“What’s with God trying to kill Moses?”

Steve Brown:
What’s with God trying to kill Moses? The answer to that question on Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
If you think laughter isn’t spiritual or that faithfulness to God, means conformity to Christian stereotypes, then this program probably isn’t for you. But if you’re looking for honest, Biblical answers to honest questions, welcome to Key Life. Here’s our host, author and seminary professor Steve Brown, along with Pete Alwinson from ForgeBibleStudy.com.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. Hi Pete.

Pete Alwinson:
How are you doing, man?

Steve Brown:
I’m doing really good. I can remember the days went on Fridays. I didn’t do well at all. And you can too.

Pete Alwinson:
Oh boy.

Steve Brown:
Man, the darkness starts coming. You think, I got this thing on Sunday. And man, and I’d like to say, I didn’t want to bring dishonor on the name of Christ, but frankly it was, I didn’t want to bring dishonor on me.

Pete Alwinson:
It’s so tough. Pray for your pastors on Friday and Saturday.

Steve Brown:
Be sure to. And be thankful for them, the way you should have been yesterday.

Pete Alwinson:
There you go. Yeah.

Steve Brown:
You have a good Thanksgiving?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah man. Yeah.

Steve Brown:
That’s a statement of faith, by the way, we’re recording this before the actual event.

Pete Alwinson:
It’s going to be good. I can smell it.

Steve Brown:
I can too. Me too, in fact I want to quit this broadcast and go get something to eat right now.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. That’s right.

Steve Brown:
I hope you had a great Thanksgiving. And, as you know, Pete comes in and we answer questions on Fridays. And we’ve been doing that for a long time. And we’ll like your questions and we like you. You can call 1-800-KEY-LIFE, 24 seven, hit the right button and record your question. And sometimes we put that on the air. That’s not a place for preaching by the way. That’s what we do. But if you have a question, feel free to ask it, or you can send your question to

Key Life Network
P.O. Box 5000
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In Canada, it’s

Key Life Canada
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Or you can email us your question at [email protected]. And while you’re doing all that you might want to think about sending us a contribution. If you do, we’d rise up and call you bless ed and squeeze every dime for the glory of God. If you can’t, we understand, do say a prayer for this ministry. Pete lead us in prayer and we’ll get to these questions.

Pete Alwinson:
We need to pray. Father, we are so thankful that we belong to you. And on this day after Thanksgiving, we honor you, we thank you for being the God who is, who was and is to come. The only God. Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the God who is gracious and merciful and kind, but also the God who is the God of all knowledge and wisdom, holiness, righteousness and justice. And Lord we come to you, we thank you for all that we have in Christ. We pray that you would help us to understand more of who we are in Christ, that we would understand your grace at a deeper level and it would energize us and set us free, as we follow you. That Lord, we wouldn’t become self-righteous, but we would become self-less and less focused on self. And so Lord, we honor you, we pray that you’d give us a good rest of the week-end.And we look forward to worship and we pray for our pastors and teachers and worship directors and leaders and all those that are gonna stand before us and draw us into your presence. May they lift you high. And may we be lifted up. And be deployed and set free to serve you in the world in which we live until you come back Jesus. So, we just commit this week-end to you and then we pray now that you deal with this Q & A time. Give us wisdom. And would you be honored in Jesus’ strong name we pray. Amen.

Steve Brown:
Amen. Pete this first question is an email question, in Exodus 4:24 God tries to kill Moses. What gives? Even allowing for the authority of the Scripture, that one is daunting and besides it does not fit the narrative. Could something have been left out of the original manuscript that might provide more explanation?

Pete Alwinson:
You know, my initial, my initial on that is that, no nothing was left out. Everything that we needed is there. Right. We’d agree with that. But it is, it is one of those, hard sayings of the Old Testament, no doubt.

Steve Brown:
Troubling.

Pete Alwinson:
It is troubling. However, when you connect it to the law and the whole idea of God’s covenantal relation with Israel, it was, God was trying to put him to death, because his son wasn’t circumcised. So if Moses is going to be the leader of Israel, he better, he better be following the law.

Steve Brown:
So it’s a strong statement about that.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah it is. Yeah.

Steve Brown:
But again, you gotta be careful here, there are perspectives when you read scripture and scripture is accurate without error in the original autograph, perfectly reliable and everything that’s supposed to be there is there and what’s not supposed to be there, is not there.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
But you gotta remember that Scripture is always written from, or at least in many places from man’s perspective and that is called phenomenological language. In other words, it may not be what’s going on, but it is what really happened, in terms of seeing it at that point.

Pete Alwinson:
Right.

Steve Brown:
So it’s with that error, but God of course, was not going to kill Moses. I mean, he wasn’t about to do that. He knew about circumcision. But he was making a strong statement about circumcision.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. That’s right.

Steve Brown:
And the other part is how it was perceived, and it was perceived accurately in a phenomenological way.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. Because if God had been trying to kill Moses,

Steve Brown:
He’d be dead.

Pete Alwinson:
He’d be dead. You know, God can not be thwarted.

Steve Brown:
Right.

Pete Alwinson:
So there it is. So that, that was so important. And that’s hard for us to remember.

Steve Brown:
I know.

Pete Alwinson:
There’s so much in the Old Testament, there’s so much in the Bible. It is an ancient, ancient book. And it is written with so much that we don’t always understand that’s underlying the texts, but nothing was left out. But again, here’s a hermeneutical principle, a principle of Biblical interpretation. You don’t build a whole scheme of doctrine on a passage,

Steve Brown:
No,

Pete Alwinson:
like that text.

Steve Brown:
That’s so true, but you can understand it once you recognize that it’s accurate from the perspective of those who viewed it, Moses himself.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
Okay. That’s enough. I love this. I’ve never gotten this question before. I like my steaks rare, but after reading Leviticus, I’m struck with the passages commanding Israelites not to eat blood. I know that we’re not under the ceremonial law. But is that something that is displeasing to the Lord?

Pete Alwinson:
Yes, absolutely. I do not understand people who like rare steaks.

Steve Brown:
Well, and, and what is the ceremonial law?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. Right. The ceremonial law that was pointing ahead to the work of Christ. So mostly thinking about the sacrifices that took place in the temple and tabernacle before that.

Steve Brown:
And there was a lot, a lot about blood.

Pete Alwinson:
A lot about blood.

Steve Brown:
Why is that?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. You know, blood is an important principle, right? Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins or forgiveness of sins. Read Hebrews in conjunction with this, but no, I’m kidding. We need, we need to make it clear. Right? Having a rare steak is not evil.

Steve Brown:
No, of course not.

Pete Alwinson:
You’re not this?

Steve Brown:
You’re not violating anything. You haven’t offended God, you haven’t, well, unless you’re Jewish, unless you’re Orthodox, you may have problem there.

Pete Alwinson:
Because when we come to the New Testament and we read Colossians, for instance, all foods are declared clean.

Steve Brown:
That’s right.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
That’s right. And unclean for the one who thinks they’re unclean.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. Read the New Testament again the whole thing.

Steve Brown:
But if it bothers you, quit. In revelation 20, this is an email, in revelation 21:1, it says that there will be a new heaven and a new earth. I can see why a new earth, this one is a mess, but what about the new heaven?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. What do you think?

Steve Brown:
Well, I think that’s a phrase, I don’t, I mean, heaven and earth is something that go together, the way horse and carriage go together. And I think you’ve got to be careful about, new literally, but something new is going to happen about heaven.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
And the new Jerusalem is going to be something that is new, but it’s not going to be a correction in the sense, that heaven is something that needs to be fixed. In fact, Jesus said that when we pray, we should pray that his will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And so in heaven, you know, it’s not that his will isn’t done, but God’s going to do some new things. And they’re going to be really cool.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. Heaven’s going to be great thing. We’re going to be learning. We’re going to be experiencing God in ways that we’ve never experienced them before. We’re going to, your, your questions will be answered, but it will be an exciting time. However, I agree one-hundred percent, new heaven and new earth. It’s sort of like, they go together. It’s, there’s going to be something brand new. And, I don’t think we need to get any more specific than that.

Steve Brown:
This is an email. Does the Bible teach universalism. First, what in the world is universalism?

Pete Alwinson:
I was going to say, is that those who believe they should go to Universal Studios here in Orlando?

Steve Brown:
It must be.

Pete Alwinson:
It must be.

Steve Brown:
What is universalism?

Pete Alwinson:
The doctrine that everybody will be saved, at some point, and go to heaven, experience that eternal relation with God. The Bible does not teach that.

Steve Brown:
I wish it did.

Pete Alwinson:
I know it’s a,

Steve Brown:
In fact, if you’re a Christian and if you don’t wish it did, you’d probably haven’t understood God’s love.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, and the wonder of what it is to be forgiven and the wonder of being in the presence of God. And, I sometimes think about this too, that do I really want other people to go to heaven? Yeah, but do I want them to go to heaven so that God is honored or that people are experiencing good existence?

Steve Brown:
It might be both.

Pete Alwinson:
It should be both, but a lot of times it’s more that God’s honored than that they’re chosen. I need to love people more.

Steve Brown:
And that’s true, but you’re right. You know, your, your short answer to that question is no, the Bible does not teach that, there is no way without twisting that you could make the Bible teach that. Because it just won’t fit in your little mold.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
And so, when we present the gospel and talk about Christ, we’re talking about eternal things and we’re talking about important things and you can say, no, no, no, leave me alone. And he will. And, that means eternally,

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. That’s right.

Steve Brown:
And we’re not going to get into the temperature of hell, are we?

Pete Alwinson:
Not today.

Steve Brown:
Okay. Let’s see, do you believe the U.S. is experiencing a spiritual awakening?

Pete Alwinson:
Well, that’s kind of an interesting question, a spiritual awakening right now? I, I don’t know if I see it on the same level as the Great Awakening, in the 17 hundreds, but I think the Spirit of God is always at work.

Steve Brown:
And I think when you come to the end of your self, and we’re getting there, as a nation. There’s a possibility that I see signs of that maybe beginning to happen. And I, you know, I was around for the Jesus movement, which was close to the Great Awakening and I pray every morning. Lord, do it again. Just one more time. We got to go. Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.