Our church has been going through Exodus on Sunday mornings, and we are taking it really, really slow. The week we started I noticed a passage which is tucked into Exodus 4-- before Moses and Aaron meet up and approach Pharaoh, but after the LORD convinces Moses through a burning bush to go get his people. Moses has begun the journey with his wife and sons from Midian to Egypt.
"24 At a lodging place on the way, the LORD met {Moses} [b] and was about to kill him. 25 But Zipporah took a flint knife, cut off her son's foreskin and touched {Moses'} feet with it. [c] "Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me," she said. 26 So the LORD let him alone. (At that time she said "bridegroom of blood," referring to circumcision.)"
After this, Aaron meets Moses in the mountains, they speak to the Israelite elders then go to Pharaoh for the first time. I keep re-reading this passage and it really has my mind all twisted. (It makes me ask questions that contain cusswords: such as the fondly exclaimed "WTF?") I don't know, but it seems to me that this is really out of nowhere in the story. I am sure God could have added the "circumcise your kids or I'll kill you" requirement when they were arguing next to the burning bush. Why did He wait? And why does the Bible just introduce the story with such a cavalier attitude? It really makes me suspect we are missing something great about God-- something that our Christianity fails to fear.
First: This section really highlights the unpredictability of God. This is something we definitely pretend doesn't exist. We tend to focus on ideas like the immutability of God, which gives us the impression that He is some stable force in the universe. But is He? I mean, Moses probably thought he and God were doing pretty good when all of a sudden the LORD was going to kill him. Oh, and we treat natural disasters (which happen often) like anomalies, when really God kills hundreds of thousands of people through them annually. In a lot of ways (all of them earthly), He is dangerous to trust. What I mean is, our idea that God takes care of our needs if only we trust Him is true, as long as taking care of our needs is part of His plan. But we tend to assume that it's always His plan to take care of our needs, don't we?
Second: The scariness of God. I was always told that when the Bible uses the phrase: "Fear God" that the word "fear" does not actually mean to be afraid of Him, just to respect Him. I don't know, though, even the New Testament requires us to "work out our salvation with fear and trembling," which leads me to expect that we aren't quite getting the word "fear" like we ought to.
Maybe Moses was just getting too comfortable and needed a little kicking in the butt. After all, he had spent most of Chapter 3 arguing with God.
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