The first time I watched Cecil B. DeMille’s classic movie, The Ten Commandments, I was awestruck. There stood Charlton Heston, larger than life, confronting Yul Brynner and all of the powers of Egypt. For me, that was the stuff of Biblical lore: conquering the bad guys in the name of the Lord.

 

As I matured, I’ve come to see that there is much more to the story of Moses and the Exodus. As the single most formative event in the history of the Hebrew people, the Exodus marked the time when God delivered his people from their enslavement to the Egyptians—the greatest power then on earth.

 

I am drawn to this story because I relate so readily to the misuse, misplacement, and mistrust of power. I empathize with the Israelites’ struggle in bondage and their desire for deliverance. Haven’t we all, to some extent, chafed against the bondage of the world that is so much bigger than us that its apparent power over us can sometimes be overwhelming? Maybe this explains the times we’ve felt alienated from God, ourselves, and others.

 

I also relate to Moses as he misappropriates the power that rightfully belongs to God, freely granting it to others or even taking it upon himself. That’s a common practice, especially when we remain asleep to God’s presence with us. Perhaps this is why I see myself when I read about a fearful Moses. Maybe you see yourself here, too: fear everywhere. We’re so anxious about possible scenarios that might never even occur that we seem to live on constant red alert. It reminds me of a cartoon in which a man was holding at gunpoint a thief who had broken into his home. As he waited for the police to arrive, he asked the burglar, “While you’re here, would you mind coming upstairs and saying hello to my wife – she’s been expecting you every night for the past 30 years!”

 

This woman is a caricature, of course, but the image of her living in perpetual fear of a break-in resonates with us. Fear is a debilitating and destructive force that steals our joy by robbing our trust of God and others. Fear produces reticence, anxiety and pessimism; it is always bidding us to protect ourselves from the wildly unpredictable flow of daily living. Fear warns us of the alleged high probability of our getting hurt.

 

Eventually, fear lulls us to sleep as we close our eyes to the life-giving power that God offers us. We dream away our lives by trading the risk of deeper living for the safety net of simply not losing. Fear smothers possibility by thwarting love’s embrace; it demands that we draw into ourselves for comfort and safety. This timid retreat pulls us downward into the smaller stories of our lives where there is little or no power for radiant living.

 

Conversely, faith calls us to launch from our fear and be drawn out by God into the wide-open spaces of unencumbered living. God invites us to thrive in his larger story where we discover ample power to navigate through any obstacles that we encounter. Fear is bondage; faith is freedom. And we see it clearly in the story of Moses.

 

At every turn, Moses is presented with options that resemble ours. He faces the temptations to sleep through life, to take matters into his own hands, to play it safe by running away, and to cover his fear by falsely accusing God. He must ask himself repeatedly, “Is my way forward going to be determined by the power others have over me, or will I walk in faith based on the power that is mine through the constant and loving assurances of God?”

 

Like Moses, we come to an hour, to a crisis point, that confronts us with fundamental questions: who or what ultimately holds power over me? Who or what is stealing me away from experiencing life to the fullest? Who or what will I ascribe reverence to? Which of the many gods clamoring for my attention will I honor as all-powerful?

 

This crisis point stands at the center of our Gethsemanes. It insists we answer: will I awaken to the reign of the Lord God Almighty, the great “I Am,” or will I continue to give God’s power to others by sleepwalking into my tomorrows, allowing myself to be tossed by the imaginary winds of fate?

 

When God calls Moses to confront the Pharaoh (and what is Pharaoh but Moses’ greatest fear?), I stand with him as his pulse quickens, his heart pounds and his face flushes with terror. I know the dread of facing my greatest fears, and perhaps you know it too. Jesus certainly did as he came to his own hour of crisis and self-doubt in the garden of Gethsemane. This is why he remembers Moses’ story. He is about to face his deepest fears, and for us these are the familiar fears of loneliness, separation, pain, and death. Jesus’ hour has come – just as Moses’ came – and the fate of God’s children hangs in the balance. A clash of powers is at hand.

 

I sometimes wonder if the power of the epic Biblical stories preached in our spiritual communities ever gets woven into the real fabric of lives. I find a certain irony in hearing so many people question God’s presence, concern, and working power today, yet they freely give praise for all of the wondrous things God has done in calling and sustaining his people for generations upon generations. That’s when I remember Suzette.

 

Suzette was 24, beautiful, single, and worked as the receptionist for my company. She was also a fairly new Christian and seemed much more interested in her spiritual growth than in mastering some of the computer skills necessary to keep her job. During training sessions it wasn’t uncommon for us to discuss our faith as opportunity arose. She knew I was heavily involved in the church and was an easy mark for changing the subject from balance sheets to Bible stories. I think the most refreshing thing about Suzette was her insatiable longing to receive the many stories of the Bible that, honestly, at the time, I saw as “old hat.”

 

With eyes beaming she would arrive on Monday mornings to share the latest revelation she had received from her Bible class the day before. Reflecting back I cringe at how patronizing my responses to her must have been. While I never said it, my demeanor certainly communicated, “That’s lovely, but it’ll get old soon.” I was asleep to God’s living presence in Suzette’s life and in my life, a presence that lived in me through these ancient stories. I was asleep to the power these stories had for my life, unconscious to the fact that without them, I had no life at all.

 

One Monday morning Suzette failed to arrive at work. We called her house to check on her. There was no answer. Maybe she was too ill to answer the phone, we thought. Other than the inconvenience of finding somebody to cover her responsibilities for the day, none of us gave it much thought. There were more important things to do.

 

The next day we received a call from Suzette’s mother. She was frantic, and it was difficult to make out what she was saying. Not hearing from Suzette, she had gone by her apartment to see if she was okay. To her dismay the door stood open. Suzette’s purse sat on the counter along with her car keys and wallet, but Suzette was nowhere to be found. Her mother phoned her friends to see if they had heard anything or knew where she might be. Everyone was clueless. Suzette’s mother called the police, filled out a missing person’s report and continued her frenetic search. By now the entire office was praying as we battled to fight off all of the horrible scenarios that went through our minds.

 

One day turned into two, then three, then a week. No word came from Suzette. The local television stations and newspaper picked up the story and asked the public for help in finding her. We hung posters in local stores and along busy streets. The whole community desperately sought to find this innocent twenty-four-year-old girl who had suddenly and tragically vanished.

 

After more than a week and a half, Suzette’s father received a call from a local convenience store clerk. Following eleven days of unimaginable hell, Suzette had been kicked out on the street, naked, by two of the most brutal men the justice system would ever encounter. She was alive, but hardly recognizable from the person we knew her to be. Throughout the entire time of her ordeal, her eyes had been duct-taped shut. Her contact lenses had dried to her retinas and doctors feared she would lose her sight. She had lost a significant amount of weight, and she was dehydrated, suffering from shock. Her physical recovery would take months. Her psychological recovery, it was feared, would never take place at all.

As the disturbing details of Suzette’s captivity emerged, I could hardly believe that people could be so cruel, demeaning and base. It left me questioning where God was through this entire episode. No one deserved something like this. I wrestled with the hate welling up inside toward the perpetrators of such atrocities. It also forced me to wonder how I would cope if I—or one of my family members—were abducted.

 

Nearly a year passed before Suzette returned to the office. In time the men responsible for her crimes—her Pharaoh—had been caught and prosecuted. Both received life sentences for kidnapping, rape and a list of other crimes that accompanied their horrendous actions. The verdict for both was life in prison without parole.

 

I wasn’t prepared to be met with the response I received. “Tim!” Suzette exclaimed as she gave me a hug, “How are you?” Then she added, “I’ve missed everybody so much—it’s so good to be back!”

 

Even two decades removed from these events, I cannot tell or type this story without a flood of tears. The memories of what she shared next still linger deep in my soul; Suzette told me how her faith sustained her throughout the entire time that unspeakable acts were committed against her. She spoke of how she prayed for these two men and wondered what must have happened to them when they were children, wrongs they must have experienced that stole their spirits and robbed them of the knowledge of the goodness of the God she had come to know.

 

Of everything she said; one statement stood out most. She told me that she dealt with her fear of dying by accepting that God alone held the power over her life. She spoke of how God affirmed to her that these men might bind her but they had no power over her. That power belonged to God, and he was giving her the strength to persevere. She said that she felt God’s reassurance that even if they killed her, it only meant that she would soon be standing before him in the fullness of his presence, experiencing the warmth of his embrace, and that together, forever, they would be one.

 

It was the power of the ancient stories she had been hearing every week at her church that sustained her. Suzette understood the principle of misplaced power, and she wasn’t about to give to another what rightfully belonged to God. Because of this, not a moment passed when she allowed herself to doubt the God who alone held the power of life and death.

 

This is not an easy principle to learn, much less to incorporate when Gethsemane appears at our door. Even Moses, the great leader and teacher of Israel struggled to embrace this reality in a time of personal and national crisis.

 

As Moses’ story begins, a new king has ascended in Egypt, one who does not recognize former treaties with Israel. For over a century Egypt had been ruled by the Hyksos, who were foreigners of Semitic origin. Because of their common ancestry, they acted favorably toward the Hebrew people. However the Hyksos were overthrown by the Egyptians around 1580 B.C. The historical context helps us make sense of the social and ethnic dynamics involved as a new king in Egypt attains power.^[1]

 

When he surveys his kingdom, the new Pharaoh concludes that “the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we,”^[2] and he attempts to suppress them by placing harsh taskmasters over them. It’s a classic power play: a show of force as we see in tyrants throughout history. As the designs of despots often do, however, Pharaoh’s plan backfires; the more he oppressed the Israelites “the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites.”^[3]

 

To alleviate this perceived threat, the king approaches the Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, with a scheme—kill all of the boys born to Hebrew women.^[4] It’s brutal but simple: eliminate all of the newborn Hebrew males and eventually the Israelites will disappear; the threat to the power of the king will vanish.

 

It seems like a foolproof plan, but it is thwarted by the faithfulness of a few. The Hebrew midwives do not struggle with the problem of misplaced power; they honor God and do not fear the Pharaoh. Consequently, they refuse to obey the Pharaoh’s command and subversively allow the newborn baby boys to survive.

 

Shiphrah and Puah personify reverence for God. They courageously risked their own lives by flouting the king’s command. Imagine how audacious this is. Two humble midwives withstood the mighty Egyptian sovereign and faced possible execution. Yet they stood firm, and God spared their lives and caused them to flourish: “because the midwives feared God, he gave them families.”^[5]

 

This preamble to Moses’ birth foreshadows the pervasive theme that unfolds throughout the rest of the story: If Moses fears (gives reverence to) God like the Hebrew midwives, he will succeed in what God has called him to do. However, if he fears others and the circumstances of his life, he will fail at every turn.

 

Realizing that his plan to murder the Hebrew babies has failed, Pharaoh broadens his edict. He gets the entire nation of Egypt into the act: “Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live.”^[6] With this decree, the desperation of the Pharaoh reveals itself. The king’s cruelty knows no limits as he wrestles to establish his power.

 

Because of the king’s edict, the unnamed mother of Moses determines that her son will be safer hidden among the reeds of the riverbank than concealed in her home. To ensure his security she instructs Miriam, Moses’ sister, to remain near and to watch over the infant.

 

Like the Hebrew midwives, the mother of Moses refuses to allow her fear of the Pharaoh to trump her reverence for God. By choosing to disregard the king, the mother of Moses places her faith and her child into God’s hands. This integral part of Moses’ background foreshadows what he will need to embrace in order to fulfill his destiny.

 

With the basket in the bulrushes, Pharaoh’s daughter goes down to the river to bathe. She notices the basket among the reeds and instructs one of her maids to retrieve it. Looking inside, she discovers a baby. Intuitively (or perhaps because he is circumcised), she realizes that the infant must be a Hebrew child. Miriam, watching from a distance, boldly approaches the princess: “Shall I go and get you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?”^[7] The Egyptian princess agrees, superseding her father’s command. Miriam returns home, retrieves her mother, and without revealing her true identity introduces her to Pharaoh’s daughter. Providentially, Moses’ daring mother is blessed to care for her own child until he is weaned.

 

With this, the stage has been set. Picture this: In the house of the Pharaoh under the influence of a humble Hebrew birthmother and a royal Egyptian stepmother, the forces for shaping Moses’ tension-filled future are in place. From the Egyptians, Moses learns the ways of power politics, the dominant culture and the prevailing religion. From his mother he learns the ways of the Israelite people, oppression, and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Moses comes to know two great powers: God and Pharaoh.

 

Not long into the story the dual loyalties of Moses clash in a disturbing incident. The adult Moses, in spite of his Egyptian upbringing, finds his heart in solidarity with the Hebrew people. He is stirred to wrath as he observes an Egyptian overlord beating a Hebrew slave. Burning at the injustice, “he looked this way and that, and seeing no one he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.”^[8] There it is: Moses has become a murderer. There is no attempt to justify the violence of Moses’ actions; by this time, Moses was hardened against Egyptian rule, and he took matters into his own hands. He would apply the Egyptian way that he learned in Pharaoh’s house against the Egyptians. Sounds like a good action hero.

 

But real life is not like an action movie, or even a vintage DeMille. Though Moses attempts to bury the evidence of his crime, the details eventually surface and he learns that the Pharaoh is seeking retribution—an eye for an eye. In fear for his life, Moses flees to the land of Midian where he will work as a shepherd in the far reaches of the desert until he receives a divine awakening – a call that will bring him to the hour for which he was born.

 

I’ve often wondered what Moses thought in those intervening years, as he wandered the wilderness with his flocks. Did he reflect on his birth, the rescue from the reeds, the rags-to-riches story of his being found by the Pharaoh’s daughter and then having the double blessing of being raised by his own birthmother in Pharaoh’s house? Did he acknowledge the hand of the God of the Hebrews upon him, or did he chalk it all up to some odd twist of fate? Did he feel that his education in Pharaoh’s house had a purpose, or did he view it as a wasted opportunity—one eventually forfeited because of his murderous passion for justice? For Moses, the wilderness is not simply an empty wasteland. It affords him time to think, a furnace of solitude out of which the figure of his identity might be forged. Additionally, it provides the setting for the decisive event of his life: the burning bush.

 

When it comes to making himself known, God needs no publicist. The story of the burning bush is one of the most familiar events in the Bible. Believers and curious alike have heard of the voice that spoke from a bush that was burning but not consumed.

 

I wonder if it might not be helpful for us to see the miracle in the burning bush not so much in the burning itself – God, after all, is limitless, and who knows what is going on in the divine heart beyond our perception – but in Moses’ being able to see the bush burning and recognize it as a message from God. Moses was given a vision: not just the theophany of the burning bush, but the epiphany of seeing the plight of his people and imagining the holy reckless possibility that things could be different, could be better. It is this vision that is important. After all, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning reminds us, every common bush is afire with the glory of God. Our call might not be so dramatic, but we all have our moments of epiphany whether we recognize them as such or not. Through this vision, Moses awakes to the undeniable presence of God working in his life.

 

This isn’t unfamiliar territory for most of us. We all, like Moses, also face the temptation to remain mired in the smaller stories of our lives. From the bush, God calls Moses to make an appeal to Pharaoh, and Moses, even in the midst of an awesome display of God’s power, responds (as we often do) in fear. Fear is incapacitating. It wipes out any sense of awe and wonder we may experience even as the numinous surrounds us. The bush is enflamed, but it does not burn. The entire unnatural episode beckons a liturgy of the holy impossible. The ground is hallowed and the air is saturated with wonder. Yet, Moses turns away from the larger story of God as he retorts, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and that I should bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?”^[9] Even after forty years of hiding in the desert, Moses is still afraid.

 

If we listen closely, we can hear the ringing of a wake up call—for Moses and for ourselves. At the burning bush, we recognize how easily fear rises up within our hearts as the antithesis of faith’s call. By questioning the voice of the One that calls from within, Moses independently takes his stand against the God speaking to him from the midst of flaming shrubbery. He overlooks the power of God and doubts the divine wisdom. Moses practically accuses God of not knowing what he is asking the aged shepherd to do, and he teeters perilously close to subverting God’s throne, of asking God to step aside so that Moses might instruct him. The story makes its point: Moses is asleep to the power of God working in his life. This ironic affair begs us to look inward to inquire how, when, and where we have done—and are doing—the same.

 

Though accused and doubted, God refuses to apply his power against Moses. Instead, God harnesses his power to perform unimaginable wonders to quell Moses’ fear and to instill a spirit of faithful resolve. God transforms Moses’ staff into a snake and then returns it to its original form. God causes Moses’ hand to become leprous and immediately restores it. God channels his power in order to reorient Moses’ understanding of where and with whom, real power resides.

 

After the presentations of power, God assures Moses that now, an entire generation after the murderous event, the Egyptians seeking Moses’ life are dead. With the demonstration of God’s power and reassurances of his own safety, Moses consents to the unthinkable: he agrees to appear before the Egyptian Pharaoh to make an appeal on behalf of the Israelites.

 

God instructs Moses to appear before Pharaoh and inform the king that the Hebrew’s God wishes his people to venture out of the land of Egypt to worship him during a three-day festival.

 

Pharaoh, unsurprisingly, responds to Moses’ request to “Let my people go” with the ancient Egyptian equivalent of “you must be joking.” In fact, he retaliates by ordering the Egyptian taskmasters to force the Israelites into working twice as hard with half as much material. Sometimes Gethsemane gets worse before it gets better.

 

In return, the Israelites become indignant with Moses and blame him for their increased burdens. Moses, afraid that he is bound to fail, blames God, saying, “Lord, why have You brought trouble on this people? Why is it You have sent me? Since I came to Pharaoh to speak in Your name, he has done evil to this people; neither have You delivered Your people at all.”^[10]

 

Moses’ irreverent allegation accuses God of not being able to manage his own affairs properly. Could God not foresee how the Egyptians and the Israelites would have responded? In the eyes of Moses, God has so badly mishandled events that the end result has been evil rather than good. Moses charges God with ineptitude in delivering his own people.

 

Let’s pretend we’re hearing this story for the first time, and the storyteller has just paused for dramatic effect–or a commercial break. What will God do? Will he strike Moses dead? Will he punish the Israelites for their faithless complaining? Will he unleash all of his fury upon Pharaoh, bankrupting him of his power? How will God respond?

 

Those all-too-likely scenarios represent our own projected images of how we expect power to react. God, however, defies our expectations.

 

God declares to Moses, “Now you shall see what I will do to Pharaoh. For with a strong hand he will let them go, and with a strong hand he will drive them out of his land.”^[11] God announces his mastery over the fears of Moses, the anger of the Israelites, and the defiance of the Pharaoh. The Israelites dread the power of Pharaoh, and Pharaoh believes his power to be invincible. Paradoxically, God intends to empower Pharaoh to do his bidding, even if Pharaoh is determined to do otherwise.

 

As his strategy unfolds, God determines that if Pharaoh will not allow the people to leave for a period of worship, then God will free them permanently. This may have been what God, as a cunning tactician, was after all along. At any rate, the hard-heartedness of Pharaoh propels God to action, and through a series of ten plagues God begins to eradicate Pharaoh’s power. Egypt is the ancient equivalent of a lone superpower, but the God of the Hebrews is going to be its undoing.

 

At last Pharaoh’s only strength was the strength to submit to God’s will. Amazingly, through the strong hand of his own decree, Pharaoh sets the captives free.

 

The story of Moses illustrates some of the central principles Scripture teaches us regarding misplaced power. The Hebrew midwives would not yield to Pharaoh, but instead chose to honor and reverence God and so they were blessed. The mother of Moses refused obey to the edict of the king, instead choosing to put her trust and the welfare of her child squarely in the hands of God. As a result, both she and her baby were blessed. Alternatively, we’ve seen how Pharaoh and Moses struggled with finding the dwelling place of true power. Both seemed blinded, unable to look beyond the veil of the immediate and ascribe to God the power that rightfully belongs to him.

 

But does this story say anything to us, or is it little more than a vacuum sucking up our time? Will this story make a significant difference in the way we live and in the way we approach our Gethsemanes? Or have we received this story as only another in a long line of pithy tales we find intriguing, but not life-changing?

 

Sometimes I’m saddened when I see what the retelling of the greatest story ever told has been reduced to today. So many have become so eager to be entertained with stories and poems and atta-boys that they are no longer left with substantive insights to keep them afloat when life happens.

 

At some point we must decide if these central Biblical narratives can shape us and the way we live in our world. I believe if we awaken to their principles we can find the power to survive through our Gethsemanes. When we read them as more than fairy tales or morality tales from a bygone era and begin embracing them as the stories of our lives, we just might discover how God provides everything to sustain and empower us in the Gethsemanes that terrify us.

 

At some point we, like Suzette, will find ourselves in a terrifying ordeal. When we do, we can reach into these ancient stories to find a present hope as we enter the Gethsemanes of our lives. When contemplating her experience I can’t fathom questioning the power and presence of God’s working in the Gethsemanes of my life. And that’s precisely why we should immerse ourselves in these stories now.

 

If we can’t find resources in the Biblical narrative to help make sense of the story of our own lives, what more do we desire of God? Should he approach us in a burning bush? But if he did, wouldn’t we, like Moses, continue to question him anyway? Does it occur to us that if the stories of Scripture fail to speak deeply into the most fearful places of our soul that even the audible voice of God might somehow get lost in the translation of our noisy world? What will it take for us to see that the accounts of Scripture form our biographies just as they formed the biography of Christ? Christ understood that the Biblical stories are the stories of us all.

 

Moses is a Christ-like-figure in the fullness of his humanity. We are permitted to watch, as he is tempted to find a way of escape even if it means forsaking the hour for which he had been born. He arrived at the intersection of faith and the impossible. He stood before his greatest fear and, like us, was called to overcome it.

 

The life of Moses is a living testimony of how God uniquely prepares each of us for his will. He was born into a potentially lethal situation. His rescue, his sustenance, and his upbringing were all performed under the auspices of God’s providential care. And yet at the moment of his call, Moses initially balked. He stood face-to-face with the only thing that could challenge the fulfillment of his future – misplaced power. At the burning bush, Moses entered his Gethsemane and encountered a life-transforming crisis point. He could awaken and reclaim the power he had given to Pharaoh and return it to God, or he could walk away from the hour for which he had come.

 

No matter how old they are, these stories continue to beckon us to awaken to the power of God, the only power able to sustain us in our Gethsemanes. Are we going to wake up from our slumber or will we continue to hit the internal snooze button, unwilling to hear what God is telling us from the burning bush?

 

As we return to Jesus in Gethsemane, three men are sleeping. Only one is awake. Which one do you think God used to change the world?

 

 

URL: http://www.presence.tv/cms/per_jesus-gethsemane-us-part-4.php

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