The Cry Heard 'Round the World

A BABY CRIED. THE WHIMPER THAT ESCAPED ITS LIPS changed the entire course of human history. All of Western civilization, all of Near Eastern history indeed the entire course of human events was affected by this cry.

While the popular adage declares that "the devil is in the details," it is more accurate to avow that God is in the details. The doctrine of providence declares that God's providential rule extends to all things great and small, from the huge to the minute, the infinite to the infinitesimal.

Little things can have major consequences. We remember the proverb: For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; For want of the shoe, the horse was lost; For want of the horse, the rider was lost; For want of the rider, the battle was lost; For want of the battle, the kingdom was lost.

And all from the want of a horseshoe nail.

Because of one solitary nail an entire kingdom was lost. It has also been said that a single grain of sand in the kidney of Oliver Cromwell changed the course of British and world history and that the beating of a butterfly's wings in China creates tiny perturbations in air currents that ultimately affect the weather on the opposite side of the earth. A small but fatal bullet ended the dream of an American Camelot. Little things can mean a lot.

What was the cry heard round the world? What infant whimper changed the destiny of Planet Earth? It was the cry of an infant cast adrift on the River Nile.

The children of Israel enjoyed privileged status in the land of Goshen, a small parcel of land in the ancient empire of Egypt. They had been granted this piece of real estate when Joseph reigned as prime minister of Egypt and invited his father and his brothers to settle in that place.

But things changed. As time passed a new king came to power who did not know Joseph. The memory of Joseph's promises had faded, and a new policy was enacted: Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. And he said to his people, "Look, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we; come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and it happen, in the event of war, that they also join our enemies and fight against us, and so go up out of the land." Therefore they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with their burdens. And they built for Pharaoh supply cities, Pithom and Raamses. But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew.

And they were in dread of the children of Israel. So the Egyptians made the children of Israel serve with rigor. And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage—in mortar, in brick, and in all manner of service in the field. All their service in which they made them serve was with rigor. (Exod. 1:8-14) The descendants of Jacob were now prisoners in Egypt. They were enslaved and functioned as a slave-labor force. The pharaoh became ambivalent toward them.

On the one hand he enjoyed the fruit of their labor as they toiled to build supply cities to protect the nation from possible future famines. (There is irony here as it was an earlier famine that caused the Israelites to migrate to Egypt in the first place.) On the other hand the pharaoh feared what every tyrant fears, an uprising by masses of people who revolt. To control the size and strength of the Jewish population, the new pharaoh issued a decree of limited genocide. He decreed the murder of every newborn Jewish male baby: Then the king of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives, of whom the name of one was Shiphrah and the name of the other Puah; and he said, "When you do

the duties of a midwife for the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstools, if it is a son, then you shall kill him; but if it is a daughter, then she shall live."

(Exod. 1:15-16) The pharaoh was not content to command his soldiers to kill the Jewish babies.

The task was assigned to Jewish midwives, who were commanded to carry out the slaughter of their own people. But in a heroic act of civil disobedience, the Hebrew midwives refused to carry out their task and tried to cover up their disobedience with lies (an interesting episode that is cited in the Christian ethics texts to show examples of justifiable acts of civil disobedience as well as extreme circumstances when the justifiable lie is uttered).

But the midwives feared God, and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the male children alive.

So the king of Egypt called for the midwives and said to them, "Why have you done this thing, and saved the male children alive?"

And the midwives said to Pharaoh, "Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are lively and give birth before the midwives come to them."

Therefore God dealt well with the midwives, and the people multiplied and grew very mighty. And so it was, because the midwives feared God, that He provided households for them.

So Pharaoh commanded all his people, saying, "Every son who is born you shall cast into the river, and every daughter you shall save alive." (Exod. 1:17-22) It is interesting to note that the midwives found favor with God for their resistance to the decree of Pharaoh. They refused to do what God had forbidden.

Further irony is seen in that the decree stipulated that the slain males were to be cast into the river. They were to be sunk in the Nile so as to never exercise any future threat to Pharaoh.

But one of the Hebrew women who bore a son took exceptional care to protect

her son from the pharaoh's decree: And a man of the house of Levi went and took as wife a daughter of Levi. So the woman conceived and bore a son. And when she saw that he was a beautiful child, she hid him three months. But when she could no longer hide him, she took an ark of bulrushes for him, daubed it with asphalt and pitch, put the child in it, and laid it in the reeds by the river's bank. And his sister stood afar off, to know what would be done to him. (Exod. 2:1-4) With further irony, this Hebrew mother consigned her son's fate to the very river that was to be the place of disposal for dead infants. But she protected the baby from drowning by designing a crude vessel made watertight with asphalt and pitch lest leaks cause the ark to fill and sink. If ever a mother delivered her baby into the hands of the providence of God, it was this one! She set the ark afloat and let it be carried wherever the current would take it. As she set the little basket in the water, this mother had about as much reason to hope that her child would survive as Abraham did when he laid Isaac on the altar.

To this day one of the most vexing problems of science is the problem of predicting with accuracy the precise movements and flow of running water.

Without warning, swirls and eddies develop that change the direction of flow. A basket floating in the Nile could be affected by concealed rocks, floating branches, and even crocodiles. Many mothers have abandoned their infants on the doorsteps of hospitals, where there is a reasonable hope that they will be found and cared for. But the only hope this mother had was in the invisible hand of the God who made the river and ultimately governed its ebb and flow.

The child's oldest sister stood by the riverside, afar off, watching the floating basket as it was carried along by the current. She was exercising her own kind of providence, watching over the baby as long as she could keep it in sight. At this moment the only eyes upon the vessel were the eyes of the sister and the eyes of God.

Then a strange thing happened, something that some would regard as a coincidence, a chance encounter, or a fortuitous event. Someone else's eyes beheld the floating craft. What had attracted these eyes to the river is a matter of

conjecture. Perhaps it was a cry from the infant: Then the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river. And her maidens walked along the riverside; and when she saw the ark among the reeds, she sent her maid to get it. And when she opened it, she saw the child, and behold, the baby wept. So she had compassion on him, and said, "This is one of the Hebrews' children." (Exod. 2:5-6) Of all the people on the face of the earth to spy the floating ark at this place and at this time, it happened to be the pharaoh's daughter. If this was a coincidence, it is one of the most remarkable coincidences of all time. The Bible does not say she heard the baby cry while it was being carried along the Nile. But when she had the ark retrieved the baby was weeping, which makes me suspect it was a cry that drew her attention to it in the first place. It may have been a piercing yell or perhaps only a soft whimper. In any case the child was discovered and evoked a sense of compassion from Pharaoh's daughter.

Another irony also is in view here. This young woman's father has gone down in history as the prototypical example of a human being with a hardened heart. The refrain that runs through Exodus repeats the description of the hard heart of Pharaoh. But the heart of Pharaoh's daughter was soft. She had compassion upon crying babies, no matter their race. She exhibited a maternal instinct that led her to rescue the child.

It is significant that she recognized the baby was Hebrew. Obviously she was aware of her father's decree. She was risking her father's wrath, a princess defying the king, by stooping to aid the helpless Hebrew baby. Had she obeyed her father's decree she would have thrown the baby back into the river, and that would have been the end of it. There would be no "rest of the story." But this was not the end of it. Not by a long shot. It was not the end of it because the woman had compassion. The baby cried . . .

Then [the baby's] sister said to Pharaoh's daughter, "Shall I go and call a nurse for you from the Hebrew women, that she may nurse the child for you?"

And Pharaoh's daughter said to her, "Go." So the maiden went and called the

child's mother. Then Pharaoh's daughter said to her, "Take this child away and nurse him for me, and I will give you your wages." So the woman took the child and nursed him. And the child grew, and she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son. So she called his name Moses, saying, "Because I drew him out of the water." (Exod. 2:7-10) The events immediately following the discovery of the baby are almost as astonishing as the discovery itself. Obviously as she was standing afar off, the baby's sister saw his rescue from the river. But she could not be sure it was a rescue; it could have appeared to her as the ultimate disaster. Thinking quickly, she went to Pharaoh's daughter and volunteered to find a nurse for the baby. By this point she must have realized that Pharaoh's daughter had a tender heart and was not inclined to destroy the child.

Another irony may be seen in the vast difference caused by one letter in the princess's one-word response, the difference between an n and a g. When the sister volunteered to find a nurse, Pharaoh's daughter could have said, "No!"

Instead she said, "Go"! So the sister went and called her mother, and the final irony took place. The baby's mother herself was hired to take care of the child.

Her child was restored to her by the hand of Providence acting through the hand of Pharaoh's daughter.

Perhaps in reality this was not the final irony. Perhaps that occurred when the baby was named not by its mother but by the princess. (Though it is likely the mother had already named him.) The baby was named (or renamed) by Pharaoh's daughter, and it was this name by which he came to be known in history. Because he was drawn out of the water, the child was named Moses.

Moses was not merely rescued by the daughter of Pharaoh. Moses was given the advantage of being raised within the scope of Pharaoh's court. He was trained in the knowledge and skills of the Egyptian culture, which was crucial preparation for the tasks God would later assign to him. He was reared as a prince, with all the benefits accorded to that rank.

Playing "What If?"

It is at this point that we are tempted to indulge in playing the game of "What if?" What if Moses' mother had not successfully hidden him from Pharaoh's soldiers for three months? What if Moses' mother had not made the ark from reeds? What if the tiny craft had leaked and sunk to the bottom of the river?

What if Pharaoh's daughter had not been at the riverside at the exact moment the ark floated by? What if she didn't have compassion? What if the baby hadn't cried?

The game of "What if?" involves contingencies, things that could conceivably occur—or not occur. They are dependent, "unnecessary" events. A necessary event is one that we believe could not have happened otherwise.

We are accustomed to think of fixed laws of nature that determine the sequence of certain events. We assume that when it rains the grass will become wet as a necessary consequence. We normally do not see this result as a pure contingency. Philosophically we do not know for sure that just because every time it rained in the past the grass got wet we can deduce absolutely that when it rains tomorrow the grass will get wet. We may say that the wetness of the grass tomorrow is a contingency. That is, it depends on whether it rains or if we water it with a hose or if dew forms in the morning. But we assume that if it does rain the grass will get wet as a necessary result. (The philosophical vagaries here were explored in great detail by the philosopher David Hume, who recognized that we do not have an immediate sensory apprehension of causal relationships but rather observe regular or customary relationships between events.) The problem of contingencies relates to the broader question of causality, which we will explore more fully later. The question we are concerned with now is the relationship of contingencies to God. The issue is, Does anything happen contingently from His vantage point? We have said that God knows all contingencies but knows nothing contingently. At first glance this may seem like an arcane conundrum, an abstract consideration that is better left to philosophers.

But it is important for us to think about it a bit as we seek a deeper understanding of the providence of God.

We remember that the term providence is derived from word forms that are at least somewhat concerned with foreknowledge. Foreknowledge belongs properly

within the scope of God's omniscience. The omniscience of God is well attested in Scripture. We think, for example, of Psalm 139: O LORD, You have searched me and known me.

You know my sitting down and my rising up; You understand my thought afar off.

You comprehend my path and my lying down, And are acquainted with all my ways.

For there is not a word on my tongue, But behold, O Lord, You know it altogether.

You have hedged me behind and before, And laid Your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; It is high, I cannot attain it.

Where can I go from Your Spirit?

Or where can I flee from Your presence?

If I ascend into heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.

If I take the wings of the morning,

And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, Even there Your hand shall lead me, And Your right hand shall hold me.

If I say, "Surely the darkness shall fall on me," Even the night shall be light about me; Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from You, But the night shines as the day; The darkness and the light are both alike to You.

For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother's womb.

I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Marvelous are Your works, And that my soul knows very well.

My frame was not hidden from You, When I was made in secret, And skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.

Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed.

And in Your book they all were written, The days fashioned for me, When as yet there were none of them.

How precious also are Your thoughts to me, O God!

How great is the sum of them!

If I should count them, they would be more in number than the sand; When I awake, I am still with You. (Ps. 139:1-18) The psalmist declares that we are perfectly and completely known by God. He knows what we are going to say before we say it. He has the capacity to know the end from the beginning. His knowledge extends down to the smallest details.

He not only knows what we will say but He also knows everything we possibly could say. He knows all the possible contingencies. Yet there is nothing contingent about His knowledge; it does not depend upon what we will do. He doesn't have to wait to see which fork in the road we choose to know which fork we most certainly will choose. He knows the future precisely because He wills the future.

It was not a surprise to God that Pharaoh's daughter went to the riverside on a fateful day in human history. It was no surprise to Him that the baby cried. He ordained that the baby cry and He ordained that it cry at the precise moment it cried. God did not leave all this to chance.

We play with the "what ifs?" and speculate on the course of history had the baby not cried. We could surmise that if the baby had not cried there would have been no Moses. Had there been no Moses there would have been no incident at the burning bush. No burning bush, no Exodus. No Exodus, no giving of the Law at

Sinai. No Law, no prophets. No prophets, no Jesus. No Jesus, no cross. No cross, no redemption. No redemption, no Christianity. No Christianity, no Western civilization as we know it. All of this if a baby in a homemade ark had failed to cry at precisely the right moment.

But there is no "what if?" in God. He is a God whose providence is in the details.