Excuses (Part 2) Series

I don’t know enough. I’m not very knowledgable about the Bible. What if they ask me a question that I can’t answer?

Truthfully, I’m afraid. What if I try to share the Gospel with someone and they make fun of me? Reject me?

When that kind of fear haunted Moses, how did God respond??

God responds with three miraculous signs:

* Staff to a Snake

Then the Lord said to him, “What is that in your hand?” “A staff,” he replied. Moses threw it on the ground and it became a snake, and he ran from it. Then the Lord said to him, “Reach out your hand and take it by the tail.” So Moses reached out and took hold of the snake and it turned back into a staff in his hand. “This,” said the Lord, “is so that they may believe that the Lord, the God of their fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob—has appeared to you.” (Exodus 4:2-5)

God begins with a question. Moses, what’s in your hand? Moses looked at his hand and the staff that he had carried with him as a shepherd for forty years.

God commanded Moses to throw the staff on the ground. When he did, something extraordinary happened.

I’ll let Chuck Swindoll tell it:

“Moses stood before the burning bush. It rumbled, bellowing smoke into the air that looked like gathering thunderclouds. The bramble stood higher than a grown man, and its thick foliage crackled and popped in flames that licked the air. He listened as Yahweh spoke.

When you’ve revealed My plan to My people, they will listen to you and believe that I sent you. Then you and the elders will go to Pharaoh and request permission for a three day journey to sacrifice to Me, but he won’t listen. So I’ll visit Egypt with so much catastrophe that they will not only let you go, they’ll give you everything they own.

When God finished speaking, Moses remembered the time that he tried to keep the two slaves from fighting each other. They clearly didn’t want his help, and their rebuff stills stung.

What a nation of mule-headed beasts the Hebrews were! Yet God spoke as though they’d go right along with everything Moses said.

What will be different this time? Moses thought. It sounds like the exact same thing I tried to do forty years ago.

“What if they don’t listen to me - don’t believe me?” Moses asked. “What if they don’t believe You appeared to me? They might say, God hasn’t appeared to you, old man. Go back to Midian, or better yet, jump in here and help us make some bricks.” Then they’ll laugh at me.”

“What do you have in your hand?” God asked.

“A walking staff.”

“Throw it to the ground.”

Moses threw it down and as soon as it hit the dirt, it coiled into a tight spiral of a long, back adder. Moses looked into the two dark, hollow beads staring back at him. Its eyes were like coal. There was life behind them, but no warmth; just a cold, single-minded evil.

The adder spat and hissed as Moses leapt for a nearby rock and hid in a cleft.

Pick it up,” God said, “by the tail.”

The tail? Moses watched the serpent from behind the rock. It didn’t look like it wanted to be picked up by any part, let alone the most dangerous.