Wisdom International Devotionals

by Seth Davey

COME TO THE WATERS  Numbers 20:6b-8  And the glory of the LORD appeared to them, and the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, “Take the staff, and assemble the congregation, you and Aaron your brother, and tell the rock before their eyes to yield its water. So you shall bring water out of the rock for them and give drink to the congregation and their cattle.” This caravan comes to another sudden halt here in Numbers 20 as the people once again grumble to Moses about their impending doom, this time over their need for water. And, of course, just like every other similar plight experienced throughout their pilgrimage, they don’t have the decency to couch their genuine thirst in kinder terms. Something like, “Moses, we’re sorry to bother you again—you’re doing a great job leading by the way—just a head’s-up that our canteens are completely dry and our livestock are famished and we’re just wondering if you could kindly ask the LORD to fill our canteens!” No, they can’t say it like that. A...

A STORY SHARED  Numbers 11:26a & 28-29  Now two men remained in the camp, one named Eldad, and the other named Medad, and the Spirit rested on them … and so they prophesied in the camp. … And Joshua the son of Nun, the assistant of Moses from his youth, said, “My lord Moses, stop them.” But Moses said to him, “Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the LORD’s people were prophets, that the LORD would put his Spirit on them!” The simple litmus test for examining whether you’re actively seeking the face of God is whether you’re yearning to share the vision with others. It’s astonishing really that Moses hasn’t grown puffed up after so many years of Theophanous witness. Those occasions when God met him on Sinai’s Mount, lavishing his eyes with ineffable glory, filling the atmosphere of his faith with Shekinah light, didn’t get to his head. He never covered his face as a means of concealing the vision from others either—the way certain cardinals during the Middle Ages con...

MOSES’ COMPLAINT Numbers 11:11   Moses said to the LORD, “Why have you dealt ill with your servant? And why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me?” Unlike the shallow griping of that faction of whiners we encountered in the previous verses, Moses’ complaint here is resonant, striking a chord with every person who’s ever born the daunting responsibility of raising argumentative children or serving a faithless spouse or pastoring a dying church or leading any cantankerous group of people who raise Cain the whole way. This is Moses at his wits end. On the verge perhaps of a nervous breakdown. You can feel the tremor in his voice through the lines of text. You can feel his knuckles tightening around his staff and choking the wooden emblem of his clerical position, just as they’d done during those final, unfruitful meetings with Pharoah. He’s fed up with all the complaining. He can’t take another word of it; and he effectively says what w...

HIGH NOTES AND LOW NOTES Numbers 10:35-36   And whenever the ark set out, Moses said, “Arise, O LORD, and let your enemies be scattered, and let those who hate you flee before you.” And when it rested, he said, “Return, O LORD, to the ten thousand thousands of Israel.” The topsy-turvy nature of cosmic existence in a fallen world, the paradoxical balance of forces that collide yet coalesce, could be described as two threads that are inextricably bound together while trying to unwind the other. And God has effectively placed our lives right between the fibers of the conflict. Wise men throughout the ages, when bumping up against these conflicting cords, have tried with finite reason to find ways to describe the struggle. They’ve called it things like the circle of life, or karma, or yin and yang, or the wheel of fortune, or chance and fate, or matter and consciousness, but these either fall too short or reach too far. Only the incarnation of God takes us to the heart of the conflict....

BETWEEN THE ANGELS  Numbers 7:89   And when Moses went into the tent of meeting to speak with the LORD, he heard the voice speaking to him from above the mercy seat that was on the ark of the testimony, from between the two cherubim; and it spoke to him. God hasn’t commissioned Moses to live a life of solitary advancement. That is, Moses won’t be the founder of an ascetic movement living in the caves of the Canaanite ridges. His mission is far bigger than that. Effectively—and I mean this symbolically of course—Moses has only seen the back of God thus far because God is always moving ahead of him to Zion, always leading him onward, bidding him to follow further up and further in. And Moses can’t catch up until all his brothers and sisters are with him. It's no small thing here in this Numbers 7 encounter that God doesn’t speak to Moses through heavenly thundering and lightning, nor through pillars of cloud and fire, but through the precious instruments that Moses and the peopl...

WAXING LYRICAL  Numbers 6:22-26   The LORD spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying, Thus you shall bless the people of Israel: you shall say to them, The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.” Micah’s kindergarten teacher at a hybrid homeschool/classical school a few years ago opened class each morning by singing a benediction of Numbers 6:23-26, and my family has been singing the little melody at our home ever since. I smile on those moments when I’m writing upstairs, sequestered in my room, and the sound that slips under the doorway to interrupt my train of thought isn’t the sound of arguing or screaming or something breaking but the sweet melody of this benediction. And the truth is, even on days when I don’t feel like singing the lines myself, my life is still immersed in them. The LORD has spoken many things to Moses throughout his pil...

ON THE FACE OF IT Exodus 33:18, 20, 22-23   Moses said, “Please show me your glory.” … He said, “You cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live … I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.” If someone were to ask you the question today, “Why can’t we see God’s face?”, say that person was an inquisitive son or grandson, or maybe even a neighbor you’d been witnessing to who just started reading through the Bible for the first time, or perhaps an agnostic acquaintance who liked to stump you whenever the chance arose, how would you answer? Think about that for a moment. Ponder the mystery. Spin it around in your mind. What would you say? This is the paradox of spiritual yearning. Like Moses, we long to see God’s undiluted glory; we wish so badly that we could gaze into the one face that has remained invisible for all of history. And w...

A PLOT TWIST Exodus 33:8-10   Whenever Moses went out to the tent, all the people would rise up, and each would stand at his tent door, and watch Moses until he had gone into the tent. When Moses entered the tent, the pillar of cloud would descend and stand at the entrance of the tent, and the LORD would speak with Moses. And when all the people saw the pillar of cloud standing at the entrance of the tent, all the people would rise up and worship, each at his tent door. Why can’t the whole Book of Exodus just end right here after this verse? What a fairytale of redemption the story would be! Talk about a turnaround! This, to me, is every bit as dramatic and unprecedented as the conversion of Judah’s life we witnessed back in Genesis. Remember how Judah masterminded Joseph’s enslavement, profited from it, kept the lie hidden for years even to his father’s hurt, fornicated with a relative disguised as a prostitute and tried to kill her when she became pregnant? He was a cowardly, sel...

DOWN WITH THE SHIP Exodus 32:30-32   The next day Moses said to the people, “You have sinned a great sin. And now I will go up to the LORD; perhaps I can make atonement for your sin.” So Moses returned to the LORD and said, “Alas, this people has sinned a great sin. They have made for themselves gods of gold. But now, if you will forgive their sin—but if not, please blot me out of your book that you have written.” I could imagine a modern, cynical sort of journalist spinning the facts of this Exodus record into a narrative that casts a shadow over Moses’ achievements. The thesis would go like this: Moses’ privileged upbringing gives him a leg up among his brothers; he exploits his exalted position and fashions a plot to ‘deliver’ them from oppression; and the power he gains vaults him to a position of prominence that he hadn’t even known as a prince in Egypt. Conclusion: Moses represents a stale, patriarchal, toxic model of leadership that oppresses people rather than delivers them...

COME ALL WHO THIRST! Exodus 32:19-20 And as soon as he came near the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, Moses’ anger burned hot, and he threw the tablets out of his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain. He took the calf that they had made and burned it with fire and ground it to powder and scattered it on the water and made the people of Israel drink it. There’s a world of difference between hearing about an evil and watching it unfold before your very eyes, isn’t there? God just told Moses exactly what these people were up to in the valley, expressing His own fiery anger at their unabashed betrayal, but Moses effectively responded, “Wait, LORD—give them the benefit of the doubt! You know how stiff-necked they are; don’t give up on them just yet!” But his demeanor rapidly changes the moment he hikes back down from Sinai’s summit, steps out into the clearing, and catches a glimpse of the abhorrent acts God just finished relaying. Just like that, all that mediatorial symp...

A REASSURING TRUTH Exodus 32:9-11a, 13a, 14 And the LORD said to Moses, “I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people. Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, in order that I may make a great nation of you.” But Moses implored the LORD his God and said, “O LORD, … Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore by your own self, and said to them, ‘I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven …” And the LORD relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people. Could the very God Who knew all things before He ever spoke “Let there be light” into the unformed cosmos, the very God Who was slain before the foundation of the world, the very God Who prophesied His coming salvation not just in the earliest, most primitive pages of Holy Scripture but in every facet of the created world—through seeds that get buried in the earth, die, and rise again, to the songs of songbird...

A BOOK SIGNING Exodus 24:3b-4a & 7a And all the people answered with one voice and said, “All the words that the LORD has spoken we will do.” And Moses wrote down all the words of the LORD … Then he took the Book of the Covenant and read it in the hearing of the people. Back when I used to write and publish children’s books, I’d often celebrate the release of a new book by doing readings and signings at diverse elementary schools throughout central North Carolina. The signing part was tedious, especially with tendonitis, but the reading part was a blast. Because the writing, illustrating, and editorial work for publishing requires hours in isolation in front of a computer screen, it felt relieving to be able to engage with readers, to laugh and cheer with them at pivotal moments, and even to get interrupted constantly to hear their own stories. In my view, art is as much about participation as it is expression, which means that a book isn’t formally complete without the collaborati...

AN INTERVENTION Exodus 18:13 & 17-18 The next day Moses sat to judge the people, and the people stood around Moses from morning till evening. … Moses’ father-in-law said to him, “What you are doing is not good. You and the people with you will certainly wear yourselves out, for the thing is too heavy for you. You are not able to do it alone.” In an ethical sense, Moses is doing a wonderful thing here. In fact, I can’t think of a nobler way for a good shepherd to treat his flock than to watch over them from sunup to sundown. Didn’t our very Lord forego eating and sleeping in order to minister to the long lines of people who constantly wanted His attention? It’s good that Moses is down here in the thick of the action. He isn’t like those cult leaders who live in mansions while their followers live in tents, or like those celebrities who pamper themselves in VIP lounges and only address the fans who pay a premium to meet them. He’s among the crowd, at the same level with the poorest o...

PITCHING IN Exodus 17:9-10, 12b So Moses said to Joshua, “Choose for us men, and go out and fight with Amalek. Tomorrow I will stand on top of the hill with the staff of God in my hand.” So Joshua did as Moses told him, and fought with Amalek, while Moses, Aaron, and Hur went up to the top of the hill. … Aaron and Hur held up his hands, one on one side, and the other on the other side. So his hands were steady until the going down of the sun. One significant reality we rediscover over and over again throughout the biblical narrative is that God always has a remnant among the people of earth and often that remnant is a whole lot bigger than it seems. Yes, we’ve heard this mixed multitude bicker constantly and blame God for taking them out of Egypt, but Moses is far from alone in his faithfulness. Aaron’s been by his side since day one, and here in verse 8 we meet a man named Joshua who’s evidently developed a reputation for unwavering courage. Notice as well that Joshua doesn’t run afte...

STRONG AS A ROCK Exodus 17:3-4 But the people thirsted there for water, and the people grumbled against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?” So Moses cried to the LORD, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” If you’ve raised kids who are now adults, what was the most trying stage of that mentorship? Was it the terrible toddler years when all they did was throw fits and whine about everything and you couldn’t reason with them? Or was it the high-school years, when they’d roll their eyes at everything you’d say, and everyone else seemed to be making an impression on their character but you? Or was it the know-it-all college years when they finally enjoyed a little independence, and they started confronting your own fixed ideas about life and God and the world, and they were high on ideals but short on experience? I’ve not yet had high-school and college-age children of my own, bu...

TREASURES IN THE DUST Exodus 16:33-34 And Moses said to Aaron, “Take a jar, and put an omer of manna in it, and place it before the LORD to be kept throughout your generations.” As the LORD commanded Moses, so Aaron placed it before the testimony to be kept. Off and on over the past few years, my wife and I have watched a show on the History channel called “The Curse of Oak Island,” a show that documents the Lagina brothers’ ten-year long search for the infamous treasure trove supposedly buried on Oak Island. While they’ve uncovered multiple underground shafts and tunnels and stone roads, and while they’ve excavated a few interesting artifacts like British infantry buttons and Templar crosses and ancient digging tools, they haven’t exactly struck gold. Nevertheless, I find the idea riveting that some mysterious group from ages past would go through all the fuss to sail the ocean blue, find a covert island, and dig extravagant chambers, all to hide a treasure. But how sweet would it be ...

GENESIS, FIRST-HAND Exodus 14:21-22a Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the LORD drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided. And the people of Israel went into the midst of the sea on dry ground. If you could’ve asked Moses for his interpretation of the creation story, whether he viewed the emerging universe as a slow process of evolution, where one cataclysmic event formed another until all things subsided into a collective, inhabitable mass; or whether he viewed it as a personal, hands-on act of God, whereby God hovered over the darkness, reached out across the endless abyss of waters to divide them, spoke piercing words that swept like east winds, and called through the night until daylight appeared, and land emerged from the waters, and a path was formed for man, so that Adam could walk in the heart of the earth just as Moses will walk through the heart of the sea; obviously Moses would’ve said the latt...

SOME THROUGH THE FIRE Exodus 11:1 The LORD said to Moses, “Yet one plague more I will bring upon Pharaoh and upon Egypt. Afterward he will let you go from here. When he lets you go, he will drive you away completely.” As I ponder the bittersweetness of this fresh manna Moses partakes of— bitter because it promises more suffering for millions of people, but sweet because it reassures him that the end of that suffering is close at hand—it strikes me that Moses continues to obey the word of God even though he doesn’t exactly understand it. In other words, Moses doesn’t trust God because he understands the significance of ten plagues over nine, or because he’s connected all the symbolical dots between these plagues and their reference to the invisible spiritual war, or because he’s seen behind the veil of Providence into the thousands of lives being refined in this furnace of affliction; he trusts God because it’s the right course of action. He acts before he comprehends, which recalls to ...

FALLING UP Exodus 5:22-23 Then Moses turned to the LORD and said, “O Lord, why have you done evil to this people? Why did you ever send me? For since I came to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has done evil to this people, and you have not delivered your people at all.” That’s gotta be it for Moses, surely. No doubt, chapter six will open with the Lord recruiting someone else. Someone who won’t make every excuse under the sun for why he can’t speak efficiently. Someone who obeys right off the bat. Someone who won’t get knocked down at the very first sign of opposition and whose knees won’t buckle under the grumbles of a discontented crowd. And definitelysomeone who won’t have the audacity to turn around and point the finger at God when the going gets tough. Well, that might be how Exodus would read if it was the story about a perfect human messenger, but it isn’t. Instead, it’s the story of a patient and merciful God who works through human weaknesses to accomplish His perfect redempt...

THE RELUCTANT HERO Exodus 3:10-11 “Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt. But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?” Imagine if the president came to Clark Kent (aka Superman) and said, “Clark, I’d like to put you in charge of the United States Air Force—we might be heading off to war soon!”, and Kent responded, “Who me? No, I’m just a regular guy, Mr. President; I’m just a reporter for a little newspaper; not to mention I don’t know the first thing about flying planes!”, overlooking his x-ray vision, his ability to fly, and his bullet-proof chest. Or imagine Chicago’s mayor came to Bruce Wayne (aka Batman) and said, “Bruce, I’d like to nominate you as the chief of police—we’ve got to cut down this crime wave somehow!” and Wayne responding, “Who me? No, I’m just a guy in a million-dollar suit and tie; I’m just a hedge-fund manager; I’m not fit to wear the unif...

ANTI-HERO Exodus 2:11  One day, when Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and looked on their burdens, and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his people. He looked this way and that, and seeing no one, he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. I didn’t always get along with my twin brother, Benjamin, growing up. We weren’t joined at the hip, so to speak. We often fought, often competed for dominance, and often brought each other to tears, sometimes to blows. But despite our differences, there’s one thing I knew and respected about Benjamin beyond any shadow of doubt. I knew that if anyone tried to hurt me or my sisters, they’d have him to reckon with. I still remember being in second grade, waiting in the carpool line at Wiley Elementary School, looking down the outdoor staircase and seeing some kid tease my sister, Candace, and, in a flash, Benjamin was down the steps pushing that bully into a rose bush. Fast forward a decade, to a more humorous occasi...