NOTHING IS WASTED

[Exodus 2:1-25]

          Introduction to the Scriptures: The story ended last week, you will remember, with the Pharaoh giving the order that every baby boy born to the Israelites would be thrown into the Nile.

[Read Exodus 2:1-25

Prayer for Illumination – Father, in the remainder of this worship time I just pray that you would help us to hear the story you are telling and to recognize our place in the story, to see your truth, to see it powerfully and vividly displayed and to be inspired by it that we might also follow you as Moses and his family and ultimately the people of God in the Old Testament learned to follow you. This is your word and we pray that you would bring it to life for us, in Christ’s name, AMEN.

Message

           In God’s economy, nothing is ever wasted. This is an amazing and true statement. You can see it everywhere. Think about creation itself, water for example. How much water do we have on the earth today, compared with the amount of water we started with? You’re right. Basically we’ve got 100% of the water we started with. Yet water is really busy. It works its way through nearly everything in creation, sustaining life itself. Your own body is roughly 60% water. On its way through the water cycle, it sculpts the land, it nourishes the crops, it moderates the temperatures, it provides essential habitat, and whether it’s flooding or whether you’re in the desert, it all returns ultimately to fall again as precipitation. Nothing is ever wasted. Nothing is wasted.

          Even death is not wasted in God’s creation. Decomposition uses every bit of the fallen object, plant or animal, to renew and sustain life. It’s just how God does things. I did a little research on this by the way, and learned quite a bit about decomposition this week, but you don’t want to hear it.

          But because we know we have a God who doesn’t waste things, it should not surprise us to learn that God does not waste anything in our lives either. Every event, every experience, every encounter, every success, or every failure is used by our sovereign God, like the blows of the sculptor’s mallet and chisel, to shape us into the person He created us to be. Nothing in your life is wasted. God doesn’t work that way. This is simply another way of stating that grand and encouraging truth from Romans 8:28, “And we know that in all things [it’s a universal term] God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” You have God’s word on it.

          Now for this to be true, of course, we need a God who is absolutely sovereign – the very God we met last week who never fails at anything He sets out to do. He can tell us the end from the beginning, as He does through the prophet Isaiah, because He takes everything that happens to every person, every event in history, every natural geological, biological, or physical event, and directs each of them to the accomplishment of His purposes. God wastes nothing.

          Last week we saw His hand directing the whole history of His people – when and where their babies were born, how they dealt with oppression, even intervening in political threats to their well-being, in order to preserve and to multiply them as a people, as He had promised to do. This morning, in the 2^nd chapter, we get to zoom in from that general providence on one particular family – and ultimately on one particular person – whom God is preparing to be a key actor in accomplishing His purposes with His people.

          By the way, before we even begin, it is worth noting that the family or tribe introduced to us here is the family of Levi. Now if you were reading through the Bible, the last thing you heard about the family of Levi at the end of Genesis was a curse that, because of a crime which Levi and his brother had committed, their offspring would be scattered or dispersed throughout the tribes of Israel. It was a curse. But in part because of what is about to happen in this chapter, Levi’s family were called to be priests, and therefore they were indeed scattered throughout Israel, but for the best of purposes. Remember, God never wastes anything, not even a curse! He can use it for good.

          So the chapter begins, “Now a man of the house of Levi married a Levite woman, and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son.” Now normally this would be very good news. It’s the way a good story should start, an indication of God’s blessing. But you will remember as the last chapter ended that the Pharaoh, feeling threatened by the rapid growth of this slave population, had just ordered that every boy born to a Hebrew slave was to be thrown into the Nile River. So their celebration is certainly tempered by this threat, and for the first 3 months of his life, his family tries to keep him hidden. You can’t do that forever, however.

          Our text says he was a “fine child.” I don’t know if that means he seemed to them particularly healthy or alert; that would be good when life is tenuous. I suspect parents then, as now, always considered their own children to be well above average. Maybe that’s what they were thinking – like all the children in Lake Wobegon. But when the story is retold in the New Testament, in Acts 7, the Greek text tells us that this was God’s evaluation of this child. So, I don’t know, maybe somehow God revealed to the child’s parents that they were to take special precautions to protect him against the threat.

          As we said, however, a three-month old baby cannot be hidden very long. His cries would be too loud, especially in a hot, open neighborhood where you can hear everything for blocks. So his mother makes a papyrus basket, coats it in pitch to make it watertight, and floats the tiny ark in the shallow backwaters of the Nile River, where the current is not flowing, among tall reeds which would both shield him from sight, and from the hot sun. Incidentally, I don’t know that the Egyptian officials would have been impressed but, if you’re paying attention here, technically she had obeyed the letter, if not the spirit, of the law. She had taken her baby boy and put him in the Nile River, as the Pharaoh had ordered! He didn’t mention anything about the basket, but . . .

          By the way, I used the word “ark” just now to describe the little papyrus boat. And in fact, this is the only other place in the Old Testament, besides the story of Noah and the famous ark, where this word is used. One might begin to think, knowing our sovereign God, that this connection is more than coincidental. The parallels seem obvious enough. The ark becomes the vehicle of salvation for His children in the face of a threat to their very lives.

          You and I may wish at times for such a miraculous intervention in the face of threats to our well-being. In light of this, you should be encouraged by the apostle Peter’s words in the New Testament. Speaking in chapter 3 of his first letter about Noah and that ark, he explains, “In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through the water, and this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also.” Ahh, we’re included. He goes on to explain, “It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at God’s right hand” with all powers subject to Him.

          I told you at the outset of this study that we would find the whole New Testament story of salvation revealed within it. Well, here is our first example. God intends to deliver all His children from the threat of death. You may not have thought of this before, but every baptism is a re-enactment of the baby Moses, placed in an ark to ferry him from death to life. Knowing how this story ends, that should be very reassuring to us as we approach baptism and see God’s promise in it, the God who always keeps His promises.

          So we continue to follow the story of how this vulnerable child is protected by God’s sovereign hand. In verse 4 we find that his older sister, Miriam, was posted nearby to see what would happen – to kind of watch out and help out if she could. By the way, if you are worried about crocodiles (I would have been), most scholars do not believe there were any this far north in the delta at this time. In any case, they would prefer an open area and deeper water. No, the threat is from the pharaoh’s officials, and those who felt compelled to do his bidding.

          And, wouldn’t you know it, just when the baby wouldn’t stop crying, one of Pharaoh’s daughters, no less, along with her attendants, comes down to this very spot along the river to bathe. There has been some discussion among scholars as to whether a princess would be bathing in the river like a common woman. But the Nile was considered sacred, and she may have been coming for a ritual bath.

          However it was, my thought as the story unfolds (and I can remember thinking this when I was just a little kid), “Oh, no! The timing couldn’t be worse.” As it worked out, however, one might observe that the timing couldn’t have been better. I’m beginning to think Moses’ mother, we learn later that her name is Jochebed, was a rather shrewd woman. It seems very likely to me that she knew where and when the princess came to bathe, and she knew about young girls, and she kind of thought they might be a little more sympathetic to this than their father. And that is exactly what happened. They hear the baby crying, they see the little basket floating among the reeds, she sends one of her girls to bring it in, and when they open the basket, they recognize the child as one of the Hebrew babies. And they are immediately caught up in sympathy for the little boy’s fate.

          At this point, the older sister Miriam, age 7 or 8, meanders up and after listening to the conversation says, “[I can help here.] Shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you?” Whether this was her own idea, which it may well have been, or her mother’s suggestion, she carries it off perfectly – showing some of the wisdom and courage which would later equip her to be the first woman to share the leadership of God’s people in a highly patriarchal society. She’s quite a lady!

          The princess agrees, and Miriam slips away and of course brings the baby’s mother. The princess, likely in a tone calculated to impress the slave woman with her authority and position says, “Take this baby and nurse him for me, and I will pay you.” Well, what can you say in the face of such an order from the king’s daughter? So Moses’ mother, no doubt deferentially, agrees to take on this responsibility on the princess’s behalf – Yes, I can do that for you. The agreement is witnessed, and the women return to their royal residence, and she takes the baby back home. Is this cool or what? The way God works? I love it. She gets her own baby back; not only that, his protection and future are now assured by authority of the daughter of the Pharaoh himself, and Moses’ Mom no doubt got paid handsomely for her services to the princess. God’s sovereign fingerprints are all over this story of the preservation of this vulnerable child.

          Ah, but this is only the tip of the iceberg – or perhaps I should say the tip of the pyramid. His mother not only nurses him as an infant, but she continues to care for him through those early formative years which every psychologist today will tell you are so critical to a child’s development. She gets her little boy back for that whole time. During these early years, the deepest impressions about life and the fundamental character of a person are formed. This will be both formal and informal as the child is loved and disciplined, and as he sees fundamental values lived out in his parents as well as receives their education. Of course he will also become fluent in the Hebrew language spoken by his parents, which would not have been true in the court of the king, you can believe. Throughout their history, the Hebrews essentially “home-schooled” their children. They knew how to do this. They taught him not only the language but their history, their culture, their faith, their values – she gets to teach him the whole thing.

          This, by the way, is precisely what is meant by that often-quoted proverb about training up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it. We like to take that as a little guarantee, but it is not a guarantee that no well-trained child would ever get in trouble. It’s not a guarantee that no-well trained child would ever rebel against the values of his parents, or mess up his life. It was a simple acknowledgment of what psychology today acknowledges, that these early years are the greatest single influence on the direction of a person’s life – “Train up a child in the way he should go.” [Proverbs 22:6] and that will form him for life. Not everyone in our culture today needs to choose “home-schooling.” It depends on the options available. But without question, every Christian parent needs to take extremely seriously their responsibility to “train up a child” in the fundamental Christian faith and values we know to be true. That is our commission from God as a parent, and God will certainly hold us accountable for this.

          It is, I believe, flagrantly irresponsible and a mis-carriage of God’s commissioning of parents to say, as I have heard many parents say, “Oh, we don’t want to force our kids to come to church or do things they don’t really want to do. They can make up their own minds about all this.” In the first place, never fear, our children are always eventually going to make up their own minds. Whatever you do, they are still going to make up their own minds. But make up their minds about what, if you have not taught them about the Christian faith, if they haven’t seen it demonstrated in your life? What are they making up their mind about? And, by the way, would you say the same about letting them learn for themselves whether it was safe to play in traffic, (would you send your 2-year old out into the street?), or whether it was safe to experiment with drugs or live reckless and promiscuous lives? Any number of things. Would you let them do that all on their own? Don’t you try to pass along your values to your children in some way? We have an enormous and critical responsibility to the Lord on behalf of our children. We had better be taking it seriously.

          By the way, you are teaching them whether you want to or not, whether you are aware of it or not. If you say, “we don’t really care whether you come and participate in worship or not,” you are teaching them something. You are teaching them that they are free to disobey God’s first commandment, and that a relationship with Him – which He says is the most important thing in the world – is really not important in your estimation. That’s what you’re teaching them, and they’ll learn it. If you say, “Oh well, I think we’ll skip the opportunity to get to the very heart of the Christian faith, that possibly life-transforming time of focusing in Confirmation class, for example, because, you know, it takes an hour of sports every week,” you are saying as clearly as you can say that sports are far more important than your relationship to God. Is that really what you want to say? Don’t be surprised if your children learn the lessons you teach them.

          In any case, Moses’ parents did not miss the opportunity, and Moses grew up learning about God, with a deep-rooted sense of the issues his people were facing, and of the covenant promises which God had made to their ancestors – a powerful and far-reaching covenant that would change the course of history itself and is continuing to change it today. But he would have known none of this if his parents had failed when God gave them the opportunity to lay that foundation for their child’s life.

          So we see God’s hand here as well, not only in saving Moses’ life, that first obvious thing, but in giving him a deep and comprehensive knowledge of his Hebrew roots, of his people, and of their relationship to the Living God. All this was critical for Moses to know and understand if he was to be the leader of the Hebrew people at this critical time.

          At the same time, God was at work on another side of Moses’ preparation for his unique calling, for after immersing him in this essential cultural and spiritual formation, his mother eventually had to return him to his adoptive mother, the princess in the royal court. And of course now a whole new phase of Moses’ education begins. Working from this strong foundation, he now finds himself exposed to the prevailing Egyptian culture of his day – a culture striving to operate on an entirely different set of principles than he had learned at home.

          Now you don’t want to give up your kids for that, but somewhere along the line that’s the whole point – that they go with that foundation you’ve given to come to understand something about the world into which God is sending them. So here is Moses, as a young man, given an extraordinary opportunity actually to receive an elite education, far beyond anything a slave might have dreamed of. Now he is going to learn the Egyptian language, and their culture and their history. Now he will become familiar with Egyptian ways of thinking, their philosophy of life, and their world and life view; he’s going to learn what they learn, mathematics, agronomy, whatever it is, and as the son of a princess, he’s going to become comfortable with Egyptian channels of power. Wow, God is at work on that side of his education as well, isn’t He? When Stephen retells Moses’ story in Acts 7 he says, “Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action.” He knew how to operate now in that alien culture of the Egyptians, to operate out of the foundation of his Hebrew faith.

          Once again we see the irony as the pharaoh who tried to take Moses’ life finds himself instead paying for Moses’ education and providing at his own expense all the experience Moses will need later on to confront the Pharaoh himself and set his slaves free. The Pharaoh may be the most powerful man in the world at the moment, but he is no match for our sovereign God.

          I might make one further observation here about Moses’ exposure to the prevailing Egyptian culture as it relates to us. I do not think Christians will be most effective in our calling if we continually retreat, as we are so often inclined to do, into our little Christian ghettos. It’s comfortable there, but that is not where God has called us. Like Moses, we certainly need a solid Christian foundation, we need to be nurtured in our home and in our church. But if our calling is to bring God’s transforming power to the world, sooner or later we have to wade in and begin to apply our values in a contrary and perhaps even a hostile culture. And to be effective at this, we need to know and understand that culture. Otherwise anything we say or do will be naive and seem irrelevant to the world around us. We cannot fulfill the Great Commission if we only talk to each other. We cannot be effective as the salt of the earth if we don’t get out of the salt-shaker. That is part of our challenge.

          Moses, by the way, even got an Egyptian name out of the deal. Verse 10 tells us the princess got to name him, and while we think of Moses (or Moshe as you would say it there) as a Hebrew name, in fact it is the Egyptian word for “child” or “offspring,” and usually it went along with the name of a god. We see it as the ending in the names of some of the pharaohs like Ahmose or Thutmose, identifying them as the offspring of particular Egyptian gods. The well-known pharaoh Rameses, who may have been the pharaoh at the time of the Exodus, has a slightly different word in his name which means not “offspring of Ra” (the sun god), but “fashioned by Ra” (the sun god). Some combination of the sun god’s name probably would have been quite a popular name at the time, and a foundling like Moses would probably get a name like Ramose. There’s a pretty good chance that’s his name, or maybe Hepmose which means “offspring of the river,” because she said, After all I pulled him out of the river. In any case the Hebrews would have considered that profane, and would have dropped the name of the god, Ra or Hep, leaving him with the suffix Mose, or Moshe.

          In any case, God has been working hard to shape our hero, hasn’t He? And he even has credibility because of his name in this culture. We do not have time to go into that much detail about the final incidents in our text this morning, but you are seeing God’s hand at work. He takes this man, founded in the Hebrew culture, exposed to the Egyptian culture, and now in verses 11-15 we are introduced to the next significant chapter in Moses’ life. A few weeks back we heard our missionary Dave Calloway comment about how people cannot decide if he is American or Bolivian, since he was born to American parents living in Bolivia, and he was raised in Bolivia. He is married to a Bolivian woman, his kids can’t even speak English, so is he American or Bolivian? I think Moses had a similar identity crisis. He has been raised as a son in a privileged Egyptian royal family, but his roots are certainly Hebrew. That’s where his value system comes from. In his soul he identifies with his own people.

          So that is what introduces this next phase, bringing these two culture together. When he goes out to see how his people are doing, he sees one of them being abused, and he intervenes, killing an Egyptian taskmaster. Not aware that he has been observed, the next day he tries to intervene in a dispute between two of his fellow Hebrews. But the man who had instigated the dispute threatens to call him on his criminal action from the day before. Moses is terrified, and he flees the country into the wilderness. He’s got to get out of town, so Moses has an early exodus. It is worth noting that Moses was moved by a commendable instinct for justice, but we would have to agree that he certainly did not exercise very good judgment. God has a lot of work to do with Moses yet. He’s making progress, but there’s work to be done before he will be ready for the job God has called him to do.

          The book of Acts tells us he was 40 years old when this event happened. That’s probably rounded off. Forty was an ideal number for the Hebrews. We read about 40-day fasts, we read about Jesus being tempted for 40 days in the wilderness, there were 40 days from his resurrection to the ascension. The Israelites would be 40 years in the wilderness, Moses would go 40 days on Mt. Sinai. You may not have noticed, but both David and Solomon at the climax of the golden age of Israel, had 40-year reigns. So it is a significant number. It is telling us something in a symbolic way. One of the things I find interesting here however is that the Bible divides Moses’ life up into three 40 year periods. He lived to be an old man and was vigorous to the end. He spent the first 40 years receiving his formal training and education. Now he is about to spend the next 40 years of his life in the wilderness as a fugitive from justice.

          There is a very fascinating revelation of Moses’ character here, because even physically and emotionally spent as he was, and alone as a fugitive in the land of Midian, the very first thing he does when he gets out there – you’d think he might have learned something – is to intervene, once again with that pesky sense of justice, in yet a third dispute. He comes to the rescue of seven young sisters who are being harassed by shepherds at a well. This final intervention works out a bit better for him, because the girls’ father is impressed and hires him to shepherd his own flocks. Moses eventually marries the man’s oldest daughter and starts a family. So here is another phase of his life, and it’s shaping Moses as well.

          Incidentally, I have to throw this in. It’s a footnote, but Moses’ wife Zipporah was apparently way ahead of her time. You probably didn’t notice this. Her name, the name of a bird, means “twitterer.” (If you thought “twittering” was a 21^st century thing, she was there way before we were!)

          I don’t think that’s exactly the point here, however. The most important thing to notice is that Moses spends these next 40 years moving around . . . where? In the wilderness, the desert to the east of Egypt. The Midianites were a nomadic people, distantly related to the Jews in Egypt, and Moses would have spent decades traveling throughout the land which would later become the escape route for the Israelites when they left Egypt. God says, You don’t know this yet, but you need a little further experience here, a little exposure to the wilderness. During that long sojourn, he would have learned the terrain well. He would have traveled all over the area the Midianites did. He would have learned all the major and minor trade routes. He would have learned where the wells and springs could be found, where he would be most likely to encounter hostile enemies, and where there would be enough vegetation to graze their herds. He would have learned what was edible in that sparse land, what building materials might be scavenged from the desert, what weather patterns he would have to cope with; in short, he would learn everything one needed to know to be a survivor in the wilderness. Well where is he ever going to use that experience?

          You know the story. I think God’s sovereign hand is becoming clear. Have you noticed that nothing has been wasted in Moses’ life? Is that great? I remember Dr. Paul Brand talking about his childhood in India, his formal education in England, his initial rejection of the field of medicine and his excursion into carpentry and woodworking, then of his eventual return to medicine with a focus on leprosy, chiding himself for the adolescent side-roads he had taken which seemed to be wasted now, only to find that those skills not only allowed him to reconstruct other people’s hands (that kind of surgery is medical carpentry), but he had the skills to set up a workshop for those recovered patients so they could learn a trade and re-enter society as productive members and not as beggars. It was a profound lesson, as Dr. Brand tells it, as he looked back on his life and realized that nothing had been wasted. Everything had shaped him for his unique role in God’s plan.

          And of course that is what God has been doing with Moses as our story concludes. Not only is he steeped in his Hebrew faith, but he fully understands Egyptian culture, and now he is an expert on wilderness survival. How could he have been better prepared to lead the children of Israel out of Egypt and through the wilderness to the Promised Land? I think God’s been at work.

          I know not everything will have a direct parallel, but it is perhaps not coincidental that Moses spends approximately 1/3 of his life getting his formal education and training, 1/3 of his life gaining broad experience in the real world, and the final 1/3 being really productive as leader. Each stage was important. He had something of value to contribute at every stage, but if nothing is wasted, we are not surprised that his greatest contributions came after he had learned his greatest lessons. There might even be a place in our society for old people. There are old fools I know, but there might be some place for some old wisdom. Moses was smart and capable, but he needed some lessons in humility before he could be effective. I’m afraid that is likely on the curriculum for anybody God really intends to use.

          What I want to be sure all of us see this morning is that God has no intention of wasting anything in your life. That is the story today. When God calls you into a relationship with himself, He sets about using everything in your life to shape you precisely for making the contribution you are uniquely qualified to do.

          It’s not that you will always see this, or recognize God’s sovereign hand in your life. Moses didn’t seem to see it as it was happening. But it is the way God reveals that He works, and for our part we need simply to be listening and responsive, responding to the opportunities, and letting ourselves be malleable in His hands, because those sovereign hands are shaping us. That is the central lesson here. The chapter ends anticipating what is to come, giving us a quick glance ahead so we can begin to think what comes next in this story. And it is a reassurance that God is paying attention. In the last two verses, God is paying attention whether they are, (or whether we are) or not. Things are not going well for the Israelites, and to make matters worse, a lot of time has gone by and they seem to have little evidence of His promised deliverance. They are not sure that God has not forgotten them, if He exists at all. But God says, Oh no. I’ve got my plan. And I’m working my plan. I’m paying attention. I’ve not missed a step. There is a purpose in everything I do, God says, and I will accomplish my purpose.

          With verses 24-25 the chapter ends and tells us four wonderful things about God. They are in your bulletin. He hears. We know a God who hears. He hears their prayers. He remembers. He remembers His promises to them – I make promises and I forget. God doesn’t forget: I made a promise and I’m going to do it. He sees. He sees the predicament they are in, and, finally, He cares. He cares deeply about them, and you had better believe He’s going to do something about it. Nothing will be wasted, and no stone left unturned in God’s commitment to deliver His people. In the words of Isaiah 49:15-16, "Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne?” We have just seen a mom’s compassion with Moses’ mother, haven’t we? “Though she may forget [God says], I will not forget you! See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.”

          Will you go away from here today believing what God has said, that He has your name engraved on the palms of His hands? He’s not going to forget. Everything He is doing in your life is to shape you for the plan He had for you from day One.

Closing prayer – Father, what a great story. I love it. And it’s not just a story. It’s what happened; it’s history. Through your sovereignty you’ve been accomplishing your will and purpose again and again and again down through centuries and millennia, and you are still at work today in us. You have a plan, and you are working it out in your perfect time table. You let a whole lot of us in because you didn’t quit a century or a millennia ago. We are glad we get to be a part of it. We don’t know how long it is to the end, but we want to be malleable in your hands that we might have a place also in your story. May we recognize your sovereign hand. May we trust your sovereign hand, and may we be shaped by that sovereign hand. We pray in Jesus’ name, AMEN.