Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: How to Respond to a Great Opportunity (Exodus 3-4)
Date: June 4, 2023
Did you know that toothpaste doesn’t dissolve very well? In my freshman year of college, I took a chemistry class called Quantitative Analysis. The class was foundational for everything else we would be doing and especially in the various labs we would take because it was all about how to figure out precisely how much of one thing you had in something else. Honestly, that’s the basis of a lot of chemistry—finding out how much of something you have in something else. If you learn how to do that really well, everything else is bonus. In any event, I didn’t particularly enjoy the class in spite of a great professor because it was thoroughly lab-based and practical and I much preferred theoretical and classroom instruction. Also, I was the black sheep of the chemistry department.
I still remember the first lab experiment we did for the class. We had to figure out how much fluoride was in a sample of toothpaste. The point, of course, was to see if our answer matched what the label on the tube said. The first step, then, was to break down the toothpaste chemically. This meant boiling it. For hours. And hours. I believe that in that first 4-hour lab period, I spent 30 minutes getting set up and most of the next three hours watching a beaker of toothpaste boil. It was riveting, let me tell you. If someone came to me now and said we were going to figure out how much fluoride was in toothpaste, I would give them a quick and unqualified, “No.” I have no intention of ever doing something like that again if I can help it. But I did it then because my grade depended on it.
For the graduates in the room—and everybody else as well—I suspect there has been a time or two over the course of your educational journey when you were given an assignment you didn’t particularly want to do. That kind of a situation sort of comes with the territory of school. If we wanted to do all the assignments we were given, there wouldn’t be any need for deadlines. Well, when you get an assignment you don’t really want to do, there are a couple of options before you. One option, of course, is to just do it. That’s certainly the simpler option. It avoids all the hassles that come with not doing it. It will perhaps come as no surprise that the second option is to not do it. You could always just refuse. There will obviously be repercussions to taking this path including lowering your grade, diminishing the esteem of your teacher, and incurring the wrath of your parents, but it’s at least on the table.
If we’re being really honest, though, how often did you really feel like that was a live option for you to take? Occasionally perhaps, but probably not very often. I suspect that for several of you it simply wasn’t an option. If you were given an assignment, you did the assignment. Whether it was parental…encouragement…or simply your own sense of duty driving that decision doesn’t matter. If you got it, you did it. And you did the extra stuff too.
Shift gears with me for just a minute, though, to life. There are times we get assignments in life. Even more than that, there are times God comes to us and invites us to a particular course of action. In each of these instances, we have the same set of choices before us that we do when it comes to school assignments from our teachers. Yet unlike with school work, when it comes to the things God may be calling us to do, we often feel like we have a bit more room to debate and even refuse than we do with our school assignments. After all, if we tell a teacher, “No,” we could flunk the class. If we tell God, “No,” though, the consequences often don’t seem nearly as ominous…or immediate.
As we have already said a few times today, this is Graduate Recognition Sunday. This is the day we have set aside to recognize and celebrate our various graduates of all shapes and sizes. This is right and proper to do as well because they have done some terrific work to get to where they are. The journey has not always been easy or smooth, but they have persevered and accomplished much. And, as you heard at the beginning of the service, this is a pretty remarkable bunch of students we have among us today.
One of the things about this particular season of life, though, is that it is marked by transitions. But the thing is, just because we are making our way through this kind of a season doesn’t mean we always recognize the transitions when they’re coming. We also don’t always have a really clear sense of where the transitions are taking us either. That means this is a season ripe with the potential for God to give us a bit more direct guidance than He does in other seasons of life when our focus can be more on putting into practice what He’s already told us to do. Well, when God comes and gives us that clear guidance, how we respond to it tends to matter a pretty great deal. With all of that in mind, this morning, I want to take a few minutes with you to give some attention to the story of a man who received a pretty clear call by God to some pretty significant work. And while he ultimately came around to answering God’s call, his initial response offers us a great example of how not to respond to God’s calls to action in our lives.
If you have a copy of the Scriptures with you this morning, you can find this man’s story toward the beginning of the narrative of Israel’s journey out of Egypt to head toward the Promised Land. We know it simply as Exodus. The particular call to action I want to look at with you today is Moses’ call to be the leader of the people. You can find this beginning in Exodus 3. If your Bible titles this section at all like mine has, you probably see some kind of a reference to a burning bush at the beginning of the chapter. God’s invitation to Moses to join Him in His work to free Israel from the enslaving hand of Pharaoh in Egypt is one of the more well known stories in all of the Scriptures. It’s definitely one of the ones that always makes the preschool story Bibles. The whole idea of a burning bush as a clear indicator of the direction we are supposed to go with our lives originated here. Nothing had ever happened like this before, and there’s no documented evidence of its happening since.
The story opens like this: “Meanwhile, Moses was shepherding the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian. He led the flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God.” Now, grabbing this one verse out of context like that leaves you realizing pretty quickly that there’s a whole lot more going on here than meets the eye. For starters, the whole thing begins with the word “meanwhile.” That means there was something going on before this that probably helps you to understand it better. And indeed there was.
The whole story of the Exodus begins with the family of Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, moving to Egypt at the invitation of the oldest son of his favorite wife, Joseph (and you thought your family was complicated…), to escape the famine wreaking havoc across the region. Joseph had been sold into slavery by his brothers and wound up in Egypt where after a long and frustrating journey he found himself appointed by Pharaoh as the second-in-command over the whole nation. Jacob’s family ended up putting down roots in their new home, and over the span of several generations grew quite large. And as long as the dynasty of rulers connected to the Pharaoh who put Joseph in charge held power, this was fine. But eventually, as Moses rather ominously notes in Exodus 1:8: “A new king, who did not know about Joseph, came to power in Egypt.”
This new king wasn’t too keen on all these foreigners taking up space and eating up food that should belong to the “real” Egyptians whose heritage went back longer than the mere 300 or more years the Israelites had been living there. At the same time, because the Israelites were so numerous as a result of their having lots and lots of big families, he had to play the whole situation carefully so he didn’t wind up having to shut down a violent revolution. Through some political maneuvering whose details we are not given, this new Pharaoh enslaved the Israelites and began exploring a variety of means of population control. After a bit of frustrating (for him) trial and error, he decided the best plan was to simply have his soldiers throw all the Hebrew baby boys into the Nile to drown.
This was the situation into which Moses was born. His parents hid him for as long as they could, but eventually decided to give him to the river rather than have him thrown in it. This sounds crazy to us, but it made sense to them. They set him afloat in a wicker basket and hoped for the best. He was eventually recovered by none other than Pharaoh’s daughter who, in a deliciously ironic twist, raised him in the palace. Years later, he discovered the truth about how his adopted people were treating his genetic people and murdered an Egyptian guard in a clumsy attempt at sparking a violent revolution against Egypt’s tyranny. His clumsy attempt failed to garner any support from the Israelites he was trying to help and he had to flee the country for his life. He wound up in the territory of Midian where after a bit of heroics he found himself married to the oldest daughter of a man named Jethro, the priest of Midian.
Meanwhile…Moses settled into the new life he no doubt assumed he would be living for the rest of his life. But then he led his flock to the far side of the wilderness on the slopes of the mountain of God. Here his life changed forever. So did human history. It all started with a burning bush that wasn’t actually burning. Verse 2: “Then the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire within a bush. As Moses looked, he saw that the bush was on fire but was not consumed. So Moses thought, ‘I must go over and look at this remarkable sight. Why isn’t the bush burning up?’” You or I probably would have thought, “Holy smokes! What’s going on with that bush,” but apparently Moses spoke a little more formally than that when he was talking to himself.
In any event, when he goes over to the bush, God calls to him from out of the bush and invites Moses to be the guy to lead the rebellion he had tried to start years earlier, but this time with God’s help and power instead of his own. The invitation went like this: “I have observed the misery of my people in Egypt, and have heard them crying out because of their oppressors. I know about their sufferings, and I have come down to rescue them from the power of the Egyptians and to bring them from that land to a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey—the territory of the Canaanites, Hethites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites. So because the Israelites’ cry for help has come to me, and I have also seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them, therefore, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh so that you may lead my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”
Have you ever wished God would be clearer about what He wants you to do to serve Him? It’s really pretty hard to get any clearer than Moses got here. This is the kind of invitation to action from God that most of us crave. This is the kind of thing we boldly assure anyone who cares to listen that if we received it, we would absolutely, unequivocally, unquestionably, say yes and jump in with both feet. After all, how could you not respond affirmatively to something so clear as this? Yet while that’s a nice thought, reality tends to be a bit messier than the neat fantasies we have playing out in our minds.
Rather than doing the whole jump-in-with-both-feet thing we confidently insist we would do, Moses starts doing his best to get out of it. He throws a series of five questions or excuses at God all aimed at allowing him to tell God, “No,” in good conscience. Let’s take just a couple of minutes here and look at these together. His first line of attack is to appeal to humility: “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and that I should bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” God’s response to this is actually kind of interesting: “I will certainly be with you, and this will be the sign to you that I am the one who sent you: when you bring the people out of Egypt, you will all worship God at this mountain.” In other words, “Who you are and what you can do doesn’t really matter. You’re going to have me with you, and that’s all you need.”
Next, Moses worries the people might be pretty skeptical of his claims. After all, he would basically be a foreigner coming in to announce that God had ordained him to be their leader. People don’t usually get in a big rush to put themselves under the authority of a leader they don’t trust, and who doesn’t look or sound like them. Leaders are always a reflection of the people they lead (and vice versa). Once again, God has a response to this. He not only tells Moses who He is (and in a way that is foundational to the rest of the Biblical worldview), but He goes on to tell Him how the whole forthcoming adventure with Pharaoh is going to play out. Most notably, it is going to end with Moses’ successfully leading the people out of Egypt. In fact, the way God is going to make sure the whole thing unfolds, the Egyptians are going to wind up essentially paying the Israelites to leave. Moses doesn’t have to worry about a thing. He only needs to trust God and do what He says.
But that’s just not enough for Moses. In a third response that suggests Moses wasn’t actually listening to God’s explanation of how everything was going to go, he immediately fires back at God, “Yeah, but what if things don’t go that way?” “What if you’re wrong, God?” From Exodus 4:1: “What if they won’t believe me and will not obey me but say, ‘The Lord did not appear to you.’” Well, at this point in the story, you start to get the sense that Moses doesn’t actually want to do this at all. Now, as for the why behind his reluctance, we don’t know. Maybe he was terrified at the prospect of going up against Pharaoh. I mean, if anyone knew what it was like to attempt to thwart Pharaoh’s will, Moses did. Perhaps he had been so long disconnected from his people (practically 80 years at this point in his life), that he really didn’t care about them anymore. There could have been some lingering bitterness in his heart at having been rejected by the Egyptian who raised him and the Israelites who birthed him. He didn’t want anything else to do with either of them. Or maybe Moses had just gotten comfortable in his life in Midian. He had a family and a job and a future and he just wasn’t interested in leaving any of that behind to go start something new.
So he said to God, “But what if you’re wrong, and they don’t listen to me.” God, showing far more patience than I would have in His exceedingly large shoes, responds by giving Moses a series of miraculous signs to prove his divine mandate to the people. These combined with his knowledge of what may have been Israel’s secret name for God would do the trick, God assured him.
But Moses still doesn’t want to go. So he tries for the humility line one more time. Look at v. 10: “But Moses replied to the Lord, ‘Please, Lord, I have never been eloquent—either in the past or recently or since you have been speaking to your servant—because my mouth and my tongue are sluggish.” Have you ever let the fear of speaking in front of people keep you from accepting an opportunity to serve in an uncomfortable capacity in the church? I’ll leave that one alone for now. But that’s what Moses appeals to here: a fear of public speaking. I’m just not good on stage God. You’re really going to have to get someone else. But God had an answer for this too that, honestly, I love. “Who placed a mouth on humans? Who makes a person mute or deaf, seeing or hearing. Is it not I, the Lord? Now go! I will help you speak and I will teach you what to say.” In other words, “I gave you that mouth. I’ll make sure you can use it when the time comes.”
Having had all of his other excuses parried away, Moses’ ugly, whiny, cowardly core is finally exposed: “God, I just don’t want to go.” “Please, Lord, send someone else.” And I know Moses’ description of God here is that His anger burned against him, but I think the best way to hear this is as a loving father who is finally frustrated with the stubborn refusal of a child to take his wise and sound advice, to do the right thing without an entirely unreasonable amount of goading. Through divinely gritted teeth God tells Moses that He is going to send his brother Aaron—who is apparently a rockstar in front of a crowd—to do all the speaking for him and thus he needs to get moving.
For all the stories of Moses we tell in the church, we don’t often spend much time looking at this one. We know of Moses as the great and faithful leader of the Israelites. He is the Giver of the Law. He thundered against Pharaoh to let God’s people go. He led them in military victories and fiercely held them accountable when they sinned. He was bold and courageous and strong and one of the greatest heroes of the Old Testament. But here? He’s a whiny coward who is trying to do anything he can to get out of what God is calling him to do. Perhaps it’s a bit easier to find something more in common with this Moses than the one we remember from a bit later in the story.
Moses’ call to action from God was about as clear as anyone could have asked for here. We talk about getting burning bushes from God as a symbol for a clear call. But we only know that as a symbol because Moses got a literal one. Yet while we sometimes bemoan a perceived lack of clarity from God when it comes to what He wants us to do—especially in moments of transition in our lives—the truth is that we often have a great deal more clarity than we are comfortable having. We have enough clarity, in fact, in the Scriptures alone so as to make our resistance put us a whole lot more on par with where Moses was here than we’d like to admit. And, like Moses, rather than jumping in with both feet, we demure and play the humility card and make excuses for why we can’t do it and even just outright refuse. I think the biggest takeaway for us from this whole affair is simple: when God calls us to go, we need to not say, “No.” When God says, “Go,” don’t say, “no.”
Indeed, if God is who the Scriptures reveal Him to be and who His followers across the annals of human history have held Him to be, saying, “No,” isn’t just wrong, it’s foolish. It’s silly almost to the point of stupidity. God is God, and we’re not. God is wiser than we are. He knows better than we do. We just want what we want. He actually wants what’s best for us. Now, if you don’t buy any of that, by all means, say, “No.” I don’t blame you. That’s between you and Him. But if you profess a view of God that is anything even remotely consistent with the Christian worldview, then when God says, “Go,” don’t say, “no.”
God will be patient with our weaknesses just like He was with Moses’. But when He has called us to do something, He really does want us to do it. The trouble, of course, is that while occasionally the things God calls us to do seem terrifyingly enormous, more often they just don’t fit with the vision we have for our own lives. We feel like we have comfort and security pretty well settled, and God’s call will force us to leave those behind in favor of trusting Him instead. There are two major points of trouble with this line of thinking on our part. First, the security and comfort we believe ourselves to have are an illusion. And while we may not have them when answering God’s call the way our culture has taught us to want them, our lives are far more secure with Him in an ultimate sense. Second, if you are a follower of Jesus, your life doesn’t belong to you anyway. That is, it isn’t your life, it’s His to do with as He pleases. As He pleases, though, will always be to His glory and your joy. When God says, “Go,” don’t say, “no.”
Whether you are a graduate or not today, it may well be that God has been calling you to something. Your best bet is going to be to do what He says. Trying to resist Him never goes well in the long term. He’s not necessarily going to call us to something easy or safe—and, again, that fact may be part of the cause of the resistance you are feeling to it or that others in your life are feeling to it and expressing to you about it—but it will be good. What’s more, you can’t now imagine the glories of what God intends to accomplish through you. Moses certainly couldn’t imagine how His story was going to end, much less how he would be remembered to history. You and I aren’t any more able to imagine that than He was. When God says, “Go,” don’t say, “no.”
Graduates—and everybody else—God has an incredible future planned for you. It is a future that there is a good chance won’t look anything like how you imagine it will be right now. It may very well contain some trials and tribulations you’d much rather have avoided if possible. You will have to learn to let go of your hold on your plans and receive with open hands what God desires to give you. But it will be good. It will always be good. It will lead to joy and life and purpose and meaning that you’ve never experienced by any other means. It will one day lead to an eternal life in God’s eternal kingdom. All of this and more will come because you didn’t say, “No.” When God says, “Go,” don’t say, “no.” Let us see together where the great adventure of His kingdom takes us.