Our Fears and Life’s Dangers (Exodus 3:1-4:17)
Big Idea: Because of who God is, we can face our fears and life’s dangers.
I almost hit burnout once. I went to see a professional at an organization that looks after pastors and missionaries here in Toronto. He asked me some questions. I thought I was doing pretty well. At the end of the session he told me that I was approaching burnout, and that I needed to take three months off immediately before I actually hit burnout.
That led to a lot of learning. What caused the burnout? I learned that it wasn’t from overwork. For sure, I was working hard, but that wasn’t the problem. It took a while to discover, but I eventually realized that my problem was that I was afraid of some people. I was facing a period of sustained conflict, and after a while those conflicts took a toll on me. I was living in fear of what these people thought, and it led me to the brink of burnout.
I was suffering from a serious spiritual condition that goes by a couple of names: fear of man and people pleasing. People had become bigger in my life than God. I needed people to approve of me. I needed these people to buttress my identity. I can relate to what Ed Welch writes in his book When People Are Big and God is Small:
- We fear people because they can expose and humiliate us.
- We fear people because they can reject, ridicule, or despise us.
- We fear people because they can attack, oppress, or threaten us.
These three reasons have one thing in common: they see people as “bigger” (that is, more powerful and significant) than God, and, out of the fear that creates in us, we give other people the power and right to tell us what to feel, think, and do.
Can you relate?
I was afraid. I didn’t think that I was someone who was fearful, but I was. It’s so easy to be driven by the need to win the approval of other people. But the consequences of living for the approval of others is deadly. When other people become bigger in our eyes than God, our souls are in danger. I had forgotten what the Bible says:
The fear of man lays a snare,
but whoever trusts in the LORD is safe.
(Proverbs 29:25)
That’s exactly the issue that Moses was facing. Moses was facing the Olympic challenge of people pleasing. I can’t think of a more extreme example of potential people pleasing than what Moses faced.
In Exodus 5:1, Moses stood before Pharaoh, the most powerful man in the world, and said, “Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, ‘Let my people go, that they may hold ta feast to me in the wilderness.’” Fat chance. In fact, God had told Moses before that “the king of Egypt will not let you go unless compelled by a mighty hand” (Exodus 3:19). This wasn’t going to be easy!
Moses had to face two problems: his fears and life’s dangers. We learn two things from his experience.
Because of Who God Is, We Can Face Our Fears
Before we ever deal with the fear of others in life, we must deal with the fear of others in our hearts. That’s where it began with Moses, and it’s where it begins with us too.
In Exodus 3, God appeared to Moses in a burning bush. You would think that if we had an encounter with God like this, that we might be pretty overwhelmed with God and his power. It’s not every day that God appears to you and that God speaks to you.
But when God appeared to Moses and gave him his assignment, Moses had nothing but questions and objections. This, word for word, is how Moses responded after meeting with God:
- Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt? (Exodus 3:11)
- If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them? (Exodus 3:13)
- But behold, they will not believe me or listen to my voice, for they will say, “The LORD did not appear to you.” (Exodus 4:1)
- Oh, my Lord, please send someone else. (Exodus 4:13)
Side note: One of the reasons why the Bible is so compelling is that it’s so honest. If Moses had made this story up, he would have presented himself in a much more favorable light. The fact that Moses appears in this passage with so much fear and so many arguments against God is actually a sign that it’s truthful. Scripture tells the truth, even when it doesn’t reflect well on the people within it.
Here’s the thing, though. Moses is standing before God himself, and he’s got nothing but fear and reasons why God’s plan won’t work. It’s hard to be too critical, because we’re pretty much the same.
How does God answer?
- Who am I? God doesn’t answer this by reassuring Moses about who he is. This is a clue to us that the answers to our insecurities are never found in looking to ourselves more. Instead, God answers, “I will be with you” (Exodus 3:12). It doesn’t matter who we are. It matters that God is with us. That’s more important than all the places we usually look for self-esteem. The truth is that self-esteem doesn’t work because we are not okay apart from God. We need what only God can offer. We need his presence and for him to remake us.
- What if they won’t listen? God says, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I AM has sent me to you’” (Exodus 3:14). When God gets bigger, other problems take on the right size in our lives. We need a bigger view of God. We already have a clear view of our problems. We need a clear view of God so that we see that he’s bigger than our problems.
- But they won’t listen! God tells Moses that he will show his power through Moses. We’re going to see in a moment that God shows that he’s bigger than three of the most powerful symbols of Egyptian religious life — the snake, leprosy, and the Nile. God is showing that he’s bigger and more powerful than anything in culture, even the most powerful culture in the world.
- Please send someone else! God does send a helper to go with Moses, but he’s ticked. God is patient, but his patience has a limit. When God calls, he extends patience to us as we wrestle with his call, but he will not abide by a no. He calls for our obedience and trust.
I want to ask you about your private conversation with God. Last Tuesday we had Jen Pollock Michel with us. She asked a question, “Where do I squirm under God’s Word, and what do I do?” We need to answer this question. Some of us, like Moses, have some business to do with God. God is speaking, but our objections are still more compelling to us than God is. We refuse to listen and to hear his call because we’re tripping over ourselves.
If that’s you, then ask God today for a bigger view of God so that your problems and objections become smaller in your life. Look at the cross. In a few minutes we’re going to come to the communion table. One of the reasons we do this every week is because we want Jesus and what he did for us to become bigger and bigger in our lives. We want to see him more and more.
What are you afraid of? I won’t give you any easy solutions to getting rid of your fears. Fear is actually helpful. It tells us what’s important to us. “Rather than minimize your fears, find more of them. Expose them to the light of day because the more you find, the more blessed you will be when you hear words of peace and comfort” (Ed Welch).
Find your fears and be honest about them. Use this list from Ed Welch’s book Running Scared:
- Fears for your safety and the safety of those you love
- Fears about how you will die
- Fears about what happens after death
- Fears about living a meaningless life
- Fears about being unloved or alone.
- Fears about being in love and the high probability of being hurt
- Fears about what you might lose
Find your fears. Confess them to God. Remember he is patient. He won’t be surprised by your struggles. Bring them to him today and ask for his help. Just don’t resist him. God’s answer to your fears is more of himself — his presence and his power. Ask him to get bigger and bigger in your life until he’s bigger than your fears. That’s what happened to Moses; it can happen to us too.
Because of Who God Is, We Can Face Life’s Dangers
It’s one thing to face our fears. But let’s get real: we just don’t face fears. We face things that can actually happen. When I talk about facing fears, it sounds like the thing we have to face is all in our head. But that’s not the case. We also have to face bad things that may actually happen in our lives.
This past week seemed to be one in which I came across a lot of struggling people. I sat down with a few people this week and just had to listen because there was nothing to say. Life can be brutal and unfair. What do we do when we face life’s dangers?
Moses was facing this dilemma. He wasn’t just facing his fears; he was actually going to have to face Pharaoh. He knows it’s going to be hard. Pharaoh isn’t going to let them go easily. He’s not going to listen to Moses.
In chapter 4, God works him through three signs to perform before Pharaoh that show God’s power. They’re meant for Pharaoh, but I think they’re meant for Moses too.
The staff — God tells Moses to throw the staff down on the ground, and it will turn into a snake, and then to grab it by the tail and it will become a staff again.
This is more than a trick. The pharaohs wore crowns adorned with serpents with raised hoods threatening Egypt’s enemies. It was also associated with Ra, the sun god who ruled over all parts of the created world.
God is reminding Moses that he has authority over a creature that Egypt reveres . He’s reminding Moses that Pharaoh isn’t the one who’s really in charge. God is. God is more powerful than Pharaoh or any Egyptian god.
It’s the same with us. Whenever we see any person or power as more powerful than God, we need to be reminded: God is in control. Bosses, judges, prime ministers, presidents — none of these have any power apart from God. God is in control despite the people and forces in our lives that seem to be more powerful.
The leprous hand — Then God tells Moses to put his hand in his cloak, and it becomes leprous. Leprosy was a very big deal back then. It was common in Egypt, and was viewed as highly contagious and incurable. I’m sure this would have been terrifying to Moses.
But then God tells Moses to put his hand in his cloak again, and he removes it, and it was restored. What is God telling Moses? God has the power over life and death.
Make no mistake: death is awful. It is our enemy. We will all need to face it. Sickness is a reminder of our mortality. In the short term, it looks like we will be defeated. But sickness and even death never get the last word. Don’t deny the reality of death and even your fear of death, but realize that “Jesus died and rose again to defeat the twin terrors of sin and death” (Mike Wittmer). God has control over our lives — even our deaths, and as we’ll remember in two weeks, death will die because of Jesus.
The Nile — The final sign involved Moses taking some water from the Nile, and that water becoming blood on the dry ground. The Nile was the heart of Egypt’s existence. It washed and cleaned Egypt’s soil. It was seen as the reason why Egypt was so fertile and wealthy. To destroy the Nile would be to destroy Egypt itself.
What does all of this tell us? Isaiah 40 tells us:
Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket,
and are accounted as the dust on the scales;
behold, he takes up the coastlands like fine dust…
All the nations are as nothing before him,
they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness.
(Isaiah 40:15, 17)
The point of this passage isn’t that Moses was so great and we should be like him. Moses was scared, just like we would have been. The point of this passage is that God is great and we can trust him even when we’re scared, even when we’re facing the worst that life will send our way.
These are all symbols of God’s power over what scare us most — to which we can add even more symbols today: the cross, by which Jesus paid for sin; the empty tomb, which shows us that he’s defeated death; the bread and the wine, which show us that Jesus offers forgiveness and freedom to all of us. Like Moses we can come in our weakness and cling to these symbols which will see us through our deepest fears.
Because of who God is, we can face our fears and life’s dangers.
I began this sermon telling you about a time that I faced burnout when I was afraid. One of the things that helped me was that I went to the Art Gallery of Ontario and saw the exhibit King Tut: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs.
As I walked through those galleries, I remembered Moses’ fear as he confronted all the power of Egypt. And I realized that if Moses could face, with God’s help, all the power of Egypt, then I could face my fears too.
Because of who God is, we can face our fears and life’s dangers. Get a bigger view of God. Bring your fears to him today.
