Ensign: These Are That Moses And Aaron

All ye inhabitants of the world, and dwellers on the earth, see ye, when he lifteth up an ensign on the mountains; and when he bloweth a trumpet, hear ye. Isaiah 18:3


AN ENSIGN ON THE MOUNTAINS                      24 February 2017


[Eight years ago I devoted my Mondays to writing chapter studies of the book of Exodus -- the book having forty chapters, it took most of a year to finish. Four years later I brought the whole study out in book form, and titled it The Burning Bush Wants To Be Your Friend. ISBN 9781481954341 And this week in my Bible study I went through a few Exodus passages and chapter six caught my attention so it brought me back to check what the whole thing is about. Or even what I thought at the time I wrote it, which still has some valuable insights to me. Take a look and study with me, David]



“Then the LORD said unto Moses, Now shalt thou see what I will do to Pharaoh: for with a strong hand shall he let them go, and with a strong hand shall he drive them out of his land.” The sixth chapter of Exodus begins with the LORD renewing the covenant, the divine promise that he’d made hundreds of years before with Abraham, for a new generation – not to change it but rather to reinforce that He had not forgotten about his people [the descendants of] Israel. This was also an answer to prayer; we left off last week with Moses and his brother Aaron having appeared before Pharaoh with the LORD’s demand to release His response. Pharaoh’s reply? Make the people work harder so they have no time to even think about their God (from Pharaoh’s standpoint, their god) and what He (he) wants to give or receive. Make no mistake; God is a giving God much more so than He’s receiving.



Convincing the officers of the children of Israel (those of their own people Pharaoh held accountable for meeting work quotas or not) that Moses and Aaron were delivering the LORD’s message was hard enough. Now that Moses was perceived as responsible for increasing Pharaoh’s burden upon them, most of the children of Israel and Moses himself are wondering why he bothered. So the LORD opens up not with covenant speak but rather a prophecy; Pharaoh will not let the children of Israel go piecemeal but rather he will let them all go. As we go on with the story of Exodus, we’ll see this happen! A miracle (or you could say series of miracles) that was fifteen centuries old when Jesus walked the earth is something that still speaks to us today when we’re willing to listen. God doesn’t stop listening when we suffer, but He will use suffering to teach us that without Him as our guiding light, we’re going to fail. God changes everybody.



Verses two through eight are the covenant, the relatable to us (in this passage, to the children of Israel) affirmation of a relationship between humanity and divinity. First the LORD establishes Who He is: “I am the LORD.” In verse three he adds a proper name: known as God Almighty to the children of Israel’s ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (another proper name, translated as “El Shaddai”) He would now also be known as JEHOVAH (“Yahweh”) – not because the LORD had His name changed in some divine witness protection program but for God to reveal Himself as a distinct being, not just a powerful and mighty entity. It’s a bit beyond the scope of this study, but every time God reveals Himself anew, it sounds like He diminishes Himself – from God Almighty to the personal name Jehovah, for instance – but He really isn’t. Hence the reason the Word of God, the Bible, is ultimately the record of God revealing Himself to us. Step by step, for that’s the only way we’d comprehend it.



The LORD had already established His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to give their descendants the land of Canaan back in Genesis. That in a nutshell is verse four, and verse five is the LORD’s promise to the children of Israel to bring them out of Egypt, to redeem them – that is, to restore the broken relationship and model that for the world – to be exclusively HIS people and He their God. Not only that, but also to give them the land “for a heritage” that he’d promised Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that He would. Verse nine tells us that Moses related this to the children of Israel, and their response to Moses the messenger was about what you’d expect from people whose fathers and their fathers and their fathers had been slaves. To use verse nine’s words, “they hearkened not unto Moses for anguish of spirit, and for cruel bondage.” Read the seventeenth-century English “for” with a modern meaning of “because of their” and this gets clearer. It takes work, yes, but what that’s worthwhile has ever been attained without work and study?



Like all of us when confronted with difficulty, Moses needed a pep talk. If your pep talk is from the LORD, you have no excuse to not be confident because it’s ultimately not because of you (beyond your being willing) but through you that He’ll accomplish His will. Sometimes the LORD’s word is as simple as … just doing it. “Go in, speak unto Pharaoh king of Egypt, that he let the children of Israel go out of his land.” You would think that Moses wouldn’t ask the LORD again, after facing Pharaoh with the divine ultimatum and having lived to tell about it, “how then shall Pharaoh hear me”? Calling himself “of uncircumcised lips” in verse twelve indicates Moses’ still-thinking he’ll be acting on his own. But even after the LORD gave Moses and Aaron their charge – with a double meaning in verse thirteen, “charge” in the sense of “shock to the system” as well as “assigned task” – to not only the children of Israel but also to Pharaoh. The children have to want to come out of Egypt as much as Pharaoh would want to let them go.



So the story ends in chapter six, but not the chapter six. It would be easy to skip over the rest of this chapter – verses fourteen through thirty essentially trace Moses and Aaron’s family tree as well as recaps the LORD calling Moses and Aaron themselves – but you will miss out on the encouragement this is meant to be, for Moses and Aaron as well as ourselves reading it. From the lines of their ancestor Levi (a son of Jacob recounted here with two others, Reuben and Simeon) who arrived in Egypt with the rest of his family hundreds of years before – see the end of Genesis for more details – the family of the children of Israel, particularly this family, has continued to grow even under bondage. Hence the transition over generations from Egypt’s open hand of welcome to a clenched fist of bondage, and even here the family’s grown. Verses twenty-three through twenty-five refer to Aaron marrying Elisheba and becoming the father to four sons (Nadab, Abihu, Eleazar, and Ithamar) and one of those sons marrying and having a son himself.



“These are that Aaron and Moses, to whom the LORD said, Bring out the children of Israel from the land of Egypt according to their armies.” Verses twenty-six through thirty recap whom this passage is talking about as well as Moses’ self-doubt, but it also shows that through all the bondage, all the pain, all the suffering of the children in Israel in Egypt, they have never lost – and in our day and age, we can’t afford to lose either – our sense of connectedness, our sense of ourselves as great people of God. It’s not by our achievements but by our willingness to serve; our procreation to perpetuate our heritage and within limits, ourselves, signifies that there’s something in us we don’t want to die with us. And if our ancestor had to deal with problems and overcame them, these are the stories we want to tell our children. Little wonder that the book of Exodus – the Hebrew epic – is so familiar to you and me from Sunday school yet something new with each telling. But we have to go step by step just as the children of Israel, all of them, did.



David


P.S. I will continue as long as God allows me to write this devotional to keep in touch with you, and I hope it encourages us too! If it's not or you would like me to get lost, please let me know. Thank you!


Thank YOU, Lord, that we can come to You in prayer and that we can count on You to provide for all our needs according to Your riches in glory, even when we don't know what our needs are. And we come to You in prayer for the peace of Jerusalem on both sides of the fence and all over the world.


Thank You as well, Lord, for everyone in leadership and service, in authority and power, both here and abroad. Thank You for the opportunities we have and the promise of new life through You by Your Son Our Brother, Jesus the Christ.


And now I pray that we all seek and have a blessed week! Amen.