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Transcript 380A
Zipporah Circumcises Moses' Son [Ex 4:24-26]
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: I have four questions concerning a scripture passage, and I'd like to have my answer on the air. It's Exodus 4:24-26. And my questions are: The wording in verse 24, that the Lord "seeks" to kill him. And yet if the Lord wanted to kill him, He could. Why this language?
The second question is: Moses had two sons. Why did Zipporah only circumcise one?
The third question is: Could these verses be transposed from an earlier part? Were these really newborn sons? If it is after Moses saw the burning bush, surely these boys would be men. I'm all confused about it. And what's the application for today? What significance does it have for us today?
HC: All right. I'll speak to these questions.
The question is raised concerning this provocative passage of Exodus 4:24-26. Moses has been 40 years in the wilderness of Midian. There he had met a wife by the name of Zipporah, and God had given them two sons. Now he has been called of God to return to Egypt, where he had grown up as an Egyptian prince. He was to return to Egypt to be God's man, to lead the nation of Israel out of Egyptian bondage into the promised land.
And while he is going, it says here, "And it came to pass, by the way, in the inn, that the Lord met him and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a sharp stone and cut off the foreskin of her son and cast it at his feet and said, Surely a bloody husband art thou to me. So He let him go. Then she said, A bloody husband thou art because of the circumcision."
What is happening here? Well, you see, 600 years earlier God had given the sign of the covenant to father Abraham, the first of the great patriarchs of the nation of Israel. The sign of the covenant was that each son was to be circumcised at eight days. And the circumcision was a figure to indicate that in Christ, or in the coming Messiah, by trusting in the promises of God, their sins could be cut away from them.
The New Testament sign of the covenant really is baptism, that in Christ our sins are washed away. But in the Old Testament it was circumcision Moses was thoroughly aware of this command. Later on we discover that it was Moses who wrote the first five books of the Bible, according to all that we can read in the Bible. He was a student of all that God had declared earlier. So Moses, as a true Israelite, even though he had been brought up as an Egyptian in the household of Pharaoh, in the palace, nevertheless he should have been aware of this.
Now imagine. Here he is, to be the leader of the nation of Israel, and he is going to begin this leadership with sin in his life. He had not circumcised his son. Now perhaps he had circumcised his other son, but that's beside the point. This son had not been circumcised. And so God sought to kill him. The Bible doesn't say how God did this. Perhaps He brought a great fever upon Moses. It seems that he was too weak to do this act of circumcision himself.
What happens in your life when adversity strikes, when difficulties arise? What is the first thing that you begin to do? You begin to check out your life, don't you? Is God saying something to me? Is God trying to get my attention? Is God chastising me? I think Moses was following true to form the life of any believer. He immediately realized that his son had not been circumcised.
So Zipporah took a sharp stone and cut off the foreskin of her son. Now there's a deeper spiritual truth in this. Really there must be. Moses, in a real sense, I believe, is a figure of Christ. He is portrayed in the Bible as a figure of Christ. Even as he led the children of Israel out of Egypt, so Christ leads us out of bondage to sin.
And he is a bloody husband, he is called here. Now actually, Christ is a bloody husband, is He not? We are the bride. As the church, we are the bride. Christ is the groom. And Christ shed His blood for our sins. It is true, of course, that Moses didn't actually have his foreskin cut off here. Apparently he had been circumcised earlier. But nevertheless, in the language here that God has given to us, he is the one who is called a bloody husband. It says here, "She cast it at his feet," so that he became identified with this circumcision.
And so Christ became identified with the fact that our sins have been cut off. The fact is that Christ became sin for us, and He endured hell for us, which was symbolized by circumcision. To be cut off means to undergo the judgment of God. So in a real sense, and I haven't explicated this well, but at least it's along this direction, we see here that there's a deeper spiritual lesson. Not only is it giving us a reminder of the fact that we must be obedient to the commands of God, but also it is showing us again the nature of Christ's salvation.
Even as Moses was a bloody husband, so Christ is a bloody husband, in order that we might be saved of our sins.