"AS I WAS WITH MOSES ..."

[Harry Foster]

Reading: Joshua 1:1-9.

"Certainly I will be with thee" (Exodus 3:12).

"And he said, My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest" (Exodus 33:14).

"As I was with Moses, so I will be with thee" (Joshua 1:5).


I WANT, as the Lord shall enable me, to bring to you this word as it came to Joshua, who stood on the threshold of an altogether new life, with the land open before him. His whole attitude and purpose was that of Hebrews 6:1: "Let us go on!" And what would be the secret of it all? "As I was with Moses, so I will be with thee." You will remember that there was a moment when the Lord said to Moses: "Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward" (Exodus 14:15); and the purpose of this word is to remind ourselves that the Lord who calls us to go on is the Lord who is leading us on. It is not our strength and our responsibility to go on, it is His, and He pledges Himself and gives Himself to us for that. So my thought is not so much to open up an exposition of Scripture as to impress this deeply on our hearts: God says, 'I am with you!' "The Lord thy God is with thee." He was with Moses -- and how was He with Moses? That is what we want to consider, in order to know the kind of God who says to us: 'I am with you.' Moses His servant is dead, but Moses' God is not dead! He is still alive, and He is still the same! "As I was with Moses, so I will be with thee."


GOD'S PRESENCE A MATTER OF DIVINE GRACE



What was the first characteristic of God's presence with Moses if not that it was a matter of Divine grace? Moses, of course, is the one who is always used to represent the Law, and in some senses he does; but I think he is used very often in that case not so much because he introduced the Law, but because the Law which he introduced and his name became associated, and thus his name became associated with a line of things which were opposed to grace. So in the New Testament it is often Moses, as it were, versus Christ, the Law as against grace; and yet there never was a man in all the record of Scripture who lived his whole life not upon the basis of a legal relationship with God but upon the basis of pure grace.

Turn to the eleventh chapter of the letter to the Hebrews. Here you will read about a mighty man of faith, but before you read about the faith of Moses you find something that happened before ever he had consciousness. The faith was not first of all in him but in his parents. God was with Moses before ever he made the grand decision to be with God. Just let that come home to your hearts! For it is true of you, if you are a man or woman of faith. God alone knows how true it is of all of us! Before ever Moses came to mature years and decided that he would be God's, God provided a love and a faith that took him and presented him to God. Is that not grace? God began the movement, where Moses was concerned. If Moses was going on it was because God started him going on, and so he began on the basis of pure grace.

And then you know how he broke into things when he became forty years old, and, as it seemed, spoiled every purpose that God had for him and had to flee for his life. If the beginning of Moses was grace, the call of Moses was sheer grace, for, after leaving and abandoning all that could be for God, and the forty years' caring for sheep, Moses himself did not resolve in the end that, after all, he would go on. God met him and said: "Certainly I will be with thee!" What grace! When Moses went away to the land of Midian he had forfeited everything. Everything was a failure, a breakdown and a miserable fiasco, and he reveals what went on in his own heart by the names of the children that were given to him. Joseph did the same. When Joseph married in Egypt, he called his first son Manasseh -- "God hath made me to forget": 'The past is finished and my father's house is all gone.' He called his second son (and second thoughts are usually best in the spiritual life) Ephraim: "fruitfulness". Moses called his first son Gershom -- "I am a stranger here": 'I have lost everything, my home, my own people and my adopted people, my mother's home, my foster-mother's home, my prospects, everything that might have been, and even my God. I am a stranger here!' I suppose he felt that he deserved that, for he had cut across God's purpose and got in the way, and all this had happened to him. Mr. Legality was belabouring him rather hard! He [62/63] had another son -- and again second thoughts are best, for he called this one Eliezer: "God is my help." He remarked when he put that name upon the boy: "The Lord saved me from the sword of Pharaoh" (Exodus 18:4). 'I am not dead. Every thing else may have gone wrong, but I am alive, and I am alive by the mercy of God!'

So the whole atmosphere of this call, so far as Moses was concerned was the sheer grace of God to him. God had pitied him and had been his help. And it was the sheer grace of God to the people of Israel. Make no mistake about that! Stephen says that they thrust Moses from them, saying: "Who made thee a prince over us?" They rejected him. Open the third chapter of the book of Exodus, and what do you find? Does God say to His people: 'Well, you are a lot of fools! I have provided you with a man who was to be your deliverer and your judge, and you have rejected him. It serves you right!' The Lord said: "I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt ... and I am come down to deliver them" (Exodus 3:7). It is the grace of God all round whichever way you look at it. Neither Moses nor God's people, Israel, have any claim upon Him at all. If they ever had, they had forfeited it. Oh, but "who is a God like unto thee, that pardoneth iniquity?" (Micah 7:18). He wipes the slate clean. He remembers these erring people, and He remembers Moses, and appears to him in a flame, a burning flame that goes on burning.

Moses did not turn aside to that bush because it was a burning bush. He must have seen thousands of burning bushes; but they all burned out. This was a bush that burned, and went on burning -- the burning flame of God's love and His grace. Moses turned aside to that. The Lord was saying to him: 'I am still here. I still stand by My word and by My promises! Come now, and I will send thee, but not as though I was going away from you, certainly I will be with you!'

"As I was with Moses, so I will be with thee." Moses had died, but Moses' God is still alive. The word to Joshua is the word to us, if we will take it. Let us go on! How shall we go on? "As I was with Moses, so I will be with thee, I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee." But He was with Moses as a God of grace, and if you go through the story with that in view you will be struck by how true it was, how at every turn and step of the way somebody failed, somebody, as it were, let God down. The people doubted Moses, they doubted Aaron, they sinned and yet all the time God went on with His people and He never forsook them. The cloud was always with them by day and the pillar of fire by night. For forty long years God was with them, and always as a God of grace. When Moses sought the revelation of the Divine glory, you will remember that what he received was a revelation of God's grace, and his whole basis of appeal to God for the people had to be this -- the pardoning mercy and love of God. That is not just a matter of sentiment. It is very precious to the heart, and we can never make too much of it: that the God who says He will be with us is supremely marked by this -- that He is the God of all grace. His basis of relationship with us is not a legal one, but of sheer sovereign grace. I say that it is not merely a matter of pleasant thought. Going on depends upon that! Move off the ground of grace and progress is immediately arrested. You see, the Lord said: "Certainly I will be with thee!" What basis is there for certainty except in God's grace?

Now the people again and again, and yet again, had a question about God. They said: 'Is the Lord with us? Can God provide a table in the wilderness?' God said: "Certainly I will be with thee!" The only ground of assurance is the ground of grace. Move off that ground and your life becomes a big question mark; and how many of the children of God today have their life curled up into a question mark, doubting, wondering, sometimes full of confidence, and at other times in the depths of despair! "Certainly I will be with thee!" With thee! 'Well, Lord, it must be on the ground of sheer grace if there is any certainty about Thee being with me!' "Certainly I will be with thee!" You see, Moses, at any point of the way, could have given up, and would have given up if he had not lived upon this basis.

If you look at the matter from a purely earthly, reasoning point of view, you will say that the man who lives with the law always before him -- what is right and what is wrong -- will live a holy life, and the man who says that God's grace is glorious and wonderful and abounds to the chief of sinners will do all sorts of things he ought not to do. That is what men have always said, reasoning as men. But how does it work actually? Like this: Here is a breakdown and a failure. Legality says: 'The Lord is angry with me. The Lord has broken with me and it is no good!' And what does such a man do? He plunges into more sin! After all, that is what the people of Israel did again and again. They had broken with the Lord and so they went headlong on their foolish way. The same failure and breakdown, and yet a sense of the infinite mercy and pardoning love of God, even to me, melts my heart, and I long never to fall in that way again. That is how it works spiritually, though [63/64] the opposite is man's reasoning about it. I think it was John Wesley who said that the great mark of people who believe in salvation by works is that they never do works and never have any confidence about salvation. Legality brings a question. It does not bring a passive hopelessness, but a positive drive of despair. "Who is a God like unto thee, that pardoneth iniquity?" What a holy life Moses lived, not merely because he knew God as a holy God, but because he knew in his own heart something of the infinite riches of the grace of God to an undeserving sinner, and, knowing that, he was able to say: 'Let us go on!' That was the mark of this man all those forty years in the wilderness. We are going on because God is going on, and God is going on, as far as we are concerned, because He is such a God of grace that He says even to us: "Certainly I will be with thee!"

Then, if Moses had dealt with the Lord upon a basis of legality as far as the people were concerned, he would have left them behind. He would have broken with the people of God and said: 'I am going on alone!' And that is another great danger of legality, and therein lies the saving virtue of the power of the grace of God. It binds us to God's people in love. God went a very long way with Moses, and went so far as to say to him: 'We have finished with this undeserving, miserable crowd of offenders. I will wipe them out, and we two will begin again.' And Moses rejected that. He said: 'No, Lord, it is Thy people, and we are all going on together!' and though some, as we know, fell in the wilderness, the purpose of God went on in His people, and Moses was saved from a spirit of separateness by the grace of God. He never despaired of God's people, though they were enough to provoke despair. He clave to them and pleaded for them before God. He was not blind to their faults. He was a nursing father, but not an indulgent father. Oh, but his heart was full of love to them! He never forsook them, with all their faults; he brought them in intercession, faults and all, to God.

That is very important, dear friends. Let us go on, but not alone. Let us go on in our home, where there are other children of God, but not alone; not cancelling the others out -- wiping them out, as it were -- and saying: 'They are not going on, so I will leave them and go on!' The grace of God is such that, while it is true these others may have grieved Him and failed Him, He has not forgotten them and has not left them. How can you and I ignore them, in our assemblies, and in all our contacts with God's children, wherever they are found? There is a sense, I know, in which we must press on, whatever others do, but there is also a sense in which we will not. Because of the greatness of God's grace we will not despair of His people. We will not harshly and critically rule them out. We will bring them to Him in prayer, if by any means we may prevail yet further on the grace of God, that His people may indeed go on with Him.

So this matter of knowing the grace of God is very important, and has far-reaching effects upon our life. Because Moses knew the infinite grace of God, he went on. The people often turned away from him, criticized him, grumbled at him, murmured against him, and slighted him, but that is another great blessing about the grace of God -- it produces a spirit of meek patience in the heart. The opposite of meekness, of course, is pride. Pride is the mark of legalism, pride at being different, pride of being better, pride of position, or resentment because of personal injustice. The more we are steeped in the grace of God, the more careless we become about our own little rights, and the more we are able to go on and not be offended, even with those who are sometimes very difficult to go on with. That was Moses' experience, at any rate. He was the meekest of all men. I do not think he was so naturally, but because he was taken up with the amazing grace of God, and that sense of God's grace made him put himself in his right perspective. He saw how little he was, how puny and how foolish, and his attitude to these critical people was jealousy for the Lord indeed, and concern for the responsibility which he had to bear, but also, who was he that he should fight for himself?



GOD'S PRESENCE MEANS REST



"As I was with Moses, so I will be with thee." Do not begin to think that Moses was a wonderful man. If you do you miss the point. Do believe this: Moses had a wonderful God. "As I was with Moses, so I will be with thee.... Certainly I will be with thee ... My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest." That was a great feature of God's being with Moses -- the rest of heart that He brought to His servant, since the Lord's presence with him was the Lord's undertaking of all responsibilities for him. Let us go on -- not in a strained, burdened, worried giving of ourselves to this matter of spiritual progress, but with a blessed casting of all our care upon the Lord. Spiritual progress must be restful, or it is not progress. It is not that fretful worry and questioning, straining, and sometimes, praying, that [64/65] produces spiritual progress. There was an occasion when the Lord said to His servant, who was evidently crying to God to come in and work mightily: "Wherefore criest thou unto me? Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward" (Exodus 14:15). 'Count on Me! My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest!' What a restful life!

Moses was responsible for many thousands of people for forty years. He had nothing with which to make provision for them. He turned to the Lord sometimes out of rest, demanding in desperation what he should do. How could he give them water? They were ready to stone him, but how could he give them water? How could the Lord provide flesh for a great multitude like that? But, whatever else the Israelites died of, they never died from lack of water. The Rock followed them -- the Lord was with them. And not one of them died from hunger, and not one of them died from malnutrition because they only had manna. They all died, but they did not die of that. The Lord was sufficient. Moses never had to produce anything, for God did it. I am quite sure that as Moses looked back on his life there were incidents that he regretted, and he must have wondered why he was so foolish as to get in a fret and strain and worry, when all the time he had God's presence pledged -- "Certainly I will be with thee." That did not mean that he left everything to God and sat back and enjoyed himself. The life of Moses, at least during those last forty years was not a contemplative life, but a life of action, with many responsibilities which he never shirked. He was a worker. And yet you have only to read the last chapter of the book of Deuteronomy, which tells of Moses' death, to find that he was never more alive. Whatever he died of, it was not the worry and tear of the wilderness life. He was a "hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated" (Deuteronomy 34:7).

What does that mean? Please do not begin to play foolishly with the Word of God, as God's children do, and believe all sorts of things that the Scriptures do not warrant, such as: 'The Lord will always keep you strong and well and young, and you can always trust Him to send you money from some miraculous place, and to do extraordinary things for you.' It does not mean that at all. The spiritual meaning behind is that Moses had not to contribute his natural energy to carry through the purposes of God. God did it, and Moses was at rest even while he served God.

"As I was with Moses ...". Do you believe that? And yet, how lacking in rest are our lives, and what a strain we get into! I think that prayer, and certainly prayer about our own affairs, should never be a matter of strain. It may need persistence, but not strain. You remember the great battle with Amalek, and Moses' attitude -- his hands up lifted to God -- which brought about the victory. It is true that he tired, and was weary, but it was not his energy that was winning the battle. In a sense, though it was not restful, it was an attitude which betokened rest, a claim upon God, and the strong, maintained affirmation that this was the Lord's battle and He would be triumphant in it. Moses kept his watch and lifted up his hands, but it was not his energy that won the battle. God did it so long as Moses counted upon Him. 'As I was with Moses, undertaking and providing, bearing the responsibility, so I will be with thee. My presence shall go with thee.'



GOD'S PERSONAL PRESENCE

How was God with Moses? Personally! We are told that there was no other such as he who had communion with God face to face. 'The Lord spake unto Moses face to face as a man speaketh unto his friend" (Exodus 33:11). "As I was with Moses ...". Did God mean that? Yes, He did, but the pillar of cloud disappeared just about the time that Moses died. Joshua was entering into the land with no pillar of cloud, no visible presence of the Lord, no opportunity of speaking to Him face to face as Moses did, yet God said to him: 'As I was with Moses personally, Myself, speaking to him face to face, so I will be with thee!' Then the Lord introduces a new element into the situation which has never been there before: "This book of the law ...". What does He mean? The Lord has many ways of speaking, but it is the same Lord Himself who is speaking. 'Moses had the cloud: Joshua, you have the Book. I spake face to face with Moses in the cloud. Keep tryst with Me, and I will speak face to face with you in the Book.'

It is true that the Lord now speaks face to face with us, not in a pillar of cloud, but through the Book. "As I was with Moses ...". Oh, Moses did not receive what he had as a mere code of laws and regulations. He received everything as a personal communication from the Lord. This Book is given to you, dear friend, not as a means of rules and regulations, but as a medium by which God wants to speak to you 'face to face, as a man speaketh to his friends'. Of course, if we do not expect that, we do not get it, but when we do expect, is it not [65/66] true that we get? The Lord never says: 'Seek ye My face!' in vain. Oh, what a privileged man Moses was! Whenever he was in a difficulty the cloud came down and the Lord told him just what to do. How lovely to be Moses! 'As I was with Moses, so I will be with thee ... My personal presence shall be the solution to every problem of yours.' It is not a matter of looking in the Bible to see what it says as a kind of principle and rule of life, so much as seeking the Lord in His Word.



"Beyond the sacred page, I seek Thee, Lord,

My spirit pants for Thee, Thou living Word."


God said to Joshua: "This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth." "As I was with Moses, so I will be with thee." That is the secret of going on. I think that often the plunges we make in wrong directions are the result of finding something in the Word, or, more often, hearing somebody say that something is 'what it says in the Word', but the safe way is to seek the Lord in His Word. We shall go on, and we shall not turn to the right hand or to the left. "The meek will he guide in judgment, the meek will he teach his way" (Psalm 25:9). "As I was with Moses ...". Do you believe that?

"As I was with Moses, so I will be with thee." Who is the 'I'? You remember the revelation that came to Moses about the Name of God: "I am that I am" -- 'I always shall be what I am! I always was all that I ever shall be! I am!' The unfailing unchanging, eternal, faithful, enduring character of God. That is how Moses knew Him. The burning bush burnt on and on -- and that is God. The other bushes burn out so quickly. That which is merely natural and human catches fire sometimes in a great blaze, but how quickly it passes and is gone! But God goes on.

More than four hundred years before; this Joseph's family had gone down into Egypt. Long before that God had spoken of this very thing to Abraham, and all through those hundreds of years His purpose was to bring His people into the land. Abraham was dead; Isaac and Joseph were dead. Another order of things had come. But God was not dead, and His purposes were still the same. Even if Moses dies, God is still alive, the same God with the same purpose. Do let us take hold of that -- He is the unchanging, enduring God. You remember that in the letter to the Hebrews it says that Moses endured and, as you know, the New Testament force of that word is always one of time, and not just an enduring for a moment. Moses endured, and if we are going on, we have to endure. If we are going to reach God's goal it is perhaps a matter of endurance as much as anything else. Oh, shall we be the bushes burning with a natural flame and burning out, or shall we burn with a Divine flame and burn on, not being consumed? Moses became, as it were, a burning bush, for he endured. How? 'Wonderful man, Moses! Great faith, Moses! Tremendous strength of purpose and will and character!' No! A wonderful God was with Moses: "My presence shall go with thee." I AM is with Moses. God is true to His purpose and faithful to His declared aim. This dispensation has gone on for a long time, and in the Church the flame of revelation and of devotion to the Divine purpose has flickered, has faltered, has sometimes been ablaze, and sometimes apparently extinct, but through these hundreds of years God has never moved one fraction of a centimetre from His own Divine purpose. His flame has burnt on, and will to the end, and we are called to that eternal purpose.

We are called to endure. "Certainly I will be with thee. As I was with Moses, so I will be with thee." Oh, do not let us get preoccupied with our side of things. Let us more and more concentrate our attention on the Lord who is with us. That is the important thing.

I have not yet said how Moses endured. How did he endure? "As seeing him ...". That is the explanation of all those wonderful things you find in Hebrews 11 about Moses: faith that chooses, that renounces, that endures. It is all a matter of God's revelation, of His presence, and of Moses simply but firmly putting his hand into God's hand and clinging to the Divine promise of God's presence. That is the other side of the picture, but it is the most real and the most important side -- the invisible One who meant everything to Moses.

Just a last word. Moses, we might think, was rather a heavy, grim, burdened, dull kind of man. Do we think that? "Let us go on!" So often that rather sounds as if it is going to be a hard, tough, grim affair, but I do not think that is true of Moses at all. He had many burdens and cares, and doubtless shed many tears, but I read the last words that Moses spoke -- and there must be special importance in the last words: "Happy art thou, O Israel: who is like unto thee, a people saved by the Lord" (Deuteronomy 33:29). It is a glorious life, this life of going on! And I read a Psalm that was written by Moses, the man of God, and in it I find these words: "Satisfy us early with thy mercy that we may rejoice and be glad all our life" (Psalm 90:14). It is a blessed thing to be going on when God is with you. "As I was with Moses, so I will be with thee. I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee." - H.F. [66/67]

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