One thing I know about us humans is that we’re really good at making everything about us.

Turns out this is an ancient trait. Today I’m reading in early Exodus; God has just called to Moses out of the burning-yet-not-consumed bush and explained His whole plan. Moses is simultaneously in awe and afraid to look at God while standing on holy ground, and obstinately answering Him with excuses. I can’t say I blame him – it’s not a job I’d choose for myself either. Returning to a place where I was a wanted criminal, where my family are slaves, and addressing the king of Egypt to get him to let us leave? Oh and I’ve been living in the wilderness as a shepherd for years – leading just sheep, not masses of people. Oh and I now have a family to think about.

When that’s your life and it’s what you know, it is unnatural to easily adapt to something foreign, a different paradigm, a disruption.

It’s unnatural for us, which is why it has to be supernatural.

Here’s the conversation in a nutshell:

God: I have come down to deliver Israel. I will send you.

Moses: Who am I?

God: I will be with you.

Moses: What if they ask me who You are?

God: I AM who I AM. I will bring you out of the affliction of Egypt. Israel will listen to you. I will strike Egypt. I will give Israel favour.

Moses: They won’t listen to me.

God: I’m giving you signs to do so they listen.

Moses: I am not eloquent.

God: I made your mouth. I will be with you.

Moses: Please send someone else.

(from Exodus 3 and 4)

I’m starting to see a pattern. Both God and Moses are fighting to be the center of the story, the person of consequence in the situation. God has explained His big picture plan to Moses: He wants to bring His people out of slavery into a good land, so Moses will go to Pharaoh and say specific things, then God will strike Egypt with wonders, then Pharaoh will let them go and they will leave with plunder and go to the land of promise. Moses frankly doesn’t agree, or he doesn’t believe God, or maybe both.

Every time God solves a problem, Moses not only doesn’t concede that, he also proposes a new one.

Why? We don’t know all of his motives, but I’m willing to bet there was fear involved, and uncertainty, and some shock, and feeling inadequate, and also some fear.

Initially Moses seems to fear God when they meet, but as conversation ensues he turns out to fear everyone else more. He fears his own people won’t believe him. He fears Pharaoh won’t listen. He fears not having the right answers, not speaking well, and just the whole thing in general. Moses was out of touch with the situation at this point; he didn’t know how Israel felt or what they would believe, but he went with his prediction rather than God’s promise.

I think one thing at the root of this fear and resistance is Moses’ inability to see beyond his own actions and limitations. He’s talking to the God of the universe, and he still thinks that all of this is between him and other people. Whereas God is constantly telling Moses what He will do. God is the one seeing, sending, acting, rescuing, leading, loving. He is the primary actor, but He’s also the story’s author. He moves people where they need to be. He does signs and wonders, He hardens Pharaoh’s heart, He softens Pharaoh’s heart, He lets Israel leave Egypt with an abundance of resources — oh, we can do this all day.

God didn’t need Moses one lick. If He needed only Moses, he wouldn’t have responded to his request to choose someone else by conceding to let Moses’ brother help. This is the God who made a way through a sea on dry land. This is the God who has power over life and death. He didn’t need Moses. But He chose Moses.

I wonder, did Moses know he wasn’t ever supposed to live very far past birth? Did he know he survived beyond the odds such that he would be nursed by his own mother but raised in the royal family not as a slave, so that he would be in a position of freedom giving him the capacity to defend a slave (yes, unfortunately via murder), so that he would flee to where he would come across the daughters of the priest of Midian and assist them, so that he would be invited in and later marry one of those daughters, so that he would stay in Midian as a humble shepherd, so that he would stumble across a burning bush in the wilderness, thereby stumbling into the presence of the living God, leading to this very conversation?

Everything up to this point, and everything after it, was not a series of accidents. That’s as true for you and me as for Moses.

How often do we put limits on what God can do simply because we are limited? How often do we think that what’s happening in our lives and in the world is all between people, and that people are the ones who make things happen?

And when God sends you, or gives you something to do, how easily does it become about you? Are you by default the main character? I am. My needs, my feelings, my actions, my contributions, my deficiencies — they all play a much bigger role in my head and heart than in reality.

This is that different paradigm, the one that’s supernatural. What could change if I believed that God and His doings and His character were of the utmost consequence, and I was only a minor player (if that)?

I would engage in arguments differently, knowing that a) God is the one who will change a mind or a heart, b) whatever we’re arguing about is far smaller than what God is doing eternally, and c) each of us is part of that eternal story.

I would regret less at the end of an unproductive day, because I believe that God did what He wanted to today, and His plans can’t be hindered by my failure. But I’d also be encouraged to start a new day, not feeling the pressure of changing the world but the invitation to be faithful in the next thing, and the next.

My prayers would change. I’d ask God what He’s doing and how He wants me to be part of it (if He does). I’d do that before making plans to fill a calendar.

I’d respond to assignments and invitations from Him more joyfully, knowing that even though I feel stretched to the point of pain and have nothing to give anyone, He is working, will sustain me, and will do all the giving the other person needs. Dying to self includes acknowledging that whatever God is doing is more important than what I want or think I need. Yet how kind He is, that He gives me Himself and all I need when I seek Him and His kingdom.

The implications are too many to enumerate. But let’s go back to Moses for a second. We gave him a hard time.

Spoiler: he did it. He did what God instructed, after all those obstacles he furnished. He went to Egypt and met with his people and showed them the signs. And did he have to argue with them about whether God had sent him? NO. They believed and worshiped, because God had seen them. Now that is the way to respond to God. That’s one of Israel’s best moments, in my opinion. They believed, and they worshiped – two things that make total sense when God is the center of the story. The humility of gratitude when you realize the Lord of creation has seen you; what mercy is this?!

And Moses kept doing the things given to him to do. Yep, he did them imperfectly, enough that he saw the promised land but ended his days outside of it. Yet God continually brought him into His presence, spoke to him, and chose him to lead His people. And we see that this was the plan all along, and that even in his early life he demonstrated he would be a protector and an advocate as God had designed him. He defended a fellow Israelite, and he defended Jethro’s daughters against attacking shepherds. The former made him a fugitive, but the latter brought him into a family – what an improvement in a short time. 😉

And over the years, God shaped him and would neither let him get away with anything, nor let him go. He advocated for his people to Pharaoh and to God Himself. He went on for the rest of his life that way, and then when God chose, he died. Deuteronomy 34 tells us that “his eye was undimmed, and his vigor unabated” at 120 years old, yet God decided it was time. Because God is the author. And though he was flawed and had failed in many ways, “there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face…”

Notice there that it was the Lord who knew Moses; God is still the subject, even in this poignant description of Moses.

Friend, whether you do signs and wonders, whether you’re famous or unknown at your death, whether you raise children or watch others’ grow up, whether you succeed at everything you set your hand to or face constant frustration, whether you have a retirement savings and an inheritance to give or can barely afford your bills, whether you make it to the promised land or everything comes crashing down around you, whether you can speak well or fumble every time, whether you’re respected or ignored or disdained or adored —

Let it be said of you that the Lord knew you face to face, that you believed and worshiped, and that your life testified that your life and the world and the universe and all eternity is always and forever about God.