Moses is one of the most intriguing people in the Bible. Your footnote in Exodus 2:10 most likely associates his name with “drawing out” just as Moses was drawn out of the Nile river. That isn’t the whole story of his name. His name isn’t Hebrew. It is Egyptian and it means “to beget” and is also similar in Egyptian to the word for “boy” (See Walton, Bible Background Genesis-Deuteronomy, 86).
Having escaped both infanticide and genocide by the Egyptians God equipped him from his birth to his death to be a great leader of the Hebrew people. One of the things that is most striking about God’s preparation of Moses was that he was a man of three worlds. He was born a Hebrew of the tribe of Levi and raised as such until he was taken to Pharaoh’s house at some point in his childhood giving him a sort of dual citizenship. He knew the ways of his people and also the ways of the Egyptians. This tension came to a head in Exodus 2 when Moses saw an Egyptian beating one of his fellow Hebrews and in retaliation killed the Egyptian. Once Pharaoh found out what happened, Pharaoh tried to kill Moses but Moses fled to Midian where he hid for forty years. This made him a man of a third world, a man familiar with the wilderness and the Midianite people. This is the same desert that he would later lead the Hebrews through to the promised land. What is more, the mountain where Moses sees the burning bush is Horeb (3:1) which is also Sinai where Moses would later go up to meet God once again and receive the ten commandments, the law, and eat with God in the company of some of his fellow Hebrews.
God prepared Moses from his birth onward. This was not a for year degree program but multiple forty year degree programs and yes, the degree was terminal.
We want God to equip and prepare us but with two caveats. First, we don’t want it to require adversity. And yet, the best kind of shaping God does in the life of a leader is born through adversity, just as Moses was born in and through adversity. Second, we want our equipping to be done quickly because we want to get to the work we feel called to but God is not required to work in line with our caveats or our calendars.
The question for us is this: What experiences has God put you through or allowed you to experience that impacts the direction of your ministry and your ministry potential?
One Response
Wonderful post. Thank you for this.