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By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter; choosing rather to be evil entreated with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season; accounting the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt: for he looked unto the recompense of reward.—Heb_11:24-26.
The answer to Dr. Jowett’s question is the whole life of Moses. But that which determined the life of Moses was the choice which he made when he reached manhood. That choice is our subject. We have it brought before us in the text in some fulness. We shall speak first of the Choice itself; next of the Faith which prompted it; and then of the Motive which inspired it.
The Choice
The choice involved two things—a refusal and an acceptance.
1. The act of renunciation was itself an act of unusual keenness of perception, for there was so much that might have been urged on the other side. It is generally not difficult to find specious reasons for doing something which we very much want to do. It so often happens that the intellect is the slave of the will, and we can make out an excellent case for following the bent of our desires. And in the case of Moses the arguments against the course he adopted were really cogent. There was the general principle that it is usually best to stay where Providence has placed us. No doubt it often happens that this principle may be overruled by a higher, that there are exceptions which warrant a departure from this course. But in the case of Moses it might well have been argued that this was pre-eminently one of those cases where the rule held good. For what, it might plausibly have been urged, had Providence given him such a position except that he might use it? And to the plea that he was making the renunciation for the sake of his people, how very effective the reply would be: “If you wish to help your people, stay where you are. You have the opportunity, as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, to do much in alleviating their lot and in making their life more tolerable; whereas by flinging away your position, you bring yourself down to their level and lose all power of effective assistance. Why sacrifice a fulcrum which gives you such a leverage and try to raise your people by a dead life?”
There is a general principle that we are bound to be more careful when the course of action we think of adopting is one that conduces to our own pleasure or advantage. We do not readily acknowledge these things to ourselves, and indeed it is very easy for us to be the victims of unconscious bias. No doubt it often happens that the right course of conduct is also the more agreeable, but in view of the peril I have mentioned we must take special precaution to be sure of our ground.1 [Note: A. S. Peake, The Heroes and Martyrs of Faith, 104.]
Felicitas was a rich widow who with her seven sons was well known in Roman society. In a time of calamity certain pagan priests represented to the emperor that this woman by her deeds of Christian piety had brought down the anger of the gods upon the people; and by imperial command the prefect, Publius, was required to see that she and her sons sacrificed to the gods. The prefect endeavoured to persuade her to make the sacrifices; but she, declaring that the Holy Spirit would strengthen her against the evil one, said: “I am assured that while I live I shall be the victor in my contest with you, and if you cause me to be put to death I shall be still more a conqueror.” Publius replied: “Unhappy one, if it is pleasant for you to die, at least let your sons live.” “My sons,” said Felicitas, “will surely live if they do not consent to sacrifice to idols. But if they commit this crime of sacrificing they will die eternally.” The first attempt of the magistrate failed, and a public trial was ordered. At this trial, when urged to have pity on her sons, Felicitas addressed them saying: “Look up to heaven, where Christ with His saints is waiting for you, fight the good fight for your souls, and show yourselves faithful in the love of Christ.” The young men were questioned one by one. Januarius, the eldest, who was offered a rich reward if he sacrificed, and scourging if he refused, made answer: “The wisdom of the Lord will support me and enable me to endure all.” He was ordered to be scourged, and was led away. The second son also refused to sacrifice, saying: “We adore one God to whom we offer the sacrifice of prayers: never suppose that you will separate me or my brothers from the love of the Lord Jesus Christ; our faith will never be overcome or be changed by any of your threats.” The other brothers were no less faithful in their confessions, and at last, when the emperor had read the report of the trial, he ordered the accused to be executed. Felicitas and three of the sons were beheaded; three of the others were beaten to death with whips; the last was thrown down from a height that he might be killed.1 [Note: J. Herkless, The Early Christian Martyrs, 46.]
2. It was necessary for Moses to make up his mind what he would do in those cases where loyalty to Israel was incompatible with loyalty to Egypt. His position was a very delicate one, and he was bound to be exceptionally careful. He might so easily be discredited by a false step, the cry might so readily be raised that he was traitorously sacrificing the interests entrusted to his care. And if he had tried to hold the balance even, he would have quickly learned that it is the fate of the moderate man to be stoned by the extremists on both sides. Moreover, as time went on his generous enthusiasms were likely to fade. The idealist would have degenerated into the practical man, and the official palliations of abuses and tyranny would have come glibly from his lips. It was better for Moses himself, better, too, we may be sure, for the cause he had at heart, that he should make a definite break with his past and devote himself whole-heartedly to his people. And that he saw this so clearly and steadily, that his judgment was not swayed by self-interest or led astray by sophistries, justifies the author of the Epistle when he finds in his renunciation the proof of his faith.
What did he refuse? Away out from the king’s palace on the plain there was a poor, downtrodden, oppressed, ill-used race, and this man, who was akin to them and belonged to them, was afraid lest, getting into the softness of retirement, the surroundings of leisure, the woolly softness might stop his ears, the very king’s palace become as it were a palace of wool, shutting out the wail of the oppressed, causing him to be indifferent to the cry of the downtrodden. He was afraid lest, if he got into the king’s palace, sat down at the feast of plenty, and had all the allurements of the king’s house, in leisure, ease, retirement, he should lose touch with his fellow-men, be benumbed and paralysed by the ease which lay within his choice. He refused leisure, and he refused pleasure.
What answers to this refusal for us? Our own conscience alone can make reply; but it may be one of many things. Perhaps there is a friendship on which we have set our heart, a friendship at war with loyalty to Christ. We must change its inner tone, or say farewell to it, if we are to choose the better part. Or it is possibly a means of gain as to which we have had gathering doubts, until now we know that unless it is renounced it will bar us out from the Kingdom of God. Or it may be some secret evil habit, sweet for the passing moment, but shameful in memory; if we do not cut the strands, and cast it off, something tells us that it will one day drag us down headlong into the pit. And yet do not let us ward off the thrust which, it may be, this passage is making at our heart by pleading that “the pleasures of sin” can refer only to gross self-indulgence and taking comfort in the thought that nothing of that kind is chargeable on us. What these pleasures meant for Moses was no base sensuality—he lived above all that—but a stage for his ambition, the intoxicating draught of personal influence and power. And many a man who would scorn to stoop to coarse wrongdoing finds, often to his own intense surprise, that the pursuit of the common ideals of success can rob him of eternal life quite as effectively.
This moment’s thine, thou never more may’st hear
The clarion-summons-call thus loud and clear;
What now thou buyest cheap may yet prove dear.
Part with thine all, spare not the needed cost;
That which thou partest with were better lost,
Thy selfish worldly schemes more wisely crossed.
Thy loss infinitesimal, thy gain
Endless, immense; thy momentary pain
The single step the boundless to attain.
These idol loves that gender loveless lust—
Weighed in the balances, whose scales are just,
With the bright hopes thou spurn’st—are breath-borne dust!
Eye hath not seen, man’s ear hath never heard,
Nor heart conceived—save some faint image blurred—
The bliss of those who keep the Christly word—-
Let go; my soul, let go!1 [Note: William Hall.]
3. In another respect the faith of Moses is shown to be eminent in that he realized that the pleasures of sin could not last. If he enjoyed them, it could be but for a season. Now this brings before us the magic of sin. It is not easy for a man before he commits a sin to look at it from the point of view which he will adopt towards it after he has committed it. The illusion of sin is what gives it its fatal power. It casts a glamour over the eyes of the tempted, so that they cannot penetrate through the radiant appearance to the hideous and loathsome reality. It captures and inflames the imagination, muffles the conscience, and paralyses the will; it makes itself seem the most desirable of all things, the one beatitude needed to crown and complete the life. It is the man of faith whose vision strikes through all disguises to the truth. He is too sane to deny that the pleasures of sin are real; but he knows, nevertheless, that they bring no permanent satisfaction—indeed, he knows quite well that sweet gratification turns quickly to bitter remorse. And Moses had just that faculty steadily to look at the sin beforehand from the standpoint of the experienced gratification, and understand that the pleasure could not last. He knew quite well that, while he could reach the goal on which his ambition was set, and the advantages and enjoyments it would procure for him would be real and substantial, his pleasure in them would always be poisoned by the thought that a higher call had come to him, and he had made the great and irretrievable refusal.
It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own narrow pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness, such as goes along with being a great man, by having wide thoughts, and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves; and this sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we would choose before everything else, because our souls see it is good.1 [Note: George Eliot, Romola.]
If young women want to know what a woman can be, read Josephine Butler’s life of her husband and see how she mingles with it as one of, shall I say, the knight-errants of the Lord Christ? Josephine Butler, living in the ease and seclusion of a snug deanery, heard the cry of awfully oppressed womanhood. It shook her heart with pain and fear. She at once made up her mind to go out into the night, if she might be the means of lifting the burden from the oppressed womanhood of our realm. She knew what it meant—the contempt of the aristocracy, the loss of much social esteem and regard; she counted the cost. She made the confession to her husband: God had created the husband as splendid as the wife; he was willing that the sacrifice should be made. She tells how she made her purpose known to her husband: “I went to him one evening when he was alone, all the household having gone to rest, and I recollect the painful thoughts that seemed to throng that passage from my room to his study. I hesitated. I leaned my cheek against the closed door, and as I leaned I prayed. Then I went in, and I gave him something that I had written, and I left him. I did not see him until the next day. He looked very pale”—he had been in Gethsemane through that night—“and very troubled, and for some days he was very silent. And then I spoke to my husband of all that had passed in my mind, and I said: ‘I feel as if I must go out into the streets and cry aloud, or my heart will break,’ and that good and noble man, foreseeing what it meant both for me and for himself, never said, ‘What will the world say?’ He had pondered the matter, and looking straight”—I like that phrase—“as was his wont, he saw only a great wrong, and a woman who wanted to redress the wrong, and in loving and reverent response he said, ‘Go, and God be with you.’ ” Out into the night she went; she chose to suffer affliction with the people of God rather than dwell in the luxurious seclusion of a deanery, and I tell you that if the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews were to return, and were to enlarge his nave, and wanted to erect a memorial to some distinguished woman, Josephine Butler would find a place.1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]
2. “He esteemed the reproach of Christ”—put that in one hand: “greater than the treasures of Egypt”—put that in the other hand. He esteemed reproach, contumely, contempt, derision plus right, more than all the treasures of Egypt plus unrighteousness. He did not mind a scar; some scars are ornaments. Is there a more splendid word in all the supremely splendid Epistles of St. Paul than “I bear about in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus”? “Do you see that?” he said; “I was stoned there”; and I think he pulled up his sleeve and said, “Do you see that? It is the mark of the scourge. If you could only see my back; I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus”; he exhibited them as some men parade their degrees. His scars were his crown. So Moses refused, he turned his back upon majesty; he chose, he preferred oppression and weakness.
It is difficult for us to realize how daring such a faith was, for we look back across the intervening millenniums and see with what unique lustre Israel has shone, and how singularly it has justified Moses’ estimate. We think of all the splendid galaxy of saints and prophets, of sages and psalmists, who so gloriously vindicated Israel’s right to the title. But all this still lay in the future to Moses. He knew nothing of the lofty spiritual achievements which awaited his race. It was rather a mere horde of slaves, with all that this implies. For we know what slavery does for men, how it takes the pith out of their manhood and grinds them into abject submission, how it creates a degraded slave-morality of its own, underhand and obsequious.
There was a man called Benjamin Waugh who was enjoying the delights of some secluded ministry, all the enjoyment that comes to the studious life. He heard the wail of a little child, and he left his study and his books, went out into the night, and encountered the tempest, antagonisms on every side. He only wanted to protect the ill-used child against the heavy, brutal hand of oppression, but he was opposed and antagonized, confronted on every hand by opposition. The police, especially the chief constables of the country, ranged themselves in opposition to him. He had to fight and fight and fight; and now to-day we have a great and popular society for the protection of ill-used little children, which must be traced to the majestic outgoing of a man who said: “I will despise ease, leisure, pleasure, treasure: I choose to be one with the ill-used children rather than to enjoy the pleasures of luxurious seclusion, even for a season.”1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]
Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and ’tis prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,
Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified,
And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.
Count me o’er earth’s chosen heroes,—they were souls that stood alone,
While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone,
Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline
To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine,
By one man’s plain truth to manhood and to God’s supreme design.2 [Note: James Russell Lowell, The Present Crisis.]
The Power
1. God had chosen Moses, but now the time had come when Moses must choose God. We are not told how the crisis came about; we know only the outcome, and that the power that enabled him to act was faith. Faith in his mother’s God, for Jochebed must have taught her boy of Him in whom she trusted. A faith that came from calm and quiet consideration, for we are told he “looked unto the recompense of the reward”; literally “he looked beyond,” or “away from that which was before his eyes.” He was brought to consider his position in the light of eternity, and to make a choice as to whether he would live for the present or for future gain.
2. “Now faith is the giving substance to things hoped for, the test of things not seen” (Heb_11:1, R.V., margin). Faith puts to the proof the statements of God by acting upon them, and in the acting finds their substance and reality. Faith tests the unseen things, and translates them into real experience. This was strikingly true in the case of Moses. By faith he looked beyond the things before his eyes, he deliberately chose to refuse all the “pleasures” and “treasures” of the present, and faith tested, proved, or gave substance to his hopes. He was led step by step away from things seen, into a fellowship and communion with the unseen God, of which he had no conception when he made his choice in Egypt.
3. The faith that is the “proving of things not seen” demands direct communication with God. Souls have often been shipwrecked here. They have rested their faith upon the written word spoken by others, rather than upon God Himself in His Word. The “faith” that can act as Moses did must have the word of the Living God as its basis—the word of the Living God in His written Word, but by the Holy Spirit applied as His direct word to the soul. When God speaks, His commands are His enablings. By the faith wrought in us by God, and the assurance of the reward of knowing Him “face to face,” we too can refuse to be of the world, and declare plainly that we seek a better country, that is, a heavenly; we too can refuse the pleasures of sin and self-pleasing, and choose the way of the cross: we too can hold lightly the “treasures” that others clasp to their breasts, and account reproach with Christ as greater riches than them all.
4. “Faith” is the key to all the treasuries of God. The gospel is practically God’s statement of what is in the spiritual world. Faith is simply believing God’s word, however contrary it may appear to the things of sense and sight. Faith in God’s statement to us is proved by action. We act according to what is told us by God, which we believe, and must of necessity obey. Living faith involves action; without action it may be said to be dead, for a mental assent to the truths of God will never give them substance in our lives. If we do believe God’s word, we shall act according to that word.
He who walks by sight only walks in a blind alley. He who does not know the freedom and joy of reverent, loving speculation wastes his life in a gloomy cell of the mouldiest of prisons. Even in matters that are not distinctively religious faith will be found to be the inspiration and strength of the most useful life. It is faith that does the great work of the world. It is faith that sends men in search of unknown coasts. It is faith that re-trims the lamp of inquiry when sight is weary of the flame. It is faith that unfastens the cable and gives men the liberty of the seas. It is faith that inspires the greatest works in civilization. So we cannot get rid of religion unless we first get rid of faith, and when we get rid of faith we give up our birthright and go into slavery for ever.1 [Note: Joseph Parker.]
O God! the scholar and the sage
Into Thy mysteries peer,
And strive by Reason’s subtle art
To make their meaning clear.
But my bewildered heart rejects
The puzzling paths they lay,
And seeks to gain the Eternal Heart
By some directer way.
Lord, draw me as the sun in spring
Draws the awakening vine,
And up some lattice of Thy love
Bid my affections twine!
So when my grasp on Reason fails,
Faith-led, I still may go,
And all the mystery shall melt
As melts the April snow.
The Motive
1. When the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us that Moses “looked unto the recompense of reward,” he seems to spoil what has gone before. Our impulse is at once to retort, “Oh, then, Moses was self-seeking after all, only he made much cleverer calculations than other people would have done. Faith was just the cooler, keener insight which enabled him to make a better bargain than his fellows. He was good because it paid him better.” The writer does not, it is true, tell us precisely what he had in mind, but we can, at any rate, rest assured that we should wrong Moses himself by such a criticism. For what we may call the higher doctrine of the future life emerged in the religion of Israel at a comparatively late period, and therefore the founder of the religion may reasonably be regarded as untouched by this as regards motive. So far as he was concerned he did his duty and made his sacrifice without thought of reward in that sense. If, then, we give to the author’s words a meaning which shall harmonize with history, we shall speak of Moses as contemplating a reward only in the sense in which we speak of virtue as its own reward. He had peace of conscience and the assurance that, at all costs, he had followed the path of duty. He had the privilege of knowing that his sacrifice had meant the redemption of his people. Above all, he was happy in the sense of God’s approval. We may all desire that our own actions may be prompted by such disinterested anticipations of reward.
To labour in a righteous cause with the assurance that some day the right will be justified is to manifest the disposition of faith. Is it not a beautiful word in the Psalmist: “He shall bring forth thy righteousness as the light”? A man said to me last week in Birmingham, only a working man, “We don’t seem to make much headway there in the slums; it is like trying to clean them with a spoon, but I am doing my best, and I am trusting God.” It came to me to quote “thy righteousness”—only like a little candle in a dark place, but if thou art faithful to it—“He shall bring forth thy righteousness as the light,” and even when thou art working, as with a candle amidst surrounding blackness, work thou as a child of the noon. Oh, that is the meaning; when we are working in the twilight, when the darkness envelops and oppresses us, to work as children of the noon. Is that not what our Master meant when He said, “Whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive”?1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]
2. And yet it was possible for Moses to see a definite though distant reward. We read of the Saviour Himself: “Who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame.” “He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied.” What do those words mean? They mean far more than we can comprehend. They, however, at least teach us that the salvation of those for whom He died will be His recompense. His reward will be the satisfaction which the presence of the redeemed, which no man can number, will give to the love that brought Him from His heaven to die for them. Such a reward in a humbler measure and in a different sense was the reward of Moses.
(1) First of all, with regard to the very people to whom he was to become deliverer, his reward consisted in being permitted, though not to enter Canaan itself, to stand on the summit of the mountain and see the land they would so soon enter. The recompense of his toil, the reward of all his suffering, was to b permitted to know that they were not in vain, but that the people for whom he in his best hours was prepared to die were finally delivered from bondage and placed in possession of the Promised Land.
(2) But that is only a type of the deeper and more spiritual joy which fell to the lot of Moses, namely, the recompense of the reward in finding that every self-denial could be made sweet, and every cross could be converted into a crown. The greatest recompense we can have for any self-denying service is to lose the sense of the self-denial in the ecstasy of the joy and privilege of it; to feel that though we may have to suffer, the suffering itself becomes a channel of joy to us in that we are permitted to suffer for the Master’s sake. The recompense of the reward is to be so transformed and transfigured by the service we render to Christ and for humanity that we shall become like our Lord, and find our greatest joy in being permitted to bless those who need our help.
In Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau Browning gives a striking picture of the inadequacy of the judgments that are passed from an imperfect seizure of the facts of the case. It will serve to illustrate the inadequacy of the world’s judgments of things that are outside of its province.
An artist in Rome covered all the accessories in the Laocoön group, leaving exposed only the central figure of the father, “with neither sons nor serpents to denote the purpose of his gesture.” Then he stood by to hear the people’s comments. What would they make of the tremendous energy of those legs and arms, and of the eyeballs starting from their sockets? With one exception the uninitiated multitude decided that it was “a yawn of sheer fatigue subsiding to repose,” and the subject of the statue must surely be “Somnolency”! Only one spectator seized upon the truth—
I think the gesture strives
Against some obstacle we cannot see!
When Moses gave up his bright prospects at the Egyptian court and set out for the wilderness, there were many that thought him mad. But they did not see all the elements of the group; they did not see what Moses saw. They failed to take into account his devotion to his God and to his people, and his grounds for faith in the promises that were his people’s heritage. And did he not choose wisely? As one of a line of Pharaohs he could not have failed of having his name and his fame written down on some of the clay tablets of his period, and we might have been digging them up to-day. But as the Leader of Israel and as the Schoolmaster of Christendom, his name and his fame are written in golden letters in the language of almost every people and nation and tribe under heaven.1 [Note: J. B. Maclean, The Secret of the Stream, 162.]
Beloved, yield thy time to God, for He
Will make eternity thy recompense;
Give all thy substance for His love, and be
Beatified past earth’s experience.
Serve Him in bonds, until He set thee free;
Serve Him in dust, until He lift thee thence;
Till death be swallowed up in victory
When the great trumpet sounds to bid thee hence.
Shall setting day win day that will not set?
Poor price wert thou to spend thyself for Christ,
Had not His wealth thy poverty sufficed:
Yet since He makes His garden of thy clod,
Water thy lily, rose, or violet,
And offer up thy sweetness unto God.2 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Poetical Works, 17.]
Literature
Bell (C. D.), The Roll-Call of Faith, 178.
Brandt (J. L.), Soul-Saving, 219.
Brown (C.), The Birth of a Nation, 95.
Brown (J.), Sermons with Memoir, 159.
Carroll (B. H.), Sermons, 126.
Chadwick (G. A.), The Book of Exodus , 34.
Davies (D.), Talks with Men, Women and Children, v. 365.
Dewey (O.), Works, 716.
Hopkins (E. H.), Hidden yet Possessed, 53, 60.
Mackintosh (H. R.), Life on God’s Plan, 15.
Meyer (F. B.), Moses the Servant of God, 17.
Neville (W. G.), Sermons, 290.
Norton (J. N.), Golden Truths, 341.
Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 133.
Peake (A. S.), The Heroes and Martyrs of Faith, 99.
Penn-Lewis (Mrs.), Face to Face, 25.
Plumptre (E. H.), Theology and Life, 147.
Punshon (W. M.), Sermons, ii. 42.
Ramsey (D. M.), in The Southern Baptist Pulpit, 314.
Rawlinson (G.), Moses: His Life and Times, 51.
Ryle (J. C), Faith’s Choice, 1.
Selby (T. G.), The God of the Patriarchs, 163.
Smith (J.), The Permanent Message of the Exodus , 16.
Whitehead (H.), Sermons, 73.
Cambridge Review, ix. Supplement No. 216 (E. H. Bickersteth).
Christian World Pulpit, xxxix. 225 (F. W. Farrar).
Contemporary Pulpit, 2nd Ser., vi. 309 (F. W. Farrar).
Homiletic Review, xlvi. 33 (J. H. Jowett); lvi. 229 (G. E. Reed).