“On the day the Lord spoke to Moses in the land of Egypt, he said to him, ‘I am the Lord; tell Pharaoh king of Egypt everything I am telling you.’ But Moses replied in the Lord’s presence, ‘Since I am such a poor speaker, how will Pharaoh listen to me?'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

We tend to revere certain people who have achieved what we determine to be great things. Part of this is totally understandable. When someone has done something we can’t do, we are impressed by that. Part of this is a leftover from the Fall and our sinful nature. It’s easier to look to people we can see than to a God we can’t. Most religions do this regularly and lean into it. Christianity has certainly been guilty of this over its history. Yet it is the one religion that doesn’t find any support for this in its founding documents. The Scriptures are clear over and over again that people are not great; God is. Let’s talk about why this matters so much.

The narratives in the Scriptures, because we believe every word was inspired by God and thus chosen specifically to convey the truths He wanted for us to grasp, while we definitely need to make sure we have the big pictures down, it becomes all the more important for us to pay attention to the details and nuances of the text because it is in those that we find gems of truth that are intended to shape the way we understand the whole.

What we see here plays into this pattern really well. This passage offers us three things, all of which are important. It gives us a summary, a setup, and a bit of repetition.

The summary is mostly about giving us context. The story had been running on a nice, smooth track before Moses suddenly hit the brakes to give us the bit of genealogical information we talked about yesterday. Having chased that rabbit trail for a bit, Moses is getting us back on track. He starts by situating us in time. This is happening “on the day the Lord spoke to Moses in the land of Egypt.” Now, exactly what day this happened to be, we don’t have any idea. The Lord could have spoken to Moses on any day. There’s also the question of whether this happened before or after Moses’ initial confrontation with Pharaoh. I would lean toward after, but before he was sent back to start announcing the plagues. While putting the full sequence together is a bit challenging, I suspect there was a day when God came to Moses to get him ready for the main event. This was the day God spoke to him in the land of Egypt.

The setup here is that we are indeed getting ready for the main event. The table has been set. The guests are all seated and hungry. Dinner is ready to be served. All that remains is for the host to say, “Let’s eat.” This bit is God’s invitation to get started. He is sending Moses to “tell Pharaoh king of Egypt everything I am telling you.” Moses’ job from here on out is simply to tell Pharaoh what God has told him to tell Pharaoh. That’s it. The plan isn’t his. The power isn’t his. The results aren’t his concern. All he has to do is be obedient to say what God tells him to say.

There’s something in that we dare not miss. What follows and what we will spend the next few weeks talking through, Lord willing, is often thought of and presented as a conflict between Moses and Pharaoh. Moses is held up as the hero of the story. He is the one the people revered for centuries after all of this took place. Moses was the lawgiver and the one who gave them freedom. Except he wasn’t. He was just the vessel for God to do what only He could have done. Moses was the mouthpiece. He was the conduit. Nothing about what is to follow came from him. He simply said to Pharaoh what God told him to say.

And as if that bit of realization wasn’t enough to help us keep our focus on God rather than Moses, the next part offers a bit of repetition. Back before Moses launched into the genealogical bit we talked about yesterday, he was struggling rather mightily with the task God had given him to do. He was struggling mightily with the rejection of the Israelites. After his initial confrontation with Pharaoh resulted in his making their lives vastly more difficult and painful than they had been before, the people wanted nothing more to do with Moses’ help and leadership. They wanted him to go away and leave them alone. Things may have been bad before, but they were worse now. They were willing to accept bad if it meant avoiding worse. That is actually something that will come back into play later on in the story several times. This twofold rejection of Pharaoh and the people shattered Moses’ already fragile confidence.

Here at the of the chapter, just before we get into the main action, we see Moses’ self-doubt put on display a second time. This is a doubling down on the doubt. Moses really didn’t have any confidence in himself. He still didn’t want to do this thing God was sending him to do. He was not the hero of the story. His faith would grow over time and become quite remarkable, but that growth came in spite of himself. It came because God was patient and gentle with him. It came first in small steps that gradually added up to big ones. But the thing his self-doubt at this point in the story helps us see is how little he had to do with how things went from here.

In another religious worldview, the presentation of Moses would have shown him to be confident and strong from the start. He would have been bold before Pharaoh. He would have grabbed hold of the mantle of leadership over the people of Israel and they would have loved him for it. Moses would have shined even brighter as the one worthy of our love and devotion. But here, he’s riddled with self-doubt and fearful that he’ll ever be able to make any kind of a difference. His job is going to be to speak, and he doesn’t think he can do that. He’s not the hero here. God is. God is always the hero. If our trust is in Him, we won’t ever fail.