God calls us to serve his purposes and does not wait for us to figure out whether he might use us. God takes weak people and shows his glory by using us. Moses eventually learns this lesson, despite his protests, and so can we.
After Moses questions whether God’s call in his life is accomplishing anything fruitful (Exod 6:12), God simply reiterates his call (6:13). But then Exodus suddenly digresses to rehearse Israel’s genealogy up to Moses (6:14-25), before returning to the topic where the narrative started (6:26-30).
This genealogy includes only three tribes: Reuben, Simeon, and Levi. Why these three? They were the first three sons of Jacob by birth order, so this was the sequence in which one would recite genealogies (cf. Gen 46:8-11). The list in Exodus 6 stops with and fleshes out more fully Levi’s descendants (6:16-25) because that that family tree brings us to Moses, Aaron, and their kin.
But since the list will focus on Levites, why does it first briefly summarize the clans of Reuben and Simeon (6:14-15)? When we memorize something in order, sometimes it is difficult for us to recall it out of order. One accustomed to orally reciting a full genealogy of Israel might be accustomed to noting Reuben and Simeon (Exod 6:14-15) before reaching Levi (6:16-25).
Nevertheless, granted that point, an experienced narrator easily could have skipped them. At some point an editor could have removed this oral feature; why mention again Reuben and Simeon at all? The answer to this question might be related to our next consideration.
Why rehearse this genealogy here? Why not at the beginning of Moses’s story, like genealogies introducing Noah (Gen 5:3-32, esp. 32) or Abraham (Gen 11:10-30, esp. 11:26-30)? Maybe the narrator wanted to get listeners engaged in the story before digressing for a genealogy? After all, there was a genealogy in Genesis 46, toward the end of the Joseph story (and after the climax of its action), so it may have been too soon for another genealogy at the beginning of the Moses story.
But granted that a genealogy might not have fit best at the beginning of Moses’s story, Exodus does not even name Moses’s parents until this point (though his brother Aaron is already part of the story at 4:14). And if there was to be a genealogy, why specifically at this moment? And why does the narrative of Moses’s questioning frame this genealogy as a digression?
This genealogy, like its context, helps to depict in stark fashion how mortal and finite Moses is. Reuben, Simeon and Levi were all patriarchs who sinned grossly. They thereby forfeited their place of honor to Joseph, who received the blessing of the firstborn toward the end of Genesis (Gen 48:5; 49:4-7, 26). Moses and Aaron are mortals whose lives were set in wider kin circles of other mortals. That is, they are historically contingent individuals, dependent on and existing in a series of temporally limited generations in history.
In other words, who is this little Moses to question the big, infinite, eternal God? Probably to reinforce such a point, the narrative repeats what it was saying before it digressed. “This was the very Aaron and Moses to whom the Lord said, ‘Bring the Israelites out of Egypt by their hosts.’ They were the very ones who spoke to Pharaoh king of Egypt to bring the Israelites from Egypt—that was this same Moses and Aaron” (Exod 6:26-27). The Hebrew text seems emphatic.
God commanded small people to do a big thing; the big thing succeeded not because Moses and Aaron were so great, but because God is so great. God did make Moses increasingly into the servant that God was calling him to be, but Moses was a vessel, an agent, a messenger through whom God worked, and Exodus is emphatic about this point. He is to speak to Pharaoh what God spoke to him (6:29); that is what a messenger does. Messengers of kings can’t boast as if they are kings themselves; we cannot boast as if we originated the message. We are just messengers, agents of the one who sent us.
Moses himself would not have wanted it any other way; he was, after all, the lowliest, humblest man in the whole world (Num 12:3). That was one reason that God could use him. God uses the weak things of the world to confound the powerful (such as Pharaoh), that the honor might belong to the Lord himself alone (Isa 42:8; 48:11; John 5:44; 2 Cor 13:4; esp. 1 Cor 1:27-29).
We all know ministers who got messed up because they got big heads, forgetting where God had brought them from. Should God choose to use us because we are weak, we must never to forget he chose us as weak vessels (cf. Deut 6:10-12; 1 Sam 15:17). He gets the credit, and we have the privilege of watching what he does even through us.
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