Why does God do this?  According to some scholars, it was to demonstrate God’s power not simply over Pharaoh, but over the sea.  To the people of the Bible, the sea represents “chaos” – and this part of the story emphasizes that God is bringing order to a world in chaos.  It’s as if – before taking the people into the wilderness, where he will deliver the law to them – God takes one more opportunity to establish who he is to the people of Israel (and ultimately the world).  Here’s what Wesley has to say:

[O]ne stage or two would have brought them to Horeb, the place appointed for their serving God, but instead of going forward, they are ordered to turn short off, on the righthand from Canaan, and to march towards the Red sea. When they were at Etham, there was no sea in their way to obstruct their passage; but God himself orders them into straits, which might give them an assurance, that when his purposes were served, he would bring them out of those straits.— from Wesley’s Commentary

What does Wesley mean by the phrase “that when his purposes were served“?  This brings up questions that we’ve asked before.  Here are the verses from the fourteenth chapter of Exodus:

1 Then the Lord said to Moses:
2 Tell the Israelites to turn back and camp in front of Pi-hahiroth, between Migdol and the sea, in front of Baal-zephon; you shall camp opposite it, by the sea.
3 Pharaoh will say of the Israelites, “They are wandering aimlessly in the land; the wilderness has closed in on them.”
4 I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and he will pursue them, so that I will gain glory for myself over Pharaoh and all his army; and the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord. And they did so.
5 When the king of Egypt was told that the people had fled, the minds of Pharaoh and his officials were changed toward the people, and they said, “What have we done, letting Israel leave our service?”
6 So he had his chariot made ready, and took his army with him;
7 he took six hundred picked chariots and all the other chariots of Egypt with officers over all of them.
8 The Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh king of Egypt and he pursued the Israelites, who were going out boldly.
9 The Egyptians pursued them, all Pharaoh’s horses and chariots, his chariot drivers and his army; they overtook them camped by the sea, by Pi-hahiroth, in front of Baal-zephon.  Ex 14:1-9 (NRSV)

What are your thoughts about today’s lesson scripture?

25 When you have had children and children’s children, and become complacent in the land, if you act corruptly by making an idol in the form of anything, thus doing what is evil in the sight of the Lord your God, and provoking him to anger,
26 I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that you will soon utterly perish from the land that you are crossing the Jordan to occupy; you will not live long on it, but will be utterly destroyed.
27 The Lord will scatter you among the peoples; only a few of you will be left among the nations where the Lord will lead you.
28 There you will serve other gods made by human hands, objects of wood and stone that neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell.
29 From there you will seek the Lord your God, and you will find him if you search after him with all your heart and soul.
30 In your distress, when all these things have happened to you in time to come, you will return to the Lord your God and heed him.
31 Because the Lord your God is a merciful God, he will neither abandon you nor destroy you; he will not forget the covenant with your ancestors that he swore to them. Deut 4:25-31 (NRSV)

How do these verses speak to you?

• About Moses?
• About the people of Israel about to cross the Jordan?
• About the people of Israel from that point until the destruction of the First Temple?
• About the people of Israel after the destruction of the Second Temple?
• About how these verses were understood by the first Christians?
• About how these verses speak to us today?

Suppose you were called to be a prophet?  Suppose God revealed his eternal plan for creation to you?  Do you think you’d be able to put into words the vision of eternity revealed to you?  Think about Moses and the prophets who followed him and imagine yourself to be in their place:  trying to explain to a world of limited understanding what God intends.  This is prophecy that is more than a foretelling of future events, it is an explanation of God’s plan to save the world.

1 Ascribe to the Lord, O heavenly beings, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.
2 Ascribe to the Lord the glory of his name; worship the Lord in holy splendor.
3 The voice of the Lord is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, the Lord, over mighty waters.
4 The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is full of majesty.
5 The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars; the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon.
6 He makes Lebanon skip like a calf, and Sirion like a young wild ox.
7 The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire.
8 The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness; the Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.
9 The voice of the Lord causes the oaks to whirl, and strips the forest bare; and in his temple all say, “Glory!”
10 The Lord sits enthroned over the flood; the Lord sits enthroned as king forever.
11 May the Lord give strength to his people! May the Lord bless his people with peace!  Psalms 29:1-11 (NRSV)

 Verse 5 - the LORD breaks the cedars - is the one that put in me in mind of Isaiah 41:14.  Here’s the commentary for that verse from Clarke:

Fear not, thou worm Jacob—In the rabbinical commentary on the five books of Moses, Yelamedenu, it is asked, Why are the Israelites called a worm? To signify, that as the worm does not smite, that is, gnaw the cedars, but with its mouth, which is very tender, yet it nevertheless destroys the hard wood; so all the strength of the Israelites is in prayer, by which they smite the wicked of this world, though strong like the cedars, to which they are compared, Ezekiel 31:3.—Adam Clarke’s Commentary

And so, the Word of God prevails against the world as the sea prevails against the headlands. It’s hard to think in terms of eternity, the best we seem capable of is to think in terms of ages. But we must strive to have in us the mind of Christ – for therein is the victory.

8 But you, Israel, my servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen, the offspring of Abraham, my friend;
9 you whom I took from the ends of the earth, and called from its farthest corners, saying to you, “You are my servant, I have chosen you and not cast you off”;
10 do not fear, for I am with you, do not be afraid, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my victorious right hand.
11 Yes, all who are incensed against you shall be ashamed and disgraced; those who strive against you shall be as nothing and shall perish.
12 You shall seek those who contend with you, but you shall not find them; those who war against you shall be as nothing at all.
13 For I, the Lord your God, hold your right hand; it is I who say to you, “Do not fear, I will help you.”  Isaiah 41:8-13 (NRSV)

Through Isaiah, God makes clear that Israel is to save the world through servant-hood.  We understand that Christ fulfills Isaiah’s prophecy, but the prophecy has its roots in God’s call to Abraham and (as we are studying this quarter) Moses.  The people of Israel understood this call (understandably – they were human) to involve nationhood, worldly dominion.  After all, the exodus experience taught them nothing if not that the power of God was unlimited.  For the next several hundred years the people of Israel would struggle with God’s relationship with the nation, just as we struggle today.  We wonder why our loyalty and devotion are not rewarded in the way we want to be rewarded – without regard to whether it is the way God wants to reward us.

Too often we confuse our agenda with God’s agenda.  At the time of the exodus, God’s agenda was to free Israel from bondage.  To a degree, this was Israel’s agenda as well (although, as would soon be seen, the people quickly longed for the comfort of Eygpt’s civilization over the rough freedom of the desert).  But go back to the reason Moses was to give Pharaoh for letting the people go: it was to worship God!

When we answer God’s call, we will be empowered – so long as we are about God’s business.  It’s when we confuse God’s business with our own agenda that trouble can start.

1 Then Moses answered, “But suppose they do not believe me or listen to me, but say, ‘The Lord did not appear to you.’”
2 The Lord said to him, “What is that in your hand?” He said, “A staff.”
3 And he said, “Throw it on the ground.” So he threw the staff on the ground, and it became a snake; and Moses drew back from it.
4 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Reach out your hand, and seize it by the tail”—so he reached out his hand and grasped it, and it became a staff in his hand—
5 ”so that they may believe that the Lord, the God of their ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has appeared to you.”
6 Again, the Lord said to him, “Put your hand inside your cloak.” He put his hand into his cloak; and when he took it out, his hand was leprous, as white as snow.
7 Then God said, “Put your hand back into your cloak”—so he put his hand back into his cloak, and when he took it out, it was restored like the rest of his body—
8 ”If they will not believe you or heed the first sign, they may believe the second sign.
9 If they will not believe even these two signs or heed you, you shall take some water from the Nile and pour it on the dry ground; and the water that you shall take from the Nile will become blood on the dry ground.”  Ex 4:1-9 (NRSV)

If you were in Moses’ place, would you have asked for visible evidence of God’s power?  Do we sometimes do so now?  If some expert questions the inerrancy of scripture, or a particular translation of scripture, then do we abandon our faith in God?  If archaeological evidence appears to contradict the chronology of biblical history, do we reject God’s call?  If scholars question whether Paul did or did not write a particular epistle, is our understanding of God shattered?  If Christians – in or out of the pulpit – make a hash of their lives or speak in spiteful or even hateful terms, do we turn our backs on the church?  I don’t doubt that we all know some people who have answered “yes” to some or all of these questions.

Meaning no disrespect to Moses, I don’t think that God owes us proof.  Of course, you could argue that Moses wasn’t asking God to prove himself to Moses – he was asking God to supply him with bona fides of Moses’s authority to speak on behalf of the LORD.  Well, all I can say is that I’m glad that Augustine, Aquinas, Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther, Sir Thomas More, John and Charles Wesley and Mother Teresa weren’t so insistent on proofs before they answered God’s call.  Too often we put God to the test instead subjecting ourselves to scrutiny.  We get back to the question of “God’s Problem”, of the question of evil and God’s justice.  We’re never going to answer these questions in one post, but I do think there’s a relationship between our human desire for proof of God and our desire for an answer to the question of evil existing in a world created by an all-powerful, wholly beneficent God.

Part of that answer (not to over-simplify) is that we’re turning the cosmos on it’s head:  we should be asking ourselves for proof of our love, our mercy, our goodness instead of calling our Creator to account.  Another part of the the answer is to realize we cannot appreciate perfection until we have experienced its lack (again, I’m trying to keep from over-simplifying while keeping this within the bounds of a blog-post).

I had meant to ask for comments on the choices of the wonders that God chose to work at this juncture (and gave some thought to asking for a discussion of the difference between turning water into blood as opposed to wine as it might relate to the difference in the Old and New Testaments).  But . . . we’ll save those for another day or another post (well – unless you can’t resist commenting on them).

In the meantime, I’ll leave us with our Master’s comment when he confronted my namesake – “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe”.

13 But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”
14 God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’”
15 God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations.
16 Go and assemble the elders of Israel, and say to them, ‘The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, has appeared to me, saying: I have given heed to you and to what has been done to you in Egypt.
17 I declare that I will bring you up out of the misery of Egypt, to the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, a land flowing with milk and honey.’
18 They will listen to your voice; and you and the elders of Israel shall go to the king of Egypt and say to him, ‘The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us; let us now go a three days’ journey into the wilderness, so that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God.’  Ex 3:13-18 (NRSV)

Moses knew that he was speaking to the God of his ancestors, but he wanted to be able to give a name to that God when he returned to speak to the Elders of Israel.  Knowing a person’s name was a form of power, it would be a sign that Moses really knew what he was talking about and on whose behalf he was going to speak.

God, however, would have none of it.  His answer “I am” has been the subject of treatises.  For today’s post, let’s just note that God is beyond a name.  Bear in mind that the people of Israel lived in a polytheistic world.  But God, the God of their ancestors was soon to tell them that he was the only God.  He wasn’t to be named like the Eygptian god “Ra”.  God was before creation – outside of creation – for he was the Creator (cf. John 8:58).  God then reiterates what he has already said, that he is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  Here also is the term LORD, which translates the Hebrew YHWH, which is connected with the Hebrew word “hayah“, “to be”  – as in “He is who He is”.

The paradox is that God, the creator who resides outside and beyond time and his creation – who is beyond naming - is knowable on a personal level.

We’ve been focusing on Moses all week – from his birth, to his identification with “his people”, to his sojourn as a “stranger in a strange land”, to his place in Israel’s history and understanding of itself, his role as leader/prophet/redeemer/law-giver, and finally to his death.  During the next few weeks we’ll explore Moses and the people of Israel in greater depth, particularly in the context of God’s call.

In the lesson scripture for today, we revisit God’s call to Moses’s that was recounted in Stephen’s speech in our scripture for this past Thursday.  Today, however, we include Moses’ response to that call:

1 Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God.
2 There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed.
3 Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.”
4 When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.”
5 Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”
6 He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
7 Then the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings,
8 and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.
9 The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them.
10 So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”
11 But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”
12 He said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.” Ex 3:1-12 (NRSV)

Moses’s reaction was to hesitate, to shy away from the task.  That’s because he made the all too human mistake of thinking that he would be the one doing the work.  God’s answer - ”I will be with you” – is harder to accept sometimes than God’s call.  Even when we answer God’s call, we sometimes forget who it is that is doing the sending and we try (often with less than stellar results) to do the work on our own.  We must remember that all God requires of us in his infinite mercy and grace, is that we have faith when we turn to him and allow the work to be done through us, not by us. 

Saint Stephen preaching, Spanisch breviary 14th century

Today’s lesson scripture continues Stephen’s speech to the council of elders in Jerusalem, answering the charge of blaspheming Moses.  His answer is to argue that Israel, God’s chosen people, have both rejected God’s prophets (and therefore God) and have tried to limit God (by insisting that the center of worship must be the Temple).  Central to his argument is that their ancestors rejected Moses.

Yesterday, Stephen recounted how Moses was misunderstood when he first attempted to intervene on behalf of “his people”.  As a consequence, Moses fled in exile to Midian.  In today’s lesson scripture, Stephen says that this exile lasted forty years before Moses was called again by God to intervene on behalf of Israel.  Forty years, as we’ve discussed before, is a figure often used to denote a generation – a long time.  Just as Israel was to wander in the wilderness for forty years for turning from God after delivery of the law, Stephen makes the point here that Israel waited forty years after initially rejecting Moses.

Many commentators have posited that Stephen’s speech in Acts is the cornerstone for understanding the whole book - as well as the Gospel of Luke – that Israel has repeatedly failed to understand God’s redeeming power, his intent to honor covenant, his unconditional, steadfast love, and has therefore rejected God’s redeeming agents, culminating in the rejection of Christ.  Yet, despite these rejections, God’s plan of redemption and salvation cannot ultimately be frustrated and Christ is victorious.

Here’s today’s scripture:

30 ”Now when forty years had passed, an angel appeared to him in the wilderness of Mount Sinai, in a flame of fire in a bush.
31 When Moses saw it he wondered at the sight; and as he drew near to look, the voice of the Lord came,
32 `I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob.’ And Moses trembled and did not dare to look.
33 And the Lord said to him, `Take off the shoes from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.
34 I have surely seen the ill-treatment of my people that are in Egypt and heard their groaning, and I have come down to deliver them. And now come, I will send you to Egypt.’  Acts 7:30-34 (RSV)

Stephen emphasizes that God is the same God who made covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and – emphasizing that Moses was standing on holy ground - Stephen again makes the point thaat God cannot be contained by Temple, but is everywhere.  This Sunday, the focus of our lesson will be on Moses and his response to God’s call (and how we can learn how we might respond to God’s calling in our own lives from the story of Moses ).

Today, the emphasis – taken from the same story of Moses and the burning bush – is on how God’s people often misunderstand and thereby reject God’s purpose by substituting our own agenda – based on our world-centered point of view – for God’s purpose.  How can we guard against this  inclination?

Anyway, I did hear some pretty good preaching, including one sermon by the president of the convention directed primarily toward the ministers. He said one thing he never likes to hear from his cohorts is: “I’m not that significant; I’m just a country preacher.”

“What do you mean by that?” he asked the congregation of ministers and laity (“messengers” in the Baptists vernacular).  “As a preacher, just who is it you think you’re representing? Are you saying God isn’t significant?”

As you might imagine, there was a good bit of squirming in the pews of the giant First Baptist Church of Jackson. Not everybody squirming was a preacher. Trust me.

That was an awfully good question for us all to ponder. As we proclaim the Good News — in our own individual styles — we need to remember who we’re representing, whose message it is we’re delivering, and that it is quite significant.

I’m fairly confident the Baptists don’t have to bear that burden alone.

— Danny

“We take care of our character; God takes care of our calendar.”

Just thought I’d pass that along.

I didn’t hear the whole interview, though. The Gaithers were on the other channel. In my next life …

 – Danny