The Deliverer (6 page)
“Mighty God, You know I am a murderer. My execution awaits me if I go back to Egypt.”
“Those who wanted your life are now dead,” God responded.
“But suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is His name?’ then what shall I tell them?”
Good question; very good question, Moses.
I knew God by many names: Yahweh, Elohim, Hashem, El Shaddai, and others. His creation called His name by what it saw Him do. I wondered which of these names God would assign to Himself for the task He was proposing.
God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’’’
Moses was still standing, but I wasn’t. I was slammed to the ground by the force of God’s words. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t. The weight of “I AM” sat on top of me.
“Say to the Israelites, ‘The God of your fathers—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—has sent me to you.’ This is My name forever, the name by which I am to be remembered from generation to generation.”
It went on like that for seven days. God would lay out the plan for Moses, and Moses would explain to God why His plan could not possibly work. Finally, God told Moses to go to the elders of Israel and tell them the cavalry was coming and Moses was leading them. Together they were to go to Pharaoh and announce the exodus of the Jews. With my face still smashed into the sand all that time and goats sniffing around my protruding backside, I found myself wondering how God thought this was going to happen.
“Surely God doesn’t think Moses can just drop in unannounced on the ruler of Egypt and get past the front door. How would Moses, a goatherd, a nobody, get in front of Pharaoh?” I puzzled it for a moment.
“Of course he can,” I mumbled into the sand. I tried unsuccessfully to levitate myself up out of the dirt as I answered my own question. “The old pharaoh is dead. Ramses is on the throne. He and Moses were once brothers. Of course he’ll get in.”
God told Moses exactly what would happen. Ramses would resist. There would be signs and wonders. Plagues would be unleashed, but at the end of the day, Moses and the Israelites would leave Egypt with the plunder. Moses found his tongue and began to negotiate with God.
“What if they don’t believe me or listen to me and say, ‘God did not appear to you’?”
Now God had been talking to Moses for about a week, saying the same thing over and over. When God didn’t strike him dead right there on the spot for lack of belief or at least terminal thickheadedness, I couldn’t stand it. It was probably a good thing for me that I was stuck in the sand, because if I could have gotten up, I would have risked my life to get in front of God just to ask Him a few questions of my own.
“God,” I would have said, “just what is Your definition of
fair
? How do the humans get away with it? Why do You allow them to question You? They express serious doubts about You, and not only do You let them live, but You also answer their doubt. Take just a moment here and think about my case. I never doubted You in the least. I had one fleeting moment of uncertainty, a simple question for clarity’s sake when the rebellion started. Do You think I would have followed that maniac in his self-destruction if I had been allowed just one minute to think things over? Why do You allow the humans to do what You would not allow the angels to do—question You? How is that fair?”
Not even a little put out by Moses’s doubt, God said to him, “What is that in your hand?”
“A staff.”
“Throw it on the ground.”
Moses threw it on the ground, and it became a snake, and he ran from it, which is just what I would have done if I could have stood up.
Then God said, “Reach out your hand and take it by the tail.”
So Moses reached out and took hold of the snake, and it turned back into a staff in his hand.
“This is so that they may believe that the God of their fathers has indeed appeared to you.”
I thought I couldn’t bear to hear another word as God went on and on as to how He was going to address Moses’s every concern. When I thought Moses had gone as far as he dared, he went further.
“O Lord, I have never been eloquent. I am slow of speech, and sometimes I stutter when I’m nervous.”
With my head still in the sand, I couldn’t see it, but I could feel the bush flame hotter. I could tell God was just about done negotiating.
“Who gave man his mouth? Who makes him deaf or mute? Who gives him sight or makes him blind? Is it not I? Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.”
If Moses had any brains, he’d get going while the getting’s good. He may have been treading on holy ground, but it sounded to me like he was close to treading on God’s last nerve.
When Moses spoke again, I was convinced he was addled. It must have been those years of talking to goats. Talking goats, talking bush, probably not all that different in his mind. That must have been it. Otherwise, he never would have dared say what he did.
“O Lord, please send someone else to do it.”
The sand where I was planted got hotter and hotter as God’s wrath burned against Moses. This had to be it. I couldn’t see how God could indulge him any further. But He did. When I heard God agree to allow Aaron, Moses’s brother, to accompany him and speak for him, I quit trying to get up and hoped I would die right there in the sand. I was exhausted and frustrated at the way God let these humans get by with things that would never have been allowed in the angelic realm. The last thing I remember was the crumpling of my wing as a goat laid down on it.
The ground was cold, the night was dark, and everyone was gone when I came around and realized the weight of “I AM” had lifted from my back. Shaking my wings back into shape, I looked around and, seeing no one, wondered if Moses was still alive after challenging God the way he had. Dead or alive, he was nowhere to be seen; even the goats were gone. Finding a flat sandstone, I sat down and tried to think about what had happened.
After a while, I figured it out. The desert had not killed Moses, but it had humbled him. So much so that he was likely the humblest man on all the earth. His questioning God was not because he doubted God but because he doubted himself. Moses couldn’t get over his sense of unworthiness, so he begged God to use someone like Aaron, a person he thought to be holier than himself and more worthy of being chosen by God. At least Aaron was not guilty of ever having killed someone like Moses had done. Moses believed he had failed God years ago and was now of no use to Him at all. And God, of course, could not resist that kind of humility.
If I had ever doubted, there was now no possibility Moses might fail.
As I flapped my way back to the second heaven, I thought about the contrast between the arrogance of Satan and the humility of Moses. Satan’s unrestrained pride caused one-third of the angels to fall to their doom. Moses’s complete lack of self would redeem a nation. I wanted to rub the irony in Satan’s face when I returned to his lair, but I would never have had the nerve to do such a thing. I couldn’t help but think about the Hebrews and their unrelenting belief for more than four centuries that someday, some way, a deliverer was coming for them. Even as hundreds of them died every day in the mud pits, the rest of them continued their song of hope.
“My deliverer is coming. My deliverer is standing by.”
I wondered how they knew.
I
S THAT
the best you can come up with?” Satan’s sarcasm was intended to minimize the importance of my report lest for one minute I might take pride in bringing him useful information. “Am I supposed to believe God came up with a ridiculous plan like this?”
I told him word for word the conversation I’d heard between God and Moses in the desert, but he wouldn’t believe I hadn’t left something out of the story. It sounded too simple. That’s another of the countless ways in which Satan is different from God. God makes things simple, especially when it comes to humans. Satan, on the other hand, makes things as convoluted as possible.
“Let me see if I have this right. Moses will just mosey into Ramses’ throne room with a stick in his hand, and Ramses will hand over the slaves. Is that what you expect to happen?”
“Something like that, sir. Of course there’s going to be hail, frogs, flies, blood in the river, all that at first, but at the end of it all, Moses will leave with the slaves.”
“Are you suggesting I don’t have the power to stop the exodus of the Hebrews?” Satan was beginning to sizzle. Trick question.
What should I say?
My mind worked double time trying to come up with an answer with the least physical consequences for me.
“No, of course not, Your Terribleness. With the humans, you’ve always got a shot because of that misconceived idea of free will God programmed into them. Moses has to obey every step of the way by an act of his will. It hasn’t been hard for him so far. But he’s been out of town for a long time, and when he comes back and sees the grandeur of Egypt and its gods (us, of course), he might realize the absurdity of the whole idea and go home. He might begin to doubt whether the burning bush really happened; maybe it was just a mirage. That sort of thing happens in the desert a lot, you know. We could help with that. Speak confusion into his dreams; suggest to his friends that he got into a hallucinogenic weed or something. It could work.”
Satan ignored my suggestions and turned to Bezel and the other chief demons.
“Station your guards in Ramses’ court. Be ready when Moses arrives.”
“We’ve had a platoon on the wall for forty years, master,” Bezel answered. “Do you really think we need more guards?”
Satan didn’t have to answer. All he had to do was cast those awful eyes toward the demon who thought he could question Satan’s decision.
“Right away, sir,” Bezel said meekly as he backed away.
Off they went in blind obedience whether they had a game plan or not. As they were leaving, I decided it would be a good time to slip out the side door and get back to my perch. Satan stepped on my tail as I crept out.
“Did I dismiss you?” he scowled. “Let me know the moment Moses steps into the city. Don’t let him get past you. You will rue the day if he does. Now get back to your post.”
That was exactly what I was trying to do.
I supposed God must have spoken to Aaron when I wasn’t paying attention. That would explain why he was headed out to the desert to meet Moses. In any event, the two of them met with the elders, handled the protocol of leaving, and before he had a chance to rethink the whole idea, Moses, his son, and Zipporah were on their way to the city.
I couldn’t wait to see the look on Moses’s face when he stepped over the crest of the sand dune and beheld Egypt in all of its glory, something he hadn’t seen in forty years. I left my perch and flew down to where he was standing, careful not to make any noise or do anything to let him know he wasn’t alone. I wanted to see what the Temple of Karnak looked like from his perspective.
I closed my eyes tightly and tried to imagine I was a human. I do that from time to time because even after all these centuries, I’m still amazed how the human race has survived against Satan’s demons. I’ve often wondered if God secretly regretted having made mankind of such inferior materials. He handicapped the entire race right from the beginning. Think about it. The whole mortality issue for humans is a terrible motivator when He needs them to go to war. Man knows he is finite. No matter how he lives or how he dies, at the end of it all, his death will be the same as the worst or best who ever lived. By contrast, even if a demon loses a battle with a human, he doesn’t die. God should have fixed this inequity centuries ago.
Humans, on the other hand, not only die, but also many of you are
willing
to die on the basis of your perceived relationship with God. Why? You die and then what? You can’t be sure what, if anything, awaits you after death. Why jeopardize the life you at least have some control over now by taking impossible orders from a God who you can’t be sure exists at all. And if He does exist, He’s been known to disappear for hundreds of years at a time with no explanation at all as to where He’s been.
And while we’re talking about it, the whole idea of the natural combating the supernatural, man against the demonic realm, is preposterous. Whose idea was that? I have a hard time imagining God came up with it on His own.
Look at the facts. Demons don’t bleed. Let’s start right there. You humans function as a result of your blood. Poke a hole in your feeble flesh, let the blood run out, and there you go—dead human. Demons cannot be physically hurt by man, and that’s just the plain fact of the matter. Humans can swing at us all the livelong day, but you cannot actually touch us. The only warfare weapon you have against us it to entreat God to dispatch the warring heavenly angels against us on your behalf. Fortunately for us, most of you never figure it out. Demons have extraordinary strength and are cunning and invisible. You humans are weak by comparison, not all that bright in my observation, and clearly visible. What kind of contest is that? Unless God has some idea of a better line of defense for you somewhere down the road, you cannot possibly win. Tell the truth—at least some of you from time to time must have thought that God set you up for failure. Certainly Satan has tried telling you that for years.