Sermon - AudioEx 4-6 - Audio
Ex 4-6 - Daily Reading
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Exodus 4
- 4.1-17: Moses protests that he is not adequate for the task. God meets of his objections.
- 4.9: The three signs speak of life and death, even as the plagues will.
- 4.14: Moses wants someone else to take on this task. God has prepared him, gifted him, even empowered him--but still he wants God to find another. God is not amused.
- 4.24-25: Before Moses can act as Israel's deliverer he has to be faithful to the covenant which means circumcision for his son.
- 4.29-31: The people believe the words and signs. Moses is shown that since this is God's mission he doesn't have to fear rejection of his leadership
Exodus 5
- 5.1-2: The opening shots of a battle that will show who the LORD is and that all the gods of Egypt are worthless.
- 5.1: The Hebrew word , has been traditionally translated “let [my people] go.” One commentator observes, “If a person was dismissed through the use of this verb, then he ceased to be within the power or sphere of influence of the individual who had dismissed him. He was completely free and subsequently acted entirely on his own responsibility”
- 5.3: The irony is that it is not the people of Israel who will suffer, but the Egyptians.
- 5.6ff: Pharaoh demands that Israel serve him completely rather than serving Yahweh completely. It is a disastrous demand.
- 5.6ff: Pharaoh also is trying to destroy the leadership of Moses, whom God has chosen. It is another very bad choice.
- 5.10: "Thus says Pharaoh" rather than "Thus says the LORD"--this is a collision course.
- 5.21: The foreman who have been beaten are extremely upset. They want God to bring judgment on Moses and Aaron, instead God will bring judgment on Pharaoh.
- 5.31-32: The opening round of the battle seems to have gone to Pharaoh. Instead of things being better they have gotten significantly worse.
Exodus 6
- Exodus 6 begins with God's response to the discouragement of Moses and Israel. We hear recurring themes about God's promise of deliverance, his faithfulness to his covenant, and knowing the pain of the people.
- 6.1: The expression “I will do to Pharaoh” always refers to the plagues. God would first show his sovereignty over Pharaoh before defeating him.
- 6.3: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob know the name Yahweh (LORD), but they did not experience the fullness of that name in the way that Moses and the Israelites will. Moses and company will see an even greater commitment by Yahweh to both the covenant and the promise of the land. There is here a further unfolding of God's revelation about himself--just as we see that further unfolding in Christ.
- 6.9: God's promises will not penetrate until Pharaoh begins to feel the plagues.
- 6.20: We find out that name of Moses' parents.
- 6.24: Korah will be famous for his rebellion.
- 6.25: Phinehas will become famous for his faithfulness to God.
8 comments:
In Exodus 4.15 It says God will teach them what to do. I always just assumed that Moses and Aaron would go not knowing what they were going to say or do and God would give them the words then and there. I understand though that God will teach them, That takes some participation and work before hand.
Oh Moses, can't you see it isn't about you anyways?! Oh wait, how many times do I think it is about me and have insecurities and complexes about things when really, all I have to do is let God show up and do his thing? A good reminder that this story isn't about us!
This morning's reading reminded me of a favorite song by Ginny Owens called "I AM"...here are some of the lyrics:
No Lord, he said, you've got the wrong guy
Simple conversation gets me tongue-tied
And you're telling me to speak with a maniac king, Or could it be I've lost my mind
Besides, I am weak, don't you want someone strong? To lead them out of Egypt when they've been there so long
And anyway, they won’t believe You ever spoke to me
It's not your problem, God replied
And the rest is history
’Cause there's a bigger picture you can't see
You don't have to change the world, just trust in Me, 'Cause I am your creator, I am working out my plan
And through you I will show them, I AM
here's a link to the rest of the song if you want to check it out:
http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/I-Am-lyrics-Ginny-Owens/8E663D0A5C4D677B48256CA2000E7E6B
What a fantastic song. It's amazing that most revered leader of Israel is so insecure. There's hope for the rest of us.
Wait...no comments on 4:24? "the Lord met Moses and was about to kill him." What's this all about?
Good morning J&C,
Glad you made it back to Hungary after your sit on the tarmac.
The bottom line in verses 24-26 is that circumcision, the sign of the covenant, is hugely important. That much we know. After that scholars have argued for centuries about how this all comes together. Moses is not mentioned by name in the account, but given his central place in the narrative it must reference him. Also, the mixture of words and Hebrew endings adds confusion to the account. So over all, it is a difficult passage.
The Word Biblical Commentary gives one of the best over all explanations. It's below, but a bit lengthy so I had to put it in a couple of posts.
The reason for this attack, as the redactor’s explanatory note in v 26b makes clear, is that Moses had not previously been circumcised. The difficulty of such a conclusion for the later generations of Jewish scholars, who proved themselves capable of contending that Moses, along with other great OT heroes, was born circumcised (Vermes, NTS 4 [1958] 314–15), has made it difficult also for a great many Christian scholars. But no other explanation of this passage in this context answers more questions than it raises.
Sasson (JBL 85 [1966] 473–74) has pointed out convincingly that Egyptian circumcision was not only performed on adults, but was, by comparison with Hebrew circumcision, merely a partial circumcision. Indeed, he contends (475–76) that circumcision may well have come to Egypt from North Syria, where it was practiced early in the third millenium BC For whatever reasons, the compiler who set vv 24–26 in their present context had apparently reached a conclusion confirmed by these facts. Perhaps he combined the abnormal circumstances by which the infant Moses had to be hidden away at birth with some knowledge of the Egyptian practice and even a belief that the circumcision of infant boys was a late development in Israel’s life. Quite possibly, he too was searching for some reason for Yahweh’s serious encounter. Whatever the case, he clearly believed that Moses was uncircumcised and that Yahweh determined to stop him en route to Egypt for that reason.
Zipporah, the only person available to perform the rite, seizes the mandatory flint cutting tool (Josh 5:2–9; cf. Sasson, JBL 85 [1966] 474) and circumcises not Moses, who would have been temporarily incapacitated by the surgery (cf. Gen 34:18–31) at a crucial time when he could no longer delay his journey, but her son. For the child, who was not to make the journey to Egypt in any case, the effects of the circumcision would be less problematic. To transfer the effect of the rite, Zipporah touched the severed foreskin of her son to the genitals of Moses, intoning as she did so the ancient formula recalling circumcision as a premarital rite: “For a bridegroom of blood you are to me!” This ancient phrase, as Mitchell [VT 19 [1969] 94–105, 111–12) has demonstrated, is a phrase of marital relationship—and it was already old enough at the time of the compilation of this sequence to require a specific comment by the redactor that the context of reference for the phrase was circumcision (v 26b). The final establishment of circumcision as the crucial point of these verses is of course that Zipporah’s action worked and that Yahweh thus “fell back” or “backed off” from Moses.
The point at issue in vv 24–26 is thus that Moses had not been circumcised or, at best, had received only the partial circumcision of the Egyptians, referred to in Josh 5:9 as a “disgrace” or “reproach” (hprj). A comparable memory for the compiler of this section may indeed have been the one recorded now in Josh 5:2–9, which
reports the circumcision of all those born in the [vol. 03, p. 59] wilderness following the exodus who had not been circumcised and so had to be before the crossing of the Jordan for the conquest and settlement of the promised land.
At the beginning of Moses’ special mission for Yahweh, this omission, or perhaps this “Egyptian disgrace,” had to be remedied. Vv 24–26 pose the problem and describe its immediate and surely temporary remedy. The language of v 24, “sought to put him to death,” may reflect an earlier layer of the story, but here it describes the seriousness of the crisis and indicates dramatically that Yahweh is still very much in charge. The language may be compared to the language of the account of the testing of Abraham’s faith (Gen 22:2) or of the struggle of Jacob at Jabbok (Gen 32:22–32). Zipporah’s reaction to the crisis is a vicarious circumcision of Moses to prevent his being painfully crippled at the beginning of the most important undertaking of his life. And what Zipporah says is the ritual statement which accompanied the premarital circumcision as a declaration to a young man’s in-laws that he was of an age appropriate for marriage. The “bridegroom of blood” of circumcision was being prepared to become a bridegroom of a bride. Perhaps there was a similar ritual statement in the wedding ceremony. To the redactor who included this narrative in Exod 4, this ritual phrase was already arcane enough to require the explanation he appended at v 26b.
I was not questioning the circumcision part; I wondered why the Lord waited until this point in the journey? (Jack)
Hi Jack,
It is a great question. The waiting reminds me a bit of Genesis 15 and 17. Why doesn't God give the sign of the covenant in Genesis 15, why wait until a later time. For some reason God chooses to hold back on his action with Moses until he is actually journeying to Egypt. Could the reason be that God waits until Moses moves from speaking about his obedience, to acting on it? Once he acts, God calls him in this moment not simply to lead his people, but to full covenant obedience as he begins this new chapter in his life.
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