Bible Commentaries

The Rod That Is in Thine Hand

Exodus 4:2; Exodus 4:17

I. God often does His greatest works by the humblest means. The great forces of nature are not in the earthquake which tumbles cities into ruins. This power passes in a moment; the soft silent light, the warm summer rain, the stars whose voice is not heard—these are the majestic mighty forces which fill the earth with riches, and control the worlds which constitute the wide universe of God.

II. So in Providence. The founders of Christianity were fishermen. Christ Himself the Carpenter, the Nazarene, despised and crucified, was the wisdom and the power of God. For did He not say—"I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me"? So in the text, "What is that in thine hand? A rod"—the emblem, the tool of his daily work. With this Moses was to do mighty deeds. Rabbinical tradition has it that Moses was an excellent shepherd. He followed a lamb across the wilderness, plucked it with his rod from a precipice amid the rocks, carried it in his bosom, whereupon God said—"Let us make this Moses the shepherd of Israel". He a stranger, a fugitive, a humble shepherd, becomes the lawgiver, the leader, the deliverer of his people.

III. The lesson of the text is plain. God still meets every man and asks the old question—"What is that in thine hand?" Is it the tool of an ordinary trade? With that God will be served. The artisan where he Exodus 4:9

"Look into the fourth chapter of Exodus 4:10

I blush today, and greatly fear to expose my unskilfulness, because, not being eloquent, I cannot express myself with clearness and brevity, nor even as the spirit moves, and the mind and endowed understanding point out.

—St. Patrick.

Exodus 4:14

When a great sentiment, as religion or liberty, makes itself deeply felt in any age or country, then great orators appear. As the Andes and Alleghanies indicate the line of the fissure in the crust of the earth along which they were lifted, so the great ideas that suddenly expand at some moment the mind of mankind indicate themselves by orators.

—Emerson on Eloquence.

Exodus 4:14

There is something in life which is not love, but which plays as great a part almost—sympathy, quick response—I scarcely know what name to give it; at any moment, in the hour of need perhaps, a door opens, and some one comes into the room. It may be a commonplace man in a shabby coat, a placid lady in a smart bonnet; does nothing tell us that this is one of the friends to be, whose hands are to help us over the stony places, whose kindly voices will sound to us hereafter voices out of the infinite?

—Miss Thackeray in Old Kensington.

References.—IV:15.—R. E. Hutton, The Grown of Christ, vol. ii. p497. IV:22 , 23.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxiv. No1440. IV:23.—J. Parker, British Weekly Pulpit, vol. ii. p542.

Exodus 4:25

The silken texture of the marriage tie bears a daily strain of wrong and insult to which no other human relation can be subjected without lesion. Two people, by no means reckless of each other's rights and feelings but even tender of them for the most part, may tear at one another's heart-strings in this sacred bond with perfect impunity; though, if they were any other two, they would not speak or look at each other after the outrages they exchange.

—W. D. Howells.

He had need to be more than a Exodus 4:31

Logic makes but a sorry rhetoric with the multitude; first shoot round comers, and you may not despair of converting by a syllogism.... So well has this been understood practically in all ages of the world, that no religion yet has been a religion of physics or of philosophy. It has ever been synonymous with revelation. It never has been a deduction from what we know; it has ever been an assertion of what we are to believe. It has never lived in a conclusion; it has ever been a message, a history, or a vision. No legislator or priest ever dreamed of educating our moral nature by science or by argument. Moses was instructed not to reason from the creation but to work miracles.

—Newman, Grammar of Assent, pp94-96.