We have seen from ver. 13 that it was not only a new king who regarded the rising strength of Israel with fear and jealousy: “the Egyptians made the sons of Israel serve with rigor, and embittered their lives with hard labor,” in town and country. It was not merely service but harsh bondage, as complete a contradiction to their original tenure of Goshen as could be.
The oppression became more cruel still, and stopped not short of plans of the most cowardly kind and in a crafty and perfidious way.
“And the king of Egypt spake to the Hebrew midwives, of whom the name of the one [was] Shiphrah, and the name of the other Puah; and he said, When ye do the office of a midwife [or, help in bearing] to the Hebrew women, and see [them] upon the birth-stool, if a son, then ye shall kill him; but if a daughter, then she shall live. But the midwives feared God, and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the male-children alive. And the king of Egypt called the midwives, and said to them, Why have ye done this, and saved the male-children alive? And the midwives said to Pharaoh, Because the Hebrew women [are] not as the Egyptian women; for they are strong, and they have borne before the midwife cometh to them. And God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and became very strong. And it came to pass because the midwives feared God, that he made them houses. And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying, Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river, but every daughter ye shall save alive” (vers. 15-22).
Such an instance as this, and as Herod's in dread of Messiah's birth, could so exceed the ordinary evil ways of man as to remind one of the hidden wicked one, the old Serpent and the Devil, and his enmity to the woman's Seed from first to last of man's day; whose blindness becomes the deeper because he ignores the secret power that works behind the scenes of the world's sad history. How little its rulers, any more than its classes and masses, believe that he is the spring that actuates the sons of disobedience, slaves of a mightier rebel than themselves! For here is a conflict unceasing between the arch-enemy instigating to destruction the first man against the Second and those dear, to Him, till the last war whether above to clear the heavenly places (Rev. 12), or the earth enters for the displayed kingdom (Rev. 19), or the final judgment and eternity (Rev. 20; 21:1-8). All other wars generally are petty in comparison, springing from ambition, revenge, or other depraved lusts. We may except such as may have typified on a small scale those immensely momentous events for the deliverance of man and the creation from Satan's thralldom, for God's glory in His purpose of exalting the Christ and all that are His in the heavens and on the earth in the highest, largest, and richest way, and alas! too in the destructive punishment of all His enemies.
Here it is but a dastardly and diabolical effort to thwart what God was doing with the sons of Israel, even through the midwives for the male-children. But it was frustrated by the fear of God in the midwives, whom God established in their houses, as they refused the perfidy and the murder the wicked king commanded.