We have Israel in Egypt, and we know something of what that signifies. The bondage, as well as the deliverance, had been foretold to Abraham when the covenant was made with him; and that covenant had been confirmed by an oath of God.
Now let us turn again to some of the words spoken by Stephen when, full of the Holy Ghost, he stood before the Jewish Council. He began his discourse by a positive proof that the resurrection was necessary to the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham; for having repeated the promise, he declared that Abraham had not so much as a foot-breadth of the land that was promised, although God had said that both he and his seed should possess it.
Since Abraham died without inheriting it, as did also a vast number of his descendants even those who, like him, had faith, the conclusion was inevitable that the fulfillment could be only through the resurrection. The only reason why so many of the Jews rejected the Gospel was that they persisted in ignoring the plain evidence of the Scriptures, that the promise to Abraham was not temporal, but eternal. Even so at the present time the belief that the promises to Israel convey an earthly and temporal inheritance, is incompatible with a full belief in Christ.
Stephen next recalled the word of the Lord to Abraham, that his seed should sojourn in a strange land, and be afflicted, and afterwards delivered. Then he said, “But when the time of the promise drew nigh, which God had sworn to Abraham, the people grew and multiplied in Egypt.” Acts 7.17. Then followed the oppression, and the birth of Moses. What is meant by the drawing near of the time of the promise, which God had sworn to Abraham? A brief review of some of the Scriptures already studied will make this question very clear.
In the account of the making of the covenant with Abraham we read the words of the Lord to him, “I am the Lord that brought thee out of Ur of the Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it.” Then follow the details of the making of the covenant, and then the words, “Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years; and also that nation whom they shall serve, will I judge; and afterwards they shall come out with great substance. And thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace; thou shalt be buried in a good old age. But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again; for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.” Genesis 15.13-16