Send Someone Else

Passage: Exodus 4:1-17

Exodus 4 falls in the middle of an extended conversation between God and Moses. Moses is living in Midian after having fled Egypt. He’s settled into a comfortable middle-class life: wife; kid; steady job. He’s working said job one day when he happens across a bush that’s engulfed in flame. He stops for a few minutes to watch, and realizes that the bush isn’t being consumed by the fire. At about this moment, the bush starts talking to him. It appears this is no ordinary bush.

As it turns out, the bush is perfectly ordinary. However, it is being used as the instrument of someone extraordinary: the one true God. God tells Moses that he plans to send him back to Egypt in order to talk the king of Egypt into letting the children of Israel go. Moses immediately identifies a few problems with this scenario. First, Moses left Egypt precisely because the king has a death warrant out on him. Second, the children of Israel currently constitute the bulk of Egypt’s cheap labor force – Pharaoh’s not going to be that interested in letting them go. Finally – and Moses emphasizes this point – Moses has problems verbalizing when under pressure. Stage fright; stuttering; call it what you will. When the heat is on, Moses can’t get his mouth to work.

Now picture the scene. Moses is having an actual conversation with God. God proves that he is who he says he is by turning Moses’ staff into a snake and giving him a quick case of leprosy. God tells Moses that Pharaoh will let the Israelites go; that the Egyptians will be overcome; even that the Israelites will plunder the Egyptians as they’re leaving town. There’s no ambiguity in God's stated intentions.

And yet Moses says, “Send someone else. I’m not up to the job.”

Moses is talking to a God who is, at this very moment, using shrubbery as his mouthpiece.

From the bush God says,

Who gave man his mouth? Who makes him deaf or mute? Who gives him sight or makes him blind? Is it not I, the LORD? Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.

Is God or is God not able to accomplish what he has set out to do? That’s what Moses is calling into question. The basis of his doubt is, of course, not God per se. It’s Moses himself. He can’t see how even God Almighty could overcome the limitations of an ordinary guy like him.

But this is precisely why God has chosen Moses. And this is why God chooses any of us. As God enacts his plan of redemption in our world, he uses people like us – people who might seem too ordinary to do God's work. This is God’s M.O.: recruiting those whose flaws and limitations make God’s own hand unmistakable when people see it at work.