The Controversy - Moses Argues with God
Excuses offered to police officers in explanation for accidents:
• An invisible car came out of nowhere, struck my car, and vanished.
• I pulled away from the side of the road, glanced at my mother-in-law, and headed over the embankment.
• The pedestrian had no idea which direction to go, so I ran over him.
• Suddenly a tree was there, where no tree had been before.
• I had been driving my car for forty years when I fell asleep at the wheel and had the accident.
The excuses we give, when we closely examine them, sound pretty ridiculous. Someone has defined an excuse as the skin of a reason, stuffed with a lie.
A farmer asked his neighbor if he might borrow some rope.
“Sorry,” said the neighbor. “I’m using all my rope to tie up my milk.”
“Why that’s ridiculous!” said the farmer. “You can’t use rope to tie up milk.”
“I know,” replied the neighbor, “but when a man doesn’t want to do something, one excuse is as good as another.”
When a man doesn’t want to do something, one excuse is as good as another. Today we come to a key point in Moses’ life. We have learned that Moses chose to follow God. We have learned that God led Moses into the wilderness of Midian, where for forty years, He prepared Moses to be a godly leader. Then we have learned that God called Moses to lead the children of Israel out of Egypt. God wanted Moses to be the instrument He would use to do one of the greatest things in history.
And now, in Exodus 3 and 4, we find Moses trying to argue with God. Moses tries to get out of God’s assignment. He offers five excuses to try to get off the hook. Lets look at them…
Exodus 3:11 But Moses said to God, “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”
This is the “I’m just a nobody” excuse. This excuse showed that Moses had his eyes on the wrong person. He had his eyes on himself. Instead of asking “Who am I?” he should have been asking “Who are you, God?” Because the ultimate success of his mission was never going to depend on who Moses was but upon who God was.
God knew this, because he answered Moses first excuse with a simple five word statement…
Exodus 3:12 …”I will be with you.”
We need to understand that when God calls us to serve Him, he never sends us off on our own to do His work. He always goes with us. In fact, it is not we who do God’s work at all, but God who does His work in us and through us.
When Jesus gave us the Great Commission to go and make disciples of all nations, he concluded it by saying
Matthew 28:20 “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
When God called Joshua to succeed Moses as the leader of Israel, he said to him
Joshua 1:9 Have not I commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified, do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.
When God called King David to go through some very difficult experiences in life, David was able to say
PSA 23 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me
When God called the prophet Jeremiah to preach to a stubborn and rebellious people, He said to him…
Jeremiah 1:8 Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you
It is the presence of God, and nothing else, which guarantees our effectiveness in His service.
Excuse #2:
Exodus 3:13 Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?”
This is the “I don’t know what to say” excuse. Moses was still on the wrong wavelength. He was still thinking that it all depended on him. He was visualizing getting into this situation and coming eventually to that terrible point where he might be at a loss for words.
You know one of the dreams (nightmares) of a preacher is of being up in front of a crowd of people and not knowing what to say. I’ve had dreams like this. I’m up at the pulpit, and I’m completely at a loss for words. I wake up in a cold sweat!
Recently, I was talking to my father in law, who as you know is also a preacher and he told me a funny story. Apparently, a few weeks ago, he got up to preach one Sunday morning, only to make the horrifying discovery that he had lost all his sermon notes. He looked in his Bible, and they simply weren’t there. Thinking that he might have left them in his study, he got the assistant pastor to lead another hymn, while he went and looked. In the few minutes that were available to him, he fairly ransacked his study, but no notes were to be found! So he could do nothing but return to the pulpit and go ahead and preach the sermon without his notes. And you know what happened? He preached one of the best sermons he’d ever preached!
God told Moses what to say, God told Moses how to say it, and furthermore, God told Moses what the audience response would be. (vv. 14-22) You see, God was teaching Moses that God and God alone was responsible for this situation.
And we need to know that when it comes to witnessing today. We get very nervous about telling people about the Lord. The reason we do, is that we think it all depends on us. We visualize ourselves getting into a situation where we don’t have the answers to people’s questions. We don’t know what to say.
Campus Crusade for Christ has a very simple definition of witnessing: Sharing Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit and leaving the results to God. That definition includes the two elements that Moses had learned so far. 1. God would be with him. Believers today have the Holy Spirit living in their lives. God is present. 2. God will take responsibility for doing His work through us. He will teach us what to say. He will show us how to say it. And He will take responsibility for the results. All He wants us to do is be faithful.
Excuse #3:
Exodus 4:1 Moses answered, “What if they do not believe me or listen to me and say, ‘The Lord did not appear to you’?”
This is the “Nobody will believe me” excuse. Now why did Moses bring this up? After all, God had just said back in 3:18 that the elders of Israel would listen to him and believe him, and God had just said in 3:21 that the Egyptians would be favorable disposed to let the children of Israel go. Why did Moses doubt God’s word? Why did Moses raise the issue of credibility here?
Well, it was because credibility was the area of Moses’ most painful failure in the past. You remember that forty years before, Moses had offered himself to the Hebrews as their leader. He was eminently qualified to be that leader, at least from the human standpoint. He had had a great education. He was a nobleman, a prince in Egypt. The Bible says that at that point in his life, he was powerful in word and in action. But he did not have credibility in the eyes of the people. When he tried to become their leader, they said “Who appointed you? Who made you to be a ruler and judge over us?”
You see, at that point in his life, Moses did not have the credibility that came from being a man of God. He could not be a leader of integrity for God’s people because there were areas of great weakness in his own life. People had seen him kill an Egyptian. They thought of Moses as a man who would seek human solutions to divine problems. They thought of Moses as a man who was impetuous; who would act rashly and violently. They thought of Moses as a man who was living in the lap of luxury in the court of Pharaoh while they were slaving away under the lash. They were not about to accept him as their leader because he had no credibility with them.
And Moses, forty years later, remembered that rejection just as though it were yesterday. But now he was a different person. He was a changed man. God had used those forty years in the wilderness of Midian to knock off those rough edges, and to build credibility.
God was going to send Moses back to the place of his greatest failure, and give him his greatest victory. But it was going to be a victory that would be won on God’s terms and in God’s way.
God gave Moses three signs which would give him credibility in the eyes of the Israelites and the Egyptians. These three signs teach us truths about the kind of people God wants us to be as His instruments.
1. He gave him a staff which would turn into a serpent.
Exodus 4:2-4 Then the Lord said to him, “What is that in your hand?” “A staff,” he replied. The Lord said, “Throw it on the ground.” Moses threw it on the ground and it became a snake, and he ran from it. Then the Lord said to him, “Reach out your hand and take it by the tail.” So Moses reached out and took hold of the snake and it turned back into a staff in his hand.
That staff was Moses’ shepherd’s staff, it was the staff he had carried with him those forty years in Midian. It was his number one tool and support and means of livelihood. He had leaned on it, he had used it to fend off wild animals, he had used it to gently prod his sheep and goats as he herded them. That staff was an all-purpose symbol of Moses’ own strength and resourcefulness and experience, gained in four decades in the desert.
The first thing that God wanted Moses to do with his staff was to throw it on the ground. If we are going to follow God, God calls us to throw down our natural reliance on our own strength, our own power. Because God accomplishes His work not by might, nor by power, but by His Spirit.
Now when Moses threw his staff on the ground, it became a snake, and his natural inclination was to run away from it, because it must have been a dangerous snake. When we commit our lives to serving God, we’re entering a battle against Satan, the great Serpent. And he is dangerous. He’ll try to get us to run away from him in terror.
But look what happens next. God tells Moses to pick up the snake by the tail. Now if you know anything about snakes, you know that you do not pick up dangerous snakes by the tail! You pick them up right at the base of their heads, so they cannot bite you. If you pick up a snake by his tail, he’ll turn around and sink his fangs into you. I’m sure Moses, after forty years living in the desert was quite well aware of that.
But God was teaching Moses an important lesson here. He was teaching him that we need to do God’s work God’s way, and sometimes God’s way seems diametrically opposite to our way.
When Moses picked up the staff, it was no longer his staff. It was the staff of God, and it is called that from that point on in Scripture. When you lay your life down at the feet of God, He tells you to pick it up again. But when you do, it is no longer your life, it is God’s life.
Galatians 2:20 I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.
1 Corinthians 6:19-20 You are not your own; you have been bought with a price.
A further lesson from the staff. Moses was going to carry it with him for the rest of his life. As he carried it, it served as a physical reminder of his time in the desert, his time of humiliation, his time of preparation, his time alone with God. If he ever felt the temptation to become proud and puffed up, he only needed to pick up his staff at the beginning of each day to be reminded of his own weakness.
Now God wanted Moses to go, with his staff, to Egypt. Shepherds were despised in Egypt. Moses was going to carry that detestable badge of shepherdhood into the very presence of the king of Egypt. That was to remind us that
1 Corinthians 1:27 God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.
So the staff gave Moses credibility as a man who trusted God; a man who had laid his life before God; a man who now held in his hands not his own staff, but the staff of God.
2. The second sign God gave Moses was the sign of a cleansed life.
Exodus 4:6-8 Then the Lord said, “Put your hand inside your cloak.” So Moses put his hand into his cloak, and when he took it out, it was leprous, like snow. “Now put it back into your cloak,” he said. So Moses put his hand back into his cloak, and when he took it out, it was restored, like the rest of his flesh. Then the Lord said, “If they do not believe you or pay attention to the first miraculous sign, they may believe the second.
Leprosy in those days was a terrible, incurable disease. Because of that, it is often used symbolically in Scripture to symbolize that terrible, incurable spiritual disease called sin. When Moses put his hand into his cloak, next to his heart, he pulled it out leprous. The Bible says that the heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. And because his heart is sinful, his hands are sinful. Our sinful behavior is rooted in the sin in our hearts.
But God commanded Moses to repeat that action of putting his hand into his cloak, and this time, his hand was healed. God was showing us that when we lay our lives at his feet, he cleanses us. He cleanses our hands because he cleanses our hearts of sin.
Moses was a cleansed man. Only a cleansed person can be a spiritual leader. Only a cleansed person will have integrity and credibility before God’s people and the world. Only a cleansed man can hold in his hand the staff of God.
3. There was a third sign of credibility:
Exodus 4:9 But if they do not believe these two signs or listen to you, take some water from the Nile and pour it on the dry ground. The water you take from the river will become blood on the ground.”
The Egyptians worshiped the Nile River. For them, it was a god. It watered their fields, it cooled their bodies, and unlike other nations, it gave them an independence from the rain that fell from heaven.
God gave Moses the power to turn their source of life to death.
Excuse #4:
Exodus 4:10 Moses said to the Lord, “O Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue.”
This is the “I don’t have enough ability” excuse. Moses was really grasping at straws by now! God had promised Moses His presence. God had given Moses His message. God had granted Moses three miraculous demonstrations of his credibility. And now Moses is talking like it all comes down to his oratorical ability!
Exodus 4:11-12 The Lord said to him, “Who gave man his mouth? Who makes him deaf or mute? Who gives him sight or makes him blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.”
Whenever God gives us a job to do, He always gives us the power to do it.
Matthew 4:19 “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fishers of men.”
2 Corinthians 3:5 Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God.
Philippians 4:13 I can do everything through him who gives me strength.
Excuse #5:
Exodus 4:13 But Moses said, “O Lord, please send someone else to do it.”
Well, now we’re down to rock bottom! This is the “Let George do it” excuse. This is the only excuse that made God really angry. And this is the point at which Moses began to forfeit the blessing that God had in store for him. It was at this point that God, though not letting Moses off the hook, brought in Aaron to serve alongside Moses. And Aaron was to become a source of headache and heartache for Moses in the years to come. And it was all because of Moses’ lack of faith to go it alone with God. It would have been much better if Aaron had not been involved at all. Aaron was to be a thorn in Moses’ side, a daily reminder that Moses forfeited blessing by trying to refuse God’s call.
God wants to do His work through us. He wants to use us as His instruments.
John 15:5 “I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.
John 15:16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit—fruit that will last.
A man was driving his car in a rain storm when he came upon the scene of a terrible accident. A van, filled with Boy Scouts, had skidded off the road and down into a gully. Many of the young boys had been thrown from the vehicle as it broke apart. Some were killed outright, others were laying in agony, some of them dying of their terrible injuries. The man was joined by another driver who had stopped at the scene, and together they did what they could for the suffering boys until the police and emergency vehicles arrived. But it was too late for some of the victims.
As the professionals took over the situation, the driver returned to his car. Along the way, he passed the other driver who had stopped to help. The man was sitting on the guardrail beside his car, with his head in his hands. His license plate read “MD”. He was a doctor. But he was crying softly “If I only had my instruments.”
God looks down on a world that is dying in sin and suffering - a world He died to save. Then He looks at Christians who are selfishly going about their own business, totally oblivious to the needs of people all around them who are going to hell. I wonder if God is ever heard to say “If I only had my instruments.”?
Will you be an instrument for God. No excuses. No conditions. Total obedience?