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Full Episode
Hey, Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for The Bible Recap. Yesterday, we ended our reading halfway through God's conversation with Moses, and Moses had given two reasons why God shouldn't or couldn't use him to rescue the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. Today, we pick up the back half of that conversation.
God gives Moses some signs to use to prove himself, and Moses gives God three more excuses or rebuttals to his call. Honestly, Moses seems kind of right. But God is unmoved. God patiently responds to each of his concerns, never hedging on his plan, despite the fact that Moses is completely ill-fitted for this calling.
I mean, even in verse 3, Moses throws the staff on the ground, and when it becomes a snake, he runs from it. The guy who's afraid of a snake probably shouldn't go toe-to-toe with a dictator. But God reassures him, not with a promise that everything will go perfectly, but with words like these, Moses doubts himself, but God, his maker, reminds him who he's talking to.
Questioning God's calling is an insult to the God who made him. All five of Moses' excuses are identity issues. Growing up in the environment he grew up in, it would be shocking if he didn't have identity issues. At this point, it doesn't seem like he really knows or believes God, which means he can't really know who he is either. At the last excuse, God gets angry.
It seems like Moses' hesitation was an affront to God's wisdom in calling him, as though Moses believes God wouldn't be sufficient. Moses' fears and insecurities here are an attack on God's character. But God does not lean into this offense. He leans into patience and compassion. He provides Aaron, Moses' older brother, to go with him. So Moses gets permission from his father-in-law Jethro,
packs up the family, and heads to Egypt. But God does not promise an easy journey. He basically tells Moses, you're going to ask Pharaoh for something, and I'm going to harden his heart so that he says no to you. That's a tough assignment. But in the part of this conversation we read yesterday, God said that with a mighty hand, he would compel Pharaoh to yield.
So at least Moses has that to hold on to. One thing I want to point out, God calls Israel his firstborn son and promises to kill the firstborn of Egypt if they don't let his son go. This is foreshadowing not just of the Passover, which we'll get to in a few days, but also of the inclusion of the Gentiles into God's family.
Remember how the firstborn gets the blessing, but Jesus, our older brother, shares his inheritance with us as co-heirs? We see this with the Israelites, too. They're God's firstborn, but in God's great generosity, he also adopted Gentiles, non-Jews, into his family as a part of his promise to bless all the nations of the world through this one family.
And because of that, we Gentiles share in their inheritance, just like with Jesus. Something puzzling happens on the way to Egypt where God gets angry and seeks to kill someone, but it's unclear who or why. Most scholars believe the reasons for God's anger is that Moses' son Gershom hasn't been circumcised. And most think that God's anger is directed toward Moses.
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