Moses is one of the most prevalent and quoted people in the Old Testament, and for a myriad of reasons: in addition to writing part of it, he was protected from birth by God, encountered and then grew in obedience with Him, was used by God to free the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt and to demonstrate God’s supreme power through miracles designed to humble the most powerful nation on the face of the earth at the time. Moses led his people in God’s way, through the parting of the Red Sea and on towards the promised land; learning God’s commandments and laws directly from Him on Mount Sinai. Moses then used God’s instructions to oversee the construction of the ark of the covenant and the tabernacle, the establishment of His priesthood, and he also saw the consequences of not holding God’s commandments as holy firsthand. He led God’s people through the wilderness, whom he saw fall into sin with the golden calf, and then saw them repent and saw the mercy and grace of God as well as His wrath in justice.
Later, in Moses’ own error he failed to fully obey God in the face of the Hebrew’s doubts and complaints- while he was called to lead them, their shortsightedness and his earthly frustrations and fatigue may have been what led him to act so rashly in an all too human moment of weakness. Moses’ life shows us a great deal of God’s mind and works, His love and judgment. Through the record of Moses’s life, through reading the law that God gave to him and the Hebrew people, and through understanding them we can better understand the character of God- who is the same today as He was then, and will be tomorrow.
But what can be learned by Moses’ life for us as Christians today, under the New Covenant, saved and secured in Christ? We cannot truly examine Moses and his life without seeing God, and while we are not bound by the law that God revealed to him, the lessons from so long ago abound- and are readily applicable to our lives today. Some of those lessons will be examined here, though we are but scratching the surface of all that we could learn by focusing on just one chapter of one book - Exodus chapter 2.
Moses is first mentioned in scripture in Exodus 2:2, though he is not named until verse 10. The context of his birth is important not only for his own life, but also its application to our own; the Hebrew people were held in slavery under Pharaoh in Egypt, and as their population grew larger, Pharaoh became fearful of their strength and decreed that their midwives murder all of the male Hebrew children at the end of chapter 1. Chapter 2 opens with a man and woman, named in Exodus 6:20 as Amram and Jochebed, of the tribe of Levi; as Levites, their descendants would go on to serve as priests in the future tabernacle and eventual temple of God. Verse 2 tells they had a son, who was hidden from the Egyptians for a few months until he was placed in a basket and set adrift in the river to avoid Pharaoh's death sentence.
Moses was saved from harm by God, and through the good works of God’s people, motivated by the love a parent has for their children. Just as God loves us as His children; the Lord protects, guides, and instructs us because He loves us. He loves not only who we are in that moment, with Moses as a baby or we as His children currently, but He also loves who He intends that they become, and works to guide and shape our growth. God knew exactly what He planned for Moses, and provided him with safety and care; first through Moses’ discovery by Pharaoh's daughter in verse 5 and him being reunited with his mother in verses 8 and 9. God saved Moses from the actions of evil men, and saved him for a purpose; today God has promised salvation for us all through the death and resurrection of Jesus - what wicked men intended for evil in crucifying Him became a wonderful gift for all the world, and He has both love and purpose for us all today as well, just as He did Moses.
Verse 11 continues with Moses’ story as a grown man, and Exodus says he went out to “his brethren” and saw their labor - while the text doesn’t specify how closely he had interacted with the Hebrews beforehand, it is reasonable to think that being raised by them he would have had an understanding of their culture and knowledge of God. Unlike them, however, he also grew up as Egyptian royalty, and as such Moses would have access to everything the empire could offer: the best education and training, ready access to luxurious food and drink, fabulous wealth all would have been at his disposal. And yet, he chose to go and see the suffering of his true brethren firsthand. We don’t know exactly why he went out to see them, but when he saw an Egyptian mistreating one of the Hebrews, verse 12 shows that he chose to kill him.
Reading this can be uncomfortable, as it reveals a messy, human side of Moses; he was so impacted by the cruelty and injustice around him that he was pushed to the point of taking life, we know it was premeditated because he looked for any witnesses beforehand, and we know that he tried to hide the body in attempt to conceal the death. Stephen’s speech in Acts provides us with some more insight to this event that may also be uncomfortable; Acts 7:25 shows us Moses’ thoughts, that he “supposed that his brethren would have understood that God would deliver them by his hand” (ESV). However, we know that in that moment Moses was wrong; he was convinced that he knew what the right thing was to do, and took decisive action in a sudden moment. As sincere as his desire to do God’s work and liberate His people was, Moses was also sincerely mistaken in this moment, and it had serious consequences.
To be clear, Moses would be the agent by which God delivered the Hebrew people, but in that moment he failed to fully realize that God would do His work in His own ways and time - and this is the final lesson for this writing; that God can only be truly served and glorified if we abide in and obey Him. We certainly can trust in the Lord to fulfill every one of His promises; we can trust in His power and righteousness, in the certainty of His word and its truth, and the totality of His justice, but if we are willing to trust Him in all of those areas, then we must also be willing to trust Him to work all things out in His time, and by His ways. There may be times where that is both exactly what’s happening, and exactly what we don’t want to hear, but as God’s mind and ways are so much higher than ours, we must trust Him, especially when it can look extremely difficult - like Moses we can only grow in God by drawing near to Him and growing closer to Him, living in obedience to Him and, when we err as Moses did, think of how we are even more blessed in the fact that we have access not only to God, but also to His forgiveness and grace as those saved by Jesus.
This review of Exodus 2 and the lessons from Moses will continue in a second section [available next week]. However, I again want to emphasize that while Moses was distinctly human, fallible and in need of grace like all men, despite any mistakes he was also a wonderful example of God’s love and power, His dedication and faithfulness, and His grace as we learn and grow. Through his life we can learn so much of God, and how we can learn to honor and serve Him no matter how strange or seemingly difficult our circumstances may be.