Let’s look at more of the “Roll Call of Faith.”
20 By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau concerning things to come. 21 By faith Jacob, when he was a dying, blessed both the sons of Joseph; and worshipped, leaning upon the top of his staff. 22 By faith Joseph, when he died, made mention of the departing of the children of Israel; and gave commandment concerning his bones. 23 By faith Moses, when he was born, was hid three months of his parents, because they saw he was a proper child; and they were not afraid of the king’s commandment. 24 By faith Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter; 25 Choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season; 26 Esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt: for he had respect unto the recompence of the reward. 27 By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king: for he endured, as seeing him who is invisible. 28 Through faith he kept the passover, and the sprinkling of blood, lest he that destroyed the firstborn should touch them. 29 By faith they passed through the Red sea as by dry land: which the Egyptians assaying to do were drowned.
Here we have the four big names in the faith of God after Abraham. Isaac was not the sharpest tool in the drawer. You can tell by the way he was so easily tricked by his wife and son. Yet even though he had no physical evidence that the land promised to his father and him was going to be passed on to his children, seeing that the Canaanites, Amorites, Jebusites, etc. still possessed the land. Yet his faith in God’s promise to dad was enough for him to pass it to his son Jacob, even though he thought it was Esau that he was passing it to.
Joseph was Jacob’s favorite son. When the family was starving from a famine in the Middle-East, Joseph brought them all to Egypt, where he had made a name for himself by being true to God. It was comfortable in Egypt. There was no indication that things would change for the family from the land of Canaan. But Jacob remembered the promise God gave to his father and his grandfather before him. In faith that God would fulfill that promise, he made his children swear that his bones would be buried in the land of promise next to his father’s.
Now we come to Moses, the man of faith who saw God’s back on the Mountain of Sinai. Moses had all the advantages of the Pharaoh’s court. He was educated by the best tutors in Egypt, ate the best food in the land, slept in luxury and had every eligible batchelorette’s mother trying to marry him off to her daughter. Yet Moses was raised by his own mother, who taught him about God. Can I get you to praise God for faithful mothers? There is something to be said for having a loving Jewish mother. Everyone who is in Christ is an adopted son or daughter of God the Father, which makes him or her an adopted brother or sister of Jesus and an adopted son or daughter of Miriam bet Joachim. So all Christians who live in faith have a loving Jewish mother.
Moses identified with the people from whom he descended, not with the Egyptian people who made him a prince of the Pharaoh. It was Moses’s faith in God that led him to murder the Egyptian slave master who was beating the Hebrew workers building the city of Pharaoh. I call it murder, although God did not, because we can see it from both angles. Some things are illegal by the laws of humanity, such as witnessing for Jesus in Cambodia or Burma, handing out Arabic language translations of the Bible in Saudi Arabia, or defending a slave from cruel and harsh mistreatment in countries where slavery is still acceptable. So what Moses did was murder in the eyes of the Egyptian government. He thought he was unobserved, but the next day, when he tried to stop two Hebrew slaves from fighting between themselves, he discovered that all the Hebrew slaves already knew about his crime. So Moses fled Egypt.
With his education and bearing, Moses could have set himself up in luxury in any court in the Middle East. But Moses went to the land where God was still served, and took up working and living as a shepherd. God loves to train His leaders by giving them a shepherd’s crook. Think about the parallels between leading people and shepherding sheep. Both flocks will tend to get themselves into trouble they can’t get out of alone if left unattended, and there are many predators who lust after their juicy flesh. So the shepherd must guard the flock from within and without.
It turns out that God sent Moses to one of the last informal priests of His faith in the desert, Jesse, who married Moses to his own daughter. That Moses kept in touch with his family in Egypt can be surmised by the fact that when he was finally called of God, he knew his brother Aaron and sister Miriam well enough to tell them of God’s message and enlist them in telling Pharaoh. Remember, when Moses left Egypt, he was a murderer in the eyes of Egyptian law and a contender for the throne of Pharaoh. The Pharaoh on the throne when Moses returned was his childhood rival. There was a real chance that Moses’s status as an emissary of the Most High God would not be respected, and Moses would be arrested and executed for killing the evil slave master before he fled. It was an act of supreme faith to walk into the court of Pharaoh and pronounce the word of God.
And God protected Moses from all the wiles and tricks of the Egyptian court. The Pharaoh himself had cause to slay Moses as a rival to the throne, the law dictated that Moses must die for his crime, and the message Moses had to deliver was not one the Egyptians wanted to hear. All reasons to avoid Egypt at any cost. Yet it was the faith of Moses that led him into the very center of danger to his life. God had a mission for him, and he was going to do it no matter the cost. That is faith in practice.
It was by that faith that Moses instituted the Passover for all the Hebrew slaves, so God would not kill their firstborn sons. Think about the absurdity of putting blood on the doorposts and lintel of your home. No one had ever done that before. There was no reason a human mind could conceive for doing so. But it was in obedience to God’s command that the Hebrew people all did so, and they lived through the final plague God put on Egypt as Uriel slew each and every first born male in the land.
It was faith that led Moses to bring the people to the shore of the Red Sea where there would be no escape for them if Pharaoh’s army caught them. God rewarded that faith by opening a passage through the sea so the Hebrews could pass through on dry land, then He closed it when the last Hebrew reached to Eastern shore so none of Pharaoh’s army would get them. Soldiers, horses and chariots all were inundated by the closing up of the sea. And in their armor, they sank and drowned.
So we must all live, by faith. Ask yourself this: do you want to be like the Hebrews, although they were socially the bottom of Egyptian society, or like the army of Pharaoh, the cream of Egypt? Remember what happened in the end.
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