B y G o d ’ s m ir a c u l o u s intervention, Moses had been saved as a little baby out of the bul rushes, but Moses did not have any say in that! The best he could do at that stage in his career was to squeak! God had foreshadowed these things. Over four hundred years before, God had told Abraham that He was going to raise up a deliv erer for His people and save them from the tyranny of a wicked Pharaoh, and now God’s hour had struck. Preserved from death, Moses was introduced by God’s divine providence into Pharaoh’s house hold, adopted by his daughter, and nourished as her own son. With all the privileges of royalty, he received a magnificent education. He was trained as a statesman, a soldier, and an administrator, and by the age of 40 he was a polished, scholarly man who could have taken his place in any society. In the words of Acts 7:20 and 22 — “He was ex ceeding fair. . . . And Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and in deeds.” This is the portrait that God gives us of the man in the prime of life, highly qualified and filled with a sense of urgency, yet in his humility seem ingly indifferent to his own intellectual stature — poised, it would seem, upon the threshold of a brilliant career. In point of fact, he was a man only a few hours away from a tragic blunder that would bring to frustration all his noblest ambitions and make him useless to God or man for forty years in the backside of the desert. Acts 7 :23 — “And when he was full forty years old, it came into his heart to visit his brethren the children o f Israel. And seeing one of them suffer wrong, he defended him, and avenged him that was oppressed, and smote the Egyptian: for he sup posed his brethren would have understood how that God by his hand would deliver them: but they understood not.” On the basis of what he was, and on the basis of what he knew, Moses took it for granted that he would be accepted in the ministry for which he believed God had called him —“ . . . he supposed his brethren would have understood . . . but they understood not.” With a strong sense of mission, he was baffled at his own impotence! Maybe this is the dilemma into which you too have fallen. You have felt the surge of holy am bition. Your heart has burned within you. You have dreamed dreams and seen visions, but only to awaken again and again to a dull sense of fu tility, as one who beats the air or builds castles in the sky. We need to turn to the record itself to discover how Moses lost the way. Exodus 2:11 — “ And it came to pass in those days, when Moses was grown, that he went out unto his brethren, and looked on their burdens: and he spied an Egyptian smiting an Hebrew, one of his brethren.” You can imagine the natural impulse of a man moved with compas-
by Major lan Thomas, T'orchbearers’ Fellowship, Capernwray Hall, England
25
OCTOBER, 1966
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