Audio restored with Diffio. Diffio processed the original archive recording to reduce noise and produce a cleaner listening version; the original stays available.
Speech quality score (model-estimated, SCOREQ): before 3.45 → restored 4.67
Use the player's Original switch to compare.How Diffio restores old speech recordings
Tonight, I'd like to return to the book of Exodus. In September, we started a series of messages on the life of Moses in the early chapters of Exodus, and I said I was going to try the pattern that Don Tinder introduced. That is, um, to just continue on when there were opportunities to speak, drop- pick it up right where I left off, even if there was a gap in between, and I wouldn't have thought that would have worked well. Uh, but Don did it with First Corinthians, and it seemed to work out quite well, so I give it a try myself, and in many ways that's much better than trying to pick single topics and subjects. The continuity, perhaps for the audience, is not as desirable as it could be, but the subject matter that comes up, uh, in a passage, um, well, it makes itself its own opportunity, and, uh, you don't have to have a, a compact single subject, but you can go right on with the book, and I'd like to do that tonight with the last part of the fourth chapter of Exodus.
Exodus chapter four. And starting with the eighteenth verse, I'm going to read to the end of the chapter. And Moses went and returned to Jethro, his father-in-law, and said unto him, Let me go, I pray thee, and return unto my brethren who are in Egypt, and see whether they are yet alive. And Jethro said to Moses, Go in peace. And the Lord said unto Moses in Midian, go return into Egypt, for all the men are dead who sought thy life.
And he returned to the land of Egypt. And Moses took the rod of God in his hand. And the Lord said to Moses, when thou goest to return into Egypt, see that thou do all those wonders before Pharaoh which I have put in thine hand. But I will harden his heart that he shall not let the people go. And thou shalt say unto Pharaoh, Thus saith the Lord, Israel is my son, even my firstborn. And I say unto thee, Let my son go that he may serve me. If thou refuse to let him go, behold, I will slay thy son, even thy firstborn. And it came to pass, by the way, in the end, that the Lord met him and sought to kill him.
Then Zipporah took a sharp stone and cut off the foreskin of her son and cast it at his feet and said, surely a bloody husband art thou to me. So he let him go. Then she said, a bloody husband thou art because of the circumcision. And the Lord said to Aaron, go into the wilderness to meet Moses. And he went and met him in the mount of God and kissed him. And Moses told Aaron all the words of the Lord who had sent him and all the signs which he had commanded him. And Moses and Aaron went and gathered together all the elders of the children of Israel. And Aaron spoken, spoke all the words which the Lord had chosen, had spoken unto Moses, and did the signs in the sight of the people, and the people believed.
And when they had heard, when they heard that the Lord had visited the children of Israel, and they looked upon their afflictions, then they bowed their heads and worshiped. May God bless his word to us. Now, I trust you'll bear with me tonight. I'm preaching on a passage I don't think I've ever preached on before. I don't know why, passed it by. Would be we were studying in September the burning bush and the excuses of Moses and the call of Moses, and I, I love those passages, and I've often preached on them. We come now to one that, for some reason or other, I've never taken a very close look at and, uh, dealt with from the platform anywhere.
We had seen Moses, forty years of age, leaving Egypt because he had made a false start at delivering the people. He wanted to be the redeemer of the people and take them out of their bondage. He'd been raised in the queen's palace, and he made a false start by killing an Egyptian taskmaster. The word got to Pharaoh, and Moses fled for his life. The people didn't back him up. They weren't ready for him, and God wasn't ready for him either. He went into the land of Midian, which is a little difficult to identify, but probably the upper part of the Arabian Peninsula, in what is now Saudi Arabia.
Judging by all these little, uh, references that are made through these chapters, uh, it would seem that that's the likely location, across the Sinai Peninsula and on into the main bulk of the Arabian Peninsula. Midian was a rather nomadic people and covered a lot of area. Moses went there, uh, married a woman named Zipporah. That's, uh, I'd like to say Zipporah, but my Bible's got an accent mark on the first syllable, so I'm trying to revise my thinking to say it that way, but I don't know for sure if anybody really knows how those names were pronounced in those days. When you're reading your Bible out loud, don't be afraid of names, you know, some people hesitate and stumble. Don't be afraid to take a shot at a name in the Bible.
Remember that none of the experts that we have today had tape recorders, and they can take a pretty educated guess, perhaps, at where people put their accents and how they pronounce their vowels, but who knows whether they are right? And with the English language, as variable as it is from state to state and country to country, um, there might have been a tremendous variation there. So we can't be sure how these names are pronounced, and we don't need to be afraid to, to read them the way they look to us, um, and trust the Lord to identify the people properly. He married this girl named Zipporah. Eventually they had two children. I judge by the story we've just read that the children were yet quite young because, uh, Moses put them on the donkey when they started back to Egypt.
But he was forty years in the land of Midian, and he was taking care of the sheep of his father-in-law, Jethro. And then one day he got way over into the bottom of the Sinai Peninsula, to the area of Mount Sinai, or Mount Horeb, or as it's called in these chapters, the Mount of God, and God spoke to him out of a burning bush. Moses turned aside to see why a bush that was on fire was not burning down, why it just kept on burning steadily. And when he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush and said, I've looked on the affliction of my people in Israel, in Egypt, their bondage, and you are to go back to Egypt and deliver them. Now, Moses was now eighty years of age, and he was not ready now.
God was ready, but he wasn't, and he began to make a series of excuses. He said, uh, who am I to do this? And they'll say, who sent me, and who are you, and and they won't believe me, and they'll say the Lord didn't appear to you. And we went through all those excuses. Uh, we got down to chapter four, verse ten, and Moses said unto the Lord, O Lord, I am not eloquent. I don't have the ability to do public speaking. I'm slow of speech. And God's answer was, who made man's mouth? I made your mouth. I can put words in it. We did not note that Moses refused that answer from God. In verse twelve, God says, now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth and teach thee what thou shall say.
And instead of saying, thank you, Lord, your promise, that's all I need, Moses said, oh no, Lord, that won't do. Send, I pray thee, by the hand of whom thou wilt send. In other words, uh, uh, that's not good enough. You'll have to get somebody else to do the talking. And verse fourteen says, the anger of the Lord was kindled against Moses. And he said, is not Aaron the Levite thy brother? Uh, I know he can speak well, and also behold, he cometh forth to meet thee. When he seeth thee, he will be glad in his heart. So God says, I'm appointing Aaron, your brother, to be your spokesman. And that was a mixed blessing for Moses. It didn't work out too well in many respects, but that's the way it was going to be, at any rate.
And then in verse seventeen, God says, and thou shalt take this rod in thy hand, wherewith thou shalt do signs. Now the staff, the shepherd's staff, the tall pole the shepherd carried, maybe with a crook on the end of it, maybe not, whatever it was like. Moses was specifically told to take that with him, and that was going to be the tool that he would have to do the various signs. And then verse eighteen, where we begin tonight, Moses went and returned to Jethro, his father-in-law. And in those few words, there's a tremendous amount of drama, because you don't leave the area of Mount Sinai and go way over into the Arabian Peninsula with a large flock of animals and get there by nightfall.
It was days. It must have been days for him to drive those flocks all the way back home. It might have been weeks. And as he journeys home, back to where his family were, his wife and children and his father-in-law, what were his feelings? Old dreams awakened, thinking of the days back in Egypt when he saw the slavery of the people and wanted to deliver them. And then the lethargy of the forty years contending with that and saying, oh, I can't do it now. I'm all out of touch with that, and I- I've- I've forgotten all my- my Greek and my Hebrew and my mathematics and my astronomy and all those sciences that I'd learned, and- and- and I'm just a shepherd now, and I can't do it now, and I'm getting older, and I couldn't possibly get up the energy I had back in those younger days, and, and then maybe Moses saying, did I, did I, did I really see God, or did I just dream about that?
Was that burning bush, was that just an illusion? And that perhaps the objections kept crowding back. There seems to be, at this point, still a great deal of uncertainty in Moses' mind. What would his wife say? What would Jethro say? What would the elders of the Jewish people say when he got to Egypt, and they might not even know him? And what about Pharaoh? He'd run away from Pharaoh before. What would happen now? Were some of the men around that were searching for him? Would his face still be hanging there on a bulletin board in the post office, wanted for murder? This man, looking forty years younger, would everybody have forgotten now? Mixed emotions must have crowded through his mind as he made that long journey back to Jethro, his father-in-law.
And when he gets there, he says to him, let me go, I pray thee, and return unto my brethren who are, are in Egypt, and see whether they are yet alive. Why doesn't he say to Jethro, Dad, I met God in the wilderness. Let me tell you about the burning bush. Let me tell you the tremendous experience I had. Why doesn't he say that? Why does he simply say to Jethro, I'm just wondering how all my relatives are back in Egypt and want to go and see if any of them are left alive. He left Egypt at a time of tremendous persecution of the Jewish people, an outright attempt to wipe them out completely, and maybe he'd had no word, and perhaps they were all dead and gone by this time, and perhaps Moses is expressing something of the uncertainty.
He's been told to go and deliver the people, but he doesn't even know whether they're there or not. And Jethro says, go in peace. Note the family headship that is pictured here, very similar to the book of Genesis. All through Genesis, you have a pattern of strong family relationships with a larger family than we know today, what today is being called the nuclear family, uh, was much larger in those days. That is, uh, the, the old man, the grandfather, the great-grandfather, as long as he was alive, he was the head. And old Jacob, uh, very old in years and blind, you know, when Joseph wanted to have his sons blessed, he brings them to his father, and the old man blesses them every time he crossed his arms over the two boys because he, he knew that they weren't just the right arrangement for what God was going to do.
And the sons looked up to the father long after they had their own wives and children and maybe even grandchildren. And that picture of the headship, of the patriarch, of the old father holds out th- throughout the book of Genesis, and it gives us a pattern of, of stability. When the old man in the family is a man of God, be he a father, grandfather, whatever he is, when he's a man who comes to know God, you get a little different picture of those men in the book of Genesis as they grow older, you know, when they're young, they're, they're rowdy and, and roughnecks and, and oftentimes uncouth, and, and Jacob, who schemed against his brother, is just not the same as the old patriarch Israel in his olden days.
Isaac, Abraham, Joseph himself, fellas like that, that, that grew, as they grew old, they became great men of God and were looked up to by the family and were able to exercise a headship. Now here's Moses coming back not to his father or his grandfather, but to his father-in-law and asking permission to leave and to take the wife and children and to go back to Egypt. Not usurping that authority, but acknowledging a headship. Modern America is systematically destroying its own family ties. Families are breaking down everywhere. We put our old people in, put them away somewhere so often in nursing homes instead of keeping them and, and looking up to them and asking them for their leading.
We break down our neighborhoods, largely by automobiles, but we don't have the neighborhood ties, and we've come into an era of great instability because we're breaking down these cultural things of family and neighborhood that provide a great deal of security. It's true that when you're my age, you don't want to be bossed around by your grandfather, and yet there's a, there's a lot of security and stability in that, and to be able to look up to the one who's the head of the, head of the home, even when you're an adult yourself, and get leading and help, and sometimes even permission. That's the picture you find in the book of Genesis in particular, and still comes over here into the book of Exodus.
But even in Bible times, such ties were sometimes violated. Here we see Moses getting the permission of his father-in-law before taking his wife and children. But back in Genesis, we found Jacob. We think of him taking his wives and children and running away from his father-in-law, Laban, who was also his uncle, his mother Rebecca's brother. Turning away, stealing away unawares, the Bible says, only to have Laban come out after him with a bunch of men to overtake him seven days later, and sitting down and making a peace treaty and saying, here, we'll put up this pile of stones, and the Lord watch between me and you, lest we come near each other while we're apart.
Don't you dare cross that border. You stay on your side of it, and I'll stay on my side, and that's the only way we'll have peace in the family if we never see each other again. Sad situation. Family rupture made permanent. And Laban, of course, was a pretty evil character, but Jacob was a lot to blame for that situation too. By leaving Jethro on good terms, Moses was able to have his support later on. And when he took the people of Israel out of Egypt and got into the wilderness, one of the first people that came to him was Jethro, coming and watching him and saying, son, you, uh, you're taking too much on yourself trying to judge all these people.
You need to appoint people to do a lot of this and only bring the, you might say, the Supreme Court cases to yourself. Otherwise, you're going to wear yourself out too soon. And Moses took his father-in-law's advice when he came out to visit him. And Jethro, seeing what God had done, I believe really got converted. That's in Genesis eight— uh, Exodus eighteen, if you want to look at that verse, um, it's rather interesting. It makes you think that Jethro might not really have known the Lord f- until this point. Uh, Genis- uh, Exodus 18, verse 8. Moses told his father-in-law all that the Lord had done unto Pharaoh and the Egyptians for Israel's sake, and all the travail that had come upon them by the way, and how the Lord delivered them.
And Jethro rejoiced for all the goodness which the Lord had done to Israel, whom he had delivered out of the hand of the Egyptians. And Jethro said, Blessed be the Lord who hath delivered you out of the hand of the Egyptians and out of the hand of Pharaoh, who hath delivered the people from under the hand of the Egyptians. Now I know that the Lord is, that Jehovah is greater than all gods, for in the thing wherein that they dealt proudly, he was above them. Now I know, he says, I've watched your life and I've watched your testimony, and now I know that your God is the right God. Well, that's a good testimony for Moses and for Jethro and for maintaining those family ties that could have been torn up so easily if he was careless about those things.
And even Jethro, perhaps an unbeliever at the time Moses goes to him, says to him, go in peace. And Moses gets his permission and starts out. Now, in verse nineteen, the Lord said unto Moses, and back in Exodus four— the Lord said unto Moses, in Midian, now in Midian, notice that is he, this is after he gets Jethro's permission, but before he gets back to Egypt. He says, go return unto Egypt. The Lord gives him another little nudge. Go return. There's an uncertainty in Moses' life. The Lord is helping him and pushing him along again. And then he says, go return unto Egypt, for all the men are dead who sought thy life. Are you afraid of those people who were trying to kill you before?
They're all dead and gone. Now, Moses had said to Jethro, I'd like to go back to Egypt to see whether my brethren are alive. And God says to Moses, the people that are dead are not your brethren. The people that are dead are the ones that were s- trying to seek your life. Your people are there, and they're prosperous. In fact, there are about two million of them by, uh, estimates based on the Bible chronologies. Um, but, uh, the people that sought your life, they're dead and gone. So you can have that reassurance, Moses, you're going to be safe from them. And that reassurance comes to him, and he goes on the way, and verse twenty one— no, verse, uh, verse twenty, Moses took his wife and his sons and set them upon an ass, and he returned to the land of Egypt, and Moses took the rod of God in his hand.
I like that little expression, a little reminder. It goes back to verse seventeen. He didn't leave it behind. He remembered God said, when you go to Egypt, take that staff with you. Why, this is just a poor little group of travelers, isn't it? Poor, no wealth, no herds, no cattle. Oh, they probably had a little money. Jethro probably, uh, gave them something, or they had money that he'd earned over the forty years to go along and pay their expenses along the way, but still a pretty, pretty poor little group to go and shake up the whole land of Egypt. How can they do it? And then you see that rod of God, not the rod of Moses, it's called the rod of God. The power of God is expressed by that staff that he carries in his hand.
We are inevitably reminded of another little group, another father who got a donkey and put his wife and little son upon it and left the Holy Land to cross over that same Sinai Peninsula to go to the same land of Egypt fifteen centuries later. Our Lord Jesus, probably about two years old at the time. And there was a very similar, um, wording in that story, although it didn't happen until they came back. Joseph and Mary and the baby Jesus went into the land of Egypt in a very similar journey to escape the efforts of King Herod to destroy the child.
And when Herod was no more and everything was safe, the word of God came to Joseph and said to him, uh, they are dead who sought the young child's life. Remember that? They are dead who sought the young child's life. Not exactly parallel, because that happened when he, before he was ready to come back. And these words here, they are dead, the men are dead who sought your life, uh, are, um, said before Moses goes. Moses is the deliverer here, the father, where in that other little company it was the baby, the young son. He was to be the redeemer, not just of Egypt, but of the whole world, our Lord Jesus. We come now to verses twenty one to twenty three, and I want to take them as a group.
The Lord said unto Moses, when you go to return to Egypt, see you do all the wonders before Pharaoh. I'd like you to notice three. Three particular expressions in this passage. I want to talk about them because, uh, this is a little prediction of what's going to happen. Somewhere along the line now, God comes along and says, now, Moses, when you get to Egypt, this is what's going to happen. First, you're to do the wonders, you're to do the signs. Second, I will harden Pharaoh's heart. And third, you will say to Pharaoh, Israel is my firstborn, and if you don't let my firstborn go, then I'm going to slay your firstborn. So these three things, first of all, the wonders before Pharaoh, the various signs and miracles, most of them involving the rod of God, the little thing of throwing down the rod and it becomes a snake and putting his hand into his chest and pulling it out leprous, and then all the plagues that were to come, the river water turned to blood, and all those signs and miracles, they were all preliminaries to the great final contest.
And in the end, God says, I will harden Pharaoh's heart. And theologians have debated the meaning of this passage for centuries, because many of the references to Pharaoh say he hardened his own heart. And Paul deals with it in the ninth chapter of Romans. Is Pharaoh responsible if God hardened his heart? But didn't he harden it himself? Yes, he did. God hardened it too, and there's a parallel here between the statement of the Lord Jesus when he says about parables, uh, I speak to them in parables because they don't want to believe, uh, I, I veil the truth so they don't, uh, so they, they don't have it, something like that. It's a, a complex thing, and we, I may take another message sometime and talk about that, uh, but just one, um, statement I'm quoting from R.
Allen Cole in the commentary on Exodus recently issued by InterVarsity Press. Different theological schools have battled over this passage in past centuries. However, the Hebrew writer did not even see a problem here. To him, God was the first cause of everything, without in any sense denying the reality and moral responsibility of the human agent involved. That is to him, he could say God hardened Pharaoh's heart, and that doesn't take Pharaoh off the hook. Pharaoh is responsible, he hardened his own heart. We'll deal more with that on another occasion. At any rate, Pharaoh continually refused to let the people go until finally the whole thing comes to a great climax when Moses goes to Pharaoh and says, Israel is my firstborn.
It's my, that nation is my firstborn son, and if you will continue to hold my firstborn in slavery, I will slay your firstborn. And that's exactly what happened. That's what happened in the Passover, when in the houses of all the Egyptian people all across the land, all that were firstborn died. The term firstborn, uh, invariably relates to males here, and the oldest son in every home, perhaps the father too, if he was the firstborn in his family, and even in Pharaoh's home. The firstborn died on the night of that terrible final judgment against the nation that would not let the slaves go free.
It comes down in the end to that very basic demand and threat. Israel is my son, says God, and either you let my son go or I will slay your son. The term firstborn, uh, this is the first mention of this in Exodus. It's a very prominent theme. The word doesn't appear all that many times, but if you really want to understand the Jewish religion and the Jewish people, you've got to come to grips with this term firstborn as it appears in the book of Exodus. It was the firstborn in each Egyptian home that was going to die, but when you get to the twelfth chapter of Exodus, God doesn't say it's just the Egyptian home.
He sends his angel to pass through the land, and the firstborn in every home was going to die. Every home, every home, not just Egyptian homes. It was a general judgment. Israel was not exempt. However, God told the people of Israel that if they would kill a lamb and eat the lamb and take the blood of the lamb and put it on the doorposts of their houses, that when the destroying angel came through that night, that angel would pass over that house in view of the fact that a substitute had died, a sin bearer had died in place of the firstborn. And of course, uh, I take it that the Egyptians could have done that too, and that maybe some of them did.
And I would also assume that some of the, uh, Israelites didn't do it and were careless or unbelieving about it and lost their firstborn. We can't be sure of that. That's just speculation. But the point is that the only way that the Jewish firstborn son was protected from the judgment that was sent to the Egyptians was if the blood of the lamb was on the doorposts of his house. Now, this gave God a claim on the firstborn. Henceforth, God considers that in each home, the firstborn son belongs to him, and that applies to animals as well as to, uh, human beings. Firstborn animals were to be given to the Lord throughout the history of the, of the law and the Jewish religion.
The first male animal to open the womb, uh, was to be given as a sacrifice to the Lord. Certain animals that were not, uh, suitable for sacrifice were to be redeemed or brought b- uh, brought, bought back, I'm sorry, by other sacrifices, and you find that in the book of Genesis, and then you find, or Exodus, and then you find also that each child who was the firstborn child was taken to the temple or tabernacle on the eighth day of his life, and a sacrifice was made for him, the Lord Jesus, when he was eight days old, according to Luke two twenty two to twenty four, because he was the firstborn, was brought to the temple, and there were two doves or two pigeons offered, uh, as a redemption for him.
In other words, the firstborn son belongs to God, but you can't kill or sacrifice it. You don't practice human sacrifice, so the f- the child is redeemed by offering an animal in its place, or, or in the case of poor people, a pair of birds offered in its place, but God claims the firstborn. Then you go on to the book of Numbers, and you find that the entire nation, in the entire nation, they counted up the firstborn, uh, that, uh, at least the firstborn that were, were born after they came out of the, out of Egypt, and they counted up the Levites, and they made an exchange, and God says, the firstborn are mine, they should be serving me, but I will swap with you all your firstborn sons for the tribe of Levi.
And they totaled it all out, and it came out to a difference of something like two hundred and ninety three. There were two hundred and two hundred and seventy three more, uh, firstborn than there were Levites, and that surplus was redeemed by the payment of gold or silver or money, something like that. You read that in N- Numbers three. Three, eleven to thirteen, and forty and forty one, if you want to study that. Numbers chapter three, that exchange. Now, another thing about the firstborn is this, that in the, um, in the practice of those days, the firstborn got a double portion of the inheritance. The oldest son was given a double portion of the inheritance when the father died.
This was the birthright that Esau sold to his brother Jacob. He despised his birthright. He despised it, I suppose, because it was only a promise. Abraham didn't own any land, and so he wasn't going to get any more of it if he didn't believe the promises, and he sold his birthright. This is the birthright that Reuben forfeited. Reuben was the firstborn of the twelve tribes, and because of his terrible sin, he forfeited that birthright, and eventually this privilege was passed on to Joseph. And in Genesis twenty uh, forty eight five and six, and verse twenty two, we find that, uh, Joseph, uh, Jacob said to Joseph, your two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, are going to have the full status of tribes.
You- both of your boys will be full tribes. And so when they got to the Holy Land and divided up the land, then Joseph actually had two portions, one for Ephraim and one for Manasseh. He got the double portion in the division of the land, and it's called that in Genesis forty uh, verse twenty two, I think. Ver- Ezekiel forty seven thirteen, if you'd like a reference on that, uh, we don't need to turn to that, but if you're interested in noting down any of these references, uh, on the double portion, that's an a good one, Ezekiel forty seven thirteen. And then one more thing, the concept of firstborn involves headship. The firstborn had the headship of the family.
He was the leader of the family. He was the dominant one once his father had died, and he had a headship over the whole family. Now we see that Israel, is being called God's firstborn, was not chronologically the firstborn. Is- who, who was secondborn if Israel was firstborn? Well, the other nations are secondborn, thirdborn, fourthborn, and so forth. And yet Israel came along later than the other nations. And God chose Israel as his firstborn. He didn't, it wasn't chronological. Israel wasn't actually the first nation that God put on the earth at all. The others were already there. But God chose that Israel would be the dominant nation on the earth.
That will still come to pass someday, when Israel will be the head of all the nations. It's in the purpose of God. It's in the intention of God. Deuteronomy fourteen one and two says, you are the children of God. The Lord hath chosen you to be a peculiar people unto himself above all the nations that are upon the earth. And he chose Israel, uh, to be a head. In, in Deuteronomy twenty eight. it says, uh, Jeho- it teaches us that Jehovah was about to exalt Israel above all the nations of the earth. Now, this helps us to understand Colossians chapter one where the Lord Jesus is called the firstborn of all creation, Colossians one fifteen. Firstborn of all creation.
Does that mean that he was created? Some would take that verse. No, it doesn't mean that at all. It means he is over creation. Creation is the second born. Creation is the third born. The Lord Jesus wasn't created. He stands in relation to creation as the firstborn stands in relation to the rest of the family. He is over creation. He is superior to it. He is the Lord of creation. Well, now so much for the term firstborn. Now we look on to the next little section here, verse twenty four. And it came to pass, by the way, in the inn, that the Lord met him and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a sharp stone and cut off the foreskin of her son and cast it at his feet and said, surely a bloody husband art thou to me.
Now here's a strange circumstance to come along. God has called Abraham three times now and told him to get going and go to Egypt, and now all of a sudden God's going to kill him. God- God's going to kill Moses. And the only way they get this problem solved is by the wife circumcising the son, and then they're able to go on their way again. And you read this, and you puzzle over it, and you wonder what's it all about, and how does it fit? And maybe this is the reason, I guess, I didn't preach on this passage for so many years. How did God seek to kill Moses? Did he stand in the way like an angel with a sword raised to plunge it into him, the way he stood before Balaam? Why did God seek to kill him?
Why did Zipporah do the circumcising instead of Moses doing? Why did Moses circumcise his own son? Why did his wife do it? And why does it say that she circumcised her son instead of her sons? There were two of them there. Why? I guess the answer to the f- the question of why did God seek to kill Moses is the easiest of the group. Uh, rather obviously, in view of what follows, is because of the neglect of circumcision. Circumcision had been given to Abraham in Genesis seventeen. It was the sign of the Jewish covenant. It was the mark that marked out the Jewish people, and every male child in Israel was to be circumcised when he is eight days old, and if he wasn't circumcised, the covenant was broken, and death was to come, broken the covenant of God, and here was Moses, the man who was to go and get the Ten Commandments and establish this covenant with the whole nation, the, the great man of the Old Testament Mosaic covenant, and here he wasn't practicing the covenant.
And that was just unthinkable, that the man who was to be the leader in getting the covenant established was going to ignore it himself. Well, Moses might give the excuse that he'd been in Midian a long time, and that this practice of circumcision wasn't culturally relevant in Midian. And he might have quoted some New Testament verses, had he a New Testament, to say that God's really not interested in the externals anyway, but that what really counted is whether your heart is right. The Apostle Paul taught us that. He said, for in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.
That's Galatians five six, New International Version. And one chapter later, Paul says, for in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature. The heart's got to be right. Does that set up a great conflict with the Old Testament? Does Exodus four tell us that circumcision is so important that Moses was going to die if he didn't do it? And the Apostle Paul tells us it's not important at all. The only thing important is what's internal, whether your heart's right. You've got to remember that Paul was dealing with a generation that emphasized externals and said, as long as you're circumcised, as long as you've got this or that, as long as you're christened and confirmed, or whatever it be if he was around today, that's what really counts, as long as you're a church member.
And the Lord Jesus would come along and say, you must be born again if you're going to see the kingdom of God, you've got to be born again. It doesn't matter if you have all the externals, if the heart's not right, you're lost and lost forever. Paul and the Lord Jesus dealt with a nation that emphasized the externals and ignored the inward reality. But the pendulum has swung the other way in our generation, and today evangelicals have soaked up a great deal of the thinking of the new morality, so as to say that externals don't matter at all, even when the heart is right. That's the only thing that counts, that the heart is right and the externals don't matter. We've gone the other generation, and I think we need other direction.
I think we need to turn, take a lesson here from, from Moses and see that externals do matter to God. God was not going to pass this thing by, whatever Moses' excuse might be. The inward reality is there. Moses was going to serve the Lord, but the externals had been neglected. What do we do today? We take lax views of sex. We condone divorce, saying it's love that really matters and happiness that counts. We sing these popular songs about, uh, you, you light up my life, and, uh, we hear Debbie Boone or whoever it is singing, and then we come to that strange little line that's injected into that song that says, how can this be wrong when it feels so good or feels so right?
I can't remember the exact wording of it. And all of a sudden you say to yourself, what is this song really written about? Adultery? Adulterous love? Why put a line like that in a song that's otherwise so beautiful? Why, why a line of apology to say, how can it be wrong when it feels so right? And you wonder, just say, but that's the new morality, isn't it? You know, God wouldn't want you to be unhappy and live such a miserable life with that wife you've got when you could leave her and you could find somebody else who'd make you real happy, now would he? See, and this kind of thinking comes into our thoughts and our minds, and then we might just well come down to the conclusion that for our modern generation, marriage is one of those things that's culturally irrelevant.
It's getting to be, isn't it? People move in with each other, move out, go on living together, and really marriage, the marriage ceremony gets to be sort of a legal tangle and not relevant to too much else for a lot of our moderns today. And we've got to be careful we don't soak up that thinking. It's very relevant in God's sight. It's like this matter of circumcision. You do it God's way, and you hear the word of God. We even find this in, in the, in the lower level of externals. The Apostle Paul writes a long chapter, First Corinthians fourteen, a long chapter about what I would call a lower level of externals, the regulation of the gifts of prophecy and tongues.
And he has all kinds of little things in there. He says two or at the most three, no more than that, and the, and that has to be in order. And if there's no interpreter there, then let the tongue speak- keeper keep silent, and the woman is not to exercise those gifts publicly in the church. And then when he gets all done with all these things, he draws it all together with these words. If any man think himself to be a prophet or spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord. If you think you're spiritual, if you think you're a prophet, recognize that the lordship of Christ is involved in these things. Or to quote it again from the New International Version, if anybody thinks he is a prophet or spiritually gifted, let him acknowledge that what I am writing to you is the Lord's command.
If he ignores this, he himself will be ignored. First Corinthians fourteen thirty seven and thirty eight. And Jesus said, why do you call me Lord, Lord, and do not the things that I say? So a lesson from Moses. He neglected the external command of God, and he had to put things right. And if we want to serve God, we've got to put things according to the word of God in our lives and in our homes. We've got to follow the scriptures and go with the word of God. How did God seek to kill Moses? And why did Zipporah do the circumcising? And the two of those things together, you put those two questions together, and they tend to answer each other.
Evidently, he was not able to do it. It wasn't Moses standing there on the road with an angel in front of him blocking the way, as with Balaam. In fact, we're told that they were in an inn. They'd stopped off at a traveler's rest stop along the way, hardly a modern motel there in the desert with neon lights flashing motel and all that, and but, uh, whatever kind of an oasis it was, they had stopped at some travelers' stopping point along the way, verse twenty four, in the inn. Remember in the book of Genesis, anybody stopping at an inn? Uh, crossing that same Sinai Peninsula, you'll find it if you get a concordance and go looking for it. I won't tell you where it is now, but I'll give you something to search for. Who stopped at the inn in the book of Genesis?
When you hear about the Christmas story, no room in the inn, go back and search the book of Genesis or think through it, see if you can remember who stopped at an inn in the book of Genesis. Anyway, um, here they are, they've stopped off at an inn, and I think probably what's happened is that Moses is sick in bed. He's been stricken, he is dying. She says to him, you're a, a bloody bridegroom, it is literally in verse twenty six, a bridegroom of blood. Uh, in other words, uh, the only way I could get my husband back is to circumcise this boy. It's the only way I could get him back. So you're just like a bloody bridegroom to me. It's the only way I could get my husband back. And she's pretty unhappy about this thing. So that's, that's very likely the case that Moses is, is down in bed, stricken, and in fact, it says in verse twenty six after she had done the circumcising, so he let him go.
He let him go. God let him go, released him, set him free, and he was able to rise up again. Well, that one other question I asked on this, why son? Why did she circumcise her son? Why doesn't it say sons? They were both there, according to verse twenty. the sons were put on the donkey beside her. Why did she just do one of them? They had two boys, Gershom and Eleazar. Two scenarios are visualized here. In one of them, Zipporah circumcises Gershom. He's the firstborn, and God has just talked to Moses about the firstborn. Israel is my firstborn, and I'm going to slay Pharaoh's firstborn, and now here's your firstborn son, and he's not even circumcised.
And so that's the only one that's mentioned. She does the other one too, perhaps, but that's the only one that's mentioned. The other scenario is that, uh, uh, that Gershom had already been circumcised and back in the land of Midian, and this had made such a fuss in the family, and she was so against this thing that when, uh, Eleazar was born, Moses said, well, I'm not going to be bothered with it. I'll, I'll just let it go, and I won't make any family fight about it. And, and, uh, so here they'd come on the way, and there was only one of the two boys, the younger one, that hadn't been circumcised. In either case, the inference seems inescapable that Zipra was the one who resisted the ordinance of God, and that he, she was fighting it all the time.
But it was not Moses, it was not Zipra, but Moses that God s- God sought to kill, and A. W. Pink makes an interesting point here, and I quote him. This point's a solemn warning to Christian fathers today. A man may be united to a woman who opposes him at every step, and he desires to maintain a scriptural discipline in his home, but as he desires, a woman who opposes him at every step, as he desires to maintain a scriptural discipline in his home, but this does not absolve him from doing his duty. Most writers suppose that it was at this point that Moses sent his wife and sons back to Jethro. We're not told when, but he definitely sent them back because in Exodus eighteen, Jethro brings them to him again during the Exodus.
Just one comment on this, though, uh, and then I close. It seems that this was probably not a very happy marriage spiritually. In other ways, it might have been a happy marriage, but Zipporah evidently did not stand spiritually with Moses. Not like Sarah and Abraham. Sarah and Abraham were a real partnership. They were a team together. They went to that promised land together, and they stood together, and they, they wrestled together for years with that problem of not having any children, and, and they were, they're put down in Hebrews chapter eleven together as a man and a woman of faith. By faith.