There is one of those wise office sayings which goes: “The Boss is not always right, but he is always the Boss”. (If it wasn’t said by Confucius it probably ought to have been.) We all face situations in life where we have to do things we don’t want to do. What is your reaction when you’re asked to do something you don’t want to do by someone you can’t refuse? We are all different. Some of us argue. Some of us make excuses. Some of us go sullen and sulk. Some of us prevaricate. Some of us agree outwardly, but inwardly plan to ignore the request. One colleague completely wrong-foots me by grinning broadly and saying immediately, “That’s the very thing I was just hoping you’d ask me to do!” – which is very disarming.
Of course, there is a difference between initial response and eventual compliance. You may remember that Jesus told a parable about two brothers who are asked by their father to go and work in the vineyard. One said, “No!” but eventually went. The other said, “Yes,” but he never went. (Matthew 21:28-32)
Our passage today concerns Moses’ response to God telling him to do something he did not much want to do. We saw last week that God saying, in verse 8 of chapter 3, “I have come down to rescue them [the Israelites],” meant (two verses later, in verse 10), “I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.” Moses hadn’t applied for the job: he had not submitted his CV, gone through an interview process and suitable personality and aptitude tests. There had been no assessment of his qualifications; no consultation at all, in fact. Forty years before, he had tried his hand at this sort of thing and it had been a resounding failure. He’d been there, he’d done that, and he had no wish to try it again.
We’ve already noted, in these sermons in Exodus, the fierce opposition that the will of God arouses on earth – not just in those who are opposed to Him, but in all of us. The divine will and our human will do not converge like the traffic from two motorways merging together imperceptibly. They meet head on – more like traffic at a major intersection which has to be controlled by traffic lights to prevent accidents. All God’s commands to us meet us head on. They cause us to think up excuses and delaying tactics and avoidance techniques and compromise.
Moses, we see here, came up with five objections (3:11 & 13; 4:1, 10 & 13) (and they tell us something about Moses). God provided each objection with a serious, patient and careful response – which will tell us much about God. Let’s start by looking at the first and the third of Moses’ objections.
1) The Sign and the Signs (3:11-12; 4:1-9)
‘Moses said to God, “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” ’ (Exodus 3:11). Moses was aware of the might of Egypt – probably the greatest empire in the world at the time. He had been brought up as one of its princes, in Pharaoh’s palace. And as far as Moses is concerned it’s not so much that the task is inconvenient or unpleasant or potentially costly, as that it is simply impossible. “Who am I to bring these people up out of Egypt?” Who could do that? But Moses is looking the wrong way: who Moses is is an irrelevance. It is who God is that matters. So, ‘And God said, “I will be with you …” ’ (3:12a). The whole book of Exodus is an explanation of those five monosyllables: “I will be with you.” – what it means for God to be with human beings.
And, as the story unfolds, Moses will learn what it is to have God with him. So he is given a sign that calls for the obedience of faith. Look at the rest of verse 12: “ … And this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt you will worship God on this mountain.” In other words, the success of the mission will prove the presence of God. And, not unnaturally, Moses finds that approach somewhat unsatisfactory.
But his next objection (in 3:13) is of a rather different nature, so I suggest we skip that one for a moment and come back to it at point 2. And we pick up again at 4:1, where this issue of signs comes up again. Despite God having said very clearly in 3:18, “The elders of Israelites will listen to you … ”, Moses objects: “What if they do not believe me or listen to me and say, ‘The Lord did not appear to you’?” (4:1). So God provides three more signs, of a rather different sort: Moses’ staff becomes a snake in verses 2-5 of chapter 4; his hand becomes leprous, in verses 6 & 7; and he is told that he will turn the waters of the Nile into blood, in verse 9 of chapter 4. Notice this, each sign required obedience from Moses: he had to throw down the staff, and (considerably more alarmingly, I guess) pick up the resultant snake by the tail; he had to put his hand inside his cloak; and he would have to fetch and pour out the water from the Nile. And as he obeyed in faith, the sign followed. So these three signs, with their small acts of obedience attached to them, were confirmation of the main sign with its much larger act of obedience attached to it – a sign that God can be trusted. If you do what He says, He will prove to be trustworthy. As Moses obeyed he would prove God trustworthy: he would indeed return with the people to worship God on the mountain.
Christian faith is exercised on the bare word of God. But as we act in obedience we find constant confirmation of the reality of God. So God says (in the words of Psalm 34:8) to the unbeliever, the unconverted here, ‘O taste and see that the Lord is good.’ That’s His word to you today if you’re not a believer yet: ‘O taste and see’ – put Him to the test and you will find that He is good.
To the believer, we get faced again and again with His will in our lives, don’t we? It comes to us head-on. We want to go one way; His will says, No, you must go another way. And we think, Oh, help! I suppose I must walk the way He’s telling me to. And when we get to look back on the way we walked, we see that God was with us every single step of the way. We learned that verse in Job: ‘He knows the way that I take; when he has tried me, I shall come forth as gold’ (Job 23:10) – it is the voice of Christian experience.
Now, these signs were not just for Moses, they were also for the people of Israel and indeed for Pharaoh himself. But, as we shall see, they elicited different degrees of obedience and faith from those different parties. But first we must go back and finish off chapter 3, from where Moses asks God’s name at verse 13.
2) The Name (3:13-23)
‘Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” ’ (3:13). To put that in context for a moment: as far as we know, God had not appeared to an Israelite for over 400 years – that is the time they had been in Egypt. So it is not surprising that they are likely to ask this sort of question. It is not that they didn’t know the name of God, or that they were now unfamiliar with the covenant promises He had made to Abraham, but they might ask, “What new revelation, after all these years of silence, have you, Moses, received from God?” By asking His name, they would be seeking to know His new relationship with them, remembering (as we must) that a name conveyed much more in the ancient East than the mere designation that it has become for us in the West today.
And God’s reply was somewhat cryptic: ‘God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’ ” God also said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers – the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob – has sent me to you.’ This is my name for ever, the name by which I am to be remembered from generation to generation” ’ (3:14, 15). You can probably see from the NIV footnotes that there are all sorts of plays on sounds and tenses and word-roots in the original Hebrew. I AM WHO I AM – self-contained, incomprehensible, not derived from anything else. It could actually mean, ‘He who causes to be’ – the beginning of all causality. The main thrust of it could be, ‘God’s unchangeable reality: the same today, yesterday and for ever.’ But the tense, certainly, takes us beyond the present. The people will experience God’s purpose by what He does in their future. I AM WHO I AM, or I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE. The possibilities are various, but the timelessness of a God who is outside time and yet His active presence inside time for those who know Him, are clearly aspects of this name, of this revelation.
It is both an answer to Moses and a refusal of an answer. It neither condones his doubt nor fully satisfies his curiosity. Because, you see, the revelation of God is not propositional: it cannot be contained in a name for God, nor in a statement about God. The revelation of God is relational: what He is like has to be experienced by men and women as they live in relationship to Him. So the verses that follow continue to reveal the character of God to Moses, and the meaning of the name is coming out in what goes on all the way through the book of Exodus. Look at the next little paragraph: God says there, “Go, assemble the elders of Israel and say to them, ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers – the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – appeared to me and said: I have watched over you and have seen what has been done to you in Egypt. And I have promised to bring you up out of your misery in Egypt into the land of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites – a land flowing with milk and honey’ ” (vv. 16, 17). You see, Moses is now to go to Israel, to tell them that the God who has always been their God is aware of their situation and is about to act to rescue them, according to His promise. And then in verses 18-20 God previews what will happen: only God’s mighty hand will compel a reluctant Pharaoh to release God’s people.
But nevertheless, according to the last two verses of the chapter, they will not leave empty-handed. Because this revealed the justice and generosity of God, it actually became established as a principle in the life of Israel – that no slave should ever be sent away empty-handed when they were released at the Seventh Year Jubilee (as we read in Deuteronomy 15). But I think that we need to move now to the second half of chapter 4, because it contains more major steps forward in God’s revelation of Himself to Moses. Although first, interestingly, it is Moses who is revealed in his true colours.
3) Moses revealed and God revealed (4:10-31)
We now come to the fourth of Moses’ objections: ‘Moses said to the Lord, “O Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue.” ’ (4:10). This is the man whom Stephen described in Acts 7 as ‘powerful in speech and action’. God’s reply is unanswerable: ‘The Lord said to him, “Who gave man his mouth? Who makes him deaf or mute? Who gives him sight or makes him blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say” ’ (vv. 11, 12). And so the true attitude in Moses’ heart is at last exposed: ‘But Moses said, “O Lord, please send someone else to do it” ’ (v. 13). It is not a welcome humility in Moses, it is not a lack of self-reliance which God might commend. It is rank doubt and disobedience, which kindled God’s anger: ‘Then the Lord’s anger burned against Moses …’ (v. 14a). But they also elicit further wonderful revelations of God’s nature and purpose.
In fact, I think there are about five different truths about God that are going to emerge in the second half of chapter 4. The first is that one we have already seen: He is the Creator God who gave man his mouth. Remember Moses had never spoken Hebrew or Egyptian for 40 years. That is why he may have been worried about going to make the case to the people of Israel and to the Egyptian authorities. He may not have spoken their languages for the 40 years he had been in Midian. But God was more than capable of teaching him again. “Who gave man his mouth? Who makes him deaf or mute? Who gives him sight or makes him blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.” God never commands us to do what He does not also enable us to do.
Second, He is the God who provides us with fellowship. Did you notice that, in verses 14-16? God gets angry, but He is very gentle and patient with Moses: “What about your brother, Aaron the Levite? I know he can speak well. He’s already on his way to meet you, and his heart will be glad when he sees you. You shall speak to him and put words in his mouth; I will help both of you speak and will teach you what to do. He will speak to the people for you, and it will be as if he were your mouth and as if you were God to him. But take this staff in your hand so that you can perform miraculous signs with it” (14b-17).
The service of God is normally a corporate affair. God does not mean us to be alone. But do you notice the strange expression that God uses there at the end of verse 16? – “ … as if you were God to him.” We noted last week how Moses was to be God in Egypt. “I’m going to go down to Egypt,” said God “that equals you, Moses, going: I’m sending you.” Man as God’s representative on earth, as the agent and means of God’s rule – and the closeness of the identification is striking. Although God was sending Moses to Egypt, there was to be no sense of separation at all. Indeed, for the Christian believer that great Exodus promise of 3:12, “I will be with you” (those five great monosyllables we were looking at) has actually become, for the Christian believer, “I will be within you.” Not just ‘with you’, but ‘within you’, as God causes the Spirit of His Son Jesus to live in the believer.
There was one elderly female believer who was being taunted by a young atheist friend about her calm Christian certainty in the face of her rapidly approaching death. “How do you know that God of yours won’t let you slip through His fingers at the very last moment?” said the young atheist. “Because, you see,” she replied, “I am one of His fingers.” It was a good answer. It is a wonderful truth for the believer: the identification of the saved with the Saviour. And it is true of you today if you are a believer here amongst us. We are His body on earth. That is how sure we can be.
Thirdly, though Moses would find that being sent by God is never a matter of leaving God, it is often a matter of leaving what has become familiar to us. Glance at the next paragraph: ‘Then Moses went back to Jethro his father-in-law and said to him, “Let me go back to my own people in Egypt to see if any of them are still alive.” Jethro said, “Go, and I wish you well.” Now the Lord had said to Moses in Midian, “Go back to Egypt, for all the men who wanted to kill you are dead.” So Moses took his wife and sons, put them on a donkey and started back to Egypt. And he took the staff of God in his hand’ (vv. 18 -20). If we would find our comfort in God, we must not expect to find it in anything else that God provides for us. The comfort is in the Creator, not in His gifts. God calls us to change and to live as pilgrims on this earth. We have a sort of vision-statement as a church here at St Andrew the Great, of which the final paragraph reads: ‘We believe that God means us to grow, individually and as a church; that growth is change; and that change may be painful. We accept the pain of change gladly for the sake of bringing the gospel to our contemporaries.’ Can I just ask you, is that process going on in you at the moment and causing you any discomfort? Is that true of you at all? – the pain of change for the sake of bringing the gospel to our contemporaries. Ought it to be true?
Then there is the fourth aspect of God’s nature, revealed in the next two paragraphs: ‘The Lord said to Moses, “When you return to Egypt, see that you perform before Pharaoh all the wonders I have given you the power to do. But I will harden his heart so he will not let the people go. Then say to Pharaoh, ‘This is what the Lord says: Israel is my firstborn son, and I told you, “Let my son go, so that he may worship me.” But you refused to let him go; so I will kill your firstborn son’ ” ’ (vv. 21-23). Again God rehearses before Moses what is about to happen in Egypt, so Moses can have no cause for complaint or surprise at how things turn out. But notice that the stakes now have been raised: for the first time the killing of the firstborn is mentioned.
Now remember this, Moses knew Egypt. He knew no Pharaoh worth his salt was ever going to let the Israelite slaves go willingly. What he did not yet know was that God was also in earnest. And He would not let Israel, His firstborn son, be restrained in bondage. It was to prove to be a matter of life and death.
And that, I think, explains the strange little incident described in the next paragraph: ‘At a lodging place on the way, the Lord met Moses and was about to kill him. But Zipporah [Moses’ Midianite wife] took a flint knife, cut off her son’s foreskin and touched Moses’ feet with it. “Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me,” she said. So the Lord let him alone. (At that time she said “bridegroom of blood”, referring to circumcision)’ (vv. 24-26). It is a strange little paragraph. But it appears that Moses’ son had not been circumcised: he had in fact been brought up as a Midianite without the sign of the covenant which, since Genesis 17, had been the outward distinguishing mark of God’s people. God had said to Moses, “Any uncircumcised male … will be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant” (Genesis 17:14). And Moses hadn’t thought it mattered. Now he learned better. For firstborn sons in Egypt it was going to be a matter of life or death, whether they belonged to the people of God or not (whether they were within the covenant).
You see, Moses knew the power of Egypt. He knew how they would cling to their slaves. and now he was beginning to learn the power and the love of God – to what lengths God would go to set His people free; and how much it mattered to be one of those people. You and I know the power of sin in our lives. We know what it is to be selfish; and we know the depth and the grip that selfishness has on us – how it controls us, pollutes us, influences us and taints everything we do, everything we say, everything we think. But do we know the power of God to save us? – how He will free His people from their bondage?
I heard an awful story once, from one of my uncles, of when he was growing up on my grandfather’s farm and two of the farm terriers got into a fight. As comes naturally to such dogs, they locked their jaws on each other; they wouldn’t let go. So someone suggested that they threw both the dogs together into the farm pond, to get them to release their grip on one another. It seemed like a good idea, so they did it. But it didn’t work. Both dogs drowned rather than let go.
Pharaoh would not let go of his slaves. He would risk almost anything to keep them. But there was One far mightier than he involved. God was claiming His own. And there is no force on this earth that can keep His own from Him when He claims them. They will be saved from sin and from death. It will not be the blood of a circumcised foreskin that avails to save them. It will be the blood of His own firstborn Son, shed on the cross. It was at that great cost that God bought us. And because He bought us at that price, we know we are safe and free now. ‘He who did not spare his own Son, but gave Him up for us all – how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?’ Paul wrote in Romans (8:32). Moses is learning here that there was no cost God would not exact, and no price God would not pay, to fulfil His plan to save. That, I suggest, holds those two little paragraphs together in this unfolding revelation about God’s character.
Finally, in the last two paragraphs of the chapter, we see God’s word already beginning to come true. Just as He had said, Aaron teams up with his brother and the Israelite elders believe them and respond to God – which is where the chapter ends – but of course if those words had come true so will God’s words about Pharaoh’s resistance – of which, more in due course.
Well, it has been a long passage; let’s just conclude. Here we see Moses learning about God’s nature and His will, by going God’s way, one step of obedience at a time. The meaning of the promise, ‘I will be with you’, and of the name, ‘I AM WHO I AM’ is being fleshed out in experience as he obeys God. It wasn’t Moses’ five-fold interrogation of God (despite the careful and patient answers that it received) that opened up the meaning, so much as the experience of beginning to walk with God. And the more Moses knew about God, the better he responded to Him.
So how are you and I going to respond better to God who is always the Boss, and is always right? That’s the trouble with God, isn’t it? How are we going to respond better? By getting to know Him better. How are we going to get to know Him better? By living with Him, going His way, putting His word to the test to see if He is a faithful God.
If you are a non-Christian, that may be, as I say, the challenge to taste and see that the Lord is good. Read His word and see if He will reveal Himself to you in it as He said He will. If you are a Christian, that means looking at the next step of obedience and taking it. Perhaps with a Gift Day at the end of the week that is the thing we need to be looking in the face at the moment: our money and our discipleship, how those two things go together.