Moses

Today on the Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind... Woven into Scripture are the biographies of great men and women. We read of their strength, heroism, faith, and even their sin and dramatic failures.

Today and over the next several Saturdays we are pleased to bring you Dr. R.C. Sproul's series, Great Men and Women of the Bible. I'm convinced that we need heroes and heroines. And I don't think we need them merely as children, but even as adults we need to be inspired, we need to be encouraged, we need to see examples of people who go beyond the ordinary to the level of the extraordinary, and by their example they inspire us. In fact, just last night we got the word, the sad news, of the death of Francis Schaeffer. And I can hardly contain the sense of admiration I felt toward him, particularly in these later years of his life where he has steadfastly continued a rigorous ministry in spite of the fact of a very serious debilitating illness. His courage spoke to me personally and continues to speak to me.

And we need to see people like that. I don't know how you feel, but I have to have somebody out there, real and alive, that is running way ahead of where I'm running to keep me from playing games with my own head, where I will say to myself, well, I've done all right, and I'm committing my life to Christian service, I'm doing this and didn't I do that, and so on, like the Pharisees in the Old Testament. And unless I see somebody out there who is a champion of godliness, I become easily satisfied with where I am in my own growth. And so I hope that what we will do in this time together is not be entertained, but be inspired, not in a superficial way, but in a lasting way by seeing people, real people, real men and real women who by the grace of God and by the Holy Spirit of God have been authentic heroes and heroines. And the first one I want to look at to kick off this series is Moses. And when we think of Moses, we think first of all of his function as mediator. Now usually when we use this term mediator, we apply it to somebody else in biblical history.

Who is it? Christ. Christ is called our mediator. It's one of the titles of Jesus that he is our mediator. Well, what is a mediator Steve? What does a mediator do?

Alright, it's somebody who stands square in the middle, right? He stands between two parties or two groups as it were. And when we call Christ the mediator, he is the one as the God-man who stands for us and in our place, he's the one who stands between us and the Father, not as a barrier. A mediator is not an obstacle, but the purpose and the function of the mediator is to do what?

To intercede and to bring together the two parties that he is representing. And when we think of Christ as mediator, we know that his work of atonement is a work of reconciliation. But again, our purpose this morning is not to speak about Christ as our mediator, but I've used that title now for Moses because we usually speak of Moses as being the mediator of the old covenant, the mediator of the old covenant. What was it that came, according to the New Testament, through Moses? The law. The law came through Moses. Did it come from Moses? No, it came through Moses.

The law is the law of God. It wasn't Moses' brainchild. It wasn't Moses' invention. Moses was the mediator. God gave the law to Moses, and Moses came down from the mountain and said, here's the word of the Lord. And he spoke to the people and announced the terms of the covenant that was made on the holy mountain, when God made Israel a nation after the exodus.

Okay? So that Moses was the mediator of the law, and he's called the mediator of the old covenant, or of the Old Testament. And as Christ is the mediator of the new covenant, Moses is the mediator of the old covenant.

Now, of course, the New Testament is jealous to call attention to the fact that Jesus is a much greater mediator, that the covenant that he brings is far superior to that which was brought by Moses, and that might tend to make us disparage the role of Moses. We think of Luther, for example, and his zeal in the discovery of the gospel. He had been so depressed and discouraged and worn down by the law that he had no peace until he discovered the gospel and the announcement that our justification is through faith in Jesus Christ. And when he made that discovery, do you remember the outrageous comment that Luther made? Luther was given to a kind of bombastic periods of outbursts. He was not sedate and calm and soft-spoken like I am, for example. He's had a little bit of influence on me.

I don't know how much of it's good. But anyway, Luther was so excited about his discovery of justification by faith and was so jealous to guard his discovery of the gospel that on one occasion he made this statement, to the gallows with Moses. That's what I call an outrageous statement. Luther was given to hyperbole. But what he meant by that was that the gospel is so much greater than the law that let's take Moses and hang him.

But of course, I don't think that really reflected Luther's deepest appreciation for the function in redemptive history that was done and performed by Moses. He was a mediator. And when we think of his being a mediator, we normally think of his delivering the law at Sinai. But if you look at his life, there's a sense in which from his childhood he was prepared by God to be in a position to mediate. The earliest stories, apart from the dramatic story of his birth and the bulrushes and all of that, we see that the history of Moses' life is skated over very quickly. We have the dramatic circumstances of his birth, and then the next thing you hear of him, he's a young man who has been educated in the court of Pharaoh.

He has been polished. He's been treated as the son of Pharaoh, as the son of Pharaoh's daughter, right? And he has been given access to the finest education and privilege that Egypt could offer their sons. His was a rearing of royalty in the most powerful nation in the world at that time. But he got in trouble, and he lost his privileged position in the royal household of Pharaoh and was forced into exile, banished and sentenced to live out his days as a fugitive in the wilderness.

What was it that caused that? What made Moses lose all of his royal privilege? He killed an Egyptian. Why did he kill the Egyptian? Because he saw this Egyptian tormenting and beating mercilessly one of his own people, a Hebrew slave. And Moses went into the breach. Moses was a man, if you see and you watch the pattern of his life, who was forever getting in trouble as a mediator in behalf of the underdog. Don't you like the root for the underdog? I mean, I did not like the New York Yankees when I was growing up.

I was always rooting for the underdog. And that's the kind of person Moses was. He saw this defenseless slave being beaten, and he went into the breach, and he struck the Egyptian. The Egyptian died, and Moses was found out, and he had to flee for his life. What's the first thing that we read about him after he goes into the wilderness? He wanders out into the Midianite wilderness. He's out there in the desert.

He's lost all his privileged position. And here comes this prince, really, an Egyptian prince, into the middle of nowhere, and he goes to a well. Well, it wasn't even a well. There were troughs of water, and these Midianite women had come with their flocks to feed their flocks at these troughs of water.

And it was their turn. And a bunch of roughneck shepherds come in from the desert, and they tell the women to get away from the water, and they push the women out of the way and start lording it over these women and usurping the water for their own sheep. And Moses sees it. What does Moses do?

Hold it right there. Like Sir Lancelot to the rescue, Moses jumps in, and he takes on the shepherds and drives the shepherds away and lets the ladies have the water. He's so gallant. But again, in these very earthy stories that we read in the beginning of his life, what role is he performing? The role of the mediator, the person who stands in the middle. And he understood something very early, that if he was going to participate in the function of mediator, he had to be a lightning rod. Because what happens if you step between two parties that are angry with each other and try to bring peace, try to bring reconciliation?

What normally happens is what? Now that you have them both down on you, right? And it's a very, very difficult position to be in. But that was the role to which Moses was called as mediator. But we know virtually nothing of his life from the time he was a young prince until the time that he was 80 years old. The great achievements of Moses, the exodus, the leading of the people through the wilderness, the judging of Israel, the giving of the law, all of these formative tasks that establish the nation of Israel as a viable nation with a history that extends down to this day. All of this Moses being the father of his country activity came well after what we would consider to be the years of retirement. At 65, Moses was still a shepherd out in the Midianite wilderness, totally unknown, living as a recluse in anonymity until the transforming experience that you all know about when God spoke to him in a burning bush that was not consumed and called him now to the highest and most holy role of mediatorial service that had been accomplished in the face of this earth up to that time. Now, when we see Moses call, we see something else about the man that's important.

But before I get that, I just want to make one comparison. I was deeply impressed last summer when we visited Norfolk, Virginia, and we went to the Douglas MacArthur Museum. Have you ever been to there?

Isn't that an impressive place? And the thing that made the biggest impression on me of the career of Douglas MacArthur was that all the things for which he is famous now, World War II, the heroics there, and the post-World War II occupation of Japan in which he was virtually responsible for rewriting the Japanese Constitution, and then after that, the Korean conflict, all of those things that have made Douglas MacArthur a national hero in the United States, happened after he formally and officially retired. And that should say something to a culture like ours that somehow has it in their heads that people are finished when they're 65 years old, which is ridiculous from the perspective of history and certainly from the perspective of the Word of God. Moses is known for something else besides being a mediator. He's known in his character for being meek. Hardly sounds meek when he's jumping in and punching out Egyptians and killing them and taking on these angry shepherds. But meekness does not mean sissiness in the Bible. There's a certain sense in which only a person of great strength can really be meek, because he's a person who, in spite of his strength, has that strength tempered by humility, by authentic humility. And he keeps that strength in check and does not allow it to become an impetus for arrogance. And that's one of the things that I admire the most about Moses.

Let's go back to that burning bush for just a second. Again, you all know the story how that God calls him out of the bush and explains to Moses that he had seen the affliction of his people. Moses speaks in verse 11 of chapter 3 of Exodus, after God has spoken to him and identified himself to him, Moses said to God, quote, Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and that I should bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt?

You would think a man of this kind of strength who waited this many decades to have an active involvement in some significant task. You would think that when God finally called him, that Moses would say, Where have you been? You know, why didn't you come and show up 50 years ago when I was in my prime, when I had been gone through all that training in Pharaoh's court, then I was eminently qualified, eminently prepared to take on the Egyptian nation. I was zealous enough then to risk everything to stop the oppression of one single Hebrew at the hands of an Egyptian. That's been my response. You know, where have you been?

I've been waiting and ready to go for all these years. Not Moses. Moses said, Who am I? Why in the world, God, would you call on me for this task?

There's no hint of megalomania in the personality of Moses. And then he actually argues with God. I mean, God gets a little irritated after a while.

He says, Look, I'm slow speech. I mean, he must have made a mistake. Surely you've chosen the wrong man. And of course, God had to rebuke him and say, Moses, I don't make mistakes like that. You let me take care of it. I've prepared Aaron to be your spokesman. You just obey me and everything will be all right. And so Moses obeys. And he takes on the task that God gives him. God tells him to go back to the people of Israel and to tell them that Moses is going to lead them out of bondage, into freedom, and that God is going to deliver them. So he preaches this sermon to the people of Israel and they get all excited.

And then what happens? Pharaoh says, Hey, enough of this zeal. We've got to elect Valensa running around Israel. We're going to put a stop to that. He said, from now on, we're going to keep the same quota of the bricks that you're required to make, but now you make them without the benefit of your daily supply of straw.

If you want to build your bricks, you're going to go scavenge for yourself to find the straw or whatever you can find to meet those quotas. So now the burden that was upon the Hebrew people was intensified as the direct result of Moses' first stage of leadership. Moses obeys. He goes, Okay, I didn't want this job, but I'll do it. And as soon as he takes one step forward to lead, he incurs the wrath of the whole multitude. So what does he say?

Let me read you what he says. Chapter 5, then Moses returned to the Lord and said, O Lord, why have you brought harm to this people? Why did you ever send me? Ever since I came to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has done harm to this people, and you have not delivered your people at all. Do you know how many ministers experience that in their pastorate where they seek to be bold, they seek to be courageous, they seek to be faithful, and the only results that they can see is destruction, pain, anger. And they turn around and they say, Do you send me to do this?

Is this what you had in mind? And the fire goes out, because one of the hardest things for any Christian, whether he's a minister or not a minister, is to wait for God to accomplish His promises. And I'm comforted by the fact that Moses struggled with that, because at that point in his life, the exodus was not an accomplished historical reality. It was still what seemed to be to Moses an unreachable dream.

Why have you sent me? And it gets worse, miracle after miracle. The Nile is turned to blood.

The hailstones fall and kill the cattle in the crops. The plague of the frogs, the plague of the gnats, the plagues that fall upon Egypt. After each one of these miraculous events, victory seems certain. Pharaoh says, Go ahead and go. I've had enough. As soon as Moses said, Let's go, Pharaoh's heart is hardened. And Pharaoh says, Don't you go. Until finally, after the death of the firstborn, Pharaoh said, Get out.

You can go. And again, his heart was hardened. And after Moses obeys every step of the way, he has 600,000 footmen, women and children, and they come to leave, and they stand between Migdal and the sea. And behind them comes the sophisticated armies of Pharaoh with their chariots. And in front of them is the Red Sea.

He is totally trapped. And all this time, he had been following the Shekinah cloud of God. But do you remember what happens when Moses is between Migdal and the sea? The first thing that happens is the cloud moves. And instead of the cloud being in front of the people of Israel, it comes around behind them and stands between Pharaoh and the children of Israel.

Now who's the mediator? God Himself stands between His people and the enemies of His people. And Moses raises his hand and the seal.

And you know the story. A nation is born, and for another 40 years or so, Moses abides. Moses was faithful, and this is what we're going to see through most of the people that we study, over the long haul.

It's easy to be heroic when you're 21 years old. But year in, year out, 10 years in, 10 years out, 40 years in, 40 years out, Moses was faithful to the day he died, so that even in his death, God did the unbelievable thing of personally burying Moses. Nobody knows where Moses is buried, but we know that he was buried. He was buried by God. Even God stooped down from heaven to care for the body of one who had been faithful. Moses, Moses, put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the ground whereon thou standest is holy ground. God addressed him personally. God anointed him, and God sustained him.

That's Dr. R.C. Sproul on the life and faith of Moses. We're glad you've joined us for the Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind. We are just beginning a series that we will continue each week, examining the lives of some of the great men and women of the Bible.

I hope you'll make plans to return each Saturday with us. As we make our way through this series, we will see how God wove an incredible story of grace throughout the Bible, both in the Old Testament and the New Testament. I think you'll enjoy studying that whole Bible perspective when you request our resource offer today. It's Dr. Sproul's series, Dust to Glory. He examines every book of the Bible in 57 messages and helps us see the narrative of the entire Bible. With that, you'll also receive an extra disc containing the study guides for the series. So for your financial gift of any amount, we invite you to request Dust to Glory.

You can do that online at renewingyourmind.org or by phone at 800-435-4343. Well next week, R.C. will introduce us to the man God commissioned with these words, Be strong and courageous, do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go. We'll look at the life and exemplary character of Joshua, next Saturday, here on Renewing Your Mind. .