Moses’ three signs

Exodus 4: 1-9: And Moses answered and said, But, behold, they will not believe me, nor hearken unto my voice: for they will say, The LORD hath not appeared unto thee. And the LORD said unto him, What is that in thine hand? And he said, A rod. And he said, Cast it on the ground. And he cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from before it. And the LORD said unto Moses, Put forth thine hand, and take it by the tail. And he put forth his hand, and caught it, and it became a rod in his hand: That they may believe that the LORD God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath appeared unto thee. And the LORD said furthermore unto him, Put now thine hand into thy bosom. And he put his hand into his bosom: and when he took it out, behold, his hand was leprous as snow. And he said, Put thine hand into thy bosom again. And he put his hand into his bosom again; and plucked it out of his bosom, and, behold, it was turned again as his other flesh. And it shall come to pass, if they will not believe thee, neither hearken to the voice of the first sign, that they will believe the voice of the latter sign. And it shall come to pass, if they will not believe also these two signs, neither hearken unto thy voice, that thou shalt take of the water of the river, and pour it upon the dry land: and the water which thou takest out of the river shall become blood upon the dry land.

God gave Moses three signs as a confirmation of his ministry. The first two signs were connected with Moses’ occupation and his person (the shepherd’s rod becoming a serpent and his hand becoming leprous). This showed that when God would be delivering His people in the last days, the revelation of the hour was going to come through the Person of Christ and His occupation as the Great Shepherd, delivering the names in the Lamb’s Book of Life.

The first two signs contained a mystery of how God would deal with sin. Moses’ shepherd’s rod becoming a serpent showed how sin began in the Garden of Eden when the Serpent seduced Eve. Now let us pay close attention to what Moses did with his hand. He put it into his bosom and it became leprous, then he put it into his bosom again and it became clean. This revealed what God would achieve for us in Christ. Man was born in a fallen condition as a consequence of sin that had come into the world because of the Serpent beguiling Eve. But then God sent His Son Jesus to the earth to deal with the sin question.

Jesus was the right hand of God, and He was the sinless Lamb of God. Jesus came forth from the bosom of the Father (John 1:18) and took our sin upon Himself on the cross of Calvary (He became spiritually leprous when our sin was heaped upon Him). When Jesus died, He went down to Hell and laid our sin on Satan’s filthy lap; then He went to Heaven, back to the bosom of the Father, and presented His atoning blood on the Mercy Seat of the heavenly sanctuary. After this, He returned back to the earth again as the sinless Lamb and showed Himself alive to His disciples by many infallible proofs (Acts 1:3). So the wondrous mystery of redemption and healing was always wrapped up inside the bosom of the Father.

The first two signs had a voice (Exodus 4:8), but if the voice of those signs was rejected, then Moses was to take water from the Nile River and pour it out upon the dry land, and that water would become blood, to show that God would drench the land in blood for rejecting the voice of the signs. So in the last days God sent a prophet with signs following His ministry, but the world rejected the Voice of God that was behind the signs, and as a consequence, God will shed the blood of these Word rejectors by casting them into the Great Tribulation and pouring out the seven vials of His wrath upon them. It is therefore a very serious offence to reject the Voice of God, and in rejecting His Voice, the world is exposed to the third sign, the sign of bloodshed and death.