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Moses 4 MOSES IN GOD’S SCHOOL
Exodus 4:18-7:7
C. The Salvation
2. The Conflicts in God’s Will Ex. 4:18-31
Moses has reluctantly agreed to God’s will. I do not believe his heart was in it. His “Thy will be done!” could be worded, “All right, God, I can’t win fighting you; have it your way.” We can only imagine his thoughts as he heads toward home to tell his wife and two boys and his father-in-law employer, that he must leave.
I believe he hoped this time that obeying God would not lead him into so many problems like it did the first time. If he did think that, HE WAS DEAD WRONG. Modern day “churchianity” peddles a Santa Claus kind of Jesus who makes us happy and able to breeze through problems like a hot knife through melted butter. But New Testament Christianity does the opposite. It gives us problems too big to handle, so we will learn to trust in God and seek holiness more than happiness. The day Moses said yes to God, a whole new set of problems came into his life. He was enrolling in God’s school. He learns about:
(1) Personal Responsibilities 4:18
(2) Power From God 4:19-23
(3) Perplexities About God 4:21-23
(4) Purity Before God 4:24-26
(5) Partners From God 4:27-31
(6) Problems Surrounding God 5:1-7:7
I. PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITIES THAT ABIDE (4:18)
1. Silence.
The first thing Moses did was go to Jethro, the man who gave him a wife and a job and ask permission to go to Egypt and see if any of his family was alive. Two things stand out - silence and submission. First, silence. He said nothing of the voice and the burning bush. Why?
Some things should be too holy for us to share. Some things need to be reflected upon to make sure what we heard or felt was from God. First John tells us to “test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 Jn. 4:1).
Many a young man has embarrassed himself by announcing his call to preach, being accepted by the church and then learning he had no call at all. Many a person has made a stupid mistake calling it the will of God. Second, we see . . .
2. Submission.
Moses didn’t pull rank. He humbly asks Jethro’s permission. The Bible calls him the “meekest” (KJV) man on earth (Nu. 12:3). Meekness is not weakness. It is strength under God’s control. Moses didn’t storm up to Jethro and say, “God has told me to go to Egypt and I have to go!” This man had been good to him. This man depended on him. This man would need to find someone to work in his place. Moses was submissive to him.
Application: Having seen the fire of God’s glory and having heard the voice of God, Moses still had personal responsibilities. First Timothy, written to a preacher, says, “If anyone does not provide for his relatives and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim. 5:8).
I need to preach the gospel and take time for my wife and children. I need to visit the sick and rake my leaves before they blow in my neighbor’s yard. We have personal responsibilities. The high call of God does not lift anyone so high that he or she doesn’t have to be a good citizen, a good neighbor and a good family man.
Illustration: I love David Jeremiah, my radio pastor. He told of leaving the church office one evening for an appointment. The phone rang and the secretary said, “Mr. _____ wants to see you now. He and his wife are having problems.” Jeremiah said, “Tell him I have an appointment. One of our other pastors can see him today and I can see him any time tomorrow.” She did, but the man said only Jeremiah would do. Jeremiah said, “Tell him I’m not available,” and left.
As he walked to his car the man came up, he’d been talking on his car phone. “Pastor,” he said, “where are you going that’s so important that you can’t talk with me?” Jeremiah answered, “My son’s basketball game.” The man exploded and asked him if a basketball game meant more than his marriage breaking up.
Jeremiah’s answer was a classic, “Right now, at this time, there are several people upstairs who can help you, but right now I am the only person on earth who can be a father to my son.” How right he was! Lesson number two is. . .
II. POWER THAT IS AVAILABLE (4:19-23)
1. Power (4:19-23).
Jethro said he wished Moses well (4:18) and as Moses no doubt prepared to leave, God told him all those in Egypt who wanted to kill him were dead.
This is God’s NATURAL POWER at work. God also told him his miracle working rod (4:17) would work mighty miracles and the last one, the death of Pharaoh’s son, would cause hard-hearted Pharaoh to let Israel go.
This is God’s SUPERNATURAL POWER at work. God’s will never places us where His grace and power cannot keep up. Those he APPOINTS to a task, He ANOINTS for that task. Look first at. . .
2. Supernatural Power (4:17; 19-23; 1 Kn. 16; Matt.-Acts).
We sometimes have God’s miracles, God’s supernatural power, where He brushes aside the so-called “natural laws” of the universe to help us.
1) The Reality of Miracles. We have, in Moses, the first of three miracle periods in Scripture. The second started 500 years later with Elijah (1 Kn. 17). The third 900 years after this with Christ and the Apostles. Miracle periods are not found all through Scripture. They come when God is doing something new in the earth and creating Scripture.
The Charismatic view that if we had faith we would have miracle after miracle, after miracle, is not Scriptural. In the days of Acts, God went beyond natural laws and Paul could raise the dead (Acts 20:9-12). After the end of Acts he couldn’t even heal Timothy’s stomach problems (1 Tim. 5:23) or himself (2 Cor. 12).
2) The Scarcity of Miracles. Does this mean we have NO miracles? No. After 36 years of pastoring and 40 years of walking with God, I believe the vast majority of God’s people, when we needed it, have experienced a supernatural touch, a miracle from God.
And to give the Charismatics their due, we might just have more if we believed more. But most of the time, like most people in Scriptures, we must trust in God’s natural power.
4. Natural Power (4:18-19).
Jethro wished Moses well (4:18). God had prepared his heart. God told Moses the people who wanted to kill him were dead. God’s laws of time and nature had done their work. We have God’s natural power, the laws of the universe on our side
Illustration: When England prayed for the Allies to be able to cross the English Channel and escape Nazi bombs a thick fog provided the cover. Farmers in my first church in dusty Oklahoma used to say, “Preacher, when you pray for rain, bring your umbrella!” Sam Jones said it another way, “We pray for rain with our buckets turned upside down.” God can and does change weather patterns.
Application: Our road may be rough. It never got easy for Moses. In Numbers 11, pastoring a church that didn’t like him or trust him, he prayed to die. But God’s power saw him through. And if we are faithful one thing we will never experience is DEFEAT. God says,
To him who tries and fails and quits -
Defeat is the foul blow.
But to him who in defeat,
The lessons of life would learn -
I lead through darkness and disaster
To where the scarlet lights of triumph burn.
- Author Unknown
III. PERPLEXITY THAT ABOUNDS (4:21-23)
Did you catch what God said about Pharaoh? He said, “I will harden his heart so that he will not let the people go.” (4:21) Then he told Moses to tell him, “You refused to let. . .(Israel). . .go, so I will kill your firstborn son.” (4:23).
Illustration: This is a puzzling, perplexing statement. It seems to make God demonic and unfair. And the perplexity abounds today in your home and mine. The movie “Price of Egypt” is now a smash success. One of my parents called and said her little girl,, witnessing on the screen the death of Egypt’s firstborn, with the screams and cries of parents, looked up at her and said, “Mama, that was mean for God to do that.” The mother told her it was something God felt He needed to do to help some people and all the children who died went to heaven. She asked me if I had a better answer and I said no. Neither do you. Let me look at this hardening of Pharaoh with three words.
1) Sovereignty
Calvinists have no problem here. They say God is God. He is sovereign and He does what He wants and it’s not for us to question God. They sing of heaven, “We are God’s chosen few/We can’t have heaven crammed/There’s no room up there for you/All others will be damned.” God IS sovereign but Scripture tells us HE IS LOVE and that He loves the whole world (Jn. 3:16). By the Bible’s definition of love (1 Cor. 13, etc.), to harden a person’s heart and then punish him for it, is the opposite of love as we know and define it.
2) Responsibility (8:14, etc.).
Over and over, Exodus says PHARAOH HARDENED HIS OWN HEART (8:14, 32; 9:34, etc.). God gives us the conditions by which we harden our hearts.
Illustration: If I look at the sun and become blind, who or what has blinded me? We could say “God” because it was eyes He created to be unable to look long at the sun. It was His sun, His radiation. He blinded me! No. We all know I blinded myself by breaking God’s laws. Pharaoh, by accepting worship like a god, by mistreating slaves and by, God only knows, what other cruelties, had hardened his heart to all the impulses of good and right God had sent his way through creation and conscience. Word three is. . .
3) Ministry (Lk. 13:23; Eccl. 12:13-14; Job. 27:2-6).
This answer may not satisfy you. No answer does. You are still puzzled. God’s word to you is MINISTRY. With all our unanswered questions we are to love and serve God and love and serve our fellow man. When someone asked Jesus if many or few would be saved, a good philosophical question, Jesus told him to enter the narrow gate to heaven (Lk. 13:23 ff).
In other words YOU TAKE CARE OF YOU. The writer of Ecclesiastes couldn’t figure anything out. Life to him was nonsense but he ended his book saying the whole duty of man is to fear God and keep His commandments (Eccl. 12:13). Job, suffering every imaginable kind of hurt, was baffled about the ways of God, but he said, “. . .as long as I have life within me, the breath of God in my nostrils, my lips will not speak wickedness” (Job. 27:3,4). We are not called to figure God or life out, we are called to love and serve and trust Him.
IV. PURITY THAT IS AFFIRMED
(Ex. 4:24-26)
Moses, having put his wife and two sons on the donkeys, started down the road toward Egypt (4:20). On the way they stopped at an inn, what we would call a motel. There, a strange thing happened. The Bible says “the Lord met Moses and was about to kill him” (4:24). His wife Zipporah quickly circumcised her son and, in apparent anger, threw the skin at Moses’ feet and called him a “bridegroom of blood” (4:25).
Whether Moses got sick, and this was seen as God’s hand of judgement or whether he actually met the angel of the Lord like Joshua (5:13), we don’t know. What we do know is that Moses, maybe, like most men, afraid of his wife, had failed to obey God’s command for all Jews to circumcise their sons as a sign that they belonged to God (Gen. 17). And GOD TOOK IT SERIOUSLY.
Application: If God killed us today for disobeying Him with so called “little” sins, our pulpits and pews would be empty. We don’t hate, steal, lie, commit adultery or kill, so we feel comfortable in not attending church, not tithing, not apologizing and not witnessing. No, our pulpits and pews are not empty. We are not dead, thank God. But maybe this is why our pulpits and pews are filled with empty people who are dead to revival, dead to God’s power and dead to answered prayers. We have not given up our pet sins.
V. PEOPLE THAT ARE ATTRACTED (Ex. 4:27-31)
When Moses and his family got near Sinai, a beautiful scene awaited them. Aaron, directed by God, met them. Divine providence calling Aaron, confirmed to Moses that God had really spoken to him. God’s wheels were set in motion. Moses shared God’s words with Aaron, they went to Egypt and called the elders of Israel together. Moses told them all that was happening; worked the first miracles found in the Bible and told them God was “concerned about them and had seen their misery” (4:31). And they all bowed down and worshipped.
Application: One thing God will almost never do - ASK US TO SERVE HIM ALONE. He attracts others to himself and to us, to walk and pray and fight and serve with us. Aaron and the leaders followed Moses because Moses followed God. Follow God and others will follow you.
