Go into the wilderness to meet Moses.
Family relationships
I. The brotherhood and affection subsisting between the different members of God’s family. This is twofold. God’s people stand in a twofold relation to one another, as--
(1) natural and--
(2) spiritual men.
II. Notice the breaches of intercourse brought about in this world between those members of God’s family who have seen and known one another in the flesh.
1. Many interruptions of intercourse are brought about by providential arrangements.
2. All direct communication between brethren in the Lord is cut off by death.
III. Consider the need of and consequent yearning after each other’s society and assistance which, while parted, the members of God’s family experience. The need is based upon, and flows from, their spiritual constitution in one body. We are, in the design of God, constituent parts of a whole, and we are continually evincing our consciousness of this truth.
IV. Consider the blissful reunion of the sundered members of God’s family in the realms of glory. There shall be a day when all the yearnings of the Christian’s heart after the society of his brethren shall be satisfied to the full, when his joy shall receive its entire complement in his recognition of and intercommunication with those whom he has known and loved in the Lord. (Dean Goulburn.)
Moses and Aaron
I. God brought the leaders together. A strange place for their meeting, and a strange scene.
II. God brought his leaders to his people. God may be obliged to prepare His leaders as well as His people. Moses was not ready for his work until he was eighty years old. How much of God’s work may be waiting for His leaders! Pray for leaders set apart in the Mount of God; but pray, too, for elders to gather about them. And pray again for a people ready to be led. Everything must stay until so much is attained,--a consecrated ministry, a consecrated eldership, a consecrated church.
III. God brought his leaders before pharaoh. God’s enemies must be subdued if they reject the Divine message. But first He will thoroughly apply gentle methods. (G. R. Leavitt.)
Moses and Aaron
I. Aaron’s commission.
1. Its reason suggestive to the reluctant servant (Exodus 4:1-14).
2. The fact suggestive of the Divine condescension and forbearance.
II. Aaron’s obedience.
1. Prompt.
2. Sincere.
III. Moses and Aaron carrying out the Divine command.
1. They observed their respective places.
2. Their reception by the people (Exodus 4:31).
IV. The interview between Moses, Aaron, and Pharaoh.
1. The reasonableness of the request.
2. The unreasonableness and haughtiness of the reply.
Lessons:
1. To analyze the Divine motive, in the use of all these human instrumentalities, is fraught with most helpful and instructive suggestions.
2. The unwisdom of hesitancy, in accepting a clearly-indicated call of God, is here seen.
3. The modesty and judiciousness with which the request of Moses and Aaron was couched, suggest the carefulness which soul-winners should exercise.
4. In the haughtiness of Pharaoh we discover the preliminary step to his fall. (D. C. Hughes, M. A.)
Lessons
1. God joineth His seconds to His firsts, as He seeth need for redemption of His Church.
2. The same Jehovah only fits and calls His first and second instruments for His works. All from God.
3. God may call the elder after the younger brother, and subject him.
4. God can bring brethren together which were as lost one to another.
5. Motion and place and work, God points out to His instruments of salvation.
6. God makes the deserts places for deliverers to meet in for His Church’s good.
7. God’s call to meeting of instruments is to teach them their respective work.
8. Hearts which God toucheth are ready for obedience to God’s call.
9. The mount of God, and God in the mount, is best for His servants to meet about His work.
10. Nature and grace teach men to give signs of love and loyalty to God’s substitutes below (Exodus 4:27).
11. It is just for supreme powers to open their commissions from God to inferiors.
12. God’s words alone are to be declared, which He speaks to His servants, and are to be spoken by them.
13. Mission and commission of God’s ministers must appear both from God.
14. God’s wonderful works as well as gracious works must be showed at His command.
15. Joint ambassadors of the Church’s deliverance need to know God’s words and works (Exodus 4:28). (G. Hughes, B. D.)
The two brothers
I. As educated by different methods.
II. As meeting after a long separation.
1. The meeting was providential.
2. The meeting had a moral and national significance.
3. The meeting was welcome to the brothers.
III. As uniting in a grand enterprise. Brothers should unitedly place themselves in a line with the providence of God.
IV. As entering upon an important future. All the casual meetings of life are important in their bearing upon present work and future destiny.
V. As reflecting commendation upon their family. Sons honour their parents when they undertake an enterprise for the good of men. Brothers cannot be better united than in the cause of God. (J. S. Exell, M. A.)
The meeting of two brothers
I. It was in a strange place. Some men are only brotherly before the crowd, in privacy or solitude they are social despots. The wilderness will test our affection.
II. It was characterized by warmth of affection. They kissed each other. Brothers do not often act thus in these days. They think it unmanly to do so. The age is cold at heart. It is a token of courage as well as love that a brother will thus greet his brother. But let the kiss be accompanied by kindly attentions, otherwise it is a mockery.
III. It was the occasion for religious talk and consultation. No better topic than this. (J. S. Exell, M. A.)
Christian brothers
1. Called by God to work.
2. Joined by God in work.
3. Conversing together about work.
4. Learning their respective work. (J. S. Exell, M. A.)
Providential arrangements
But admire the manner in which God governs the things of this world and of His Church. When it pleases Him to save a soul, or call a servant, He causes all persons and all events to work together for this end, and in a way already determined. As a skilful general sends each division of his army, without the knowledge of the others, to assemble on the same field of battle, so the Lord sends His servants who are fighting the good fight, to the place and at the time where they ought to meet. It was thus that He sent Peter to Cornelius, Ananias to Paul, Philip to the eunuch. It is thus that in our time He sends missionaries to heathen lands. It was thus that He caused Farel and Calvin to meet at Geneva, that they might help each other, and form a friendship that lasted during their lives, and greatly contributed to the success of their work. How this thought enlightens, strengthens, comforts, and rejoices those who are engaged serving God. (Prof. Gaussen.)
The two brothers
The history of Moses and Aaron appearing together at the court of Pharaoh, the one working miracles and the other as his spokesman, may have given rise to the traditions of the Greeks and Romans, in which Jupiter and Mercury, both of them Egyptian deities worshipped at Hammon and Thoth, are described visiting the earth in a similar relationship. The latter was represented with the caduceus, a rod twisted about with serpents, and was the god of speech or eloquence. To such traditions the saying of the people of Lystra may be referred, when Paul had healed the cripple (Acts 14:11). (T. S. Millington.)
Moses and Aaron; or, the use of association
True greatness is modest. It is a false greatness that magnifies its own powers, and disparages the strength of opposing forces. One of the penalties of greatness is isolation. It removes the man from common aids and sympathies, and sets him by himself. Greatness is lonely. This isolation Moses was beginning to feel, while the task before him grew awful, and swelled into a frightful magnitude. Solitude, and that isolation which is worse than solitude--separation from the insight and sympathy of men around us--is weakening. Moses grew weak and drew back. Thinkers are not always speakers, nor speakers thinkers. Nay, thought in its very striving after accuracy and exactness, is apt to be a hindrance of fluency. Moses could think and act, but he could not speak. He was a greater man than his brother, but his brother was a better speaker. He could excogitate the ideas, and his brother could put them into words for him. God is economical in His bestowments, and seldom heaps His manifold favours on one man. Cromwell, whether a good or a bad man, was certainly a great man; yet out of his tangled utterances it was hard to come at his meaning. Here, then, the want was supplied, and with it, as appears in the subsequent history, a much broader surface of want besides; for God is, “able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think,” and is “wont to give more than either we desire or deserve.” The abundance of His mercy will not be kept within the narrow bounds our mean conceptions set to it. Moses, in the guise of an Egyptian, and as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, had learned to recognize and love his brother Aaron under Amram’s roof; they had been nurtured for uses of which neither of them dreamed. How much of this provision for a secret future is there in the lives of men. What important effects to the end of life may flow from the seemingly casual associations and intimacies of childhood I This companionship at once delivered Moses from his solitude, the isolation of peculiarity, by raising up for him a co-worker, to stand with him on the same elevated plane above the mass of the people, and aid him in bearing cares on which none but one so commissioned might presume to intrude. Here, then, was unity with subordination, and harmony with distribution and diversity; and thus the apparatus of action for the great enterprise was complete. See here the good of association. See how it raised Moses out of the ague of despondency that overtook him when the object of his long desire had at last come within his grasp; how it warmed his powers into resolute endeavour, and shed a benign influence upon his subsequent labours and sufferings. So “Jonathan, Saul’s son arose, and went to David in the wood, and strengthened his hand in God.” So, too, our blessed Lord thought of this principle and acted upon it, and stamped it with the seal of His infallible wisdom, when He sent out His disciples two by two, making but six missions, where an earthly wisdom would have thought it better economy to make twelve. And the great St. Paul had always with him Barnabas, or Mark, or Luke, or Gaius, or Epaphroditus in his missionary travels and labours. Let us remember that in the Divine household we are knit together into one fellowship, and are to learn to be mutually considerate and helpful, and “bear each other’s burdens,” as “every one members one of another.” God’s work, our work, will be done more easily, pleasantly, effectually. See here, too, the good of subordination. Aaron was always with Moses, his shadow or second self; but Moses always was head. If both had been heads the machinery would not have worked so kindly, smoothly, and comfortably. Nothing does well with two heads. (R. A. Hallam, D. D.)