“Then Moses went back to his faither-in-law, Jethro, and said to him, ‘Please let me return to my relatives in Egypt and see if they are still living.’ Jethro said to Moses, ‘Go in peace.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the less exciting classes I Took in college was one called Form and Analysis. We spent an hour three mornings a week looking at different classical pieces to learn about some of the rules composers tended to follow when writing their works. One of the things all composers do is to introduce a musical theme toward the beginning of the piece and then spend the rest of the time developing and refining it. What we are seeing here is God introducing some themes that are going to be developed throughout the story. Let’s talk through what some of these are and why they matter.

I’m a details guy. I tend to focus on the nit-picky stuff, sometimes to the exclusion of bigger pictures issues. In light of that, Moses’ request to his father-in-law here catches my attention right out of the gate. God had just told Moses that his brother, Aaron, was on the way to see him, and would be thrilled when he did. In making his request to leave (which would have been a really big deal…more on that in just a second), though, Moses doesn’t mention Aaron or the mission God had given him. Instead, he asks to go see if his relatives were still living. This is indeed what he was going to do, but it certainly wasn’t the whole truth of it.

It makes you wonder a bit why Moses didn’t apparently tell him the whole truth. Did he still not really believe it himself? Was he afraid that if he told Jethro what was really going on his father-in-law wouldn’t let him go? That he might leak word of his real plans to Pharaoh somehow? We don’t know. This theme of not really trusting God and holding back just a bit to keep things in our own control (or at least our own illusion of control) is a theme we see throughout the Scriptures. It goes back to Abraham and Sarah hatching the plot to give themselves the son God had promised through a union of Abraham and Hagar rather than waiting patiently on God’s timing and trusting full in His promise.

It is to Jethro’s credit that instead of giving Moses a hard time about leaving as Laban had done to his nephew and son-in-law, Jacob, so many generations before, that he simply says, “Go in peace.” We don’t know whether or if Jethro had any other sons-in-law living there with him. We know only of his having daughters. This means that Moses’ leaving was a pretty big deal. He may have been the only other male in the family living there with Jethro. His daughters were capable shepherdesses, but having a male running the show was important in that culture. Moses’ absence would have likely left Jethro in a very tight spot. Besides all of that, he was taking Jethro’s oldest daughter and grandsons away from him. Those grandsons would have been the future workers to safeguard the family’s land into the next generation and beyond. Perhaps all of this played into Moses’ reluctance to go when God sent him.

Over the next five verses, we see several other themes introduced that will play a role not only in the rest of Israel’s story, but more importantly, in the story of God’s own Son, whose life would be modeled in many ways after the Exodus narrative sequence. We see God’s telling Moses that it is safe to return to his home because the people who wanted to kill him were dead themselves. The statute of limitations had run out, so to speak. This was the same thing He would one day say to Joseph to send him and his family from Egypt back to Israel. Moses’ return to Egypt prefigured an eventual return to Israel as well. Moses put his family on a donkey for the journey. When Jesus rode into Jerusalem at the beginning of His final week on earth, He rode in on a donkey.

Offering a preview of what would yet happen in this story, God goes on to give Moses another preview of how the whole adventure was going to go. Notably, Moses was not going to find immediate and resounding success. God specifically notes that He is going to harden Pharaoh’s heart so that he will refuse Moses’ request to let the people go. God’s plan is ultimately to take the firstborn son of Pharaoh in order to finally convince him to submit to God’s authority and power. One day, God would lay down the life of His own firstborn Son in order to free us from the bondage of sin.

This idea of the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, of course, opens up an extra-large can of worms that we are not going to try to digest right now. Suffice to say here that Moses goes back and forth between using the language of God hardening Pharaoh’s heart and of Pharaoh’s hardening his own heart. He treats the two ideas which seem like complete opposites to us as interchangeable. This is a tension we would prefer to have neatly resolved, but which Moses and the rest of the authors of the Scriptures consistently hold instead. The nexus of divine sovereignty and human responsibility is a messy one indeed. But it is a tension the guys who contributed to the Scriptures never resolve for us. That means we are stuck simply living with the tension. Again, it’s messy, but trying to resolve it actually winds up making an even bigger mess because we diverge with the Scriptures, and things are always messier when we do that.

That’s about all for today. There’s nothing too groundbreaking here. But there is this introduction of material we will see again and again both in this story and the story as a whole. This is part of why the Scriptures are worth our time spent studying. Among their many important qualities, they offer us a lens through which we can better understand all of the rest of human history. God’s grand symphony constantly plays on the same themes. There is indeed nothing new under the sun. When we grasp that and come to better understand the themes introduced to us in places like this one, not only will be better positioned to understand the scope of human history, but we will better understand the ins and outs of our own stories. This exercise may get tedious at times, but it will always prove worthwhile in the end.