Word of Salvation – Vol. 43 No. 15 – April 1998

 

Make Your Choice: It’s Either Faith or Christ

 

Sermon by Rev. J. Rogers on Hebrews 11:23

Scripture Readings: Exodus 1:1 – 2:10; Hebrews 11:23

 

Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ.

“By faith, Moses was hidden by his parents for three months,” says our text.  But let us think about this practically for a moment.  How did they hide him?  It is possible, but only very occasionally, for a prospective mother to hide her pregnancy.  But it is certainly not usual.  Therefore, it is fair enough to ask, how did Jochebed hide this boy?  There she is, she has a big belly one day and a couple of days later, she hasn’t!  And with that edict of Pharaoh hanging over them, everybody would be terribly apprehensive, and so, when Jochebed appears at the local well after a few days’ absence, the questions would be flying: “What did you have Jochebed, a girl or a boy?”

And if it had been a girl, it would then have been, “Thank God for that.  Let’s see her and have a little celebration.”  But with the answer being, “A boy,” the next question would have been, “How are you hiding him Jochebed?  The soldiers will come, you know.  Or, have they come already?”  Because it seems from Exodus 1:22 that, after having had no joy with the mid-wives, that the soldiers would get the job.  For “Pharaoh gave this order to all his people: ‘Every boy that is born you must throw into the river, but let every girl live’.”

Maybe she simply lied to her friends at the well that the soldiers had already come.  But that would be very hard to get away with.  They would also know who is pregnant and wherever you have oppression, you always have informers.  Furthermore, how would she keep little Aaron’s mouth closed even if Miriam seems old enough to understand how serious the whole situation is?

But there is a very obvious question to ask about all this, surely.  The text says, “…by faith, when he was born, Amram and Jochebed hid Moses for three months.”  But what mother needs faith to save her newborn child?  Or father, for that matter?  It is simply a natural instinct – it’s legendary.  We speak of a mother fighting like a bear robbed of her cubs.  Even the prostitute in Solomon’s day wanted to keep her own child.

So what is the big deal here?  Where is the faith?  Where is faith needed?  A mother’s love would surely be strong enough, wouldn’t it?  Well, where does faith come into it?

One writer suggests that Amram and Jochebed fervently looked forward to the deliverance from Egypt that had been promised to Abraham years ago and was reaffirmed in Joseph’s instructions about his bones.  He left them in Egypt for the people to remind and encourage one another to believe – even as Joseph had – that one day they would get back to Canaan.  And, therefore, because of their faith in God’s promise, they were prepared to have another son in the hope that he might be the deliverer.  Maybe!  But Moses was only three years younger than Aaron.  It is quite possible that Jochebed was expecting when Pharaoh gave his edict.  As well as that, in the days before contraceptives, these things just tended to happen!

But also, mother’s love might be legendary; but it is not unbreakable.  In the siege of Samaria under Joram, son of Ahab, the famine became so bad that mothers killed, cooked and ate their own little children.  And the same happened in 70 AD when Jerusalem was besieged by the Romans.

Don’t let us forget that abortion, by which we kill many thousands of babies per year, is very old and is the act of a mother killing her child.  And just as in Rome yesterday, so today in India – and especially China – little girls are put out to die every day.

So perhaps, in the light of this and the fact that maybe there was a penalty for not obeying the king’s command, perhaps it was only by faith that she hid her newborn son.  Even though they had two other children already, they had faith in God to look after them all, while they simply did their duty.  In thankfulness to God for this gift, they did all they could to provide for him and protect him.  They feared the king’s edict, but they feared God more and so, at the risk of their own lives and maybe the lives of their older two children, they hid this boy.

And how many millions of parents throughout the world have done that?  With or without faith in God.  And maybe that is part of our writer’s point.  The faith that Hebrews is calling us to – steadfast faith in the promises of God, even though to have faith in them will make one look as though they are away with the birds – is not terribly uncommon.  It was the faith Christ had.  And He has given all His people down through the ages that same faith; and to many very ordinary, humble, desperate people, not knowing where to turn – like Moses’ parents.  And by showing us this Christ-like faith in these Old Testament saints, God stirs us up to the same faith.

Can you not imagine how these two would fret, turning this thing over and over in their minds every moment of every day?  Can you not see Amram straining every nerve in his body to look unstrained and unconcerned, and trudge in from the fields and kilns with his mates when, in fact, there was that horrible question burning in his heart that made him want to race home: “have they been today?!”

And so perhaps some of you carry fears in your heart every moment and every day about your children – quite different fears of course, and perhaps not quite so urgent, because while there’s life, there’s hope.  But nevertheless…!

So, like you, Amram and Jochebed did the only thing they could.  They hid Moses.  Just so, you reason with your children or whatever it is that is worrying you.  And you pray.  And hope.  There is nothing heroic about it at all.  You simply do what Paul tells us to do in Ephesians 6: “Put on the full armour of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.”  Sometimes there is nothing more to do.

But we are told a little more.  Two things:

1.  THEY SAW HE WAS A BEAUTIFUL CHILD

When Stephen talked about this in Acts 7, he said “he was beautiful to God.”  And here, too, literally it says, “Moses’ parents hid him…because they saw he was a beautiful child.”  Which, of course, does two things to us.  We both recognise ourselves in that and hate ourselves for what we recognise!

Nothing evokes our admiration and protective instincts more than a beautiful baby.  But perhaps, in a way, nothing should have our love and protection more than an ugly baby.  But worse, while it does make a difference to us, what should make less difference than beauty?  We know that God does not look on outward appearance but on the heart.  And so we know that beauty or lack of beauty should make no difference.

So, what kind of an example is this to us?  Amram and Jochebed are great examples of faith for us to follow because they hid Moses because he was a beautiful baby!  Well, I think the NIV’s rendering is helpful.  It says, “he was no ordinary child,” and that probably captures the idea well.  Calvin says the beauty was some sort of mark, something about him that promised great things for the future.  That is a bit hard to understand but we do have another example in the Bible.  God put a mark on Cain so that others would not take his life.  We have no idea what that mark was, but we are told that he had it.

It seems that God enabled these two parents to see some sign of great destiny in their child.  So they did not do what perhaps some others were doing to their sons, throwing them in the Nile.  Such a thing is unthinkable to us, by the grace of God, but it is no big deal in the world at large.  Nor is it unknown in Israel.  There were several periods in Israel’s history in which sons and daughters were sacrificed to Moloch.  But instead, at great risk to their lives, they hid him because they trusted God to protect him and them.

Then we are told one other thing:

2.  THEY DID NOT FEAR THE KING’S EDICT

But, as a matter of fact, they were terrified of the king’s edict!  Why else would they hide the boy?

There are a couple of things we can say about this.  First of all, fear, in the Bible, does not always mean being afraid.  We are to fear God, but we are not to be terrified of Him.  So perhaps it is rather more with this idea that we are to understand this statement.  They gave no honour, no obedience to the king’s edict.  Rather, they feared God; they obeyed God and would not kill their son.

Calvin thinks Jochebed and Amram’s faith was weak and eventually cracked, so they put him in the Nile in the ark.  If their faith were strong they ought simply to have carried on with him in the home.  Yet, he goes on the say, “That weak faith was accepted by God and brought about the salvation of Moses and Israel and eventually the whole Church of God through Jesus Christ.”  He may be right and it certainly is a beautiful thought and one we need to remember.  It is not the strength of our faith that saves us.  God saves us through faith in the promised deliverer, the Lord Jesus Christ, however weak and stumbling that faith may be.  That is certainly true, and thank God for it.

The Church has often had to fight this way of thinking.  In the early years of the Church, there was a great controversy over whether believers who had renounced their faith under persecution could still be saved.  Yes, the saints must persevere and the saints will persevere, but, are we saved by the fact and strength of our perseverance?  Or are we saved by Christ in whom we still believe with all our hearts even though right now we are denying Him with our lips because, in our weakness we simply can’t stand our body being stretched any more, or the burning of our flesh, or the continual beating of the soles of our feet?

Eventually the Church realised that we are saved not by strong faith.  Rather, we are saved by a strong Christ through faith, weak or strong.  It is not when we fall out of weakness that we are lost, but when we deliberately keep on sinning that no sacrifice for sins is left – says Hebrews chapter 10.

And we have the same battle, only in a different guise today.  Yes, say some, God may heal you if your faith is strong enough.  But if your faith is not strong enough, then He will not.  That is one of the cruelest teachings I have ever heard.  It praises to the skies the strong faith of the believer.  But let us, rather, praise to the skies God and His strong Saviour.

Brothers and sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ, we are saved by Christ, through faith, and not the other way round.

Well, John Calvin may be right in the way he understands Moses’ parents’ faith.  The point he makes certainly is right.  But there is another way we can look at the situation.

Maybe, as a plain fact, Amram and Jochebed simply did not fear the king’s edict.  Maybe their faith was – or eventually became – strong.  What is really dreadful in this world is not to fall into the hands of an earthly king, but to fall into the hands of the living God.  So maybe it was that, after three months of skulking and hiding and knowing it could not go on forever, they came out of the closet and defied the king’s edict.

Think about it for a moment.  Why would Jochebed put Moses in the Nile?  Everything in Egypt centred on the Nile.  In Europe, all roads lead to Rome.  In Egypt, all of life in every aspect converges on the Nile.  It is hardly a place to get out of harm’s way.  Was it a surprising thing that Pharaoh’s daughter went down to the Nile that day to bathe?  Very likely it was her daily habit.  Did Jochebed simply throw down the gauntlet, as it were, before Pharaoh’s daughter?  She’s not as likely to be as hard as her father.  And remember, the child was beautiful and nothing draws out our sympathy more than a beautiful child – and more so in a woman than a man.  And his sister also “stood at a distance to see what would happen to him.”  That, in itself, is an interesting phrase, but do you know how the old translation has it?  It translates: “to see what would be done to him.”  And that is correct – “to see what would be done to him.”  Was she expecting that he would be discovered and that something should be done to him?

Was Jochebed expecting someone there that day?  Like Pharaoh’s daughter perhaps?  We don’t know.  But the Bible nowhere says that Moses was hidden in the bulrushes.  There is a lot we do not know about this mysterious verse that, “by faith Moses’ parents hid him and did not fear the king’s edict.”  We simply have to look at the possibilities and try to see how faith works in each of them.

“Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”  That is, faith is being sure of God and His salvation in Christ.  Faith is not at all being sure of me and my faith.  Rather, faith looks away from self, not in on self.  And that salvation is as sure to one who struggles every day of their lives and reads biographies of great Christians and feels ashamed of themselves again so they can hardly crawl to Church next Sunday.  They feel so inadequate, so defeated.  Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Bible does not commend that daring faith by which Jochebed put Moses in the Nile, maybe even with the intention that Pharaoh’s daughter would find him.  Even though her faith that day was very great, no doubt about it.  The faith that the Bible commends to us is the faith of Amram and Jochebed even when it was so weak all they could do was to hide Moses in the house.  Maybe that feels like your kind of faith.

Well, salvation is as sure to those with weak faith as it is to those to whom God gives the faith of heroism and who fill the history books not written by God and which make the rest of us feel inadequate.  Whichever way we are to read the life of Amram and Jochebed, let us be encouraged, congregation.

So do not throw away your confidence; it will be richly rewarded.  You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what He has promised.  For in just a very little while, He who is coming will come and will not delay.  But my righteous one will live by faith.  And if he shrinks back, I will not be pleased with him.  But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who believe and are saved.

Even if your faith is of the ‘Lord-l-believe-help-Thou-my-unbelief’ variety.

Amen.