G'day and welcome to stories of a faithful God for kids.

I'm Dave Whittingham, your host.

I can't believe we're up to episode 16

already.

Don't forget to ask your parents to follow

stories of a faithful God on Facebook.

And if you're liking the show, or if you have

any questions, jump onto faithfulgod.net and send me your comments or questions.

I was chatting to someone the other day and they said they weren't sure if they were

allowed to send in questions.

Absolutely.

I love to hear from you, parents, carers, grandparents.

If you're listening along with your kids, I wanted to let you know about an article I've

just had published.

It's on a website called growingfaith.com.

That's an excellent christian parenting website.

Short articles, practical but grounded in the Bible.

I strongly recommend it.

My articles about why I think hearing these

stories is so important for both kids and for adults.

I've worked to ground it in everyday life, like how you're feeling when money's so tight.

Check it out, but also check out the other articles on that website, growingfaith.com.

I'm going to put a link to it in the show notes so you can get there easily.

The whole website will help you as you work to raise your kids to know Jesus.

Now, so far we've done a couple of shorter series with Jonah and Elijah and our Easter

special.

Today we're kicking off a longer series

looking at the amazing book of Exodus.

There's going to be magicians and frogs and

plagues.

The sun's going to be turned off for a few

days.

Best of all, we're going to see the faithful

God doing amazingly powerful things.

Let me ask you first, though, what do you

think would stop God from keeping his promises?

Do you think he might forget about them or get a bit bored or get sick and tired of sinful

people? Well, what about if you were trying to stop

God from keeping his promises? I don't recommend that, but if you were, what

would you do? Because in today's story, someone tries to do

just that.

Let's see how they go in this episode of

stories of a faithful God for kids way back before Jesus came as a human, back before

Jonah or Elijah, in fact, more than three and a half thousand years ago, God had made some

amazing promises to Abraham.

He'd made the same promises to Abraham's son,

Isaac, and also to Isaacs son, Jacob.

He said that their family would grow so big

theyd be like the number of stars in the night sky.

Now if you live in a big city, you might think that that means three or four, but when you

get out into the country you realise that its millions and millions.

God promised to give them the land of Canaan as their very own.

He promised to bless them, which means make good things happen for them.

And he promised to bless the whole world through them.

You can read about how God made all those promises in the book of Genesis, the first

book of the Bible.

God shows time and time again in Genesis that

he's really faithful.

We'll look at that story one day on the show.

But by the end of Genesis you might be starting to feel just a little bit impatient.

God's blessed the family by making them really rich, but they're not very nice to each other.

God's only given them a tiny bit of the land of Canaan and now they're not even living

there.

They've actually all moved down to Egypt.

God's blessed the Egyptians through them, but not the whole world.

And God's started to make the family grow.

They've reached 70 people by the time they

moved to Egypt, but that's still not very big in Genesis.

God keeps his promises in little ways, just enough to show that he's faithful.

But he also shows Abraham's family, who are called the Israelites, or also sometimes

they're known as Hebrews.

He shows them that they're going to have to

wait and be patient and trust him, that he's got it sorted now.

The promises that God keeps in tiny ways in Genesis, God starts to keep in massive ways in

Exodus.

Today we're going to see how God started to

keep his promise to grow the family.

We're also going to see how the king of Egypt,

who's known as Pharaoh, tries to stop it from happening.

Exodus starts by reminding us about how Jacob and his family moved to Egypt.

It included his son Joseph, who God used to save the Israelites and all the Egyptians from

starving to death.

All the Egyptians owed their lives to Joseph

and his God.

And then we read this in verse six.

It says by some time later, Joseph and his brothers had died along with all the people

who had lived at that same time.

But the people of Israel had many children and

their number grew greatly.

They became very strong and the country of

Egypt was filled with them.

Do you see what God's doing?

He's keeping his promise, he's faithful and making the family grow bigger and bigger and

bigger.

But then a new pharaoh comes along and he is

not happy.

In fact, he's scared.

Listen to this from verse eight.

Then a new king began to rule Egypt.

He did not know who Joseph was.

This king said to the people, look, the people

of Israel are too many and they are too strong for us to handle.

We must make plans against them.

If we don't, the number of their people will

grow even more.

Then if there's a war, they might join our

enemies.

Then they could fight us and escape from our

country.

So God's been keeping his promise and making

the israelite numbers grow.

But Pharaoh's scared of them and he wants to

put a stop to it.

And he doesn't say, umm, excuse me,

Israelites.

Yeah, we've noticed that there are a lot of

you and, umm, we'd really like to keep being friends.

Is that okay with you? No. The Egyptians just turn up one day and

make all the Israelites their slaves.

Listen to this from verse eleven.

So the Egyptians made life hard for the people of Israel.

They put slave masters over the Israelites.

The slave masters forced the Israelites to

build the cities.

Python and ramesses.

For the king, these cities were supply centers in which the Egyptians stored things.

So not what you'd call the friendly approach, but you know what?

God's in charge and he's not going to stop keeping his promises.

Instead of all this stopping the Israelites from having more and more children, it

actually seems to make it worse.

Well, worse if you're an Egyptian, not if

you're happy with God keeping his promises.

Listen to this.

The Egyptians forced the Israelites to work even harder.

But this made the Israelites grow in number and spread more.

So the Egyptians became more afraid of them.

They forced the Israelites to work even

harder.

The Egyptians made life hard for the

Israelites.

They forced the Israelites to work very hard

making bricks and mortar.

They also forced them to do all kinds of hard

work in the fields.

The Egyptians were not merciful to them in all

their hard work.

Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.

You're telling me that the Egyptians worked the Israelites really hard and that just meant

that they had more and more kids and that scared the Egyptians so much that they just

worked the Israelites harder, huh? That's craziness.

Well, finally it clicks for the pharaoh that this really isn't working.

And so he comes up with a really nasty plan.

He calls in the israelite midwives.

Midwives are nurses who help mums when it's time to have their babies.

They help keep the mums and the babies safe.

We really like midwives so the Hebrews have

two midwives, Shiphra and pure.

And the king asks them to do something

horrible.

It's really awful.

In verse 15, the king of Egypt said to the nurses, when you're helping the hebrew women

give birth to their babies, watch.

If the baby is a girl, let the baby live.

But if it's a boy, kill it.

Isn't that awful?

We haven't really talked about the king of Egypt much yet, but it's worth remembering a

few things here.

At that time, at this time that we're talking

about, Egypt was the biggest, richest, most powerful country on earth, which made the king

of Egypt the most powerful king in the world.

In fact, the Egyptians even said that their

king was a kind of God.

And so when this king tells you to do

something, you don't usually say, yeah, nah, I don't really want to do that.

He can have you beaten up.

He can have you killed.

So people obey him because people are too afraid not to.

But these hebrew midwives, they actually fear someone else.

They fear the one true God.

Like if they let the babies live, Feyre is

going to be angry.

But who's he compared to the real God?

How's the real God going to be if you do kill the babies?

That's a much more terrifying thought.

And we've talked about this a few times on the

show, certainly when we were talking about Elijah and Obadiah.

If you fear God, then you have nothing else to fear.

And so these midwives, they ignore pharaoh.

They let the boys live.

So Pharaoh calls them in, and he's really angry.

And he says to them in verse 18, why did you do this?

Why did you let the boys live? And these hebrew women standing in front of

the most powerful king in all the world, the king who can order them to be killed, how do

they respond to him? They make a joke.

In fact, they make an insulting joke.

They make it seem like hebrew women are really

strong and tough.

But egyptian women are really.

They're just weak sissies.

In verse 19, the nurses said to him, the

HebREw women are much stronger than the egyptian women.

They give birth to their babies before we can even get there.

Now, it's not like they're expecting pharaoh to believe them.

They're not lying to him or trying to trick him.

Just think about it.

If the HebRew women always give birth before

the midwives can get there, why would you even need midwives?

Everyone knows that thats not true.

And you might expect PharAoh to get really

angry and kill these midwives.

But you know, what God looks after them?

PharAoh likes to think that hes a God, but hes got no power compared to the real God.

Verse 20 tells us God was good to the nuRses.

And the HebRew people continued to grow in

number, so they became even stronger.

Because the nurses feared God.

He gave them families of their own.

So after all this effort, after all these

plans to try and stop God from growing, the number of IsraElites pharaohs failed

completely.

The HeBREW numbers are getting bigger and

bigger and bigger.

And now even these hebrew midwives who

Pharaoh's really angry with, God's giving them babies of their own as well.

Can anything stop God from keeping his promises?

Can Pharaoh with all his power and strength and big armies and lots of gold?

Of course not.

Nothing can stop God at all.

But Pharaoh's gonna try one more thing.

He's not gonna try ordering any Hebrews to

help him this time.

Hes going to get people he can trust.

He orders his own people, the Egyptians, to do the most horrible task in the world.

Verse 22 says so.

The king commanded all his people.

Every time a boy is born to the Hebrews, you must throw him into the Nile river, but let

all the girl babies live.

This is really bad.

What's going to happen? Well, that's a story for next time.

See you then.

Thanks so much for listening, adults.

If you think this podcast is helpful for your kids and for others, please show your

appreciation by donating some money to help keep the show going.

You can donate@faithfulgod.net.

That's faithfulgod.net dot.

Thanks so much to everyone who already has donated.

You make all this possible.

Also, kids and adults, I'd love you to go to

the website and send me a message.

Tell me how you're finding the show.

And don't forget to follow stories of a faithful God on Facebook, Instagram and ads.

Bye for now.