Yet the pharaoh's of yesterday and the pharaoh's of today have their own schemes using power to persuade, intimidate and, when all else fails, annihilate. If a shrewd king wanted to get rid of a whole nation of people, he would kill all the female babies. Perhaps the Chinese government today is more shrewd than pharaoh. It has decreed that only one child per family can be born, so thousands of female babies are being killed so that families may have an economically more valuable male child who will carry on the family lineage. Yes, the powers of death are real.
Life is under threat.
And it will take more than the family to overcome the forces that wage war against it. But how we go about overcoming pharaoh is crucial if we are to be a people of faith. What is instructive about the story of the midwives is that it offers a novel, new model of heroism based on intelligence and compassion rather than violence. The reason why the midwives defied the king was not because they hated the king, and not because they sided with the Hebrews. The reason why they did what they did was because they feared God, and the way they feared God was in honoring their calling as midwives, as bearers of life.