Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the leaders notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. Dr. Rutland is a world renowned leadership expert. He is a New York Times best selling author and he has served as the president of two universities. The Leaders Notebook is brought to you by Global Servants. For more information about Global Servants, please Visit our website globalservants.org Here is your host, Dr. Mark Rutland.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Now, if you have your bibles, if you'll take those and turn if you will, to the book of Exodus. So this second chapter, this series is called the Magnificent Seven.
It is each there is a series, but each one of them is standalone. So if this is your first one, then it's not like you've missed the first two and you can't catch up.
Each one of them is one of seven people that I selected from the Old and New Testament that are sort of magnificent personalities. Leaders lives of the Old and New Testament. They stretch from all the way from Abraham to St. Paul.
And I hope that the whole series will be a blessing to you.
Tonight is Moses.
Now let's just bring us up to where we are. And so if you can remember those of you who were here, Abraham, I said Abraham is the is the father of the Semitic peoples who on both sides of the aisle, through Ishmael, he is the father of the Arab peoples through his son Isaac or Itzhak, he is the father of the Jewish people.
Now what that brings into question is was Abraham a Jew?
And the technical answer is no, he wasn't. He was a Mesopotamian from the modern, what would be the modern nation of Iraq.
And the Jewish people sprang from him.
But his relationship with God was based on faith, pre law, Pre circumcision.
And St. Paul makes much of this later on, saying that we're the children of God through Abraham by faith. And it was his faith was counted unto him as righteousness.
Then Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Abram, Itzhak, Yakob, and then through Jacob, his youngest at the time that he was that he was lost to them. Joseph. We talked about Joseph on last Wednesday.
I was not at all happy with how that teaching came out about Joseph. So I may ask pastor to let me have eight Wednesday nights and come back and try Joseph again.
See if we can do better with Joseph. He deserves better.
But Joseph then sold into slavery and resold in Egypt. And then you'll remember, we won't rehash his whole life. Finally raised up to be second in command to 4 Pharaoh, the second most powerful man in the world, a descendant of Abraham, fourth generation from Abraham. And then the famine hits Canaan. Canaan, where they are where the family of Jacob they come bring. They finally re encounter their lost brother and son and he gets them to settle in Egypt.
And they stay as the as under the favor of Joseph.
He's the second most powerful man in the most powerful empire of the known world at the time of Egypt in its ascendancy.
And this family, 37 people settle in the land of Goshen, which is a territory of Egypt.
And they are there 430 years later.
Now you can imagine Pharaoh has died. Another Pharaoh has come, another Pharaoh, another Pharaoh. And life has moved on.
Now four and a half, nearly four and a half centuries later, there comes a Pharaoh who doesn't remember the story of Joseph, doesn't remember how he blessed Egypt, doesn't remember any of that. He only knows one thing.
He's got now a nation inside his nation.
From 37 people in Egypt, God has made the family of Abraham now is into a nation about two and a half million people living in the land of Goshen.
And this new Pharaoh, he's not the Pharaoh that succeeded that one. Obviously 430 years later, he has turned them into slaves.
And the bondage is backbreaking, but God continues to prosper them.
If you'll remember if you were here on last Wednesday, divine favor, which I said is one of the themes of Joseph's life, rested upon Joseph and upon the people not called Jews until 2 kings, but the Hebrew people, if you will.
And despite the bondage and the slavery and the poverty and everything, they grow stronger until Pharaoh becomes nervous about them and nervous about their strength and their numbers. And so he orders that the midwives, the Egyptian midwives assisting in the birth of these slave babies, that if it's a girl baby, they should let her live. If it's a boy baby, they should kill it.
Now, just before we read the text, let me just say this to you, that this is speaks to a demonic. The most ancient hatred in the world is the hatred of the Jewish people. Anti Semitism is a demonic hatred.
And it speaks to the reality that Satan fears babies.
Satan hates babies, fears babies because they are made a. They are made in the image of God. And Satan always knew that deliverers, plural and ultimately the deliverer singular, would always come into the world as a baby. And he still hates babies. The satanic lust for the death of babies is a prevailing and demonic reality.
And so at that point we enter Exodus chapter 2.
And there went a man of the house of Levi and took a wife, a daughter of Levi. And the woman conceived and bore a son. And when she saw him that he was a goodly child, and she hid him three months to keep him from being killed.
And when she could no longer hide him, she took him. She took for him an ark of bulrushes and daubed it with slime and with pitch and put the child therein. And she laid it in the flags in the flat stones by the river's bank.
And his sister stood afar off to watch what would be done to him. And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to wash herself at the river, and her maidens walked along by the river side. And when she saw the ark among the flags, she sent her maid to fetch it. And when she opened it and saw the child, behold, the babe wept.
And she had compassion on him. And she said, this is one of the Hebrew's children.
Let's pray. Heavenly Father, in the next few moments, I pray that your spirit will speak to us somehow, Lord, despite every weakness of the speaker, every distraction of hearer, that when we leave here tonight, we will say, surely the Lord has spoken unto us.
In the mighty name of Jesus, the strong son of God. Amen.
It is.
It is the most sublime irony, the practical joke of God Almighty, that Pharaoh says, I will kill all the Hebrew boy babies.
And God says, okay, I'll give you one to raise in your house.
The daughter of Pharaoh takes this baby. She's not confused.
She doesn't say, I wonder where this baby came from.
She takes this baby, and it is the impulse of her sensitive heart, but it must also have been the supernatural impulse of the Holy Spirit to guide her, even when she doesn't know it. God can use instruments that don't know they're being used of God and don't even want to be used by God.
Now, Moses is named Moses by this Egyptian princess.
So is his name Hebrew or is it Egyptian?
Yes.
So most.
If you. If you know the name of the Egyptian pharaoh, Ramses, it is Ramosis.
So the Moses part of Ramses has a derivative that sounds like Moses in Egyptian. It means a son, or it can mean born.
Moshe in Hebrew can mean plucked out or pulled out.
So it is a Hebrew name in a sense, and it is an Egyptian name in a sense. And how appropriate it is for this man. He is raised for 40 years as an Egyptian, as an Egyptian lord, as an Egyptian aristocrat of the highest level, the adopted son of the daughter, the grandson of Pharaoh, the adopted son of the daughter of Pharaoh. And imagine the position and the priority the privilege, the wealth and power with which he is raised.
Now, God has a secret weapon.
His sister sees the baby being taken out of this basket. It's called an ark in the King James Bible. But this basket by the flagstones on the bank of the river.
And she says to the Egyptian woman, wouldn't it be good if you had some woman that was able to nurse the baby?
It's possible. And I believe that there was a wink that she said, hey, I just happened to be standing here watching this baby, and I just happen to know a woman that's just had a baby and still has milk. How would you like to hire her to come and nurse the baby?
And I think everybody in the story knew it was Moses natural mother.
So Moses mother came, at least in his infancy, into the palace.
Can you see how bizarre this is?
This slave woman comes into the palace of Pharaoh to nurse a baby boy, which the Pharaoh ordered to be killed.
Now, what isn't told is how long she stayed a part of that household.
So there is a possibility, and I can show you why I think it is, that Moses biological mother was retained by the princess as his nanny.
And because later on it says, When Moses became 40, he chose to abandon his Egyptian privilege and identify with the Hebrew people. The book of Hebrews tells us that he. He chose to do that. Why. Why would he even have known he was a Jew? Why would he have even known that he was a Hebrew? Why would he have had any inclination to? And I think it was because his nanny, quote, unquote, is whispering in his ear, you're not an Egyptian, you're not an Egyptian, you're not an Egyptian. Enjoy this. But you're not an Egyptian.
Now, having said all that, let's talk about Moses himself.
I believe that one of the words that identifies the life of Moses is the word struggle.
There his whole life can be defined really around the word struggle.
So at 40, he has the struggle of whether to live in the privilege and wealth and power of Egypt or to identify with his slave people.
And he identifies. He struggles through that decision and decides to do that.
But in so doing, he winds up killing an Egyptian guard, one of his own soldiers, as it were, and buries the body.
So there's that physical struggle, there's the emotional struggle, the cultural struggle, there's the physical struggle. And he kills. He's guilty now, at least of manslaughter, and if not, out and out murder, but at least of manslaughter, that is witnessed by another slave.
And Moses realizing that this Crime is visible, flees for his life. He leaves Egypt and goes to northwestern Arabia to a land that is called at that time, Midian.
Now, Moses, life can be divided into three 40 year segments, precisely 40 years in Egypt, 40 years in Midian, 40 years in the desert with the, with the Hebrew people.
So those 40 year segments, each one of them deals with the issue of struggle.
So as Moses arrives at Midian and immediately is into a struggle with herdsmen and defends these Midianite girls. And evidently Moses must have been a serious hombre. He's all alone. He defeats these guys, defends these girls, they take him home to their father and he winds up marrying one of these girls and lives there 40 years.
Now that father in law is called in the book of he of Exodus, Jethro.
Now let me just give you a little passing word about Jethro.
If you've ever heard of the Druze people. Druze D R U Z E. The Druze people in Israel and around in the Middle east, they are a mysterious secret religion.
They are actually pro Israel. There are many Druze in the Israeli army and I've been in Druze villages many times.
The Druze people claim to be descended from Jethro.
Jethro is their, is their prophetic guy that they claim to be descended from. It is not clear if Jethro is actually his name or a title.
It may mean an exalted leader, maybe an honorific, if you will, because he is also referred to later on as Ruel and in another place in Numbers as Chobab.
So it, it is a thought that Jethro is actually a title, like you might say, your honor, and that his real name is Hobab.
Jethro plays a part in Moses life and we'll, we'll come back to him.
40 years in Egypt, 40 years on the backside of the Midianite desert and everything is fine.
He's escaped Egypt, he never has to go back.
He's.
Nobody's going to come and find him in the desert. He's alone, he's married, he's got children, he's a shepherd. Everything is fine until this dramatic encounter on the mountainside with God speaking to him through the personification of the burning bush.
And God reveals to him his lowercase M Messianic, his messianic mission. He is not the Messiah. He is a savior, prototype to lead the people.
God says, I'm going to send you to lead the people out of Egypt and into the land that I promised to their forefather Abraham.
Despite all of Moses objections.
God is absolutely unwilling to hear anything. And he says, I've chosen you and you're going. And it is this powerful encounter. I don't want to give you a theological lesson on the encounter there. I want to deal with the life of Moses.
But Moses now inescapably summoned.
I just want you to sense the struggle of this.
He is insecure as a person.
He, he says, God, I don't feel capable of this.
It is not clear by the way much has been made and preachers love to talk about Moses being a stutterer, but that is not clear. He just says, I, I'm, I'm not confident of my public speaking ability. We don't know that he's a stutterer or he's just not, just not confident.
But either way, God sends to him his natural brother Aaron, his older brother Aaron, who has come now to join him in Midian. And they too, Moses and Aaron go back to Egypt, where remember, there's a price on his head.
He is an 80 year old man, insecure with a price on his head, going back to Egypt from the backside of the Arabian desert.
Imagine the struggle inside of him. Imagine what he's dealing with, agonizing over it.
And then there is the, the dramatic encounter with Egypt over this, the, the, the Hebrew people.
Now this is very, very important what I'm going to say now. And, and it is most often missed if there's one thing that is missed about the struggle between God and, and his, and his spokesman, Moses. The struggle. The issue is this.
The issue is not about slavery.
The issue is not about sin. God is not trying to bring revival in Egypt. He's not asking the Egyptian people to repent. He's not offering them that option. He is not telling them that they've sinned against the Hebrew people. He's not dealing with that at all. There's only one question.
Whose people are they?
God says the Hebrew people are mine.
Pharaoh says the Hebrew people are mine.
So the contest between God Almighty and Pharaoh is over possession of the Hebrew people.
God is not even trying to bring reformation to Egypt. He's not dealing with that. He is only saying, these are my people. And Pharaoh says they're my people.
That's, that's the, the contest.
And of course the plagues. I, I don't want to rehash property that, you know, I want to deal with other things, the plagues. And finally Moses leads them out.
Then there is 40 years wandering in the wilderness. 40 years in Egypt, 40 years in Midian. 40 years in the. In. In the desert. 40 years wandering in the desert.
So let me just make a couple of things that people sometimes miss. Probably you didn't, but some people do. The 40 years wandering in the desert were not God's plan.
That was the result of the faithlessness and disobedience of the Hebrew people.
God's plan was for them to leave Egypt, go to Mount Sinai, receive the law, go straight to Kadesh Barnea and invade Israel from the south and take the land immediately.
And you remember the story of the. Of the spies who came back and said, you know, we. There are giants in the land. And they turned back and went back into the wilderness. And God, in His infinite grace, kill them all. He sustained them. But here's another thing people often miss.
Living in the desert on manna. People think it's a great thing. Oh, how wonderful that God gave them manna. That was never God's plan.
God living on manna is not God's plan. What God wants is for us to have the fruit of the promised land. He doesn't want us to live in the desert living on manna. That was never his plan. He gave the manna out of his grace. Despite their faithlessness and disobedience and their cowardice to go in and take the land.
40 years. God is simply waiting for that generation to be gone.
Now, during that 40 years, Moses is not without struggle.
So let me talk to you about one of the struggles.
It's a struggle of leadership and sibling rivalry.
His brother Aaron and his sister Miriam, which is the Hebrew version of Mary.
So Miriam and Aaron become jealous and envious of the anointing that's on Moses.
And Miriam really is the one that drives this thing. She says to Aaron, is he the only one that can hear from God?
He the only one. God never speak to anybody but Moses. He's on the way. I. If it hadn't been for me, if it hadn't been for me standing by that river, get my mother into the palace. And he. He thinks he's such a hotshot. And. And then they choose this thing.
Moses has married a Midianite woman, so they use his interracial married an Ethiopian woman. And he uses this interracial marriage as the provocation to rise up and rebel against him. And they lead a rebellion. His own siblings lead a rebellion against Moses in the desert at yet another struggle.
And here's a provocative passage, and it says, and Moses was the meekest of all men, the meekest man ever born.
So that Demands that we explore the word meek for a minute.
Meekness is not weakness.
Meekness is power, under control.
So let me give you an example of meekness.
So here's a mother lion.
Her jaw could snap anything.
And her baby comes up and starts climbing on her and biting her ear and pulling on her and everything like that. All she has to do is just snap that baby with a paw or with her jaw, biting. Instead, she kind of holds it. Her power is under control.
She's not weak.
Meek.
So when. When Moses is described as meek, here. Here's the fluke on the word meek.
You cannot be meek unless you have power.
So many years ago, my wife and I ran. For 18 summers, we ran a youth camp. Best. One of the best youth camps I've ever seen in my life. 18 years.
1 year we had a boy there that was a senior in high school.
He was a rounder. Oh, God.
He was a tough kid, bad kid. And one night he came to the altar and he got saved. I mean, the whole nine yards. Saved. Baptized in the spirit. It was powerful.
So we went back to the dorm, and several of us were in his room. He was laying in the bottom bunk, and we were all talking everything. Two little idiot seventh graders are in the hallway chasing each other. The one has thrown water on the other one, and the other one's chasing him with a tumbler full of water. And the one kid dashed in, ran past, and the other boy threw that water at him. He ducked out of the way, and he hit that big boy right in the face. And we all just froze.
We just froze because he could have snapped him.
And he looked at that skinny little kid, and that kid froze.
It was a pregnant moment.
And that guy said, now you boys need to calm down and go into bed. And he laid in that wet bed and went to sleep. And I said, there's a God in Israel that is meekness. And that's what it means. That Moses refused to take power in his hand. And he could have called down fire. He could have anything. He said, this is God's business.
This is God's business.
And God strikes them with leprosy and says the only way that they can be healed is if they go to Moses and apologize and appeal for healing. And Moses prays for them, and they're healed.
Moses whole life is one struggle after another.
40 years struggle in Egypt, 40 years in the wilderness. A struggle with God, a struggle with destiny, a struggle with his purpose, A struggle with his own siblings. A struggle with people two and a half Million rebels in the desert that Moses has said, you've made a terrible mistake. You've lost the Holy Land in your generation.
Now God's going to wait for another generation, one struggle after another. You can see it building up in the old man. He's now 80, 90, 95, 100, 110 years old. And it's constant with these people. Constant. One sin after another, one weakness after another, and the struggle of it. Finally, God punishes them by sending serpents. Now, I want you to hear. This is very, very important.
The prophetic character of the ministry of Moses. Listen to this. The serpents are biting the people. They're dying with poison. And God says, make a brass serpent, put it on a stick and hold it up. And everyone that will look on it with faith will be healed.
That that moment speaks to the cross.
Paul makes the point.
Every man that hangs on a cross is cursed. And that Jesus took our curse when he was hung on that cross. So that as we look upon him in faith, our curse, the snake bite of sin and damnation is lifted from us and fastened on that.
It's fascinating. Listen. He doesn't say, lift up a stick and put a dove on it. He says, the snakes that are killing them, put a serpent on it. Lift it up and put a serpent. So that the curse that they have is here. They look on this curse lifted up and be healed. It's the perfect curse. Picture of the cross that Jesus hung on that cross. The prophetic power of the life of Moses.
Now, Moses is a great man.
He's not perfect.
So people say, we're going to die here without.
Without water. They come to the waters at Mera.
Mera, in Hebrew, it's. It's translated bitter. But it means more than bitter. It's not. It's not bitter. You could drink bitter water you might not like. It might taste bad, but it won't kill you. But mera means toxic.
It means poisonous.
So the water is toxic, alkaline desert water.
And again God says, take this tree, put it in the water, and it'll be healed again. The symbol of the cross, so powerfully that when we put the cross in our most toxic, poisonous moment, there's the healing power of the cross.
Then there is the water that comes from a rock over and over again, until finally they come to a place. And the people say, we're dying of thirst.
And Moses makes his one bad mistake.
He says, do I have to. Do I have to bring water out of a rock for you?
And God says, speak to the rock. And Moses loses.
It's such a tragic moment.
He loses his meek, calm, sweet spirit and he takes his staff and strikes the rock.
I'm going to show you some complicated things here. Stay with me.
Moses has done the wrong thing.
Moses has disobeyed God.
But it doesn't obviate the performance of the grace of God.
The water still comes out.
The water still comes out. The fact that the minister of God does the wrong thing the wrong way doesn't mean that God won't do the right thing out of his infinite and unsearchable grace.
So let me show you some way that applies.
So somebody said to me, I took my, I took my brother in law back many, many years ago to hear this faith healer.
And he got healed. Wonderful healing, a miracle, he said. Then I found out that the guy's totally corrupt.
Totally corrupt. He said, Dr. Oatman, explain that to me.
Explain that to me. How can, how can God do that?
Here's the answer.
In the Middle Ages, people in the little villages out in the Black Forest somewhere, they have some priest who's corrupt.
So they're, he's serving the mass and he's corrupt. Keeping a woman on the side or whatever it is.
So they sent to Rome and said, how does this work? Is the mass still effective?
And the Roman church came up with this doctrine exopero para. It means in the working. It works in, in the, in the operation, it operates.
In other words, the effectiveness of the mass is not dependent on the righteousness of the priest.
Therefore, the grace of God that brings water from the rock doesn't depend on whether or not the priest, the man of God, does it correctly or even if his spirit is right.
What a wonderful God.
What a wonderful God. What if God would have said, no, you've treated Moses so bad that he finally cracked and therefore you can all just die. Thirst.
God says, no, my grace is still operational. I'm going to still bless you.
But then he says to Moses, I'm going to let you see the Holy Land.
But you never get to go in.
It's one of the hard moments in the Bible.
Moses goes on to Mount Nebo.
I've been there, looked across the Jordan river toward the city of Jericho, which you can see, and there he died. And evidently God himself buried mountain Moses.
The life and the ministry of Moses, prophetic, powerful, one of the greatest men that ever lived, who encountered God almost face to face, who received the commandments, who saw in a vision the heavenly tabernacle and received the dimensions for the tabernacle on earth. From God. Architect plans from God.
What a man. What a man who single handedly, without an army, brought Egypt to its knees, destroyed an army, and that God used in miraculous ways to prefigure the coming Messiah.
The cross upon which, if we would look with faith, we should be healed and our curse would be fastened on him. That him who knew no sin would become our sin.
That we might become the righteousness of God in Christ.
The story is so amazing.
And yet.
And yet a man with the weaknesses of a man.
What does it mean then?
What. What does it mean to us in this place? Tonight, none of the weaknesses of any of these great people. And next week we're going to talk about David. Whoa, you don't want to miss that one. David had a few minor flaws, but none of the weaknesses of the giants of this. Of the magnificent Seven, none of their weaknesses are to excuse us to.
To justify our weaknesses.
They are to summon us to find the grace that they found Moses.
Plucked from a river, raised in a palace, died alone on a mountain.
The greatest of all the prophets.
Who met with God.
Who met with God.
Let's pray.
Heavenly Father, for the law and for the life of Moses, we give you praise.
But we thank you even more for him who delivered us from the bondage of the law.
We thank you for this, our Savior, even Jesus, who hung up on a cross and that we can look on him by faith and the curse of sin and death is lifted from us and fastened on him.
Thank you, God. I praise you, God. We give you glory and honor.
And Lord, we praise you that despite every weakness, every failure of human leadership, every sin, every fallenness, all the humanity that somehow, even in. In your church, God, which is made of real people who make real mistakes, somehow your grace comes through generation after generation after generation. Thank you, God. You set us free from slavery.
You call us into the promised land. You call us to second rest.
We thank you and we praise you for the operational grace which you offer us.
We praise you for it. We thank you in the mighty name, Jesus, the strong, son of God and our true Messiah.
Amen. Amen. And amen. God bless you, everyone. God bless the church.
[00:38:51] Speaker A: You've been listening to the leader's notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. You can follow Dr. Rutland on x @DrMarkRutland, or visit his website, Drmarkrutland.com where you can find information about his materials and his app. Join us next week for another episode of the Leader's Notebook.
