Then the Lord said to Moses, “This is the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob when I said, ‘I will give it to your descendants.’ I have now allowed you to see it with your own eyes, but you will not enter the land.” So Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab, just as the Lord had said. [Deuteronomy 34:4-5 (NLT)]
We all know the story of Moses. When his mother can keep him hidden no longer, she puts him in a waterproof basket and lays him in the reeds of the Nile. He’s found by Pharaoh’s daughter who, taking pity on the crying infant, adopts him. Moses’ sister appears and offers to find a wet nurse for the infant. Moses and his birth mother are reunited but, once he’s weaned (around two or three), the boy returns to Pharaoh’s daughter who raises him as her own. Unfortunately, with only eleven verses of Scripture about Moses’ childhood, there’s no way of knowing how much contact he had with his birth family after that or what he knew of his Hebrew heritage. Nevertheless, Moses must have been torn by the knowledge that he was living a privileged life in the palace of the man who was mercilessly oppressing his people. Did he ever feel he belonged in the palace? As a Hebrew boy being raised as an Egyptian prince, I suspect he never was fully accepted by those in Pharaoh’s court. Even though he was raised as a prince, was he too much of a Hebrew to be considered an Egyptian by the people around him?
When he was grown, Moses went out “to visit his own people” but we don’t know why. Was he visiting his birth family, supervising some labor, or merely curious? Scripture only tells us that when Moses saw an Egyptian abusing a Hebrew slave, the outraged man killed the Egyptian and hid the body. The next day, when Moses returned to his people, he happened upon two Hebrews fighting. When he tried to intervene, he was sarcastically rebuffed: “Who appointed you to be our prince and judge? Are you going to kill me as you killed that Egyptian yesterday?” Apparently, Moses was too much of an Egyptian to be considered a Hebrew by his own people!
To escape Pharaoh’s wrath over the homicide, Moses fled to Midian. The man who belonged to both the overlords and the slaves became a foreigner in a strange land. Reflecting this sense of not belonging, he even named his son Gershom, meaning “foreigner” or “stranger.”
While the years spent as a prince in Egypt and as a shepherd in Midian were the perfect preparation for the man who would deliver Israel, Moses didn’t know that. It’s easy to understand why he was so reluctant when God told him that he’d be the one to lead the Hebrews to freedom. What did Moses know of his people and God’s covenant with Israel? He hadn’t even circumcised his son!
Part of me finds the story of Moses incredibly sad. He spent a third of his life as an outsider in Pharaoh’s palace, a third as an exile in Midian, and a third as a nomad in the wilderness. A man who always lived as a stranger, he never really had a place to call home. Although Moses was the one who led his people to their home in Canaan, he never stepped into that Promised Land. After viewing it from a distance, he died and was buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in Moab.
Yet, isn’t this what the Apostle Paul was talking about when he gave his examples of faith in Hebrews 11? He wrote of faithful people like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who, like Moses, only viewed God’s Promised Land from a distance. True faith, however, allows us to see beyond what is right in front of us. We’re all strangers in a strange land because this world is not our home. The Promised Land is not a piece of soil; it is the Kingdom of God and a piece of eternity.
Monday’s devotion (“No Words of Comfort”) originally was published back in 2018. It came to mind because my son-in-law recently died. His death was sudden and unexpected and, when my daughter told me, I was sure I’d misunderstood her words. Not Mike! Still a young man in the prime of his life; it couldn’t be, but it was! Just as we all know we’re going to die someday, we know the people we love will die. It’s just that we expect those deaths to be on our timeline. But they’re not—they’re on God’s. The only guarantee that comes with life on earth is that it will end!
We were discussing when and how we came to believe in the existence of God. Those who’d been brought up in families of faith said there never was a time they weren’t aware of God’s presence. Others spoke of believing in God because He is visible in His creation—in flowers, majestic mountains, birds, sunrises and sunsets, the vastness of space, or the miracle of birth. One came to believe in God while attending Vacation Bible School with a neighbor and another met God through a campus ministry. After apologizing in advance for “grossing” us out, one woman shared her experience while in medical school.
Back in 1957 (long before PETA existed), Curt Richter, a professor at Johns Hopkins, conducted a series of cruel and inhumane experiments to demonstrate the power of hope and resilience in overcoming difficult situations. In this case, the difficult situation was rats being put in a bucket of water with no means of escape and timing how long it took them to drown. After two preliminary experiments, Richter hypothesized that introducing hope to the rats would increase their survival times.
Occasionally, I’ll spot a partially open moonflower (Ipomoea alba) during an early morning walk at the park. While the Moonflower’s cousin the Morning Glory opens wide to welcome the sunlight, the Moonflower prefers darkness. It’s only when the sun sets that it opens to a large trumpet-shaped bloom. Rather than competing during the day with brightly colored flowers for pollinators like bees and butterflies, Moonflowers enjoy pollinators like bats and moths at night. As the morning sun rises, the Moonflower again rejects the light and rolls up into itself.
Devotions of the Heart 