“When Forty Years Had Passed”

And I invite you to turn with me to the book of Exodus and to chapter 3. And if you care to, you could also put your finger into Acts chapter 7, where, in Stephen’s sermon before his martyrdom, he includes a part of the story of Moses, which begins in chapter 7 around verse 17.

Anyway, Exodus 3:1:

“Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Midian, and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. And Moses said, ‘I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.’ When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, ‘Moses, Moses!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ Then he said, ‘Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you[’re] standing is holy ground.’ And he said, ‘I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.

“Then the Lord said, ‘I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and [a] broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. And now, behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.’ But Moses said to God, ‘Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?’ He said, ‘But I will be with you, and this shall be the sign for you, that I have sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain.’”

And in Acts 7, at this point in the story, Stephen records that “now when forty years had passed, an angel appeared to him in the wilderness of Mount Sinai, in a flame of [a] fire in a bush.”[1]

Father, what we know not, teach us. What we have not, give us. What we are not, make us. For Jesus’ sake. Amen.

Well, during the week I said to myself, “There’s a kind of Franz Schubert element to what is going on with me at the moment.” And most of you say, “I haven’t the foggiest idea what you mean.” Those of you who are from the sort of Cleveland Orchestra realm will immediately know, because Schubert, for all the things he’s famous for or remembered for, is remembered for his unfinished symphony. He wrote two of the movements, and he didn’t die, but he just didn’t write movement 3 and movement 4.

And so I said to myself, “So there is some precedent for this. Schubert had an unfinished symphony, and Begg has an unfinished series.” And that is why we’re going to end our time this morning and this evening in this series, which will remain, at least for the time being, unfinished. And we have been paying very careful attention to the unfolding of the timing of God, which, using as a title for this morning the opening phrase from Stephen’s statement in Acts chapter 7, the title for this morning is “When Forty Years Had Passed.”

Now, I didn’t choose that in relationship to myself. It’s only as I read it now, it sounds a little pretentious, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t that. It’s because it says in the text, “When forty years had passed…” And it is a forceful reminder of what we’ve been saying the last couple of weeks, two or three weeks: that God is not in our kind of hurry. God is not in our kind of hurry. Moses, we’re told, was forty years of age when he emerged from the palace. He had been schooled in the context of his Hebrew home. He had been nurtured in the instruction of an Egyptian education. He had come out of there, we’re told, “mighty in … words and [in] deeds.”[2] And we may recall that we said it would seem that he was perfectly prepared for the task that would fall to him as the deliverer of the people of Israel from the bondage of Egypt.

But, of course, as we continued to study, we saw how his first attempts at being a deliverer had actually achieved nothing, and as a result of that, he had fled and had run away and found himself in Midian. And last Sunday evening, those of us who were present pondered the fact that there he was on the receiving end of God’s goodness to him. He not only found a place to stay; he found a job; he found a wife. And when he was in his mid-seventies, we might, if we had met him out there in the search of pasture for his sheep, come across him. Someone said, “That’s Moses over there. Do you want to go and talk to him?” And I said, “Yeah, I want to go and talk to him.” I want to say, “Hey, Moses, how’s life these days? Anything new? Anything exciting? Anything going on?” And he’d have said, “No, pretty much the same. It’s pretty much the same routine. Every day, I lead Jethro’s flocks in search of pasture. It doesn’t really seem like much is happening at all.”

Of course, he didn’t know what we know because we’re reading the text: He did not know that God was at work in those strange and silent years. He was preparing him to be the shepherd of his people. The psalmist in Psalm 77, which you may have read this week in the course of your Bible readings, it says that God shepherded his people by the hand of Moses and by the hand of Aaron.[3] And if we’d met him and suggested this to him, nobody would have been more surprised than himself.

Now, it’s a small point, but it’s worth noting that it was in the fulfilling of his routine responsibilities that he finds himself here, according to verse 1, in Horeb, at “the mountain of God.” Now, I just want to say to you that there are many places today, morning and evening, when it would be possible for me to divert and go on a long digression. For example: Do you want to think more about “the mountain of God”? And we could track that all the way through. I’m choosing not to do that. All I want you to know is that it was an apparent happenstance that brought him to that place, and that place was to prove a significant place in the purposes of God.

Let’s just acknowledge that for most of us, our lives are routine. I mean, every so often something comes in that makes it perhaps more special, but by and large, we do what we do on a routine basis. And unless we find meaning in those routines, we will find ourselves always in search of something to try and make sense of what is going on.

The name Fred Mitchell, I think, will be unknown to the vast majority of you. He became, after D. E. Hoste, the director of the China Inland Mission. He died in a plane crash coming out of the Middle East—no, coming out of Asia. The last message that came from the cockpit to the control tower on that occasion was “We are climbing on track.” And then, of course, they lost radar communication, and they were all gone. The little biography which I regard as one of my favorites is entitled Climbing On Track, and it tells of Fred Mitchell. He was a pharmacist. He was a businessman. He was just going about his business. And the biographer says it was “on that ordinary, hum-drum track” that “he walked with God, climbing steadily in spiritual experience.”[4] “On that ordinary, hum-drum track … he walked with God.” Since our lives are routine, if we don’t learn to walk with God on the humdrum track, we’re never going to learn how to walk with God.

There is no humdrum in the purposes of God. There is nothing that is irrelevant when he lays hold upon you and has plans and purposes for you.

George Herbert, who lived in the sixteenth century, he was an academic, he was a theologian, and he was a poet. His famous poem (at least famous to me) which is called “The Elixir”—E-l-i-x-i-r—begins as follows:

  Teach me, my God and King,
  In all things Thee to see,
And what I do in anything
  To do it as for Thee. …

  A servant with this clause
  Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,
  Makes that and th’ action fine.[5]

Horatius Bonar similarly, in his hymn, writes,

Praise in the common things of life,
Its goings out and in;
Praise in each duty and each deed,
Exalted or unseen.[6]

Now, clearly, Moses was going to be involved in the most dramatic intervention that the people of God would ever see in the history of history. And yet it was in these forty years that God was preparing him in the routines of life. We never know what a day will bring for any one of us. He had lessons that he needed to learn that he couldn’t learn in the palace. He needed to learn them in the desert. He needed to learn them on another path. He was going to learn them in a lonely place. He was going to learn them in a place where nobody called his name, where nobody thought he was significant, where nothing at all was happening. It was, if you like, somewhat humiliating. God does this.

I said to myself when I was studying, “Has he done this for you, Alistair?” Then I said, “Well, yeah, I think so.” I mean, I hate to intrude, but I had something of a crash course when, having figured out my entire life, I determined that I didn’t have it figured out, and having sent God a fax with my expectations for what I would do with my life: “I would like to have an American girl for my wife, I’d like to have a law degree, and I’d like to have a BMW 2002—and not necessarily in that order.” Well, as you know, he only gave me the girl, which is fabulous. But he sent back to me just an open page. He said, “Alistair, if you’ll just sign your name at the bottom of this blank page, let me fill in the top for you. Don’t you worry about the rest of it.”

And that led me to deliver meat in the back of a small minivan from the local butcher. It wasn’t exactly anything other than humdrum—a little stinky, but humdrum nevertheless. And that was for a period of time before I graduated to my new career, which was as a cleaner/handyman. And in that college I cleaned, polished the brasses, cleaned the windows, vacuumed the carpets, always wondering, “Is this it? Is this what I signed up for when I put my name at the bottom of this page? This is kind of humdrum.” Listen: There is no humdrum in the purposes of God. There is nothing that is irrelevant when he lays hold upon you and has plans and purposes for you.

And it occurred to me, again, as I was preparing for today, that we haven’t come very far in forty-two years, in this respect: that when we set out in ’83, in our studies in Nehemiah, I remember saying that “one of the reasons that we’re going to study this is in order that we might discover the principles that need to be applied when God is going to do something that is lasting. We need to consider the principles, and we need to consider the people that God will choose to use in doing that.” And here we are. What are we doing? We’re closing as we began: the principles of what it means to be prepared and the people that God chooses to use in the process.

You see, while Moses was doing something, he was on the way to becoming something. You don’t, in the economy of serving God, set out to become something. You set out to do something, and to do that which you are set apart to do. If he chooses in the process that you become something, then fine. That’s his prerogative. But it’s not the position from which we start.

“Hey, Moses, how’s it going? Anything new?” “No, nothing.” Hold your breath, Moses! It’s all about to change in a moment.

You say, “Well, good. We finally got to the text.” Yes. I just want to point out three straightforward things.

An Appearance of God

First of all: an appearance of God. An appearance of God—that is, that God appears. He shows up. And he shows up, as the record records for us, in this bush that is burning, but it’s not consumed. Don’t let’s get diverted on thinking about bushes that are burning and so on. God, who is the creator of the universe, is able to do whatever he chooses to do at any point at any place along the journey. And therefore, once we have established that he created the universe, then the fact that he intervenes in his universe in any way that he chooses should be no surprise to us at all.

And in doing what he does here, you will notice it actually says in the text that Moses said to himself, “I will turn aside”—verse 3—“I will turn aside to see this great sight”—not of a bush that is burning, because that was routine. In the desert, anything could start them off. It wasn’t that the bush burned. It was that it burned, and it was not consumed. “I’m going to have to look at this! I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

So what happens? Well, he’s stopped in his tracks. What tracks? His ordinary tracks. He didn’t get up on that morning and say, “I’m going to meet God in a special way.” He got up on that morning and said, “I’ll go and do my thing with the sheep again.” And in doing what he was called to do, he found himself in the mountain of God, and he found that God had planned to meet him there.

“The angel of the Lord” is an enigmatic statement. Again, we could delay on this. Suffice it to say that “The angel of the Lord” is referred to, as the text goes on, as God and as the Lord—so, “the angel of the Lord,” and then it says, “And the Lord said…” and then it says, “God said…” “Well, wait a minute! So the angel of the Lord is distinct from and yet synonymous with?” Yes. “Whoa, that’s kind of strange!” Yes. Fast-forward. Have you ever come across somebody who is the same as and yet distinct from? Jesus! Of course! He is truly God and truly man, steps down into time, distinct and yet eternally the same, coequal and coeternal.

Don’t get stalled on the angel. Understand that the fire is not only an indication of this dramatic reality of God that is eternal and cannot be consumed, but it is also an expression of the holiness of God—that the presence of God causes Moses here to be afraid. It doesn’t cause him to say, “Can we do a selfie?” He is afraid. He wants to hide. We’ve got a real problem when we think that God has come just to accommodate himself to us—we can live as we choose, think what we want, do as we planned, and somehow or another, we’ll just be gratified if he will bow down to us. We can’t do that. God is. God is. And in this encounter, the person in the bush, the angel, speaks.

So, you’ll notice that in this appearance, first of all, we could say that Moses is intrigued. Secondly, we discover that he is directed. He is directed. Verse 4: “When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, ‘Moses, Moses!’” It’s fantastic, this. I mean, he’d seen it all. I mean, forty years in the desert, and then we got a bush that burns! There’s no reason to stop except that it burns, and it doesn’t go out. “I need to see that.” And then there’s a person in the bush. It’s not the bush that’s talking. It’s a person that’s talking! You see that? “Moses, Moses,” he said. Who called to him? Look at verse 4: “God called to him.” He’s not talking to a bush. “God [spoke] to him out of the bush.” Can God do that? Clearly. It’s here. And he said, “Well, here I am.” “Don’t come near!” That’s number one. Or “Stop coming nearer. Back off, and take your shoes off. Remove your sandals.”

Removing your shoes is—well, in Asia, removing your shoes is actually a sign of worship, to go barefoot. Removing your shoes in a building here may be an expression of all kinds of things. But here it is an indication of the fact that in this intriguing encounter, God directs him and makes him aware of the fact that he is standing on holy ground. It is the presence of God that makes it holy. And he says to him, “Not only are you on holy ground, but you actually know who I am. I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.” In other words, you see, he doesn’t say, “I just appeared from nowhere.” No. “And Moses hid his face,” and “he was afraid.” He’s intrigued, he’s directed, and he’s afraid. His intrigue at the sight is actually addressed, is clarified by the sound of the voice.

You see, God in his holiness exposes sin. God in his holiness recoils from sin. His wrath is his settled and inevitable antagonism—a wrath that is aroused only by evil. Sin cannot approach God, and God cannot tolerate sin. That’s what’s happening in this encounter.

An Assurance from God

So, an appearance by God, and then, secondly, an assurance from God. An assurance from God.

You see, while this encounter is taking place, it would be perfectly understandable if the people of God—who are not in Horeb the mountain of the Lord, but they are back in Egypt—it would be entirely understandable if those folks, who are still back there under the taskmasters of the Egyptian rule, were asking themselves, “Where is God? Where is the promise that was made to Abraham, that there was going to be a great nation?”

Now, only those who had paid careful attention to the promise would know that included in the promise was the assurance that the people of God on their way to the promised land would experience that which was now before them. In other words, they would need the information that God supplied in order to make sense of what was going on. Nothing has changed: We need the information that God has supplied in order to make sense of what is going on. And they needed to learn what routinely we need to learn—namely, that no matter how things look from the outside, if it looks like it’s out of control, it isn’t, because God’s covenant is intact. His promises are trustworthy. We can take him at his word.

And you’ll notice he then explains to Moses what we noticed last Sunday evening. It’s almost a recapitulation. Verse 7: “I have surely seen the affliction … [I] have heard [the] cry …. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of … [into]…” That’s what God does. And the intensity of the cry from the people is more than matched by the sensitive response of God. “And now,” he says, “behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I[’ve] also seen the oppression,” and so on. “I’m aware of all of this.”

Now, we can almost sense, perhaps, the relief that would then be in the mind of Moses. As he reflects on his first forty years and now his second forty years, he has got no concept of what the future will hold. He’s not about to say, “Tomorrow I will go into this city and sell and get gain.” No, he knows now, “I can only say, ‘If the Lord wills, I will do this.’”[7] And what is going to happen? Well, the fact of the matter is that he shouldn’t be feeling too easy about things, because God is about to act. Well, he might have said to himself, “I wonder how he’s going to come down.”

An Assignment by God

And that brings us to our third and final point: Not only has he been confronted by the appearance of God, not only does he have the assurance that God is in control, but he’s now about to be given an assignment by God. Look at verse 10: “Come.” It’s interesting, because he just said, “Don’t come,” right? He said, “Back off.” You see, we come to God on God’s time. We come to God on God’s basis. We don’t stumble into an assignment for God. So he is told, “Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.”

What a moment that must have been as he stood there! He knew that God would deliver his people. He could deliver his people by the exercise just of his mere presence and the power and strength of his voice. Moses also knew that he had made a real stumbling start at doing a kind of deliverance that had resulted in a complete fiasco. And now he’s about to discover that looking after someone else’s sheep for forty years has been a preparation for the final third of his life.

We come to God on God’s time. We come to God on God’s basis.

Now, I want I want to stop there. Because it continues in verse 11, and verse 11 can wait until the evening hour. “Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.” You expect him to say, “Yes sir! Ready and willing. I mean, after all, you showed up. You spoke to me out of a bush. You’ve done all these things. You’ve protected me, kept me. I’m eighty years old. Here we go.”

Now, I don’t want to spoil it, but you can see that he was a real dunderhead when it came to this process. And that will be the way we finish thinking about him this evening. Because by Moses, as we know, Israel was to be set free from the bondage of Egypt. That was going to be as a result of the initiative of God, and it points forward, as we’ve said in each of our studies, to the fact that Jesus is the great Deliverer—that he comes to set us free from bondage to ourselves, to sin, to death, and so on.

And it is with that that I want to end, before we sing a closing hymn. Because while I was studying, my doctor of old—his picture is on my desk always. I actually prop it up against a lamp. His name was Tony Thomas. He was a doctor at the Cleveland Clinic. Some of you knew him personally. He looked after me right up until the discovery of the cancer, prostate cancer. But why I thought about him was because of this reason: He had been looking after me. He’d been telling me, “This is what you need to do, this is what you shouldn’t do,” and so on. And he called me one day, and he said, “I am about to retire, and I don’t want to discover after I am gone that you have cancer and that I missed it. And so I would like for you to come in and let me biopsy you, and then we’ll go from there.” Characteristically, I said, “Will it hurt?” He said, “It will be uncomfortable, but I will not hurt you.” That was a Wednesday. On the Thursday, he called me; he said, “You have cancer.” And then our friendship developed until, ironically, he himself died with the very same cancer that he had found in me. And I keep his picture with me on my desk.

Now, here’s my thought: I am about to retire. And I have tried my best for forty-two years to say to men and women within hearing of me, “Are you a Christian? Are you a follower of Jesus? Do you know that Jesus is your Savior and that he is the King who has enlisted you in his service and under whose banner you are marching in your life?”

Because the story of the Bible—that’s why we’re able to move from here to Jesus with relative ease—the story of the Bible is, as we’ve said before, “God made it. We broke it. Jesus fixed it.” That’s the story of the Bible: “God created it. We messed it up. Jesus came to fix it.” So he comes to fix us, not in a generic way but in an individual way.

Imagine for a moment that your life is a book, and the book contains everything about you—everything you ever thought, everything you ever did, all of it in the book. And then just imagine that you are walking down the main street of Chagrin Falls, and you see a sign in the window that says, “You ought to read this book about Begg!” It would be a terrifying thought, wouldn’t it? Because it would contain material of which I am ashamed—thoughts, words, language, motivations, deeds. Oh, you couldn’t stand it!

The good news is: There’s no such book. And it’s not in the window. But don’t breathe a sigh of relief too soon. Because God knows everything that’s in the book of your life and mine. God knows the things that we have pretended about. God knows the things that we have reason to be ashamed of. And God, because he is holy, must punish sin. Must punish sin. The wonder of it is, of course, that the God who is so just and holy that he must punish sin is the God who is so loving that he sends to those worthy of his punishment a Deliverer. And that Deliverer is Jesus. And Jesus comes to take the punishment that we, as sinners, deserve, so that because of his death in the sinner’s place, he offers forgiveness to us.

“Oh, well,” you say, “I’m not sure I actually need to be forgiven.” Or you say, “Oh, I thought I was automatically forgiven.” The congregation that I’ve had the privilege of preaching to is not largely made up of men and women that come to me at the end of a service to say, “You know, I am such a wretched sinner that I can’t believe there’s a possibility of forgiveness”—maybe one in a thousand. No, the kind of people that talk to me afterwards, they don’t say, “I can’t believe that God would forgive me.” They say, “I can’t believe that I need to be forgiven. I come to church. I have ‘faith.’ I try and do my best. I believe in God.”

Is that it? No, all of that is fine. But you and I can do all of that and still not be a Christian. Still not be a Christian! Being a Christian is not about what I do. It’s about what Jesus has done. When a person becomes a Christian—when a person becomes a Christian—they are accepting the fact that when Jesus died upon the cross, he wasn’t simply dealing with sin. He was dealing with my sin, my messed-up life, my super-religious life, where I’m trying to rely on all the good things I’ve done, or my sorry life, where I’ve been trying to fix everything under my own agenda. Jesus does that.

And when a person becomes a Christian, they accept that “Jesus has done that on my behalf.” “On my behalf.” It means that we turn away from our sin. We turn away from going our own direction in order to walk on the narrow way with Jesus. And when we do, he forgives our sin; he grants us eternal life, beginning now; and he gives us the Holy Spirit to live in our lives, to continually fashion us, knock the bad parts out, put the good parts in, fix us up over the long haul.

And this is what I wanted to say to you. Let me ask you this: Are you a Christian? If Jesus is not your personal Savior and King, then the answer to that question must be no. If Jesus is not my professed Savior and King—not because of something I’ve done but because I understand exactly what he has done—then the answer is no.

But here’s the good news: It’s not too late. Today, quietly, personally, honestly, you can simply talk to God. You tell him, “You know, I’ve been listening to that story for so long, and I thought somehow or another that I was just swept in with the group. I didn’t realize that. I thought I was in the policy. I never… Hmm.”

And if you’re saying to yourself, “Well, what would I say if I spoke to God?”—maybe something like this: You could say, “Dear God, I realize I’ve rebelled against you in thought and word and deed. I’m a sinner. I’m sorry I’ve done this, and I ask you to forgive me. I know that Jesus died on the cross to take the punishment I deserve. I know that if I trust in him, you have forgiven me. Thank you that he rose from the dead to give me new life. As best I can and with your help, Father, I will turn away from rebellion and follow Jesus as my King. Please, today, come, take control of my life, and make me all you want me to be.”

When you leave this morning, there are out in the vestibule various little bits and pieces that are there for you. The most helpful, I think, is simply a copy of the Gospel of John. And in the introduction—it runs just about eight pages or so, maybe nine—there’s a wonderful explanation of what it means to move from intellectual assent to commitment. I commend it to you, and I do so in the awareness of the fact that we’re moving, each of us, to a meeting with that God, and there’s only one thing that we can say in our defense when we stand before him: “I trusted Jesus, and he’s the one who said I could come here.”

Let us pray:

Our Father, we thank you. We thank you that you love the world so much that you sent your only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.[8] Lord, I pray that you will take all this rambling stuff this morning and accomplish your purposes in and through it, for your glory and for our spiritual well-being. Thank you that there is “a land that is fairer than day”[9] that we’re going to see and that we will stand before you on that day with our only confidence in the finished work of Jesus. So grant that we might find our answer, both to our lives and our deaths, in him. And we ask it in his name. Amen.

[1] Acts 17:30 (ESV).

[2] Acts 7:22 (ESV).

[3] See Psalm 77:20.

[4] Phyllis Thompson, Climbing On Track: A Biography of Fred Mitchell (London: China Inland Mission, 1953), 11.

[5] George Herbert, “The Elixir” (1633), lines 1–4, 17–20.

[6] Horatius Bonar, “Fill Thou My Life” (1866).

[7] James 4:13, 15 (paraphrased).

[8] See John 3:16.

[9] Sanford Fillmore Bennett, “In the Sweet By and By” (1868).