Exodus Chapter 2: A Question Cast Upon the River of Silence, and the Grace of a Hiding God

Exodus Chapter 2: A Question Cast Upon the River of Silence, and the Grace of a Hiding God

"When she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. Now the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river. When Moses had grown up... Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian." (Exodus 2:3, 5, 11, 15 excerpts, NIV)

Exodus 2 breathlessly compresses forty years of a man's life into a few verses. A tumultuous journey—born Hebrew, raised as an Egyptian prince, turned murderer and fugitive in Midian—is condensed into mere sentences. On the surface, this story appears to be a string of remarkable coincidences. Just when the mother could no longer hide her child, just when Pharaoh's daughter came down to bathe, just when she discovered the basket hidden among the reeds. The author catalogs all these "coincidences," and only at the chapter's end reveals that God heard Israel's groaning. In other words, the author is making a confession of faith: none of this was human coincidence, but God's meticulous providence.

Here we stand on a knife's edge: the question of God's existence. If there is no God, then all this interpretation becomes, as Feuerbach claimed, nothing more than religious illusion—humanity projecting its own desires. It would be like ministers staging a coup, installing a puppet king, then kneeling before their own creation in a bizarre charade. The appearance is loyalty to the king, but the reality is humans creating and sustaining the throne. If God is merely a construct imprisoned within human thought, then our prayers are soliloquies scattered into empty air.

But if God truly exists beyond human thought, outside the boundaries of our reasoning, the story changes entirely. Even our doubts are held within God's grand providence. Yet here we encounter another discomfort. If everything is God's providence, are we merely marionettes moving according to a script? We resist being treated as robots. But God's providence doesn't manipulate humans; rather, it operates as a vast wisdom that weaves together even our free failures and random events to accomplish His purposes.

When Moses fled to the Midian wilderness, he entered a space of profound silence. God did not answer immediately, and Moses seemed abandoned as a failure. We may use the heavens as parchment and the seas as ink to discourse about God, but ultimately the proof of God's existence is God's task, not ours. Humans can only ask questions; the answer remains God's prerogative. We sometimes demand that God "prove Your existence," but upon reflection, we realize how dangerous such a demand truly is.

If God were to reveal His overwhelming existence in raw fullness, we sinful humans would tremble and perish before that holy fire. Therefore, God's silence—His hiddenness behind the curtain of history—is not weakness but hidden grace, a merciful distance that allows us to survive the encounter. His quiet watching may, in fact, be the kindest thing He can do for us.

We look again at that papyrus basket. It is not merely a hiding place, but the original pattern of faith—entrusting our existence to the river of God's silence. We withdraw our demand, "God, if You exist, prove it," and move toward the humble confession: "You owe no proof, and I trust even Your silence." Our perception and reason hit their limits, but precisely at that threshold, God begins to work. The river flows, the basket drifts toward an unknown destination, but when we acknowledge that the current itself is within God's providence, we finally find rest. The wilderness silence is not emptiness, but holy waiting—preparation to hear the voice that will soon speak from the burning bush.