His Encouragement #139

Welcome to His Encouragement Thursday! I don’t know about you, but Thursdays are my struggle day of the week. By Thursday, I have already been working hard at school and at home, and I just wish it would hurry up and be Friday already. LOL! I definitely need a little extra Jesus time on Thursdays.

Trisha, my blogger friend at Joy of Reading, and I decided on calling this post “His Encouragement” because our real source of peace, strength, and security can only come from Jesus Christ. He and He alone is our constant! We pray and hope that these Thursday posts become a real encouragement to you and help you end your week strong in God’s love and purpose for you. God bless!

Today’s Thursday Encouragement:

Now the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her young women walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her servant woman, and she took it.
Exodus 2:5 ESV

In the Bible, names are important and we should pay attention to them.

Many times in the Bible people are named and their names are somehow symbolic. For example, Isaac’s name in Hebrew means laughter. We know that Abraham and Sarah both laugh when they are told they will become parents in their old age, hence Isaac is named laughter. Sometimes, figures in the Bible are unnamed at first but in later chapters we find out their given names. For example, Moses’s mother is named Jochebed, but we don’t find that out immediately. And, sometimes people are part of a narrative in the Bible and are never named — I’m thinking of the random man Joseph meets in Genesis when he is looking for his brothers (Genesis 37:15). But if we’ve spent any amount of time in our Bibles we should all agree that names, and the lack thereof, are important.

In Exodus 2, Pharaoh’s daughter is called “Pharaoh’s daughter” five times. We never receive her name in the text. She is simply marked by the man who owns her — her father, the king of Egypt. It always makes me sad that this woman whom God put into Moses’s life as a mother figure is reduced to just “Pharaoh’s daughter.” I mean God must have thought more of her than just being the daughter to the king who mistreated and abused the Hebrews, right?

The answer is YES! God thought a lot about this woman, and I can prove it.

In 1 Chronicles 4:8b we are told, “And these are the sons of Bithiah the daughter of Pharaoh, which Mered took” (emphasis mine). If you read just a little earlier in 1 Chronicles 4 you learn that Mered is a son from the line of Caleb the son of Jephunneh (verse 15). If you follow the timeline, Mered lived during Moses’s time and fled Egypt with Moses’s Egyptian mother. Interesting huh?!

The coolest part — Bithiah in Hebrew means “Yahweh’s daughter.” When Moses’s Egyptian mother left during the Exodus God gave her a new name, a name that reflected the way HE saw her — as His daughter.

I think this is amazing. Actually, it makes me tear up a bit. God is so cool. The world may see us only by our labels — this man’s daughter, that man’s wife, this kid’s mom, or by the jobs we have — BUT GOD sees US. He knows each of us by name. And we matter.

If you are struggling today for any reason, remember that God KNOWS you. He sees you. And, He wants to call you HIS. Go to God today — He’s got you!