Straight to the heart of Moses – Third free chapter

Thanks to the kind permission of Monarch we are able to share the third chapter of Phil Moore’s book. Other chapters are also available.

WAITING IS NOT WASTING (2:11-25)

“During that long period, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God.” (Exodus 2:23)

God wants to be seen through his People, but it certainly didn’t feel that way to the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. They had none of the hindsight which we enjoy today to reassure them that he was working in secret on his prison break. Many of them began to doubt whether he actually wanted to be seen through them at all. We can all feel the same during our own periods of waiting.

If you have been a Christian for any length of time, then you will have discovered that God is not in a hurry. Like Gandalf in “The Fellowship of the Ring”, he “is never late; nor is he early. He always arrives precisely when he means to” – but even so, the Christian life involves a lot of waiting. A marriage partner, a job search, the conception of a baby, the salvation of a friend – whatever it is, he is invariably the God “who acts on behalf of those who wait for him”.[1] As I write this, I am entering a second year of trying to sell my house, which doesn’t make sense when I have told all my neighbours that I serve the God who answers his People’s prayers. Situations like these can make us doubt whether the Lord truly wants to be seen as much as the Pentateuch suggests. That’s why Exodus begins with an encouragement that ‘waiting is not wasting’, because the Lord can be seen through his People even as they wait.

During Israel’s darkest night, the Lord still used them to reveal himself as God-the-Faithful-One. When Pharaoh commanded the Hebrew midwives to murder every newborn baby boy, they were tempted to put their faith to one side and to compartmentalise their working lives. Pharaoh demanded that his subjects address him as “My King, my Lord, my God, my Sun, the Sun in the sky”,[2] and he had power to execute any health worker who refused to obey his edicts straight away. When the midwives “feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do”, they gave the Lord an opportunity to demonstrate his faithfulness through their lives. Moses tells us that “because the midwives feared God, he gave them families of their own.” In fact, although he does not even bother to identify the pharaoh who gave the order,[3] he makes sure to record the names of Shiphrah and Puah because they made God’s faithfulness visible through their courage whilst they waited.[4]

In the midst of delay, the Lord also revealed himself as God-the-Saviour. Moses tells us in 6:20 that his parents were named Jochebed and Amram, meaning Yahweh-Is-Glorious and The-People-Are-Exalted. This implies they were a family who still believed that God wanted to be seen through his People despite the confusingly long delay. They kept such faith in the Lord that he describes himself to Moses in 3:6 as “the God of your father” (not the God of your fathers), and they saw something in their newborn baby boy which made them trust God to save him and give him a role in delivering his People.[5] We can see this even more clearly if we understand a bit of Hebrew, since the word têbâh is used in only two places in the Bible: twenty-six times to refer to Noah’s ark and twice here to refer to Moses’ basket in the Nile. By faith, Jochebed copied Noah and coated a papyrus basket with waterproof pitch,[6] then took her baby down to the very riverbank where Pharaoh ordered that he be drowned. When she trusted the Lord to save him from the floodwaters and bring him to rest on an ‘Ararat’ of his own, her unflinching trust in her unseen Lord made him visible as God-the-Saviour.

When the grown-up Moses refused to wait any longer, the Lord was even able to reveal himself as God-the-Indweller through his sin. The New Testament tells us that he hoped to give the Lord a helping hand, assuming that “his own people would realise that God was using him to rescue them, but they did not.”[7] It only took one nasty comment from a Hebrew to send Moses running into forty years of exile in the desert. He learned the hard way that man-made solutions always fail, but he “persevered because he saw him who is invisible”.[8] When the Lord met him at the burning bush and sent him back to Egypt with a promise that this time “I will be with you” (3:12), he made God visible to the rest of Egypt too. The man who was spooked by a Hebrew slave on his own, could stand up to Pharaoh when accompanied by his God.

Finally, those forty years of delay enabled the Lord to reveal himself as God-the-Covenant-Keeper. Moses married into a family of Midianites, the descendants of Abraham through his concubine Keturah. Unlike most Midianites, they still followed Abraham’s God and offered sacrifices based on the covenant he had made with their forefather many centuries before.[9] Moses was a failed-schemer-turned-shepherd like the patriarch Jacob before him, but Jethro’s family out-Israeled Israel and modelled a covenant-keeping community for him to follow. They inspired him to name his first son Gershom, or Alien, out of homesickness for his Hebrew countrymen, and to name his second son Eliezer out of confidence that God-Is-My-Helper.[10] That’s why Moses ends chapter 2 by telling us that “God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob.” The Lord had heard. The Lord had remembered. The Lord had looked on his waiting People with concern.

All this should encourage us in our own times of waiting and confusion. If the Lord could be seen through the Hebrews as God-the Saviour, God-the-Indweller, God-the-Faithful-One and God-the-Covenant-Keeper, even during the darkest midnights of their lives, then he will also make himself visible through our own lives if we trust him while we wait.

Will our lives be full of delays and disappointments and dismay? Yes, probably.  But waiting is never wasting when we follow the God who wants to be seen through his People.