Exodus 4:18-26

Hey friends, thanks for joining us on Monday as we continue through Exodus.
We are about halfway
through the fourth chapter,
some strange ground today,
perhaps.
I think we’ll probably get there.
Just to recap where we’ve been,
Moses has been given a task by God.
He’s tried to talk his way
out of it unsuccessfully.
God has finally kind of had enough,
and the last thing we looked at,
God essentially says, “Look, Moses,
you’re doing this.
I’ll send your brother Aaron with you,
the Levite, the priest.
He’ll help you,
but this isn’t negotiable.
You’re doing it.” And so now we have Moses having been called to return to Egypt,
and we now get an overview of
that part of the journey.
And there is in this text a very strange detour that nobody has fully
explained, but we’ll talk about it when we get there.
So verse 18 here,
“Moses went back to his
father-in-law, Jethro, and said to him,
‘Please let me go back to my kindred in Egypt and see
whether they’re still living.’ And Jethro said,
‘Go in peace.’ The Lord said to Moses in Midian,
‘Go back to Egypt,
for those who sought your life are dead.’ So Moses took his wife and his sons,
put them on a donkey,
and went back to the land of Egypt.
And Moses carried the staff of God in his hand.
And the Lord said to Moses,
‘When you go back to Egypt,
see that you’ve performed before
Pharaoh the wonders I’ve put in your power,
but I will harden his heart so that he will not let the people go.
Then you shall say to Pharaoh,
‘Thus says the Lord,
Israel, my firstborn son, I said to you,
let my son go,
that he may worship me,
but you refused to let him go.
Now I will kill your
firstborn.’ So in general here,
a moment of reckoning with the father-in-law,
‘Please let me go,’ and he says,
‘Go in peace, a blessing upon him.’ We’ve seen that kind of thing in Genesis,
but here it’s a moment where Moses’ father-in-law wishes him well.
It’s a blessing of sorts.
Moses does exactly that.
He takes his wife,
his sons, and they head back to Egypt.
And then God gives him a foreshadowing of what will come.
And this is one of those themes through Exodus
Michael that is prominent,
not easy to understand,
difficult to process at times.
But God warns him
that you will go and do these things,
but I will harden the Pharaoh’s heart.
And what’s fascinating about this is that we understand that the Pharaoh is probably a man of power.
He’s probably a stubborn
man.
He may even be a man who believes the hype of his own divinity.
And yet,
in the book of Exodus,
so convinced is it
that ultimately God exercises power,
that the Pharaoh is not even given credit
for his own actions.
So above the Pharaoh’s power is the power of God that God even takes credit
for the hardening.
I will harden his heart.
I am going to make an example of him.
I am going to punish him.
They attacked my son Israel by killing children,
and I am going to respond to
that.
And there’s a foreshadowing in that,
Michael, but I think this phrase hardened his heart.
This is going to occur dozens of times,
and we need to probably come to terms with it as we go through the narrative.
It is particularly important in the book of Exodus.
It’s also somewhat universally
important as this phrase appears throughout the Bible and other places.
And the idea that we
transitioned from Moses being given these signs,
which by the way I might remind you was for the
people of Israel.
The idea was, what do I tell the people if they don’t believe me?
God gives him the staff,
you remember the serpent,
and then the leprosy,
and then the blood, right?
These three
signs being the things that Moses has given.
Now we’re told that these signs will be used as a way
to show Pharaoh that there is a power far greater than Pharaoh at the negotiating table.
What is interesting,
I think,
is we do see a foreshadowing with the reference to the sun of what is going to
happen in the ten plagues.
We know that if we know sort of our children’s Bible,
we know that this is one of the stories of Exodus,
but I think this story is also in some ways backward looking.
In that,
it points out to us the realization or the recognition that the atrocities being done
at the hands of the Egyptian people to the Israelites
is so great that they have chosen to
kill their sons is once again justification for what claim is this foreshadowing of what will be, right?
So in some ways,
the book is setting up the ramp
that will ultimately lead to one of the
greatest signs of judgment in the Old Testament.
I mean, you shouldn’t rank judgment worse or less,
but certainly the cost that is going to be required of the Egyptian people is going to be substantial and significant.
And so I just think we’re in a moment here in the text where we’ve
transitioned out of that revelation narrative and we’re moving into the actual transition and
movement into Egypt where Moses, the reluctant leader,
finds himself caught between the Lord
of Egypt and the Lord of Israel.
And we, the reader, are going along with this on the journey of the story.
I think there may be also,
Michael, a kind of cultural disconnect here in that,
you know,
we are kind of steeped in the idea of
maybe fairness,
the idea of
I don’t want to say accountability because certainly we don’t have any mechanism by which
to hold God accountable.
But the idea,
you know, there is throughout the narrative of the Old
Testament, there are moments where it says the people harden their hearts.
The prophets tell the people, “Don’t harden your hearts.” Here,
God says, “I will harden the Pharaoh’s heart.” In other Egypt’s harm, essentially,
to their discredit.
And perhaps that seems strong to us,
perhaps that seems “unfair” to us.
But understand that this is the Israelite family story and it’s written
against the man who tried to enslave them and who tried to eradicate them and who had their children
put to death.
And so there is no sympathy.
We may feel some measure of compassion for the Pharaoh.
That’s not in this book.
That’s simply not
one of the markers of the way this story is told.
The Pharaoh deserves and Egypt deserves whatever they get.
And so if that seems harsh,
certainly understand it,
but it simply is a part of the story.
And I think we have to accept that if
we’re going to enter the text.
It seems rough and it is,
but it is a roughness that is embedded
in the way this story is told.
Yeah, let’s not miss here,
Clint, that we’re told in verse 21 that the Lord’s going to harden
Pharaoh’s heart.
You spent some time talking about that.
Then look here at the end of verse 23,
saying to Pharaoh,
“You refuse to let the son go.
Now I will kill,
I being God, will kill your firstborn son.”
We have even here in the narrative this idea that God is predicting the refusal,
that God is going to harden the heart,
and God is saying to Moses,
“You’re going to give these
signs and it’s not going to work.” And so there’s really no surprise in this text.
And there’s a beautiful art in biblical storytelling that is somewhat counteractive or it’s against our modern storytelling techniques.
We like to save things,
sort of surprises as we go along the
story.
We like to have little gotchas and like,
“Oh, I didn’t see that coming,” moments.
But here,
because this story is about God,
this is not about Moses,
it’s not about his charisma or ability,
because this story is about God.
As we see these details being fleshed out,
the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, hear the absolute acceptance.
No,
he’s going to refuse to let the people go.
The point isn’t for us to be surprised later down the road.
The point is for us to know
that God had this as part of the plan,
that God’s not surprised by this,
that God is Lord, regardless of Pharaoh’s attempts to squirrel away or to use his own earthly power.
As a storytelling device,
because this is fixated on us seeing what God is doing,
the story is told in a way that really,
from the start, tells us what’s going to happen.
And we might not find that’s incredibly important,
maybe that’s a little dated,
but I think if we understand what’s happening,
I think it’s really interesting.
Yeah, there is, I think, a clear sense here,
Michael, that for the next multiple chapters,
we’re only playing out what God has already dictated and directed is going to be the outcome.
We will explore how we get there,
but where we go is known,
where we end up is already claimed.
Now we get to the curveball.
This is one of the stranger texts,
I think, in Exodus.
If it sounds like a head scratcher,
you’re in good company.
I’m not aware of
too many Bible scholars, maybe or any,
who with confidence say we understand
this story and what it means.
So let me read it for you.
And I don’t know any preacher that stands up on Sunday saying,
“I am excited to preach this text.”
Yeah, this is not probably a popular sermon text.
“On the way,
at a place where they spent the night,
the Lord met him and tried to kill him.
But Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin and touched Moses’ feet with it,
and said, ‘Truly, you are a bridegroom of blood to me.’ So he led him alone.
And it was then, she said,
a bridegroom of blood to me.”
So the relationship between Moses and God has its moments.
There are some interesting things
that we will see in the way they relate to one another positively and to some extent negatively.
However, I don’t think any of it is weirder than this moment, Michael.
We know that circumcision is already a part of the story.
If you were in the Genesis study with us,
you remember there were stories that had to do with circumcision.
So it’s already being practiced.
It is already a mark of God’s people.
If this is perhaps indicating that Moses,
who grew up as an Egyptian and now lives outside of Egypt,
outside of his own people,
is perhaps not circumcised.
Certainly, his son is not circumcised.
It is a very odd
sentence.
The Lord met him and tried to kill him.
Maybe an indication that Moses was taken ill,
that was struck ill.
But for whatever reason,
the text attributes that to God trying to harm Moses, and Zipporah intervenes.
And how she knows how to do this,
the text doesn’t tell us.
It’s one of those moments where we’d love to have about three times the verses we have here.
So we had some explanation,
but it’s a simply told, concise
story.
She circumcises her son
and touches Moses with it.
And I don’t want to get too carried away here,
but understand the Hebrew language, feet often doesn’t mean feet.
And so when she touches Moses with the foreskin,
it’s not on his feet,
it’s on his genitals.
And then she says this thing,
“You’re a bridegroom of blood to me,
so he,” and the he here is God,
“let him alone.” And we are then left to just shrug
our shoulders to some extent,
impressed by Zipporah’s
intervention,
confused by God’s action,
and sort of bewildered by the whole thing.
And Michael, that’s really all I know.
If you have something to add, we’d all love to hear it.
So a couple of things here,
Clint.
One is,
I love it when you turn into a commentary,
and the commentary on a section is pages long and
text is a paragraph.
That always tells you something about it.
It tells you that the scholars
and the people who study this,
some with the precision of one word at a time,
are able to find in this a rich place of questioning.
There’s a lot of perspectives that one can bring to this.
One of the questions that I do think is interesting is why does this story come here?
What are the connections to the story that came before?
And it is interesting that in the story that we led with today,
we have the idea that the Lord is going to take the firstborn sons of Egypt.
Well, here we have the circumcision of a son.
Now, I don’t believe we’re told that it’s a first son,
but it’s a…
Sort of implied, I would guess.
You’ve got the connection of a son at the very least.
And here, you do have the question.
Moses is a
son of Israel, and therefore a son of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob.
And of course, we know because of our study of Genesis that this right of
circumcision is one of the identifying markers of one’s inclusion in the covenant of God.
And so, you know, one way to read this is to say that Moses has failed to live into the fullness
of the covenant that he’s been called into.
Of course, we know that Moses was born in an
Israelite family.
He is of that tribe,
but yet he grew up in Egypt.
And we’ve spoken many times
already in the study that Moses very much lives between two peoples.
He’s a man who doesn’t
perfectly fit in either one.
So for whatever reason,
Moses didn’t have his son circumcised.
And so here,
with absolutely no setup,
with no previous statement of God’s
ill will or frustration or judgment towards Moses,
God comes to commit this,
to kill him, the text says.
And we’re left to fill in a lot of blanks there.
Now, is that connected to the son?
Maybe it is.
Is there a way in which here we’re discovering some text which to its original
readers would have had significance for the priesthood and for the understanding of the
nation of Israel?
I mean, some of that may be in it.
So yeah, I’m sorry.
If this sounds like
rambling, it’s because I’m trying to feel that I think that there’s a mosaic of possibilities here,
Clint, and it would take you engaging with some scholars who are going to have a variety of
opinions and perspectives to really flesh out the options here.
Yeah, and we are always intrigued by the open-ended stories,
the stories that have the most
question marks on them.
I mean, there’s something compelling about it.
Well, even scholars argue about,
and we’ve made an assumption,
but I should tell you,
we’re on the side of some of the scholars
when we say the hymn here that is God is seeking to kill is Moses and not the son who is then
circumcised.
Others suggest that the hymn in question is the son,
and it is the son who is
saved, probably the firstborn,
when his foreskin is touched to his father’s genitals,
his “feet.”
When these kind of texts happen,
people who study the Bible become fascinated because they’re unanswered questions.
And truly, there is the most interest in some of the strangest and
possibly least helpful stories of the Scripture,
and I think this is one of them here.
Having said that, we’ve seen similar moments in Genesis where a leader is tested,
Abraham is tested,
Jacob wrestles with God.
There is a certain seasoning,
a certain proof that is demanded
for those who speak for the Lord,
and perhaps this is Moses’ version of something along those lines.
It is odd without question.
It is not clearly understood,
but perhaps it is just part
of the story and the way in which Moses is being strengthened for the task ahead of him.
Please
don’t feel alarmed if this doesn’t make sense to you.
You stand in a large company.
And I don’t want to speak too candidly,
Clint,
and I don’t want to be incendiary,
but if someone stood up and said,
“Here’s the authoritative interpretation of this text,” I would be very
quick to change the channel and turn that one off.
And I also would point out that though we may be
drawn to those texts that have bumps that sort of take us by surprise and the meaning isn’t exactly clear,
you know,
those can be fun because we’re reading the biblical text and suddenly we’re
like, “Whoa, where’d that come from?” I would also advise you to avoid people who glamorize
texts that are different and who fail to see the overall thread and narrative of the Scriptures.
In other words,
if you just stumbled upon this study because you were interested in this text,
we’re really glad that you’re here.
Unfortunately, we can’t tell you exactly what it means,
and I would advise you that the overall message of Scripture is not going towards the point of this
story.
This is in there,
and it would have meant something to the people who put it there and to
the people who received it,
and maybe someday we’ll have access to that.
But as we stand here today, as modern interpreters,
we see,
yeah, this is probably connected by some
right of passage, some understanding what it means to be in the nation,
to be part of the people,
and what we’re going to jump into tomorrow as we continue on is as if the story went on without this.
And so whatever this is,
it has meaning, and maybe we can find some connections,
but don’t write a whole theology on this because it’s not going to take you anywhere that you want
to go.
As modern readers, one of the frustrating consistencies of the Scripture is that whenever it leads us to
the question, “Why would God do that?” it almost never answers.
God has the freedom and power to do as God will,
particularly in the Old Testament,
but I would argue in the whole of Scripture, and
the Scripture doesn’t feel compelled to explain that,
to justify that, or to in some
times even acknowledge it.
And if God does it,
God does it, and we live with it.
And to some extent,
that kind of reverence and awe hangs over a text like this,
and the Bible doesn’t feel compelled
to try and make it make sense.
It simply tells us the story.
Yeah, I don’t want to draw this out,
but if you watched any of the ceremonial
transition things that happened not long before this study was recorded,
the Queen of England died, and there weren’t
traditions like this per se,
but there’s some odd ones in there,
some really, really odd ones that only make sense to British people and their royal transition.
There’s ancient thousands of years of history here, right?
And there are traditions that can be called upon from the text
that we just don’t have part of our culture.
So before you start decrying and saying,
“Well, look at how horrible and backwards and violent this is,” you have to recognize that we’re separated by time,
by culture,
by tradition,
by even a sense of what it means to be community
and family.
There’s a lot of things happening here,
so don’t write off Scripture because of
the places where Scripture takes turns that we didn’t know where it was going.
No, it is nice to be reminded that we do not have it all figured out,
and these texts are suitable reminders of that.
That said, hope that there’s been something interesting or maybe at least something that
raises a question for you that you can explore later.
Glad that you’d be with us here today.
We will see you tomorrow.
Thanks, everybody.