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Photo by Mahmoud Yahyaoui: pexels

My life tendency is always to fixate on things that will probably expire two weeks from now. Of course, there are moments when it is necessary to stop everything and get on the floor to play with my son, but not all events rise to that level.

Exodus 2 starts with details that at first seem insignificant until you remember where everything started and how everything ended.

Moses is born from Levites (2:1); he’s placed in a basket as an adorable boy and grows up to soon pick fights—forget Mike Tyson. Moses is so ferocious that the same knuckles that knock out his first Egyptian opponent are the same hands that immediately bury him (not a healthy way to begin ministry anywhere).

Meanwhile, this is the guy that’s going to lead the deliverance of God’s people from oppressors like Pharoah, yet he’s just oppressed somebody to the grave too. (In Exodus 2, Moses’s rage is not applauded, yet we see God later graciously calling him the “meekest man on earth” (Number 12:3)

Does it add up? Hold on for a second

Let’s track back to his birth; this killer Moses, whose ministry is later compared to the ministry of Christ (Heb. 3:1-6), had first been abandoned in a basket in a river. God’s future agent had been left to die on one of the longest rivers in the world, and somehow God was still aware of what was going on.

Does it add up? Hold a second.

At that same time, Pharaoh’s daughter (of all times) is taking a stroll by the river. What are the chances? God’s grand timing and commitment to keep the covenant with his people through Abraham ensure that the daughter of a mass murderer, Pharaoh, is walking by the Nile at a particular hour, just in time, to see the floating basket containing a boy who will grow to wreck her father’s kingdom.

In verse 9, God stirs her up to take care of a random boy “drawn out of the water” (which is what “Moses” means)

Again, if your attention is solely on the boy in the abandoned basket, you might miss it.

Later on, the grown Moses, perhaps guilty of his own sin, escapes to Midian and the Israelites he leaves behind groan from oppression, as if they have never descended from Abraham. Why would children of the promise groan at all? Wasn’t the promise theirs?

Verse 24 of Exodus 2 tells us the answer: God heard their groaning—and wait for it—remembered their covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, “..and God knew.”

What an ending. God saw it all and yet knew. God knew.

God knew what time Pharaoh’s daughter would arrive at the Nile. God knew and saw the career of his minister getting launched in bloodshed, and yet, he knew. This is exactly what the people who pierced Jesus’s ribs missed too: that “God knew and God knows.”

They threw fake robes and crowns on Jesus but knew not what God knew (Acts 2:23). The activities of the lawless men at Gologotha, just like Moses’ lawless activities, weren’t random. Ask Joseph too. God used (and uses) the seemingly tough events of his Son and servants to remind us who’s in charge of stitching redemptive history.

Likewise, some, like us today, are also consumed by the weight and cares of recent details and disappointments. The constant character of the people in our circles often lets down; disregard for human life drains; and all these moments make the children of the promise cry like children of the curse. In that moment when the sword is piercing the ribs of an innocent man, it seems like the end of the world until you realize God’s big picture.

Life’s dangerous details will derail you until you see what God was achieving amidst Moses’s call and, finally, Jesus’s. Unfortunately today, present “circumstances” are all some believers ever see and assess. They only see an abandoned basket instead of a better Moses—Jesus!

So what are you seeing amidst what’s going on with you?