- The River,* Part 4. On who God had waiting at the river.
When she opened it, she saw the child, and behold, the baby was crying. She took pity on him and said, “This is one of the Hebrews’ children.”— Exodus 2:6
The basket was not left completely alone. Moses’ sister stood a little way off to see what would happen to him (Exod. 2:4).
Then Pharaoh’s daughter came down to the Nile to bathe, with her young women walking along the bank. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent a servant to bring it to her (2:5). When she opened it, the baby was crying. She recognized him as a Hebrew child, one of the boys her own father had ordered thrown into this river. She took pity on him anyway.
Then the sister stepped forward. She was only a Hebrew slave girl, yet she spoke to the daughter of Pharaoh and offered to find a Hebrew woman to nurse the baby (2:7). The princess said yes. Picture that girl hurrying home, and her mother looking up as she came through the door.
Pharaoh’s daughter gave the woman a simple instruction: “Take this child away and nurse him for me, and I will give you your wages” (2:9). When this mother set the basket in the reeds, she walked away with empty arms, not knowing whether she would ever hold her son again. Now the king’s own daughter was placing him back in her arms and telling her to take him home. She would no longer have to hush his crying for fear of the neighbors. She could nurse him in the open, and the royal house would even pay her for it.
The boy Pharaoh wanted dead was being raised by his own mother, at Pharaoh’s expense.
In that world, mothers often nursed their children for two or three years. So God gave this mother something she could not have expected when she let him go: more time. She had already sealed one basket of reeds. Now she had a few more years to weave the other one, made of God’s Word, that Moses would carry inside him.
Then came the second goodbye. When the child grew older, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. Pharaoh’s daughter named him Moses, because she had drawn him out of the water (Exod. 2:10). From then on the river was part of his name. Every time someone called him, his name told how he had been saved.
Whatever his mother taught him in those years, we can see what stayed with him. Moses grew up in Pharaoh’s palace and was trained in all the learning of Egypt (Acts 7:22). Even so, as a grown man he went out to see his own people at their forced labor (Exod. 2:11), and he “refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter” (Heb. 11:24). The palace taught him a great deal, but it did not change who he knew himself to be.
When we let go of someone we love, we stand where this mother stood. We can see the reeds and the water, but we cannot see who is coming down to the river. A child drives off to college, or someone we have discipled takes a job where faith will cost something, and we wonder who will be there for them.
Sixteen centuries ago, a North African mother named Monica had a son who was brilliant, restless, and far from God. She had taught Augustine the name of Christ when he was small, but as a young man he wanted nothing to do with her faith. When he decided to sail from Carthage to Rome, she begged him not to go. That night, while she prayed in a chapel near the harbor, he slipped onto a ship. She never chose to let him go, as Moses’ mother did. In the morning she came down to the shore, and the ship was gone.
In Rome, he applied for a post teaching rhetoric in Milan, and the official who chose him was Symmachus, a prefect known for defending the old pagan gods. In Milan the bishop was Ambrose. Augustine went to hear him preach only to judge his speaking style, but Ambrose’s sermons began to open the Scriptures to him. In time Augustine came to faith, and Ambrose baptized him. Later he wrote that even in his wandering years, the name of Christ he had taken in with his mother’s milk never left him.
Monica could not see Milan from that harbor, and Moses’ mother could not see a princess walking toward the Nile. God does not limit Himself to the ways we expect. Sometimes the person He has waiting at the river is the last one we would have chosen.
Hebrews says that when Moses’ parents hid him, they acted by faith and “were not afraid of the king’s edict” (Heb. 11:23). We can see that same faith in the basket his mother made and in the way she let it go. Letting go in faith means doing our part with care, then trusting God with the part that was never ours.
Moses’ mother let her son go twice, first into the river and later into the palace, and neither time could she see what was coming. She only knew what she had done. She had sealed a basket, and then spent a few short years weaving God’s Word into a little boy’s heart. The rest was in God’s hands, and those hands were already at work in places she could not see.
Whoever we are letting go of, the river they are on is not empty. Somewhere downstream, God may already have someone walking toward the water.
She did not know who was coming down to the river that day. God did.
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