We come, today, to the moment of Moses’ commissioning and motivation for the work of God. It is a moment in Exodus which is awe-inspiring, confronting, humorous – and much discussed. And at the heart of it is the commissioning and moving of Moses to be the instrument of God’s commitment to his people.
There is much we could say here, but I think this much is crucial: it is God’s holiness and glory that is both the foundation, and fount, of Moses’ work. In this sense, we have a pattern for ministry throughout God’s word: it is the nature and reputation of God himself that is the foundation, the wellspring, the motivation, the equipping, of all forms of ministry by God’s mob. Anything else will be counterfeit, will be broken, and will be driven (ultimately) by a concern for our reputation and significance, and not God’s.
What kind of ‘saviour’, what kind of ‘deliverer’, do God’s people need?
The need for their deliverance is not in doubt – by the end of Exodus 1, God’s people are oppressed by the profoundly anti-life forces of those arrayed against God (who is fundamentally pro-life and good). In slavery, with the lives of their children threatened, God’s people need a deliverer. And the implication is that they need a deliverer who is mighty and magnificent.
We meet Moses – a baby, threatened, remarkably saved, taken into Pharaoh’s household. And we are meant to notice his uniqueness, but his confused cultural heritage is problematic. As he reaches mature adulthood, our hopes are raised… but then he moved progressively away from his people, to the margins of society, and rejected by his own.
What kind of deliverer is this?
But it is the parallel ‘seeing’ of God that returns our hopes to the right place. Moses has potential but it is God who is powerful, because of his promises. In this way, Moses is both a tie to what God has already done (a people created by him) and the shadowy template for the Saviour still to come.
Reformation Sunday—the Anabaptists
There is so much that we enjoy as a wider society, and as a church, that we take for granted. The whole idea of the nation-state, the process of liberal-democracy, the wonderful privilege of religious freedom, accessibility to information, education, a free-market economy, the Bible in English...and all of these privileges can be traced to the Reformation.
This cataclysmic event of the 1500s was really the climax of a long period of fermentation, and it’s consequences remain vitally active—and debated—even today. Within the Reformation, there is a wing that has been labelled ‘the radical reformation’. And within that wing, there is a group that was pejoratively described as ‘the Anabaptists’ - the ‘rebaptisers’.
There is much about this group that I love, and which we can applaud and agree with—their wholehearted view of Jesus and God’s word and making decisions in line with that, and their embracing of the notion that the church is on the outside. But there is also much that is problematic … and today we will be looking at the Anabaptists.
