This verse and the two that follow have long puzzled scholars. The Lord has just told Moses to go to Egypt, and Moses is going, and the Lord shows up to kill him. Why?

The answer lies in the relationship between the Lord and the Children of Israel, and in a brief change in Moses’ spiritual meaning.

Prior to this verse - and again starting with Verse 27 - Moses represented the Lord’s law that would govern the Israeli Church. Here. However, the Writings tell us that he represents the Israeli people as their soon-to-be ruler.

As for those Israeli people, the Writings tell us they were as hard and external as all the people around them in the world at the time. They were one of the vestiges of the Ancient Church, but had none of the spiritual knowledge and internal worship that church had once had. This external nature shows in the fact that this happened at an encampment, also translated as an inn or a lodging-place - a place where thoughts and ideas can come and go without real meaning and without being questioned.

The fact that the Lord - translated as "Jehovah" in some versions - came to meet Moses and kill him shows that the external nature of the people of Israel stood in opposition to the Lord’s intent, which was to use them to create a church that could contain spiritual ideas.

(Reference: Arcana Coelestia 7041, 7042, 7043)

7043. 'And sought to kill him' means that a representative Church could not be established among those descendants. This is clear from the meaning of 'seeking to kill' as not receiving, dealt with in 3387, 3395, here therefore as not receiving or choosing that nation in order that a representative Church might be established among them. That nation is what Moses their future leader and head is consistently used to mean in these three verses, see above in 7041.

That nation was not chosen, yet it stubbornly insisted that it should be the Church, see 4290, 4293.

No Church, only a representative of the Church was established among that nation, 4281, 4288, 6304.

Holy things of the Church can be represented even by wicked people, for in a representation no attention is paid to the person who represents, only to the thing represented by him, 3670, 4208, 4281.

Something similar to what is meant here in the internal sense is contained in Numbers 14:12, where it says that Jehovah wished to destroy that nation completely and in their place raise up from Moses another nation, and also where it says that Jehovah regretted that He was going to lead, or that He had led that people into the land of Canaan.