Exodus 33:11 says “So the Lord spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend…”, and this is my desire and prayer for this new year of 2021. I desire to speak with the Lord face to face, and to grow in my intimacy with Him each and every day. The Lord has done so many great things in this past year despite the trials and tribulations that were in 2020. He has shown me His faithfulness, and He has guided me in faithfulness step by step. My children and wife have shown me so many important lessons and it is my prayer that I would remember those lessons as I think back to those times when I first learned them. I don’t want to be a stiff-necked person.
Even in the time of Moses of which this passage was written God’s intention was to grow in relationship with His people. The same holds true today. God spoke to Moses and gave him a goal, a new years goal if we want to call it that. Moses was to bring the people out of Egypt. It was God that said He would bring them into the promised land, not Moses (though He did not explicitly say that so far as I can see). But Moses got it in his head that he was supposed to do this and he wanted to know how to do this. Is it any wonder that he ended up wandering around in the desert for 40 years? His perspective was incorrect, and it cost him his life in the end, though it was a full life by all standards. The rest of verse 11 states that Joshua did not depart from the tabernacle. To me this seems obvious that Joshua was the one that would end up bringing the children of Israel into the promised land, however, I am reading this thousands of years later with the full story in my hands. It might not have seemed that obvious to Moses at the time. This was not the first time that Moses had gotten his perspective askew with what God was calling him to do.
God has been calling me to take care of my wife and my family before I consider anything or anyone else. I have seen entirely too many examples of pastors and leaders in the church which have families that have been hurt badly because of misinterpreted priorities of work and family. To me, I am convinced that my family needs to come first and God has continually shown me that over these last several years. The reason I know He has called me to do this comes not only from His word, but also from life and familial circumstances. When I have misplaced my priorities my family suffers, and when I am putting my family first I can see the fruit of a correct set of priorities. I believe Moses too saw this in his life yet he chose to “do ministry” instead of doing what God called him to do in the first place. The example in scripture comes to us in chapter 4 of Exodus, Moses was about to head out to Egypt after having the encounter with God at the burning bush.
The first thing I notice about the verses in chapter 4 are that God never said when he needed to go, so if Moses needed to take care of his family first I’m sure God would have honored that just as his wife’s father honored his request to leave in verse 18. The children of Israel had been in captivity for over 80 years (430 if you count when Abraham left Haran (Genesis 12:1-4), so what was an extra year or so in the whole scheme of time? But something must have been askew here because God states that He met Moses on the way back to the camp and sought to kill him! Why? God had just revealed what Moses was to do in Egypt and yet God is seeking to kill him? Perhaps Moses was doing something (or not doing something he should be) that was deserving of death? Now I’m not sure of the penalty for not circumcising your children in the Jewish culture but I doubt it was death.
The second thing I see in these next verses (25-26) is that God “let him go”, or in other words ‘God didn’t kill him’ because Moses was about to be taught another very important lesson, this one through his wife. Let me also pause here for a second just to say that God uses our spouses and children to teach us important lessons. How much better it is to learn those lessons from our human family than it would be to be judged by God? Apparently Moses had failed to circumcise his son so his wife did it instead and then yelled at Moses saying that he was a husband of blood to her after throwing the foreskin at his feet! I’m not entirely sure of the context of that phrase but regardless it doesn’t seem like a compliment. It was perhaps at this point that Moses’s wife and sons left him and returned home to her father Jethro. There is no more mention of Zipporah until Exodus 18 when it mentions that Jethro brought her back to Moses after he (Moses) had sent her back.
Both of these examples show me that Moses didn’t fully understand and obey what God was calling him to do. I won’t even mention here about the many excuses Moses made during the burning bush incident, that demonstrate Moses wasn’t really ready for the job God had for him to do, or at least it’s accurate to say if he was ready he didn’t make the proper preparations with his family prior to announcing he was going to Egypt to rescue the nation of Israel. Kind of a big thing to not talk about or prepare your wife for right? Let me interject my own prayer in here because this is after all my interpretation of these scriptures. Lord I pray You would show me grace and the path of my life and that I would obey you immediately. But God is so good isn’t He?! Because my prayer is Moses’s prayer much later in chapter 33 AFTER he had already brought the children of Israel up out of Egypt. I wonder what the struggles would have been like if Moses had his wife and family on board with him during the entire time in Egypt? Would there have been a need for all those plagues or would Moses simply have been able to throw down the staff and then Pharaoh would have believed? Likely not, but perhaps Moses could have simply mentioned that the Lord was going to kill his firstborn son like He said in chapter 4 and Pharoh would have let him go. Who knows? The text in the earlier part of chapter 4 points to Moses having to perform a couple of God’s miracles including turning the river water into blood, so it is likely that it would have taken at least a couple of those “threats” in order for the Pharaoh to let the children of Israel leave. The text doesn’t even say that God would kill his firstborn son, it just says that “if [he] refused to let him go, indeed I [God] will kill your son, your firstborn”, so it could have been similar to other times in scripture where God relents from doing harm if we obey Him.
I believe Moses tried to do Gods work for Him. The rock of Meribah is the premier example of this because it was at this place where God tells Moses the consequence for disobeying Him. Moses was supposed to speak to the rock and water would come out, but he struck the rock twice instead. He tried to do the work for God and became frustrated. This was disobedience, and lack of patience on his part, and it came with a big consequence.
Consequences can be hard to accept sometimes especially the ones that come about because of our own stubborn heart and ungodly actions. Moses certainly experienced that by not getting to go into the promised land. However, did God really ever say that Moses would go into the promised land? I noticed in chapter 33 verse 12 that Moses said to the Lord “See, You say to me, ‘Bring up this people’. But You have not let me know whom You will send with me. Yet You have said, ‘I know you by name, and you have also found grace in My sight.'” This is a great insight into the relationship Moses and God had. Moses talked with God face to face and asked very specific things to God. But can you sense it still in this verse that Moses is asking something from God because he assumed something that God was going to do? He probably assumed that he (Moses) would go into the promised land, and he was asking God who else would help him do it without ever noticing who was right under his very eyes being prepared for this very job. It was Joshua. Don’t you think that Moses’s wife would have noticed something like that and pointed it out to him? I think so. Now God had still been graceful to Moses throughout this time. Not only had God spared his life (all the way back in chapter 4), but He had also brought up a leader to finish the job that Moses would not finish. Lastly, God would also show Moses the promised land, He just wouldn’t let him enter it. That is grace to me, but it is also ‘consequences’.
It’s interesting to think about what our life would have been like had we followed what God was telling us to do and done it with the right priorities in step. God promises us so many things in this life but how many of those promises do we rest in on a daily basis? Do we ask God the types of things that Moses asked God? We should. Even if we are out of step with God’s priorities for our life we can still be comforted and guided by God. It is His almighty hand that is controlling everything in this world, and we are never too far out of reach from God’s helping hand.
God can speak to us just as He did to Moses. Even though Moses didn’t know all the answers, and we too don’t know all the answers. We thought we might have been “seeing clearly” going into 2020 and bought into a false sense of security. However, that was dashed to pieces as the year progressed wasn’t it? Now here we are in 2021 and we have this day to make a new decision to follow God in all He is calling us to do. Let us question God, and ask for His priorities to become our priorities, His path to become our path, and let Him show us through His word what we are to do. We can rest in His power, and in His grace, because He said “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” For we must always remember that God’s Presence (His Holy Spirit working in our life) will go with us, and He will give us rest. (Exodus 33:14).
Happy New Year everyone. May you trust God this year, seek His Presence, and rest in His goodness and grace.
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