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First Cumberland Presbyterian Church
This Is Our World
Exodus 1:8–2:10 · Preached by Rev. Chris Warren · August 23, 2026
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At a Glance
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Scripture
Exodus 1:8–2:10
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Speaker
Rev. Chris Warren
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Theme
God still shows up for the outsider. So should we.
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A New King Who Did Not Know Joseph |
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Exodus 1:8: “Now a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph.” Chris chased that one line down a rabbit hole all week: did this Pharaoh never meet Joseph, or never even hear his story? Our best estimate is that somewhere between 64 and 200 years passed between Joseph's death and Moses' birth, enough time for a whole nation to forget. |
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The Israelites did not arrive in Egypt as slaves. They were invited in during a hard season, partly as a political favor, and welcomed because they would do the laborious jobs no one else wanted. Over time that willingness to serve was turned against them. |
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There is a hard twist back in Genesis. To survive the famine, Joseph stores the grain and then, year by year, takes the people's money, then their livestock, then their land, and finally their freedom. “It turns out Joseph enslaved his own people.” |
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Chris was honest about how that landed on him: “I was shocked when I learned that. But now that I'm a little bit older, it's kind of less surprising. It seems like things like that happen all the time.” |
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Ask Yourself
Joseph never set out to be the villain. He was solving a famine one hard year at a time, and by the end a whole people had lost everything. Where in your own life has a string of reasonable choices carried you somewhere you never meant to go? It's worth stopping this week to notice the direction you're drifting, not just the next step in front of you.
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The real trouble was never the economy. “The issue that comes up for the Egyptians is more than an economic one. It's an issue of fear-mongering.” The elite Egyptians grew afraid these growing people would outnumber them, dilute their culture, or simply decide to get up and leave. |
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Pharaoh's math was cold. He needed the labor, so he could not expel them; he just wanted them to stay the same in number and stay in their place. His fix was to kill the baby boys, so there would be no army to resist him in fifteen or twenty years, while the women kept doing the work. |
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Two midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, quietly refuse. “But the midwives feared God. They did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live.” Two women with no power to stop a king simply would not do the cruel thing, and Scripture says God dealt well with them. |
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When that plan fails, Pharaoh orders every Egyptian to throw the Hebrew baby boys into the Nile. It fails too. The very river meant to drown them carries Moses safely into Pharaoh's own household, where he is raised to become everything the Egyptians feared in the first place. |
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Ask Yourself
Shiphrah and Puah could not overthrow anything. They just refused to do the cruel thing set in front of them. You may never face a Pharaoh, but somewhere this week the easy and expected thing will also be the unkind thing. What would it look like to quietly do the right thing anyway, even if no one notices but God?
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Chris did not leave the story in Egypt: “I assert that we are still living in this same reality right now, and this time our nation is Egypt.” For centuries we have invited others in to do the work we did not want to do, first for no wages at all, then for wages lower than anyone else would accept. |
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The pattern repeats itself. When a group gets, in his words, too numerous or too proficient or too uppity, a nation finds a way to take them down. He named Europe's treatment of the first peoples of this land and the import of enslaved people as the most egregious examples of it. |
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This is why Chris became a Cumberland Presbyterian. The Confession of Faith commits the covenant community to oppose, resist, and seek to change “all circumstances of oppression, political, economic, cultural, racial,” that deny people the dignity God intends for them. As he put it, that is not just a Cumberland Presbyterian belief, it is a Christian one. |
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The engine is still the same one: fear-mongering, the whisper that says they might destroy us if we don't control them. Against all of it, Chris pointed straight back to the text: right here, in the second book of the Bible, God shows up for the immigrant and the oppressed. |
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Ask Yourself
It's easy to talk about Egypt from a safe distance. It is harder to ask who, right now, in our own town, gets treated as a problem to be managed instead of a person God loves. This week, bring one such person to mind by name, and ask God for the eyes to see them the way He does.
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Key Quotes
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Rev. Chris Warren · on Joseph and the grain
“It turns out Joseph enslaved his own people. I was shocked when I learned that. But now that I'm a little bit older, it's kind of less surprising.”
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Rev. Chris Warren · on what really drove Egypt
“The issue that comes up for the Egyptians is more than an economic one. It's an issue of fear-mongering.”
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Rev. Chris Warren · on our own nation
“I assert that we are still living in this same reality right now, and this time our nation is Egypt.”
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Rev. Chris Warren · on the heart of Exodus
“Right here, the second book of the Bible, God shows up for the immigrant, the oppressed... We study this and then we somehow miss it entirely in our own context.”
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First Cumberland Presbyterian Church · Exodus 1:8–2:10 · August 23, 2026
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