4:24-26
The whole story is quite amazing, and we now come to another amazing part of it. The Lord meets Moses and is about to kill him! There are two amazing things about this. The first is that it has taken quite an effort to get Moses on the road, one would think that God would breathe a sigh of relief! The second is that God has chosen Moses for this task, and is now about to kill him. How does that work? The reason was that their son had not been circumcised. There are many lessons we can draw from this. One is that when we are chosen by God there is a demand for greater holiness (eg. Eph 1:4; 5:27). Secondly, it is his wife Zipporah who has the spiritual insight to see what needs to be done. There is a time for men to listen to women! A woman not having authority over a man does not mean that God will never use the woman to speak to the man. We know that in the New Testament the issue of circumcision caused many arguments, Acts 15, Galatians and Romans being the main examples. Abraham was circumcised, here it was clearly important for Moses, and these two examples are both prior to the Law. So we can perhaps appreciate why some of the Jewish Christians considered it to be so important. Finally, Moses’ son not being circumcised was not a new situation. Why did God suddenly bring the matter up now? There may be issues in our life that have been an issue for a long time, but God seems to have been happy to overlook them, then suddenly He demands that the issue be addressed. And God’s timing will seem to be the most awkward possible.
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