Today we’re beginning a new sermon series on Women in the Bible. This isn’t about making a political statement, it’s about telling stories that deserve to be heard. These are accounts of faith that often get passed over, yet they reveal something profound about how God works in the world.
Because women make up half the population and more than half of this congregation. Today women can vote and lead nations. But the women we find in the Bible often had no power or voice in their societies. And that’s precisely what makes their stories so compelling. They show us what God accomplishes through people the world overlooks. These women aren’t just admirable examples. They are more than just heroes of faith for us to copy. They are people through whom God chose to work, essential to the unfolding of his story of redemption. Whatever story from the Bible we are looking at, we need to remember that God is always the main character.
Now, we love the stories of David and Daniel, and rightly so. But most of us aren’t kings, and we aren’t prophets. The women in Scripture often lived lives closer to our own, lives where faithfulness looked like perseverance in ordinary circumstances, courage without a crown, obedience without an official calling. All of us, men and women alike, have much to learn from how God worked in and through them.
Ironically, our first message on the women in the Bible begins with a man who had a problem. He was the king of Egypt and his problem was that he did not know Joseph. That’s Joseph who was sold as a slave by his brothers, who was taken to Egypt, who was falsely accused and put in prison, who interpreted the king of Egypt’s dreams and predicted the coming famine and who was put in charge of food collection to save the lives of many in Egypt. In return, the king let Joseph and his brothers settle down with their families in Egypt where there was plenty of food in good years and bad. And they did what healthy growing families do. They had lots of babies who had lots of babies until that family of Joseph and his eleven brothers became a large community of Israelites living among the Egyptians.
But a new king came to power in Egypt who didn’t know about Joseph and didn’t know or care what he owed to Joseph’s wisdom and oversight. He looked at the many thousands of foreigners living in his land and he was afraid. He was afraid of their numbers. He was afraid of their strength. And listen to what he said to his advisers:
“The Israelites have become much too numerous for us. Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country.”
This king is afraid that the Israelites will grow strong and fight and win and leave. Not take over. Not stay where they are. He’s afraid that they’ll leave him without their labour, without their contribution to his economy. He only values them for what he can extract from them.
This is the attitude, the rebellion at the heart of all sin. The king is acting like he is God and treating other people like things. It’s this attitude that motivates his plan for the Israelites.
“So the Egyptians put slave masters over the Israelites to oppress them with forced labour, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh.”
The king’s plan had two main goals. Firstly, to weaken the Israelites with hard work. And secondly, to get the most value out of them that he possibly could before they collapsed and died.
But the king’s plan failed because the Israelites were blessed by God. Because the more the Israelites were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread. Instead of becoming weak, they became strong. Instead of dying out, their numbers increased all the more. It wasn’t because slavery made them strong, because Egypt’s plan was to destroy them. This was a miracle from God. He was intervening, not to rescue them out of their suffering yet but to strengthen them within it.
Suffering is never easy. It doesn’t just drain us of our physical strength. It undermines our hope. We begin to fear that things will never change. But the Israelites’ forced labour for the Egyptians wasn’t the end of their story. It was only a kind of beginning. And with the benefit of hindsight we can see four ways in which God was at work in their experiences. Firstly, he was reminding the Israelites who they were. They were God’s people, the children of Abraham and the heirs of God’s promises to Abraham to bless his family, to make them many and to give them their own land. Secondly, he was making it clear that they didn’t belong in Egypt. Egypt had been a great temporary home during the famine. But the land God had promised them was Canaan. It was time for the Israelites to leave Egypt and to go home. Thirdly, God was helping the Israelites to want to leave Egypt. They had grown comfortable in this land of plenty. No one willingly leaves a land while their life is comfortable. But the king’s harsh treatment of the Israelites turned this paradise into a prison. They would never be happy until they found a land of their own. And lastly, God was hardening them for the journey to Canaan. It would not be easy going through the harsh desert lands that lay in the way. But through their forced labour for the king, the Israelites were being made ready for the hardships that lay ahead of them.
God’s timing isn’t always our timing, but his purposes are always at work. Even in suffering. Even in waiting. Even when rescue seems delayed. God was preparing the Israelites for freedom, even while they remained in bondage.
And so the king tried something even worse. Confronted by his failure, he doubled down on his harsh treatment of the Israelites. He worked them ruthlessly. He made their lives bitter. They weren’t just working for him, he was using them, treating them not like people, but like tools. In his mind, the king had stripped the Israelites of their humanity and once this happens, there’s no limit to the cruelty that follows.
We need to be careful here. It’s easy to look at Pharaoh and see a monster, someone completely unlike us. But dehumanisation doesn’t only happen in palaces or concentration camps. It happens whenever we stop seeing people as God’s image-bearers and start seeing them as obstacles, problems to be managed, or means to our own ends. It happens in our politics when opponents become enemies. It happens in our workplaces when people matter only for what they produce. It happens in our conflicts when we take sides and assume the worst of each other. Because once we strip someone of their humanity in our minds, even in small ways, cruelty is never far behind. Not the king of Egypt’s violence perhaps, but our words, our indifference, our contempt.
The antidote is to remember what the king forgot: that every person, no matter their usefulness to us, no matter their politics or position, is made in God’s image and worthy of dignity.
Driven by fear and hatred, the king of Egypt plotted genocide. Exodus chapter 1 says,
“The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah, ‘When you help the Hebrew women in childbirth and observe them on the delivery stool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, let her live.'”
The goal in this plan is the elimination of the Israelites as an independent people with their own identity. The men are kept alive as slaves. The boys already living will grow into a future workforce. The women are reduced to a means of producing the next generation.
And the female babies will be allowed to live we presume to become wives for Egyptian men. But the male babies will be killed, not only so they’d never grow up to be soldiers fighting against Egypt, but to destroy the Israelites completely. This isn’t a crime of passion or a moment of rage. This is evil as state policy, cold and calculated to engineer the death of a people while extracting maximum economic value from them in the process.
And at the heart of the king’s plan were two Israelite women. Shiphrah and Puah. They were midwives, chosen and trained to assist other Israelite women in childbirth. To the king, they seemed the perfect instruments for his plan. First, they had access to Israelite boys at their most vulnerable. Their first breath. Second, the deaths of newborns could be explained away as tragic accidents. And third, these women appeared insignificant, people with no power, who could be compelled to do what the king commanded.
But they didn’t do it. Yes, they still served as midwives. Yes, they helped the Hebrew women in their childbirth. But they would not kill the baby boys as the king had ordered. And the Bible explains why.
“They feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do. They let the boys live.”
Now, I’ve spent years trying to explain what it means to fear God. I’ve said it doesn’t mean being afraid of him, but treating him with awe and respect. I’ve used analogies about healthy fear, the kind that makes you cautious on the road, that makes you swim between the flags. And those aren’t wrong. But I’ve come to believe that when the Bible talks about fearing God, it’s not merely talking about a feeling. It’s talking about a conviction that shapes our choices. Because the Bible always mentions fearing God in the context of obedience. Doing what God commands even when it costs us something. To fear God means to recognize who he truly is: our creator, our judge, the one to whom we will give account.
It means seeing him rightly in all his holiness and power and authority—and letting that reality determine how we live. And when we see God rightly, when we fear him above all else, something remarkable happens. We fear no one else. We can’t be compelled to do the wrong thing. We aren’t swayed by peer pressure. We don’t need to please people or bow to those with power over us. When we fear God, everyone else’s threats lose their power, and we’re left with a clear choice to obey him, even when that choice is costly, even when it puts us in danger, even when it might cost us everything.
The apostles faced this same choice centuries later. The religious authorities in Jerusalem had arrested them for preaching about Jesus. They commanded them to stop speaking in his name. And the apostles’ response was simple and direct:
“We must obey God rather than human beings!”
That’s the essence of fearing God. When human authority commands one thing and God commands another, there’s no real dilemma for those who fear God. The choice is clear. The apostles knew they might be beaten, imprisoned, even killed. But they feared God more than they feared the Sanhedrin’s threats.
That’s what Shiphrah and Puah did. They saw God’s authority as higher than the king’s. They recognized that they would answer to God for what they did in those birthing rooms, regardless of what the king commanded. And that clarity, that fear of God, set them free to do what was right.
When Pharaoh discovered the boys were surviving, he summoned the midwives and demanded an answer. “Why have you done this? Why have you let the boys live?” And they said to him, “Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women; they are vigorous and give birth before the midwives arrive.”
Now, we should pause here. Many people believe that all lying is wrong, always and in every circumstance, and that position deserves respect because of the commandment, “You shall not bear false witness.” So it’s possible the midwives were telling part of the truth. Perhaps Hebrew women were indeed vigorous, and maybe the midwives didn’t rush to the childbirths, and they used these partial truths to distract the king from what they were trying to achieve.
But whether their words were complete fabrication or strategic truth-telling, the effect was the same. They deceived Pharaoh to protect innocent life. Consider what would have happened if they’d been completely honest, if they’d said, “We won’t kill babies because we fear God.” Pharaoh would have executed them and replaced them with midwives who would obey. The babies would die anyway, and these two faithful women would be gone. These women weren’t afraid of dying. They feared God, not Pharaoh. But their deception wasn’t self-preservation, it was life preserving. It kept them in position to keep saving lives. As long as Pharaoh thought the problem was Hebrew biology rather than midwife defiance, they could continue their quiet resistance. And the text tells us God blessed them for it.
So maybe sometimes protecting innocent life from murderous authority requires more than just saying no. It requires wisdom, cunning, and courage.
We’ve seen this throughout history. The Dutch families who hid Jews in their attics during the Nazi occupation lied to German soldiers searching for them. Corrie ten Boom and her family deceived the Gestapo to save lives. Christians living under oppressive regimes today, in North Korea, in parts of the Middle East and Asia, must meet in secret, deny their activities to authorities, use whatever means necessary to protect themselves and their brothers and sisters from persecution. These aren’t failures of faith. They’re expressions of the same fear of God that moved Shiphrah and Puah.
For most of us, living in relative safety and freedom, honesty is always the best policy. We should tell the truth. We should build our relationships on trust. We should raise our children to be honest. But we need the humility to learn from Christians living under murderous regimes that undermine trust and demand complicity in evil, from those who’ve had to make choices most of us will never face. When people ask, “If lying is sometimes okay, where do we draw the line?” perhaps the line is here: when it saves innocent lives from those who would destroy them. When evil authority demands we participate in murder, in betrayal, in destruction, fearing God means resisting by whatever means we have—including deception when it saves lives.
Because this is the verdict of Scripture: “So God was kind to the midwives and the people increased and became even more numerous. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families of their own.” Notice what God honours here. Not their perfection. Not their power or position. But their courage to fear him more than they feared the most powerful man in the world. And notice what the text preserves for us: their names. Shiphrah and Puah. We don’t know the name of this Pharaoh. The text doesn’t bother to tell us. He was the king of Egypt, the most powerful man of his age, and history has forgotten his name. But Shiphrah and Puah, two powerless women, midwives with no army, no wealth, no political influence, their names are written in Scripture for all time.
Because God sees differently than we see. He values differently than the world does. And he works through people the world overlooks. This is what we learn from the women in the Bible. Not just that they were brave, though they were. Not just that they were faithful, though they were that too. But that God was at work through them, accomplishing his purposes, advancing his kingdom, protecting his people.
And if God worked through these two midwives facing down a king, then he can work through any of us. The question is: Will we fear God more than we fear anyone else? Will we trust his authority above every human authority? Will we do what’s right even when it’s costly, even when it’s risky, even when no one else will know? Because God sees. God honours. And God works through those who fear him.