An Early Baptism

When the child grew older, she took him to Pharaoh’s daughter and he became her son. She named him Moses, saying, “I drew him out of the water.”

 - Exodus 2:10

The command had gone out from Pharaoh, to cast every boy born to the Hebrews, into the Nile River.

How many times have you read this account from Scripture? How many times has it been read to you? Dozens of times? Scores? Surely we all know that Pharaoh had ordered the execution of all the baby boys born to the Hebrews. 

Baby boys.

If a Hebrew woman became pregnant, and gave birth to a boy, the baby was taken instantly, and thrown into the river, where presumably he would float down and perhaps wind up in the Mediterranean. There's no telling what was to be the final state of these babies. 

Were they typically thrown in, alive? How much thinking do we do as newborns? Do we feel fear? Pain? Loneliness? Sadness?

These thoughts do not enter the minds of people that kill babies. If it can't talk back to you, it doesn't count. Has it ever occurred to you what monsters these servants of Pharaoh were? Even Hitler's Nazis would recoil in horror at the thought of it!

And what's the result, when governments start destroying our most innocent people? Slavery, more violence, war . . . it doesn't get better. Evil always begets more evil. And evildoers always reap what they sow.

My thinking is that we need to read this passage with new eyes, and let the real meaning of what happened sear our hearts and souls. Moses emerged out of the most vile of societies, perhaps in the world's history. And when we see the same thing happening today, we can either ignore it, or respond as though it were our own baby boys being thrown into the Nile. 

So the Nile River represented the most depraved form of death. Remember now . . . death was our punishment for sin. In the end, we all die. We die because we are selfish, vile, sinful creatures. God did not want such to live forever. 

If death is a curse, humanity has become quite adept at making it worse still, by the manner in which we kill; the people we kill, and the reasons we kill. We kill in ways that make it even clearer why we must die in the first place.

But Moses' mother placed him, as a baby, in a basket, on the bank of the Nile. They must have had guards all over the place, making sure all baby boys were surely placed on the way to their certain death. When she could hide him no longer, at three months of age, she took him out among the reeds of the Nile, along the banks. Maybe she was being watched by Egyptian sentries. 

But carefully she placed him where he would be safe, while ostensibly following Pharaoh's dictate to kill him. 

But out of the Nile, where Hebrew baby boys died, an Egyptian woman found the baby Moses, and took him in. Like a baptism, into the water and out of it, from death to life, Moses came forth. This signaled new life for the Hebrews . . . and in the end, became life for all of us.