The Deliverer by Linda Rios Brook Read Free Book Online Page A

did.
    “O Lord, please send someone else to do it.”
    The sand where I was planted got hotter and hotter as God’s wrath burned against Moses. This had to be it. I couldn’t see how God could indulge him any further. But He did. When I heard God agree to allow Aaron, Moses’s brother, to accompany him and speak for him, I quit trying to get up and hoped I would die right there in the sand. I was exhausted and frustrated at the way God let these humans get by with things that would never have been allowed in the angelic realm. The last thing I remember was the crumpling of my wing as a goat laid down on it.

    The ground was cold, the night was dark, and everyone was gone when I came around and realized the weight of “I AM” had lifted from my back. Shaking my wings back into shape, I looked around and, seeing no one, wondered if Moses was still alive after challenging God the way he had. Dead or alive, he was nowhere to be seen; even the goats were gone. Finding a flat sandstone, I sat down and tried to think about what had happened.
    After a while, I figured it out. The desert had not killed Moses, but it had humbled him. So much so that he was likely the humblest man on all the earth. His questioning God was not because he doubted God but because he doubted himself. Moses couldn’t get over his sense of unworthiness, so he begged God to use someone like Aaron, a person he thought to be holier than himself and more worthy of being chosen by God. At least Aaron was not guilty of ever having killed someone like Moses had done. Moses believed he had failed God years ago and was now of no use to Him at all. And God, of course, could not resist that kind of humility.
    If I had ever doubted, there was now no possibility Moses might fail.
    As I flapped my way back to the second heaven, I thought about the contrast between the arrogance of Satan and the humility of Moses. Satan’s unrestrained pride caused one-third of the angels to fall to their doom. Moses’s complete lack of self would redeem a nation. I wanted to rub the irony in Satan’s face when I returned to his lair, but I would never have had the nerve to do such a thing. I couldn’t help but think about the Hebrews and their unrelenting belief for more than four centuries that someday, some way, a deliverer was coming for them. Even as hundreds of them died every day in the mud pits, the rest of them continued their song of hope.
    “My deliverer is coming. My deliverer is standing by.”
    I wondered how they knew.

C HAPTER 4
    I S THAT the best you can come up with?” Satan’s sarcasm was intended to minimize the importance of my report lest for one minute I might take pride in bringing him useful information. “Am I supposed to believe God came up with a ridiculous plan like this?”
    I told him word for word the conversation I’d heard between God and Moses in the desert, but he wouldn’t believe I hadn’t left something out of the story. It sounded too simple. That’s another of the countless ways in which Satan is different from God. God makes things simple, especially when it comes to humans. Satan, on the other hand, makes things as convoluted as possible.
    “Let me see if I have this right. Moses will just mosey into Ramses’ throne room with a stick in his hand, and Ramses will hand over the slaves. Is that what you expect to happen?”
    “Something like that, sir. Of course there’s going to be hail, frogs, flies, blood in the river, all that at first, but at the end of it all, Moses will leave with the slaves.”
    “Are you suggesting I don’t have the power to stop the exodus of the Hebrews?” Satan was beginning to sizzle. Trick question. What should I say? My mind worked double time trying to come up with an answer with the least physical consequences for me.
    “No, of course not, Your Terribleness. With the humans, you’ve always got a shot because of that misconceived idea of free will God programmed into them. Moses has to obey