Exodus: The Lord and His PilgrimsНамуна

God’s secret weapon

Aslan, the Great Lion of Narnia, was right: we are never told what would have happened. There is no point in saying, ‘Suppose Moses had got it right …!’ Stop speculating; just look at what is before our eyes: the marvellous working of God. 

Out of a genocidal royal house (1:22) emerges a tender-hearted ‘daughter’ (she is called ‘Pharaoh’s daughter’ five times in 2:5–10, to stress her genetic inheritance) who takes the Hebrew child under her wing (vv. 6, 9–10). The place of death (1:22) becomes the place of life (2:10) – indeed the Nile, designed to drown Israel, in fact drowns Egypt (14:28)! The Hebrew mother, instead of being bereaved, is paid to bring up her child (2:9). Egypt’s destroyer is nourished in Egypt’s royal family (v. 10; cf. Acts 7:21–22). Pharaoh’s daughter does not know that her walk by the river is divinely ‘managed’ as to time and place; nor does Miriam know that her careful choice of a place where the baby’s ‘ark’ (as the NKJV puts it) will be held by rushes and not carried away by the current is hand-picked by God! Pharaoh’s daughter’s unthinking walk and the family’s plan of care are alike in his hand. 

But it is a tense moment when Pharaoh’s daughter opens the ‘ark’. The Hebrew says, ‘When she saw him – the child –…’ She takes note of his masculinity; he is a child sentenced to death. Surely her lineage would cause her to promptly chuck the baby in the river? But no. Divine sovereignty destined this child not for the river but for the palace! How very marvellous is the providential working of God! Humanly speaking we would say Moses promptly got it all wrong and set God’s programme back by forty years (vv. 11–15; Acts 7:30), but God’s sovereign providence is more wonderful than that: what we think of as his forward planning has taken account of our errors. See how God had a home waiting for Moses in Midian (vv. 16–21) – a wife, family, and a flock (3:1) – so that he could learn to be the shepherd God’s people would need (Ps. 77:20). 

Reflection

Divine sovereignty is at work in a world seemingly governed by chance (Prov. 16:33). Here we see the wonderful ‘blending’ of divine sovereignty and human responsibility (Prov. 16:9; Acts 2:23).