Moses’ Prayer Life: God Comes Down to Us

In the first ten verses of Exodus 3, God does most of the talking. Yes, Moses responds when God calls his name but beyond that it’s God speaking with Moses and in verse 8 God says something I find both amazing and reassuring. After telling Moses that He has seen the suffering of His people, God says, “So I have come down to deliver them…” God saw that His people were in a bad situation, and He came down to do something about it. I’m encouraged because I believe He still responds the same way today when His children are in a bad situation.

Going back to the definition that I found for the first part of this series, prayer is described as something that sounds one sided. It is defined in a way that makes it sound as if we do all the talking while God listens. Yes, there is the hope that God will do something in response to whatever we are asking but, in this case, God starts the prayer by describing what He was already in the process of doing.

Here we see an active God who has come down to deliver. The same could be said about what we see in the Gospels. God saw that mankind was lost in sin and so He came down and took on flesh with the goal of delivering us from a bad situation. Because God loves us, He came down and did something about our situation. This is a fundamental part of the Christian doctrine. Jesus Christ, who is God in the flesh, came down to earth and died to pay our sin debt. God is not passively watching us from a distance, He was and is active in the lives of His children, just as He revealed Himself to be during Moses’ prayer time at the burning bush.

In my previous post about Moses’ prayer life, I wrote that we must be willing to listen from time to time when we pray. I believe that if we do so, we will find that God is active in our lives even before we ask. Prayer can serve as an opportunity for God to reveal what He is doing in our lives, if we give Him the chance to do so. So, continue to make your supplications known to God. Continue to ask with the expectation that He will respond in some way. Just make sure that you are willing to stop from time to time to give Him a chance to reveal what He is doing in response to what you are asking.

Faith or Extraction?

Every now and then a TV show reminds me of what Christians deal with as we try to serve our Lord, and this season one show in particular served as a reflection of one of the more difficult aspects of a life of faith. Recently Fox Television introduced a reality series called Extracted in which twelve teams work together to try to win $250,000. The teams were made up of one amateur survivalist who attempted to live in the woods of British Columbia and two family members or friends who lived in a nearby cabin, serving as a support team for the survivalist. The support teams competed to earn equipment and food that was sent to the survivalists, with the possibility that the losing team of each round might wind up sending an empty crate out to their teammates.

The support teams could see and hear the survivalists and had the ability to pull their survivalists out of the game by hitting a big red “Extraction” button but doing so would mean the end of the game for both the survivalists and the support teams. This set up left the support teams with two questions. What were they willing to do to earn the best supplies for their survivalist teammates? As suspected, some of them were willing to lie and manipulate others to improve their odds of winning. Then there was the big question. How much suffering would any support team allow before hitting the button and extracting their teammate from the woods?

There are times in my life where I feel like I am in a reality competition like Extracted, times where I feel like I am a survivalist enduring trial after trial while God watches from a nearby cabin. At times I feel like I am in the middle of nowhere with my very survival at stake and my only hope is that God is doing everything He can to get me what I need. Then there are times when life gets so difficult that I wish God would hit the “extract” button, doing something miraculous to pull me out of whatever I find myself in. I often wish He would help me avoid difficulty, but He often allows life to crash in, while telling me to, “Have faith!”

When I hear those words, I know I have a choice. I can choose to trust in God, knowing that His plan is perfect and it involves me reaching the goal He has set before me. I can choose to have faith, or I can ask to be extracted: pulled out of the situation without trusting that God has everything under control. I know which one I should choose but I don’t always act like it. Which one do you choose? Faith or extraction?

Like Christ, Go and Change Lives

Matthew 8:3 tells us that Jesus touched a leper and completely changed the man’s life. He could have simply given a command and the man would have been healed. Instead, Jesus touched one who was an outcast and I believe this is still how God responds to broken people. He touches them and He invests Himself in each individual person, no matter what situation they are in.

According to the law, a leper was to be declared unclean by the priest who examined him/her (Leviticus 13:3, 8). Jesus, by touching the leper, should also have been declared unclean but instead the leper was healed. Jesus then sends the former leper away to follow the law as prescribed for the day of cleansing healed lepers in Leviticus 14.

By touching the leper Jesus proved that He is not bound by the law in the same way that a mere human would have been. If He were a pagan we could accept this as Him simply being someone who was not born under the covenant between God and Israel, although we would still expect Him to contract leprosy. As Mary’s child, Jesus was Jewish and thus born under the covenant. As such the law should have applied and He should have been unclean immediately after touching the leper. The fact that the leper was immediately healed shows that this is not the case.

Assuming the law to be true, there is only one other explanation. Jesus was something or someone Who by nature was not governed by the same weaknesses that other people experienced. His lineage was also the Holy Spirit, making Him the Son of God. By His very nature He was on the other side of the Old Covenant: The side held, not by a human but by God Himself. The rules on that side of the agreement were different as they called for God to be Lord and to deliver. Jesus was God and Lord and He routinely delivered people. The healing of the leper was the evidence of this delivery and of the fact that Jesus is God.

It was Jesus’ nature as God incarnate that not only kept Him from becoming unclean but also gave Him the power to cleanse that which was by nature unclean. That same nature dwells in all of God’s children in the form of the Holy Spirit of God. By nature, He cleanses us and by nature keeps us clean with His word. Thus, by nature we are to touch broken people like Jesus did, even when we are afraid of being made unclean. We are to let Jesus touch them through us so that instead of us becoming unclean, they are cleansed by the power of the Spirit of God. And we are to know by His power that Jesus is God and LORD of all.

Like Christ, His followers should be ready to touch those who are less fortunate, sharing the Gospel that sets people free. Are you ready to be like Christ? Are you ready to answer the call to change lives?

 

(Note: This is based on an entry I wrote in my journal back in 2019. While researching more recently I came across a webpage on evidenceunseen.com where James Rochford makes a similar argument about Matthew 8:3)