In our series on ‘Questions’, we looked at Exodus 3 & 4, Moses being commissioned by God. This encounter with God radically changed Moses and we see raw, honest communication (so necessary for all relationships) as Moses questions God and God asks Moses ‘What is in your hand?’ (Ex 4:2) We can learn much from this exchange.
Moses clearly felt inadequate to the task of going to Pharaoh and leading the Israelites out of Egyptian slavery. His ‘Who am I?’ question to God reflects how we often feel too. God’s answer is that it’s not really about who Moses is, but who God is; it’s not about who Moses is but whose He is. In other words, it’s not about Moses’s identity, but God’s. ‘I will be with you.’ (Ex 3:12)
Moses’s next question looks deeper into this question of God’s identity and who He is. It’s one thing to go to the Israelites and say, ‘God is with me’, but he anticipates their questions and assumes they will want to know more about this ‘God of their fathers.’ They will ask for more details and Moses is unsure about his relationship to God. He hasn’t got all the answers. He doesn’t know how to answer the questions that will surely come. We can often feel like this too. We don’t have all the answers to the many questions people ask us about God and we feel uncertain and often lacking confidence because of this. God’s answers take us ever further and deeper into His heart: ‘“I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’” (Ex 3:14)
Moses’s next question presupposes that these answers aren’t going to be enough to convince the Israelites, let alone Pharaoh! (Ex 4:1) He was struggling to believe that he, this outcast for forty years, this man who had been in Midian being a shepherd – a shepherd, of all things! – could be used by God to lead God’s people out of slavery. It seemed impossible. Yet God asked him, ‘What is in your hand?’ (Ex 4:2), and used the ordinary shepherd’s staff to convince Moses, turning it into a snake! God was going to take the ordinary things of Moses’s life and use these to demonstrate His miraculous, totally supernatural power to the Israelites and to Pharaoh. He would give the people the signs they needed to believe it was God. God would sort it out.
Ultimately, what God is looking for is not our ability and skill, but our obedience and faith. The ordinary things of life, when surrendered to God, can become something amazing. God is the One who steps into our ordinariness to equip us for the extraordinary. He is the One who qualifies us, as Paul reminded the Corinthians. (2 Cor 3:5-6)
