Moses fled to Midian from Egypt at the age of forty after killing an Egyptian for beating a Hebrew. He's been living in Midian a long time and is married to the daughter of a priest and helps the priest to manage his estate and his flock of sheep. Later in Exodus we'll be told that Moses is eighty years old when he returns to Egypt, so in our passage today he's been in Midian for close to forty years.
We take a moment now to look at what's been going on in Egypt during Moses' exile. "During that long period, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. God heard their groaning and He remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them." (Exodus 2:23-25) The king who wanted Moses dead is dead himself. Movies and TV shows about the exodus often portray the king who wanted Moses dead and the king when Moses returns to Egypt as the same man, but they are not. This helps us to understand why the new king will allow Moses to come into his court numerous times; he doesn't bear the same animosity toward Moses as the former king did. If the Pharaoh of the exodus is Tutmoses III, as we speculated last week, then legally (though not biologically) he and Moses are step-brothers. This is because if Hatshepsut was the princess who adopted Moses, she was the wife of Tutmoses II and step-mother to Tutmoses III who is the son her husband fathered by a secondary wife.
Whoever the new king is, he's as bad as his father when it comes to oppressing the Hebrews. The rock band known as The Who had a song called "Won't Get Fooled Again", and in that song there's a line that goes: "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." I'm reminded of that song when reading about this new boss in Egypt who is the same as the old boss in regard to his attitude toward the Semitic shepherds in his land. We know he's not treating them any better than the former king did since the Bible tells us they are still crying out to God for deliverance. God hears their cries. He didn't deliver them as soon as the Egyptians turned against them, but His ears haven't been closed to a single prayer. Sometimes we think God isn't listening when He doesn't come to our rescue immediately, but He always has a purpose for the wait. While the Hebrews have been in Egypt, their numbers have grown until some scholars estimate there may have been as many as two million of them. They are now large enough in number to take possession of the promised land and to hold onto it by having enough people to defend themselves. They've been segregated in Egypt due to the Egyptians' prejudice against them, and this means they've held onto their religion and culture. They've been living in an incubator, so to speak, which they would not have been able to do in Canaan. In Canaan, over the centuries, they would have intermarried with the other shepherding tribes of the land. The tribes of Canaan were idolatrous but had nothing against intermarrying with people who worshiped the God of Abraham. The Hebrews were smaller in number (before they went to Egypt) than the peoples of Canaan and would gradually have been absorbed into other tribes. They'd have been enticed into idolatry themselves and by this time---approximately 430 years later---they would have been indistinguishable from any other people of Canaan. God heard their prayers during their long years in Egypt, but it was imperative that He leave them there for a specific period of time, and that's the same reason why He doesn't always answer our prayers immediately. There's a purpose in the wait. We might not always understand the purpose, at least while we're still in the difficult circumstances, but God never allows any difficulty into our lives unless there is a reason for it.
Yesterday we learned that the name of Moses' father-in-law was Reuel but he will be called Jethro from here on out. We discussed the possible reasons why this man would have gone by more than one name, so if you missed yesterday's passage you might want to back up and take a look at it before proceeding with the remainder of today's lesson. But from now on Moses will always refer to his father-in-law as Jethro. "Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God." (Exodus 3:1)
Moses has lived in Midian for forty years and has no land or flocks of his own. I believe he's been made the heir-apparent of his father-in-law's estate since Jethro has no sons, but while Jethro is alive everything Moses oversees belongs to his father-in-law and not to him. The flock he shepherds is not his own, which is good training for leading another flock not his own---the people of God. The Israelites are God's people and they belong to Him; Moses will merely be their shepherd.
Moses isn't the only man who became a great leader after spending many years humbly tending someone else's flock. King David spent his youth tending the flock of his father. He wrote the most famous psalm of all, Psalm 23, while tending sheep. Shepherding is an honorable occupation in the Bible, so honorable that we'll find prophets and priests and apostles referred to as shepherds. The Lord Jesus Christ, though He was a carpenter by trade, referred to Himself as the Good Shepherd of the sheep. Leading and caring for a flock is hard work, it's exasperating work, it's lonely work, and it's sacrificial work. The shepherd must place the needs of his flock before his own needs. It's a job that calls for being in the right frame of mind, for if a person doesn't display stability of character, the flock won't follow him. If the shepherd's relationship with the Lord is not what it should be, he can't help others find their way to the Lord. Sheep have to follow a shepherd; they can't be driven from behind like cattle. If the shepherd is not worth following, and if he does not appear to be in charge, and if he does not seem trustworthy, the sheep will ignore him and go astray. Moses had to learn to lead a flock of stubborn, bleating, fearful sheep in the desert before he could lead God's flock (who like all of us were sometimes stubborn, complaining, and fearful) through the wilderness.
Moses is going about his business just as he would on any other day. To him it's an ordinary day, the same as every day before. He expects his life to go on like this, day after day after day. But it won't because the time has come for God to deliver His people from Egypt and Moses is the man He's chosen to do the job. "There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. So Moses thought, 'I will go over and see this strange sight---why the bush does not burn up.'" (Exodus 3:2-3) Brush fires weren't uncommon in a dry land in the intense heat of the desert. It's believed a type of spontaneous combustion occasionally took place or that there might have been thunder and lightning without rain and that lightning sometimes struck dry vegetation and caused it to catch fire. But it wasn't common for a bush to burst into flames without burning up, burning out, and turning into a pile of ash. This bush remains intact while a fire burns within it. Such an unusual sight catches Moses' attention, which is the Lord's intention. He has to startle Moses. Moses long ago gave up on his dream of being the deliverer of the Hebrews. He's convinced himself he was mistaken about his calling in life. Now he just trudges through each day, performing his duties on automatic pilot. He expects every day of his life to pretty much be the same. I think sometimes he doesn't even look up from the dusty desert floor while leading the sheep to new pasture. The Lord has to do something wild and unexpected to startle Moses out of the daily grind and out of his defeated mindset.
Join us tomorrow as the Lord identifies Himself to Moses and commissions Moses to lead the Hebrews out of Egypt and into the promised land.
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