Lesson # 1: God Never Goes to Sleep
Exodus 2:1-10
Moses. We all remember Moses best because of the stirring portrayal by Charlton Heston from the great movie, The Ten Commandments. Still today, we can watch that movie and be inspired by the special effects, the costumes, and epic nature of the film, but more importantly we are inspired by the story, and Moses is at the heart of that story.
Why am I inspired by Moses? Well, above anything else, Moses was 80 years old before he ever had a spiritual impact. That means there is still hope for me. Sometimes I wonder how God can use me because I know how I can be—so impatient at times, so impetulent, sometimes I can even be a bit pithy with comments I make. But, hey, I’m only 41, so maybe I’ve got 39 more years for God to clean me up, and there is a great deal of inspiration in that. I like what the great evangelist D. L. Moody said about Moses—“Moses spent his first forty years thinking he was somebody. He spent his second forty years finding out he was a nobody. He spent his last forty years discovering what God can do with a nobody.” I wonder which stage we might find ourselves in. We’ll get a glimpse of what Moody was talking about in the next few weeks as we learn a few lessons from the life of Moses.
There is no better place to start than at the beginning, all the way back in Exodus 2. There we find the story of Moses’ birth. Listen:
v. 1—During this time…
What time was that? Let’s take a quick view of history to see what the time, because the time is terribly important in understanding the lesson we learn in the birth of Moses. Now understand, there are many lessons we could take from this passage, but because in the interest of time let’s focus on only one. Jacob, the man who was named Israel, the father of the nation of Israel, had among many others, a son named Joseph. You may remember from your Sunday school lessons that Joseph was the youngest of Jacob’s sons, and he was not well liked by his brothers. As a matter of fact, they sold their brother into slavery and told their father he was dead. But God worked in Joseph’s life, and Joseph was carried into Egypt as a slave. But Joseph rose to prominence in Egypt, and after many years, those same brothers had to come groveling, in a time of severe famine in the land of Canaan, to Joseph who had become the Prime Minister in Egypt.
The Pharaoh (the ruler) in Egypt favored Joseph, and Joseph forgave his brothers and told them to go get their father and bring all their families to Egypt to live through the famine. They did, and the nation of Israel flourished. God really took care of the nation of Israel. They were living the good life.
But that Pharaoh died, and then another and another until there was a ruler over Egypt who didn’t remember Joseph, or the great things he had done for the nation of Egypt. Instead, this new Pharaoh saw only the threat that the flourishing Hebrews could pose to his kingdom. There was the fear that these Hebrews had done so well that they might even entertain the thought of teaming up with the enemies of Egypt to overturn the nation, and defeat the Egyptians. Pharaoh was convinced that something must be done, so he forced the Hebrews into slavery. Exodus 1 tells the story of how the persecution of the Hebrews in Egypt began. It was only the beginning.
Pharaoh’s oppression didn’t work well. The more he oppressed the Hebrews, the more they proliferated. Pharaoh devised another scheme. Isn’t that how persecution usually comes about? It starts in small ways, like passing laws to forbid ownership of businesses, or passing a law mandating that Jewish people be identified in public by the wearing of a yellow patch. But from there it is only a short step to forcing them from their homes into “work” camps, and then an even shorter step from those work camps becoming “death” camps. Yes, you know I’m talking about Nazi Germany, but what happened in Egypt before Moses’ birth is eerily similar. Pharaoh’s new scheme called for the Hebrew midwives to murder the male children born to Hebrew mothers. But this scheme didn’t work either because the Hebrew midwives would not cooperate with Pharaoh in this plan that was the ancient equivalent to partial-birth abortion. Yet the ruthless Pharaoh was not to be outdone. He ordered every Egyptian person to find and throw into the Nile River every Hebrew male newborn.
Such were the circumstances of the time of Moses’ birth. The Hebrew nation had literally gone from feast to famine. In more modern terms we might say the Hebrews had gone from the penthouse to the poorhouse. The ease, abundance and prosperity they had known throughout the life of Joseph and the next two generations had been traded for a life of task-masters and whips, hard labor, and hopelessness. And I am certain, knowing human nature as I do, that God got accused of not caring, of not being aware, of not being big enough. It was, to the Hebrews, as if God was asleep at the wheel.
How do we know? We can look ahead to Exodus 3. There, God speaks to an adult Moses and says, “I have heard their cries…I am aware of their suffering” (v. 7). The conversation between God and Moses occurred when Moses was 80 years old. Now we may think eighty years to be a long time, but the slavery of the Hebrews lasted well over 400 years. Listen to God’s promise to Jacob’s grandfather, Abram:
Genesis 15:13-14
Then the Lord told Abram, "You can be sure that your descendants will be strangers in a foreign land, and they will be oppressed as slaves for four hundred years. [14] But I will punish the nation that enslaves them, and in the end they will come away with great wealth.
Four hundred plus years of anguished cries ascending on the prayers of God’s people, and nothing. Wake up, God. Hear us calling. Our children are dying, Lord. Why won’t you do something, God? God did hear their cries, and God was busy throughout those 400 years working to send the deliverer He promised long before. God was busy in those years; the Hebrew people just didn’t see it. Circumstances sometimes cloud vision, and it is hard, if not impossible, to see and understand what God is doing when it appears that He is so silent and so distant—when it appears that He is sleeping.
I am reminded of a scene from the life of Jesus. He and his disciples were on a boat on the Sea of Galilee when an unexpected storm arose. Jesus lay sleeping at the rear of the boat, but the disciples could only awaken him and exclaim, “Teacher, don’t you even care that we are going to drown?” (Mark. 4:38).
No, the Hebrews may have been the first to accuse God of being asleep at the wheel, but they weren’t the last. We often find ourselves muttering similar words when our circumstances surround us like the darkness of a cloudy midnight. We want to know where God is when six million Jews are being exterminated by a ruthless dictator. We wonder how God can be so silent as hundreds of thousands of Rwandans are murdered with machetes and left lying in the streets. We wonder how God can sleep through the killing of one million infants every year in this nation. Don’t you hear us, God?
On a more personal level, we wonder where God is when those we love lie dying with cancer, and we pray for healing, but the silence seems deafening. We wonder why God doesn’t intervene in our marriage that may be falling apart. Where are you God, when it hurts so much?
Rest assured, my friend, God is not asleep, because God never goes to sleep. That is the lesson here for us. That lesson contains three elements I won’t us to take away today. First, God never misses a thing. God is not dependent upon CNN or the Fox News Network for the latest updates. The God who hung the stars in place counts the hairs of our heads and knows, and more importantly, cares about little bitty old us. God will do whatever it takes to bring a deliverer to His people. His deliverance may not arrive on our timetable, or in the way we expect or even desire, but when the time is right the deliverance will come.
Secondly, no test surpasses God’s concern. I can only think of how God must have rewarded the Hebrew midwives who refused to obey Pharaoh’s command. He didn’t miss that! The test of the last year in your life may have been great, and the future only appears to be filled with gloom and despair. In the quiet moments between the demands of work and family you wonder, Where are you, God?
God is right here, right now, and he is sending his Holy Spirit to fill your heart with his love, a love that is unsurpassed in passion and intensity. A love so deep that Jesus gave his very life to show how much God cares, and that loving care surpasses every test or circumstance we face.
Finally, nothing can erase God’s promises. God kept his promise to Abram by sending Moses at the right time. God kept his promise through the prophets when “in the fullness of time” Jesus was born of a virgin, and became the deliverer of all God’s people for all time. And at the proper time, the time that has been determined from before the foundation of the world, God will send forth His Son…again. The King of kings will one day return to deliver his blood-bought people.
Isaiah 40:8
The grass withers, and the flowers fade, but the word of our God stands forever."
My friend, we come to share a meal together, and this meal reminds us that God is working in our midst. It is a visible, tangible way to know that God is not asleep, even if we can’t see or comprehend how God is working. It is a visible and tangible way to know that deliverance has come to those who believe in Jesus Christ, and it is a visible and tangible reminder that Jesus is coming again, in God’s time and in God’s way.
A mother was putting her little four-year-old daughter to bed for the night. The child was afraid of the dark, and the mother, on this particular occasion, with her husband away, was fearful also.
When the light was out, the child caught a glimpse of the moon outside the window. “Mommy,” she asked, “is the moon God’s light?”
“Yes,” the mother said.
Then the child asked, “Will God put out his light and go to sleep?”
The mother replied, “No, dear, God never goes to sleep.”
Then, out of the simplicity of a child’s faith, the little girl said something which gave reassurance even to her mother: “Well, as long as God is awake, there is no sense both of us staying awake.” And off to sleep she went.
We can sleep because we know that God never does.
