Hebrews 11:23 Commentary and Bible Study

This is a precious example of faith, the faith of the parents of Moses. The cruellest Pharaoh of all came to rule Egypt, and he determined that all the baby hebrew boys should be killed. The hebrew midwives frustrated his purpose at first, but then his command was very definite that all male babies should be thrown into the Nile. The parents of Moses determined to keep him alive and made an ark of bulrushes. In the book of Exodus, it is daubed with slime, which is possibly asphalt used in the building processes of Egypt, and they made this ark and put Moses in it, setting his older sister who wouldn't be suspected to watch over him. The daughter of Pharaoh came to wash and walking down the riverside saw the ark among the reeds and found Moses, and decided to adopt him as her son. But we are more interested in the motives of the parents. After three months the ark was made and Moses was put there, but how would that preserve him.? Surely, he would be discovered. Ah, they trusted God that something else would happen. This is what the verse means when it says, ‘By faith Moses, when he was born, was hid three months of his parents.’ They put him in that ark, ‘because they saw he was a proper child.’ Whatever does that mean? Literally it is ‘a beautiful child’. The Greek word actually comes from the word ‘city’. If you lived in a city in those days, you were a more sophisticated person, a favoured person, and they looked at their child, Moses, and they saw he was especially favoured. This is more than beautiful. That is why the King James translators clearly recoil from translating the Greek as ‘beautiful’. They say ‘proper’ because they know there is something deeper here. He was a proper child, a favoured child. We could imagine that the parents of Moses, wished to preserve him at home for just as long as they possibly could, but it would not be possible to hide him indefinitely. They were compelled to build the ark and put him on the river because they had all the protective instincts of parents and they loved him and couldn't bear the thought that he must perish. No doubt all that was true, but Hebrews 11 doesn’t mention that. The more significant reason why his parents did this was because they saw he was a favoured child, a child favoured by God. They saw the stamp of God was upon him, that this child somehow was destined in the purposes of God. Yes, they might have done it because they wish to protect him, but the motive brought out here is that they saw he was a special child. Another factor is added: ‘they were not afraid of the king’s commandment’. You could interpret this to mean that they were not afraid of being found out and punished, but again there is more to it than that. They put the two things together; they saw the stamp of God was upon this child; this was an unusual child; God had destined something for this child, and they were not afraid of what the king might do because they were sure the child would live. The king’s decrees will not result in the death of this child. How could they be so certain as to have no fear, no anxiety? All they were doing was putting the child in an ark daubed with asphalt and pitch; he couldn’t survive there for long. Someone was going to have to look after the child. They did only what they could and it was a feeble and short-lived provision. They did not know how God would do it, but they were not afraid. And so it turned out, they worked by faith.