In His Time — Part Two

I’d like to invite you to turn to the book of Exodus and to chapter 2 and to follow along as I read a brief section, from verse 11 to verse 15. The focus of our time in the Scriptures today will be the balance of Exodus chapter 2, so we will pick up again, God willing, in the evening at verse 16. But for now we focus just on verse 11 to 15:

“One day, when Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and looked on their burdens, and … saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his people. He looked this way and that, and seeing no one, he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. When he went out the next day, behold, two Hebrews were struggling together. And he said to the man in the wrong, ‘Why do you strike your companion?’ He answered, ‘Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?’ Then Moses was afraid, and thought, ‘Surely the thing is known.’ When Pharaoh heard of it, he sought to kill Moses. But Moses fled from Pharaoh and stayed in the land of Midian. And he sat down by a well.”

Now I invite you to turn to Exodus chapter 2. And before I pray and return to that, I’d like just to say a word about how it is that we come to study the Bible as we do. You say, “Well, I think we know that.” Well, it’s always good to be reminded of it. This comes, really, out of a conversation that I was involved in, in the last couple of weeks. In fact, it might be more than one conversation. Routinely, when people ask about what I do and where we function and everything else, if they have any kind of church background at all, and particularly if they come from a very liturgical setting, they will—if they have any knowledge of what we do here—they will often ask, “Why is it that your services last as long as they do? And secondly, why are you on about the Bible so much?”

And, well, the answer to the second question is really the answer to the first question. If we could dispense with this, then we’d sing another hymn and then just get on to lunch. But you’re not going to get out as easily as that. No, there’s a certain fundamental conviction, and it is this: that here we believe that the Bible is the Word of God and that the Word of God does the work of God by the Spirit of God in the people of God. So in other words, what we’re doing when we unfold the Scripture is we’re listening to God speak. And we believe that what God has said to us is actually more important than what we have to say to him. That doesn’t mean that our praise is irrelevant. It just means that it is subservient to our listening.

And, along with that, four things: The conviction that, number one, the Bible has one true author—namely, God himself. Number two: that the Bible has been given to us through human authors. So you’ve got the dual authorship of Scripture. God breathes it out, and the personality and context and history of the individual writers writes the book. That is why, for example, studying an Old Testament narrative such as in Exodus is very different from studying a little letter such as the letter of Philemon: because a different person, under God’s direction, was giving us the material. Thirdly, the Bible’s purpose is to actually lead us to Jesus. The Bible’s purpose is to lead us to Jesus—that when we lose our way around the Bible, it’s because we’ve taken our eyes off Jesus. And, fourthly and finally, we need the Holy Spirit in order to understand the Bible. “Well,” you say, “but wait a minute. I understand verbs, adjectives, and so on. I mean, I can understand a sentence.” Well, what we’re actually meaning when we say that is that it is obviously possible for us to say, “Well, this is what this text says”—but for it to be illuminated to us in such a way that we understand that this is something that God has chosen to speak directly through his Word to our lives.

What we’re doing when we unfold the Scripture is we’re listening to God speak. And we believe that what God has said to us is actually more important than what we have to say to him.

And it is that which underpins the fact that we systematically work our way through the Bible. And it is for that reason that we like to pray before we study the Bible. And so I invite you to bow with me as we pray before we look at this passage of Scripture. I want to use a prayer from the Anglican prayer book. The prayer book is not inspired, but the prayer is actually inspiring:

Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners. Grant your people grace to love what you command and to desire what you promise, so that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

So, with that said, we turn to the passage which begins, “One day, when Moses had grown up…”

You know, they say that time flies when you’re having fun. The fact is, it flies even when you’re not having fun. The future comes in at the rate of sixty seconds a minute. We have no control over it. Time and tide waits for no one. And especially when you come to these summer months, I find that couples, families are made very tellingly aware of the transition of time. Children that have now reached the age where they go off to school means that the mother watches them eventually go to the bus or get in the car and says to herself, “Where did all that time go?” Or, if you go forward from there, the child drives off to college or to university. The child that you pushed up the main street of Solon in a baby carriage has now driven off in a car. And somehow or another, Fiddler on the Roof is playing in your head. It’s going, “Sunrise, sunset. Sunrise, sunset. Swiftly flow the days.” “Is this the little girl I carried? Is this the little boy at play?”[1]

You say, “Well, what? Are you becoming nostalgic or something the closer you get to the end?” Maybe, but I don’t think so, no. Because I was imagining Moses’s mother with Fiddler on the Roof playing in her head. Because look at this character here: “Is this is the little boy at play that I’m finding here?”

You see, the time matters because there is a gap between verse 10 and verse 11 of forty years. Forty years! Now, you wouldn’t immediately see that, but it is actually the case. When we go from him being drawn out of the water and being taken into the custody of the princess, the daughter of Pharaoh, that was a long time ago. That was actually forty years ago. He was rescued from the Nile, he was nursed by his mother, he was adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter, and now he’s a middle-aged man. And if life begins at forty, then you can look at this and say, “Okay, here we go.”

Now, when you look at this passage (and I hope you’ll read it again on your own later on, perhaps, and think it through), perhaps you will be struck by what struck me forcibly to begin with—namely, that since there is a gap of forty years between verse 10 and verse 11, it’s quite striking, the absence of any of the details of Moses’s first forty years; that Moses, who is the author, has not given us a big, long line of what he did, where he went, and so on. It’s just not there.

In some ways, it’s similar to Jesus, isn’t it? You know, Moses is the deliverer who is to come, and we don’t have a lot of the details. Jesus is the Deliverer who is pointed to by Moses. We know Jesus’ early days, then we have a twelve-year-old encounter in the temple, and then you have silence all the way through, until he steps forward at the age of thirty.

So we’re left with questions. I said to myself—and maybe this question would occur to you as well—I said, “I wonder: How long did he stay with his mother?” How long did he stay with his mother? And the only thing I can determine (and it’s conjecture) is that he clearly stayed long enough to be instructed in the roots that were his as a child of Israel—that his mother would have told him about the promise that God had made to Abraham; that his mother would have told him also that the promise of being in Egypt was being fulfilled, and yet that same promise had carried with it the fact that they would live as sojourners until the day that God was ready to bring them out and send them on their way to the promised land. So they were sojourners. They were afflicted. Eventually, they would be out.

And she would almost inevitably… She would have to, because children always ask, you know, “Where was I before I was born?” And that takes about twenty minutes to answer that one, and you have to make it up. And you don’t. You just say, “Well, you didn’t exist before you were born. So go to school.” Anyway…

“Are you telling me,” he says to his mother… ’Cause you imagine that his mother is just sitting with him at his bedtime. She’s lying on the end of the bed. She’s putting him to bed. And he says, “Are you telling me that Pharaoh said that all the Hebrew boys should be murdered?”

“Yes.”

“How was that?”

“Well, they were to be thrown in the Nile. The Nile was regarded as a god. And the Egyptian god would swallow up the children.”

“But Mama, I wasn’t swallowed up.”

“No, you weren’t swallowed up.”

“Well, I must have been protected.”

“You were protected.”

“How was I protected?”

Then she’d tell him: “I made a little plait, put you in it, set you amongst the rushes. But,” she said, “that wasn’t really the protection. The protection was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He determined to protect you, because he has purposes and plans for his people. And you, Moses, are one of his people.”

“Do you think he’s got a plan for me?” he might have said. “Do you think he kept me for a purpose?”

“Oh,” she says, “that’s enough for this evening. Too many questions! Come on; pull the blankets up under your chin, and let’s go to bed.”

See, what was happening was that long before Solomon ever wrote his verse in the Proverbs—to train up a child in the way that it would go, and when it’s old, it wouldn’t depart from it[2] (Proverbs chapter 22)—long before Solomon ever wrote that, Moses’s mother was doing that. She was doing that. You see, because biblical truth that is planted in our children at an early age doesn’t mean that they will never sin, doesn’t mean that they will never wander, but it is a promise that the truth planted in them in infancy and in those tender years will be used by God to restore them to himself. So, in passing, let me say: If you have a wanderer on your hands, be encouraged. God has a lot of his children on a very long leash. It is his hand that is at the other end of the leash.

So, Moses’s home life involved that. But he had not only a home life that gave him a foundation; he also had a palace life. Because we know that he was raised with the privilege of being “instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.”[3] That’s actually what we find in Stephen’s sermon in Acts chapter 7. And if you find me saying something, and you look down at the text, and you say, “It’s not there,” you’ll find it in Acts chapter 7. And if it’s not in Acts chapter 7, you’ll find it in Hebrews 11. If you don’t find it in Hebrews 11, then send me a text, and I’ll apologize later. All right. So…

But let’s ponder this. Because he’s got a dual background, doesn’t he? He enjoys the privilege of being “instructed in … the wisdom of the Egyptians.” He was raised as a prince. Now, we’re not told if he served in the army. We’re not told if he traveled abroad. But we do know this: What is true of him is true of each of us—that we are a product of our background; that it’s very difficult for us to enjoy great privilege without it bringing perils that accompany it. Because when we enjoy privilege, we may arrogate to ourselves a certain perspective on life. We may actually think of ourselves more highly than we ought. And so when we conceive of this man not only being nurtured in the framework of the foundation of his faith but enjoying the privileges that were his there, his background as he looks on it is significant: “I survived the Nile. I was protected. I was raised as a prince. I have enjoyed an amazing education, second to none. And I have somehow or another, in my head, a sense of divine purpose.”

God has a lot of his children on a very long leash. It is his hand that is at the other end of the leash.

In short order, the benefit of privilege is mitigated by the reality of pride. And as you see these events unfold, you realize that privilege has not come on its own. Because if you think, it might seem, in light of this, that this man is ready for action right now. Why is it that God has not decided—after the background in his home, his Hebrew heritage, his princely involvement, his great education, his grasp of things—why is he not immediately put forward as the great deliverer of Israel? What are we waiting for? Why didn’t God establish him?

The short answer is simple, and it is clear: because he wasn’t ready. Because he wasn’t ready. Who’s the “he”? God and Moses. God makes everything beautiful in his time.[4] He knows what he’s doing. He’s not caught off guard. But Moses wasn’t ready. And the recorded events that we have in the text here—and I hear somebody saying, “Oh, well, good; I’m glad you finally returned to the text”—well, “One day…” “One day…” “One day”—no ordinary day—“he went out to his people.” “He went out to his people.” “It came into his heart,” Stephen says in Acts 7: “It came into his heart to visit his brothers.”[5] In other words, if you like, he’s got some kind of identity crisis of his own. Because as he looks on the situation there, he says, “I am one of them.” But he is one of them in reality, but he’s not really one of them in terms of his garb, in terms of his background, in terms of his education. He is, in some senses, “a walking contradiction.”[6]

But what he does, you will notice, is intervene. He sees them in their burdens, and he sees an Egyptian—presumably a taskmaster—beating one of the Hebrew people. And he is motivated to do something. His motivation, we would, I think, agree, is understandable. His reaction to injustice is noble. “This shouldn’t be happening,” he says. And when he finally takes action, his action is disgraceful. His understanding of the injustice is a noble perspective, but the action he takes is disgraceful. Look at what it says: “He looked this way and that.” What does that mean, that he was trying to cross the road? No. He’s looking: “Hey! Hey, wait a minute.” Then, like the killing fields in the Pol Pot regime, when you watch that old movie, when you have these horrible scenes where they’re burying these bodies—this is an ugly scene. This is a surprising scene for the one who will be the deliverer of Israel. And that’s exactly what he does.

Now, it’s on the following day that he goes to stage two. Day one, this first day, is a day, if you like, of him identifying with his people, coming out to say, “Well, I’m a Hebrew. I’m on the side of the Hebrews.” On this first day, he appears to be striking a blow for liberation: “I’m going to go in there, and I’m going to deliver this man from this.” He actually thought—and this is Acts 7—he actually thought that when the people saw him do this, they would say to themselves, “He must be the instrument of God to deliver us.”[7] That’s why he has acted as he has done. And he thought that. He said to himself, “If they see this, they’re going to say, hey, I did good.” Guess what? He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Because look at what happens on the next day. On the next day, he goes out, and he finds two of the Hebrew brothers, and they’re fighting each other. And the man who was wronging his neighbor, whom he addresses, pushes him aside, and he asks him the question, “Who made you the judge and ruler over us? Who do you think you are? Do you want to kill me like the way you killed the Egyptian? Is that your plan?” Reaction, once again, understandable: “Moses”—14b—“was afraid,” and he thought to himself, “Surely [this] thing is known.”

Now, what has happened here is straightforward. Number one: He has lost his moral authority. He’s committed murder, and the people that he tries to put to rights say, “Well, wait a minute. This is ridiculous! What moral authority do you have to tell us about life?” Answer: He’s lost it. Secondly, he’s discredited by his own people—the people he’s seeking to help. And thirdly, as the text makes clear, he is on Pharaoh’s hit list. He “fled from Pharaoh.” He couldn’t return to the palace. He was unwelcome among the Hebrews. And so he decides to make a run for it. He takes to his heels. He does what is understandable.

Now, I mentioned at the beginning that it was striking to me that we have no details of forty years’ worth of life; we’ve got some peculiar details for two days in life—that the same Moses who has, if you like, just cast a veil over, you know, thirty-five years of his life has determined that it is important that in the record, we would know exactly what had taken place. And he has covered in these two days a revelation of what he was actually like: that he was impetuous, that he was overbearing.

See, remember what I said about him? If you’d been raised as a prince and you come out of one of the elite universities of Egypt, that’s going to do something to you. You may be able to carry yourself in a humble posture from time to time, but if push comes to shove, it’s going to come out: “Hey, I’m the man to interfere here. I’m the man to take charge here.” And that is exactly what has happened.

One of the commentators says what we have in this is “the ‘shortcomings of his virtues’”[8] being put on display. “The ‘shortcomings of his virtues’”—the virtue of his education, the virtue of his authority, the virtue of his background, all of his virtues. Because people’s pluses are so easily their minuses. If you’ve got a great ability with language, you have the ability to use language to encourage and to strengthen. You also have the ability to kill somebody with a word. And so it goes.

And here we see him. If we were scoring Moses at this point, giving him marks out of ten in various categories, what do you think? We could give Moses, I think, ten out of ten for his response to injustice. We could give him another ten for his compassion. We give him another ten out of ten for his motivation. But we give him minus ten for attempting to do two things: to impose his own timetable and to use an ungodly methodology. He seeks to intervene when it is inopportune and not demanded, and when God finally intervenes, the impact of it will be to the glory of his name, in direct contrast to Moses’s method of intervention, involving a burial to hide his shame.

Now, when we go on in Moses—and for a short journey we will—we discover that God’s plan to use him unfolds, but not now. Not now. There’s a time, there’s a time, there’s a time[9]—and God makes everything beautiful in his time. Alec Motyer, whom we love, says Moses “bustled” into the scene and “put the divine programme back [by] forty years.”[10] Think about it. He was under the economy of God, but from a human perspective, that’s exactly what happened: a huge detour in his life. His natural capacity, his natural ability needed to be refined in the providence of God so that what God desired might be then implemented according to his eternal counsel and plan. The problem was that Moses ran ahead. Moses had to learn to wait.

As we look back on our lives, we understand this. God’s plan for him to refine him and prepare him involved this significant course correction. He is about to find himself just sitting down, looking at his knees, looking at his sandals, looking around him, perhaps saying to himself, “What in the world have I got myself into now?” Well, it is the refining process of God. In the next forty years, in this detour, God would accomplish all the plans that he had for the boy that he saved in the baby basket so that the boy from the baby basket at the age of eighty would go before the burning bush and hear the word of command from the one whom he serves.

Now, we’re pretty well done. Tonight we will return to this, but I want to end in this way: It would be strange if there aren’t some people within earshot of me going, “Well, that’s okay. Fair enough. I mean, that is a long time ago, and, yeah, thank you for the history lesson, but I don’t know what in the world… You know, I’ve got to go to lunch, and I’ve got a business meeting tomorrow, and my kids, and so—what has this got to do with me?”

Well, that’s why I started the way I started. Remember point number three, that the Bible is a book about Jesus? So that means that when you study, irrespective in where you are in the Bible, it will eventually lead you to Jesus. So Moses, who’s about to become the deliverer of [Israel], setting them free from the bondage, the enslavement that they “enjoy,” is pointing forward to the real Deliverer, to Jesus. And Jesus will come and set his people free. Free from what? Free from ourselves. Free from our sins. Free from our shortcomings. Free from our preoccupation with our own agenda. Free from the sense of futility that often marks our lives, even when we’re doing really well. That is what this book points us to.

And what we will discover, those of us who have the privilege of the evening—I call it a privilege always to be with the Bible—but what we’ll discover is there’s no detour for Jesus. Jesus doesn’t need a detour. The Bible actually tells us that Jesus, when he realized his time was come to give his life as a sacrifice for sin, he set his face steadfastly towards Jerusalem.[11] There’s no winding road. It was straight there. Why? Because he’s the Savior. Because he’s the Deliverer. Because he has been prepared from all of eternity to enter into the plight of men and women. He is the one in whom safety is found.

You know, I had to do a procedure during the week. I won’t say the name of it, because it makes you wince. But when I had to listen to the lady at the screen, the nurse, she asked me all the questions. And I tried to answer them all truthfully. And one of them was “Do you feel safe?” I said, “Well, apart from the drip you got stuck in me right now, I feel… I was safe up until about three minutes ago, yeah.” “No, no, no, no,” she says, “no. Do you feel safe in your own home?” I said, “Yeah. Yeah, I do.” I thought, “What an interesting question!”

Are you safe? I mean, do you have a sense of eternal safety—a safety that actually walks right through the reality of death and into eternity? That kind of safety? Because it seems to me, until that is settled, any other temporal safety is just a little notion along the journey towards the one eventuality.

Paul Simon—as you know, my favorite lyricist—in a song called “Questions for the Angels” writes as follows:

A pilgrim on a pilgrimage
Walked across the Brooklyn Bridge,
His sneakers torn,
In the hour when the homeless
Move their cardboard blankets
And the new day is born,

Folded in his backpack pocket
The questions that he’d copied from his heart:
“Who am I in this lonely world?
And where will I make my bed tonight?”[12]

Don’t you think that was what Moses was thinking? “And he sat down at the well,” running away from Pharaoh, aware of the hash that he’s made of his early attempts at identification and deliverance, saying to himself, “Well, who am I in this lonely world? And where will I sleep tonight?” And, of course, the answer is that God has a plan to keep him safe. And God has a plan to keep you safe. But that plan is unknown outside the safety that is found in Jesus.

Are you safe?

Let’s just pause for a moment of quietness, and then we’ll sing a closing song:

Our Father, we thank you that we can study the Bible on our own and see if these things are actually there. Thank you that you’ve made us sensible people so that we can think, not swayed by emotion but keen to understand. And we pray that you will so work in and through the circumstances of the days through which we’re living that, perhaps as never before, you’d bring us to a sincere conviction that safety is ultimately and only found in the work of Jesus, who delivers us from our sins. And we pray in his name. Amen.

[1] Sheldon Harnick, “Sunrise, Sunset” (1964).

[2] See Proverbs 22:6.

[3] Acts 7:22 (ESV).

[4] See Ecclesiastes 3:11.

[5] Acts 7:23 (ESV).

[6] Kris Kristofferson, “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33” (1971).

[7] See Acts 7:25.

[8] Willem Hendrik Gipsen, Exodus, Bible Student’s Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982), 44.

[9] See Ecclesiastes 3:2–8.

[10] J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Exodus: The Days of Our Pilgrimage, rev. ed., The Bible Speaks Today (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021), 25.

[11] See Luke 9:51.

[12] Paul Simon, “Questions for the Angels” (2010).