Covenantide

Author: SJ Hatch

  • God’s Call Upon Moses (Exodus chs. 3-4)

    What would it be like to directly encounter God in person?  This question bears much more reflection than we are typically inclined to give it.  We live in a day and an age characterized by glibness and superficiality, and we are inclined to approach God with the same kind of casualness that we would approach our friends.  But that is clearly not the picture we get in these chapters of Moses’s first encounter with God.  There is mystery, unexpectedness, and even an element of fear present in this meeting.  The LORD defies our categories and conventionalities; we respond to His agenda, not He to ours.

    To say that Moses’s first encounter with the LORD was the turning point in his life is true, but fails to adequately capture the matter.  God revealed Himself to Moses in a profound way because He intended for Moses to play a central role in the greatest redemptive act He had done in human history to that point.  For Moses to carry the burdens he would have to carry, He needed to know that behind those things was a God whose awesomeness was unsurpassed.  How did God reveal Himself? 

    The Burning Bush

    As One working miraculous signs.  Moses’s encounter was prompted by the sight of a bush that was on fire but not consumed.  In a dry and arid environment, a bush that caught on fire would burn up quickly.  Not in this case.  That mystery is what prompted Moses to take a closer look.  This image was not unique to this occasion.  When the LORD made the covenant with Abraham, it was a smoking oven and a burning torch that passed through the severed carcasses to take on the obligations of the covenant (Gen. 15:17).  After Moses’s encounter at the burning bush, the LORD would lead His people out of Egypt in the form of pillar of cloud and fire (Exod. 13:21, cf. 14:19-20 & 24, 24:15-18, 40:34-38, Num. 14:14).  Both the cloud and the fire denote the presence of God without limiting Him to a particular form, but the latter points to His power; the former to His mysteriousness.  This is not a God we approach lightly.

    As One who is fundamentally divine.  God first manifests Himself as an “Angel of the LORD” in 3:2, but that quickly shifts to referring to the LORD as God Himself.  “Angel” simply means “messenger,” but it becomes quickly apparent that the messenger is none other than God Himself.  This happens in multiple places in the Old Testament, where the narrative begins by talking about an “Angel of the LORD” only to shift suddenly and talk about God explicitly (Gen. 16:7-11; Gen. 22:11-15; Num. 22:22-35; Judges 6:11-22; Judges 13:21; 2 Sam. 24:16; 1 Kings 19:7; 2 Kings 1:3, 15; 1 Chron. 21:12-30; Isa. 37:36; Zech. 1:11-12, 3:1-6).  With the clarity provided by the New Testament, we can see that this “Angel of the LORD” is no ordinary angel, but rather, is the pre-Incarnate Christ.

    As One in covenantal relationship to His People.  Three times in Exodus ch. 3 God identifies Himself as the “God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (3:6, 15, 16).  Indeed, it is because He covenantally bound to His people that He has heard their cries, is responding to their distress and will save them from their bondage so that they may have fellowship with Him in the land He promised to their forefathers.

    And, lastly, as He is in Himself.  Moses asks what he should tell the people when they ask for the name of God who is sending him.  Curiously, God responds by saying, “I AM WHO I AM,” and then He connects that to His covenantal relationship with the people by using the name, the “LORD God” (3:15).  In English Bibles, the name “LORD” (all capitals) represents the Hebrew “YHWH,” typically spelled Yahweh, and is related to the verb, “to be.”  The LORD’s declaration here makes this the covenantal name of God; it is the proper name by which  God’s people are to refer to Him.

    This is not what we would expect of a name, but it is deeply profound.  In connecting the name with the characterization that “I AM WHAT I AM,” God is giving His people several important revelations about Himself.  For a people who had lived among polytheists for over 400 years, He is not just one God among many, nor even just their God; rather, He is THE God, the only God.  This is vital for His people to know in the confrontation that He is moving toward with Pharaoh, who claimed to be divine.  He is the self-existent God, and as such, He is eternal and unchangeable.  Because this name is related to the verb “to be,” there is a variation on God’s name in the Book of Revelation that captures this notion succinctly: “Him who is and who was and who is to come” (Rev. 1:4).  There is nothing higher than Him.  The 11th century bishop Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109 AD) once described God as that Being, greater than which cannot be conceived.  Given all this, while God has made Himself known to His people, these attributes make He is nevertheless incomprehensible: we can know Him, but we can never exhaust our knowledge of Him.  This is the God who was intent on dealing with the bondage and suffering of His people. 

    The LORD is doing more than just revealing things about Himself in this encounter with Moses; He is calling Moses to act as His agent, His Mediator for His people.  How does Moses respond?  The LORD that required that Moses approach Him as holy, as One worthy of reverence and awe (Exod. 3:5).  Moses responds, rightly, by hiding his face.  For a God who is higher than anything, He is not to be approached in a casual or flippant manner.  He is worthy honor and respect.  A point for us to reflect upon is whether we approach God with the awe, the honor, and the respect He deserves.

    Moses then begins a dialogue with God, which showed that he failed to have the prompt, faithful obedience and covenantal love (hesed) that marked Abraham at his best.  Moses raises two questions of God which are legitimate, but then makes three statements that increasingly show he really does not want to do what God is calling Him to do.  With each of these, God nonetheless responds with concrete measures of assurance:

    1. “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and that I should bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?” (3:11).  God promises to be with Him, and signals as confirmation of His presence that He would return him to the mountain they were at (3:12).
    2. “What shall I say to them when they ask what is God’s name?” (3:13).  As already discussed, this is where God reveals Himself as the I AM, who is the same God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (3:14-17).
    3. “But suppose they will not believe me or listen to my voice; suppose they say, ‘The LORD has not appeared to you’” (4:1).  God provides three miraculous signs to confirm His word to Moses: the serpent rod, the leperous hand, and turning water into blood (4:2-9).
    4. “O, my Lord, I am not eloquent, neither before nor since You have spoken to your servant; but I a slow of speech and slow of tongue” (4:10).  God promises again to be with him and to give him the words to speak (4:11-12).
    5. “O my Lord, please send by the hand of whomever else You may send” (4:13).  Though Moses’s recalcitrance angers the LORD, the LORD nevertheless promises to have Moses’s brother Aaron be his spokesman.  But He still commands Moses to lead (4:14-17).

    Arguing with God is a dangerous thing, but God shows forbearance and mercy.  This background, however, makes the contrast all the more stark a few verses later when we read, “And it came to pass on the way [to Egypt] at the encampment, that the LORD met him and sought o kill him” (4:24).  This is a curious statement: why would God want to do this?  And why was the act of Moses’s wife, Zipporah, satisfactory in making God stop this effort to kill Moses?  The text does not say why Moses had failed to do this, whether it was an oversight or carelessness, but in any event, God calls His people to covenantal faithfulness (hesed), that is, steadfast love.  If Moses was going to be a Mediator for God’s people with Pharaoh, then he needed to identify himself fully with that people.  Circumcision was the sign God had given to Abraham of citizenship in covenant community.  Moreover, Moses would become Israel’s law-giver, and as such, needed to be obedient to the law himself.  In the New Covenant, we see Jesus as Mediator fully identifying with His people in the Incarnation and being fully obedient to the Law, even unto death.  What Moses foreshadowed; Christ fulfilled.

    The task Moses was being called to was without any doubt a tall order.  God wanted Moses to approach the most powerful ruler of the day with the request that he let hundreds of thousands of slaves go, and even told Moses beforehand that Pharaoh would not comply (3:19, 4:21-23), so that God could display His glory in the ensuing confrontation.  This is a hard providence to accept, but accepting it requires trusting in the great God who stands behind His people and in the plan that He has formulated for their good.  And, as will be seen, God came through on all His promises in a great and mighty way.

  • From a Son of God to a Shepherd in the Wilderness (Exodus 2)

    In this chapter we have three vignettes of Moses’s life: how he was saved from the genocide being perpetrated against his people; his failed attempt at delivering his people, and his flight to Midian (today in northwestern Saudi Arabia).  Interestingly, when Stephen the Deacon recounts Moses’s role in redemptive history in Acts 7:17-43, he spends more time on this than on the Exodus and the forty years Moses led the people in the wilderness.  This is curious, since it is a truly anti-heroic narrative: Moses is saved by women at birth, fails at leading his people in Egypt, and in fleeing Egypt is reduced to helping shepherdesses in the wilderness.  The combination of these vignettes, however, highlight the glory of God in preparing Israel’s deliverer.

    The Pharaoh at the time of Moses’s birth most likely was Amenhotep I, the son of Ahmose, the founder of the 18th Dynasty, and the decree to kill the male children of the Hebrews probably was in effect only for a limited time.  Moses’s brother Aaron was three years older than him and was not affected, and there is no indication that the persecution either escalated or went on.  Moses was probably born in 1526 BC, the last year of Amenhotep I’s reign (r. 1546-1525), and when Thutmose I (r. 1525-1512) took over he probably ended the persecution; he would have enough to deal with in securing his position as Pharaoh without provoking a large alien ethnic group within his realm.

    Moses Discovered by Pharaoh’s Daughter

    Commentators have speculated that the daughter of Pharaoh who drew Moses from the water was Hatshepsut, who would later go on to exercise kingship in her own right (r. 1504-1483).  She certainly would have had the force of personality to defy Pharaoh’s edict, but depending on how one calculates the chronology, she may not have been much older than Moses himself, and thus unlikely to have adopted him.  In any event, Moses’s mother probably reared him for several years before presenting him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and in that time impressed upon him his covenantal heritage.

    When he became part of the Egyptian court, he would enter a new world.  In ancient Egypt, Pharaoh’s were considered nearly divine and typically were deified upon their death.  To be a member of the royal family, then, would almost be tantamount to being the son or daughter of a god.  In addition to being given the best education then possible, most of Moses’s mature years would be under Hatshepsut’s reign, which was marked by diplomatic embassies to Punt (modern day Somalia) and other parts of the Near East.  Moses certainly would have known about these trips and may even have participated in some.  That would have given him insight into how covenants functioned as treaties at time when diplomacy was beginning to flourish in the ancient Near East.

    One other thing in Hatshepsut’s reign may also have shaped him, indeed, may have radicalized him: Hatshepsut boasted in her official inscriptions that she finally eliminated the Hyksos as even an external threat.  Knowing that his people had flourished under the Hyksos and were now oppressed, he almost certainly had to have been disturbed by this boast.  It is probably in 1486 BC, then, that he killed the Egyptian who was beating one of the Hebrews.  Moses’s action certainly bespeaks a righteous indignation, but there may also have been some political calculation as well: if people saw him as a judge, then he could lead them and throw off the Egyptian yoke—except the people did not follow him.  Found out, his actions certainly would have been seen as treason by the royal court, which is why he fled.  The Pharaoh from whom Moses fled was probably Thutmose III, the long-ruling and greatest Pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty (r. 1504-1450), who died just before the Exodus (Exod. 2:23).

    While we can comprehend the fall from privilege that Moses experienced, the full depth of it is not readily obvious to most Western readers.  When we think of shepherds, we typically think of bucolic pastoralists, gently caring for white fluffy sheep.  In the ancient Near East and even to this day, however, shepherds engaged in tedious, hard labor in the heat and in the cold throughout the year, living as nomads on the edge of society.  By settled peoples, they were typically seen as neither committed to one place nor one king, and often only a step or two away from open brigandage.  Thus, Moses went from being almost as high as he could possibly be to being almost as low as he could go.  And even then, Reuel’s daughters did not think to invite Moses to come to their family’s tent until berated by their father, despite the help he rendered to them.

    Why did God have Moses go through what he did?  Moses was certainly destined to lead God’s people and God had prepared him expressly for that purpose, but it was God who promised to deliver His people.  For Him to receive the full glory for fulfilling His covenantal promise He needed Moses to be at a point where he was not trusting in himself or his abilities, but trusting in God.  Moreover, God used Moses to prefigure Christ Himself.  This is probably why Stephen spends so much time on Moses’s backstory in Acts ch. 7.  After recounting Moses’s background, Stephen says, “This is that Moses who said to the children of Israel, ‘The LORD your God will raise up for you a Prophet like me from your brethren.  Him you shall hear” (Acts 7:37).  The one that the Jews of Stephen’s day claimed to follow pointed them toward a deliverer better than himself.  Christ was not simply like a Son of God, He was the Son of God who Himself was fully God.  Ascending from the of the Father, He was humiliated in His life on earth, culminating in His death.  Humiliation, however, precedes glory, and just as Moses’s humiliation preceded the glory of the Exodus, so Christ’s humiliation in death preceded the glory of His resurrection on the third day.  To God alone be the glory!

  • Strangers in a Strange Land (Exodus 1)

    The Book of Exodus begins with a listing of the members of Jacob’s family who came to Egypt when Joseph was vizier over the land and connects Exodus seamlessly to the final chapters of Genesis.  The transition is so seamless, in fact, that one does not notice the fact that more than four hundred years have passed.  The Bible records no history in this period, and that begs the question as to why.  

    Jacob and his family probably settled in Egypt around 1876 BC, during the Middle Kingdom period of Egyptian history.  The land in the Nile River delta was fertile and as pastoralists, the Israelites probably were reasonably well off.  We know from archaeology that by about 1700 BC the unity of the Egyptian empire began breaking down, with a rump Egyptian state remaining along the central part of the Nile with its capital based in Thebes, the southern stretch of the Nile becoming dominated by the kingdom of Nubia (modern day Sudan), and the northern area around the Nile River delta controlled by a Western Semitic people called the Hyksos, with their capital in Avaris, not far from biblical Goshen.  Because the Israelites were also a Semitic people, the almost certainly flourished under Hyksos rule.  This period is known as the Second Intermediate Period, and from the Egyptian perspective, it was seen as a period of disunity and disorder.  By about the early 1500s BC, the Egyptian kingdom in Thebes began reunifying the country, defeating the Nubians and then expelling the Hyksos, a process completed by about 1570 under Ahmose, who founded the 18th Dynasty and established Egypt’s New Kingdom.  Because the Israelites were ethnically kin to the Hyksos, they were viewed with suspicion by the Egyptians.  This is the background behind the Bible’s comment, “Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph” (Exod. 1:8 KJV).  It also explains the concern the Egyptians had which motivated them to begin persecuting the Israelites (Exod. 1:9-10); the Hyksos had been expelled, but these Western Semitic peoples were still on Egypt’s borderlands in Canaan, and therefore still a threat.

    Moses, in writing the Pentateuch and giving the Israelites their history, is showing them that their identity as a people is not based on who their ancestors were or the culture they produced or the events they experienced to that point, but solely upon their covenantal relationship with God.  In the covenant God made with Abraham centuries earlier, He told Abraham, “Know certainly that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs and will serve them, and they will afflict them four hundred years.  And also the nation whom they serve I will judge; afterward they shall come out with great possessions” (Gen. 15:13-14).  In Exodus 1:8-14, we not only have a detailed description of the oppression that Israel came to experience, we also can see that God was setting up the situation to bring great glory to Himself by His subsequent deliverance of them.  Israel may have been comfortable in Goshen, but for their time there they were always strangers in a strange land.  Their real home was always in another land, a land where God would dwell with them and where they would worship Him without constraint.  As heirs to the same covenant, the same is true of us as well.

    The covenantal promise God made to Abraham was not simply about the land; that was simply a tangible token for the more significant promise that God was creating a people for Himself.  In God’s initial promise to Abraham He tells Abraham, “Get out of your country, from your family and from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you.  I will make you a great nation; I will bless and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing.  I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:1-3).  In Exodus chapter 1, while the persecution draws our attention because it is more dramatic, three times in this chapter we are told that the people of Israel were multiplying greatly (Exod. 1:7, 12, and 20).  Indeed, the promise to multiply the people was one that had been handed down to God’s people through the generations: to Adam (Gen. 1:28), Noah (Gen. 8:17; 9:1, 7), Abraham (Gen. 17:2, 6; 22:17), Isaac (Gen. 26:4), and Jacob (Gen. 28:14; 35:11; 48:4).  Even in the midst of their suffering, God was at work fulfilling His promise to grow and create a people for Himself.

    Even the account of the Hebrew midwives shows the fulfillment of God’s promises.  This account has long troubled interpreters, since we know that God is a God of truth, who hates lies and falsehoods, and yet He rewards the Hebrew midwives despite the fact that their claim to Pharaoh—that Hebrew women give birth before the midwives arrive—is highly implausible.  It could be true in a technical sense if the midwives deliberately delayed their arrival so as to avoid being present when the babies are born and therefore avoided having to carry out Pharaoh’s edict to kill the male children.  Still, the more significant point is that God rewards those who fear Him and are loyal to Him, and He values justice above all other things for His people.  He promised to bless those who bless His people and curse those who curse them (Gen. 12:3).  God is ever-faithful to His promises and we need to remember that.