Exodus 4:13

These verses come near the end of the long conversation at the burning bush in Exodus 3–4, which began when Moses, keeping sheep in Midian, came to the mountain of God (Exodus 3:1). God had remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Exodus 2:24–25). He has now told Moses his name, “I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus 3:14), and has commissioned him to bring Israel out of Egypt.

Moses has answered with one objection after another. He asked who he was to go, and what name he should give when the people asked who had sent him (Exodus 3:11–13). Then he said the people would refuse to believe him (Exodus 4:1), and God gave him three signs: the rod that became a serpent, the hand that turned leprous and was healed, and the water of the river that would turn to blood (Exodus 4:2–9). With verse 10 Moses turns to his own speech, and in verse 13 he will ask to be let off altogether.

His own history lies behind the reluctance. He was rescued as a baby and brought up in Pharaoh’s household (Exodus 2:1–10), he killed an Egyptian and fled to Midian (Exodus 2:11–15), and he has lived there as a shepherd for forty years. A man with that failure behind him and those quiet years around him is now told to stand before Pharaoh, the most powerful ruler of his day, whom Egypt treated as a god-king, and to lead a great enslaved people out from under him. In Egypt and in Israel alike a leader or an envoy was expected to speak well, and a prophet’s whole work is to speak the words of God. So the weakness Moses names was a serious one for the task in front of him.

Moses describes a real and lasting difficulty in speaking. “I am not eloquent” is literally “I am not a man of words”, since dâbâr is the ordinary Hebrew noun for a word or speech. He adds “neither heretofore, nor since thou hast spoken unto thy servant”. “Heretofore” translates the pair shilshôwm and tᵉmôwl, the Hebrew way of saying “in time past”. Moses is saying that he has always been this way, and that even now, with God speaking to him (the verb is dâbar, to speak), nothing has changed.

Then he names the trouble. “Slow” comes twice in verse 10, and both times it is kâbêd, which literally means heavy. He is “heavy of mouth” (kevad peh) and “heavy of tongue” (kevad lashon), where lâshôwn is the tongue itself, the organ of speech. The wording points to a physical difficulty in getting words out, such as a stammer, and that fits what follows, because God goes on to give him another man to do the speaking. Scripture leaves the exact trouble unnamed.

He says all this humbly. “O my Lord” is bîy ʼĂdônây. The little word bîy is a word of entreaty, a request for leave to speak, and ʼĂdônây is the title of reverence that owns God as Lord and Master. Moses also calls himself “thy servant”. The narrator, for his part, uses the covenant name Yᵉhôvâh, which the KJV prints as “the LORD”. So the scene is a servant pleading with the Master he acknowledges, and with the covenant God who has just made himself known to him by name.

God’s reply turns Moses’ eyes from his own mouth to the One who made it. “Who hath made man’s mouth?” The word for man is ʼâdâm, a human being or mankind as a whole, and peh is the mouth, which also stands for speech itself. The question needs no answer from Moses, because God gives it himself: “have not I the LORD?” The mouth Moses calls too heavy for the work was fashioned by the God who is sending him, and the Maker of speech is well able to make it serve his purpose.

The second question widens the claim. “Who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind?” Speech, hearing and sight, and the lack of each, are all set under God’s hand. The pairs cover the whole range of human ability and inability, so that nothing about a person’s body falls outside his knowledge and rule. David praises God for the same truth when he says that God formed him in his mother’s womb and that he is fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:13–14), and through Isaiah the LORD says that he forms the light and creates darkness (Isaiah 45:7).

The answer closes on the name. Yᵉhôvâh is the name God had just revealed at the bush, the name of the One who is, the self-existent and eternal God, and it is the name tied to his covenant. The God who made every mouth is the same God who has bound himself to Israel and is now speaking with Moses face to face.

On the strength of that, the command comes again: “Now therefore go.” The verb yâlak means to walk or to go, and here it is a plain order. The “therefore” ties it to verse 11. Since the LORD made the mouth, the state of Moses’ mouth gives him no ground for staying where he is.

With the command comes a promise that fits the fear exactly. Moses complained of his mouth, and God says, “I will be with thy mouth.” The Hebrew behind “I will be with” is ‘ehyeh ‘im, the language of God’s own active presence, and here that presence is promised to the very part of Moses that he thought would fail. God will also “teach” him what to say (wəhôrêtîkā). The verb is yârâh, a word used for throwing and shooting, for rain, and for pointing something out, and so for teaching. Moses will be shown what to say, and the message will be God’s from the start.

God spoke to Jeremiah in the same way. Jeremiah also pleaded that he was unable to speak, and the LORD told him to go, promised to be with him, touched his mouth and put his words in it (Jeremiah 1:6–9). Jesus gave his disciples the matching promise for the day they would stand before rulers: they were to take no anxious thought about what to say, because it would be given to them in that hour, and the Spirit of their Father would speak in them (Matthew 10:19–20, Luke 12:11–12). The way God gave words to Moses and the prophets was particular to them, and the principle holds for the church: the Holy Spirit gives believers wisdom, boldness and fitting words when they are called to speak for God, and by his power they are Christ’s witnesses to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8).

Moses answers the promise with a polite refusal. “And he said” uses ʼâmar, the everyday verb for saying, and what he says begins as humbly as before: “O my Lord”, ʼĂdônây again, with the same word of entreaty, “I pray thee”. Then comes the request: “send, I pray thee, by the hand of him whom thou wilt send.”

The verb shâlach means to send, and “send” comes twice in verse 13. “By the hand of” uses yâd, the hand, in the common Hebrew idiom for the agent through whom something is done. Put together, Moses is asking God to send the message through whomever he pleases, and the meaning is plain enough: please send anyone else. He grants that God has every right to choose his messenger. What he resists is God’s choice of him. The same reflex shows itself in the men who wanted to follow Jesus once other things were settled first (Luke 9:59–62).

“Is not Aaron the Levite thy brother?” The question reminds Moses of a helper God had ready all along. Aaron is his elder brother, of the tribe of Levi, the tribe that would later serve as priests, and Aaron himself would be called by God to be the first high priest (Hebrews 5:4). “I know that he can speak well” doubles the verb dâbar in Hebrew (dabber yidbar), a construction that stresses the point: Aaron can certainly speak. The man of heavy mouth is matched with a fluent one, and God, who knows both brothers, fits the gift to the need.

Two details follow that show how far ahead God’s care runs. “Behold, he cometh forth to meet thee”: Aaron is already on the road while Moses is still objecting. And “when he seeth thee, he will be glad in his heart”: the helper will come willingly, with a brother’s affection, after the long years apart.

The last command returns to something Moses already holds. “Take” is lâqach, a broad verb for taking, receiving and carrying, and here it is an order to take the rod up for use. “Rod” is maṭṭeh, a branch, and so a staff for walking, ruling or correcting. It is the shepherd’s staff of Moses’ daily work, the tool for guiding, guarding and counting sheep, and the same rod that became a serpent earlier in the chapter. A few verses on it is called “the rod of God” (Exodus 4:20).

With it Moses will “do signs”. The word is ʼôwth (in the plural, ‘otot), a signal, token or mark, and so a miracle that serves as evidence. A sign in this sense carries a message. These signs are given so that Israel will believe that the God of their fathers has sent Moses, and so that Pharaoh will learn whose power he is facing. Egypt had its magicians, and the signs done with the rod would show the LORD supreme over them and over all Egypt’s gods as the plagues unfolded from Exodus 7:14 onward.

The rod appears again and again in what follows. A rod is stretched out over the waters of Egypt and they turn to blood (Exodus 7:19). Moses lifts it over the sea and the waters divide (Exodus 14:16). He strikes the rock with it and water comes out for the people (Exodus 17:6). An ordinary stick has no power of its own, which is exactly why God uses it: the power is seen to be his.

Moses is one case of something God does throughout Scripture. He cut Gideon’s army down to three hundred men so that Israel could never claim that its own hand had saved it (Judges 7:2–7). Paul tells the Corinthians that God has chosen the foolish and weak things of the world to confound the wise and the mighty, so that no flesh should glory in his presence (1 Corinthians 1:26–29). And when Paul asked for his own weakness to be removed, the Lord answered him, “my strength is made perfect in weakness”, so that Paul learned to say that when he was weak, then he was strong (2 Corinthians 12:9–10). The same apostle could say, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” (Philippians 4:13).

So a deliverer with a heavy tongue was God’s deliberate choice. When Israel came out of Egypt and received the law, everyone could see that it was God’s doing, since the man at the front could hardly have talked a nation free.

Moses the deliverer, prophet and lawgiver points forward to Christ, and this passage shows the difference between them. Moses was no man of words. Jesus is the Word himself, who was in the beginning with God and was God (John 1:1), and who was made flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). He taught as one having authority (Matthew 7:29), his words are spirit and life (John 6:63), and whoever has seen him has seen the Father (John 14:9). He spoke only what the Father gave him to speak (John 12:49–50). “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1–2).

Moses asked that another be sent. The Son said, “Lo, I come (in the volume of the book it is written of me,) to do thy will, O God” (Hebrews 10:7). He is the One truly sent by the Father, that the world through him might be saved (John 3:17). He took up the burden that no one else could carry, bearing our griefs and our iniquities (Isaiah 53:4–6) and becoming obedient unto death, even the death of the cross (Philippians 2:8).

Moses stood to Aaron in the place of God, and Aaron served as his mouth. In Christ both meet in one person, truly God and truly man, the one Mediator between God and men (1 Timothy 2:5), and no one comes to the Father but by him (John 14:6). Aaron the spokesman became Aaron the high priest, and Christ is both the Apostle and High Priest of our profession (Hebrews 3:1), the great high priest through whom we come boldly to the throne of grace (Hebrews 4:14–16).

The God who said “Who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind?” walked among us in Jesus, who made a deaf man hear and loosed his tongue (Mark 7:32–37) and gave sight to a man born blind (John 9:1–7). And where Moses did signs with a rod in his hand, Jesus is himself the sign God promised, Immanuel (Isaiah 7:14). His miracles came from his own authority. The first of them showed his glory (John 2:11), and he pointed to his works as the proof that the Father was in him (John 10:38). The rod served a rescue from slavery in Egypt, and Christ by his own blood obtained eternal redemption (Hebrews 9:11–14). Revelation shows him at the last ruling the nations with a rod of iron (Revelation 19:15).

The promise made to Moses and Aaron, “I will teach you what ye shall do”, has its fuller form in Christ’s gift of the Spirit, who teaches his people and brings Christ’s words to their remembrance (John 14:26) and who leads the sons of God (Romans 8:14).

This passage is honest about Moses, and that honesty is a kindness to us. The man who would lead Israel through the sea began by listing his faults and asking to be excused, and God’s purpose for him held firm through all of it. The LORD knew the heavy tongue before he called him, since he had made the mouth.

It also shows how God supplies what is lacking. To Moses he gave his own presence, the words to say, a brother who was already on the road, and a use for the staff that was in his hand. He gives to his people still by his presence, by his word, by other believers whose gifts make up for ours, and by the ordinary things of our lives put to his service. Whatever work he gives, he gives with it what the work requires.

And the passage keeps us truthful about our excuses. Moses’ words were humble and his request was still a refusal, and the LORD was displeased with it. A low opinion of ourselves can sit alongside a low opinion of God’s promise. The answer he gave Moses is the answer for every fear of that kind: “have not I the LORD?”