Exodus: Taking the Road Out
Part 2
Flukes of History in the Plans of God
Exodus 2
Now if you would turn to the book of Exodus, I am going to read from Exodus Chapter 2. I am going to read the first ten verses. We began to look at this section of Scripture last week.
Exodus 2:1 says,
“Now a man of the house of Levi married a Levite woman, and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. When she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months.
“But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch.
“Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile.
“His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him.
“Then Pharaoh’s daughter went down to the Nile to bathe, and her attendants were walking along the river bank. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her slave girl to get it.
“She opened it and saw the baby. He was crying, and she felt sorry for him. ‘This is one of the Hebrew babies,’ she said.
“Then his sister” (Miriam) “asked Pharaoh’s daughter, ‘Shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you?’
“ ‘Yes, go,’ she answered. And the girl went and got the baby’s mother.
“Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, ‘Take this baby and nurse him for me, and I will pay you.’
“So the woman took the baby and nursed him.
“When the child grew older, she took him to Pharaoh’s daughter and he became her son. She named him Moses, saying, ‘I drew him out of the water.’”
Well, we began to look last week into the book of Exodus. Of course the hero of the book of Exodus is Moses. Half of Chapter 2, the section we have read, covers the first forty years of Moses’ life.
And the next verse, if we were to read it, from Verse 11 on, talks about an event that took place when Moses was forty. And the rest of the chapter covers the next forty years of Moses’ life until he was eighty years of age.
So eighty years of Moses’ life are covered in this one chapter. And then an unbelievably 134 chapters of the Old Testament are given to Moses’ life as an old man over eighty, from Exodus Chapter 3 through to the end of the book of Deuteronomy.
Now if anyone here has an ageism mentality, you can forget it now. If you think that you are too old to be useful, you need to think again. If you think that old people are past their prime and are no longer of any use, you need to think again - 134 Chapters on Moses, over the age of eighty, leading the nation of Israel out of Egypt and doing his biggest and greatest work after the age of eighty.
This morning what I want to do is cover the first eighty years of Moses’ life and I want to point out to you things that are vital to the rest of the story. So hold on tight; it’s eighty years in a few minutes.
Moses, you remember, was born in treacherous days. The Israelites had been in Egypt for 400 years. They had long worn out their welcome as the saviours of Egypt under Joseph’s leadership.
And as Chapter 1 Verse 8 says,
“A new king, who did not know about Joseph, came to power in Egypt.”
And because he did not know the history, he looked at the Israelites – what are they doing here? They don’t belong here. They were multiplying fast. They had grown to something like 2 million people, though when they arrived, they were only 70. And he felt threatened by them.
And so he reduced them to slavery in the hope of breaking their spirits and breaking their wills. And then he introduced an even more drastic measure. He ordered the midwives, “When you attend the birth of a Hebrew slave, if it’s a boy, kill it; if it’s a girl, let it live.”
Understandably, the midwives refused to cooperate and so Pharaoh passed the responsibility over to the population in general. And in Chapter 1:22 it says,
“Pharaoh gave this order to all his people: ‘Every boy that is born you must throw into the Nile, but let every girl live.’”
So all the Egyptians were brought into this genocide of baby boys born to the Israelite people, known then as the Hebrews, in the land of Egypt.
Now at this time there was a man called Amram who married a lady called Jochebed – we don’t have their names until Chapter 6. It was a slightly unusual marriage because Jochebed was actually the aunt of Amram. She was his father’s sister. And they of course were both of the tribe of Levi.
And Jochebed became pregnant at one stage and gave birth to Moses. Now Moses was not their first child; he was their third child. Their first child was a girl called Miriam, the second child was Aaron, and we know from later events that Aaron was three years older than Moses. And so three years after Aaron, Moses was born.
And Verse 2 says that,
“When she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months.”
Now I don’t know how much significance we should give to the fact that she saw he was a fine child. I mean, most parents think that about their child. I mean yours probably did once, for the first three months at least.
And Hebrews 11, talking about this in Verse 23, elaborates a bit and says,
“They saw that he was no ordinary child.”
Well I don’t know; we can only speculate and that isn’t always wise to do, but maybe God whispered something in Jochebed’s ear about this baby.
We know that God sometimes did that. He whispered in the ear of Sarah about her baby Isaac. He whispered into the ear of Hannah about her son Samuel. He whispered to Elizabeth things about her baby, John the Baptist. And of course He spoke to Mary about her son Jesus.
Now all those that I have cited to you were unusual births because the mothers were either too old, like Sarah and Elizabeth, or they were barren like Hannah, or she was a virgin, as in the case of Mary.
But it seems significant enough for both Exodus and also in the book of Acts and the book of Hebrews to say about Moses as a baby, “he was no ordinary child”. There was something about him that they recognized.
And so, like Mary, Jochebed probably tucked this away and pondered it in her heart. Now she kept him at home for three months where no Egyptian would see him and then obey the edict to throw him into the Nile. But after three months, presumably the risks rose a little bit.
Maybe after three months he became too noisy or he became too smelly or whatever the reason, she decided that she would hide him in the very place he was supposed to die – in the River Nile.
She had already been through this exercise because somehow Aaron had escaped the wrath of Pharaoh. And we don’t know anything about Aaron’s story but Aaron had been saved in some way as well.
But she decided that she would make a little basket and coat it with tar and pitch and place this child in the basket amongst the reeds on the banks of the Nile.
And I was on the Nile last year on a boat. Somebody, when I was speaking at the Maadi Church in Cairo took me out - some of the young people went out with the youth leaders – went out on a boat. There are still bulrushes – lots of them – on the side of the Nile. They are tall enough to hide this basket.
And Miriam, his eldest sister, had to go down and stand on the banks and just make sure that he was safe and make sure he didn’t somehow get released from his moorings and end up in the mainstream of the Nile and get swept out into the Mediterranean or make sure no crocodile came too close.
And Miriam one day was standing on the banks of the Nile apparently minding her own business, one eye on the basket where the baby was, when a chariot pulled up and an elegant lady stepped out and walked down to the Nile to bathe. And it was Pharaoh’s daughter. And I am sure Miriam thought to herself, the last thing that must happen now is that Moses should cry.
But he cried because babies do that when they are not supposed to. And Pharaoh’s daughter heard the cry and sent her servant to find out what it is and came back with a basket – here’s a baby.
And I think Miriam is a fantastic girl. Instead of running home and saying, “Mommy, they have got Moses!” she came alongside, came to Pharaoh’s daughter and said, “Excuse me, I see you just found a baby. That’s cute, isn’t he? Do you need a nursemaid to look after him? I know somebody who is just out of work who would be absolutely perfect for the job.”
And Pharaoh’s daughter said, “Run and get her and I’ll pay her to look after him.”
And Miriam ran home, got her mother, and in an amazing fluke of circumstances, Moses’ own mother was paid to bring up her son in the safest place on earth for a Hebrew slave – in the palace of Pharaoh.
She probably fed him out of a golden bowl everyday with a golden spoon and sat him on a golden potty. And it must have been Moses’ mother who told him who he really was. It must have been her who one day said, “Moses, (actually it was Pharaoh’s daughter who called him Moses because the meaning of Moses is “I drew him from the water”.)
We don’t know what name his parents gave him before that. Maybe he was called Fred or something, we don’t know. But it was Pharaoh’s daughter who called him Moses and that name of course stuck.
And it must have been she who said, “Moses, you don’t belong here. You are not an Egyptian. You are a Hebrew. I mean, look at the shape of your nose.”
And as Moses grew up, he understood, “although I am growing up in the palace of Pharaoh with all the privileges associated with that, it isn’t where I belong.”
And there came a time when he had to make a choice. Knowing he belonged to the Hebrew slaves he could have cut off all connection with them and retained all the privileges of Egypt or he could identify himself with his own people.
And interestingly, the book of Exodus does not tell us of this dilemma that he had to face and this decision he had to make. But in Hebrews 11:24 is says,
“By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He chose rather to be mistreated with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time.”
Egypt, with all its attractions and all its privileges was the wrong place, he recognized. Interesting, it talks about he chose to be mistreated with the people of God rather than enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time. There are of course pleasures in sin.
But pleasure is not joy. There isn’t joy in sin. Pleasure often seduces us and draws us away from joy. In fact it is pleasure that often kills the joy in people’s lives.
And Moses was smart enough and discerning enough to know pleasure is not always your friend. And he chose to reject the pleasures of sin available to him – notice, for a short time, because they are always temporary.
And then at the age of forty, motivated by his desire to identify with the people of God and his desire to free them, he made his big mistake. Let me read it to you in Verse 11.
Verse 11:
“One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to where his own people were and watched them at their hard labor.”
Notice, by the way, he is still at this point enjoying the privilege of being an Egyptian because he is not participating in their labor. He was never a slave himself. He could come and watch them.
“And he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people. Glancing this way and that and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.
“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?’
“The man said, ‘Who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian yesterday? Then Moses was afraid and thought, ‘What I did must have become known.’
“When Pharaoh heard of this, he tried to kill Moses, but Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian, where he sat down by a well.”
Moses, seeing an Egyptian beat a Hebrew, decided that if I am going to rescue the Israelites out of Egypt (and probably that was the sense that he had even at this stage. Probably that’s what had been germinating in his heart and mind. “I am going to attack the Egyptian (which he did – buried him in the sand. Notice it says that he looked this way; he looked that way. Of course he forgot to look in the most important way; he forgot to look up and say, “Is this God’s business?” Because this was Moses’ business; it wasn’t God actually.
He buried the man quickly in the sand; probably buried him too quickly; left his big toe sticking out at one end and his nose the other. And somebody came along and tripped over the nose, landed on the toe and the body stood up. Rigor mortis had set in and they found the body.
Next day in an argument with a fellow Hebrew, said “You going to kill me the way you killed the Egyptian yesterday?”
“How did you know about the Egyptian yesterday?”
“Everybody knows.”
And he went to Pharaoh. When he heard of it he tried to kill Moses and he fled out into the Midian desert. He sat down by a well and there were seven sisters who had come to collect water for their father’s sheep but there were other shepherds who were bullies who didn’t like the idea of women coming and accessing the well when they were there. And so they tried to drive these women away and Moses intervened on their part and he rescued them and watered their flocks.
And they went back home and told their father about this man, this stranger. And he said, “Why did you leave him at the well? Go and get him and bring him home to eat.”
And Moses came home and he ate and they gave him a job as a shepherd. He married one of the daughters and he lived there for the next forty years in the Midian desert. The King James describes it as the backside of the desert. You couldn’t get more remote than that.
Such were the fortunes of Moses. Eighty years – he stayed there until he was eighty - of the biggest pendulum swings in history. Condemned to die as a baby (that’s how he was born); suddenly a swing to the other side – he is brought up in Pharaoh’s palace with access to all the riches and privileges of Egypt, of the royal family of Egypt – the safest place on earth.
And then back to the other side of the pendulum, out into the desert; not just out in the desert for forty years, but on the backside of the desert looking after sheep.
And as Genesis 46 tells us, all shepherds are detestable to Egyptians. So he is right at the very bottom of the social structure of Egypt. They detest shepherds whereas he had been right at the very top – grandson of Pharaoh, of the king.
Well you know, we read all that and we say, well that’s interesting and intriguing; now let’s go on to Chapter 3 where God meets Moses at the burning bush and the real story begins.
But that is not how it works. The story never begins when we think it does. Chapter 2 is not just background just so our curiosity about where did Moses come from is satisfied. But what happened in Chapter 2 was vital to what would happen in Chapter 3, 4, 5 and right on through for the next 134 chapters of Moses’ life.
You see, God was preparing him for things – preparing him in ways he had absolutely no idea as to what God was doing and why God was preparing him in this way.
And I want to give you three simple, practical things from this story this morning that I trust you will find relevant in your life, but which I suggest to you were true of Moses.
The first thing I want to say is embrace your past. You see there are two sides to Moses’ past. The two sides were there were problems – mountains of them; and there were privileges – mountains of privileges too.
Here are some of the problems: he was born into an oppressed and abused people. He was separated from his birth family from the early days through the cruel acts of Pharaoh. He grew up lost to his true identity, alone in an alien world. And when he had the chance, he rejected it as Hebrews 11 says, when he had grown up he refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter.
You know many people – maybe many of us here this morning – don’t like our past. We would dearly have loved to have lived according to a different script than the one that seems to have been given to us.
Maybe some of us would have loved to have been born into a different family because of the pain that you have experienced in your family. You would have loved to have been born into different circumstances, maybe loved to have been born in a different location. We would have loved to have had different opportunities. We wish we could have had different pain to that which we have had.
Do you feel like that this morning? There is a lot of pain in Moses’ history.
On the other hand – on the other side of Moses’ past was privilege. Brought into the royal palace of Pharaoh, legally adopted and therefore a prince of Egypt. Not only that, but it tells us Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action.
In other words, as Egypt was then the great superpower of the world, he had the best education available, educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. As the adopted grandson of the king of the most powerful nation on earth, he had inherent power, inherent authority. As he walked down the street, people would know who he was and bow to him and make way for him.
And no doubt there are those of us who are very grateful for privileges that have been part of our lives. Maybe you have come from a stable home and that’s a wonderful privilege. Maybe you have lived with a measure of comfort. You are grateful for your family, for your circumstances, grateful for the location in which you have lived.
And Canada is one of the most privileged countries on earth. Many of us – myself included – came here from elsewhere and we have found it to be a place of privilege. We are grateful for the opportunities. You know, maybe we have had very good starting blocks to begin our race of life from.
Moses’ past is a mixture of problems and privilege but this is more than just a matter of fate, much less a matter of luck or good fortune or bad fortune.
You see, when we read the story of Moses forward and we don’t know the significance of all of this. But when we read the story backwards, as we do, because we know who Moses was after 80, and then we start to read the story backwards, it begins to make sense.
You see why did Moses need to be born to Hebrew slaves? I’ll tell you why. Only a delivered person can become a deliverer. Only a rescued person can become a rescuer. Only someone who knows what it is to be saved can save others. Only those who have lived in darkness can go into the darkness without fear. You see God does through us what He has first done in us.
Paul wrote about something very similar when he said in 2 Corinthians 1:5,
“Just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.”
The sufferings and the comfort go together.
“If we are distressed” (that’s us – if we are distressed, he says), “it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer.”
Paul says, “As Christ sufferings flow over to us, He understands us. So our sufferings and our comfort, our experience of God flows over to you.”
You see if you are going to pray, “Lord use me” – and that ought to be the basic prayer of every Christian – “Lord use me”, the process by which He equips you to be used, the way He makes us useable may not be pleasant.
You see the temptation that we have is to run to God and ask Him to take away every trouble, to take away every pain, to take away every fear. Our instinct is to do that but these may be the very things that God is giving to you that out of what you learn of Himself in these sufferings, God will use you.
Why, at 40, did Moses, having fled to Midian, end up spending forty years looking after sheep? I mean these were the prime years of his life and what is he doing? He is sitting out in the desert under a cactus bush or something watching boring sheep.
I have worked with sheep. They are boring. They only cease to be boring when they get into trouble, and they do because sheep are notorious for going the wrong way and doing the wrong thing when they get the opportunity.
You know Isaiah 53 talks about that,
“All we, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way.”
And you know something? Moses spent forty years with sheep that are either boring or going the wrong way. No one ever sits back and says, except when they are little babies and aren’t they cute because they spring around. But nobody is about to say, “What beautiful sheep.” It’s either they are boring sheep or they are a nuisance. They are going the wrong way, doing the wrong thing.
But you see Moses was going to lead a nation for forty years through another desert, and as all we like sheep go astray, certainly the Israelites went astray. And it was useful to know a bit about the desert and to know a bit about sheep.
Moses didn’t know that when he ended up there. I am sure there were days Moses went through depression and discouragement – not just days – months; not just months - years. Not just years – decades - a shepherd, detestable to the Egyptians. “When I used to be at the top of the tree.”
Have you ever thought that as God was preparing Moses in that experience for his leadership of the nation that God is preparing you in the dark tunnels through which you sometimes go for things you don’t know about yet?
We learn more from our tears than we ever learn from our laughter. And again and again it’s our tears that invest in building us and equipping us and giving us empathy and compassion.
The problems of Moses were his equipping. What about the privileges? Why was Moses transferred to the royal palace of Egypt? Why did God in His providence allow that to take place? Why, as Scripture says, was Moses educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and powerful in speech and action - the best education around? Egypt was the most developed nation in the world at the time. Moses had the best education in Egypt. We could surmise he was one of the best-educated men in the world.
Now think about this. The best selling book in history is the Bible; it still is. Year after year after year – so much so, the statistics, when they list best-sellers do not include the Bible. The Bible is excluded from the New York Times best-selling list because it would sit in the Number 1 spot week after week after week after week after week – still the best-selling book in history.
Made up of 66 books, written by over 30 authors over a period of 1500 years. Do you know who is the biggest single author of the Bible? It’s Moses. In my own Bible Moses wrote 196 pages.
In contrast Paul wrote only 68 pages. Moses wrote three times as much as Paul.
Where did Moses learn to do that? Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. And when he sat down to his studies with his personal tutor handpicked by Pharaoh’s daughter -one of the best tutors of the land - what was going on in Egypt, the enemy of the people of God, was a God in His Sovereignty was equipping Moses to give to us today, thousands of years later, 196 pages of Scripture. And we’re still reading his stuff today.
And Moses’ ministry after the age of 80 is a combining of all the problems in his first 80 years with all the privileges of his first 80 years and nothing is wasted – nothing.
Your past is important – it’s not what you may have chosen. But one day you and I will have the privilege of reading our stories backwards like we do with Moses. And starting at the end, what was God wanting to do with my life – let’s go back - oh man, those things that I wished hadn’t happened, they are the very things which equipped me with understanding and compassion and ability
Your past is important. Do you believe that? If you don’t believe that you will begin to resent it, in all likelihood. Instead, thank Him for it.
Moses embraces the past.
The second thing I wanted to say from this, having embraced your past, engage your present. There are three tenses of time – past, present and future – and we only ever live in one of those. We only ever live in the present. We don’t live in the past and we will never live in the future because it is always the future. We live in the present.
It is in the present where we engage, which is why God’s name given to Moses in Chapter 3 is I AM – not I was, or I Will Be – I Am – God is present tense.
And it is always in the present that we make choices, that we make decisions. And there were crucial times in Moses’ present tense when he did not know the end consequences; he made decisions that were right. Let me read to you from Hebrews 11:24–27.
“By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time.
“He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward.
“By faith he left Egypt, not fearing the king’s anger; he persevered because he saw him who is invisible.”
Now notice the action lines in those few verses. He refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter – that must have been a very hard decision for him because he no
doubt was full of gratitude to Pharaoh’s daughter. She had mothered him and cared for him.
But he recognized that he belonged to the people of God. So he made this choice. He refused to be known as Pharaoh’s daughter.
Second thing he chose to be mistreated with the people of God. He made a choice that he knew would disadvantage him and he would become mistreated.
Thirdly he refused to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time.
Fourthly he regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than all the treasures of Egypt. “I am better living in disgrace associated with the people of God than I am with a reputation and enjoying the treasures of Egypt.”
And when it says he left Egypt not fearing the king’s anger – why? Because his security was in someone else. Now there is a lot there to unpack and we haven’t time to do that.
But let me point out three things that did not impress him. The treasures of Egypt did not impress him - he regarded disgrace as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt. The pleasures of Egypt did not impress him. He chose not to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time. His reputation in Egypt did not impress him – he refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter.
Now do I need to make a parallel between this and the world in which we live - the treasures of this world, the pleasures of this world, the reputation of this world? Those three things are exactly what John calls worldliness in his letter in 1 John 2:16
“For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh” (its pleasures), “and the lust of the eyes” (its treasures - greed), “and the pride of life” (it’s reputation), “is not of the Father; it is of the world.”
And when our lives are motivated by treasures or pleasures or reputation you know this: you are not on the agenda of the Father; you are living as the world.
And you and I have to deal with these issues before ever we can be used by God.
It wasn’t hard for Moses to deal with this because he had something better. Look as this – verse 26 – because “he was looking ahead to his reward.” Verse 27: (This is in Hebrews 11.)
“He persevered because he saw him who is invisible.”
Notice that? He was looking ahead and he saw Him who is invisible.
When we see Him who is invisible the things that are visible cease to impress us, but when we don’t see Him who is invisible we become very impressed by the visible things, by the tangible things, by the material things, and treasures are important and pleasures are important to us and reputation is important to us because we do not see the one who is invisible.
And God – we may believe in Him but He’s not real and so the visible things override the invisible. And because Moses saw the invisible God, the visible things were not important.
Embrace your past; Moses did. Engage your present; Moses did. Enter your future – no time to talk about this - but in Chapter 3, when it says at the end of Chapter 2 that God heard their groaning, He remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and Jacob, God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them. In heaven the heart of God is breaking for His people.
And as God always does, He looks for a man and He found one – a shepherd on the backside of the Midian desert who had been moulded, broken, equipped, had a vision of the invisible because all the visible he had recognized to be so temporary, just for a season.
And God is always looking for a man or a woman – the eyes of the Lord, the Scripture tells us, go to and fro throughout the whole earth seeking someone who will allow God to show Himself strong on their behalf, looking for a man or a woman who will say, I will let God be strong in and through me.”
And we will look next week at what happened at the burning bush when God met a man who is not [fuller ?] or cocky and ready. He says, “Who am I? I can’t. I am no one.”
And that’s the most qualified person that God could get hold of.
Are you embracing your past, engaging your present; making the right decisions? And will you enter your future with the confidence that God is working out something that is His plan?
Let’s pray together.
Part 2
Flukes of History in the Plans of God
Exodus 2
Now if you would turn to the book of Exodus, I am going to read from Exodus Chapter 2. I am going to read the first ten verses. We began to look at this section of Scripture last week.
Exodus 2:1 says,
“Now a man of the house of Levi married a Levite woman, and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. When she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months.
“But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch.
“Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile.
“His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him.
“Then Pharaoh’s daughter went down to the Nile to bathe, and her attendants were walking along the river bank. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her slave girl to get it.
“She opened it and saw the baby. He was crying, and she felt sorry for him. ‘This is one of the Hebrew babies,’ she said.
“Then his sister” (Miriam) “asked Pharaoh’s daughter, ‘Shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you?’
“ ‘Yes, go,’ she answered. And the girl went and got the baby’s mother.
“Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, ‘Take this baby and nurse him for me, and I will pay you.’
“So the woman took the baby and nursed him.
“When the child grew older, she took him to Pharaoh’s daughter and he became her son. She named him Moses, saying, ‘I drew him out of the water.’”
Well, we began to look last week into the book of Exodus. Of course the hero of the book of Exodus is Moses. Half of Chapter 2, the section we have read, covers the first forty years of Moses’ life.
And the next verse, if we were to read it, from Verse 11 on, talks about an event that took place when Moses was forty. And the rest of the chapter covers the next forty years of Moses’ life until he was eighty years of age.
So eighty years of Moses’ life are covered in this one chapter. And then an unbelievably 134 chapters of the Old Testament are given to Moses’ life as an old man over eighty, from Exodus Chapter 3 through to the end of the book of Deuteronomy.
Now if anyone here has an ageism mentality, you can forget it now. If you think that you are too old to be useful, you need to think again. If you think that old people are past their prime and are no longer of any use, you need to think again - 134 Chapters on Moses, over the age of eighty, leading the nation of Israel out of Egypt and doing his biggest and greatest work after the age of eighty.
This morning what I want to do is cover the first eighty years of Moses’ life and I want to point out to you things that are vital to the rest of the story. So hold on tight; it’s eighty years in a few minutes.
Moses, you remember, was born in treacherous days. The Israelites had been in Egypt for 400 years. They had long worn out their welcome as the saviours of Egypt under Joseph’s leadership.
And as Chapter 1 Verse 8 says,
“A new king, who did not know about Joseph, came to power in Egypt.”
And because he did not know the history, he looked at the Israelites – what are they doing here? They don’t belong here. They were multiplying fast. They had grown to something like 2 million people, though when they arrived, they were only 70. And he felt threatened by them.
And so he reduced them to slavery in the hope of breaking their spirits and breaking their wills. And then he introduced an even more drastic measure. He ordered the midwives, “When you attend the birth of a Hebrew slave, if it’s a boy, kill it; if it’s a girl, let it live.”
Understandably, the midwives refused to cooperate and so Pharaoh passed the responsibility over to the population in general. And in Chapter 1:22 it says,
“Pharaoh gave this order to all his people: ‘Every boy that is born you must throw into the Nile, but let every girl live.’”
So all the Egyptians were brought into this genocide of baby boys born to the Israelite people, known then as the Hebrews, in the land of Egypt.
Now at this time there was a man called Amram who married a lady called Jochebed – we don’t have their names until Chapter 6. It was a slightly unusual marriage because Jochebed was actually the aunt of Amram. She was his father’s sister. And they of course were both of the tribe of Levi.
And Jochebed became pregnant at one stage and gave birth to Moses. Now Moses was not their first child; he was their third child. Their first child was a girl called Miriam, the second child was Aaron, and we know from later events that Aaron was three years older than Moses. And so three years after Aaron, Moses was born.
And Verse 2 says that,
“When she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months.”
Now I don’t know how much significance we should give to the fact that she saw he was a fine child. I mean, most parents think that about their child. I mean yours probably did once, for the first three months at least.
And Hebrews 11, talking about this in Verse 23, elaborates a bit and says,
“They saw that he was no ordinary child.”
Well I don’t know; we can only speculate and that isn’t always wise to do, but maybe God whispered something in Jochebed’s ear about this baby.
We know that God sometimes did that. He whispered in the ear of Sarah about her baby Isaac. He whispered into the ear of Hannah about her son Samuel. He whispered to Elizabeth things about her baby, John the Baptist. And of course He spoke to Mary about her son Jesus.
Now all those that I have cited to you were unusual births because the mothers were either too old, like Sarah and Elizabeth, or they were barren like Hannah, or she was a virgin, as in the case of Mary.
But it seems significant enough for both Exodus and also in the book of Acts and the book of Hebrews to say about Moses as a baby, “he was no ordinary child”. There was something about him that they recognized.
And so, like Mary, Jochebed probably tucked this away and pondered it in her heart. Now she kept him at home for three months where no Egyptian would see him and then obey the edict to throw him into the Nile. But after three months, presumably the risks rose a little bit.
Maybe after three months he became too noisy or he became too smelly or whatever the reason, she decided that she would hide him in the very place he was supposed to die – in the River Nile.
She had already been through this exercise because somehow Aaron had escaped the wrath of Pharaoh. And we don’t know anything about Aaron’s story but Aaron had been saved in some way as well.
But she decided that she would make a little basket and coat it with tar and pitch and place this child in the basket amongst the reeds on the banks of the Nile.
And I was on the Nile last year on a boat. Somebody, when I was speaking at the Maadi Church in Cairo took me out - some of the young people went out with the youth leaders – went out on a boat. There are still bulrushes – lots of them – on the side of the Nile. They are tall enough to hide this basket.
And Miriam, his eldest sister, had to go down and stand on the banks and just make sure that he was safe and make sure he didn’t somehow get released from his moorings and end up in the mainstream of the Nile and get swept out into the Mediterranean or make sure no crocodile came too close.
And Miriam one day was standing on the banks of the Nile apparently minding her own business, one eye on the basket where the baby was, when a chariot pulled up and an elegant lady stepped out and walked down to the Nile to bathe. And it was Pharaoh’s daughter. And I am sure Miriam thought to herself, the last thing that must happen now is that Moses should cry.
But he cried because babies do that when they are not supposed to. And Pharaoh’s daughter heard the cry and sent her servant to find out what it is and came back with a basket – here’s a baby.
And I think Miriam is a fantastic girl. Instead of running home and saying, “Mommy, they have got Moses!” she came alongside, came to Pharaoh’s daughter and said, “Excuse me, I see you just found a baby. That’s cute, isn’t he? Do you need a nursemaid to look after him? I know somebody who is just out of work who would be absolutely perfect for the job.”
And Pharaoh’s daughter said, “Run and get her and I’ll pay her to look after him.”
And Miriam ran home, got her mother, and in an amazing fluke of circumstances, Moses’ own mother was paid to bring up her son in the safest place on earth for a Hebrew slave – in the palace of Pharaoh.
She probably fed him out of a golden bowl everyday with a golden spoon and sat him on a golden potty. And it must have been Moses’ mother who told him who he really was. It must have been her who one day said, “Moses, (actually it was Pharaoh’s daughter who called him Moses because the meaning of Moses is “I drew him from the water”.)
We don’t know what name his parents gave him before that. Maybe he was called Fred or something, we don’t know. But it was Pharaoh’s daughter who called him Moses and that name of course stuck.
And it must have been she who said, “Moses, you don’t belong here. You are not an Egyptian. You are a Hebrew. I mean, look at the shape of your nose.”
And as Moses grew up, he understood, “although I am growing up in the palace of Pharaoh with all the privileges associated with that, it isn’t where I belong.”
And there came a time when he had to make a choice. Knowing he belonged to the Hebrew slaves he could have cut off all connection with them and retained all the privileges of Egypt or he could identify himself with his own people.
And interestingly, the book of Exodus does not tell us of this dilemma that he had to face and this decision he had to make. But in Hebrews 11:24 is says,
“By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He chose rather to be mistreated with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time.”
Egypt, with all its attractions and all its privileges was the wrong place, he recognized. Interesting, it talks about he chose to be mistreated with the people of God rather than enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time. There are of course pleasures in sin.
But pleasure is not joy. There isn’t joy in sin. Pleasure often seduces us and draws us away from joy. In fact it is pleasure that often kills the joy in people’s lives.
And Moses was smart enough and discerning enough to know pleasure is not always your friend. And he chose to reject the pleasures of sin available to him – notice, for a short time, because they are always temporary.
And then at the age of forty, motivated by his desire to identify with the people of God and his desire to free them, he made his big mistake. Let me read it to you in Verse 11.
Verse 11:
“One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to where his own people were and watched them at their hard labor.”
Notice, by the way, he is still at this point enjoying the privilege of being an Egyptian because he is not participating in their labor. He was never a slave himself. He could come and watch them.
“And he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people. Glancing this way and that and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.
“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?’
“The man said, ‘Who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian yesterday? Then Moses was afraid and thought, ‘What I did must have become known.’
“When Pharaoh heard of this, he tried to kill Moses, but Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian, where he sat down by a well.”
Moses, seeing an Egyptian beat a Hebrew, decided that if I am going to rescue the Israelites out of Egypt (and probably that was the sense that he had even at this stage. Probably that’s what had been germinating in his heart and mind. “I am going to attack the Egyptian (which he did – buried him in the sand. Notice it says that he looked this way; he looked that way. Of course he forgot to look in the most important way; he forgot to look up and say, “Is this God’s business?” Because this was Moses’ business; it wasn’t God actually.
He buried the man quickly in the sand; probably buried him too quickly; left his big toe sticking out at one end and his nose the other. And somebody came along and tripped over the nose, landed on the toe and the body stood up. Rigor mortis had set in and they found the body.
Next day in an argument with a fellow Hebrew, said “You going to kill me the way you killed the Egyptian yesterday?”
“How did you know about the Egyptian yesterday?”
“Everybody knows.”
And he went to Pharaoh. When he heard of it he tried to kill Moses and he fled out into the Midian desert. He sat down by a well and there were seven sisters who had come to collect water for their father’s sheep but there were other shepherds who were bullies who didn’t like the idea of women coming and accessing the well when they were there. And so they tried to drive these women away and Moses intervened on their part and he rescued them and watered their flocks.
And they went back home and told their father about this man, this stranger. And he said, “Why did you leave him at the well? Go and get him and bring him home to eat.”
And Moses came home and he ate and they gave him a job as a shepherd. He married one of the daughters and he lived there for the next forty years in the Midian desert. The King James describes it as the backside of the desert. You couldn’t get more remote than that.
Such were the fortunes of Moses. Eighty years – he stayed there until he was eighty - of the biggest pendulum swings in history. Condemned to die as a baby (that’s how he was born); suddenly a swing to the other side – he is brought up in Pharaoh’s palace with access to all the riches and privileges of Egypt, of the royal family of Egypt – the safest place on earth.
And then back to the other side of the pendulum, out into the desert; not just out in the desert for forty years, but on the backside of the desert looking after sheep.
And as Genesis 46 tells us, all shepherds are detestable to Egyptians. So he is right at the very bottom of the social structure of Egypt. They detest shepherds whereas he had been right at the very top – grandson of Pharaoh, of the king.
Well you know, we read all that and we say, well that’s interesting and intriguing; now let’s go on to Chapter 3 where God meets Moses at the burning bush and the real story begins.
But that is not how it works. The story never begins when we think it does. Chapter 2 is not just background just so our curiosity about where did Moses come from is satisfied. But what happened in Chapter 2 was vital to what would happen in Chapter 3, 4, 5 and right on through for the next 134 chapters of Moses’ life.
You see, God was preparing him for things – preparing him in ways he had absolutely no idea as to what God was doing and why God was preparing him in this way.
And I want to give you three simple, practical things from this story this morning that I trust you will find relevant in your life, but which I suggest to you were true of Moses.
The first thing I want to say is embrace your past. You see there are two sides to Moses’ past. The two sides were there were problems – mountains of them; and there were privileges – mountains of privileges too.
Here are some of the problems: he was born into an oppressed and abused people. He was separated from his birth family from the early days through the cruel acts of Pharaoh. He grew up lost to his true identity, alone in an alien world. And when he had the chance, he rejected it as Hebrews 11 says, when he had grown up he refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter.
You know many people – maybe many of us here this morning – don’t like our past. We would dearly have loved to have lived according to a different script than the one that seems to have been given to us.
Maybe some of us would have loved to have been born into a different family because of the pain that you have experienced in your family. You would have loved to have been born into different circumstances, maybe loved to have been born in a different location. We would have loved to have had different opportunities. We wish we could have had different pain to that which we have had.
Do you feel like that this morning? There is a lot of pain in Moses’ history.
On the other hand – on the other side of Moses’ past was privilege. Brought into the royal palace of Pharaoh, legally adopted and therefore a prince of Egypt. Not only that, but it tells us Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action.
In other words, as Egypt was then the great superpower of the world, he had the best education available, educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. As the adopted grandson of the king of the most powerful nation on earth, he had inherent power, inherent authority. As he walked down the street, people would know who he was and bow to him and make way for him.
And no doubt there are those of us who are very grateful for privileges that have been part of our lives. Maybe you have come from a stable home and that’s a wonderful privilege. Maybe you have lived with a measure of comfort. You are grateful for your family, for your circumstances, grateful for the location in which you have lived.
And Canada is one of the most privileged countries on earth. Many of us – myself included – came here from elsewhere and we have found it to be a place of privilege. We are grateful for the opportunities. You know, maybe we have had very good starting blocks to begin our race of life from.
Moses’ past is a mixture of problems and privilege but this is more than just a matter of fate, much less a matter of luck or good fortune or bad fortune.
You see, when we read the story of Moses forward and we don’t know the significance of all of this. But when we read the story backwards, as we do, because we know who Moses was after 80, and then we start to read the story backwards, it begins to make sense.
You see why did Moses need to be born to Hebrew slaves? I’ll tell you why. Only a delivered person can become a deliverer. Only a rescued person can become a rescuer. Only someone who knows what it is to be saved can save others. Only those who have lived in darkness can go into the darkness without fear. You see God does through us what He has first done in us.
Paul wrote about something very similar when he said in 2 Corinthians 1:5,
“Just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.”
The sufferings and the comfort go together.
“If we are distressed” (that’s us – if we are distressed, he says), “it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer.”
Paul says, “As Christ sufferings flow over to us, He understands us. So our sufferings and our comfort, our experience of God flows over to you.”
You see if you are going to pray, “Lord use me” – and that ought to be the basic prayer of every Christian – “Lord use me”, the process by which He equips you to be used, the way He makes us useable may not be pleasant.
You see the temptation that we have is to run to God and ask Him to take away every trouble, to take away every pain, to take away every fear. Our instinct is to do that but these may be the very things that God is giving to you that out of what you learn of Himself in these sufferings, God will use you.
Why, at 40, did Moses, having fled to Midian, end up spending forty years looking after sheep? I mean these were the prime years of his life and what is he doing? He is sitting out in the desert under a cactus bush or something watching boring sheep.
I have worked with sheep. They are boring. They only cease to be boring when they get into trouble, and they do because sheep are notorious for going the wrong way and doing the wrong thing when they get the opportunity.
You know Isaiah 53 talks about that,
“All we, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way.”
And you know something? Moses spent forty years with sheep that are either boring or going the wrong way. No one ever sits back and says, except when they are little babies and aren’t they cute because they spring around. But nobody is about to say, “What beautiful sheep.” It’s either they are boring sheep or they are a nuisance. They are going the wrong way, doing the wrong thing.
But you see Moses was going to lead a nation for forty years through another desert, and as all we like sheep go astray, certainly the Israelites went astray. And it was useful to know a bit about the desert and to know a bit about sheep.
Moses didn’t know that when he ended up there. I am sure there were days Moses went through depression and discouragement – not just days – months; not just months - years. Not just years – decades - a shepherd, detestable to the Egyptians. “When I used to be at the top of the tree.”
Have you ever thought that as God was preparing Moses in that experience for his leadership of the nation that God is preparing you in the dark tunnels through which you sometimes go for things you don’t know about yet?
We learn more from our tears than we ever learn from our laughter. And again and again it’s our tears that invest in building us and equipping us and giving us empathy and compassion.
The problems of Moses were his equipping. What about the privileges? Why was Moses transferred to the royal palace of Egypt? Why did God in His providence allow that to take place? Why, as Scripture says, was Moses educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and powerful in speech and action - the best education around? Egypt was the most developed nation in the world at the time. Moses had the best education in Egypt. We could surmise he was one of the best-educated men in the world.
Now think about this. The best selling book in history is the Bible; it still is. Year after year after year – so much so, the statistics, when they list best-sellers do not include the Bible. The Bible is excluded from the New York Times best-selling list because it would sit in the Number 1 spot week after week after week after week after week – still the best-selling book in history.
Made up of 66 books, written by over 30 authors over a period of 1500 years. Do you know who is the biggest single author of the Bible? It’s Moses. In my own Bible Moses wrote 196 pages.
In contrast Paul wrote only 68 pages. Moses wrote three times as much as Paul.
Where did Moses learn to do that? Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. And when he sat down to his studies with his personal tutor handpicked by Pharaoh’s daughter -one of the best tutors of the land - what was going on in Egypt, the enemy of the people of God, was a God in His Sovereignty was equipping Moses to give to us today, thousands of years later, 196 pages of Scripture. And we’re still reading his stuff today.
And Moses’ ministry after the age of 80 is a combining of all the problems in his first 80 years with all the privileges of his first 80 years and nothing is wasted – nothing.
Your past is important – it’s not what you may have chosen. But one day you and I will have the privilege of reading our stories backwards like we do with Moses. And starting at the end, what was God wanting to do with my life – let’s go back - oh man, those things that I wished hadn’t happened, they are the very things which equipped me with understanding and compassion and ability
Your past is important. Do you believe that? If you don’t believe that you will begin to resent it, in all likelihood. Instead, thank Him for it.
Moses embraces the past.
The second thing I wanted to say from this, having embraced your past, engage your present. There are three tenses of time – past, present and future – and we only ever live in one of those. We only ever live in the present. We don’t live in the past and we will never live in the future because it is always the future. We live in the present.
It is in the present where we engage, which is why God’s name given to Moses in Chapter 3 is I AM – not I was, or I Will Be – I Am – God is present tense.
And it is always in the present that we make choices, that we make decisions. And there were crucial times in Moses’ present tense when he did not know the end consequences; he made decisions that were right. Let me read to you from Hebrews 11:24–27.
“By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time.
“He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward.
“By faith he left Egypt, not fearing the king’s anger; he persevered because he saw him who is invisible.”
Now notice the action lines in those few verses. He refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter – that must have been a very hard decision for him because he no
doubt was full of gratitude to Pharaoh’s daughter. She had mothered him and cared for him.
But he recognized that he belonged to the people of God. So he made this choice. He refused to be known as Pharaoh’s daughter.
Second thing he chose to be mistreated with the people of God. He made a choice that he knew would disadvantage him and he would become mistreated.
Thirdly he refused to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time.
Fourthly he regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than all the treasures of Egypt. “I am better living in disgrace associated with the people of God than I am with a reputation and enjoying the treasures of Egypt.”
And when it says he left Egypt not fearing the king’s anger – why? Because his security was in someone else. Now there is a lot there to unpack and we haven’t time to do that.
But let me point out three things that did not impress him. The treasures of Egypt did not impress him - he regarded disgrace as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt. The pleasures of Egypt did not impress him. He chose not to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time. His reputation in Egypt did not impress him – he refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter.
Now do I need to make a parallel between this and the world in which we live - the treasures of this world, the pleasures of this world, the reputation of this world? Those three things are exactly what John calls worldliness in his letter in 1 John 2:16
“For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh” (its pleasures), “and the lust of the eyes” (its treasures - greed), “and the pride of life” (it’s reputation), “is not of the Father; it is of the world.”
And when our lives are motivated by treasures or pleasures or reputation you know this: you are not on the agenda of the Father; you are living as the world.
And you and I have to deal with these issues before ever we can be used by God.
It wasn’t hard for Moses to deal with this because he had something better. Look as this – verse 26 – because “he was looking ahead to his reward.” Verse 27: (This is in Hebrews 11.)
“He persevered because he saw him who is invisible.”
Notice that? He was looking ahead and he saw Him who is invisible.
When we see Him who is invisible the things that are visible cease to impress us, but when we don’t see Him who is invisible we become very impressed by the visible things, by the tangible things, by the material things, and treasures are important and pleasures are important to us and reputation is important to us because we do not see the one who is invisible.
And God – we may believe in Him but He’s not real and so the visible things override the invisible. And because Moses saw the invisible God, the visible things were not important.
Embrace your past; Moses did. Engage your present; Moses did. Enter your future – no time to talk about this - but in Chapter 3, when it says at the end of Chapter 2 that God heard their groaning, He remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and Jacob, God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them. In heaven the heart of God is breaking for His people.
And as God always does, He looks for a man and He found one – a shepherd on the backside of the Midian desert who had been moulded, broken, equipped, had a vision of the invisible because all the visible he had recognized to be so temporary, just for a season.
And God is always looking for a man or a woman – the eyes of the Lord, the Scripture tells us, go to and fro throughout the whole earth seeking someone who will allow God to show Himself strong on their behalf, looking for a man or a woman who will say, I will let God be strong in and through me.”
And we will look next week at what happened at the burning bush when God met a man who is not [fuller ?] or cocky and ready. He says, “Who am I? I can’t. I am no one.”
And that’s the most qualified person that God could get hold of.
Are you embracing your past, engaging your present; making the right decisions? And will you enter your future with the confidence that God is working out something that is His plan?
Let’s pray together.