Moses had been carrying his shepherd’s staff, that ordinary piece of wood, for many years and nothing dramatic had ever happened with it. But when Moses listened to God and allowed Him to work through him, the staff became ‘the staff of God’ (Ex 4:20) and became capable of the miraculous. It was this staff which would later enable Moses to part the Red Sea (Ex 14:16), bring water out of a rock (Ex 17:5-6) and defeat enemy armies. (Ex 17:9) There was absolutely nothing special about the staff. What was special was God working through it.
This is so true of us too. When God asks us, ‘What is that in your hand?’, He is essentially asking us to name our ordinariness, whatever we have which seems so very mundane and inadequate to us. But we need to understand that if we surrender what is in our hand to God, miracles can happen.
Samson slayed hundreds of Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey. (Judges 15:15) It wasn’t the jawbone itself that was special. What was special was ‘the Spirit of the Lord came powerfully upon him.’ (Judges 15:14)
David killed Goliath with a slingshot and five stones. It wasn’t just that he was a good shot; he defeated Goliath because of his trust in God: ‘You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied.’ (1 Sam 17:45) David used the ordinary things he had and was familiar with, rather than the armour of Saul, but it was God who gave him the victory.
The young boy gave his picnic lunch to Jesus and that lunch fed over 5000 people. It wasn’t that he brought a massive lunch; the miracle happened because Jesus, the Bread of Life, was present. (John 6:1-13)
We don’t need anything ‘extra’ to do God’s will. We don’t need any new, special gifting. We don’t need to pass an exam or earn more money or do something special. We just need to give ourselves wholly to God and realise that He is the One who is going to do the miracles. God called Moses to lead His people out of Egypt, and that was something way, way beyond Moses’s capabilities. But it was not beyond God’s. And this ordinary staff of Moses would become something extraordinary when he used it as God commanded. God is just as capable of using our ordinariness, whatever is in our hands, to achieve extraordinary things. All He needs is our surrender and submission.