Moses: Persevering Faith

Hebrews 11:23-28

Back in 1975, a researcher named Roger Hart conducted a study on where children felt safe to play. He focused on 86 children between the ages of three to twelve in a small town in Vermont. He would follow the kids throughout the day, documenting everywhere the children went by themselves. You could get away with that back then. Today … not so much. You’d be arrested for sure. Of course, he was just studying them. He then took that information and made physical maps that measured the distance each child was allowed to go by themselves and what the average was for every age group.

He discovered that these kids had remarkable freedom. Even four- or five-year-olds traveled unsupervised throughout their neighborhoods, and by the time they were 10, most of the kids had the run of the entire town. And the kids’ parents weren’t worried either.

Then several years ago (about 2014), he went back to the same town to document the children of the children that he had originally tracked in the ‘70s, and when he asked the new generation of kids to show him where they played alone, what he found floored him. Hart said, “They just didn’t have very far to take me, just walking around their property.” In other words, the huge circle of freedom on the maps had grown tiny.

He then said this, “There is no free range outdoors. Even when the kids are older, parents now say, ‘I need to know where you are at all times.’” But what’s odd about all of this, is that the town is not more dangerous than it was before. There’s literally no more crime today than there was 40 years ago.

So why has the invisible leash between parent and child tightened so much? Hart says it was absolutely clear from his interviews. The reason was fear. Here’s the conclusion to his new study: fear of the world outside our door narrows the circle of our lives.[i]

Fear has a huge impact on how we live our lives. We spend a lot more time than we realize avoiding things that make us afraid. If a snake crawled through the door of the church and into my office, I’d burn the building down and start over. Now, I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t be wary or careful. We should. And we should look out for one another too.

But fear can also leak into my relationship with Christ, and when it does, it can keep me from living the life God has created me to live. Fear and faith CAN coexist. We all FEEL afraid sometimes, even as we follow Christ. But we cannot allow fear to control us. We cannot allow fear to drive. When fear and faith collide, faith must win. Turn with me to Hebrews 11:23-28.

Moses is arguably the greatest person in the Bible outside of Christ himself. If there was a “Mount Rushmore” of Biblical people, it would almost certainly include Moses, along with Abraham, David, and St. Paul. Wait, what about Jesus? He’s the one its all about. Yes he is. He’s the mountain into which they are carved, for they all point us to him. Abraham, Moses, David, and St. Paul – they were all human. They were ordinary people. They made mistakes and failed miserably. Just like us, they all dealt with sin and doubt, and they faced challenges and difficulty.

Moses didn’t even speak well. He stuttered. His brother Aaron often spoke for him, especially early on. He allowed his emotions to get the better of him on more than one occasion, and his tendency to get angry eventually cost him the chance to lead Israel into the Promised Land himself. The people we consider the superheroes of the Bible were very broken, ordinary people who had an extraordinary faith in an even more extraordinary God.

But of those four who tend to rise to the top – Abraham, Moses, David, and St. Paul – Moses was the greatest. The Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, which is made up of five different sermons that Moses delivered to the people as they stood on the cusp of the Promised Land, right before he died, ends with these words, “And there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face, none like him for all the signs and the wonders that the Lord sent him to do in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land, and for all the mighty power and all the great deeds of terror that Moses did in the sight of all Israel” (Ex. 34:10-12).

Back in the book of Numbers, God himself said this about Moses, “Hear my words: If there is a prophet among you, I the Lord make myself known to him in a vision; I speak with him in a dream. Not so with my servant Moses. He is faithful in all my house. With him I speak mouth to mouth, clearly, and not in riddles, and he beholds the form of the Lord” (Numb. 12:6-8). Talk about a vote of confidence! No one else in all of Scripture is described in this way!

And yet, in spite of all of this, the Bible says, “Now the man Moses was very meek, more than all people who were on the face of the earth” (Numb. 12:3). Moses did fall into sin, just like every other human being who has ever lived. But one thing he didn’t do was let his special relationship with God – and it was a VERY special relationship with God – go to his head. He was meek. Humble. More meek and humble than every other person on the earth. In the humble Olympics, Moses won the gold medal. But he refused to accept it.

Hebrews shines a light on three events in his life, and in those three events it is the persistence of his faith in God that leaps from the page. Persistence is simply the ability to keep going. It is a refusal to quit, even when you fail. Even when the obstacles in front of you seem surmountable. And that takes courage. Fear wants to quit. It takes courage to keep going.

Look first at V. 23. We see the COURAGEOUS OBEDIENCE – not of Moses, but of his parents, Amram and Jochebed. Amaram and Jochebed had three children together, all three of whom played a key role in God’s deliverance of his people. There was Moses, the great deliverer. And then Aaron, who became their first high priest. And then a daughter, Miriam, who served as a prophetess as they marched through the wilderness toward the Promised Land. Amram and Jochebed’s family did pretty well, I think.

Moses was born in a time when the people of Israel, who had come to Egypt to avoid a famine, had grown great in number. It was over 400 years after Israel had gone down to Egypt to wait out the famine, in in that time, they had really multiplied. So much so that THEIR Pharoah feared them and wanted to control their population. His first step was to order all of the Hebrew midwives – the Israelite women who helped deliver babies among the Israelites – to murder all male babies as soon as they were born. When that didn’t work, he ordered that all newborn baby Israelite boys were to be thrown into the Nile river as crocodile food.

But Amram and Jochebed weren’t playing that game. Hebrews says that “they saw that the child was beautiful.” That doesn’t mean that he was just a handsome baby. EVERY parent thinks their children are the most beautiful kids ever born. I remember when our kids were little, someone came up to Becky and I and said, “You know, you two are okay looking, but your kids are gorgeous.” I didn’t know whether it was an insult or a compliment. I was like, thanks. I think. I don’t know.

But that isn’t what Hebrews means when it says that “they saw that the child was beautiful.” In Acts 7:20, Stephen used the same word when he said that Moses “was beautiful in God’s sight.” Again, this doesn’t mean that Moses was an attractive baby who was going to win a bunch of beauty contests. It means that they saw that this was no ordinary child. That God had a special purpose for Moses.

Although the Bible doesn’t make any mention of it, many scholars believe that an angel appeared to Amram and Jochebed either in person or in dreams to tell them to not give in to Pharoah’s edict when Moses was born, much like God appeared to Mary and Joseph, and also to Elizabeth and Zachariah, and to Abraham and Sarah. There’s an ancient Jewish tradition that says much the same thing.

Regardless, Amram and Jochebed courageously disobeyed. They hid Moses, maybe dressed him up like a girl or whatever, as long as they could, and when he was obviously showing signs of being a boy, his mother placed him in a reed basket in the river near where the people of Pharoah’s house went to bathe. And she had his older sister, Miriam, hide in the bushes to keep an eye on him. The hope was that he would be discovered by someone who would have mercy on him.

I love that. Jochebed was like, “Fine, I’ll put him in the river. In a basket. Right were Pharoah’s daughters go to bathe. I can promise you, someone would make sure there were no crocodiles or other dangerous animals on that stretch of the river.

And of course he was spotted by one of Pharoah’s daughters – a princess of Egypt – and she fell in love with him right away and decided to raise him as her own. But she hadn’t given birth, so she couldn’t nurse him. She needed a wet nurse. And out popped Miriam to let her know that she knew of a woman who had just given up her baby who could nurse him for her. So the Egyptian princess gave Moses back to his own mother to nurse him until he could be weaned.

I love how God flaunts our best attempts at avoiding him, working around him, or outright opposing him. You think there aren’t times when God rolls his eyes and says, “whatever,” and goes about his work. Jochebed did exactly what she was supposed to do. She put Moses in the river. Where he was found and adopted by Pharoah’s own daughter. The man who would lead Pharoah’s slave workforce to freedom grew up right under his nose, in his own palace!

But the thing we need to see here is the courage it took for Amram and Jochebed to disobey Pharoah. Pharoah was, well, Pharoah. His word was the law. He was completely and totally, unequivocally in charge. If Pharoah found out about what they were doing, he could have them imprisoned or killed. No court. No jury. No lawyers. Just what he wanted done. They stood to lose everything, including their very lives, but they obeyed God anyway. Courageous faith is very aware of the consequences, of all the ways things could go wrong, of the money that could be lost, or the life that might be lost – the price that might just be paid, and obeys God anyway. Authentic faith means courageous obedience.

Now, look at Vv. 24-26. Not only does authentic faith require courageous obedience, it requires courageous identification. We are willing to be identified with Christ, and we are willing to be identified as a part of his people.

Moses grew up in Pharoah’s court. V. 24 says that “he refused to be called the son of Pharoah’s daughter.” The way that phrase is worded, its actually a title. Like the “Duke of York” in England or something like that. He would never sit on the royal throne, but he did have a royal title. He was considered a prince of Egypt, and he had all of the rights and privileges that went with that. But as he became aware of who he was and where he really came from, he began to identify with his own people – the people of Israel, Egypt’s slave work force – rather than with the household of Pharoah.

To the point where at one point Moses, now a young man, came across an Egyptian work foreman beating an Israelite, and he killed the Egyptian. That isn’t an endorsement of murder, by the way. Moses was broken and fallen, and he could have intervened without killing the man. Regardless, in that moment he broke fellowship with Pharoah’s house and identified himself with the people of God.

And because Christ has always been present with his people, Hebrews can say that he “considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt.” In that moment, he renounced his royal title and stepped fully into his identity as a child of God. And that renouncement took courage, because even giving up his title was an insult to Pharoah.

As followers of Christ, we need to be willing to publicly identify with him, regardless of the cost. Not just in the “safe” circles, in our church or Bible study, but out there in the world. And when we identify with Christ, we identify with his people in the world too. His church. As quirky and broken as we far too often are. Yes, we can and should admit that we don’t always get it right.

We need to give up the dualistic delusion that if we’re following Christ everyone will like us all the time. That isn’t the case. But it also isn’t true that we need to work overtime to be hated and should be as obnoxious as we can be. Truth be told, if we’re really following Jesus, the world should view us with a mixture of appreciation and contempt. That’s how Jesus himself was received. People sometimes didn’t know what to do with him. The same should be true of us.

But remember, most of the contempt came from the people who claimed to be the people of God. Regardless, Jesus both comforts and challenges. That means there will be times when we’re comforting and appreciated, and times when we’re challenging and held in contempt. It takes courage to be willing to be consistently identified with Christ and take the bad with the good that comes with that.

Authentic faith requires courageous obedience and courageous identification. And that leads to courageous perseverance. Look at Vv. 27-28. Leaving Egypt didn’t happen overnight. There was a lot of back and forth between Moses and Pharoah. Pharoah even agreed to let Israel go a couple of times and then rescinded the offer. There were all of the plagues, culminating in the night of Passover when Egypt lost every firstborn child and the firstborn of each herd of livestock and type of livestock.

Authentic faith perseveres in spite of opposition and obstacles. And that takes courageous obedience, courageous identification, and courageous persistence. A willingness to keep following Christ through the frustrations of life and the opposition we encounter.

In his memoir, Everything Sad Is Untrue, Daniel Nayeri tells the gripping story of his mother’s conversion from a devout Muslim background to a saving faith in Jesus Christ. She gave up wealth and social status, eventually being forced to flee from Iran under a death threat. But she was willing to pay the price. Nayeri writes about one example of her costly faith:

One time she hung a little cross necklace from the rearview mirror of her car, which was probably a reckless thing to do. … My mom was like that. One day after work, she went to her car, and there was a note stuck to the windshield. It said, “Madame Doctor, if we see this cross again, we will kill you.”

To my dad, [who is not a Christian], this is the kind of story that proves his point. That my mom was picking a fight. That she could’ve lived quietly and saved everyone the heartaches that would come. If she had kept her head down. If she stopped telling people. If she pretended just a few holidays a year, that nothing had changed. She could still have everything.

My mom took the cross down that day. Then she got a cross so big it blocked half the windshield, and she put it up. Why would anybody live with their head down? Besides, the only way to stop believing something is to deny it yourself. To hide it. To act as if it hasn’t changed your life.

Another way to say it is that everybody is dying and going to die of something. And if you’re not spending your life on the stuff you believe, then what are you even doing? What is the point of the whole thing? It’s a tough question, because most people haven’t picked anything worthwhile.[ii]

[i] Adapted from NPR, “World with No Fear,” Invisibilia podcast (1-15-15)

[ii] Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue (Levine Quierido, 2020), pp. 206-207