Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Welcome to February's bonus episode.

We're aiming to do an episode like this at the end of each month, offering some reflections

and some corrections.

Let's start

with reflections, looking back at all we've covered so far. The Bible is one unified story. It's the

story of a family, and it all starts in Genesis. God set out to build a relationship with this family,

but things went terribly wrong when they fractured the relationship through sin. But their sin

didn't surprise God. He already

had a plan in place to restore this relationship even before it was broken, and he continues

working out that plan immediately, undeterred and unhindered by their rebellion. He sets apart a man

named Abraham to be the patriarch of the family, and he gives this family a name, the Israelites.

There are a bunch of busted people who lie, cheat, and steal. God blesses them despite their sin,

but it still has its consequences. One of the long storylines of consequence is of the 400

years they spent enslaved in Egypt. That all started because one brother, Joseph, was a bit of a show-off,

so his older brothers were jealous and sold him into slavery. But God responded to their sin with

rescue. He sent a murderer named Moses to demonstrate his power to the Egyptian Pharaoh,

who was not impressed. Eventually, after 10 rounds of power displays that culminate in the death of the firstborn

of all of Egypt, Pharaoh agrees to let the Israelite slaves go. They flee to the desert led by God and his

servant Moses. God gives them the basic rules of how to have a stable society since they're new to all

of that and have only ever known slavery under a cruel dictator.

They've never seen good leadership demonstrated.

...