• Title: The God Who Passes Over
• Big Idea: We remember the tenth plague through the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, to never forget that we are “passed over” only in Jesus Christ.
• Preaching Tips: This final plague is absolutely tragic but the Lord is emphatic that his people must remember it. You can show the connection to the Lord’s Supper where Jesus also asserts the crucial importance of rememberance.

Text: Exodus 13:17-17:16

• Title: Our Fickle Memory and Our Faithful God
• Big Idea: Even though we persist in forgetting how good God is, he persists in being good to us.
• Preaching Tips: Where the last passage emphasizes the importance of rememberance, this section underscores the inevitability of forgetfuleness. Thankfully our rescue is based on God’s faithfulness which never flags.

Text: Exodus 18

• Title: The Need for Wilderness Guides
• Big Idea: God provides leaders in the church in order to guide us through the difficult Christian walk.
• Preaching Tips: With obvious parallels to the reasons leaders are given to churches, you can encourage your listeners to embrace a leadership structure that is based on a desire to serve people.

Text: Exodus 19

• Title: Walking with a Holy God
• Big Idea: What we must realize about a mediated relationship with God is that it does not lower his standard of holiness.
• Preaching Tips: Israel needed two provisions before they were ready to receive the law: a plurality of leadership in chapter 18 and a mountain experience in 19. Here the Lord affirms their relationship but emphasizes the distance between them (Moses has to go up and come down with the message, v. 3), and then ramps up the unapproachability of God from there.

Text: Exodus 20:1-21

• Title: God’s Top 10 List
• Big Idea: We give God the honor he is due when we love him and love his children.
• Preaching Tips: The Decalogue can be divided into two parts—a vertical table and a horizontal table. Verses 3-11 focus on loving God; verses 12-17 focus on loving neighbor (Matt. 22:34-40).

Text: Exodus 20:22-26

• Title: Worshiping God His Way
• Big Idea: Worship must always be centered on the gospel to be appropriate before God.
• Preaching Tips: Here God makes curious demands and they increase in their peculiarity. But God teaches he is the sole source of deliverance, not human hands. We tend to shape God into a manageable deity with whom we participate in salvation. God wants to divest us of this thinking, especially in our formal worship of him.

Text: Exodus 21:1-23:9

• Title: Our New Testament Need for Old Testament Laws
• Big Idea: We need laws to teach us how to love our neighbor.
• Preaching Tips: The previous paragraph applies the first table of the Decalogue (vertical) so now we come to the second (horizontal). Many of these laws seem irrelevant today, but they point now as they did then to our obligations toward others. Use several specific examples from this section to demonstrate this.

Text: Exodus 23:10-19

• Title: Work & Rest
• Big Idea: We should honor the principle of the Sabbath in our Sunday worship because the principle behind the law is still good for us.
• Preaching Tips: Here you can explain your view of the Sabbath and apply it to the extremes of workaholism and idleness. The Sabbath has come up several times now (in chs. 16 and 20). I had promised the congregation that we would unpack it more in an upcoming sermon. In this message, I surveyed all the texts in Exodus on the Sabbath (there’s more in chs. 31 and 35) including the pattern of Creation in Genesis as well as some relevant verses in the New Testament. You will either use the feasts of vv. 13-19 as reasons why the Sabbath also no longer applies or how the differences between them speak to the Sabbath’s enduring application to today.

Text: Exodus 23:20-33

• Title: Grace & Obedience
• Big Idea: Our assurance of salvation is found in the fact that it is secured by Christ and marked by obedience.
• Preaching Tips: Rather than preaching through these verses in strict order, my first point was that a covenant relationship with God is always based on God’s action not ours (Grace—vs. 20, 23, 27-28, 31b). The next point is that it also always demands resultant obedience (vs. 21-22, 23-24, 25, 32-33).

Text: Exodus 24:1-11

• Title: A Blood Covenant
• Big Idea: To worship rightly we must recognize that it cost Christ’s life to make it possible.
• Preaching Tips: You can draw the connections between the bloody rituals and Christ’s spilled blood, then explain from the rest of the verses that the result should be a grand vision of God.

Text: Exodus 24:12-31:18

• Title: The Assurance of God With Us
• Big Idea: We can be assured of our relationship with God because Jesus is our perfect Priest.
• Preaching Tips: Alec Motyer (see Commentaries section below) provides a reasonably clear chiastic structure of this section where the function of the priesthood is in the middle (p. 253). While chiasms do not always necessarily work to emphasize the center portion as the central point, in this case it seems to work that way. Exodus underscores God’s holiness and unapproachability. This section juxtaposes this gap with God’s initiative and desire for his people to commune with him. He accomplishes this via the priestly office.

Text: Exodus 32

• Title: A Profile in Rebellion
• Big Idea: Sin is utterly destructive, but God will not cast out the repentant.
• Preaching Tips: You can point out the features of this passage which demonstrate how devastating sin is and how it is easy to slip into rebellion. But there is hope because God offers forgiveness for repentance. Warning, however, might be the dominant tone here.

Text: Exodus 33-40

• Title: The Glory of the Lord
• Big Idea: Our moral failures will not void God’s presence with us because of Christ’s intercession for the church.
• Preaching Tips: After a big moral failure, what assurance is there that a walk with God can be continued? As with Moses, it is Christ’s intercession on our behalf that secures God’s presence—not our lack of failures (cf. Luke 22:31-32). Comfort might be the primary tone for this sermon.

Application

Exodus is not the place to recount old stories and quickly draw cheap lines to morals for today. No biblical book is. But, handled well, Exodus is pregnant with deep, universal truths that prove glaringly relevant for today. We should first ask, “What does this teach us about the nature of God and the nature of man?” Only then can we ask, “How are we to respond to these revealed truths?” Keep the focus on God and his agenda through each passage. If you begin with, “What would be some good, fresh applications to preach this week?” you might find yourself mounting relevance onto the text rather than mining relevance from it.

Application in a sermon does not always have to take the form of a to-do. Often Scripture is after a “to-be.” Attitudes we should adopt, truths we should be reminded of, comforts we should take, hope we can cling to—responses to God’s Word take many shapes. Keep the application landscape varied by taking a broader view of what makes a passage relevant.

Several themes will arise repeatedly, as explained above. There is no need to feel frustrated wondering how in the world you are going to yet again apply the fact that God is preeminent over every power, prince, and principality. Don’t reach for something else that isn’t there in the text. Rather, think about the various ways a theme makes contact with our lives.

Here are some examples:

Wilderness Dependence

Over and over again this idea will present itself as the obvious thrust of the passage: we are totally dependent upon God each step of the way. But think of the various ways you can connect this to your listener. One sermon might seek to undo our self-dependence by demonstrating that even today we cannot control what we’ll eat, drink, or wear (Matt. 6:31-33). Even tomorrow’s schedule is not really in our hands (Jam. 4:13-17). Another sermon can remind us that this arrangement is God’s idea—he’s never bothered by our dependece but he is glorified in it (14:18). This is so encouraging for a spiritually weary audience. This idea can prompt prayerfulness (Luke 11:5-9), humility (Jam. 4:13-17), joy, thankfulness, and peace (Phil. 4:4-7).

Persistent Obedience

How exactly you work this out will be in accord with your specific theological positions, but you’ll have to wrestle with that tension between the assurance of the promised land and the contingency of obedience. At least we can agree that the outright rebellious will not make it (Ex. 32:28; Heb. 10:26-31). Many claim covenant membership but refuse to pursue covenant obligations. But real disciples are students of Christ’s commands (Matt. 28:20). Sermons throughout this series should not shy from Exodus’ demand upon the reader to obey God. None of us is perfect, but to follow God in Jesus Christ is to demonstrate pursuit and progress in the area of obedience. Christ’s perfect obedience is the cause of our salvation; our persistent obedience is the result.

Reflective Adoration

This is more relevant than one might initially think. Our typical listeners totally understand this application. People don’t go to concerts to “do” anything. They go for an immersive experience—to behold with their eyes and ears, to enjoy, to soak in sights and sounds, and to reflect on the experience later with fondness and excitement. Challenge your auditors to behold God in the text! Craft sentences that will invite their eyes and ears to absorb the details of the verses and how they emanate God’s glory and beauty (28:2, 40). Where some pericopes might easily serve up an obedience-focused message, some will beg for reflection and enamoredness. These sermons seek to reach behind obedience to the attidudes that motivate it. Aim for their hearts, not just their hands. God’s splendor is on constant display in Exodus and we should preach for amazement (15:11).

Helpful Resources

For all of God’s demands for obedience, he does not leave us to ourselves to strive for it. He constantly provides help in various forms. Not just the supernatural kind either. Blazing pillars of fire and sun-blocking clouds are great, but think of the value of clear rules, a plurality of leaders to help judge between disagreements, a weekly rhythm of rest, and visible reminders of God’s covenant. They were as crucial then as they are now! Christians sometimes think they can skip church because it’s not necessary for salvation. But it’s necessary to help us follow (Heb. 10:23-25). Church leaders, fellow members, Sunday services, taking the Lord’s Supper together—these are all there for our encouragement and edification. Inspire your listeners to see these more as privileges and resources than detached obligations.

Theological Themes

Some of the prominent motifs that you will be challenged to grapple with throughout this series include:

The Journey of Freedom

Exodus is about the movement of God’s people from captivity into the wilderness journey and toward the land of promise (Gen. 15:12-21). Your church’s positions or your own convictions on the nature of the Mosaic covenant aside, you can see God drawing a picture of what will be the journey of every follower of Christ (Heb. 3 for example). Jesus himself completes the journey so that ours will be successful in him (Matt. 2:13-4:11). Thus, this is not a story stuck in the past but one that provides constant application to our walk with God. For one thing, the exit from darkness is just the beginning. Learning to follow God is a process and we are encouraged both by looking back to what God has done (Ex. 12:17) and forward to what he will do (34:24).

God Reveals Himself

We should appreciate the fact that God allows us to feel our way toward him through general revelation (Acts 17:27), but Exodus shows that God grants special revelation so that we know specific things about who he is and what he expects of us. The God that was revealed in Genesis (Ex. 3:6) is now providing higher definition to our understanding of him (conversation at the burning bush, power over each Egyptian deity, the details of Passover, Feast of Unleavened Bread, Cloud, Fire, Tent of Meeting, the laws, etc). These give you opportunities to fine-tune your listeners’ understanding of what God is like.

The Presence of God

God repeatedly emphasizes throughout the book that he cannot be simply approached—that proximity to his holiness means danger. From the removal of Moses’ sandals to the tempest at the mountain, God is not to be intruded upon lightly. Yet God is there. He dwells among his people and sets rules and boundaries to protect them in his presence. Look to approach this series advancing both sides of this theme—the fierceness of God’s holiness but also the grace shown in God doing whatever it takes to make proximity happen. Ultimately, Jesus accomplishes the perfect union that this book could only foreshadow.

The Importance of Rules

God’s laws given in the Old Testament, and no less in Exodus, are relevant for today. All of them. Preachers will differ on the various ways they are relevant—some will use the traditional division of civil, ceremonial, and moral laws. These categories may not prove as helpful as they might seem at first, especially if they’re viewed as impermeably separate sets with no overlap. We should all agree however that they each reveal something about how to love God and neighbor. What is significant here is that God does not simply give us a command to love and worship him but gives some specifics so we can see love and worship in action. If your dog gets out and tramples your neighbor’s vegetable garden, shouldn’t you go out and buy some vegetables, the best you can afford (22:5)?

God’s Right to Total Allegiance

The plagues of chapters 7-12, for instance, demonstrate not only that God is matchless in his supremacy but that he gives no quarter to competition. God’s jealousy is not a petty one and he doesn’t act out of insecurity. There really is no competition. No powers real or imagined, human or otherwise, can compare with the great I Am. God demands loyalty not because he’s the best among many but because there is none like him whatsoever. Since idoloatry is not a sin peculiar to certain times, press God’s preeminence to your hearers throughout this series and seek to divest them of similarly absurd competitors to Yahweh in their hearts.

Dependence

“We cannot rescue ourselves.” This will be a repeated sentiment throughout the series. Of course it is not just the exit in view here but the journey. Israel needed food, water, shelter, navigational direction, and protection from enemies. From the Feast of Unleavened Bread to the construction of the Tabernacle they are reminded they need God desperately. He provides bread that cannot be made by human hands and water that cannot be sourced naturally. He defeats gods and soldiers in ways that supercede human might. The Book of Exodus shouts loudly and repeatedly that in order for the journey to be a success, God must be the author of it from start to finish. God’s people are to depend on him completely.

My Encounter with Exodus

The sermon series at our church was titled, Exodus: God’s Exit Strategy. The first sermon gave our congregation background not only to the book but to a way of understanding the events as predictive of Christ and our relationship to God in Christ. This allowed me to make connections throughout the series without having to build that biblical theology from scratch every time.

The pay-off was huge. It established once again that we can linger on a longer book for a few months without rushing it and still feel like we’re drinking from a refreshing fountain each week. Some sermons really challenged our theological categories, some challenged our day-to-day commitments, but all sought to move us along toward a grander vision of God. Not only that, but I continue to find myself referencing Exodus frequently in New Testament sermons. It is so foundational.

Think of the great points of anxiety your listeners face. The desperation of the unbeliever. The fatigue of the follower. They don’t need over-produced worship services and anecdotes for sermons. They need an exit. Not an emotional escape but a real one. Show them how God sees our plights. Teach them that all the various kinds of pain and peril we experience stem from one much deeper problem. And point them to the mighty, glorious, matchless deliverer—the better Moses that God provides for true freedom, Jesus Christ.

Commentaries

John D. Currid, Exodus, EP Study Commentary, (UK: EP Books, 2000).

J. A. Motyer, The Message of Exodus, The Bible Speaks Today, (Downer’s Grove: IVP Academic, 2005).

Anthony T. Selvaggio, From Bondage to Liberty: The Gospel According to Moses, The Gospel According to the Old Testament (Philipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2014).

Douglas K. Stuart, Exodus, The New American Commentary, (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2006.

Lucas O’Neill is a Clinical Associate Professor of Homiletics at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (Deerfield, IL). He has pastored Christian Fellowship Church (Itasca, IL) for over ten years, and is the author of "Preaching to Be Heard" (Lexham Press, 2019).