Just Who Do You Think You Are?
Counties Senior Evangelist, Roger Chilvers, looks at the faith of the little-known parents of Moses.
Fame and notoriety are interesting phenomena, especially in a culture obsessed with garnering followers and ‘likes’ on social media. The quotation attributed to Andy Warhol that: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” is hardly likely to be fulfilled, but it does raise the question:
Why would anyone want that sort of renown anyway? Christians should be especially careful, not least because there’s more than a grain of truth in another saying: “Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.”
In the Bible, Moses is one of the most ‘famous’ men. Many consider him to be one of the greatest men who ever lived, at least from a merely human perspective. Although not without flaws in his character, his leadership qualities, humility, obedience, and dependence on God – what we might call his spirituality – all mark him out as an amazing, incredible man. Because he was one of the greatest men who ever trusted God, Moses appears prominently in the list of great people of faith in Hebrews 11. There is so much to learn from his life.
However, when I recently re-read Hebrews 11, it was not Moses himself who grabbed my attention, but two unnamed and largely unknown people closely associated with him. Verse 23 says, “By faith, Moses’s parents hid him for three months after he was born, because they saw he was no ordinary child, and they were not afraid of the king’s edict.”
So, here are two people of such importance that they are listed amongst the preeminent people of faith, yet unnamed and comparatively unfamiliar to us. Most people, even Christians, would be hard-pressed even to name Moses’s parents!
So, what are we to make of Amram and Jochebed being elevated into such exalted company? There are several things we can note:
They had an unusual, even questionable, relationship! Jochebed was Amram’s aunt (Exodus 6:20), which later God says (Leviticus 18:12) is an unsanctioned relationship for his people to enter. So, Moses was born as the product of a relationship that was soon to be forbidden. It reminds us that even a rocky family background, history, or incident need not prevent God from using us as we faithfully follow him.
We are specifically told that Jochebed was born into slavery with its inevitable limitations and lack of opportunity to make a mark in serving God (Numbers 26:59). This is not what you would expect as the ideal start for entering the list of the greatest demonstrations of faith! If a complex family history does not prevent God from using us, neither does He hinder us in even the most limiting environments.
In addition, when you look at their story, you realise that Amram and Jochebed faced not only the general pressures of all enslaved people, but also much more personal and specific issues.
At the invitation of a benevolent Pharaoh in a time of famine, Joseph had taken the people of God to settle in Egypt. Some sixty-four years later, the Egyptian leadership changed: a new king ascended to the throne.
As the number of Israelites continued to grow, Pharaoh felt threatened by them and so enslaved them. He also feared insurgency, so to control the situation, he passed an edict to have every baby boy born to slave parents thrown into the Nile.
This decree became a personal threat to Amram and Jochebed because they had just had an addition to their family, the baby Moses. What were they to do? It was a totalitarian state, and they were just an average slave couple with this unbearable anguish hanging over them for three months.
It is difficult to imagine the agony they must have faced as they hid Moses in the house, desperately hoping that he could be kept quiet so as not to reveal their secret to the ruthless Egyptians.
The story is found in Exodus 2:1-12, and then, in a handful of words in Hebrews 11:23, the Bible makes clear why Amram and Jochebed are portrayed as heroes of faith. Although Hebrews lists them as nameless (even today they are hardly known), who in Egypt would have been considered insignificant as slaves under severe oppression, in God’s big picture, they are recorded amongst those listed as examples to us all.
Here’s how the writer of Hebrews explains the situation that Amram and Jochebed confronted. At a personal level, they knew the threat they faced, but more than that, they knew God.
Their trust in the sovereignty of God lifted their eyes higher than the things they could touch, see, and experience. It gave them courage. They believed in a higher power and authority than that of Pharaoh.
They could not have known the personal consequences and, especially, the historical repercussions of their actions. Still, because they had faith, they worked without fear: “By faith …They were not afraid of the king’s edict,” says Hebrews 11:23, even in their desperate circumstances.
Amram and Jochebed did not sit back in resignation saying: “If God wants to sort something out, He can.’” Instead, they took every practical step possible. They surely had no idea where their actions might lead, yet through it all, they trusted God.
They made a small boat, woven out of papyrus and waterproofed with bitumen. And then the fragile little boat was set adrift with Moses, later to be discovered by Pharaoh’s daughter. And they took every precaution to protect him by having Miriam, Moses’ older sister, surreptitiously guarding him.
And the result? God was working out the whole future of God’s people and salvation history through the faith of this unknown couple.
Today, it is easy to feel that we have little significance, either as individuals or as a small, seemingly unimportant church. The constrained circumstances over which we have no control, or the personal pressures that crush us, may make us feel irrelevant. But anonymous though we may be, when we continue to live by faith, there will come a time when the outcome of our faith will be seen to be not only significant but essential in God’s hidden plan. Generations that follow will thank God for us.
And in Counties, we will not all be people that are known or appear influential, but we can all be those that pray, promote, support and defend those that are on the front line because we live ’by faith’ as Amram and Jochebed did and thereby we become the ancestors of true greatness.