If Jesus is Lord, No One Else Is (Hebrews 11:23-28)
This sermon was preached on August 3rd, 2025.
1 Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. 2 This is what the ancients were commended for…
23 By faith Moses’ parents hid him for three months after he was born, because they saw he was no ordinary child, and they were not afraid of the king’s edict.
24 By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. 25 He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. 26 He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward. 27 By faith he left Egypt, not fearing the king’s anger; he persevered because he saw him who is invisible. 28 By faith he kept the Passover and the application of blood, so that the destroyer of the firstborn would not touch the firstborn of Israel.
Our passage today is filled with a family of criminals. Two people who had a son and disobeyed a law by keeping him hidden. That son who rejected his place of privilege as the adopted grandson of the king and led the freeing of slaves that ultimately ruined the economy and civilization of Egypt.
It’s easy for us to miss what it would have been like to be any of them—the culture and time they lived in is so distant from us. And the story of Moses can be so large in our imaginations that we forget that this was real life, flesh and blood people. Not some legends.
When we read this passage, we aren’t supposed to see these people as superheroes different than us, capable of things we could never imagine. As I’ve said in previous weeks in this passage: these are not heroes. These are brothers and sisters in the faith, people just like us, in different circumstances. And they are being mentioned in Hebrews 11 to remind us of that—they did not exist at some good ol’ days of God’s grace but people just like us, full of struggles and weaknesses and sin, who found God’s grace and point us to the sufficiency of God, and trusting and depending on Him.
People who had choices in front of them that they did not want—but people who walked forward in their difficulty by faith in God, realizing that trust in God often means giving up on your trust in other things. Specifically for these people, trust and dependence on God meant not having trust and dependence on the only country, land, and king they had ever known.
And what I want to propose this morning is that through them and how they point to Jesus, we get a picture of what it means for us to take seriously that we are not our own, but belong to God and how allegiance must be our highest allegiance.
Our story refers back to the earliest chapters of the Book of Exodus. The Israelites had been in Egypt for almost 400 years, having first come there as one large family during a famine. And when they first arrived in Egypt, they were well-received. In fact, they were people who helped the entire nation survive the massive famine.
400 years later, no one remembered that. All the Egyptians knew were that these people were growing and the king saw it as a problem. They didn’t belong there, refused to assimilate to Egyptian culture. They refused to do the things good Egyptians were expected to do.
So Pharaoh makes their work incredibly hard on purpose, hoping to break them so. It doesn’t work, so he gets far more drastic and commands Israelite midwives—the women in charge of caring for mothers and babies—to kill every newborn boy. They refuse to do this, lying to Pharaoh. Then Pharaoh gives the order to all the people “Every Hebrew boy that is born you must throw into the Nile.”
Pause there. Pharaoh has given a license for homicide to everyone in the kingdom. These people were already slaves, already being worked and worked, and now it’s open season on their sons. I want our hearts to break here. I remind you, this is no fairy tale. A man, Pharaoh, drunk with power and driven by fear, has allowed his heart to harden to the point that these people are trash to him.
That’s the background for our passage. And that brings us to the parents of Moses. What they do is no small thing. They directly disobey the command of Pharaoh. They hide a baby for 3 months (can you imagine?) At the end of the three months, they have to do something else. Either the mom was being forced back to work, or it was simply getting too difficult to hide the baby.
We aren’t told what was going on in her mind. And I can’t imagine. She builds a basket, which the way it’s described, was a casket. The mom did not know what to do. She couldn’t bear the thought of someone else grabbing her baby boy and throwing him into the water. In her terror the only thing she can think to do is make a little coffin for her baby.
What impossible grief! What a hopeless situation. Yet it might be her last bit of rebellion against Pharaoh that she doesn’t toss him the river, like Pharaoh had commanded, but she placed him this basket, among the reeds in the shallow part of the river. Releasing him outside her ability to care for him.
In God’s mysterious providence, his basket floats to an unexpected place: to where Pharaoh’s own daughter bathing in the Nile. From that point on, Moses is raised in the very house of Pharaoh. And in one of my favorite ironies of the story, Pharaoh’s daughter hires Moses’ mom, without knowing who she is, to care for him until he is weaned. That brings us to Moses.
Moses was raised as a prince in Pharaoh’s household, with access to the the best everything. And I’m sure he had an inward battle, fighting to figure out who he was and who he was going to choose to be. Yet as v24 tell us, Moses “refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter.” He rejected the leg up that would have given him for his life personally and, v24 “chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the fleeting pleasure of sin.”
He realized that he couldn’t do both. He learned this from the sacrifice of his biological parents. They were nobodies, at least in the world where he lived. They didn’t factor in—according to the king, his adopted grandfather, they were trash, worth being tossed away. But Moses chose to be counted with those who were “trash” and “slaves” in the eyes of the world.
I want to camp out here for a minute, so that we don’t miss the call to us. Because these words are no small thing to us. Moses refused what belonged to him by right. He chose to be mistreated. Why? Because the easy and prosperous route was a pathway of destruction.
The way our passage talks about it is remarkable: it calls a lifetime of luxury and ease “the fleeting pleasures of sin.” Yet he chose disgrace in the eyes of the world, disgrace that was of greater value than all the treasures of Egypt.
Also note what these ‘fleeting pleasures of sin’ were. They weren’t what I think we tend to think of when we say “fleeting pleasures of sin.” We’re probably prone to think of sexual sin or substance abuse. But neither of those are mentioned in Exodus. The fleeting pleasures of sin were sins of excessive wealth that was built off the slave labor of others. The fleeting pleasures of sin were racial pride that exercised itself in violence and oppression.
I’m not saying sexual sin or substance abuse are small things—they aren’t. They’re incredibly serious. But the sacrifice this passage is talking about is that Moses decided to be numbered among the lowest rung of society, because the society where he lived, Egypt, was an unjust one, and to profit from it was sin. He chose to identify with the people of God in their low status rather than take the easy path of being considered among the powerful.
God intervened in the story of the Israelites, empowering Moses to be the leader who challenged the power of Pharaoh directly, putting before Pharaoh the same choice: renouncing his false power and turning to God, or the pathway of holding onto his false power and being destroyed along with it.
Pharaoh chose the latter, after clear and repeated warnings, and God visited judgment upon Egypt. Drastic judgment. Yet God also gives a warning and a way out. Something that maybe sounded strange to them. To slaughter a lamb for a meal, then applying some of the blood of that lamb on the doorposts of that house. It was a sign that the house was one who had turned toward God, which meant turning away from Egypt.
All of this was a dramatic and foundational moment for God’s people. This image of exodus, coming out from slavery toward freedom at the actions of God, became one of the primary images that the Old Testament used to speak of how God was at work and how he would work in the future. And in the New Testament, the idea of Exodus was taken up by the writers of the gospels to describe Jesus.
Jesus, the true and better Moses—the one to whom Moses was pointing all along. Jesus, who had to be hidden from Herod, a king who commanded boys to be killed because he was drunk on power and steeped in fear.
Jesus, who chose to leave the glory that belonged to him as the eternal Son of God and take on the form of a servant—to condescend to become one of us, for us. He who deserved all glory and honor, who experienced disgrace and shame and rejection and death on behalf of us.
Jesus, the true and better Moses who not only instructed us on how to be saved but paid the price for our salvation.
Jesus, the true and better Moses who entrusted himself to God the Father and in the face of worldly power did not bow to it, but believed that the Father would vindicate him. And he did in resurrection. And in lifting him to the place of glory, above every name-that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow and every tongue confess.
As we reflect on the story of Moses and his family, I think we’re meant to trace the line to Jesus, so that our trust and hope is not in ourselves but in God. Just like Moses and his parents—their hope wasn’t that they were strong in themselves. Moses wasn’t someone who had a particularly special and superhuman character. He was a human being like all of us. A human being with flaws and weaknesses.
No. Their hope was that they entrusted themselves to God who was able, God who was able, God who was unchanging in his nature and unchanging in his purposes. God who came through on his promises.
The same is true for us, and it’s why this story is listed for us in Hebrews 11. I reiterate: these were not super-humans with characteristics that we don’t have. They are us. And in situations that they didn’t want and probably didn’t expect, they placed their trust and dependence in God.
I don’t know what kinds of things you’ll face in your life. But I do know this: God is calling you to open your eyes to the world you live in. There are so many things about American culture I love. And there are so many things about American culture that, if we’re going to earnestly follow Jesus in this world, we must reject.
The idea that the goal of our lives is wealth or comfort or prestige. That seems nice, of course. But we are called in there here and now to open our eyes, hearts, and homes to those at the bottom rung of society, to testify to the dignity and worth of those no one else shows dignity to or values. We are called, clearly throughout Scripture, to take up the cause of the poor, the widow, and the orphan. As the book of James said, this is the kind of religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”
Friends, we are called in the story of Moses to see it all through the lens of Jesus, and to follow Jesus in following this. No matter where it leads us.
For some Christians in our world, and maybe for some of us in possible futures, it may lead us to do things that are “illegal” in the eyes of our country. Not in the eyes of God. Those aren’t the same things. But following Jesus may lead us to make trouble—good trouble.
The good trouble that refuses to bow down to tyrants: whether those tyrants are political leaders or abusive spouses or terrible bosses. The good trouble that demands the human dignity and worth of people is seen and recognized. The good trouble that bristles at power that isn’t being used to further human thriving and goodness. That sees the image of God in people as the most important thing about them—the thing about them that has to recognized before anything else.
I’m not coming at this from a talking point of any politician. And if you’re hearing that from perspective, I’m begging you to step outside of it. No left/right. No democrat/republican. That didn’t exist in the time of Moses or in the time of Jesus. I’m talking about Jesus Christ and human beings. What does the Son of God becoming one of us mean for how we think about people?
The pathway of faith in this world, for us, is to throw everything in on Jesus and his Lordship, and everything else has to form around that. Jesus is Lord, and it means that no one else is.
Let us cling to him.