It would naturally seem that the best way for Moses to help the oppressed Israelites would be for him to retain his high position in Pharaoh's council. Being an adopted son of Princess Thermuthis, he might reasonably have thought, “I can do them most good here as a patron and friend at court: if I identify myself with them in their sins and miseries, I can do nothing.” There would be in most princes a natural reluctance to be associated with the herd of slaves who were so bitterly hated and despised by the Egyptians whom their toils enriched. Radbod drew back when Bishop Wolfran was just going to baptize him, saying, “I would sooner be with my ancestors in Woden's Hall, than in heaven itself with your starveling band of Christians.” And there would be much inducement to even more benevolent men than he to prefer remaining in a secure and dignified position, where they could do good to the “lower classes” without any serious loss to their own pockets or reputations.
But Moses was to take a different course; like those Moravian preachers who went in amongst the lepers, and bade farewell to all the world beside. No earnest mind has approval for the Sybarite of Herodotus, who could not rest when a crumpled rose leaf was on his couch, and who fainted on seeing a man working hard. But many earnest minds have admiration for Simon Stylites receiving the homage of the people as he stood year after year on his uncomfortable pillar above them. It were better that he should come down and “walk the radiant path that Howard trod to heaven,” by plunging into the squalor and infection of prisons and charnel houses, that he might rescue those that were bound in affliction and iron. To be sure this way has its disadvantages: Howard dies of the fever; the Jesuit priests, who nursed the cholera-stricken in Paris, were buried with their patients; Father Damon has just written from the leper settlement in the Sandwich Islands, to say that at last the disease has seized upon himself. Yes, it certainly has its disadvantages. If one be afraid of losing caste, he had better not rashly adopt it.
He Whose course was thus foreshadowed and after-shadowed, being in the form of God, became a little lower than the angels; and, being found in fashion as a man, humbled Himself unto death, even the death of the cross. He made Himself of no reputation. So completely does He identify Himself with fallen, guilty, unclean men, that He says to Jehovah, “My goodness extendeth not to Thee"; and, being blameless and holy, He confesses our foolishnesses and sins as His own. He is not ashamed to call us brethren!
Moses therefore voluntarily takes his place amongst the outcasts. He finds them broken by internal contentions; and so suffocated by oppression that they are more ready to settle down in their afflictions than to welcome his aid. There is a process called scientifically “alternate generation “: the insect aphid gives life to a larva which remains a worm, but gives birth to a new aphid, which in its turn originates a new worm. And this is the course of sin and misery; sin produces misery and misery produces further sin. The one is a cause and also an effect of the other, like famine and pestilence; together they conspire to degrade Israel, and sink them to a depth from which it seemed impossible to raise them. “What can you do with such dogs?” said the explorers of the Africans. “What is the use of preaching to such dogs?” echoed the colonist to the preacher. (The preacher was old Dr. Moffat; and so he gave out his text, “Yet the dogs under the table eat of the children's crumbs.") Well, no doubt these “dogs” are bad enough, but the oppressor's testimony against his victim cannot be implicitly relied on: men generally slander those whom they wrong. The wolf in the fable made a very plausible statement against the lamb and his family; but it was an ex parte statement after all, and would hardly do to go before a jury without some judicial comment.
Moses demands their release from Pharaoh, who treats him with scornful brutality. But what would you? Consider what unbounded impudence it must have seemed to Pharaoh for these firebrands to come agitating amongst his slaves, upsetting the whole fabric of society! Truly the evangelist must not be too sensitive to rebuffs: he needs toujours l'audace to bind the strong man and spoil his goods; he will find a grim earnestness in those other little French sayings, that one cannot make a revolution with rose water, nor make an omelet without breaking eggs. And there is a still greater trial that will meet him. To Moses it must have been the keenest sorrow of all when he found that the result of his sacrifices and labors is but to intensify the already bitter misery of their lives. For the usual course of things when people seek to keep others in oppression takes place now. Their slave-drivers say they are listening to these agitators because they are idle, and so their work must be increased; they must make bricks without straw. Pharaoh regards Moses and Aaron as the sole cause of these disturbances in his Arcadia. (Ex. 5:4, 94And the king of Egypt said unto them, Wherefore do ye, Moses and Aaron, let the people from their works? get you unto your burdens. (Exodus 5:4)
9Let there more work be laid upon the men, that they may labor therein; and let them not regard vain words. (Exodus 5:9)), and roughly drives them from his presence. On their way thence they are met by the elders of the wretched Israelites, who solemnly denounce them with bitter upbraidings for being the cause of their fresh miseries.
All this is very natural and very typical: the Hebrew proverb says, “When the tale of bricks is doubled, Moses comes.” But the case usually is, that the deliverer's approach causes the work and suffering to be increased. The Hindu saying is more appropriate; that when a person is threatened by a serpent, he is awakened by a lizard crawling over him. For we usually find that the awakening of those, who are sunk in a lethargy of temporal or spiritual oppression to a sense of their condition, is in all ways a repugnant process. It is when the drowning man is being resuscitated that he suffers most severely; it is a necessary suffering if he is to be saved; but it is painful for the rescuer to contemplate.
The emancipator brings war; the evangelist brings trouble: the first signs of the new life are often cries of pain. “These that have turned the world upside down have come hither also,” said the Thessalonians, “and Jason has received them!” The first coming of the Prince of Peace brought a sword, world-wide contention, the destruction of Jerusalem with a million lives. And yet it is not the deliverer that is responsible for this, nor does anyone grieve over it so bitterly as he. “Moses said, Lord, wherefore hast Thou so evil entreated this people? Why is it that Thou hast sent me? For since I came to Pharaoh, he hath done evil to this people: neither hast Thou delivered Thy people at all.” In that crisis of insult and disaster he utters no word of retaliation to the attack of the elders, nor of complaint as to the treatment which he has received, either from king or serf; no complaint, even like that of Elijah's, that his work was in vain (much less any complaint in that wretched spirit of Jonah, who would sooner see a city destroyed than he should suffer in professional reputation). In the nadir of his course he thinks of their sufferings; not of his own. There is no higher expression of magnanimous sympathy than this; except in that sacred life of One, Who, though He knows that to His people “Death is the crown of life “appointed by God” to free the oppressed and crush the oppressor,” yet weeps at the grave of Lazarus; Who in all our afflictions is afflicted, though well-knowing that each pain is but the birth-pang of some future happiness; Who, in the hours of His passion and death, wept for the guilty Jerusalem, whilst telling her daughters to weep not for Him but for themselves.