To Encourage You

Hebrews 11:23 “By faith Moses, when he was born, was hidden for three months by his parents, because they saw that the child was beautiful, and they were not afraid of the king’s edict.”

Do you realize that God has built into humanity certain things that help us to elicit a God-honoring response?  In spite of the fall of the human race, there are some good things that just come naturally even to a sin-polluted mind.  I think we see one such thing in the verse above.  Notice that it says that Moses’ parents saw that he was a beautiful child at birth. It seems strange to me that this is noted. The same thing is repeated in two other places where Moses’ birth is recorded: in the original account in Exodus 2:2 and then in Stephen’s speech prior to his being stoned in Acts 7:20.   It is noteworthy in the Acts account that Stephen adds that the baby Moses was beautiful “in God’s sight.”  Perhaps this is telling us that although God’s ways and thoughts are so much higher than man’s ways and thoughts, one of the things that both man and God agree on is the beauty of a newborn babe.  Indeed, what parent doesn’t think that their newborn baby is beautiful. I sure thought that about each child that was born to my wife and me!  This beauty, this innate goodness that a baby’s birth represents, touches hearts of parents worldwide. It’s mention in the verse above is set in contrast to what was going on at the time Moses was born. Moses was born in Egypt as his parents dwelled there in bondage as slaves.  It was because of the rapid growth of the population of Jews in Egypt that Pharaoh became concerned that they would overrun his kingdom. His solution? Issue an edict that every baby boy born to an Israelite be immediately thrown into the Nile. What a stark contrast was this wickedness set against the goodness of this beautiful child. 

Moses’ parents feared God rather than Pharaoh, and as a result, they hid Moses rather than do this wicked sin that the king commanded.  There’s a similar thing mentioned a little later in the story of Moses.  It was after Moses became too old to hide anymore that his mother put him in a tiny raft and set that raft among the reeds along the Nile.  She did this in a way that the women, in this case Pharaoh’s own daughter, would find him as they came down to the Nile to bathe (Exodus 2:1-5). The Bible tells us that when Pharaoh’s daughter found him, “the baby was crying (and) she took pity on him.” Baby’s cry. That’s the way God made them. And it is that cry that naturally elicits pity from adults who are in their presence. God’s will is that we care for them, for baby’s are helpless without such care.  And that cry gets our attention, doesn’t it?  It did to Pharaoh’s daughter – and in response to the pity she had on the baby, she raised Moses as her own. 

It’s a wonderful story and a demonstration of God’s sovereign work of deliverance in the face of what seemed like a hopeless situation.  God rewarded the faith of Moses’ parents, and he rewards the faith of all those who truly seek Him (Hebrews 11:6). 

But back to the thing of the beauty of this little baby, this universal and natural reaction that God has placed in the human heart.  Pharaoh, conversely, had a very hard heart. He could care less about these beautiful babies. To him, they were better dead than alive. But doesn’t this speak to the horror of the age in which we live?  It’s an age where millions of babies are killed each year, worldwide, each one a beautiful creation of God. In Romans 1:28 God talks of “the debased mind.” It’s something that God will give people over to if they insist on rebelling against Him. It’s a mind that doesn’t think right.  It’s not even natural. It’s a mind that can kill a precious baby and call it simply a matter of a women’s health or a “right to choose.” It’s the mind of a Pharaoh or of a Herod who slaughtered all the children under two years of age in Bethlehem and the surrounding region to eliminate the most beautiful child that ever lived, the Lord Jesus Christ (Matthew 2:16-18). But that’s exactly the world in which we now live. It’s a world given over to debased minds, minds that don’t recognize the good things God has built into the natural order, and minds that promote with great gusto things that make absolutely no sense. 

May God grant repentance and revival to this world today, for that is the only hope for our generation.   It’s only the hope of the gospel that can accomplish this, for that’s the only thing through which it is possible to make all things new (2 Corinthians 5:17).  It is only when one is born anew by the Holy Spirit that one can hope to obey God’s command to “not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2). And it’s the renewed mind that is the only hope for anyone in this or any other generation that has ever been or will ever be.  May God grant repentance to those in this world who are blind to the natural order of things because of their debased mind.