Faithful Foresight, and a Lasting Reward (Heb. 11:24-26)
Notes
Transcript
Call to worship:
Call to worship:
7 but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. 9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, 10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Reading #1, for perspective:
Reading #1, for perspective:
11 One day, when Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and looked on their burdens; and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his people. 12 He looked this way and that, and seeing no one he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. 13 When he went out the next day, behold, two Hebrews were struggling together; and he said to the man that did the wrong, “Why do you strike your fellow?” 14 He answered, “Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” Then Moses was afraid, and thought, “Surely the thing is known.” 15 When Pharaoh heard of it, he sought to kill Moses. But Moses fled from Pharaoh, and stayed in the land of Midian; and he sat down by a well.
Reading #2, main text:
Reading #2, main text:
24 By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, 25 choosing rather to share ill-treatment with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. 26 He considered abuse suffered for the Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he looked to the reward.
Intro.1
This is a storyline I think we tend to gravitate toward, and it grabs our attention:
The hero, at the top of his/her game, steps away from their high place and takes up a new station or pursuit in life, leaving the old life and things behind, and “stepping into the unknown” with a lot of questions and uncertainties ahead.
Michael Jordan, after winning three NBA Finals and two league MVP’s, steps away from basketball after the murder of his father and tries “finding himself” instead in playing Major League baseball.
Or more closely to our text:
Prince Harry too, after marrying Meghan, steps out of his place in the royal family and instead moves to Southern California to pursue a new life (and new career) there.
Intro.2
It’s Mark Twain’s Prince and the Pauper that draws us into the “riches to rags” storyline, too.
Edward, Prince of Wales, leaves the palace in disguise and trades places with Tom, a poor boy of London who was born on the very same day as the prince was, and who looks identical in every appearance to the prince.
Things start very badly for the prince immediately as he leaves the palace gates. He is beaten and kicked to the curb by a guard who doesn’t recognize him as the prince. He is chased by a mob. And a group of boys ridicule him, tormenting him even more when their insults cause him to reach for his sword that he forgot was no longer by his side.
He is isolated. He is insulted. Outside the palace gates and thrust into the life of the poor boy (pauper), he is unpampered, but he is also unprotected. He fends for himself—often lousily—and eventually he clamors to return to the palace, hearing that his father the king has died: but he also suspects that Tom, the actual pauper, is going to remain in the palace and try to usurp the crown and throne that actually belongs to Edward!
Intro.3
But there is also the story, like that of Moses, where the sense of “law” foists the massive downward shift in lifestyle on to somebody.
Martha Stewart, for instance, becoming a billionaire while she was in federal prison—but then in the same period, she watched her popularity fall and her net worth decrease in half, as well.
Or Enron’s Kenneth Lay lost his company in 2001 to the largest bankruptcy in history, and he died shortly before being sentenced federally for his engagement in a massive case of securities fraud.
I.
The author of Hebrews, too, reminds us that Moses as well was at the “top of his game”:
24 By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter,
The Greek there is much more vivid than our English Bibles let on:
“Moses,
being great (mighty, important; literally “mega”)
REJECTED (DISOWNED) being called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter.”
(Acts 7:22 uses our word for dynamite: Moses was mighty),
He refused being called Pharaoh’s daughter’s son. He failed to claim it as his own. He threw it off and cast it off, in order to take on his life and identity as somebody else.
II.
Exodus 2 though fleshes out the circumstance and shows that, in this act of “faith,” there actually was a great amount of fear in Moses’ life that had transpired to bring it about!
Moses—the great prince and the very son of Pharaoh’s daughter—in a “moment of passion” has killed a man.
The act we say is spontaneous, rather than premeditated. It’s “in the heat of the moment.” It’s unintentional. And it’s impulsive, a case of instinct rather than anything “deliberate” or “planned.”
Moses sees that, in “going out to his people” [an interesting word choice!] “and seeing their burdens,” one of these Hebrews whom he is observing is being beaten by an Egyptian who [presumably] is a taskmaster and slavedriver.
And rather than identifying himself with the Egyptian, with whom Moses has spent far more of the span of his life than with any Hebrew slave—instead, Moses apparently remembers his roots, and he identifies and empathizes with the beaten Hebrew. And in that moment of fury, Moses attacks the Egyptian slavedriver, kills him, and “buries” his corpse into the sand.
In a sense the Egyptian acts as the representative and arm of who Moses is…but in that moment it’s the Hebrew who reaches Moses’ heart.
It’s the same word, “buries,” that Job uses—perhaps in much more faith and in vindication of his own righteousness and cause!
33 Have I covered my transgressions as others do by hiding my iniquity in my heart 34 because I greatly feared the crowds and because the contempt of the clans terrified me, so I grew silent and would not go outside? 35 If only I had someone to hear my case! Here is my signature; let the Almighty answer me. Let my Opponent compose his indictment.
Moses, however, has none of the sense of self-vindication that Job seemed to enjoy. He has none of the clamor or any of the preening or chutzpah.
Instead, Moses goes into hiding. He fears Pharaoh—which ironically, in hiding him in the bulrushes, his parents did NOT do (recall last time, Heb. 11:23). Nor did the daughter of Pharaoh do it either, fearing Pharaoh in any sense: instead having taken Moses in and raised him, right under Pharaoh’s own nose and against Pharaoh’s own edict to destroy the Hebrew boys (also recalling Heb. 11:23)!
III.
But Moses fears Pharaoh and fears for his own life—and he disowns his place in the family of Pharaoh because of it. And Moses goes into hiding, and he fled to the land of Midian:
Midian being the place, interestingly, of the people who originally bought Joseph as a slave (Gen. 37) and who were responsible for bringing Joseph to the land of Egypt!
But now Moses goes there to Midian, to escape Egypt and to have his own exodus and his own flight from out of Pharaoh’s control and grasp. And to find his own rescue and haven from the death sentence that Pharaoh had (once again) issued on the life of Moses—this time when Moses was “grown up,” when he was great, and when he was important as an adopted member of Pharaoh’s own family!
IV.
So this morning I want to remind us then, in an important way, of who WE are. And I turn us, then, to 1 John 3:1:
1 See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. 2 Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. 3 And every one who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.
“Hope.” The word there shares roots with the word in our Hebrews, New Testament text: the word, “faith.”
There is our vindication, too—we who hope have a share, and a right, to the purity of the Christ who saves us, and who cleanses us from our sin.
This is something unshakeable from the world—unshakeable from the tyrants like Pharaoh who might seek our life, and unshakeable from any force, any foe, and any imagination which would seek to undo our place as the very children of God.
Yet, it is also something unattainable in our own selves. We cannot purchase it. We cannot accomplish it in our own doing or our own merit. And yet, it is ours! Bought FOR us—merited FOR us! Achieved, signed, sealed, and delivered FOR us!
* * *
However—I want us to know there is no disowning or disinheriting this title of “child of God” (unlike what Moses had done with disowning his relationship to Pharaoh’s daughter).
You and I, I mentioned in our last time together, are the adopted children of God. And in God there is no way whatsoever to be a prodigal adopted child of God, either a runaway or a castaway.
You are in Christ, the scriptures emphasize again and again. You are “in the family,” and the inheritance is ready and preserved for you. There is “nothing that can separate” you “from the love of God” that is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom. 8:39).
Moses was “not made perfect,” Hebrews 11 will go on to say (in 11:40), because “God had FORESEEN something better for us.” Moses lived in the shadows.
We too live in the shadows—and yet we have, and know, Christ! We too live in the waiting, the uncertainties, and the trials and struggles. Yet Jesus has come to secure our hope—and Christ is our “older brother” who will deliver us unto our God on high!
We are God’s children, John says: and we have Jesus Christ as our older brother and our guarantee of all our future place and promise!
V.
Meanwhile, Hebrews 11:25 gives us an interesting correlation that Moses shares with Christ, too: which is the willingness of both Christ and Moses to willingly give up the comforts and effects which they enjoyed, and to take on instead the trials and tribulations and struggles of a lesser life.
In Jesus it’s theologically called his “humiliation”—and we see that expressed quite profoundly in Paul’s so-called kenosis song, Philippians 2:5-8:
5 Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.
Hear this again:
“Not counting equality with God a thing to be grasped” (something to be seized/grabbed/pulled to oneself), “but (he) emptied himself,” taking that form of a servant and a slave.
(We hear this theme so fully at Christmastime in the reminders of the incarnation—Jesus leaving heaven, coming down to earth, humble, lowly, later beaten, harassed, and—Paul says—bloodied, killed on a cross.
* * *
So too is Moses here.
He leaves the pampered palace and lifestyle of Pharaoh’s daughter. And as Jesus took on the form of a servant, Moses also joined the throngs (who were “many” and “mighty” in Egypt, Exodus 1:9) and he became one of the slaves in Egypt.
“Sharing ill-treatment with the people of God” rather than enjoying what the author of Hebrews summarizes as “the pleasures of sin.”
Moses was “brought up” as the very son of Pharaoh’s daughter (Acts 7:21), “instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” (7:22). No doubt he had the finest schools and teachers as such, the finest foods and fill of drinks in the hot desert sun, the full comforts and pamperings of having his every wish and need met by attendants and servants—never lifting a finger to toil, never struggling to make bricks out of hay and mud as the other Hebrews were forced to do.
His “wish was the command” of anyone who was lower in status than he was—and being the adopted grandson of Pharaoh, just about everyone was lower in status than he was!
Yet having “the rights and privileges thereof” afforded to him, still he cast them off and put them aside to take on the problems and daily struggles that his true people and associates faced.
He identified with the Hebrews, “the people of God,” and Moses goes where his empathy (rather than his privilege) leads him.
Moses’ allegiance is with the people of God—and in a moment, he casts everything else aside, he “forgets what lies behind,” to borrow the words of Paul (Phil. 3:13-14), “pressing toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”
VI.
But notice the value system and “trade-off” that the author of Hebrews brings out in Moses’ choice to leave the palace and princely life behind:
26 He considered abuse suffered for the Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he looked to the reward.
This corresponds with the words of Jesus himself, of course, as we consider Moses leaving his adopted mother and setting aside all that was behind him in Pharaoh’s courts.
For one, Jesus points out Moses’ long-term perspective of the Christ:
46 If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me.
And Jesus also says:
29 And every one who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold, and inherit eternal life.
Or he also says:
36 For what does it profit a man, to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?
VII.
There’s a “long-term” perspective that this view takes, a faith-filled foresight to look beyond the here-and-now and instead see that eternal life—and, indeed, to value it as “a hundredfold” increase over anything that this world can offer.
For Moses, “he looked to the reward.” He counted the cost. He saw that forsaking his greatness, Pharaoh’s grandeur, was worthy as a calling—or as Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously wrote, in Cost of Discipleship, “When Christ calls (someone), he bids (one) to come and die.”
Moses left all his stewards and attendants, all the comforts and luxuries. Exodus 2 tells us he ran to Midian—and even there, as the text continues, he almost immediately finds himself needing to go into a bit of self-defense against shepherds who harassed him.
(Whom could he have called to this little battle in his stead, maybe a slew of bodyguards, had he remained as a prince in Egypt??)
But Moses strikes out on his own path, considering even “abuse,” the text says, as better than anything else he could have had as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter.
He embraces shame and disgrace (other words for “abuse” there in the passage), and he even gives up the roof over his head to become a wanderer, a nomad, and a rover.
So Jesus, in calling his disciples (again, that “cost of discipleship” in Bonhoeffer’s terminology):
20 And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.”
Conclusion.1
So where are you clinging this morning, and to what are you grasping?
To use other famous words, this time of Jim Eliot: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”
Or the famous stanza of Martin Luther’s hymn:
Let goods and kindred go,
This mortal life also;
The body they may kill,
God’s truth is living still.
Conclusion.2
Where is your hope this morning, and where is your faith?
If anything is singing you its “siren song” in the here-and-now—any power, any prestige, any position, any privilege—I pray this morning that you hold on to it loosely, that you discard it and forsake it willingly even at a moment’s notice.
Remember Moses only as he points to Jesus: not considering it a robbery to set the temporal, temporary things aside. But even setting them aside willingly, he gave up power and place to have a new home: one which took exceeding faith in the moment to embrace, and one which took him ultimately to the house- and the family of God.
Jesus ushers us into that home. That home is, ultimately, our hope—and we are adopted in, and Jesus is our surety that we will be welcomed there, even into eternity.
Nothing fleeting or passing away or fading—but Jesus holds on to it for us, forever.
By faith, that is also our eternal hope.
Amen.
Parting blessing:
Parting blessing:
20 Now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, 21 equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in you that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ; to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.
Translation/notes:
Translation/notes:
24. By faith Moses, being great/big/“mega”/strong/mighty/important, rejected/declined/disowned/failed-to-heed being called a son of the daughter of Pharaoh,
25. instead choosing/electing to be badly-treated/ill-treated with the people of God rather than to have/possess the occasional/temporal/temporary/passing/momentary/inconstant/short-lived enjoyment/pleasure of sin,
26. “hegemonying”/considering/counting/esteeming as greater/bigger/mightier/more-important wealth the reproach/shame/disgrace/reviling of Christ than the treasures/“thesauruses” of Egypt, for he was respecting/looking-to/steadfastly-considering/regarding/fixed to the reward/due/payment (Heb. 10:35; neg., Heb. 2:2).