May 6, 2024 - Good Morning! It's Monday, May 6.
Mother's Day is this Sunday, and this morning we begin a five-part series on mothers of the Bible. Our first character is one that the Bible says very little about. She's only mentioned a few times, and during a part of her story she isn't even referred to by name. But we know her name. It was Jochebed, and she was the mother of Moses.
By the time Moses was born, the Israelites had been in Egypt for over 400 years. The memory of Joseph, who had saved Egypt from famine, had faded. In Exodus 1:8 we read these unsettling words, "and there came a Pharaoh who did not know". That Pharaoh, distrusting the Jewish people and seeing them as a threat, made a chilling decree that all Hebrew boy babies should be killed. It was a decree that would be echoed 15 centuries later, when King Herod, fearing the Christ child, had all the male infants in Bethlehem put to death. Jochebed hid Moses for the first three months of his life, and then she came up with a remarkable plan.
Every morning, the daughter of Pharaoh would come to the Nile to bathe. On one such morning, Jochebed put Moses in a basket and placed it in the river. The Egyptian princess saw the child and had her attendants rescue it. Cue Miriam! - the sister of Moses - who approached and offered that she "knew" of a Hebrew woman who could nurse the child - for a price. And so Jochebed was paid by Pharaoh to care for her own son. But she had a price to pay, too. When the baby was weaned, he would move to the palace and be raised as a child of the king.
Jochebed was a mother who showed great faith and trust. When she laid that baby in a basket, she did not know that her son would grow to become a leader of his people, a leader who would free them from slavery. She also had a characteristic that we see in every godly mother - she was selfless. Jochebed put the needs of her child above her own. A beautiful story. A story of love and sacrifice. A story that would be echoed 15 centuries later . . . in Bethlehem.
Meet you back here tomorrow,
Bro. David
dmathis@fbccenter.org
