A Mother’s Faithfulness, Exodus 1:15-2:8
Introduction
Ian MacLaren, that great preacher of the Word of God, once visited a home and found an old Scotch woman standing in her kitchen, weeping. She wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron, and when the minister asked her what was the matter, she confessed, “I have done so little. I am so miserable and unhappy.” “Why?” asked MacLaren. “Because I have done so little for Jesus.
When I was just a wee girl, the Lord spoke to my heart, and I did want so much to live for Him.” “Well, haven’t you?” asked the minister. “Yes, I have lived for Him, but I have done so little. I want to be of some use in His service.”
“What have you done?” “Nothing. I have washed dishes, cooked three meals a day, taken care of the children, mopped the floor, and mended the clothes.
That is all I have done all my life, and I wanted to do something for Jesus.” The preacher, sitting back in the armchair, looked at her and smiled.
“Where are your boys?” he inquired. She had four sons and had named them after Bible personalities. “Oh, my boys? You know where Mark is. You ordained him yourself before he went to China. Why are you asking? He is there preaching for the Lord.” “Where is Luke?” questioned the minister. “Luke? He went out from your own church. Didn’t you send him out?
I had a letter from him the other day.” Then she became happy and excited as she continued. “A revival has broken out on the mission station, and he said they were having a wonderful time in the service of the Lord!” “Where is Matthew?” “He is with his brother in China. Isn’t it fine that the two boys can be working together?
I am so happy about that. John came to me the other night--he is my baby and is only nineteen, but he is a great boy. He said, ‘Mother, I have been praying and, tonight in my room, the Lord spoke to my heart about going to help my brother in Africa! But don’t you cry, Mother. The Lord told me I was to stay here and look after you until you go home to glory.’
“The minister looked at her: “And you say your life has been wasted in mopping floors, darning socks, washing dishes, and doing the trivial tasks. I’d like to have your mansion when we are called home! It will be very near the throne.”
Transition
How many of the mothers present here today can relate to those sentiments? Being a mother can be a thankless and undervalued job. To be sure, being a mother is seldom full of glamour and glitz. From the moment we enter this world we are busy testing our mother’s patience and stretching her limits of endurance.
There is a television show on a certain channel called “Dirty Jobs” where the host of the show travels all over the country to various dirty job sites. He spends the episode cleaning pig pens, scrubbing sewage lines, feeding ostriches, standing atop huge suspension bridges to replace light bulbs, and many other dirty and frightening jobs.
My wife and I enjoy watching the show but in all of the times that I have watched the show it occurs to me that he has never spent the day being a mom. Perhaps he doesn’t have the courage or the stomach for what is, at times, the dirtiest job of all!
On this Mother’s Day we will examine a mother’s faithfulness and as we do, we will see what we can learn from her, and the other women who saved Moses from an early death, about faithfulness.
Today, we will examine the story of Moses birth and the faithfulness of his mother and the midwives who helped him enter this world safely.
Exposition (Reference the Storyteller’s Companion to the Bible, volume two)
The Pharaoh in the story is most likely Ramesses the Second; also known as Ramesses the Great. Ramesses was one of the greatest of all of the Egyptian Pharaohs. In fact, he ruled on his throne from the age of 20 from 1279 BC to 1213 BC – a span of 66 years.
Ramesses was perhaps the greatest of all of the Pharaohs of Egypt. The length of this reign was unprecedented and his accomplishments were equally unparalleled. Ramesses the Great was an extraordinary builder. We can barely find the words to describe the breadth of his undertakings.
Ramesses was a brutal taskmaster who had a habit of having his name scrawled on the walls of monuments that other Pharaohs had erected. His ego was perhaps only match by his rough treatment of the Hebrew people.
The Israelites were not paid workers but state-owned slaves. Life in the fields was very harsh. The main activity of the Israelites appears to have been brick making.
These bricks were used for the construction of Ramesses palaces, monuments, and pyramids. A leather scroll from Ramesses day records that a single brick maker’s quota for the day might have been as high as 3,000 bricks.
Have you ever noticed that God does not choose weak adversaries? If every there was a powerful earthly King it was Ramesses. It is amazing to me that God should choose to deliver His people through the leadership of one of the very children that this brutal and powerful Pharaoh sought to kill.
Isn’t it amazing how God is always taking the things which are meant for evil in this life and turning them into miracles of His glory! Moses life was spared because of the faithfulness of those around him.
The heroes of this story are not powerful and mighty men of war. They are not the architects who designed the pyramids. The heroes of this story are the midwives who disobeyed this powerful king and the mother who, in spite of the very real possibility of her own death for defying Pharaoh, were faithful to God.
The name of Moses mother appears only a few chapters later in Exodus 6:20. Her name is Jochebed and Moses father was Amram. We are not told how long his mother lived but his father lived for an amazing 137 years.
Can we even imagine what it must have been like for all of the mothers of Israel and for the midwives, Shiphrah and Pauh, to have received an order to kill every new born baby boy? It was not as though they were living in a democracy where they could appeal this order of Pharaoh to the Supreme Court.
The words of Pharaoh were absolute. He was the Supreme Court! The Scriptures tell us that Pharaoh brought these two Hebrew midwives before him and told them that they were to kill these precious little baby boys just moments after their mothers had gone through the agony of labor and the ecstasy of seeing their children breath their first breaths of life.
As Shiphrah and Pauh left Pharaoh’s presence surely they must have been absolutely shaking with fear. To disobey Pharaoh would mean their deaths but to kill even one of these babies would have meant the death of their conscious and the abatement of their very souls.
Rather than obeying the evil decrees of a worldly king, which were clearly wicked, they chose to be faithful to God just as they were faithful to these children.
It is at times when we face difficult decisions, when we must put the wellbeing of others before ourselves that the true test of faithfulness comes.
Inherent in the concept of biblical faithfulness is the reality of sacrifice! Genuine faithfulness always brings with it sacrifice of self interest and surrender to God.
This is the kind of faithfulness that we see in the life of Christ, foreshadowed here in the lives of these woman. Oswald Chambers, the great devotional author and Christian thinker, wrote, “Watch where Jesus went. The one dominant note in his life was to do his Father’s will. His is not the way of wisdom or of success, but the way of faithfulness.”
Indeed, a mother who is faithful to her child is the embodiment of the very love of Christ. Christ love is sacrificial. In I Thessalonians 5:24 it says, “He who calls you is faithful, who also will do it.” (NKJV)
I have seen three sons born and I can not imagine the person who could kill a new born child, still wet from it mother’s womb. This passage teaches us that life is precious from the very moment it is conceived because it is the gift of God.
Perhaps Shiphrah, the midwife, was called the very next day to deliver a baby and when it was born, seeing that it was a little boy, said aloud, “Kill this child? I cannot for I fear God more than Pharaoh!”
What of the main character of our story? What of Moses mother, Jochebed , who took the great personal risk and risk the life of her baby by making a basket of reeds and sending him down the river to be found by Pharaoh’s daughter?
In the King James Translation, the Scripture says that when Jochebed saw her baby boy she declared that he was good or goodly. The Hebrew word used here is the word tob which is also the word that is used in the book of Genesis 1:31, “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good (tob).”
She looked at the little baby boy which she carried in her arms and said that he was very tob; very good. She could not even fathom the idea of destroying this precious little baby. She spared him from the knife but what was she to do now?
Pharaoh had decreed that all the baby boys were to be killed. If she disobeyed it might not only be him who died but once found out, she and her son would no doubt be killed. What was she to do?
Indeed, how often it is that a mother is faced with a set of choices for the wellbeing of her children, none of which are easy, yet she must decide. We see this principal played out in our own experience today.
Mothers are faced with everything from deciding if it is the right time for braces to deciding what we ought to do with a child who struggles to learn to read and some mothers are faced with decision which are even much harder even than those.
When faced with this terrible she, like the midwives who delivered Moses, remained faithful and steadfast, even in the face of such difficulty. Were it not for the faithfulness of a mother where would Moses have been? Was it not for the faithfulness of mothers and grandmothers and the women who God places in our lives, where would any of us be?
Faithfulness always involves sacrifice. Moses mother had to endure the pain of watching another woman, Pharaoh’s daughter, raise her son but no doubt she took great joy in the gift of watching him grow nonetheless. For her sacrifice and her risk God eventually rewarded her by making Moses a great man of God!
It occurs to me that Jochebed was not only a faithful woman but a shrewd woman as well. God is the rewarder of faithfulness to be sure, but he is also the giver and rewarder of wisdom. Proverbs 31:26, speaking of the virtuous woman, says, “She opens her mouth with wisdom, And on her tongue is the law of kindness.” (NKJV)
How ironic it is that God used the very house of Pharaoh as a home for the man who would one day return in the power of the might of God to defeat Pharaoh and win the freedom of the Hebrew people. I never cease to be amazed at the ways of God. He seldom does things the way that we would do them or the way that we would want or even expect Him to do them.
If you are looking for God’s hand in your life, take care to inspect the unexpected and obscure areas of your life. In the last verse of our Scripture today it says that Pharaoh’s daughter named the baby she found in the reeds Moses because she drew him out of the water.
In Hebrew Moses is connected with water but the name Moses in ancient Egypt the name Moses was well attested among the Pharaohs. (Thut-mose, A-mose, Ka-mose) Thut-mose was the son of Thut, A-mose was the son of A, and Ka-mose was the son of Ka. Moses is only half a name and half of an identity.
Only later in his life does Moses discover that his mother is not, in fact, Pharaoh’s daughter. His mother is the Hebrew nanny who, I suspect, had a large hand in shaping his character.
Though Moses mother was not the daughter of a King, she was blessed nonetheless. She was faithful and faithfulness is a virtue to be more highly treasured than all of the riches and power that this world has to offer.
Conclusion
An Arab, losing his way in the desert, was in danger of dying from hunger. At last he found one of the cisterns out of which the camels drink and a little leather bag near it. “God be thanked!” exclaimed he. “Ah, here are some dates or nuts; let me refresh myself.”
He opened the bag, but only to turn away in disappointment. Alas, they were only pearls, and what good were they to a man who was dying of hunger? Was this man rich or poor? He was rich yet poor.
Abraham Lincoln once said, “No man is poor who has had a godly mother.”
When Moses learned of his true identity it was not the riches of the palace of Pharaoh which made him rich. It was the faithfulness of God which made him powerful and that faithfulness began when a scared yet brave and unsure yet faithful woman placed him in a basket and set him a sail to Pharaoh’s daughter.
Today we celebrate all of the mothers who are present with us, all of the mothers who are represented here, and all of the faithful mothers who have gone home to be with their faithful Lord.
Today, Let us be sure to learn not only to learn from the faithfulness of the women in Moses early life, but also let us be sure to learn from the faithfulness of the women in our lives even as we celebrate them today.
Amen.
