Exodus 2 — Drawn Out of the Water

Today’s Passage: Exodus 2

Come and sit with me for this next chapter, because after the darkness of Pharaoh’s murderous decree at the end of chapter one, God begins His answer in the smallest and most fragile of ways, with the birth of a single Hebrew baby. There is no thunder here, no plague, no parting sea, only a frightened mother, a watching sister, a little basket of reeds, and a river that was meant to be a grave. Watch how quietly the LORD works. A child who should have been drowned is set afloat in a papyrus box coated with pitch, and the very daughter of the king who ordered his death is the one who lifts him out of the water and hands him back to his own mother to nurse. That child grows into a man named Moses, and we follow him through a rash and violent morning, a killing he tries to hide in the sand, a fear that drives him out of Egypt, and a long exile beside a well in Midian where he becomes a shepherd and a husband and a father far from his people. And then, at the very end, the chapter turns like the tide, and four short verbs open a window into heaven. God heard. God remembered. God saw. God knew. Hold those four words close as you read, because everything that follows in this whole book grows out of them.

As you read, hold this: God heard the groaning of His people, remembered His covenant, saw them, and knew, long before they saw His hand at work.

Exodus 2:1–4 (BSB)

¹ Now a man of the house of Levi married a Levite woman, ² and she conceived and gave birth to a son. When she saw that he was a beautiful child, she hid him for three months. ³ But when she could no longer hide him, she got him a papyrus basket and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in the basket and set it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. ⁴ And his sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him.

Notice how ordinary the opening sounds, and how much is hidden inside it. A man of the house of Levi marries a Levite woman, and a son is born, and the Bible does not even give us their names yet, as if to remind us that God’s greatest works often begin in unremarkable homes among people the world would never notice. But this is no ordinary birth, for it happens under a death sentence. Every Hebrew boy is to be cast into the river, and so from his first breath this child is a marked baby, and his mother must decide whether to obey Pharaoh or to trust God.

She chooses to trust God, and she does it with her hands as well as her heart. She hides the boy for three long months, and when she can hide him no longer, she does not throw him into the Nile as commanded, but she does place him in the Nile, in her own way, tucked safely inside a little ark of reeds sealed against the water. Think of the faith in that act. She cannot keep him and she will not drown him, so she gives him back to the God who gave him, and she sets him adrift among the reeds and lets go. And she is not entirely alone in her watching, for the boy’s sister stations herself at a distance to see what will happen, a young girl keeping quiet guard over a basket, and over the future of her whole people, though she cannot yet know it.

Exodus 2:5–10 (BSB)

⁵ Soon the daughter of Pharaoh went down to bathe in the Nile, and her attendants were walking along the riverbank. And when she saw the basket among the reeds, she sent her maidservant to retrieve it. ⁶ When she opened it, she saw the child, and behold, the little boy was crying. So she had compassion on him and said, “This is one of the Hebrew children.” ⁷ Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and call one of the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?” ⁸ “Go ahead,” Pharaoh’s daughter told her. And the girl went and called the boy’s mother. ⁹ Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child and nurse him for me, and I will pay your wages.” So the woman took the boy and nursed him. ¹⁰ When the child had grown older, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. She named him Moses and explained, “I drew him out of the water.”

Now watch the hand of God move, though His name is never spoken. Of all the places along that great river, and of all the people who might have passed, it is Pharaoh’s own daughter who comes down to bathe exactly where the basket rests among the reeds. She opens it, and there is the crying baby, and her heart melts. She knows at once he is a Hebrew child, one of the very babies her father has condemned, and yet compassion rises up in her stronger than any decree, and she will not let him die. The God who could not be resisted by all the might of Egypt now bends the tender heart of a princess to overrule the cruelty of a king, and He does it through the tears of an infant.

And then see how completely God provides. The watching sister steps out of the shadows with a question so simple and so bold, shall I go and call a Hebrew woman to nurse him for you, and the princess says yes, never guessing that the woman fetched will be the baby’s own mother. So the child’s mother, who only hours before had surrendered her son to the river in faith, now receives him back into her arms, safe, protected by the palace itself, and paid to raise her own boy. Only God writes a story like that. And when the child is older, he is brought to Pharaoh’s daughter and becomes her son, and she names him Moses (מֹשֶׁה) Mosheh, pronounced moh-SHEH. Strong's H4872, drawn out (proper name, Moses). Pharaoh’s daughter’s naming line, “I drew him out of the water,” ties the boy’s name straight to the Hebrew verb mashah, to draw out, to pull up out of the water. The name is a permanent reminder of how his life began, a baby lifted up out of a river that was meant to be his grave. But there is a deeper music in it that only the rest of the book will make plain. The one whose very name means drawn out will himself become the one who draws out, for God will use Moses to draw all Israel up out of Egypt and up out of the sea. What was done for the child at the river will one day be done through the man for a whole people. , saying she drew him out of the water. She could not have known that the little one she drew out of the water would grow up to draw an entire nation out through the waters of the sea. God had been laying His plans long before anyone could see them.

Sit with the wonder of that for a moment. God does not waste a single detail, not even a name spoken by a foreign princess who did not know the God of Israel. She meant only to mark how she found him, yet the Holy Spirit set the word down as a quiet prophecy. The God who drew Moses out of the water is the God who draws His people out of every deep place, and every rescue in this book, and in your own life, is a small echo of that saving name.

Exodus 2:11–15 (BSB)

¹¹ One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to his own people and observed their hard labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people. ¹² After looking this way and that and seeing no one, he struck down the Egyptian and hid his body in the sand. ¹³ The next day Moses went out and saw two Hebrews fighting. He asked the one in the wrong, “Why are you attacking your companion?” ¹⁴ But the man replied, “Who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you planning to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” Then Moses was afraid and thought, “This thing I have done has surely become known.” ¹⁵ When Pharaoh heard about this matter, he sought to kill Moses. But Moses fled from Pharaoh and settled in the land of Midian, where he sat down beside a well.

Here the baby has become a man, and we should read what he does soberly, neither excusing it nor turning it into a spectacle. Moses goes out to his own people and looks upon their hard labor, and something stirs in him that will never be stilled, a burden for his enslaved brothers. That much is right and good. But when he sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, he looks this way and that, sees no one, strikes the Egyptian down, and hides the body in the sand. The very care he takes to look around first and to bury the evidence tells us he knows in his own heart that this is not the way. He has the right compassion and the wrong hand, a true zeal carried out in his own strength and in secret, and it will not deliver anyone.

The next day proves it. Moses tries to make peace between two quarreling Hebrews, and the man in the wrong turns on him with a stinging question, who made you ruler and judge over us, and then, are you going to kill me as you killed the Egyptian. In an instant Moses learns that his secret is no secret at all, and fear takes hold of him. When Pharaoh hears of it and seeks his life, the grown son of the palace becomes a fugitive, fleeing east into the wilderness of Midian, where he sits down, exhausted and alone, beside a well. The man who thought he could rescue his people in a single violent morning now has nothing but a long road of exile ahead. God will indeed use Moses to deliver Israel, but not like this, and not yet. First the deliverer himself must be humbled and shaped through forty quiet years, until the work is plainly God’s and not his own.

Exodus 2:16–22 (BSB)

¹⁶ Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters, and they came to draw water and fill the troughs to water their father’s flock. ¹⁷ And when some shepherds came along and drove them away, Moses rose up to help them and watered their flock. ¹⁸ When the daughters returned to their father Reuel, he asked them, “Why have you returned so early today?” ¹⁹ “An Egyptian rescued us from the shepherds,” they replied. “He even drew water for us and watered the flock.” ²⁰ “So where is he?” their father asked. “Why did you leave the man behind? Invite him to have something to eat.” ²¹ Moses agreed to stay with the man, and he gave his daughter Zipporah to Moses in marriage. ²² And she gave birth to a son, and Moses named him Gershom, saying, “I have become a foreigner in a foreign land.”

There is a gentle providence at this well, and if you have walked with me through Genesis you will feel the echo, for this is not the first time God has met one of His servants at a well in a far country. Moses, still every inch the man of action, sees seven shepherd girls being bullied away from the water by rough shepherds, and he rises up to defend them and waters their flock himself. The same courage that struck down an Egyptian now guards the weak and serves the thirsty, and here it finds its proper channel. The daughters go home early and tell their father that an Egyptian drew water for them, and notice the word, he drew water, for the man whose name means drawn out is forever drawing others up out of trouble.

Their father, the priest of Midian, called Reuel here and Jethro elsewhere, is struck by the strange rudeness of leaving such a man standing at the well, and he sends for him and takes him in. So the wandering exile finds a home, and a family, and a wife, Zipporah, and in time a son. And listen to the name Moses gives that boy, Gershom, for he says, I have become a foreigner in a foreign land. It is the sigh of a man who belongs nowhere, no longer an Egyptian prince, not yet a leader of Israel, a stranger raising a child far from his own people. Yet even this long, obscure season is not wasted. In the wilderness of Midian, tending another man’s sheep, the impatient young fighter is slowly being made into the patient shepherd God can use, and he does not know that the God who has heard his people’s cry is about to meet him here.

Exodus 2:23–25 (BSB)

²³ After a long time, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned and cried out under their burden of slavery, and their cry for deliverance from bondage ascended to God. ²⁴ So God heard their groaning, and He remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. ²⁵ God saw the Israelites and took notice.

Now the chapter lifts our eyes off of Moses altogether and turns them to heaven, and everything changes. A long time passes, the old king dies, but the misery does not, and the people of Israel groan and cry out under the weight of their slavery, and their cry goes up to God. Perhaps they wondered, through all those bitter years, whether anyone was listening at all. And here the Bible answers that question with four short verbs stacked one upon another, and each one is a window into the very heart of God’s faithfulness. God heard their groaning. God remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God saw the Israelites. And God knew.

Do not rush past those four words, and do not read into them more than they say, for they say more than enough. God heard, which means their cries never once fell on deaf ears. God remembered (זָכַר) zakar, pronounced zaw-KAR. Strong's H2142, to remember, call to mind, keep in mind. When the Bible says that God remembered His covenant, this does not mean that God had forgotten and then suddenly recalled His people, as though He had let them slip His mind for four hundred years. In Scripture, when God remembers, it means He acts on what He has promised, He moves to keep His word. God remembered Noah, and the waters began to recede. God remembered Abraham, and Lot was spared. And now God remembers His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the great deliverance of the exodus is set in motion. His remembering is the beginning of His rescuing.

Not that He had ever forgotten, but that the time had come to act on the ancient promise He had sworn to their fathers. God saw, so that not one of their tears escaped His notice. And God knew, He took full notice of their affliction and made it His own concern. This is the hinge of the whole book, and truly of the whole Bible, for salvation begins not with Israel’s strength but with God’s attention. The people could not see it yet, but the God of the covenant had already turned toward them, and He was at that very moment preparing a shepherd in the desert to bring them out. Whatever burden you carry into today, rest on exactly what the text tells you here, no less and no more: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob hears, remembers, sees, and knows.

And notice the beautiful company this word keeps in these verses, for it is bound together with hearing. God heard their groaning, and He remembered His covenant. The Hebrew word for that hearing is shama, the word for truly listening and heeding. Hearing and remembering belong together in the character of God, for He does not merely listen from a distance; His hearing moves Him to keep His covenant. This is the God we serve, the God who so binds Himself by promise that when His people cry out, He hears, and having heard, He remembers, and having remembered, He comes down to save. Every promise He has ever made, He keeps in exactly this way.