Moses: Leaving Egypt

“Seeing him who is invisible.” The phrase shouldn't work (it is a contradiction in four words) and yet it explains everything about Moses. Pharaoh was overwhelmingly visible: the armies, the monuments, the wrath that could end a man with a word. The God of Israel had no statue, no chariots, nothing to point to. And Moses walked out of Egypt as if the invisible One were the solid reality and Pharaoh the shadow. That is the eyesight faith gives: not seeing different things, but seeing things differently, with their true weights restored.

The text says “he endured” by this seeing. Endurance is faith's least glamorous form. Between the burning bush and the Red Sea stretched months of confrontations, refusals, and plagues: Pharaoh hardening, the people complaining, deliverance delayed again and again. What keeps a person steady through the long middle of obedience is not willpower but vision. You can endure almost anything if you can see the One who is invisible. Lose sight of Him, and even small pressures become unbearable.

Then Hebrews adds a second act of faith, quieter and stranger: “he kept the Passover and the sprinkling of the blood.” On the last night in Egypt, Moses didn't organize a defense against the destroyer. He told families to kill a lamb and put its blood on the doorframe. As military strategy, it is absurd. As theology, it is everything. Israel was not spared that night because they were better than Egypt. They were spared because they were under the blood. Judgment did not skip them; it was satisfied before it reached them. A lamb died in every house where a firstborn lived.

The two halves of this verse belong together. The God Moses saw by faith is the God who provided what faith could never supply, only apply. We endure by looking at Him; we are saved by what He has done. Centuries later, John the Baptist would point at a man from Nazareth and say, “Behold, the Lamb of God.” The doorframe was always pointing somewhere. Take refuge there today, and then face your Pharaohs.