Moses

Into that brick yard a boy is hidden for three months and then floated, in a tar-sealed basket of papyrus, onto the very river the empire has just turned into a grave for Hebrew sons. Pharaoh's own daughter draws him out and gives him an Egyptian name and an Egyptian education. Acts 7:22 sums up forty years in one sentence. Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and in deeds. He would have been trained in the hieroglyphic and the cursive scripts, in court etiquette, in administration, in military strategy. The man God will use to lead a slave nation out of Egypt is, by upbringing, a son of the house that enslaved them.

Then comes the second forty years, which Egypt would not have recorded at all. Midian is a tent-and-flock culture on the eastern arm of the Red Sea and into the high country of what we now call northwest Arabia. Moses tends sheep there for Jethro, a priest of his own people's God, in a landscape of wadis and acacia and the long silences of the desert. Exodus 3:1 says he led the flock to the back of the desert and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. The empire trained his head. The wilderness trained his heart. By the time the bush burns, he is no longer the prince who killed an Egyptian in anger. He is an eighty-year-old shepherd who has learned how to wait. The Lord has been writing the deliverer's resume in two completely different schools, and Egypt has no idea.

The Exodus itself, whenever scholars place it, is presented by Scripture as a real and dateable event. Exodus 12:40 keeps the count: the sojourning of the children of Israel was four hundred and thirty years, and at the end of those years, even the selfsame day, all the hosts of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt. The plagues read like a controlled dismantling of the Egyptian pantheon, the Nile turned to blood, the sun put out, the firstborn taken. Sinai, wherever its exact peak lies among the candidates in the southern peninsula or in the northwest of the Arabian range, becomes the place where a delivered slave people are given a law and a tabernacle and a name to call their God. From the basket on the Nile to the view from Nebo is a hundred and twenty years. None of them were wasted.

He is the God who hears. Three times in Exodus 2 and 3 the verbs stack up. He saw their affliction. He heard their cry. He knew their sorrows. He came down to deliver them. Long before the basket, before the bush, before any plague, He was already listening. Moses learns this first and tells it the rest of his life. The Lord is not far. The Lord is not aloof. The Lord is the One who comes down.

He is the God of holy fire. The bush burns and is not consumed. The mountain shakes and smokes. The cloud fills the tabernacle so heavy that the priests cannot stand. The same fire that delivers Israel out of Egypt would also have consumed Israel at Sinai if Moses had not stepped into the breach. Holiness is not God being unkind. Holiness is God being God, and the deepest mercy in the whole story is the mediator He provides so sinful people can stand in front of Him at all.

He is the God who proclaims His own name to the man who asks to see His glory. Exodus 34 is one of the most quoted self-portraits in Scripture. The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty. Mercy and justice in one sentence. Tenderness and holiness in one face. This is the God who walks Moses up the mountain forty days and forty nights, twice, and writes the words with His own finger.

He is the God who keeps covenant down to the smallest promise. The Exodus itself is, at root, an obedience to the word given to Abraham hundreds of years earlier. Deuteronomy 7:9 says it plainly. Know therefore that the Lord thy God, He is God, the faithful God which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love Him to a thousand generations. Moses watches God carry the bones of Joseph out of Egypt after four centuries. He learns that the silences of God are never forgetfulness.

The Passover is the deepest of all the shadows. A lamb without blemish chosen on the tenth day, kept until the fourteenth, killed at twilight, its blood painted on the doorposts so that the destroyer would pass over the house. John the Baptist looks at Jesus and says, behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world. Paul says it as plainly as anyone could. Christ our passover is sacrificed for us. The night Israel walked out of Egypt with kneaded dough on their shoulders is the night every believer is walked out of the kingdom of darkness by the blood of the true Lamb.

The bronze serpent in Numbers 21 is the picture Jesus reaches for in His own mouth. As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life. The cure for the bitten people was not a ritual, it was a look of faith at what had been lifted up on a pole. The gospel is no more complicated than that, and no less.

The Law itself is fulfilled in Christ, not abolished. John 1:17 keeps the Old and the New in the same sentence. The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. The tabernacle pattern Moses built on the mountain finds its yes in the body of Christ, who tabernacled among us, in the high priest who entered once with His own blood, in the veil that was torn from top to bottom on Good Friday afternoon. Hebrews 3 is the careful balance of it all. Moses verily was faithful in all his house, as a servant, but Christ as a Son over His own house, whose house are we. Moses is great because he points away from himself to the greater One who is to come.

And the last and tenderest scene is the mount of transfiguration. Moses, who was not permitted to enter the land, stands in the land with Elijah and with Christ, and the three of them speak of the exodus that Jesus will accomplish at Jerusalem. The deliverer of the first Passover talks with the deliverer of the last one. The mountain Moses could only see is the mountain he is finally standing on, because the One who buried him in Moab is the One who is about to lead a far greater multitude out of a far greater bondage.

For the one who feels unqualified: Exodus 4 is one of the most pastoral conversations in the whole Bible. Moses lists five reasons why he is the wrong man. Who am I. They will not believe me. I am not eloquent. I am slow of speech and of a slow tongue. Send someone else. The Lord does not scold him. He answers each one. He gives him a sign, He gives him a brother, and He gives him the only sentence that finally matters. Certainly I will be with thee. Calling is not the discovery that you are enough. Calling is the discovery that He is.

For the one whose past disqualifies them in their own eyes: forty years before the bush, Moses tried to deliver his people his own way and ended up burying a man in the sand and running for his life. He thought his story was over at Pharaoh's window. God thought his story was just beginning at a Midianite well. There is no failure so old that the Lord cannot meet you on the back of a desert and call you forward again.

For the one standing between a wall of trouble and a sea that will not part: Exodus 14:13 is a verse to keep in your pocket. Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord. The Lord shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace. The waters did not open until they walked toward them. Faith is the obedience that puts a foot down before the path is visible.

For the one carrying people who complain, who turn back, who build a calf in the very week you went up the mountain for them: Moses fell on his face and asked God to blot his own name out of the book rather than let the people be cut off. Intercession is the secret labour of every shepherd God raises up. It is not glamorous. It is mostly tears and dust and a worn-out face that keeps coming back up the hill. The Lord sees it.

For the one who messed up at the cost of something dear: Moses struck the rock in anger when he was told to speak to it, and a single moment of unbelief in front of the people closed the door of Canaan to him. The Lord did not stop loving him. The Lord still buried him in the next chapter, with His own hands, in a grave no man has found. But there are consequences in a life lived close to God that are not the absence of grace. They are the seriousness of grace. The Lord is jealous for His holiness because His holiness is the only safe ground His people will ever stand on.

And for the one who will not see the fulfilment of the thing they have given their life to: Mount Nebo is one of the gentlest mountains in the Bible. The Lord Himself walks Moses up. The Lord Himself shows him the whole land, from Gilead to the western sea. The Lord Himself buries him. Hebrews 11 calls him faithful. The Father did not measure his life by whether he crossed the Jordan. He measured it by whether he walked with God all the way to the top of the hill. That is the measure of yours, too.