The Firstborn of the Egyptians Are Slain by Gustave Gore
If you were writing a list of the top ten Old Testament Bible stories, would you include the story of baby Moses floating down the Nile in a basket? I know there are lots of entertaining and inspiring Old Testament stories to choose from, but I still think it would make my top ten list. After all, Moses is a major character in the Bible, and no one else had a start in life quite like his.
But when the author retold the stories of faithful people in the Old Testament in Hebrews 11, he skipped right over the story of Moses in the basket. He praised Moses’s parents for the faith they showed when they hid baby Moses for three months, and then went straight into a discussion of Moses’s faith as an adult.
Still, the story of the rest of Moses’s childhood, including the story of baby Moses in a basket, is important background to help us understand the man Moses’s faith. If you remember the last piece in this series on the faithful people in the Hebrews hall of faith, you know that Moses’s parents defied the pharaoh’s command to kill any Israelite baby boys that were born. They saved Moses’s life by hiding him until he grew too old to keep hidden at home. After this, his mother laid him in a watertight basket and placed it among the reeds in the Nile River, where Pharaoh’s daughter found him. She knew he was an Israelite baby and felt sorry for him. Moses’s sister, who stayed nearby to see what would happen to her little brother, went up to Pharaoh’s daughter and offered to find an Israelite woman to nurse him. And so, in God’s providence, little Moses went back to his own mother, only this time Pharaoh’s daughter paid her to care for him, and this time he was safe from the king’s evil edict (Exodus 2:3-9).
We aren’t told how long Moses lived with his Hebrew family, but it was probably a few years, and maybe more. Surely his parents, as faithful Hebrews, used this time to teach him as much as they could about his people, his people’s history, and, most of all, his people’s God. Perhaps they also saw God’s hand in the remarkable circumstances of his upbringing and suggested to him that he might one day have a significant role in God’s deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.
Eventually, when Moses was old enough, his mother handed him over to Pharaoh’s daughter and he became her son (Exodus 2:10). For the rest of his youth and early adult years, he lived as Egyptian royalty, but he didn’t forget where he came from. Here’s more of Moses’s story as told by the author of Hebrews:
By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his rewards (Hebrews 11:24-26 NIV).
As an adult, Moses identified with the enslaved people of Israel rather than the Egyptians. One day he saw an Egyptian taskmaster beating a Hebrew man and he killed the Egyptian (Exodus 2:11-12). Some call what Moses did murder, but when the New Testament martyr Stephen retold this story in his speech before he was stoned, he spoke more positively about what Moses did. Moses, he said, “went to [the abused Israelite slave’s] defense and avenged him.” As Stephen explained it, when Moses defended the slave, he knew “God was using him to rescue [the Israelites]” (Acts 7:23-25).
When Moses killed the Egyptian, he showed that his true allegiance was to the Hebrew people rather than to Pharaoh and the Egyptians who oppressed them. He was aligning himself with his birth family and his natural kinfolk instead of his adopted family. But most of all, he was siding with Israel’s God and rejecting the false gods of the Egyptians. Moses chose the never-ending heavenly reward that comes to those who seek the one true God instead of the this-world-only pleasures that came with the wealth, power, and status he enjoyed as Egyptian royalty.
Moses, according to Hebrews 11, chose “disgrace for the sake of Christ,” which seems like an odd thing to say about someone who lived long before Jesus was even born. I think the simplest and best way to understand this statement is this: Through Moses, God was working in history to accomplish his plan of salvation, a plan that would culminate in Christ’s death to save his people. Any suffering that furthered God’s redemptive plan—like, for instance, the hardships Moses endured for the sake of the Israelites, who he would deliver from slavery, foreshadowing Christ’s saving work—was suffering for the sake of Christ. By describing his suffering this way, the author makes Moses’s story relevant for the first century believers to whom he was writing. Some of them would be persecuted for their faith, but instead giving up on Jesus to avoid mistreatment by their families, friends, and governing authorities, they should follow Moses’s example and embrace suffering for Christ’s sake like he did.
This isn’t all the author of Hebrews had to say about Moses. After the verses quoted above, he continued:
By faith he left Egypt, not fearing the king’s anger; he persevered because he saw him who is invisible. By faith he kept the Passover and the application of blood, so that the destroyer of the firstborn would not touch the firstborn of Israel (Hebrew 11:27-28 NIV).
When Pharaoh learned that Moses had killed an Egyptian, he tried to have Moses killed, but Moses escaped to Midian. Moses’s reason for fleeing, according to these verses, was faith in God rather than fear of the king. If you’ve read the story of Moses as recorded in Exodus, however, you know that when Moses discovered that everyone knew he had killed the Egyptian, he was afraid (Exodus 2:14). What did the author mean, then, when he wrote that Moses wasn’t afraid? What exactly was he getting at?
Surely Moses knew that renouncing his Egyptian family and joining the Israelites was a dangerous move. He must have known that defending a Hebrew slave was an even riskier one. But he loved the people of Israel and trusted Israel’s God, so he didn’t let his justifiable fear of severe consequences keep him from acting. When Moses fled Egypt, his very real fear of Pharoah wasn’t his prime motivator, either. As he acted to preserve his life, he was trusting God’s plans for his future and the future of the Israelites. We might say that his faith in “him who is invisible” overrode his fear.
Moses also acted in faith when he followed God’s instructions for the first Passover. As the last plague on the Egyptians, the plague that would finally force Pharaoh let the Israelites leave, God put to death the firstborn of every house in Egypt—every house, that is, except for those of the Israelites, who had carried out Moses’s order to put blood from a lamb on the doorframes of their homes. When Moses told the Israelites what God wanted them to do and made sure they did it, he trusted God to keep his promise to pass over the bloodstained Hebrew homes and spare their firstborn sons. He also trusted him to keep his promise to strike all the Egyptian homes so Pharaoh would finally release the Hebrew slaves.
Like all the others commended in Hebrews 11, Moses was an example of someone who looked to his future eternal reward to spur his earthly obedience to God. Like Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, and the others, he stayed faithful because he believed God would keep his promises to him. But the author of Hebrews chose to focus Moses’s commendation on a one specific aspect of his obedience: his allegiance to God’s people. For the sake of his Israelite brothers and sisters, Moses gave up the comfort and prestige that came with his life as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. For the benefit of his people, he was not afraid to endure the disdain of his adopted royal family or provoke the wrath of the king. He risked his life to defend one of his Hebrew brothers from abuse. Even when he fled to Midian to preserve his life, wasn’t he waiting for the proper time—God’s time—to return and finally rescue God’s people? And when Moses kept the Passover, wasn’t his purpose to save the Israelites?
Some of the original recipients of the letter to the Hebrews were afraid of the mistreatment and persecution they might experience if they continued to associate with other Christians, so they stopped meeting together with them (Hebrews 10:25). They didn’t necessarily want to abandon the faith, but they didn’t want to be publicly identified as Christian either. This was a dangerous way of thinking. It put them at risk of apostasy and was one reason the author of Hebrews was concerned about them.
They needed to be more like Moses, who was one of their heroes. He chose to align himself with the Israelites even though associating with them brought him hardship. He was willing to sacrifice for them, not because they were always easy to love—They weren’t! They were whiners and complainers and rebels—but because he loved God, and they were God’s people. He knew the true value of the eternal rewards promised to those who suffer for Christ’s sake, so he endured the mistreatment that came from his connection to his Hebrew brothers and sisters.
Moses is an example for us, too. Are you a believer? When you chose to follow Jesus, you aligned yourself with his people. You belong to him, and through him, you belong to everyone else who belongs to him. Yes, some of them may be disagreeable, or needy, or just plain embarrassing, but they are your people—and you really can’t disconnect from them without also disconnecting from Jesus.
And just as Moses and Jesus were willing to suffer for God’s people, those of faith are willing to suffer for their brothers and sisters. Most of us won’t be asked to risk our life for the sake of our believing brothers and sisters, but we are asked to bear their burdens, even when it costs us (Hebrews 10:32-35; 13:1-2). And when it costs us, we know the value of anything we lost is nothing compared to the great treasure that is eternity with Jesus.
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Sunday, June 9, 2024 at 8:21AM 
