Dear Friends of Jesus Christ,
When I was in Sunday School, my Sunday School teacher taught me the story of
baby Moses in the in the basket floating in the Nile River. I can almost remember what
the picture on the Sunday School paper looked like. There’s a basket. There’s a baby.
There are the reeds. There’s the river. There’s a woman leaning over the river looking
into the basket. What I failed to grasp at the time was the significance of that baby in
God’s plan of redemption. Who is the greatest figure in the Bible after Jesus? Is it the
Apostle Paul? Is it mother Mary? Is it king David? Elijah? Is it Abraham? No, it’s
Moses. Moses leads God’s people out of their darkest hour. Moses communicates God’s
law to God’s people. Moses has a lot to do with the writing of the first five books of the
Bible. Moses has always been the most important figure in Judaism. Moses, in the last
part of Deuteronomy 18, points people to Jesus. Moses is the second most important
human figure in the whole Bible and arguably in all of human history. And he almost did
not survive infancy! From a human perspective, that is. From a divine perspective, he
was as safe in the basket as Jesus was in the manger. God Almighty had a plan to bring
his people out of Egypt to the Promised Land and long before the creation of the world he
chose Moses to lead his people.
Moses is born into the house of Levi. Levi is one of Jacob’s 12 sons. Levi’s
descendants would be the priests of Israel. Moses is from a priestly line. And even as a
baby, his mother could see that he was special. In verse two we read that his mother sees
that he is a “fine” child. Of course, any mother would say that about her son or daughter.
Every baby is special! But Moses is different. In Acts 7:20 Stephan says that Moses was
no ordinary child. He is a special baby – the second most special baby in the whole
Bible. His mother hides him from the genocide for three months and then when her
cover is blown she puts him in a pitch coated papyrus basket and places him in the Nile
amongst the reeds.
God has used such a method before to save his people. Who else did God save
with a pitch coated basket on the water? Noah. The word for basket is the same word for
ark. Both the ark and this Moses basket are covered with pitch. God is saving his
people. He’s doing it again. First he was saving his people from his own judgment.
Now he’s saving his people from the judgment of the cruel king of Egypt. He’s using a
mini-ark, a pitch-coated basket to save Moses.
We need to be saved too. We are vulnerable like baby Moses lying in a basket,
floating on the Nile River. We are no more secure, no more in control of our future than
baby Moses lying in a basket in the reeds. You and I need the hand of God to save us
from our sins, to protect us, to provide for us, to give us calling and to give us a future
every bit as much as Moses needed the hand of God 3500 years ago. We are no less
vulnerable. We are no less in need of the hand of Almighty God. He carries us in a
basket along the dangerous rivers of life in an evil world and we need him to carry us or
else we will all die in every sense of the word.
It was strategic for the mother of Moses to place him in the reeds of the Nile. It
would be like placing a baby on the steps of a hospital or by the front door of an
orphanage. Women would come to the Nile to bathe and wash clothes. In an ancient
society, the river is where the action is because water is so necessary for life.
Pharaoh’s daughter goes down to the Nile to bathe. Her assistants there with her
walking along the river bank. Pharaoh’s daughter is bathing in the Nile and she sees the
basket and she calls on one of her assistants to go and get the basket. And they open up
the basket and Moses is crying. He’s three months old. He wants to be held. He’s
crying. The rest of his people are crying too. They’re crying out to God because they are
being whipped and abused by the Egyptians in a great trial of slavery. All of Israel is
crying and God hears them and he will answer them and he will use Moses – this crying
baby – to answer their cries. In his time. First, Moses has to grow up.
In order to grow up Moses has to eat. Mirium, Moses’ sister happens to be there,
by the providence of God and perhaps by a conniving plan on the part of Moses’ mother.
She says, “Hey, shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women to nurse this Hebrew
child?” “Yeah, why don’t you go do that.” “Okay.” And so Mirium goes and gets her
mother, who is the baby’s mother and brings her to Pharaoh’s daughter and now
Pharaoh’s daughter will pay Moses’ mother to nurse her own baby. Ha!
Moses grows up and Pharaoh’s daughter adopts him full-time. He becomes a
prince in Egypt. An abandoned Hebrew baby becomes a prince in Egypt. It’s all God’s
plan. God will use the resources of the Egyptians to grow and educate Moses and then he
will turn Moses against them. God will use anyone to accomplish his plans. He uses the
Assyrians and Babylonians in the Old Testament. He uses the Ninivites in the day of
Jonah. He uses Caesar. He uses a Pharisaic anti-Christian named Paul. God will use
anybody to discipline his people. He will use anybody to bless his people. He will adopt
anybody into his family to lead his people. He’s very creative. He will use Pharaoh’s
hardness of heart for his own glory as he leads his people across the Red Sea. He’ll use
anyone to accomplish his purposes and bring glory to his name.
His plan in this story is to use a Hebrew prince of Egypt named Moses. Now
Moses needs a life-altering event to separate him from Egypt because Egyptian training
alone will not prepare Moses for his calling. Moses needs to go out in the desert with
God for 40 years. Moses is 40 years in Egypt; then 40 years in the desert – all
preparation for 40 years leading Israel. He needs a life altering event to move him from
Egypt to the desert where he’ll get the second half of his training. The event occurs one
day when Moses sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew. Moses has enough sense of his
own ethnicity and a great enough sense of justice to become angry. His anger boils over
into murder. And now Moses is a marked man because someone saw it happen and so he
goes on the run. God did not order Moses to kill that Egyptian. It was murder. But God
uses even our failings, even our sin, to accomplish his plan. He’s ingenious that way.
You mess up in a big way and God uses the results of the mess to get you on the right
track and bring you to your calling. It’s the grace and providence of God. Chuck Colson
worked for Richard Nixon. He was involved in Watergate. He went to jail for what he
did in the Watergate scandal. On his way to prison he saw that his folly was rooted in sin
and he read C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity and he became born again and now he has a
massive prison ministry to inmates around the world. God uses even our folly, even our
sin, to accomplish his purposes. It’s the grace and providence of God.
Moses flees to Midian which is somewhere East of the Red Sea. He’s a fugitive.
He marries a woman named Zipporah. He has a son. He becomes a shepherd. God
matures him in the wilderness for 40 years. Meanwhile, what is happening? Pharaoh dies
and there’s a new slave-driving Pharaoh in power. What else is happening back in
Egypt? Verse 23 “The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out and their cry for
help because of their slavery went up to God.” The people who were crying out to God
when baby Moses was crying in the basket are still crying 80 years later. Have you ever
cried out to God for a long time and wondered, “When in the world is he going to do
something?” What does verse 24 say? “God heard their groaning and he remembered his
covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. So God looked on the Israelites and
was concerned about them.”
I love that second to last sentence: “God heard their groaning and he remembered
his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob.” The grace in this text is that
God remembers his people and remembers what he has promised to his people. God
promised Abraham that he would make a great nation through him and bless the whole
world through him – Genesis 12. The nation is in Egypt in slavery. At this point they are
not great and the world is not being blessed through them. They will not be great until
they get out of slavery and get to know God in the wilderness and get to the Promised
Land where they can be at the center of the world and influence the world. They will not
really bless the world until Jesus is born into their nation and proclaims his kingdom and
dies on the cross for sinners and rises from the dead to defeat death and Satan and this
news is then sent out to the nations by the early missionaries. Then they’ll be blessing
the world. God has this all in mind. God remembers what he promised Abraham. He
needs to make his people great and bless the world through them. He needs to bring his
people into the Promised Land. He needs to send Jesus Christ among his people so Jesus
Christ will bless the world.
God remembered his covenant with Abraham. Good thing too because if he
forgot his covenant with Abraham then you and I would not be here today worshipping
because there would be no Israel and no Jesus and no gospel and no salvation and we
would still be in slavery to our sins.
My friends, God’s story of redemption is one big story spread over hundreds and
hundreds of years. Abraham is a part of the story. Moses is a part of the story. Israel is a
part of the story. Jesus and his cross is the center of the story. Paul and Peter are a part
of the story. St. Augustine is a part of the story. John Calvin and Martin Luther are a
part of the story. Billy Graham and Mother Teresa are a part of the story. You and I are
a part of the story. And God has remembered his people and his covenant promises to his
people every step of the way. You and I can look back and see this faithfulness of God
over all these centuries and take comfort in this consistent faithfulness.
The challenge is the time in the desert. Moses is in the desert for 40 years being
prepared by God for his mission. I said last week that some individual Israelites only
knew slavery and genocide. They never got to the Red Sea or the Promised Land. The
challenge is the desert and the trial. You need to know deep in your heart that God’s
story is really, really big and you are a part of this big, big story. You need to know deep
in your heart that God himself is really, really big – big enough to love you in your sins
and bring you into his story and his people through the cross of Christ. When we really
see the bigness of God and the grandness of his story in redemption history we are
overwhelmed by his awesomeness and we can persevere through anything. Because then
we trust him!
My friends, you and I are the New Testament Israelites. We are in covenant with
God. He is our awesome God and we are his loved people. He hears our praises and he
hears our cries. He is concerned about us and he is faithful to us. May you be
impressed. May you be filled with awe and then with faith. Amen.