earthly father and ask him for bread, he will not give you a stone and if you go to an earthly father and ask him for fish, he will not give you a serpent.  So, likewise, He then makes the leap your heavenly Father loves to do good things for you.  If Jesus then—pointing to what we all know, the love of an earthly father—could then elevate it and say whatever you can perceive in that earthly expression, our heavenly Father is so much more, that’s my license today and in this book to look at earthly mothers in their comforting or loving expression because this day gives us that good focus and memory on what mothers are and what they mean and what they do. 

I can look at a mother who is earthly in Scripture, see her love, and say on the basis “As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you” how much more today and any other day we can count on our heavenly Mother, which El Shaddai gives us license to say “If we see love in an earthly mother, how much more shall our heavenly Mother comfort.”   Too bad all the feminists aren’t here today.  You go tell them about it.  They’ll never believe I preached this message.

And I look at three Biblical mothers: Jochebed.  You have to go a little forward to Exodus 6 to find the name of the mother of Moses.  And she will give us a view specifically focused in a particular situation, a view of a mother’s love that when seen I can say “How much more our heavenly Father.”  You all know the story.  The some 400 years was approaching when God had promised Abraham that his people—who would be carried, His descendants, that is, who would be carried into bondage, fall into slavery—would be delivered and come back to the place of promise given to Abraham.  The Pharaoh knew about those prophecies.  He knew the time was upon him and he proceeded to eliminate all the male children born among the slaves in order to eliminate the possibility of a deliverer

growing up—all of the male children thrown to the crocodiles in the river Nile. 

Jochebed—the first name in Scripture linked with Jehovah.  It’s a cognate, or rather a composite word, that links her name with Jehovah.  Literally it means ‘the glory of Jehovah.’  She’s pregnant and as the child develops within her, living in a slave hut made of mud and reeds, fear must have grown accordingly—“Will it be a boy or will it be a girl?”—in the knowledge that if it’s a boy it will be seized immediately, thrown into the river, killed.  Sure enough, when the baby is born it’s a boy.

Now I want Jochebed to portray the love of a mother to the hopeless and to the helpless, those that are caught into a circumstance—in this case not of Moses’ choosing—those who are caught in a circumstance that is beyond your power to cope with, a helplessness and a hopelessness that surrounds and it communicates only one thing: your destruction, your annihilation, your end.  I see this mother Jochebed with this baby whose every cry brought the threat of descending soldiers—see this mother who was a slave with no rights of any kind.  For 3 solid months she managed to hide him—somehow suppress or prevent his cries from being heard 3 solid months.  There are mothers here today who know the stress of those first 3 months.  Every hour, every day: “Will he be discovered?”  And he can do nothing.  Moses can do nothing. 

         She contrives a way.  Somehow or other she manages to bring reeds and mud from the riverbank and make a little basket.  Somehow or other she manages to find out where the princess goes everyday to bathe.  I’m sure that’s not something that was common knowledge among the slaves.  Somehow she manages to slip through the streets of that slave city in Memphis carrying this baby, knowing that at any