What we heard in our Bible
reading this morning was just a small part of a much larger story. Last week, we talked about the story of
Moses’ birth and what happened to him as a baby. Well, now Moses is all grown up. Lots of stuff has happened to him along the
way, and we’ll talk about some of it in a little while.
The result of all the things that have happened to Moses
is that he is now the leader of the people of Israel. The people of Israel are still living in
Egypt, just as they were when Moses was a baby.
Basically, they’re slaves there.
And Moses is going to confront the mighty and powerful Pharaoh and
convince him to let the people of Israel go.
Moses was pretty scared about doing this. He had thrown every excuse he could think of
at God to convince God to have someone else do it. But God did not accept Moses’ excuses, and
now here Moses is. And with God’s help,
Moses makes all kinds of things happen to try to convince Pharaoh to let the
people of Israel go.
We did not cover all of them in our reading for
today. We just covered a couple that
happened at the Nile River, in keeping with our “Let’s Go to the River” sermon
series theme. So I just want to go
through all these things quickly so we realize everything Moses did, again with
God’s help of course. He threw down his
staff and it became a snake. He changed
the water of the Nile into blood. He
made a plague of frogs come out of the Nile.
He brought about a plague of gnats.
He brought about a plague of flies.
He caused the death of the livestock of the Egyptians. He caused huge boils to appear on all the
people. He brought about a huge
hailstorm. He caused a plague of
locusts. He caused darkness to cover the
land for three days. Finally, he caused
every first born son of Egypt to die.
That last one
is what caused Pharaoh to let the people of Israel go. But if you know the story, you know there’s
still more to it. After letting the
people of Israel go, Pharaoh changed his mind and sent the army after
them. At that point Moses, again with
God’s help, parted the Red Sea so Israel could cross it safely, and then had it
come back together again to wipe out Pharaoh’s army and finally set Israel
free.
Now, again, it
was only with the help of God that Moses could do these things. The power belonged to God, not to Moses. We know that, and of course Moses knew it,
too. But I want to look at this from
Moses’ perspective.
If you’ve
never read the first several chapters of Exodus, or if it’s been a while and
you don’t remember them very well, you really should read them, because Moses
really had a roller-coaster life. He had
all kinds of ups and downs. He started
out, as you heard last week, under a threat of death when he was still a
baby. But he grew up in the court of the
Pharaoh, surrounded by all kinds of wealth and privilege. But then he had to go on the run to avoid a
charge of murder. He went to live in
another country, got married, had kids, and was working as a shepherd for his
father-in-law. That’s where he was when
God called him to be the leader of the people of Israel.
So imagine
you’re Moses. You started with
nothing. Then you had everything. Then you had nothing again. And now, finally, your life seems to be in
order. You have a family. You have stability. You’re an ordinary guy, living an ordinary
life, and you’re pretty much okay with that.
And then God tells you to go back to Egypt, back to the place you ran
away from, and confront the most powerful man in the world, the Pharaoh.
You’d be
scared to death, right? And Moses
was. Again, he came up with every excuse
there was to tell God why he should not have to go do this. But now, here he is, standing in front of the
Pharaoh. And all of a sudden, he’s able
to do all kinds of things. He’s able to
change things into other things. He’s
able to create things out of nothing. He
has power over light and darkness. He
even has the power to cause death. Here
he is, this ordinary guy who not long ago just wanted to be left alone to raise
his family and live his life in peace, and now he’s defeating the mighty and
powerful Pharaoh. And we’re told that,
at the end of all this, “the people feared the Lord and put their trust in him
and in Moses his servant”.
How would that
feel, do you think? How would that feel,
to have that kind of power? How would
that feel, to be able to do things that no other person could do? How would that feel, to literally have the
power of God coursing through you? How
would that feel, to have started out as a nobody and now have all the people of
the nation putting their trust in you?
Maybe your
answer is different from mine. But it
seems to me that it would be really easy, in that position, to let all this
stuff go to your head. I mean, yes, you
know God is the one behind it all, but hey, I’m still the one out there
actually doing it. I must be pretty
awesome. And besides, even granting that
God is the one really doing it, God chose to do it all the through me. God is using me to do all this. God has given me the power to do all
this. I must be a pretty big deal. I mean, out of all the people in the world
God could’ve chosen to do this, God chose me.
I must be pretty darn special, to be the one God chose to get this power. I must be the most incredible person that
ever lived.
Now, we don’t
have any indication that Moses actually felt that way. In fact, in Numbers, Moses is described as
being the most humble man on earth. And
maybe that’s one of the reasons God chose him, because it had to be
tempting. It had to be tempting for
Moses start giving himself the credit for freeing the people of Israel, rather
than giving that credit to God.
I know it’s
sure tempting for me. Is it for
you? Whenever something goes right, it’s
really easy for me to think “I did that” instead of thinking “God did
that”. And it seems like the harder it
is to do something, and the longer the odds are, the more I want to take credit
if things go right.
It seems like
it should be the other way around, right?
I mean, logically, the more unlikely it is that things should’ve gone
right, the more likely it is that God must’ve done something to make them go
right. But too often, we don’t seem to
see it that way.
Now, when it
comes to things going wrong, that’s a whole different subject. I’m more than willing to blame God when
things go wrong. I’m ready to ask why
God did this or that when things go wrong.
But when they go right, then we want to take the credit. And again, the more unlikely it is that
things would go right, the more credit we want to take.
Now, two
things here. One, there’s nothing wrong
with feeling good about yourself when you accomplish something. We all need to take a certain amount of pride
in what we do. We need to have a certain
level of self-esteem. As long as we
don’t carry it too far, that’s fine.
And the second
thing is, what I’m talking about here is how we feel inside. It’s easy to say humble words. We can all do that. We can all put on this false humility and
pretend we don’t think we deserve credit.
But if inside we still think it was us who did it, rather than God, we
have a problem.
And it is a
problem. One of the themes that comes up
in the Bible over and over again is the sin of arrogance. It’s one of the things that got Pharaoh in
trouble. Think about what would’ve
happened if Pharaoh had let the people of Israel go when Moses first
asked. Think of all the trouble he’d
have saved himself and the entire nation.
Think of all the lives he’d have saved.
But instead, Pharaoh’s arrogance kept him from letting the people of
Israel go. And it led to all these
terrible things happening.
Arrogance can
lead to terrible things happening for us, too.
We probably won’t have a plague of frogs. But arrogance, thinking we can do things on
our own instead of relying on God, can lead us to make all kinds of mistakes
and get into all kinds of trouble.
So what can we
do about it? As it so often does, it
comes down to prayer. It comes down to
staying as close to God as possible. It
comes down to trusting God and having faith.
It comes down to asking the Holy Spirit to come into our hearts and into
our lives. It comes down to putting our
lives in God’s hands, rather than taking control for ourselves.
I don’t know
how often you pray, and I don’t know what you pray for. But I know that I need to pray every day, and
one of the things I pray for every day is for God to forgive me for my
arrogance. I know I need that
forgiveness. And I don’t think I’m the
only one.
Moses
accomplished amazing things, but he could only do them because God was with
him. You and I can accomplish amazing
things, but we can only do them because God is with us. Let’s pray, and keep praying. Pray that God will keep us humble, the way
Moses was humble. Pray that we won’t
just say humble words, but that we actually will have humble hearts. Pray that God’s Spirit will come into us, so
that we will know, feel, and believe that God deserves the credit for every
good thing that happens.
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