| “And she called his name Moses: and she said, Because I drew him out of the water” (Exodus 2:10). |
| I am sure that most of you, and perhaps all of you, know the story of Moses. But did you know that his name means “drawn out”? His name was actually given to him by Pharaoh’s daughter, because she had been the one to find him in the little ark of bulrushes in the river. His name was not given to him by his own parents. But it was a suitable name, and it is the name by which he was known all his life. |
| It took a great deal of faith on the part of Moses’ parents to keep their little son, for you will remember that Pharaoh had said that all the boy babies were to be thrown into the river. Of course they would drown, but Moses’ mother did put him into the river; only she made him a little ark of bulrushes to keep him from drowning. When Pharaoh’s daughter came down to the river to bathe, she and her attendants found Moses in the ark, and God put it into her heart to feel sorry for him. The Bible tells us that he was “a goodly child,” meaning that he was a beautiful baby. She was attracted to him and wanted to keep him. Surely the Lord arranged all this, for He had special plans for Moses. |
| All this has a lesson for us too. In the Bible, Egypt is a picture of the world around us, and is under the control of Satan. Satan does not want children from Christian homes to grow up and live for the Lord; rather, he wants them to be swallowed up by this world, and be spiritually dead. But Christian parents will want to protect their children from the influence of the world, and the ark of bulrushes is a picture of this protection. We have to live in this world, and sometimes mix with it, but we do not have to experience spiritual death from it. |
| The water also speaks of death, but someone else has already passed through those waters of death — the Lord Jesus Himself. Now children can be taken out of those waters, and Moses is given back to his real mother, to nurse him for Pharaoh’s daughter. Because of this, everyone assumed he was the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. |
