His Silence Is Not Absence

Most of us carry a tidy formula: Old Testament is Moses and law, New Testament is Jesus and grace. Read the Old Testament properly and it falls apart. Moses, the man whose name is welded to the law, turns out to be a study in grace operating long before any law arrives in Israel. The full life this series keeps describing is never the wish list of the comfortable life you wanted. It is a life where God's will gets done through you.

In Moses, that grace shows up in four places you would rather not look.

Four Hundred Years in Four Verses

Genesis ends high, with Joseph second in charge of the most powerful nation in the ancient world and the family restored. Exodus opens on a different note entirely. Four hundred years pass in four verses. Joseph dies, his brothers die, that whole generation dies, the people multiply, a new king rises who does not know Joseph, and the oppression begins. Four centuries, and not one person inside them is named.

The arithmetic is worth doing. Pastor Josh's father is ninety-two and has grandchildren, so four generations fit inside a century in his family. Four hundred years is that, four times over.

If your own life feels like one of those unnamed generations, that is the point of the passage rather than an accident of it. You go to work, you come home, you think about what to eat tomorrow, and you ask what your purpose is. His wife Yoonah has asked it about herself for years.

Do you see that sometimes we feel, I feel like my life is invisible. No one notices, no one sees. We are in this footnote.

The answer is not that your life is secretly spectacular.

His silence does not mean His absence.

Those four verses are not empty. Seventy people walked into Egypt as a family and a nation walked out. Four hundred years in a foreign country and they still knew they were Israelites, before the law, before Sinai. Grace preserved them, and not one of those ordinary generations lived to see what it was for. You do not have to manufacture meaning for a life God is already using.

Sometimes Your Only Job Is to Live

Pastor Josh has been through depression, and said plainly that taking his own life had looked like the easier choice at the time. He knows that psychology from the inside. The only reason he lived was that God said no, and in that season living rather than dying was the greatest thing he could do.

It doesn't have to be spectacular. It doesn't have to be colorful. Just live today. Survive today and you will see what I can accomplish through your life.

Years ago at a youth conference overseas he threw out his prepared message and preached one he called "the reason why we shouldn't die today". He told the room about his own depression, and the whole room broke down. If that is you, talk to somebody today, and then live, day by day.

You Are Not in a Picnic, You Are in a Battle Zone

Silence was not Israel's only problem. Pharaoh got insecure about the numbers and ordered the Hebrew boys killed, and in the middle of that the text says the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied. Grace was working inside the crisis rather than arriving after it.

Expect that pattern to repeat. Wherever God works to accomplish His will there is opposition: your own flesh, the world, and the power of darkness. Ephesians 6 is direct that we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Paul never simply got upset with the man in front of him. He looked for the person behind that person.

Your husband is not the issue. Your wife is not the issue, really. Your job may not be the issue.

Apply that to the week after a spiritual high. After camp comes the unexpected family fight, the lost work, the flatness nobody can explain. Early in ministry Pastor Josh fought with Yoonah every Sunday morning, and his first diagnosis was that she had a problem. Once they saw the timing never varied they made a rule: on Sunday mornings, they do not go there. So do not underestimate prayer. The intercessory team covered camp for weeks and nobody saw a minute of it.

The Grace in What You Didn't Choose

Moses' mother hid him three months, and when she could hide him no longer she put him in a basket among the reeds. Read that as someone's life rather than a fairy tale, in a cruel ancient world. Pharaoh's daughter came down to bathe and decided to keep him. His own mother was paid wages to nurse her own son, and a Hebrew boy grew up in the palace of the king who wanted him dead.

Moses chose none of it, and neither did you. Your face, your personality, your parents. Pastor Josh has argued with God about this one, asking for years why he had ulcerative colitis, a disease he was told at the time was a white people's sickness.

Because of that sickness I went through, I became a better pastor. Because of the struggle I went through, I could actually empathize more with the people going through hardship.

Then came Skye's ADHD diagnosis, and her follow-up: "Dad, I think you have ADHD too." She was right. That is either a curse you call unfair, or part of how God built a man who can run three campuses like a wild horse. You are the way you are because God chose you.

The Grace in What You Did Choose

Then there is the other pile. Moses grew up, saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, looked this way and that, and killed him. Call it a saviour complex. He took the matter into his own hands and thought nobody saw. Somebody always sees. Pharaoh heard, and Moses ran to Midian.

Notice the timing of the call. God did not use Moses while he was on fire to put the world right. He came for him only after the palace, the authority and every trace of the saviour were gone.

A man who is full of himself, there's no room for God to work. The first thing God does, empty him.

If you are carrying consequences you have never said out loud, ones that have already shaped how you see yourself, the gospel covers the things you did not choose and the things you did. Grace does not stop.

Grace Starts at I Don't Deserve It

Law is the symbol of our effort to reach God: grab His attention, make Him like us, earn enough favour that we deserve His power. Grace begins from the opposite end.

But grace, starting point is, I don't deserve it. I can't own this. I can't make it happen. I'm just sitting here acknowledging who I am. And that's where God comes and says, now you're ready.

So live. In the season of height and the season of low, in obvious activity and in silence, knowing He is the God of grace.

• If God feels silent, He is not absent. Live today.
• If you are in a crisis, treat prayer as the battlefield engagement it is.
• If you did not choose it, tell God you are satisfied in His decision.
• If you are paying for what you chose, let Him empty you.

Or as they said it to each other on the way out: let's have full life in Christ.