pherd, the first thing Moses does is try to get out of it: "Who am I . . . ?" he says, along with about a half-dozen other objections. But when the Lord is talking to you, and you're really listening to what He has to say, you aren't going to beat Him.
So Moses, kind of reluctantly, carries out the Lord's will by going back to Egypt where Pharaoh puts up quite a fight, and we have the plagues and all. But we know that Moses leads the people out of Egypt, how the Red Sea parts for the Israelites and consumes the Egyptians, and they begin to wander in the wilderness. But did you know that Jesus was with the people?
It's true. Let's take a look at Exodus, Chapter 23, beginning at verse 20. Here's Moses up on top of Mount Sinai, where he and God are having a pretty serious chat. Just a couple of pages earlier, God gave Moses the ten commandments, and He's been giving him a lot of other rules and regulations to go with them. But then, in Chapter 23, we start to read about the Promised Land, and how the Israelites are going to take possession of it. And here's where we first read about Jesus.
"Behold, I am going to send an angel before you to guard you along the way, and to bring you into the place which I have prepared" (v. 20) That angel is Jesus. "Be on your guard before him and obey his voice; do not be rebellious toward him, for he will not pardon your transgression, since My name is in him" (v. 21).
Now, this is God talking directly to Moses. A German theologian by the name of Karl Barth wrote that "We shall have to regard God's speech as also God's act, and God's act as also God's mystery" (133). And what is the mystery? That long before the prophets of Israel would speak of the Messiah, Jesus had already been with them. Barth also wrote that the Bible is not just so many words but that it is "God's revelation in proclamation and Scripture, we must understand it in its identity with God Himself. God...