When God gave Moses his marching orders, Moses still resisted. He had all kinds of excuses. The one that seemed to make sense is the fact that he could not speak well. It is possible that he had a very serious speech defect, like to the stuttering defect that the prophet Jeremiah was to have centuries later when God called him to prophesy to the people. This points up another thing about God: his insistence on using flawed and defective instruments for critical missions, most unlikely individuals.
Even after God thought he had it worked out between himself and Moses, Moses, at the end said, “I still think you should appoint somebody else.” So, God told him, “You have your brother Aaron. Take him along. He can do the speaking and you can be like God to him, just telling him what to do.” It is so touching seeing God being so humble and so willing to work along with us when we have so many hang-ups, and so many personal problems. He tries so hard to accommodate us, but thankfully he doesn’t give us, and in the end does what he set out to do in the first place.
So, Moses meets up with Aaron along the way and also his sister Miriam, and they enter Egypt together for the showdown with Pharaoh. It is not pleasant. I am sure you know the story, and about Moses’ staff turning into a snake, and Pharaoh’s magicians doing the same thing, until finally God sends the ten plagues to haunt the Egyptians. Finally, because of Pharaoh’s obstinacy, God strikes down the firstborn of the Egyptians, by sending the angel of death to pass through Egypt, sparing only the firstborn of the Israelites whose doors were marked with the blood of the lamb they had sacrifice. The blood on the lintel and the door posts was like a cross, a prophetic sign of salvation for the Israelites.
Pharaoh, broken by the death of his firstborn, relents and tells the Israelites to leave. The whole Israelite population, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, some estimating the total as close to a million people, left Egypt and crossed over into the Sinai desert.
Now let’s pause and contemplate this awesome event, and God’s involvement. This group of people, the Israelites, has been nurtured by God ever since he originally called Abram. He clearly had a long-term purpose for this special people, but knew that they had to grow and multiply, and become a tightly-knit nation before he could use them for what he had in mind. If they just grew and multiplied in the land of Canaan, they would have become like any other people. They would have had families, and grown and spread out and in time fragmented and lost their cohesive tightly-knit bonding to one another, a bonding which God needed of them.
While in Egypt, though they were originally treated kindly, in time they were made a nation of slaves. But what this did, it bonded them to one another in a bond so tight that their compact unity would be unique among all other peoples. They had no choice, their slavery held them tightly together, conscious of their identity as all children of one family, the family of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. No other nation had ever been bonded so forcefully. Only slavery could have accomplished this, like slavery has bonded the African-Americans today into a tightly-knit family of over forty million people. But, this was necessary for God’s purpose when it came to the Israelites.
So, again, we see God as unbelievably patient, knowing that only centuries of time could prepare this people for the unique mission he had in store for them. But, four centuries of forced hard labor? Then we ask, “Is this something God intended or something God foresaw?” Was it a punishment for Joseph’s brothers for selling him into slavery? Did he arrange for those people to be brought to Egypt for slavery, or was it a natural development of a tribe of people with an exploding population in a country that was not theirs, and which the rulers decided they needed to control?
Whichever it was, it did serve God’s purpose, and it toughened the Israelites to be the strong and fiercely independent people he needed. This amazingly patient God, for whom speed meant nothing when centuries of time was required to prepare what was necessary for the next phase of his plan. We saw his patience with very unstable people whose lives were far from his moral ideals, and had nowhere near the integrity of their father’s faith. We saw his ability to use a group of hateful brothers who sold their own brother into slavery, as the means of saving a whole nation, but also the children of the promise, a prophetic symbol of the future Savior of the world. We see God now as very astute and wise as he deals with a fearful Moses who is only too aware of his inadequacies to carry out the mission God is foisting on him. He deals with Moses by way of options, and compromises. It is fascinating to see the mind of Yahweh at work with a man of no importance as he places on his shoulders a task of Herculean dimensions and who is wriggling at every suggestion God makes. We see a God who is the ultimate in patient understanding of the hesitant, insecure and frightened shepherd he is dealing with.
But now, Moses has already accomplished the first phase of his mission. God has succeeded in prying loose a million people from a powerful nation, so he can provide them with the freedom needed to carry on the next phase of his awesome plan. Moses is now in the middle of a desert with a million people and not knowing what he supposed to do next, and without ever having the slightest training as a leader or a ruler. It is all in God’s hands, and Moses can only wait for his next set of instructions.
