Do you remember the story of how God used Moses to deliver Israel from their bondage in Egypt? The burning bush, the confrontations with Pharaoh, the plagues, the deliverance, and the parting of the sea. By anyone's standard, truly an astounding series of events.
What we sometimes tend to overlook (or at least play down), however, is the common humanity that saturated the events and situations surrounding the deliverance. You know: the doubts, the fears, the struggles. The stuff that everyone goes through.
To begin with, Moses doubted both himself and God. He flatly told God that he did not want the job of confronting one of the most powerful persons on the planet. (Imagine going before the head of the People's Republic of China and demanding that his country grant religious freedom to its Christians.) God responded by promising that Moses would not be alone, that he (God) would be right there. And as tangible proof of his presence, God gave Moses a helper in the form of his brother, Aaron. (See Exodus 4.)
Then there was the initial confrontation with Pharaoh, followed by the immediate release of the children of Israel. Right? Wrong. Actually, Pharaoh arrogantly rejected the unknown God and his apparently powerless ambassador. And as if to add insult to injury, he made the Israelites' lives even more miserable by ordering them to make brick without straw -- without falling short of their daily quota. (Talk about doing more with less!)
Understandably, at this point the Israelite leaders were a bit perturbed. The only thing they wanted deliverance from was the presence of Moses and Aaron, toward whom they vented their anger. Moses then returned to God and did some venting of his own. (See Exodus 5.)
And let's not forget (as Paul Harvey would say) the rest of the story: Israel's post-exodus idolatry with the golden calf, their incessant whining, and their outright rejection of the Promised Land -- followed by forty years of slogging through the wilderness.
Not exactly how we tend to remember God's deliverance of Israel via Moses, is it? And yet there are some invaluable lessons to be learned from all this. Here are a few that come to mind:
1. God wants real people, not superheroes. Which is great news for us, since superheroes exist only in the make-believe world of comic books and movies. The real world is filled with real -- i.e., imperfect -- people like you and I. God can, will, and does use even us. All he asks in return is that we seek to trust in and obey him. We are called, in other words, to be grateful and faithful.
2. God doesn't ask us to go alone. People can do some very strange (not to mention dangerous) things in an effort to avoid being alone. In one respect that is a testimony to the fact that being created in God's image includes being social -- i.e., interacting with other people. No where does the Bible lift up a spiritual lone ranger for our emulation. Of course Moses had Aaron. The kings had their advisers. The prophets had their scribes. Jesus had his disciples. And Paul had his traveling companions, as well as numerous friends and ministry partners. For today's Christian, this translates into the nonnegotiable need to be a committed member of a local Bible-believing church.
3. We can expect problems and difficulties. It's never a matter of "if" they come, it's always a matter of "when." What better example along these lines than the apostle Paul? His second letter to the believers in Corinth includes a litany of laborious sufferings, including: jailings, beatings, stonings, shipwrecks, arduous travel, danger, betrayal, hard labor, sleepless nights, missed meals, nakedness, and worry over his fledgling churches (11:23-28). Yet despite these and other hardships, this Christian-persecutor-turned-Christ-proclaimer remained a bottomless well of joy (see his letter to the Philippians). How did he do it? Simply put, Paul sought God's strength and God's perspective.
4. God is with us every step of the way. Why is it that people want to blame God when things go wrong, but then want to credit everyone and everything except God when things go right? In point of fact, God is always working through any and every situation to bring about his glory and our good. But lest we forget, some of our greatest opportunities to trust in and obey God come disguised as some of our greatest problems.
5. God disciplines us for persistent sin. (And you thought this was a feel good message!) On more than one occasion God threatened to wipe Israel out completely. In the end he chose instead to kill off an entire generation of chronic grumblers. Which, I suppose, is another way of saying that God is more patient with stumbling and bumbling than with grumbling.
6. We may not see the complete fulfillment of God's promises. Moses never set foot in the Promised Land -- but he did get a great view of it from a distance. He died knowing that he had accomplished God's will by forging a people into a nation and then guiding them to the place God had for them.
7. We are worth much more than what is on our resume. (I can appreciate this point!) Without making light of his accomplishments, it could be argued that Moses ended his life having been: an illegitimate prince, a sheep herder, and a tour guide. Yet we rightly remember him as a great man of God who played a monumental role in God's plan of establishing for himself a people set apart to know, love, and serve him.
Article by Greg Williamson (c) 2004, 2006
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