There are
times that I grow up into some new level of maturity, and find myself trusting
God for things I had previously only known doubts, when suddenly I am
overwhelmed by regret that I did not know these things sooner. As I see how
renewed faith helps me take steps of faith in fellowship and ministry with
others, I can’t escape thinking about people who would have benefitted from me
learning, and knowing, and practicing, these things much earlier in life.
Lately I have
been feeling wonderful encouragement from God’s Holy Spirit in areas of
ministry that have often left me feeling like a hopeless failure. For whatever reason,
an area of my life that has seemed to take quite a beating, has suddenly
emerged stronger. It feels like one of those experiences where my soul has been
thrown into the fiery furnace in order to expose and remove dross, and purify
my faith.
The apostle
Peter explained such things in these words:
In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.[1]
Peter was
talking about how we rejoice in the wonderful gift of salvation we have
received in Jesus Christ, and then explains why we can also be “grieved by various trials.” It is so
that our faith can be tested for genuineness. As we go through trials, and we
face fears, doubts, and insecurities, that we can do nothing to eradicate (“blessed are the poor in spirit”[2]), we
find ourselves turning to God in genuine faith with that “hunger and thirst for righteousness”[3] we
know is a gift of God’s grace. We discover that our faith is genuine because
the present trials have increased our faith. We regret how much dross was
exposed along the way, but we rejoice at how gracious and powerful God is to
remove it. It’s just that we sometimes wish we had learned these lessons, and
had purer faith, long before.
This morning, God
provided gracious comfort to me by turning my heart to another man’s
experience. There was a well-known figure that made a rather glaring mistake in
handling a situation, and seemed to be lost to the whole world as he
disappeared under the radar of history.
When this man
turned up again, he was telling a whole nation of oppressed people that God had
appeared to him, that God had spoken to him, that God was concerned for all of
them, and that it was the time for their deliverance. He then went to the king
he had run away from four decades earlier, and demanded that he set free these
people of God from their slavery. The king refused. However, it wasn’t long (comparatively
speaking) before God had humiliated the King and his people, and released his
nation of children from their oppression.
The person I
am speaking of is Moses. God’s book tells us of his birth, and his miraculous
protection from the murderous plot of the Egyptian king, when the king’s
daughter took Moses in and raised him as her own.[4] The
next thing we learn in the historical record is stated like this:
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. He looked this way and that, and seeing no one, he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.[5]
Notice that
Moses “went out to HIS people.” Even
though he had grown up in luxury under the protection of the king, he still
knew who were “his people.” He saw
the “burdens” that they were
experiencing in their oppressive slavery. And that’s when he took things into
his own hands. He was so troubled by the abusive actions of the Egyptian slave
driver that he struck him down. Moses killed him. And then he tried to hide
what he did. The short of it is that Moses was busted for what he did, the king
wanted to kill him, so Moses left town and disappeared into a foreign land.
When Deacon
Stephen was giving a defense of the church’s faith in Jesus Christ, his
historical background included further description of Moses.
23 “When he was forty years old, it came into his heart to visit his brothers, the children of Israel. 24 And seeing one of them being wronged, he defended the oppressed man and avenged him by striking down the Egyptian. 25 He supposed that his brothers would understand that God was giving them salvation by his hand, but they did not understand.[6]
What stands
out here is that Moses “supposed”
that his act of dominance over the Egyptian oppressor would assure his brothers
that God had sent him to deliver them. There is no record that he ever asked
God about this. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing where he acted on an impulse,
no one understood what he was doing, the king wanted him killed, and so he had
to go into hiding.
At the very
least, we can put ourselves in this picture in the many times we may have
supposed that we knew what God wanted us to do, but took matters into our own
hands and stepped out in the flesh, not in faith. We may have been right that
God was doing something in our lives to bless and help others, but wrong in our
belief that God intended to release us on the world right then and there.
Note that
Moses was forty years old at the time that he tried to save his people. He
ended up in a distant land, married, raising a family, and looking after the flocks
of his father-in-law. The next thing we learn is that, “Now when forty years had passed, an angel appeared to him in the
wilderness of Mount Sinai, in a flame of fire in a bush.”[7]
Moses was
forty years old when his attempt at saving his people failed. He was eighty
years old when God appeared to him and called him to deliver his people. When
Moses was younger, he acted on his own suppositions. Now that he was older, and
four decades of shepherding had passed him by with no fanfare, God was setting
in motion his own plan of deliverance. And, no matter how Moses had previously
failed, God would now use him to lead his people out of their oppressive
slavery.
What mostly
stood out to me this morning was the way God commented on Moses’ life and
experience. While the historical record gives us brief details of Moses’ experiences,
the book of Hebrews adds a look into Moses’ heart that we would otherwise have
missed.
24 By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, 25 choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. 26 He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward.[8]
When Moses’
life was described in terms of historical events taking place in space and
time, the prelude to his work of delivering Israel was brief. He grew up in the
king’s house, he killed the slave-driver, he disappeared into the wilderness,
he came back to lead his people to freedom.
However, when
we look at this from the viewpoint of faith, and gain the divine glimpse into
the man’s heart, we see that Moses’ identification of himself with the
oppressed people of God, those he called “his
people,” was driven by a value system that was literally out of this world.
Moses had
knowledge that there was a greater reward in association with the people of God
than anything his first four decades of life had given him in the king’s household.
It was not that he was giving up wealth, but that he was giving up a certain
kind of wealth for something vastly superior. He was not giving up pleasure,
but the pleasures of sin in order to have the pleasures of God.[9] He
would bear reproach then to experience reward later.
What God ministered
to my heart this morning was that his view of a man’s life because of faith is
far different from the way we might view a man’s life through his works. We see
a man who failed to deliver God’s people at forty years of age because he
thought he could do it himself, but at double the age could be used by God for
such a work because he was willing to submit to God by faith.
What is
fascinating, and encouraging, and exalting to the grace of God, is that there
was no long process of languishing in regret over failing to deliver God’s
children at an earlier time. God simply protected his servant until it was
time, waited for the nation to hunger and thirst for deliverance,[10]and
then called him to get with the divine program.
So today, as I
consider that God is at work in ways he has appointed for here and now, working
in us “to will and to work for his good
pleasure,”[11]
he does not call us to relate to this with self-deprecating seasons of regret.
Instead, we join him by working out our “own salvation with fear and trembling.”[12]
I am sure that
some of God’s working in us will be to lead us to will and work repentance for
any sins and transgressions. However, as Peter was led from his three denials
to preaching on the day of Pentecost with a thrice-repeated question of, “do you love me,”[13]
so God has a gracious way of leading us from our failures into his activity
with far greater focus on him and what he is doing now, than us and what we
were doing then.
And for that,
I am exceptionally thankful!
© 2015 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517,
Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8 ~ in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless otherwise noted,
Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English
Standard Version Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good
News Publishers.)
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