.The Footsteps of Moses

When I was a boy, my dream was to be a marine biologist. I wanted to explore the oceans, and the weird creatures living there. I have since found that it is not an uncommon dream. A lot of children have it. There is something about the hidden world of the sea that fascinates us. The thought of us, being land animals, being able to go to the very bottom of the ocean in our submarines and diving suits is exciting. In that world, the strange creatures we see are the native, and we are the aliens.
Christians are aliens in this world, too. Our real native land is fare above, in heaven with God.
Imagine you are a deep sea diver. You spend hours each day exploring the ocean. You interact with the creatures of the sea. Then one day, you become so comfortable with the sharks and the octopi that you forget you don’t belong there. You take off your mask, and you immediately find yourself in trouble. As much as you think of yourself as belonging in the ocean, you don’t. You cannot breathe what they breathe. You were born to the land.
Being aliens, we must stay disentangled with this world. We must keep our focus and remember that at the end of the day we are going to our true home, and our true world.
It requires faith to remember who we are as we stare out into this alien landscape. It is easy to think that this world is our world. By faith we keep our vision and our sanity.
In Hebrews 11:24-29, we read about Moses, who kept his vision and his faith, in spite of some great temptations to the contrary.

By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh's daughter. He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time. He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of pt, because he was looking ahead to his reward.
By faith he left Egypt, not fearing the king's anger; he persevered because he saw him who is invisible.  
By faith he kept the Passover and the sprinkling of blood, so that the destroyer of the firstborn would not touch the firstborn of Israel.
By faith the people passed through the Red Sea as on dry land; but when the Egyptians tried to do so, they were drowned.

In the Hall of Fame of faith, there’s wing devoted to Moses. Last week’s story about Moses’ parents was just the beginning of the tour. There’s a lot more to see. This week, we are going to see three separate acts of faith performed by Moses in his early life, and a surprise act of faith, performed by someone else.
These four separate acts are marked off with the simple words “by faith.”
First, Moses chose humility over status.
By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh's daughter. He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time. He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward.
 We do not know how much Moses knew of his inheritance as a Hebrew. Moses did not have a Hebrew name, but an Egyptian one. The greatest Pharaohs had similar sounding names --Ramses, Thutmose. The first parts of these names refer to the God they worshipped. Take away that name, and you get Moses, This gave us an idea that Moses must have been raised thoroughly Egyptian and in the royal family.
We do don’t know how much he knew about his Hebrew heritage. He had some inkling, to be sure. He may have been instructed by his mother/nursemaid, but we do not know when or how he knew he was not Egyptian.
But we know he knew the Egyptian court. It was a great place for a boy to enjoy. There were pleasures and delicacies in abundance. If you were going to live in the ancient world, it is better to be in the court of a king than anywhere else.
As a boy, Moses must have enjoyed it. But as he grew into manhood, he would discover that it was not a good place to be. Take the example of the most famous pharaoh--King Tut. Forensic examination of King Tut's mummy revealed that he was only nineteen when he died, and that he was probably murdered. It may be good to be the king, but it is also dangerous. You can enjoy the privileges of being a kingdom if you didn’t mind murdering people, and possibly getting murdered yourself. The court was a beautiful place, but a cruel place as well.
Moses saw the best Egypt had to offer, and rejected it. He realized that it was lie. People were not happy. All the pleasures of the court were nothing compared to the wickedness of people in it.
Moses had a choice. Did he stay with adopted family and become a ruler, or did he choose his God-fearing relatives and become a slave? Moses chose God over power. He chose to be a humble servant, rather than being a cruel master.
What would you choose, if you had the chance—wealth and power, or truth and Godliness? In the end, Moses clearly made the right decision. .
Second, he chose loneliness over the wrong company

By faith he left Egypt, not fearing the king's anger; he persevered because he saw him who is invisible.
Moses angered the Pharaoh. He could have worked his way in Pharaoh’s graces, but he chose not to. Instead, he left all his relatives, friends, and servants, and went alone into the Sinai desert.
The desert must be a profoundly lonely place for a man traveling alone without even his wife and children. But Moses endured and was rewarded.
The term they use in the Bible is persevered. We can live alone, but we cannot survive as Christians if we choose those who will undermine our faith. The greatest fear Moses had was not the snakes and scorpions of the desert, but the corrupting influence of a world which did not know God. Moses believed in the invisible God, who judges all men, and to whom he must answer in the end.
Third he chose to fear God more than worldly power.

By faith he kept the Passover and the sprinkling of blood, so that the destroyer of the firstborn would not touch the firstborn of Israel.

The writer of Hebrews recalls an event which happened at the end of Moses’ confrontation with Pharaoh. God brought plague after plague upon Egypt until Pharaoh agreed to let them go. The last plague was the word of all—the plague of the firstborn sons. God was going to send an angel to kill the firstborn of every household. God told Moses to mark the doorpost of his house, and all the other Hebrew houses with the blood of a lamb, to assure the angel of their faithfulness, as well as a means of atonement for their own sins. Moses did exactly as he was told.
Picture the contrast in what Moses is doing. Moses has appeared ten times before the mightiest ruler on earth. Ten times, he has shown himself to have no fear of him. He did not obey his commands. He did not respect his position. But God tells him to mark the door with blood, and he does it without hesitation.
He knew that Pharaoh was utterly ruthless. He could kill his entire family on a whim. Yet Moses is unconcerned. He does not even take unusual precautions against assassination. He stays in the open. But when the first-born faced the angel of death, Moses offered an atonement to God. He knew that people could not hurt him. But he also knew that God could. By faith he feared a sovereign he could not see more than one he did not.
Which do we fear more, Man or God? Most people fear people more than they fear God. But Moses had the faith to believe in the invisible God, which he had not seen, except as a voice form a burning bush. He did not doubt that God was going to do what He said he will so, so he protected himself and his family from the wrath of God.
Then the writer of Hebrews tells us of a fourth great act of faith from a surprising source.

By faith the people passed through the Red Sea as on dry land; but when the Egyptians tried to do so, they were drowned.

Notice those words—by faith, the people. This is the last exhibit in the Moses wing, and the greatest. It was not only Moses who had faith. All the people who followed him had to have faith as well. A million and a half people at least went down into the Red Sea, walking between two walls of waters, and started for the Promised Land.
Moses was a mighty man of God, but he was just one man. If Moses had all the faith in the world, and no one shared it, it would be useless. If God gave us a Moses today, to lead our nation out of spiritual bondage to the light, it would do us no good, unless someone followed him.
God has given us great leaders—people like Luther, Calvin, Knox, Wesley, Asbury, Moody, and Billy Graham. These were men of God who followed humbly the directions of God. But you would have heard of none of these if it were not for the millions of people who were called to faith by them and responded.
A pastor cannot have faith for the church. The church must have faith for itself. A pastor cannot evangelize a community. The church must evangelize the community. If the people of God do not have the faith, courage, and desire to leave the comfortable ways of the past and to set out on a new adventure from God, then no leader, however effective will do them any good.
But what if we do follow? Then there will not be one Moses, but a thousand Moseses, a million, a hundred million. Whenever people choose to leave their pleasurable lives full of comfort and ease, and follow a risky course, then they follow the steps of Moses.
More than that, they follow the steps of Christ.

Moses' Parents

Is “a bird in the hand worth two in the bush?”
You have all heard that expression. But what it doesn’t say is this—those who go for the two in the bush may wind up with one more bird than those who settle for the one in hand.
Going for the two in the bush requires boldness and willingness to risk. You must believe in your ability to catch birds. If you fail to catch the two, you might catch one. If you fail altogether, at least you’ve learned an important lesson in catching birds which may help you later.
A bird in hand is fine for those who don’t know how to catch them. But for those who know how to catch birds, it is no enough. The only thing that makes that lonely bird better than the other two is if you are not convinced that you can catch the other two.
That’s what faith is—going for the two in the bush.
Sometimes we take risks because we have no other choice. Usually, though there is a choice. We can choose to be cautious or to act boldly. If we are cautious, we risk little. We may survive today. But the more cautious we are, the more likely we are to achieve nothing in the end. We cannot keep our lives, our property, our relatives, our friends, or our fortunes. Eventually, we lose them all. If we never take risks, we may keep what we have in the end, but in the end, we will lose everything else.
Faith is trusting God enough to take risk. If we really trust in God—I mean really—there is nothing we cannot do. If we really trust in God—I mean really—we can move mountains, defeat armies, stop storms, walk on water, and win the prize.
But if we don’t trust God enough to try, we will achieve nothing.
As believers, we have put our trust in Christ as our Lord and Savior. That is called Saving Faith—the faith the Jesus has forgiven or sins and that we will go to heaven when we die. Saving faith is vital to every Christian.
But Saving Faith is not the only kind of faith we need from God. We need living faith. too, to use in our daily walk with Him on earth. Saving faith is for the future. Living faith is for today.
Living faith is trusting God enough to take bold and decisive action. Living faith is not being satisfied with surviving, but is interested in thriving. Living faith is the willingness to take God at his Word that He created us for greater things than the ordinary.
We may be believers, but that doesn’t mean we have a living faith. We know we have a living faith when we are ready and willing to sacrifice our present comfort for future blessings. Living faith is when we give our money sacrificially to God’s work, instead of holding onto it ourselves, because we believe that God is capable of providing for all our needs. Living faith ins being willing to try a new thing for God, instead of fretting that we don’t have the time, or don’t have the training, or because we’ve “never done it before.” Living faith is crossing social, ethnic, or class barriers, without fretting that we might have our hand slapped when we do. We trust God that we can handle how others respond, and we trust God to bring results from our sacrifices.
Living faith is not being satisfied with just a bird in the hand. It’s going for the two in the bush as well.
The next exhibit in the Hall of Fame of Faith is a splendid example of living faith. Their real names were Amram and Jochebeb. They are better known as Moses’ parents.
Without their faith, there would have been no Moses, no Exodus, and not Jewish people. In fact, if it were not for four people and three bold acts of faith, Israel would be no more than a memory.
The first act of faith happened before Moses was born. Look at Exodus 1:6-22.
Moses was born four hundred years after Joseph, when God’s people had become slaves in Egypt. They had been slaves for almost ten generations—or the same length of time between us and the Pilgrims.
What happens to people after they’ve been prisoners for a long time? The longer we are in bondage, the harder it is to imagine ever being free. Multigenerational slaves lose all hope for rescue. Their captors appear all-powerful. They not only believe it, but they also teach it to their children. Their hopelessness travels from one generation to the next.
But no matter how docile a group of people become, there are always limits in what they will tolerate. Pharaoh went one step too far when he ordered the death of all male Israelite babies. Pharaoh was smart enough to know that if he sent his troops into the slave villages demanding their little boys, not even his might could protect him. So he hit upon a much more subtle and devious kind of genocide.
Pharaoh called the Hebrew midwives together, probably in secret. He told them that it was their responsibility to kill the male children. “Do it quietly” Pharaoh would have told them. That way, there would be no riots, just a lot of grieving parents. In a generation, the Hebrew women would marry outside their tribe, and the Israelites would simply disappear.
But there were two midwives who resisted. Their names were Shiphrah and Puah. These two could not have been all the midwives there were—after all, there were over a million Hebrews! They were just the two who resisted.
There must have been other midwives, too. The reason we don’t hear about them is probably because they went along with Pharaoh. These other women had a choice to make, and they chose the other way. They must have had their rationalizations for doing it. But there would only be one real reason—they were afraid for themselves. Proverbs 16:2 says “All a man's ways seem innocent to him, but motives are weighed by the LORD.” In other words—we can rationalize anything.
But Shiphrah and Puah stood their ground They refused to kill children. If it weren’t for these two women, there would be no Israel.
But two greater acts of faith would follow it.
Hebrews 11: 23 By faith Moses' parents hid him for three months after he was born, because they saw he was no ordinary child, and they were not afraid of the king's edict.
One of the children they saved was Moses. After his birth, Moses’ parents kept him hidden for three months, I violation of Pharaoh’s orders.
How do you keep a baby quiet for three months? They did not live in a palace. They lived in a slave village, with no glass on the windows, where every house was up against every other house. They had little or no privacy. How many times did his mother have to get up in the night to shush a baby that was not supposed to be there? How many narrow escapes must they have had when some overseer came down the crowded streets just before feeding time? If they were discovered, then the whole family would have been put to death for the sake of the children.
Moses’ parent risked their whole family for the sake of one boy. They did this because they believed that God had a special destiny for him, and that He would take care of the family.
But the greatest faith was yet to come.
After three months, Moses’ parents realized they could not keep the boy hidden. At the same time, they came to believe that this boy was the promised deliverer. We do not know how they came to that conclusion, but they did. If this boy was called by God, then he must be saved.
Mrs. Moses wove a basket. Mr. Moses covered it with pitch. Mrs. Moses got her finest blanket out of her chest. She wrapped her little baby Moses in that basket. Then they both kissed him goodbye, and set that basket in the Nile River.
The Nile river! Along its shallow banks live crocodiles, hippos, rats, and wild animals. The cities upstream from them dumped their sewage in that water. Yet somehow, these two people had such faith in God that they took their precious baby and let him loose in the wild waters of the Nile. Could there be in our wildest imaginations a greater act of faith than that?
The suffering of that woman and man must have been horrible. She cried because she believed she would never hold her baby again. He wept to think his son-his future—just floated off down the river. There was earthly reason to believe that anything would happen to that little reed basket except sink in the Nile. Even if by some miracle he survived, they would never see him again. They had just released their baby boy. All they to cling to was a feeling that God was in charge.
Some parents today make similar sacrifices. When a man or woman sees their child go to war, they do not know if they will ever return. When mother or father waves goodbye to their child going off in a mission trip, they put them in God’s hands. They may have saving faith, and know their child is saved. But they need more—they need a living faith to sustain them for the moment. They must believe that God is in charge, and that He is a rewarder of those who believe in Him.
God has other calls and other sacrifices that require the same living faith—when we move to a new home, when we leave a for a new job, when we decide to take a woman’s hand in marriage. We have no guarantees. But God is in control, and that He will honor our willingness to step out on faith.
Moses parents and the midwives all had choices. What if his parents or those midwives had acted differently? Suppose they decided to go along with authority, or to try to keep that baby boy all to themselves? What would have happened? Perhaps nothing. But there would never have been a Moses. There would never have been a deliverer. The Hebrew people would have been just a memory, and their God a distant but fading light.
Faith is required for living. Nothing is required for dying. Faith is required to find success. Failure may be achieved without it.
The problem with us is that we follow the path of least resistance, fight only the battles we are sure we win. If we encounter opposition, we shrink away, because we do not have faith. When we take the safe path is that we are content to exist rather than live.
In the next chapter of Hebrews, the writer says “Therefore, being surrounded by such a cloud of witnesses, let us run the race that is set before us. Looking unto Jesus, he author and finisher of our faith.” Moses’ parents are two of those witnesses. Moses is another. And all those other people mentioned in Hebrews 11 are on the sidelines, too, cheering us on. “Fight, run, persevere!“ They shout at us. We are the latest of their generations. We have been passed the baton. It is our time to run out race. One day, we will receive a crown of life, but only if we run with bold and fearless faith.

Faith as an Unnatural Act

On Wednesday nights, we've been following the trip of the Israelites with Moses to Mount Sinai from he book of Exodus. When Moses went up on the mountain for forty days and nights, the people he left behind became nervous, then rebellious. They demanded a God they could see, who could be right in front of them to give them courage as they traveled through the desert. So they had Aaron make a golden calf on their behalf. The golden calf was most useful, not only because of his artificially comforting presence, but because he was a god who would always go exactly where they wanted, instead of the messy business of having to blindly following the God of Moses.


I can't say that I blame them. I would have probably done the same thing, giving the situation they were in at the time. They were a million and a half people on a barren plain in the middle of the desert. There was no natural source of food or water anywhere. would anyone in their right mind have recommended that they should stay in the middle of such a barren wilderness indefinitely? Even in a land where there was plenty of water and good grassland, it doesn't seem likely that they would survive. Common sense would have told them that this was a hopeless, untenable position.

Or think about the disciples on the day of Jesus' crucifixion. Many if not most of them seemed to have temporarily lost their faith. Wouldn't we? How many people do you know, get up and walk out of tomb after three days in an airless cave? In real life, people don't just get up and walk away after they've been buried. Common sense would suggest that when our loved on is out in the cemetery, we should let go and let the healing begin. Anyone with any common sense at all would not stand around waiting for a resurrection.

I want to be honest here, but I also want to be careful. I am not condoning their actions. The Israelite should not have built a calf. The disciples should have waited with hope. But these two examples illustrate an important lesson. Common sense is not always right when you are talking about heavenly matters. There is nothing common or sensible about the wisdom that comes from God. We serve a supernatural God, not a natural one. He doesn't have to play by our version of the rules, and neither do we when we are on His team.

"Faith," the writer of Hebrews said "Is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." We cannot walk by faith and by sight, It has to be one or the other. It's fine to follow our own knowledge when we have not heard from Him, but we must do it tentatively, ready to change when He speaks.

We may wish that God would show us what is around the next bend, but if He did, we would not walk beside Him. We would run ahead, lag behind, and saunter at our own pace. Faith will never make sense to us. God's desire is to keep us walking right by his side, obediently looking to Him for guidance and direction.

Presbyterians like to think of ourselves practical people, doing things in a slow, conservative, deliberate fashion. We do this without thinking whether or not practicality and faith can walk together without contradiction. To be rational is to lean upon our own understanding. When we are being rational, we have to know before we do. Faith asks us to do before we know. When the Hebrews started into the desert, they were marching into certain disaster without divine intervention. When the Peter and John went to the empty tomb, they did so with no more evidence than one hysterical woman.

How can faith be practical? Sometimes it can't.

I'm not suggesting we all take foolish chances. We must make sure we hear the God's Word before we take a leap of faith. Moses certainly sought and received confirmation before he marched into Pharaoh's court and demanded he let his people God. The disciples followed Jesus because they had seen three years worth of miracles. They diligently sought to understand God and had proof of His existence, before they stepped out in faith.

Faith is more of a skill than anything else. It something we develop with practice. The more we practice, the more we learn to stand on the sometimes shaky ground of faith. If we are going to walk on water, it is a good idea to get out sea legs first. Unfortunately, we are too impatient to practice faith. We don't pray through our situation. We get up off our knees quickly so we can do something, anything, rather than to wait around for an answer. When our schemes for church ministry don't work, we quickly find somebody to blame scheme again, rather than ask the question "What is God telling me in this defeat?"

If we are going to be people of faith, being naturally wise is not enough. We must be unnaturally, supernaturally wise, walking with our eyes on Jesus, listening for His voice, and taking His advice.