Every year for as long as I can remember, my family has watched the 1956 movie version of The Ten Commandments around Easter. It’s all about the life of Moses from the time he was born until his death, just before the Israelites crossed over into the Promised Land. My favorite scenes are toward the beginning because I am in awe of how God protected Baby Moses from death because of the plan that He had for Moses' life. It reminds me each time that God does the same for all of us: His plan for our lives will not be thwarted even if our enemy seeks to destroy us.
The story of baby Moses begins during a time when pharaoh ordered the death of all Hebrew male infants. To save him, Moses’ mother, Jochebed, placed him in a basket and set him afloat on the Nile River. By God’s providence, pharaoh’s daughter discovered the basket and decided to adopt Moses. Unknowingly, she hired Moses’ own mother to nurse him. This miraculous rescue set the stage for Moses’ future role in delivering the Israelites from Egyptian bondage.
If you read the entire Bible, you see that it is not a collection of individual stories of individual people or nations with whom God interacted. It is one long story, each person and chapter building on the previous one, reaching a climax with God’s redemption of the world through His Son Jesus. Therefore, to understand the significance of Baby Moses’ birth and life, we need to go back further in time to those happenings that set up his story and his relationship with God.
Abraham was the first person (after the flood in Noah’s day) that God set apart from all of humanity as one with whom God would covenant; God would protect and provide if Abraham would follow His lead.
Abraham had one son and two grandsons. One of these grandsons was Jacob, who became the father of the twelve tribes of Israel that God ordained through the birth of twelve sons. Of these boys, Joseph was favored by their father, so his jealous brothers sold him into slavery. Many years later, Joseph ended up in prison in Egypt, but when God gave him the ability to interpret a dream of the pharaoh, Joseph was promoted to second in command in all of Egypt. That’s a statement we don’t want to fly by too quickly: Joseph, a slave in the dungeons of Egypt one day was pharaoh’s right-hand man the next. His story alone is one that all of us need to remember: God always has the perfect plan even if it doesn’t look perfect at the moment. He will always do what is good and right even if it doesn’t feel good or right at the time.
Joseph invited his father and brothers to Egypt, and there in Egypt, Israelite families began to multiply. Both Joseph and the pharaoh he served died years later, and the new pharaoh didn’t remember Joseph–all he knew was that Joseph’s race, the Israelites, were growing by leaps and bounds. This pharaoh (there is debate over which pharaoh this was) considered a large group of non-Egyptians living in his country a threat and called for them to be enslaved (which they would endure for hundreds of years).
The pharaoh at the time considered how he could reduce the number of Israelites beyond those who were dying from the rigors of slave labor. So pharaoh decided that all Hebrew boys were to be killed so the Israelites couldn’t raise an army against him someday. But God would thwart these plans. One of these Hebrew boys would escape infanticide and be used by God in a mighty way.
Exodus 2:1-10 recounts the story of Moses’ birth and early days. Baby Moses’ parents were Jochebed and Amram, both of the tribe of Levi. They had two children, Aaron and Miriam, before pharaoh decided that male Hebrew infants needed to be eliminated. Then Jochebed became pregnant with another boy and was faced with this new edict. She knew when pharaoh plotted against the Hebrew babies, he commanded midwives to murder them as they were being born. But according to Matthew Henry, “[The midwives] feared God, regarded His law, and dreaded His wrath more than Pharoah’s and therefore saved the male children alive.”
But Jochebed was fearless when it came to her child. He was protected at birth by God’s provision, but how did she keep Baby Moses a secret? The International Standard Bible states, “The mother resolved upon a plan which was at once a pathetic imitation of obedience to the commandment of the king, an adroit appeal to womanly sympathy, and, if it succeeded, a subtle scheme to bring the cruelty of the king home to his own attention. Her faith succeeded. She took an ark of bulrushes ..., daubed it with bitumen mixed with the sticky slime of the river, placed in this floating vessel the child of her love and faith, and put it into the river at a place among the sedge in the shallow water where the royal ladies from the palace would be likely to come down to bathe.”
And that’s exactly what happened. Pharaoh’s own daughter was the one to discover this floating basket. Moses’ sister Miriam had been following his travel from the shore, and when she saw that the princess found him, she emerged and said she would be happy to find a nursemaid for the child. Pharaoh's daughter accepted, and Miriam brought Jochebed, Moses’ own mother, to be his nursemaid. Baby Moses was then adopted into the family of the very man who was trying to kill him. God’s plan for Moses’ life would not be thwarted, and in fact, God would continue to prove to be the sovereign God He promised to Abraham and his descendants. God would use Moses and his brother Aaron to be His spokesmen (while sending 10 different plagues) to convince pharaoh to let His people go.
Every time I watch the scene in The Ten Commandments when Baby Moses’ basket is closed and sent down the river, I’m in awe, not only of his mother’s relentless faith, but also of all the pieces that would come together in this story to show that God was indeed in control. His entire life story is one of miracle after miracle, and one that we as Christians can glean much from for our own life stories.
Mike Leake’s article, “4 Lessons We Can Learn From God’s Protection of Baby Moses” describes the situation so well: “The hand of God behind the rescue of Moses is unmistakable. The timing for the basket to arrive at just the exact moment it needed to for this young Egyptian girl to discover it. The right person discovered the baby at the exact right time and then was given to the boy's very own mother to nurse. These things are not a coincidence. God was clearly working to save this child and place him into an instrumental position within Egypt. Why? Because God had purposed to rescue the Israelites.” But God is not only sovereign in the lives of people to whom He gave great commissions in the Bible. He is just as in control of every bit of our lives, and we can trust His control to get us through whatever we need to endure in life.
Jochebed and Amram knew that children were a gift from the Lord and were to be treasured. They saw the fear of the Hebrew midwives who cared more about pleasing God than pharaoh (who could have them killed). They saw that “God was kind to the midwives and the people increased and became even more numerous” (Exodus 1:20). They knew that to have a son was one of the greatest treasures, and they were not about to let this one be slaughtered. They had tremendous faith in God to care for him with plenty of reasons to believe he wouldn’t survive a perilous journey down the Nile. We are called to that same level of faith because God loves each of us as much as he loved Moses, and He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He is more than able to carry us through waters dangerous and deep.
This article only touches on one small portion of Moses’ life. God would go on to make him a deliverer of God’s people, though he felt ill-equipped to come against pharaoh. God would put Moses in charge of leading millions of people through the Red Sea, communicating God’s law to the people, and wandering in the wilderness for 40 years because the Israelites rebelled continually against God. But that was not the end of the story for us.
Leake goes on to say that “...And [God] purposed to rescue the Israelites because He had purposed to rescue humanity through Jesus Christ.” The Israelites thought they needed to be freed from slavery, but more importantly, they needed to be saved from their sins. They proved that God’s law could not be kept perfectly, and they, like us, needed more than a man to help deliver us from our sins. We needed God Himself to redeem us through His one and only Son. God’s rescue of His people thousands of years ago in the desert points to a greater rescue that is available to everyone in every generation. Hallelujah!
Further Reading
Baby Moses – Bible Story Verses and Summary
Who Was Moses in the Bible?
4 Lessons We Can Learn from God’s Protection of Baby Moses
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain
Mary Oelerich-Meyer is a Chicago-area freelance writer and copy editor who prayed for years for a way to write about and for the Lord. She spent 20 years writing for area healthcare organizations, interviewing doctors and clinical professionals and writing more than 1,500 articles in addition to marketing collateral materials. Important work, but not what she felt called to do. She is grateful for any opportunity to share the Lord in her writing and editing, believing that life is too short to write about anything else. Previously she served as Marketing Communications Director for a large healthcare system. She holds a B.A. in International Business and Marketing from Cornell College (the original Cornell!) When not researching or writing, she loves to spend time with her writer daughter, granddaughter, rescue doggie and husband (not always in that order).