“Let go and let God.” (A twelve-step slogan.)

Ex. 4:1   Then Moses answered, “But behold, they will not believe me or listen to my voice, for they will say, ‘The LORD did not appear to you.’” ² The LORD said to him, “What is that in your hand?” He said, “A staff.” ³ And he said, “Throw it on the ground.” So he threw it on the ground, and it became a serpent, and Moses ran from it. ⁴ But the LORD said to Moses, “Put out your hand and catch it by the tail”—so he put out his hand and caught it, and it became a staff in his hand— ⁵ “that they may believe that the LORD, the God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has appeared to you.” (Exodus 4:1-5, English Standard Version)

Letting go of things is not easy for me. You would know this immediately if you looked at my bookshelves or my garage. Then, there is the matter of letting go of the past and all the regrets associated with it. No, letting go of things is not easy for me.

Of course, holding onto things isn’t easy either. My arthritic hands have a difficult time holding onto glasses when I’m doing the dishes, much less holding onto heavier objects. Then too, my hands are only so big and so strong anyway. I really can’t hold much at all. Neither, probably, can anyone.

Moses was holding on to his staff. He was a shepherd. He needed his staff. Yet, in his encounter with the LORD in the desert, Moses wasn’t sure that God had chosen the right man for the job. So God asks him a question, “What’s that in your hand?”

Now the truth is this: When God asks a question, God already knows the answer. God doesn’t ask questions for God’s benefit but for ours. What did Moses have in his hands? The same gnarly rod that he had used on his sheep for some time now. Nothing dramatic, nothing special.

God gives Moses a strange command. “Throw it down.” And what happened when Moses threw down his staff? It became a snake. And then, on a rather humorous sidenote, we are told that Moses ran away from the snake. The Bible is much funnier than we sometimes are willing to admit.

Sometimes, we have to let go of things, to throw them down. When we do, we don’t like the initial results at all. In fact, those results can be pretty scary.

And then, God gives Moses another even stranger command: “Pick it up by the tail.” I’ve never been much of a snake handler, but even I know that if you pick up a snake by its tail, you’re likely to get bitten.

But Moses obeys, despite his fear, and the snake becomes his staff again. We can debate until the cows come home and have been milked whether this is some kind of magic or a miracle or whether it is factual. My personal belief is that, if there is a God at all, changing one thing into another would be no more difficult for God than me changing my shirt. But I think that if we get enmeshed in these kinds of science-versus-religion debates, we may be missing a major truth. We may be missing the idea that, if we are willing to let go of our regular stuff and our everyday lives at God’s commands, strange and wonderful things may happen.

What if I let go of my money, books, relationships, and time today? What if threw to the ground my right to be right about everything from love to politics?

When Moses was returning to Egypt to confront the most powerful ruler of the ancient world, the Bible says that Moses took his wife and sons to Egypt with him. It also says that Moses took the rod of God (Exodus 4:20). When did the rod of Moses become the rod of God? Apparently, when Moses let it go.

What do you and I need to let go of today?