Lessons from Moses' Meeting with God

(Read Exodus 3:1-6)

The time: Moses is already 80 years old. He has every good reason to suppose that the story of his life is pretty much written and, indeed, he is now living out its epilogue, which goes: "And Moses lived out his remaining days as a shepherd in the family of a Midianite priest. The End."

And back in Egypt, Pharaoh sits at peace, secure in his power and glory, fully supposing the whole world with all its creatures belong to him and the gods who stand behind him. He sees no threat coming on any horizon.

Neither Pharaoh nor Moses imagines how the whole world is about to be turned upside down, for them and for their nations. And neither of them imagines the roles to be played in all this by their personal qualities, whether humility, pride, obstinacy or meekness, in the rise and fall of their people.

The lesson for us: God chooses times and circumstances that seem unremarkable to us to do astounding things. God displays His might and will just when we are expecting nothing, and who we are, what sort of children we are of His, will play a key role in the materialization of His will. This lesson applies even to the final, ultimate consummation of things in this world, as the New Testament repeatedly exhorts us, in a manner of speaking, to have our character in order, in top form, ready for Christ's appearing whenever it might come. (Read 1 Thess. 5:2; Matthew 24:43; Mark 13:33) The moment God breaks into the scene, it's too late to start playing catch-up; when He acts, all the choices have already been made.

Without warning the Voice resounds in the desert, "Moses! Moses!", and instantly Moses' entire accustomed order of things disappears.  What looked like life's epilogue has suddenly turned into its whole purpose and essence; a series of events is being launched that will change the entire world, and "this old man", Moses, finds himself in the very middle of it all.

We need to grasp this so we can better understand the ensuing conversation between Moses and God, to better understand just how astounded and stupefied Moses was by all this. In terms that are not very King-James-ish, we might well say Moses was flabbergasted! This is the state he's in when he desperately begs God not to send him to Pharaoh. I don't think any of us is any different from Moses; we'd have all responded in shock and confusion at the appearing of this majesty and glory and the summons to turn our whole world upside-down on the spot. 

(Read Exodus 3:5) This is a meeting with holiness. What's very interesting is that this is the first place in the whole Bible where the word "holy" appears. That's hard to believe, isn't it! It seems incredible that, in everything the Bible recounts before this—when Man defied God's holiness in the Garden; when a holy God destroyed a sinful world in the Flood; when God made a holy covenant with Abraham, promising to make him the father of a great nation, yes, a holy nation in a holy land—that in all of that the word "holy" never actually came up! But it comes up here: "the place where you are standing is holy."

This first appearance of the word "holy" tells us a lot. The simple fact that the word didn't show up earlier reminds us that God doesn't immediately reveal literally everything to Man about His divine being and ways. That's for two reasons: first of all, Man can't possibly comprehend, absorb everything at once—he's finite, limited; in the second place, logic dictates that the eternal God cannot reveal, to the uttermost, to the nth degree, the depths of his infinite Being at all, never mind to a finite creature like man. How can what's endless be completely revealed? It takes an eternity to reveal the eternal! And in this vein we Christians must admit, must embrace, the truth and reality that, though we have come to "know" Jesus Christ, we are more unfamiliar with God than we are "familiar" with Him, since He is eternal and infinite. It is an inescapable truth that there is infinitely more in God we don't know about than we do know about.

The first appearance of this word "holy" serves, furthermore, as a hint and foretaste of what this dramatically new manifestation of God means after the "silent" passage of four centuries. God is in a new way revealing Himself and His purposes on the world stage. He is about to do the unprecedented. Here He is summoning, to minister to His holy nation, a chief, a teacher, an intercessor/priest, a prophet, a lawgiver. Take note: this has never happened before in the history of God's dealings with Man, not even in the history of God's dealings with the family of Abraham, before this moment. Before this moment, the people of Israel have been a family, with patriarchs. Now, here, in the desert, with Moses and the burning bush and the voice of God and the declaration of a new order, the people will be a nation, in every sense of the word—with rulers and laws and, yes, a country of their own. God is summoning Moses to lead His people into a holy land, where the Israelites won't be merely Jacob's family anymore but a genuine state—yes, a kingdom.

This is a turning point—a turning point of dimensions and depths we can barely absorb—in the history of the "people of God" and everything that "people of God" means. It is a moment when all things become new. And it all begins in an encounter with holiness, the holiness that defines everything.

But even when God reveals Himself and His purpose in stunningly new ways and dimensions, He always reveals that He is the very same God, not a different or new one: (read verse 6). He is the very same God Who spoke, long ago, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He knew then, even if the patriarchs didn't, that His will and ways then would, dear Moses, lead to this meeting with you, now. God is one, His whole purpose is one and its ultimate fulfillment will be the consummation of all its meaning and substance in the one Person of Jesus Christ!

As we read further, we notice an interesting series of verbs (read verses 7-9). "I have seen, I have heard, I know, I am going...." This is the God of Man, the Creator of Man, who condescends to identify with Man and relate   to him "humanly", in human terms comprehensible to His creation. "I have seen… I have heard…": such terms don't limit God, on the contrary they demonstrate the eternal God's right and freedom to relate to Man, created in His image, in whatever way He wishes. To deny that God may do this, even to assert that God cannot possibly experience "human" feelings and emotions—that actually is to limit God. It is God's love to know us and suffer our sufferings, and such love was consummated in the Incarnation of Christ, who endured all human sufferings and bore our sins to the cross.

And now I want to look at Moses' four objections to the summons of God. Moses takes four stabs at dissuading God Almighty from sending him on this outlandish quest.

First Moses offers what I call the Political Objection (read verse 11). In other words, Who am I, Lord? I'm a nobody in the world. I have no status, no title, no geopolitical weight. Pharaoh doesn't have the least reason even to grant me an audience, much less take anything I have to say seriously!

To Moses’ “Who am I?”, God replies, “I will be with you.” End of argument. You will be the one who God is with. What other status would give you more authority? And when you and I and the nation of Israel meet again here, on this mountain, you will look back on your question “Who am I?” and realize how foolish it was.

Moses, however, has more objections to try out before caving to the divine mandate! So next he tries what I call the Social Objection (read 4:1): Maybe the people won’t like me, won’t want to listen to me, won’t believe me! Now Moses isn’t worrying about Pharaoh; he’s worrying about his own people.

God settles this objection in a no-nonsense way. See that staff in your hand, Moses? Oops, now it’s a snake, how about that? And, oops, now it’s a staff again, how about that? And look at your hand…covered with a leprous disease! Look at it again…healthy as a newborn’s! And if that isn’t enough, Moses, just wait till they see the power I will reveal over the forces of Nature. They will believe, you, Moses, because they will have to believe Me.

So the Political and Social Objections have flopped completely, but Moses is stubborn. He’s going to reach into his bag of objections to see whether one or two others might not work better. The next one he whips out is the Handicap Objection (read verse 10). Lord, I have a handicap—I can’t do public speaking! I freeze up! I get stage fright! I’m a total dud on the dais! I get all tongue-tied. You definitely don’t want a disastrous orator like me to be your spokesman. It’s a terrible fit.

In His mercy, God continues to dispense with Moses’ objections one by one, rather than dismissing Moses out of sheer impatience. His answer to the Handicap Objection (verses 11-12): I am the Maker of everything. You can’t possibly have a weakness, a handicap, a failing, an imperfection, an anything that I don’t know about and can’t use exactly as I see fit. Did Moses imagine that God was unfamiliar with Moses’ “speaking career” prior to this encounter? Again in His mercy, God assures Moses, “I’ll help you; it will all be okay.” When God says “I’ll help you”, that pretty destroys the Handicap Objection, doesn’t it.

And, finally, the final objection. There is still one left in the bag. I call this the Will Objection, that is, the objection based on will. (Read verse 13).

Well! Now that’s honest! Maybe we could call this “Will Objection” the “Won’t Objection”, as in “I won’t do it”! Or at least the “I Don’t Wanna Objection”. When he has run out of every other plausible argument and good reason why God really should pass him up and find a better candidate, Moses finally admits the core issue: he just doesn’t want to do it. “Please find somebody else, not me!”

Indeed, had Moses known from the outset that this was something he wanted, or at least was willing, to do, then there never would have been a Political Objection or a Social Objection or a Handicap Objection. He would simply have said, “Yes. I’ll do this.” Because it always comes down to a matter of the will. Of willingness to yield to God.

But before we think of severely judging Moses in our hearts, let’s remember that Moses went out that fine morning to pasture his flock without the least suspicion that, this very day, Almighty God would appear to him with a summons to be Israel’s Deliverer from the power of Egypt. I suppose I’d have responded in bewilderment and confusion as well!

God demonstrates mercy and understanding in His love. For each problem Moses conjures up in his mind, God patiently supplies the perfect solution. And He does so beyond anything Moses could have anticipated. Even before Moses thought of telling God he couldn’t handle public speaking, God had already dispatched Aaron in Moses’ direction, returning Moses’ brother to him, and not only a brother but the spokesman Moses needed for the job ahead. (Read verses 14-17). It reminds us of Ephesians 3:20, where Paul speaks of God as the one who “is able to do far beyond all that we ask or think.”  

But take note! This same loving, generous, magnanimous God suddenly appears strange, dangerous, frightfully unfamiliar and, certainly, less than “tame” only a very short while afterwards, as we read in 4:25, 26 (read).

And the unavoidable question is why. And, how? Why would God act this way, and how can it even make sense in light of God’s explicitly revealed calling and purpose for Moses?

Remember what it says in 4:14: “The the LORD’s anger burned against Moses.” Yes, providing Aaron was generous, compassionate, merciful and beyond anything Moses could have imagined. But—the Lord’s anger “burned” against Moses.  Why? Well, it seems pretty obvious. All these handy objections Moses was pulling out of Objection Bag represented, at root, a rejection of faith, a refusal to trust, an implicit charge that God was less than God and somehow making a terrible mistake.

I don’t think that God Almighty was “miffed” the petty way you or I might get miffed. I don’t even think He was outraged or indignant the way you or I might be…usually out of a sense of insecurity and insult to our ego. But—the Lord’s anger—the fire of His holiness as it confronts sin—burned, at that moment, in response to the sacrilege of Moses’ disbelief and testing of God.

So there is a precedent, a theological precedent, to the strange, confusing encounter on the way to Egypt, when the Lord Himself wants to kill Moses.

Moses had failed to fulfill the conditions of the Abrahamic covenant. A slight, unimportant detail? Obviously not! Should God have talked with Moses about it first…the way He did through the burning bush…rather than pounce without warning? Well, in the first place, Moses’ wife knew perfectly well what the problem was; therefore, Moses must have known as well. And in the second place, when God spoke with Moses on the mountain, Moses presented God with a laundry list of objections.

There are moments when the children of God need a fresh, stark reminder that God is not, in the words of C.S. Lewis, “a tame lion”. He is, the writer of the epistle the Hebrews says, “a consuming fire”. A fire of absolute purity and holiness. Could God have killed Moses that day on the road to Egypt but still have fulfilled His purpose some other way?

Do we even need to ask?

Yes, God loves, but that doesn’t make Him a “tame lion” that we play with. Yes, God loves, but God’s love isn’t what might naively and simplistically sum up as a “mutually satisfactory arrangement”, acceptable to us as long as we find it comfortable and unthreatening. God’s love is the manifestation of His unfathomable holiness, and you don’t come to a “mutually satisfactory arrangement” with such holiness, but only to a surrender and self-abandonment that magnifies and glorifies God and transforms, dare I say transfigures, our own lives. We come in the self-abandonment and surrender that embraces whatever He wills to do with us.

God says, “I AM, and the place where you are standing is holy.”

Our only possible human response, in order to be truly human and truly His, is to surrender, adore, and love Him.