SCRIPTURE STUDY: Is Resistance Futile?
When God invites Moses to undertake the mission to confront Pharaoh and lead the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt in chapters 3 and 4 in Exodus, four times Moses raises objections to the plan. First, he argues “Who am I that I should go …?” (3:11). Next, he objects that “they will not believe me” (4:1). And in the passage we looked at this week, 4:10-17, he first offers that he is not a good speaker (4:10), then, dropping any pretense or attempt at obfuscation, Moses states: “Lord, send someone else!” (4:13). And so we have arrived at the heart of the matter: Moses does not want to go. All of the arguing with God and offering up of excuses, which God has answered one by one, are really just justifications for the simple truth that Moses does not want to go.
But why is it that Moses does not want to go? During our study last night, folks suggested a variety of reasons, all with the same motivation: fear. Moses is afraid of returning to a country where there is a price on his head because of his past criminal acts (killing the Egyptian). He is afraid of being rejected by the Israelites, his family of origin, because of his upbringing as a favored grandson of the king who has brutally oppressed them. Maybe he is afraid of his own inadequacy to the task at hand—reinforced by his earlier confusion over the events that transpired between him and his fellow Israelites after his killing of the Egyptian overseer. Remember too that Moses has settled down to a comfortable life in Midian—married with children, part of the family business. Leaving this life of relative stability, comfort and security could have also inspired fear in Moses.
It would be easy at this point to make a bit of a caricature of Moses, to laugh at his fear or to disparage his reluctance at accepting God’s invitation. This is after all, God, all-powerful, almighty, all-knowing. But to do so would only reveal our own limited understanding of just what Moses is being asked to face and just how little he really knows about this God who is doing the asking.
The crux of it is this: God is asking Moses to confront an Empire, an Empire which seems unassailable, invincible, eternal. An Empire which simply rolls over anyone who dares to question its power, anyone who dares to question its right to pursue its national interest in whatever way it sees fit. God is asking Moses to face down a powerful king—a king considered more a god than a human being—equipped with armies, state of the art weaponry, unmatched military power. And, at this point in the story, God asks Moses to do this armed only with some words, a few magic tricks, and God’s promise that it will all work out.
And this God does not ask Moses to raise an army from among Egypt’s enemies. Moses’ only initial co-conspirator is to be his brother Aaron, a Levite, one of the beaten-down slaves from among the Israelites, whose only real asset is that he is more eloquent than Moses. These two brothers—one a criminal in exile, and the other an apparent runaway slave—are tasked with leading a revolution against the most powerful and enduring empire of the time.
In this light, Moses’ fear might now strike us as both justified and sensible. And even the promise of a God speaking from a burning bush—a God, remember, who has apparently been absent during the Israelites’ oppression these many long years—would not hold nearly the same motivating force as would the real, demonstrable and experienced power of Pharaoh and his empire.
To walk into Egypt and confront Pharaoh to his face can only seem like folly to Moses. What God is inviting him to must surely seem like suicide. What is the power of one man, or two—even with the support of a whole nation of slaves—against Pharaoh and the Egyptian empire in all its glory and might and ruthlessness? This is what Moses must have been contemplating.
And so maybe recognizing some of that same fear and reluctance in ourselves in our own day, we have to agree that Moses’ fear is real, that he would be risking everything to take up this mission, and that it is likely to all end in suffering, disaster, and death. The great powers of every era throughout history nearly always control good men and women through creating and fostering just such a perspective—that it is futile to think things could be any other way, that it is futile to challenge them.