The Deliverer, Part 1. On the right heart and the wrong way.
He looked this way and that, and seeing no one, he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.— Exodus 2:12
Stephen tells us Moses was forty years old when it came into his heart to visit his people (Acts 7:23). He had been raised as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, yet Exodus twice calls the Hebrew slaves making bricks under the whip “his people” (Exod. 2:11). Whatever his mother had woven into him in those early years had held.
One day he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew. Moses looked this way and that, saw no one, killed the Egyptian, and buried him in the sand (2:11–12).
When Stephen retells this story in Acts, he tells us what Moses was thinking.
He supposed that his brothers would understand that God was giving them salvation by his hand, but they did not understand.— Acts 7:25
Moses was not acting out of plain rage. He believed God meant to free Israel, and that he was the one God would use. In a sense he was right. God did intend to save His people through Moses. Moses had the right heart and even the right calling. What he did not have yet was God’s way of doing it.
The Hebrew text makes this easy to see. The word for “strike,” nakah (נָכָה), appears in three verses in a row. An Egyptian strikes a Hebrew (2:11). Moses strikes the Egyptian (2:12). The next day two Hebrews are fighting, and Moses asks the one in the wrong, “Why do you strike your companion?” (2:13).
Moses wanted to stop the striking, and the way he tried was by striking harder. He had grown up in a kingdom that kept its slaves in line with taskmasters and whips (1:11–14). When he set out to end that cruelty, he reached for the same tool. The man he challenged saw it right away: “Who made you a prince and a judge over us?” (2:14). Then he asked whether Moses meant to kill him too, the way he had killed the Egyptian.
Moses understood that his secret was out. Pharaoh heard about it and tried to have him killed, and Moses fled to the land of Midian (2:15).
God would still strike Egypt. When He later sent Moses back, He said that He Himself would stretch out His hand and strike Egypt (3:20). The rescue would come from God’s hand, announced to Pharaoh’s face, with nothing to bury in the sand.
Moses’ mistake is one we know well. We care about the right thing, and then we reach for whatever worked in the world that raised us: control, anger, winning the argument. James writes that “the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (James 1:20). Where are we fighting for something good with tools God never handed us?
Centuries later, Peter drew a sword to protect Jesus, and Jesus told him to put it away (Matt. 26:52). The Deliverer God finally sent did not save us by striking anyone. He let Himself be struck. Isaiah describes the suffering Servant as “stricken, smitten by God” (Isa. 53:4), and “smitten” comes from the same Hebrew word, nakah.
Moses loved his people enough to walk out of the palace for them, and God wanted them free even more than he did. God’s deliverance would not come by Moses’ fists, or by ours.
Pharaoh’s palace had taught Moses how a king gets his way, and he used that lesson the first time he tried to help. In Midian, God would spend forty years teaching him another one. When Moses finally walked back into Egypt, he carried a shepherd’s staff (4:20), and the striking was left to God.
Next time: forty years in the wilderness, and the moment Scripture says God remembered.
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