Over the last few weeks we've looked at the lives of Abraham, Jacob and Joseph. The stories of each of those guys takes about 12 or 13 chapters of Genesis. These last 3 weeks it’s been quite a task to squeeze 13 chapters of Genesis into a 25 minute sermon. So, when I began thinking about today's message about Moses, I almost gave up. He is the major character in four entire books in the Old Testament; Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
Then I remembered that the goal of this series in not to tell the whole story of any of the characters. It’s to take a bird’s eye view of some of the high and low points in their stories and see if we can learn something from their experience that will transfer into our own. That’s doable!
So this morning we’re going to take a brief look at the man who is probably the greatest leader in the Bible. Moses is mentioned 847 times, second only to Jesus, who’s mentioned 1275 times, obviously all in the New Testament. Moses is traditionally credited with writing, or at least collecting, most of the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.) And, since the remainder of the Old Testament can be described as the record of Israel’s attempts (with various degrees of success) to be true to what is written in those first five books, you can say that he towers over all of the Old Testament. And his shadow falls over the New Testament as well, where he’s mentioned 85 times. He’s an important guy! And there’s no way we can do justice to his importance in one Sunday morning sermon. What we can do, though, is look at one aspect of his life and seek to learn something from that.
Last week we followed Joseph down to Egypt as God led him into a position where he could save many lives. Among the lives he saved were those of his own family who moved down to Egypt to join him. That’s where the book of Genesis leaves off.
Exodus, the second book in the Bible,
begins a few hundred years later. Joseph is long forgotten by the Egyptian
rulers who now see these Asian immigrants as a threat. The Egyptians, who were
Africans, had enslaved the Asian Israelites as a way to control them and
subjugate them. When that didn’t work they implemented a law that required all
the male Israelite babies to be killed at birth. Moses’ mother hid him as long
as she could, but when it was no longer possible to keep him hidden she put him
in a basket and floated him down the
Fast forward thirty some years. Moses has grown up in the Pharaoh’s house as the adopted son of the princess, but he knows he’s different. His natural mother had been hired by the princess to be his nanny, and as the saying goes, “the hand that rocks the cradle, rules the world.”
I’ve no doubt that Moses grew up a very conflicted young man. He was raised as the child of privilege in the king’s palace, but at the same time his mother would no doubt have reminded him of where he had come from and the situation of “his people.” But who were his people? The family that had taken him in and saved his life, or the family that had given him life in the first place?
In the trailer for the movie “Amazing Grace” there is a short clip where a member of the British Parliament, a man of privilege, stands up in a debate over the slave trade and says, “There is no evidence that the Africans themselves object to the trade.” I’m sure Moses heard the same kind of thing around the dinner table. As his adopted family enjoyed the benefits of the slavery of his people I’m sure they tried to convince him that, “the Israelites are really quite happy in their condition.” That’s what oppressors and slavers tell themselves, whether it’s Africans enslaving Asians three and a half thousand years ago, or Europeans enslaving Africans 200 years ago, or Africans, in places like Chad and Sudan, enslaving other Africans today. They tell themselves that this is the natural way of things and that the slaves are content.
Then one day Moses decided to go and see
for himself. And what he saw was forced labour so brutal that he killed one of
the Egyptian overseers. Having, at least in his own mind, identified himself
with the slaves, he then sought to mediate between them, but he had absolutely
no credibility. 2:13 The next day he went out and saw two Hebrews fighting. He asked the one
in the wrong, “Why are you hitting your fellow Hebrew?” 14 The man
said, “Who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as
you killed the Egyptian?” Then Moses was afraid and thought, “What I did must
have become known.” 15 When Pharaoh heard of this, he tried to kill
Moses, but Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian…
You see, it’s not enough to see the problem, we need to take the time to find God’s solution.
Moses could see the problem, his people were being oppressed and enslaved, and he felt driven to do something about it. So he killed one of the overseers. That may have given him an outlet for his anger and frustration, but it really didn’t do much for the situation of the people he was supposedly helping.
In fact he probably made it worse. That’s often the case when we decide to solve problems in our own way rather than seek God for the solution. We end up making the situation even messier than it was before. I’m sure that the disappearance of an Egyptian overseer didn’t go unnoticed. And if the Egyptians were like any other oppressive regime I know of, then there would have been reprisal killings of Israelites to make sure they knew who was boss.
Over the last few weeks we’ve seen that trying to solve problems in their own way, rather than God’s way, was a recurrent theme in the lives of the Patriarchs. Abraham figured he could solve his lack of a child by getting Hagar pregnant. Not a good idea! Jacob figured he could secure God’s blessing by cheating everybody in sight. Even Joseph gave himself grief by sharing his dreams of future greatness with his brothers.
You may be able to see the problem, you may even have an idea of what a better future would look like, but unless you’re willing to take time to hear God’s plans you will often only make matters worse.
One reason why we need to seek God for his
solutions
is because ours are often just too small.
God’s plans are often much bigger than our
own ideas.
We were talking about this topic in talk-back a few weeks ago and someone suggested that Moses was thinking of saving the Israelites “one at a time.” That would be a good evangelical way to do it. In many ways it would be a manageable way to do it. But it wasn’t what God had in mind. God’s plans were so much bigger than anything Moses could have envisioned.
In the 18th century in Britain there were significant numbers of Christians who objected to the slave trade. Many of those were themselves marginalised because they didn’t belong to the state Church of England. Many of them were Quakers and Congregationalists and (yes) Baptists. These people would buy slaves for the express purpose of giving them their freedom, saving them “one at a time.” But God had something else in mind for William Wilberforce and his friends. As members of the ruling class they were in a position to not just help the odd slave, but to eradicate slavery as an institution. It took Wilberforce most of his life, but he eventually succeeded in having slavery made illegal.
Last year there was a conference in
If people keep slipping on the ice and hurting themselves it’s good to help them up and care for them. It’s even better to put some salt on the sidewalk so they don’t fall in the first place. So, for instance, it’s important that we continue to minister to those whose lives have been damaged by drugs, but we need to address the wider issues as well. On Wednesday there was a drug bust just round the corner on Wentworth as the police raided a crack house. They were acting on information from people in the neighbourhood, some of them members of this congregation. Police raids won’t deal with the reasons why people take drugs, but they help deter those who live off other people’s misery.
Also this week, I received an invitation to meet with the director of the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction. I’m going to accept that invitation, and bring along some of the other TrueCity pastors, because it’s not enough that we run front line food banks and meal services. We need to be involved in dealing with the bigger issues that make those ministries necessary. One way to do that is to engage with the city.
Another reason why we need to seek God for his solutions is because we need to learn that God needs our abilities less than our inability.
The temptation in these kinds of situations is always to be like Moses, to see the problem and respond with our own solutions without asking God. (I’ll respond to the Roundtable tomorrow, a week after I got the email, because I wanted to reflect and pray and consult about how to respond; hence the inclusion of the other pastors in the process.)
Moses spent about 40 years wandering around the wilderness with the Midianites. The wilderness is a good place to go if you want some peace and quiet to reflect and pray. I’m sure Moses spent some time reflecting on his “failure” in Egypt. But during that time he also learned stuff. He learned how to survive in the wilderness, how to find pasture for flocks, how to find water, how to read the land and the sky so he could keep his family and flocks safe. He didn’t know it at the time, but that knowledge would come in very useful when he was leading a whole nation of people through the desert.
God was preparing Moses for his life’s work, but God is not in a hurry. He took the best part of 40 years to train Moses in all the education of the Egyptian state. Then he took another 40 to train him in the ways of the wilderness. In the process Moses learned to come to terms with his own inability. The desert is a good place to learn how small you are.
That was a lesson Moses had to learn. He had been raised in a privileged family, and one of the side effects of that kind of upbringing is that it leads to a sense of ability, a sense of power. We like to think that our society gives everybody an equal chance, but the truth is that those who come from educated, successful families are much more likely to make it to higher levels of education and business than those who don’t. They grow up with all kinds of advantages over other kids.
Moses had to unlearn that sense of power so he would rely upon God. He had to walk a road that led from being sure of his own ability to fix things, to a place where he recognised his inability.
By the time God calls him at the burning bush he has made that move from ability to inability.
3:1Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest
of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the desert and came to
Horeb, the mountain of God. 2 There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire
from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn
up. 3 So Moses thought, “I will go over and see this strange
sight—why the bush does not burn up.”
4 When the Lord saw that he
had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, “Moses! Moses!”
And Moses said,
“Here I am.” … 10 “So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring
my people the Israelites out of Egypt.”
11 But Moses said to God, “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring
the Israelites out of
The man who was so sure he could free his people has come to see his own inability. Moses attitude is basically, “I’ve tried that and failed, I’m not going down that road again.” It takes God some time to convince Moses that, with God’s help, he can do what God is calling him to do. It’s not that God doesn’t want to use our abilities. He used Moses’ abilities as a leader and his knowledge of the desert. But he does want us to admit our dependence on him.
When Moses eventually faces down Pharaoh,
he’s learned that his own anger or sense of outrage are not going to accomplish
anything. Instead he speaks for God. 5:1Afterward Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said, “This is what the Lord, the God of
It takes some time, and a lot of suffering on the part of the Egyptians, but eventually they let the Israelites go. Then Moses leads them through the desert for a generation on their way to freedom… but that’s another story.
It isn’t enough to see the problem, we need to get God’s solution. I remember being at a neighbourhood policing meeting a while ago. There was a lot of anger and frustration about stuff that was going on in the neighbourhood. That’s understandable, but James 1:20 says “man’s anger never brings about God’s justice.” If we want to be part of God’s solution to injustice, whether that’s at a personal level, a community level or at the level of society as a whole, we need to take the time to find out what God wants.
God’s plans are often bigger than our own. We tend to see things from our own perspective. God sees the big picture. We have a choice. Follow our own plans, make some impact, perhaps for good, perhaps not. Or, seek God’s plans and make a greater impact for good because we’re working with him.
God needs our abilities less than our inability. Last week we ended Joseph’s story with a reminder that it doesn’t matter how hard life has been to you; an abusive family, slavery, injustice – God is bigger than that and can still use you. Moses’ story is the other side of the coin. He started out with all the connections, the education, the confidence, but God had to bring Moses to the point of recognizing his own inability before he could use him. Because, when it comes to serving God, it isn’t about our ability or inability, it’s about God’s call. And when God calls you to do something, he will equip you to do it.
So, what makes you angry? What injustice makes you want to floor somebody? What abuse makes you just seethe inside? That anger may be more than just impotent rage. It may be the beginnings of a call from God to do something about it. What we learn from Moses is how important it is to allow God to shape our response to injustice. Because only then will we be able to truly set people free.