Acts 7:20 “At that time Moses was born, and he was no ordinary child.”
No ordinary child….
I was recently reading the account in Exodus 2 where the infant Moses was delivered from the edict of death issued to all Hebrew boys living in Egypt. With the desperate hope of sparing her baby’s life, Moses’ mother carefully laid him in a basket and placed him in the Nile River. There, Pharaoh’s daughter found him and took him as her son, thus securing his future. The footnote in my Bible states his rescue foreshadows Israel’s future deliverance from Egyptian bondage. And, of course, Israel’s deliverance foreshadows the escape of all believers from the slavery of sin and death through the blood of Christ.
Just as the scripture states that Moses was no ordinary child, so Israel was no ordinary nation, and believers today are no ordinary people. It made me think of a movie I saw in the 80s, Ordinary People. The movie portrayed how tragedy affected a so-called ordinary middle class American family, exposing the depth of its dysfunction.
Without the blood of Christ, we too, are ordinary people. We are bound to our flaws and failures. We may look good on the outside, but the arrival of adversity all too often reveals our dysfunction. There is no more hope for our deliverance than there was for Moses or Israel. But just as something extraordinary happened to them, so something extraordinary has happened to all of us who believe. An extraordinary God has made it possible for us to be delivered from sin and its devastation.
Now, when we look at ourselves and at others in Christ, we ought not to think in terms of ordinary. As C.S. Lewis writes, we have never met a “mere mortal.” We are no longer stuck in sin. There is always hope for redemption, for restoration. We find freedom from the ordinary for ourselves and liberty to view others in the same life-giving light.