“Now the Lord had said to Aaron, ‘Go and meet Moses in the wilderness.’ So he went and met him at the mountain of God and kissed him. Moses told Aaron everything the Lord had sent him to say, and about all the signs he had commanded him to do. Then Moses and Aaron went and assembled all the elders of the Israelites. Aaron repeated everything the Lord had said to Moses and performed the signs before the people. The people believed, and when they heard that the Lord had paid attention to them and that he had seen their misery, they knelt low and worshiped.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

When you don’t have the rhythm or melody of a song, it’s really hard to understand and enjoy it. It makes it harder for other people to enjoy it too. I remember once when I was playing drums for my high school jazz band – and in a competition no less! – and I flipped the beat. I had had my hi-hat foot chomping along on the 2 and the 4, and suddenly I was riding hard on the 1 and the 3. Or, if you’re not a music person at all, I messed up big time. The whole band nearly fell apart, and would have but for our director’s quick thinking and directing like we were a concert band until I could get the beat back in the right place. In a similar sort of way, it’s hard to understand and apply passages of the Scriptures – especially in the Old Testament – when we don’t have their rhythm down. Let’s talk a bit about the rhythm of these verses, and what it might look like to incorporate them into our lives.

The whole back half of Exodus 4 here is odd. Just as we are really starting to jam along with God’s efforts to convince Moses to accept His invitation to action, the melody suddenly changes and to something really dissonant with what the main theme had been. That was the part about God’s apparently going after Moses because his son wasn’t circumcised that we talked about yesterday. But then, in the very next verse, we find God telling Aaron to go and meet with Moses at the mountain of God where the whole conversation between Moses and God had been taking place earlier. In other words, we are back on the main theme again.

Have you ever been telling a story, and when you got to a certain part of it, your mind suddenly remembered a detail that was loosely relevant, but didn’t fit the immediate context, yet you knew if you didn’t say it right then you would forget all about it and the story would be not quite as complete as it would have been with it? That happens to me a lot. It feels like it happens to the guys who contributed to the Scriptures fairly often as well. I think something like that is what was going on here.

One of the dangers of engaging with the Scriptures is that we read them the same way we might read a book today where everything is very sequence-driven. Each action follows fairly immediately on the heels of the action described before it. The narratives in the Scriptures, though, regularly condense lengthy periods of time down to the space of a few verses. The net effect is that times we think bits of action follow each other in fairly quick succession are actually times when there was a lot of space between the elements.

God had told Moses after his final plea for Him to send someone else that He had already called his brother Aaron to go meet up with his brother. The two had in all likelihood not seen each other for decades. Here, though, we see God telling Aaron to go meet with Moses on the mountain of God in the wilderness. In other words, we left Moses a couple of days ago, jumped possibly several weeks or even months ahead to Moses’ trip back to Egypt, and here have jumped several weeks or months back in time to when God spoke to Aaron independently of everything else that was going on and probably long before the episode with the burning bush had even happened. From the standpoint of the larger narrative, though, everything follows in the sequence in which Moses wanted to present it. God spoke to him. He started back to Egypt. He got to Egypt with Aaron and set about doing what God had told him to do. The precise timing of the details is all over the map, back and forth in its actual historical sequence, but the larger picture flows fairly smoothly. In other words, the rhythm is far more consistent than it might seem at first glance. There are simply some polyrhythms happening that can sound confusing if you haven’t learned how to listen to them.

There’s one more thing here worth noting. Now that we understand the rhythm of this passage relative to its narrative context a bit better, we can look a little closer to see something even more interesting. In these five verses we can see an echo of the larger rhythm of the Scriptures and the invitation to action God gives to all of us in Christ. That rhythm is this:

1. God works behind the scenes to prepare some good works for us to do (see Ephesians 2:10). We see His doing this at the beginning of v. 27.

2. God invites us to join in His activity. Moses relates God’s call to Aaron in v. 28.

3. We accept God’s invitation and put into practice what He told us to do. We see this happening in vv. 29-30.

4. People respond to God’s action performed through our faithful obedience. This response may be positive or negative, but when we act on God’s behalf, people are going to respond. In this case, Moses tells us that the people believed right at the beginning of v. 31.

5. God’s action performed through us results in worship as the very end of v. 31 shows. The final response to God’s activity is always worship.

This is a rhythm we see played out again and again across the Scriptures and which has continued to play out over the centuries of human history since. It is a rhythm that we can make sure our own lives reflect. God is always at work in His world. When He invites us to join Him in some effort to advance His kingdom, we can rest assured that He was working ahead of that invitation to get things ready for us. As Paul said in Ephesians 2:10, we were created in Christ Jesus to do good works “which God prepared ahead of time for us to do.” From there, we have the choice of whether or not to accept His invitation. If we don’t, He’ll invite somebody else, and we’ll miss out on the blessing. But if we do, people will respond, and worship will be the result. That’s simply the rhythm of creation. The more we learn to live in light of it, the more our lives will be in harmony with the world around us. May your life thrum to the rhythm of God’s great song today and forever.