WE shall now look at the varied exercises which Moses passes through in fulfilling his service. We have looked at those which qualified him for service; but the servant of God needs a continuance of discipline to keep him ever and anon in dependence on God. With Moses this new order of discipline commences very early, indeed, we may say immediately on his entrance into the path of service.
Accompanied by Aaron he presents himself to Pharaoh, and announces God's summons to let His people go; but not only does Pharaoh refuse to comply, but he increases the burdens of the people in consequence of the demand. Here, then, was a disheartening commencement to a servant in his novitiate, after making a just appeal, and conscious that his message was from God. All it seems to effect is an open disavowal of God's rights, and an augmentation of the people's sorrows. Nor was this all. The people themselves do not hesitate to reproach him, as the cause of their increased troubles; the more sad and severe to him, doubtless, were these upbraidings, because they came from the very people whom he desired to serve. What can he do in such a strait? He returns to the Lord, and in bitterness or spirit refers the difficulty and discouragement to Him, the consequence of which is, that another page of instruction is opened to him. This was a moment for that peculiar discipline in a servant's life which, when effective, enables him to pursue his service independent of results. The general tendency is to judge service efficient if the results are satisfactory, and vice versa; but the real servant must keep his eye only on his Master's word and leave the result to Him. Our Lord, when He felt that his word and works were in vain, so that He reproached the cities where most of His mighty works were done, turns to the Father and says, “Father, I thank Thee, because Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.”
Moses must learn this self-same spirit, or his service will be characteristic of his own state, i.e., weak and unstable. A man without faith is double-minded, and a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.
The Lord's instructions to him on this point are detailed in Ex. 6. He is there brought into an enlarged knowledge of God, as a preliminary to all further instructions. The more we know of God the easier is it to depend on Him. “Acquaint thyself with God and be at peace;” and the deeper our acquaintance with him, the greater is our calm and steady dependence on Him.
God, as Jehovah, the covenant God, here reveals Himself to Moses, a revelation not made to Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob, for none of them were called into the same line of service, or conflict with adverse powers. With them God had established his covenant to give Israel the land of Canaan, &c.; and this covenant He now brings forward in addition to the fresh revelation of Himself, in order to confirm the soul of Moses and enable him to bear up against casual reverses, assured that the result would be satisfactory, because it rested on God's word and covenant.
In a measure reassured, Moses presents himself to the children of Israel, but they hearken not to him for anguish of spirit and cruel bondage; and, still unequal to the service, he replies, when the Lord tells him to go again to Pharaoh, “Behold, the children of Israel have not hearkened unto me, and how shall Pharaoh hear me, who am of uncircumcised lips.” He had suffered so much from his own attempts to deliver in the energy of nature forty years before, that he is now more prone to despond, and the further he enters upon service the more does he find out its difficulties, and his own lack of qualifications for it. But the Lord will make His servant perfect and happy in His work; and accordingly He now gives Moses and Aaron a “CHARGE unto the people of Israel, and unto Pharaoh, King of Egypt, to bring the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt.” The CHARGE is the first thing to service. No certainty of character or purpose will do without it. “That which is committed unto thee,” (as Paul wrote to Timothy), is that which gives distinctiveness and point to our service. A man who knows not what his line of service is can never expect to fulfill it, or adequately to pursue it; but when he knows that he has received from the Lord a distinct charge or line of work, there is a sense of trust as well as the responsibility of trust. This charge is now given to Moses, verse 13, but still he feels his own insufficiency; and, mark! according as he is made to feel it, is he supplied from God with that which will counteract it.
First, He is made to rely on Jehovah, the covenant God, who had bound himself to bring this people unto the land of Canaan.
Second, a distinct charge is given to him, and if he believes that he is acting for Jehovah, he has now the prescribed result and effect of his mission, his appointed work marked out for him; and, Third, To silence every hesitation, and sense of unfitness, he is invested with power. The Lord says to him, “See, I have made thee a god unto Pharaoh;” and still more, he is commanded to repeat unto Pharaoh the miracle which had before re-assured his own soul at the burning bush—that of transforming his rod into a serpent. There, however, (i.e., at the burning bush,) he was made to take the serpent in his hand in order that his own individual faith might be established; here, the object is more to exhibit Moses before Pharaoh as invested with the power of God, so that this part of the miracle is not repeated.
This gracious instruction of the Lord perfects the discipline necessary for Moses' soul, in order to enter on his service so fully and fixedly that nothing can divert him from it, or make him doubt as to the result according to God; and after this he fulfills it with faithful and unflinching labor, strong in the power of God before Pharaoh, and without reproach from his brethren, until he reaches the grand result of this first stage of his service—viz., the deliverance of the people out of Egypt. From the time that his soul was thus really established in service until the night of the Passover, when he, with the people, marched out of the land of their captivity, was an interval highly honorable to Moses. But we don't dwell on it, as he was then acting uninterruptedly as God's instrument, the effect of the previous discipline which we have noticed, but no fresh phases of individual exercise are brought out.
Behold, then, the Israelites, having left Egypt with a high hand, encamped between Migdol and the sea; but what a testing there awaits them. What a crisis for Moses, at the moment of the successful issue of all his toil and anxiety! Success was all but attained when apparently insurmountable obstacles present themselves: Pharaoh and his host at one side, the sea with its raging waters on the other; and once more he is challenged by the unbelieving multitude for having brought them there to die because there were no graves in Egypt. But how calm and strong in faith is Moses at this critical moment. How different from the timorous notices we have had of him before! “Fear not,” says he, “stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord.” This was what he himself had learned during his forty years of discipline. Nature was to “stand still,” and faith to wait for God's salvation. He first calms the people, and then cries unto God himself. This scene describes one of the most important exercises in which a faithful guide to God's people is schooled—viz., to maintain unswerving confidence in God's succor in moments of embarrassment, and at the same time to receive from God the power and mode by which this succor can be successfully directed. He does both; he calms the people and honors the Lord by expressing the fullest confidence in Him; and then, looking to Him to realize his faith, he is directed by Him as to how the succor is to be afforded. How fully and blessedly is this direction given. “Speak to the children of Israel that they go forward; but lift thou up thy rod and stretch out thine hand over the sea,” &c. What a strength and elevation this event must have afforded Moses; and how must such an extremity have taught him afresh the wisdom and magnitude of God's resources; and what a result! We read, “the people believed the Lord and his servant Moses.”
In chap. 15: 23-26, we see him passing through another exercise, and of a different order. Scarcely had the last echoes of the song of triumph died away, when the people murmur against Moses, saying, “What shall we drink?” The servant of God must be prepared for every shade of trial and disappointment. No matter what the amount of his services, he must expect no appreciation of them from the congregation, or at best be prepared to do without it, and look to the Lord alone. Moses must have felt this deeply, after the song of praise that had just passed their lips; but by such means and discipline the faithful servant is led into fellowship in spirit and in power, too, with man's best and greatest servant. He cries unto the Lord, and again is he instructed in the amplitude and perfection of God's resources for every variety of man's need. What a distinguished place, to be the medium through, which all these mercies flow! The exercise and the pressure may be very great for a moment. It may be Marah; sowing indeed with tears, but it is only “to reap with joy.” If the servant finds that there is not a moment in which he may rest from service on account of the need of the people of God, he is, on the other hand, made acquainted, in the deepest and truest way, with the resources of God; and is also made the channel of those resources himself. Thus was it with Moses here; he is told to cast the tree into the waters and they are made sweet.
In chap. 16 we are presented with another order of service which this well-tried servant learns and records. The trials of the people become a school to him for learning and attaining that service which was to meet their need, and while so doing his own soul was necessarily enlarged in the wisdom of which he was the minister. It is interesting and important for us to see, that for each need and trial Moses is taught a distinct and suited lesson, so that his own soul is growing in God while his service is affording the needed relief to the people.
In this chapter they felt the dearth of the wilderness so intensely (and this we must bear in mind was on the second month after leaving Egypt) that they murmured against Moses and against Aaron, and said, “Would to God that we had died in the land of Egypt where we did eat bread to the full.” Moses was the one who, under God, had led them into these circumstances; and must he not have felt how critical was the position? Yes, truly; for human help there was none. But so much the more must his soul have depended upon God, who thus exercised him, to cast him upon Himself and His own resources. And again the Lord communicates to him instruction suited to the occasion. “Behold I will rain down bread from heaven for you,” &c. This is the revelation to Moses. But the way in which he evangelizes it (if I may say so) is also recorded, and worthy of notice, in connection with our subject, as showing the nearness to God, and consequent searching and humbling of heart, which revelations of God's mercy effect. He desires the people to “come near” before the Lord who had heard their murmurings. He had known the effect in himself; and, as a wise master-builder, he would lead his brethren into the same, though it be by a different path. The glory of the Lord, and the resources of the Lord, had already instructed him; and now he seeks that the people may receive the same blessed instruction, though it be drawn forth by their discontent and murmurings. “And they looked toward the wilderness, and behold the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud,” &c. And they then hear His gracious provision for their need.
Let us note that a servant's discipline must always be in advance of the service required of him. He cannot lead beyond that point to which he himself has been led. But when the depth and reality of the truth has been established in his own soul, he is made the channel of it by various modes; sometimes by an unexpected revelation sometimes as an answer to his own prayer—sometimes, as we shall see in subsequent instances, by the manifestation of gift. Of the two latter we find a record in chap. 17.
At Rephidim he again suffers from the congregation, who are ready to stone him; but the Lord, even a very present help to him in time of trouble, invests him with peculiar power to effect relief for the rebellious people. Since he has been personally assailed, he must be personally honored—and by those, too, who had reproached and threatened him. The elders of Israel are called to see the water gush forth from the rock as Moses strikes it. Thus the Lord approves His servant before the heads of the people: and the servant's own soul is confirmed and enlarged in apprehension and appreciation of the power which God had given him for service.
At Rephidim, too, was it that the children of Israel first encountered mortal strife with any of the human family. Amalek comes against them. Moses is now placed in new and untried difficulties; and he determines that Joshua must encounter man, but he, in spirit, must be engaged with God. He will betake himself to the top of the hill, with the rod of God in his hand.
What a season of blessing to him, thus separated unto God—storing his heart and filling his soul with the assurances and evidences of God's might and mercy for His people. But at this very moment the sense of his own feebleness is made more convincing than ever. If he held up his hand, (an expression of dependence on God,) victory was secured to Israel; but if he let it fall, Amalek prevailed. A place of eminent service this, without doubt. But how humbling to Moses to know and to feel that he was too weak in nature to accomplish what the spirit of his mind so desired. His hands were heavy, and would have dropped but for the help and intervention of others. In the primary sense, we learn by this, as has often been before remarked, that the priesthood is necessary to sustain any service, however devoted; but in a secondary sense, and regarding the scene in its individual relation to Moses, we are taught that, when contending with man, the greater the eminence with regard to God, the more must our own insufficiency in nature be made to appear. No wonder Moses should have built an altar there, and called it, “Jehovah-nissi.” The conflict was with man—an unnatural contest. “Love not the world, because of offenses: and woe unto that man by whom the offense cometh.” But when it does come, there is no banner to shield against it but Jehovah. And at that stage of the soul's experience, Jehovah-nissi is its altar, or, in other words, the character of its worship.
The next incident recorded in Moses' history brings him before us in a lower point of view. He is influenced, and, in a measure, perverted by man. He had reached great eminence in service; he had just erected an altar in record of what God had been to him in his conflict with hostile man; but now he has to encounter the voice of nature, in the well-intentioned but pernicious advice of his father-in-law; and yielding to it, he morally sinks. In converse with Jethro, he seems to forget the lesson just taught him by the conflict with Amalek! and surrenders the service to which he was called, or part of it, without any counsel or even sanction from God. The assistance which he sought here from the heads of the people was of a very different order to that which he rightly accepted from Aaron and Hur in the conflict with Amalek. The latter was a help to himself personally; whereas the former was a transference of the duties imposed by the Lord on himself to others. Jethro had heard of all that the Lord had done for Moses and for Israel; and he comes to re-engage Moses with his wife and children, who it appears he had sent back. Jethro, I think, here morally represents the association amongst men which a servant of God may be enticed into by relationship; and who, while owning in common with him the work of the Lord, assumes an undue importance; for it was an assumption for an uncircumcised Gentile to arrogate to himself leadership of the people of God, by inducing Moses and Aaron and the elders of Israel to join in fellowship with him. When the soul gets into a clouded position before God, it is comparatively easy to divert it from its responsibilities on the plea of inability. Moses is here induced to consider himself unequal to what God did not consider him unequal for. And though the arrangement is permitted, it must have been with loss to him. He is now at the mount of God, experiencing the fulfillment of God's promises to him at the burning bush, after having traversed a strange and wondrous path. But here, now at the end of it, after all the Lord's dealings and communications to him, he appears before us as susceptible of the influence of nature, even as other men—proving how little, in any position, is man to be accounted of.
Now, however, on the Mount of God, Moses is to enter on a new office, and fulfill a different mission.
Up to this he had been a deliverer and a ruler; now, he is to be a lawgiver and a prophet—one who, as revealing the mind of God to the people, is thus, in a sense, a mediator between God and them. Moses, as a highly favored servant, must be instructed in this blessed line. God had met His people in their need and delivered them, but as yet, like many a delivered one, they do not apprehend the nature of God. The pressure of impending ruin had been removed, but they have yet to learn God, and how utterly ruined they are in His sight, and Moses, the instructed of God, is now to instruct them in this.
He is, therefore, called up into the mount, and brought into a nearness to the Lord, and given a revelation of Him different from what he had previously seen in the burning bush. There it was all grace. Though “holy ground,” the aspect of the Lord was one of grace and compassion; here, it is God's terrible majesty, the claims of a holy God on man, and how great must His distance be from a man. Both these lessons were necessary for Moses in order to fit him for the place assigned him towards the people of God; and it is always that manner of God's discipline to make His servants practically pass through and learn in a fuller and more vivid way that particular line of truth of which He designs them to be the channel. Stephen saw the Glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God, before he made his announcement that heaven was open, and that he saw the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God—that is, he saw a greater and a fuller truth than he communicated; but the greater only qualified him the more for communicating the lesser, which last was the suited measure for his audience. So Moses, now in the mount, divinely instructed in the nature and mind of God, is thus qualified for revealing Him to the people. He sees Him in His righteousness making a demand on man on earth and still in the flesh.
Having pronounced the law, and in type and figure sprinkled the blood of purgation, he is called (Ex. 24) to receive not only the law, engraven on stones, but also a much fuller revelation of God's interest for His people; the provision of grace based on the Lord's foreknowledge of their inability to keep the law. In these interesting scenes it is not the subject of them which must engage us here, but the blessed way in which Moses is prepared and qualified for the fulfillment of the task entrusted to him. He is called up into the mount, on which the glory of God rested. Six days the cloud covered the mount, and on the seventh day God called unto Moses out of the midst of that glory which was like devouring fire in the eyes of the children of Israel; and Moses was in the mount forty days and forty nights.
A fit preparation, truly, for one who is to be commissioned to set forth on earth a pattern of the things which he saw. Thoroughly detached from earth, and enwrapped in the cloud which surrounded the glory of God, his soul was impressed with the wondrous subject and detail of his commission. Then it was that the Lord said unto him, “Let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them, according to all that I show thee.” Thus we have an insight into God's manner of educating His servant for His own purposes; and let us here especially note two things; First, That Moses is near God while learning the truth, and knows in himself the effect of being near Him; and, second, he learns the truth consciously from God; he is not only near Him while learning it, but he knows that he has learned it from Himself. If we be not near God while we are learning our knowledge will be profitless; and if it be not from Him that we learn we may rejoice in the truth for a moment, but, like the disciples, it will require to be recalled to our remembrance by the Holy Ghost, which we know is very commonly the case.
But before Moses has entered on this new mission, the people of Israel have made an idolatrous calf, and he is summoned from his exalted position in the mount to witness the departure of the people from the covenant just made; and here he gives expression to sentiments which testify to us how deeply he had learned to care for the glory of God. (Ex. 32:11-1311And Moses besought the Lord his God, and said, Lord, why doth thy wrath wax hot against thy people, which thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power, and with a mighty hand? 12Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, and say, For mischief did he bring them out, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth? Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people. 13Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, thy servants, to whom thou swarest by thine own self, and saidst unto them, I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have spoken of will I give unto your seed, and they shall inherit it for ever. (Exodus 32:11‑13).) In this point of view, it is an utterance hardly equaled in the whole of Scripture; but the previous forty days and forty nights enabled him thus to appreciate it, and every step he takes in this trying moment declares how fully he had entered into the mind of God.
He breaks the tables of the covenant, for they had already been broken on man's side, and this is no time to publish them. Then he took the idol which they had made and burnt it with fire, and ground it to powder, and strewed it on the water, and made the people drink of it. Their sin must not only be put away, but they must taste in themselves the reality of it. Then, he insists on separation from evil, and requires every one who is on the Lord's side to slay the recreants. In a day of universal failure, the witnesses of repentance and returning allegiance cannot too strongly enunciate their severance from their former associations, annihilating every trace of them, even unto death, and Moses, the well-prepared vessel, leads the way in this.
Thus having, so to speak, prepared them for God, as repentant and separate, he returns to God for them to make an atonement. The Lord refuses to go up with them, and desires them to strip themselves of their ornaments, that He may know what to do with them. In this moment of great suspense, while the people are waiting under the hand of God, Moses, learned in the holiness of the mind of God, knows what to do for the people, and how to restore relations.
He pitches the tabernacle afar off from the guilty camp, in order that every one who, humbled under a sense of sin, desires to seek the Lord, may seek Him there, apart from the defilement. This act met the mind of the Lord, and restored His presence to Israel; the cloudy pillar descended and stood at the door of the tabernacle, and the Lord speaks to Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend, and not only promises that His presence shall go with him, but also accedes to his request that He will resume His place in the midst of Israel. How blessedly Moses is enlarged in the mind of God! Difficulties the most serious, are only unfolding to him the more the resources of God; but he only reaches those resources by first responding to the holiness of God.
At this conjuncture, he learns both God and man; the latter as unreliable and failing in every circumstance, and the Lord, as the resource of his heart and his portion forever. And hence, when God had acceded to all his desires, he breaks forth in the earnest entreaty, “I beseech Thee, show me Thy glory.” “I have seen enough of humanity to recoil from it. I have seen enough of the blessed God to desire to see Him in consummated glory.” This desire was partially answered here; but still more distinctly when, on the Mount of Transfiguration, he, with Elijah, talked with the Lord about his decease, for, and on account of, this very stiff-necked Israel, as well as for all the redeemed.
We have now followed Moses in his ascent to the highest point, which was ever accorded to man. To the Apostle Paul, a man in Christ, greater, and clearer, and peculiar glories were revealed, but “there arose not a prophet in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.” Paul (though unconscious of being in the body) must needs have a thorn in the flesh, lest he should be puffed up. We need not, therefore, be surprised to find Moses ere long demonstrating that he is not able, through a sense of his own infirmity, to maintain the great position assigned him.
He who had seen so much of God's power, forgets and ignores it, when pressed by the evil and unbelief of the people, (Num. 11) and exclaims, “I am not able to bear all this people alone, because it is too heavy for me.” Man cannot sustain the high position God calls him to, without notices now and then of his own weakness. If we have not the sentence of death in ourselves, we shall trust in ourselves. Had Moses, who had been in the glory, known this, he would not have looked to himself either in strength or weakness, but to “God who raiseth the dead.”
He is now humbled before the seventy elders of Israel, before who in he had previously been exalted. The spirit which was upon him is put upon them. We have seen that at the suggestion of his father-in-law he had before allowed this leaven to enter in a milder form, but now, as is ever the case when yielded to, it has worked to a fuller development. This is a time of humbling for Moses, but no less interesting to us than the time of his exaltation, as illustrating the nature of the divine school in which he is. His submission and acknowledgment of the hand of the Lord is very instructive, and his interest in the work nothing abated by being in a measure supplanted. He rebukes Joshua for envying for his sake. But though the Lord had thus dealt with the unbelief of His servant, He will not allow man to undervalue or slight him. The cause of reproach appeared just, for he had married an Ethiopian woman, and it appears that Aaron and Miriam were encouraged by the late humbling which Moses had undergone; but the Lord in a most signal and terrific manner avenges him and makes him the intercessor for the guilty parties. The Lord may rebuke him Himself, but man must not; and the way in which Moses bore these taunts evinces how deeply learned he was in God's interest for himself and how humbled in spirit. We have seen his righteous anger burst forth when the glory of God was at stake; but when personally assailed, he is silent.
Another instance of this we find in the case of Korah. (Num. 16.) Instead of vindicating himself and his office, Moses refers the decision to the Lord, who pronounces it by terrible judgment on the offenders, and then instructed in the mind of God, he knows what will stay the plague among the people, and he makes use of the priesthood here, as before in the case of the golden calf and the unbelief at Kadeshbarnea. He had himself mediated on their behalf before God.
We now come to the last scene which we shall notice in the history of Moses, and that is his forfeiture of his right to enter Canaan, because he failed to sanctify the Lord in the eyes of the people. This occurred in the thirty-ninth year of their wanderings, just as he was about to see the happy termination of all his labors and the fulfillment of God's promises. Moses seems here to have failed in those very points in which he has before appeared most eminent. He speaks “unadvisedly with his lips” and fails to sanctify the Lord in the eyes of the people, (that Lord whose glory was so dear to his heart,) and thus disqualifies himself from planting the people in the land of their inheritance, when on its very borders. When the congregation murmured for water, God tells him “to take the rod and gather the assembly together, thou and Aaron thy brother, and speak ye unto the rock before their eyes, and it shall give forth his water.” But instead of this, Moses, carried away by his irritation, first upbraids the people, and says, “Must WE fetch you water out of this rock?” and then he lifts up his hand and smites the rock twice. The Lord was now acting in grace, and through the priesthood towards the people. The rock was not to be smitten again, Moses is not at this moment in fellowship with the mind and ways of the Lord—he has failed in his mission and he must forfeit his leadership. Such is the manner of God's discipline! No amount of faithful service will mitigate or divert the penalty of assumption in that service. Paul, contrary to the warning of the Spirit, would go to Jerusalem, and a prison was his penalty for many a day afterward.
God may and will, no doubt, use His servants in the place which their own failure has entailed on them: (Paul was thus used in a new and special service—as his Epistles were to him, Deuteronomy was to Moses:) but He must subdue the willfulness of their nature which has led them to act independently of Him. Moses began his course by attempting a right work in his own strength, and endured many a day of exile on account of it; and now he lays himself down on Pisgah, after beholding the glorious land, from which he is excluded because in acting for the Lord he acted independently of the Lord, whose servant he was. His first failure bears a close analogy to his last. But though thus chastened as to his service and mission, he loses nothing of his personal nearness to the Lord, and, indeed, gains in this way, for the Lord Himself shows him the land. So was it with Paul; while suffering the penalty of his failure in prison, he found more than ever that Christ was everything to him, and more than service; and, no doubt, Moses on Pisgah must have felt that God was greater to him than even the promised land, or than leadership thereto. At any rate, his submission to the Lord's will is very beautiful, and his transference of his own dignity and office to Joshua.
But, nevertheless, this transference WAS a chastisement to Moses as a servant, and while his very eye feeds on the inheritance, he is suffering crucifixion in his vile body. But, for that body Satan may contend in vain. Michael rescues it from his grasp, for the Lord claims all of him. The body is the Lord's, to whom be honor and glory now and forever. Amen.