Moses’ Boat: Salvation is Far Reaching
Daily Reading: (Exodus 2:1-4):
“Now a man of the tribe of Levi married a Levite woman, and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. When she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months. But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him.”
She placed Moses in a basket in the Nile River because she has a plan to save her baby. God would be with Moses and deliver the deliverer of the Israelites into a home that would bless him and also prepare him for his life mission ahead to lead God’s people to the Promised Land.
God caused His people to prosper and God also was protecting them against the threat of the king (Exodus 1:7,17) and as the decree of slavery happened (Exodus 1:11) God had already orchestrated the birth of a deliverer out of slavery into a Promised Land (Exodus 2:1).
God’s people through some remarkable events were led to live in Egypt the wealthiest place on the planet. You could think it doesn’t get any better than this-but God’s got something even better in mind for His people- the Promised Land. However, they needed something to happen that was unpleasant to get them to move onto something even better.
The common misconception is that the Israelites were slaves for 400 plus years in Egypt. It’s not true. Shortly after slavery was introduced Moses is born in Exodus 2:1. So there is some wisdom here Moses’s older sister Miriam was so named because of the bitterness of the slavery (mar = bitter). Tradition claims Miriam was 6 years older than Moses. And since we know Moses was 80 at the story of the Exodus (Exodus 7:7), the slavery lasted somewhere between 86 and 116 years.
It is important to note these were Hebrew midwives because if they were Egyptian they would have believed the pharaoh was a god. And if you believe that god himself told you to do something, you’d do it. But these were Hebrew women. “The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do; they let the boys live.” When you are in awe of God and what He has done for you, you won’t succumb to the pressure of someone in power (Exodus 1:17).
We have the faith of midwives and the faith of Moses’ parents which will set the stage for the salvation of God’s people.
Charles Spurgeon said: “God gives to faith, God accepts from faith, God saves through faith, God keeps through faith, God sanctifies through faith, God perfects through faith. In all good things the power, life, and acceptance are “not by works, lest any man should boast,” but by faith so that all things may be by grace alone.”[1]
God arranged for Moses to be raised in his earliest years in his mother's and father's home. This way he got a clear idea who he was a Hebrew, a descendent of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob so he would have a chance to learn about who God is (Exodus 2:7).
The enemy wanted to have baby Moses killed but God’s plan was to get his parents paid to feed and raise their own baby (Exodus 2:9).
“When the child grew older, she took him to Pharaoh’s daughter and he became her son. She named him Moses, saying, “I drew him out of the water” (Exodus 2:10). His name would tell the story of how God would save the Israelites out of Egypt.
[1]https://www.thekingdomcollective.com/spurgeon/sermon/1421/