October 9th

Exodus 1:1-3:22; Matthew 26:1-30; Psalm 19:1-6

Straight in here with another of the heroes of the faith – Moses. No messing about in Genesis, one chapter linking Joseph and the present situation and then straight in to Moses. And just like Abraham and all the other big names of the Bible that we have come across we discover that he is not perfect.

Moses didn’t grow up in a ‘normal’ family with 1.8 kids (or whatever the average is per family now). He was effectively an adopted kid who was given to a nanny who happened to be his mother. I wonder if he ever knew!?!? And then he went and killed someone which perhaps leads us to our first lesson from this passage, that God does not always chose perfect people to do the jobs he needs to do. If you think you are a bit of a misfit with a rap sheet longer than Amy Winehouse then you might just find that it’s you God wants to lead his people. You never know.

Then there is the calling of Moses, where he tries to back out. This is the first half of a longer passage with Moses doing a far better job of trying to whinge out in tomorrow’s readings. But God is having non of it. You could just imagine the great booming voice of the cartoon God, then Moses being a wimp, then the booming voice each time getting more and more exacerbated with him. The classic is when Moses says “but who shall I say sent me”. It’s God you eejet, they know who God is, he was with Israel all through Genesis, had Moses not read it. But funnily enough God has a far more powerful answer than this “Just tell them ‘I am who I am’”. (v14) So intriguing and yet so powerful.

As one commentator puts it, it is sufficient to know that he is what he is. I doubt God is called Dave, or Bob and we don’t need to know. We can look at his nature, all that he is and all that he ever has been and we can just know that he is God. we role in all we have been talking about for the last month, all of creation, all of the stuff in Job about his domain, all of the praise in the Psalms. We pull all that together and just know that he is God.

But let’s take another tack on it:

Yesterday we looked at the fact that Jesus is in everyone we meet. Extend this video and think about everyone who has ever walked about on the face of the earth. I am all these people. Think of a test tube that holds all the energy of a chemical reaction until it is too much and the test tube shatters. Well God holds within him all that has ever existed in the universe, every star that he knows by name, every mountain goat, raven or lioness (Job 38) and every single one of us. He holds all of that together within himself. He is who he is.

That is one awesome God and he wants you no matter what your faults are.