He Looked This Way and That

Lord, I have done good things for reasons I would not want read aloud. I have walked into rooms You never pointed me toward and called it obedience because the need was real. Search me before I go out today. Show me which of my callings I handed to myself.

Moses had the facts right. An Egyptian was beating a Hebrew, one of his own people, and Moses had grown up in the house of the people doing the beating. The injustice was not imagined. Read the verse before our text slowly, though:

And he looked this way and that way, and when he saw that there was no man, he slew the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand. (Exodus 2:12)

He checked the street first. A man who knows he has been sent does not need to look both ways. The next day he tried to break up a fight between two Hebrews and got the question that has followed every self-appointed rescuer since: who made thee a prince and a judge over us? Stephen, preaching it centuries later, says Moses “supposed his brethren would have understood” that God would deliver them by his hand (Acts 7:25). He supposed. They did not.

This is where it gets close. Moses was nursed by his Hebrew mother and raised by Pharaoh’s daughter, and I think he belonged fully to neither. The blow he struck was partly an answer to that. It said, I am one of them. A lot of our calling works the same way. We take up the cause to quiet the question of who we are. The mentor who needs the young person to need him. The advocate who would be lost if the problem were ever solved. The lawyer who takes the case for the photo on the courthouse steps. The minister whose whole ministry is a reply to a father who never came to the game. The work is real. Underneath it a wound is steering, and we bury what it costs in the sand so nobody sees.

God’s answer took forty years in Midian. When He finally sent Moses, He started with whose Moses was: I am the God of thy father (Exodus 3:6). Only then did Moses get the words he would carry: I AM hath sent me unto you (Exodus 3:14).

Jesus was asked nearly the same thing in the temple: who gave thee this authority? (Matthew 21:23). He could answer, because He said, I can of mine own self do nothing (John 5:30). Moses struck the oppressor and ran. Christ let the blow fall on Him, prayed for the men swinging the hammer, and walked out of the grave. In Him you are already claimed. You do not have to earn a name by rescuing anybody, and that is what frees you to go to them as one who was sent, and to stay when nobody is watching.