In the first two chapters we notice first something which, in the light of what we have just been saying, might very well surprise us. It is that the narrative appears to be so thoroughly secular. It sounds like typical human history, after all, for it covers a long succession of events with barely a mention of God.
The process by which the sons of Jacob, once welcome immigrants in the land of Egypt, multiply and prosper until the Pharaoh sees them as a potential threat to his country's internal security and takes ruthless political steps to contain it, is briefly described. And here we are moving on a very familiar plane of human affairs, where the balance of power is the controlling factor that determines how the men of state move the counters on their chess board.
Only at the point where the two midwives Shiphrah and Puah sturdily defy the Pharaoh's order to them is the curtain drawn aside for a moment to give us a glimpse - the merest, fleeting glimpse - of God's influence on events: "The midwives feared God." It is said simply to explain their courage.
Even so, God's interest is disclosed in what is, after all, a very minor matter amid all the larger affairs of their time. The happiness of these two women in being given children of their own hardly disturbs the course of events at all, and soon their courage appears to have been a futile gesture anyway, for the campaign to kill the Hebrew boy babies at birth is taken out of their hands and given into the hands of the Egyptian populace at large. The regard the two women had for God appears in fact to have made things worse, not better. The curtain that was briefly parted closes to again, and no further hint of God's interest in events is given until the plight of the Hebrew slaves has become apparently quite hopeless.
There appears to be no hidden, guiding hand on events. The joy of Moses' parents at his birth, their anxiety while they hid him, the daring risk they took in letting him loose on the river, and the danger to his sister while she watched - all this is recounted without the faintest suggestion that any factors were operating but purely human ones.
The little ark in which the baby cries is snagged by the reeds quite by chance, it seems, where Pharaoh's daughter will hear him. The princess's decision to defy her father and adopt the child is recorded as though nothing else is needed to account for it but the unpredictable impulse of that creature of whims, a woman!
When the child comes to manhood and emerges at last on to the wider stage of his people's life, where every instinct tells you he has a dramatic role to play, his first attempt to take a hand in their affairs comes to grief almost at once. Still the Pharaoh is the only power, apparently, to be reckoned with. The shadow of his worldly power stretches out over the whole of the long ensuing period while Moses drifts further and further into obscurity, a nameless shepherd in the remote mountain fastnesses of Midian. There, the whole story of this supposed man of destiny threatens to run out into the desert sands and come to nothing.
It is told, this tale, as such an all too human sounding story; it all sounds so depressingly familiar. What use are the brave midwives? ... or the good Levite couple who care so hopefully for their child? What use is Moses himself, come to that, even when he is an angry young man ready for social action and violent protest? What are all these before the might of the ruling earthly power? Of what use is religious conviction in the face of the ruthless efficiency of a godless establishment? How pitiably feeble are simple faith and honest goodness in their protest against the big battalions! Might is right - and human rights, however passionately they are espoused, count for nothing. They are doomed to defeat even before they can struggle to birth. Life is ruled by the Pharaohs of this world, and God, if He exists at all, can only stand helplessly by. The best that can be expected of religious faith is that it might bring a bit of cheer into the drab life of a midwife here and there, and perhaps a gaggle of harmless farm girls in the remote outback. It is for women and kids.
Only then, when everything seems hopeless - when the lights on the stage have dimmed and the curtain has come down - does the Bible writer lift that curtain and let us see, in the half light backstage, the God Who has been keeping watch above His people. "Their cry under bondage came up to God," he says at last (2:23). "God saw the people of Israel, and God knew their condition." Now, when all seems lost, God steps out of the shadow and beckons to His servant Moses, and the action ... what? Begins? No. The action continues. It is not as though God has been stirred from sleep at last and rouses Himself to intervene in the nick of time, so to speak. Not at all. Rather, we are permitted to see and hear for a moment the God Who has been hidden but active all along, remembering His Covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Even so, He makes Himself known only to one man at first, and then only in secrecy. Soon He will withdraw from sight again behind the action. Moses, the man of humble faith, will be ever watching for Him with the eye of faith; but Pharaoh, the man of unbelieving pride, will be blind to Him even when the hand of God actually touches his family and his life.
Now if we have caught the Bible writer's intention correctly in telling the story this way, two conclusions follow:
1. Events serve God's providence, and
2. Faith serves God's purpose.
The first lesson to be drawn is that despite the chance appearance of things, they are in fact ordered by God's providence.
Over that frail ark in which the infant Moses lay, did there not rest the protecting, guiding hand of God? Did not all things serve His will? The current in the full river, the lie of the bulrushes that steered the haphazard course of the frail basket among them, the hour of the princess's bathe and the spot where she took it, the child's cry, the impulse welling up in the princess's heart into swift resolve, the innocent venturesomeness of the sister, the happy ploy that gave the child back to its mother - all these and a dozen other trivial and unrelated things, all of them the merest chance apparently, are spun together into the strong cable of circumstance by means of which God draws out His secret purpose slowly but surely into reality and deed. Beside the deliberate scheming of the earthly Pharaoh, who can command armies and deploy labour squads and issue edicts a million human beings must obey, the means by which God carries His purpose forward look so frail, so chancy, so vulnerable, so fraught with the risk of miscarrying. But it is man's purpose which fails, and God's which succeeds. Man fashions impressive programmes with elaborate care to achieve his ends; God is content with trivia. For His purposes the commonplace which man despises is sufficient. (See Note 1 below)
And though it may seem a slight lesson to draw out of such weighty matters as these events sustain, it is yet a lesson Jesus Himself sought to impress upon us. "Do not be anxious about your life ... your heavenly Father knows your needs. Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all things needful shall be yours as well." (Matthew 6:25, 32-33)
The man of faith who knows this can never hope to demonstrate to his unbelieving friend that nothing that happens to him is an accident. But the man who knows the God of Moses, who is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, knows that nothing can happen that has not first come under the heavenly Father's scrutiny and been sieved through the mesh of His higher wisdom and passed through as advantageous to the purpose of God for his life - and through him for others' lives.
As God remembered Noah in his ark, so He remembered Moses in this other, lesser ark, and the Covenant He had made with his fathers.
The word 'remembered', when it is used of God in the Bible, means much more than that a thing came suddenly to mind which God had been forgetting lately. The tenses of Hebrew grammar are curious; it could almost be said that the Hebrew language has no future tense, but only past and present tenses. That is because the Hebrew's interest in time was somewhat different from ours. His chief concern was with action; and whether that action was past, present or future was not at all as important to him as whether it was finished or continuing. When they spoke of God remembering, therefore, they used a tense that indicates uninterrupted continuance. God was mindful of His people in that instant as He had been continually mindful of them in every instant in their past, and as He would be mindful of them in every instant in their future.
In our daily life, in large affairs and small, it should encourage us to reckon on God's remembrance of us, on His real though undiscernible providence, and stop worrying! "Not even a sparrow falls to the ground but your Father knows," said Jesus, "so don't fret. You are worth more to Him than many sparrows." (Luke 4:7)
The second lesson to be drawn is this: Not only were the chance happenings of every day serving God's purpose for His people, so also was the simple faith of the despised few who believed in Him.
The midwives Shiphrah and Puah play an active part in His purpose, as do Moses' parents Amram and Jochabed. And to do so was no easy thing for them. Their kinfolk, most of them, oppressed though they were by Egyptian tyranny, yet worshipped Egypt's gods. "Your fathers," Joshua tells their children in later years, "served other gods in Egypt." (Joshua 24:14) Ezekiel would remind his contemporaries that the generation that knew Moses "indulged the abominations of their eyes, and defiled themselves with the idols of Egypt." (Ezekiel 20:8) "But," reads Hebrews 11:23, "by faith, Moses when he was born was hid for three months by his parents; for they were not afraid of the Pharaoh's edict."
It was more than natural mother love that led Jochabed to risk her life to Egyptian soldiery, and her child to the jealous spite of other Hebrew mothers who had lost their sons - it was trust in the God of her fathers, when life around her was godless and brutish. When Shiphrah and Puah spared the infants they delivered, it was not simply because they were too soft-hearted to see the little darlings suffer, but because it was not right according to the faith of their fathers!
None of these four good folk could have had the remotest idea what magnificent fruit was to be born of their faithfulness. Their vision of the future was as limited as ours. They could have had no more idea than could you or I that the child born of Jochabed would become the agent of God in such mighty deeds as were to be wrought by him. They were prey to doubts, I am sure, in their gloomier moments, whether any useful purpose was served after all by their trouble-fraught faithfulness to such light as they had. To what end were they preserving these children anyway, but to a life of miserable servitude? It must have seemed to them at times to have been a futile gesture of faith.
But as they remembered God, so God remembered them. As they set God before their eyes from day to day, so God shone the light of His face upon them from day to day, and all unwittingly they were drawn into the strong current of God's purpose for their time - a purpose mightier by far than all the high strategy of Egypt. And without their defiant faithfulness that high purpose of God did not sweep onward. They built far better than they knew.
It is always so. "Seek ye first the rule of God and His righteousness." And because they did that, there belongs to them a glory greater by far than the accumulated earthly glories of all the Egyptian dynasties.
It was from among this tiny remnant of despised folk loyal to their God that Moses was 'drawn out' (for that is the meaning of his name). And as it was with the child in his little basket, so it would be with the Child in the manger. It was from among the humble poor like Joseph who obeyed the angelic voice ... like Mary who said meekly, "Be it unto Thy handmaiden according to Thy word" ... like old Simeon who was righteous and devout and whose weary eyes had not ceased to look for the consolation of Israel despite the long, long years of hope deferred ... it was from among these, and the likes of these - Elizabeth and Zechariah and the rest - that a greater than Moses was born who would free His people from the slavery, not of Egypt but of sin - not of Pharaoh but of Satan. It was not the Herods or the Pharaohs, playing their heady games in the corridors of power, who served the purposes of the God of heaven, nor enjoyed the blessings of His rule, but the humble poor who had the courage of their gritty faith.
The mighty who ignore God and exert themselves with arrogant pride to shape the world to their will are dashed in pieces in the day when God puts forth His strength to save. "They shall suffer the punishment of eternal destruction and exclusion from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might, when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints, and to be marvelled at in all who have believed." (II Thessalonians 1:9)
So as we go out into each day's life, rejoicing to know that God remembers us, and all things are in His hand, let us remember Him, assured of this: that although the reward of faithfulness may seem but a slight thing to us now and of small profit, yet there is henceforth laid up for us a crown of righteousness, a crown of glory, which the Lord will award to all who have loved His appearing. Our humble life will have furthered the grand design of the high God of heaven.
Note 1:
This will be amply demonstrated again in the events associated with
the Nativity.
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