Moses' Snake

The story of Moses at the burning bush is one that is probably familiar to most of us, but there is one detail that may get overlooked. In Exodus 4:2 the Lord asks Moses to throw his rod on the ground, and when he does the rod becomes a snake. The Lord next asks Moses to pick up the snake, and again Moses obeys. When he grabbed the serpent it was immediately transformed back into Moses’ walking stick. The point of this exercise was to demonstrate God’s sovereignty to Moses, proving to him that this call was real and that God would empower Moses to stand before the most powerful man on earth.

But here is the detail that may often get overlooked: “So he cast it on the ground and it became a serpent, and Moses fled from it (v.3).” Moses was scared of the snake; scared enough to actually run away from it. Yes, Moses grabbed the snake when God told him to, but we must not think Moses was a snake person. He was not the kind of guy to keep a pet python in a terrarium in his bedroom. Moses is a man after my own heart—I once dialed 911 when I found a snake in our bathroom. If God told me to pick up a snake I’d like to think I would obey, but until then, I’ll keep a safe distance.

Moses not only obeyed God’s instruction to pick up the snake, but he even did in it the specific way God told him to: by the tail. Snakes are not normally grabbed by the tail, unless you just want it to turn around and bite you. But that is what God told him to do, and his obedience caused the snake to turn back into a harmless rod. This was God’s way of getting Moses to trust Him. After all, if he could not confront a snake, he would never be able to confront Pharaoh. No one promised that obeying God would always be easy, but when we trust Him, good things happen. Even if we do not understand what God is doing in the present, it could be that He is equipping us to do something in the future. When you are tempted to run from your problems, stand in God’s strength and face them. What looked like a deadly snake may just turn out to be a harmless walking stick.