“The Israelites traveled from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand able-bodied men on foot, besides their families. A mixed crowd also went up with them, along with a huge number of livestock, both flocks and herds. The people baked the dough they had brought out of Egypt into unleavened loaves, since it had no yeast; for when they were driven out of Egypt, they could not delay and had not prepared provisions for themselves. The time that the Israelites lived in Egypt was 430 years. At the end of 430 years, on that same day, all the Lord’s military divisions went out from the land of Egypt. It was a night of vigil in honor of the Lord, because he would bring them out of the land of Egypt. This same night is in honor of the Lord, a night vigil for all the Israelites throughout their generations.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I’m sure we’ve talked about this before, but there are some places in the Scriptures that leave you wondering a bit exactly why they were included. They don’t appear to tell us anything of particular applicational worth. They just give details that we don’t really feel like we need. What is the point of these places? Why would God include them? Can we just skip them without missing much? Today, let’s see about answering some of these questions and more as we talk through what’s happening in these verses, potpourri style.

Let’s start with that last question and work backward from there. The short answer to whether we can just skip parts of the Scriptures that seem irrelevant and come back to them later is, yes, we certainly can. The biggest reason for this is that the Scriptures – what we usually just call, “the Bible” – are not a book the way we think about books today. I recently finished reading through a trilogy of books. The story was a mystery/thriller about a girl who inherits an enormous fortune from a total stranger and finds herself having to navigate an exciting, but dangerous world full of intrigue and ulterior motives and puzzles. Lots of puzzles. It was a fun series that was written to be a page-turner. If you missed a single chapter, there was a good chance you were going to miss an important detail in the story without which later parts of it weren’t going to make any sense.

The Scriptures aren’t like that. While we have them collected and bound together like a single book today, that’s not how they were originally written. No one document was written with future documents in mind. At times there were hundreds of years that passed between two documents. There were at least 40 different authors who contributed to what we have as the final product. The order we put the documents in today (especially of the Old Testament) is not the same order the ancient Israelites used. The New Testament is only organized like it is for convenience. There’s nothing particularly sacred about why they are like they are. Church leaders hundreds of years ago decided to group the stories about Jesus first, starting with the one they thought was the oldest (we now know they were wrong). Then came the story about the church. After that were Paul’s letters from longest to shortest. Then the non-Pauline letters from longest to shortest. Revelation got tacked onto the end because it is about the end. That’s it. Reading it straight through like a book without missing anything is not only not necessary, but not terribly wise, especially for folks who are fairly new to the Scriptures.

If you are feeling stuck on one part, skip it and move on to the next part. There’s no rule that says you can’t. But what about what Paul said to Timothy about all Scripture being God-breathed and useful for shaping us more fully into the people He created us to be? Doesn’t that mean we shouldn’t skip any of it? No. That means there’s something for us in every part of it. It means we should ultimately give attention to all of it. But it doesn’t mean every part of it is for us in every moment or situation of our lives. There are seasons one particular document or section is going to be particularly meaningful, and seasons when another will. Read broadly, yes, but when it becomes clear that you need to slow down in a particular section, do that. If you don’t, keep right on going until you do.

All of that is to say that if you hit passages like this one and want to skim through them, you don’t need to feel guilty about that. That being said and as I plan on sharing with you tomorrow, Lord willing, there is nonetheless worth to be found in the details. While no single part of the Scriptures was written specifically with another part in mind, because God’s Spirit inspired all of it, and because later authors were often well-versed in what was written before them, there are often connections between sections, even and especially in the minute details, that can yield some pretty rich veins of application if we are willing to be patient in our study. Time spent meditating on a particular section that isn’t making a lot of sense in a given moment will rarely be wasted.

So, yes, there is applicational worth to the details of the Scriptures. But something else we need to keep in mind is that these stories were well-written. In addition to everything else they represent for us, the Scriptures are good literature. They tell good stories well. Whether because the authors God chose were particularly skilled writers, because they were inspired by God’s Spirit in their writing, or a combination of both, the various documents that make up the Scriptures are all exceedingly well-crafted literary works. And part of telling good stories well is including details to make the stories more interesting. If certain details don’t seem relevant to us, though, we need to remember that we aren’t the original audience. While God preserved them for us, they weren’t written for us. Details that don’t seem relevant to us may not have been written for us. They may have been written for and meant a great deal more to the original audience.

If the details of the text matter, then, and since this section is full of them, let’s take just a bit longer today to walk through the details we find here. Israel started their journey heading from Rameses, located somewhere in the Nile Delta region where they had lived for hundreds of years, to Succoth, a few days’ journey to the south. This fits with Moses’ repeated request for the people to go into the wilderness for a three-day religious retreat. It was not the most direct route to the Promised Land. That particular route would have been well-traveled and public, but also crawling with Egyptian soldiers whom God did not want the people to have to fight along the journey (more on that in a few days, Lord wiling). We’re not exactly sure where either of these two locations are, but archaeologists have at least educated guesses on the matter. Google both places and you can find some of their thoughts.

Moses tells us the original group departing Egypt consisted of 600,000 able-bodied men, along with their families and some other folks. That’s a lot of people. We’re not given an exact number beyond 600,000, but modern scholars have used that to figure up a total group size of north of 2 million which is an enormous crowd to move through the desert for any length of time, let alone 40 years. This has led many to doubt and otherwise find ways to reduce the total group size quite substantially. Yet while the number seems dubious to us, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. The Scriptures have been proven right in details we had previously doubted many times before. I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt as much as possible.

The note about there being a “mixed crowd” going with them suggests that there were quite a few non-Israelites who came along for the journey. Who were these folks? There’s a good argument to be made they were Egyptians. Why would a bunch of Egyptians be going with Israel after everything that had happened? Well, because of everything that had happened. It is not at all unreasonable to conclude that by the time God had revealed Himself through the ten different plagues, there were a number of Egyptians who had concluded that Israel’s God was bigger and stronger and more worthy of their devotion than Egypt’s gods. Whatever happened to Israel, they wanted to stick with them because they were going to be following their God from now on. So, when Israel left, they went with them.

Moses notes again that the people were stuck with unleavened bread. They had mostly followed God’s instructions to be ready for a journey, but they hadn’t packed much or prepared extensive food provisions for themselves. As a result, they didn’t bring any yeast along for the journey. Part of the reason for this was that God had told them to get rid of it all from their houses in preparation for the Passover. They were going to be eating unleavened bread for a while now. This once again highlights just how quickly Egypt was pushing them out of the country. They really didn’t have time to prepare for what lay ahead of them. This meant the journey they were taking was going to have to be a journey of faith from the start. It revealed once again the power of their God that He could indeed provide for them. They were right and wise to trust in Him. How telling that they would still struggle to trust in Him over and over again in spite of how trustworthy He had and would continue to prove Himself to be. This serves as a reminder for us that our faith often isn’t nearly as strong as we imagine it to be, God is far more patient than we imagine Him to be, and it gives us the encouragement that when we struggle in our faith we are not alone.

Because we live in such a relatively young nation, it’s hard for us to imagine the lengths of time covered in the histories recorded in Genesis and Exodus. Israel was in Egypt for 430 years. That’s a really long time. That’s longer than from the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock until now. We genuinely have trouble fathoming that much time. And, given just how much the world has changed in the last 430 years, we have even more trouble imagining the world staying fairly static for that long. But it did. There was nothing like the Christian worldview to spark innovation back then like it did around the time settlers were just starting to explore this continent. Now, this doesn’t mean Israel was enslaved for all of that time – they almost certainly were not – but it was how long they had been without a true home as a people. God had told Abraham it was going to take that long before his descendants came back to the land God had sworn to him to give them, so things were moving exactly on the pace He was dictating, but it’s an awfully long time nonetheless. Cultures come and go and change rather completely in that amount of time. God had given Himself plenty of time to be starting with a fairly blank slate when it came to His work of building a people who were going to be called by His name.

When the people left, Moses describes their going out in military divisions. This was not a defeated people leaving Egypt, but a victorious one. They were marching out with their heads held high. Moses’ language here speaks to the fact that they scored a great victory. The irony to that is they didn’t do any of the actual fighting. In fact, there was no fighting. No blood was shed in any kind of a battle. God did His thing and the people marched out victoriously. What a gracious God we serve who allows us to join in the victories He wins. Incidentally, our victories never manage to compare with His. His are total; ours only partial. His are just; ours are often not. His last; ours eventually collapse. His advance His eternal kingdom; ours only scratch a temporary itch. It is always better to bask in the glow of His victories than to try to claim them on our own.

One last thing: When God wins victories on our behalf like this, we are wise and right to celebrate them. It is good and necessary to remember them. This was what the Passover was for. It is why we celebrate Easter today. Christmas too. When God wins, we need to remind ourselves not only that He won, but that it was Him who did the winning. That way we are encouraged to stick with Him in order to experience more victories like the ones we celebrate.

That’s about it for this morning. This was just a jog through some details that are otherwise easy to skip. But a bit of patience can reveal some gems worth mining if we will give ourselves time to find and polish them to a nice shine. God’s word truly is useful at every point for making us more like Him.