Hey, friends.
Welcome back.
Thanks for being with us.
Thanks for coming back after a week off.
Sorry about that.
It’s good to be back with you as we continue through Exodus.
We are jumping in just a little bit
ahead of
verse 16.
We kind of split 15 into the middle,
and we’ll cover some ground
today in terms of the number of verses,
but this is sort of one of those passages just kind of
moving things along.
Remember that Moses has fled from Pharaoh.
He settled in the land of Midian.
We’re told at the end of verse 15,
he sat down by a well.
And in the Old Testament,
if you went through Genesis with us,
you know that wells are kind of places where things happen.
I think we mentioned that last time we’re together,
but let’s look at it here.
I’ll read for a little while,
and then we’ll talk about the verses.
So 16,
“The priests of Midian had seven daughters.
They came to draw water and filled the trough to water their father’s flock.
But some shepherds came and drove them away.
Moses got up and came to their defense and watered their flock.
When they returned to their father,
Reuel,
he said, ‘How is it that you’ve come back so early today?’
They said, ‘An Egyptian helped us against the shepherds.
He even drew water for us and watered the flock.’
He said to his daughters, ‘Where is he?
Why did you leave the man?
Invite him to break bread.’
Moses agreed to stay with the man,
and he gave Moses his daughter Zipporah in marriage.
She bore a son,
and he named him Gershom.
For he said,
‘I have been an alien residing in a foreign
land.’” So just kind of some backstory here as we get to this part of the text.
This man has seven daughters.
He has no sons.
That makes an opportunity for Moses to stay with him, to help
him essentially,
you know,
again, not always comfortable with this,
but in payment he’s given
one of the daughters to marry.
We’re not sure, maybe presume the oldest,
but we don’t know that.
Anyway,
Moses ends up with a wife and a son,
a father-in-law,
a job, and a place.
And all of that happens in the context of just a few verses, Michael,
but it really kind of is a transitional story,
kind of sets the stage.
It also gives us a sense that some time has passed.
This isn’t a weekend,
you know, this is a while.
Moses has,
he’s fled from Pharaoh.
He’s settled into this new life.
Perhaps the danger of Pharaoh is gone.
We don’t know that yet.
We’re about to learn that,
but we don’t get the sense it’s hanging over him,
and we do get the sense that he’s moved on from Egypt,
and he’s now settled in a new place with a new life.
Yeah, you use that word transitional,
Clint, and let’s be honest,
nobody counts transitional narrative sections of the Old
Testament as their favorite,
so I’m not going to pretend to you that we’re going to be able to put
some frosting on this and make this your favorite biblical dessert.
But I will tell you this,
I do think there’s a really interesting question that lives inside this transition moment for Moses,
and it’s a question that we’ve already hinted at,
and quite frankly, it’s a question I don’t know that’s going to be completely resolved in this entire book,
and that is,
who is Moses,
and who are his people?
Because note that when this text begins here, Clint,
Moses flees from Pharaoh, who’s Pharaoh?
Pharaoh is the king,
the figure, the symbol of the nation of Egypt, right?
Well, look as the text goes on,
verse 19,
what do the daughters say when
they return to their father?
They say an Egyptian helped us.
Interesting, right?
Even the guard that
Moses has on tips off that he’s an Egyptian,
but he’s an Egyptian who fled Egypt,
the place where he was an adoptive son,
because the people of Israel,
the very people he considered for a moment
he was helping, rejected him.
So now he sits by a well,
and I want to just point out the really
odd language here that we have in the book of Exodus, verse 16,
the priest of Midian.
Listen,
you turn to Deuteronomy,
or Numbers,
or Judges, and you find me a priest story that’s not
about the Israelite priests,
and it is a negative reference.
I mean, so the reality here that we have a priest,
and my commentary says that we might be able to read into that a little bit like a priest
king kind of thing,
how there might be not just a religious significance,
but maybe some social,
political significance to that title.
But either way,
here you have the adopted son of an Egyptian
who is an Israelite,
getting a father-in-law who’s of neither of those,
and he’s living in the middle
of nowhere, literally middle of nowhere.
And in the midst of that experience,
we the reader are
asking the same question that Moses is asking,
and that is,
is he alone?
Is he by himself?
Who is he?
And where is his life going?
And, you know,
it’s the transitional stories that are easy to read
through.
I’ll go back to how I started.
I realize that we’re not going to trick this up and make
this into your favorite passage,
but it’s easy to read past these claims.
That’s the point.
It’s easy to miss that the long seasons of life before our spiritual questions are answered
are real moments of life.
And you and I have them as much as Moses did,
not the same kind of
complications clearly.
But we have these moments,
and Moses is in one of them,
and you might find
yourself in one of these right now.
And if you do,
then you have good company,
because it’s not always clear.
And I would also say, Michael,
that though I’m not sure this is primarily the point,
we do see something of Moses’ character again.
In your preceding story,
when an Egyptian attacks a Hebrew,
Moses defends them.
He kills the Egyptian.
That’s why he ends up having to flee.
Here,
a group of shepherds essentially take advantage of or assert authority or hinder
this group of women,
and Moses comes to their defense.
And we don’t know how many there are,
but the word is plural.
Some shepherds came up.
Moses got up and came to their defense.
It is interesting that there is something in Moses’ character that resonates with the underdog.
He’s in a different land.
He’s far from whatever he could call home.
And yet, when he sees this
act of abusiveness or disrespect,
he’s drawn to do something.
He engages it.
And I think that is a
foreshadowing of what God is going to ask him to do in taking the role,
speaking for the powerless against the powerful.
Here, we see him doing it naturally,
and it seems to be almost woven in
to his character.
But I think in that moment,
you have to give Moses a great deal of credit
for not simply being an observer,
but engaging a situation and acting on behalf of those
who are the weaker in that moment, who are vulnerable.
I’m going to practice a thing that I generally find not incredibly helpful.
I don’t generally find it helpful when we turn to the Bible and we try to create character studies and
try to figure out people’s history.
But for a moment,
I think it’s fair to make the case that
Moses at least seems in his youth to be impulsive.
I think we can make a general case for that in the
text thus far.
He sees, as you say, this Egyptian mistreating a Hebrew individual,
and he reacts to that violently.
Here, he responds to these women in need,
and he does what’s necessary to make it
possible for them to not only get the shepherds pushed away,
but also he actively helps with
really no personal gain guaranteed in that to help these women with the watering of their flocks.
What’s interesting is the contrast we’re going to see,
Clint,
just a few chapters,
or not chapters, excuse me, paragraphs down the road here,
when Moses is talking to God,
you almost are going to
get this sense that Moses is hesitant.
He’s the opposite of impulsive in some ways,
like, “Whoa, not me.
I’m not on that train.” I don’t want to spoil that when we get to it,
but there is a
wondering that I have here is,
what is happening to Moses here?
Is this a fixture of youth?
He’s just impulsive, and he responds,
and then he starts thinking later.
Or is Moses shaped when he
encounters God, and he’s been out in the middle of nowhere,
and he just becomes happy with his
life?
Does this interim period become a comfortable period for him?
I’m in some ways skipping ahead,
but it’s an interesting question of who Moses is as a developing character in the story,
because in some ways, we know nothing about what he thinks,
but we know a decent amount for biblical characters, at least,
as to what he does.
And so far, the point I’m trying to make is,
his actions have been rather impulsive.
I mean, he’s seen a thing,
and he does a thing,
and then he figures it out later.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that’s fair, Michael.
I mean,
whatever it is that leads him to
interact in this way,
whatever it is that his sense of being a Hebrew,
his sense of connection with the underdog,
his sense of protection of these women, whatever it is,
he does throw himself
into situations, at least thus far.
I think even tomorrow,
we’ll look at the burning bush,
and his language is,
“I must go see it.” I mean,
there is that sense where I think Moses is kind
of compelled by his situation.
Just quickly, let’s then move.
The text does another transition,
but this one, I think, is a bigger transition,
and in some ways,
I don’t want to say more
interesting, but it is interesting.
So verse 23,
“After a long time,
the king of Egypt died,
the Israelites groaned under their slavery and cried out.
Out of the slavery,
their cry for help rose up to God.
God heard their groaning,
and God remembered his covenant with Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob.
God looked upon the Israelites,
and God took notice
of them.”
So,
you know, if this was a movie,
you’d be panning back over the desert,
back to Egypt, from wherever Moses is in this land of Midian.
Moses is doing fine,
wife,
son,
place,
resting comfortably, probably seems to be,
but where he came from,
that situation has only gotten worse.
The Hebrew people,
the Israelites groan.
There’s this language.
There’s lots of this.
God hears their groaning,
took notice
of them.
They cry out of their slavery.
They cry for help,
rose up to God,
and God remembers the covenant.
Now,
“remember” doesn’t mean that God has forgotten.
“Remember” means that God decides it’s time to act.
God reconfirms his commitment to these people,
and God took notice of them.
This is a powerful couple of verses here, Michael, that God
has decided the time to act is at hand because the people that he has covenanted to are suffering mightily.
I want to point out,
just to accentuate what you had said earlier, notice verse 23,
“after a long time.” If we hadn’t gotten that from Moses and,
you know, the child and his wife and this newfound family,
now we were
explicitly told by the text that this is a long time.
This both gives us the idea of the passage of time,
but it also gives us a sense for how long the people
have been suffering because we look on and see that they are groaning under their slavery,
they are crying out,
and to be fair,
Clint, once again, the people know who to cry out to.
The sense is that they have not turned to another God.
That will be greatly in question as the book
of Exodus goes on,
and the people are into the wilderness.
We’re going to see a very different
side of the people,
but now the people are very much turning to God and looking for a relief and
respite from God is to God where their cries are being directed,
and God remembers the covenant.
There’s probably not a more substantial phrase in terms of the connection to Genesis than what we
have right here in verse 24.
God hears they’re groaning.
God remembers his covenant with Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, and right now, when you call those three names together,
make no mistake about
it, this is supposed to bring into our minds,
much like a flashback in a movie,
that all of these scenes of hopelessness,
the end of roads,
the generation that isn’t continuing because of
barrenness or because of famine or because of all of these challenges we saw in Genesis,
all of that now gets called into this story,
and when we’re told the God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob,
we know as the reader this is substantial because the one who has been faithful
in the past is now the one who is on the scene,
and it is striking that what will come immediately
on the heels of this,
Clint, you already said, you know, tomorrow’s the burning bush narrative,
what is immediately going to come on the heels of this is a revelation of God moment, one
of a distinctive revelation of God type moment in the entire scripture,
and on the heels of
this crying out and great need,
the people of Israel are going to see a God who’s actively
working to complete the promises that God made all the way back through the beginning of the
Genesis story.
It is transitional,
but I think it’s transitional in the sense of pulling the
story back to the main character.
If you had got lost and thought that this was about Moses,
you are now pulled back to reality to remember,
no, this is God’s story,
Moses is just on the stage at the time.
Yeah, I think it’s interesting to read these two verses
separately.
You know, what did the people do?
They groaned and cried.
And what did God do?
God heard,
God remembered,
God looked,
and God took notice.
So, here we see that like Moses in the story before,
God too is on the side of the underdog.
God too is aware of the needs of the vulnerable,
of the oppressed, of the victim.
And God has taken notice of this suffering and will then act,
and I think act in a most unlikely way,
but we’ll look at that tomorrow.
One thing that’s striking here,
Clint, and just very briefly,
it is interesting in Exodus how
much of the story’s narrative is really marked by Pharaoh’s dying,
right?
Because you remember those
Exodus began with the Pharaoh who dies,
and no one remembers Joseph anymore.
And now here,
the Pharaoh who Moses has been in conflict with,
that Pharaoh dies, and it marks a new
epoch.
It marks a new moment in the story because suddenly,
with that change of leadership in Egypt,
now God is about to do a new work for the people under Egyptian slavery.
It’s an interesting just
sort of marking in the text of these different transitional moments.
Yeah, so tomorrow we’ll continue with a passage that I think everybody’s pretty familiar with,
though there might be some things in it that could surprise us.
It’s one of those stories,
I think, each time we revisit it,
we often find something we forgot about or didn’t notice last
time.
So, I hope you can be with us as we continue Moses’s journey.
Thanks, everybody.