He saw him who is invisible

In Hebrews 11:27, it was “By faith that Moses left Egypt, not fearing the king’s anger; he persevered because he saw him who is invisible.”

So God must have revealed himself in such a way that Moses could carry on doing that God wanted him to do, no matter what the enraged leader of the most powerful nation in the world at that time threw at him. But how did God get that across to Moses?

There’s a clue in Exodus 3:1, when Moses had moved his father-in-law’s sheep to Mount Horeb, and there God spoke to him from a burning bush saying, “I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” (6), and “I’m sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt” (10) and to “this (same) mountain” (12).

Moses wonders how the Israelites will react, to which God replies in verse 14, “Tell them: ‘I AM has sent me to you’” – ‘I AM’ is the same as “The Lord” (16) – and this was to be his “name throughout the generations” (15). Which to the Israelites would be a new way of seeing God, because as God himself said in Exodus 6:3, “by my name ‘the Lord’ I did not make myself known to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”

Instead, he’d made himself known to them as El Shaddai, “God Almighty” (3), because in making a “covenant with them to give them the land of Canaan” (4), it got the point across that he had the power to make such a promise. But in making the promise come to pass, it would be by his name YHWH, “the Lord,” the ever-present one, to also get the point across that “I have watched over you and seen what’s been done to you in Egypt” (3:16), and “I will rescue you from your slavery, redeem you by mighty acts of judgment, take you as my own people and be your God, and give you the land I promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” (6:6-8). 

Because “Then you’ll know that I am the Lord your God” (7); now they’d see him who is invisible in his obvious awareness of their troubles and his committed presence to help them. And when that God became visible to Moses “he left Egypt, not fearing the king’s anger,” Hebrews 11:27, because no matter what the future held, the “I am the Lord” (Exodus 6:8) – that name of God – was the God who’d promised him “I will be with you” (3:12). 

And that same God in the same way would be with those in Hebrews too, which is just what they needed to hear, because they’d been “Losing heart because of suffering”….(next blog)