At age 40, Moses, the Prince of Egypt tried to spark his own revolution. Things did not go well. He ended up a fugitive on the backside of a desert and it took another forty years before he was ready to fulfill his destiny. In the process he discovered two truths that all of us need to grasp:
- There are no wasted moments with God; and,
- Strength is forged in deserts rather than palaces.
Maybe you are discouraged today. You have waited for finances to improve, illness to go away, a marriage to get better, a son or daughter to come to Jesus, or victory over some addiction. But your patience is wearing thin. Waiting on God may be the hardest of all spiritual disciplines.
Before Moses was ready to lead the Exodus he had to spend 40 years on the backside of a desert. Before the Jews could enter the Promised Land they wandered in that same desert for 40 years. In Acts 7:20&21 Stephen says of Moses “…Pharaoh’s daughter took him and brought him up as her own son. Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and actions.” You will recall that the Pharaoh ordered all newborn Jewish boys to be drowned in the Nile. But his Hebrew parents put Moses in a reed basket and sent him down the river, believing that God would keep him safe. God rewarded their faith by guiding the basket into the bathing pool of Pharaoh’s daughter. Though her father ordered this infanticide, God softened her heart toward this baby. She adopted Moses, and turned him over to his birth mother for nursing. Every day this slave woman not only gave the baby her milk, she also fed him her faith. She told her boy about the God of the Israelites and the covenant he made with Abraham. In those years before he was weaned, little Moses knew he was a child of Abraham.
Exodus 2:11 says, “One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to where his own people were and watched them at their hard labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people.” Moses didn’t just stumble onto this scene. In Acts 7:25, Stephen says that Moses purposely went out there to rescue his people. He believed that God had called him to liberate them. His Jewish birth mother must have told him about a prophecy that God had given Abraham in Genesis 15, some 500 years earlier.
The prophecy was that his descendents would be slaves in a strange country, abused for 400 years. But they would come out of this land of slavery with great possessions, and afterwards seize their Promised Land. Moses did the math. When he was 40 years old it had been almost 400 years since the twelve grandsons of Abraham settled in Egypt. He must have reasoned that it was time for God’s prophecy to be fulfilled, and he was going to be the one to get the ball rolling. So he chose to walk away from the privilege and pleasures of a palace and throw his lot in with a brutally-oppressed slave people. Hebrews 11:24-26 says
“By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as the son of the Pharaoh’s daughter. He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time. He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt because he was looking ahead to his reward.”
Moses understood what missionary Jim Elliott wrote in his diary a few days before his martyrdom: “He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.” Moses was potentially in line to sit on the throne of the greatest superpower on planet earth. But he was gripped by a bigger vision that a nameless slave woman had given him some 35 years earlier; the same dream that God had first given Abraham: that a great Son would come from his lineage; that this man would bless the whole world, bringing salvation to people from every tongue, tribe, and nation until the spiritual descendants of that old patriarch were as numerous as the stars in the heavens.
We know that Son to be none other than Jesus Christ! His resurrected majesty eclipses the god-kings of Egypt whose mummies rot beneath the sifting sands of North Africa. His everlasting Kingdom dwarfs the ancient Egyptian Empire in size, duration, and authority.
Fourteen hundred years before the first Christmas, he may not have known Christ with the clarity we know him 2,000 years later. But he knew enough to walk away the temporary pleasures of this world, even if it meant suffering the disgrace of Christ. In that sense, Moses was a far better person than most of us. He was truly a son of Abraham when he walked away from that palace for the last time.
Moses’ story ought to encourage every parent and grandparent. That nameless slave woman only had a few hours with her son each day for maybe 5-7 years. It wasn’t much time compared to the 35 years that Pharaoh had to craft him in the Egyptian palace. But she didn’t waste a single moment of her precious time. When Moses left his infancy and walked away from his birth mother for the last time, his faith was set.
No matter how much time you have with your children, they will end up in Pharaoh’s clutches—whether it’s the public schools, or university, or the pervasive media of this world, or a thousand other voices in the marketplace that will impact their thinking. But take heart! Godly instruction when your children and grandchildren are babes is more powerful than all their later years in the courts of the Pharaohs. Abraham Lincoln’s mother died when he was 7 years-old, but during those dark years of the Civil War he said, “My mother’s prayers have always followed me. They have clung to me all of my life.”
Moses may have been a son of Abraham, but he was also the adopted grandson of a Pharaoh. Even if our faith is set when we are children, our original sin nature is further corrupted in the courts of the Pharaohs. Two men wrestle for control of Moses’ soul: Abraham and Pharaoh. It is the faith of Abraham that drives him to liberate his people. It is the influence of Pharaoh that causes him to go about it in an ungodly way. Exodus 2:12 says, “Glancing this way and that and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.” Any righteous person would want to stop a slave driver who is beating a man half to death. That’s the Abraham in Moses.
But it’s the Pharaoh in Moses who acts. When you read, “Glancing this way and that and seeing no one,” you might recall the words of the Pharaoh in Exodus 1:9&10, “The Israelites have become too numerous for us. We must deal shrewdly with them…” The Hebrew word shrewdly means to deal strategically, to calculate carefully, to act with cunning, and to angle for safe outcome. That’s what Moses did when he made sure no one was looking, and then buried the evidence of his murder in the sand. When you read, “…he killed the Egyptian…” you see the murderous heart of the Pharaoh who orders the killing of Jewish boys. When Moses plays God and takes vengeance into his own hands, you see the arrogance of the palace. Moses may have his birth mother’s faith, but he plays by his Egyptian grandfather’s rules.
It’s possible to try to achieve godly ends in ungodly ways. We Christians do it all the time. The way of Abraham (and his great Son, Christ) is described by the Apostle in 1 Peter 5:6: “Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God that he may lift you up in due time.” Moses is anything but humble at this point in his life. Nor is he willing to wait on God’s timing. So he jumps the gun 40 years too soon. The way of the Pharaoh—whether it is played out in the ancient palaces of the Egyptians or the halls of Human Institutions—is always the same: human shrewdness and strength. But the only liberation that ever lasts comes from God’s wisdom and power.
Beneath our swagger, we all battle with the spiritual schizophrenia of Moses. God created the first human from the dust of this earth. He blew into his nostrils the breath of life. The human is both the dust of this earth and the breath of heaven. We long for the things of this fallen world, and we have an inescapable hunger for God. Even after we come to Christ, the new spirit and the old flesh (the faith of Abraham and way of Pharaoh) war within us. Like Moses, it’s as if we have two souls battling for control. So God must unify our soul into one whole.
The half-brother of Jesus said in James 1:8, “…a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.” The original Greek could be translated, “a man with two souls…” Moses is both Abraham and Pharaoh at the same time. As you can see in Exodus two, that makes him very unstable. Others see his “double soul.” The next day, when he comes out to kick-start the liberation movement, one of the Jewish slaves responds in verse 14, “Who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me the way you killed the Egyptian?” He is saying, in effect, “We’ve already been under the rule of killer Pharaohs for almost 400 years. Why should we exchange an Egyptian Pharaoh for a Jewish Pharaoh?” On the other hand, we read in verse 15, “When Pharaoh heard of this, he tried to kill Moses.” He now knows that 35 years in the palace hasn’t exorcised the Abraham that lurks in the breast of his adopted Jewish grandson. Instead, he has only managed to craft a skilled revolutionary who now poses a clear and present danger to his nation’s stability.
Because Moses is both Abraham and Pharaoh, in the end he is neither. The Jews can’t follow him because of the Pharaoh in him, and the Pharaoh can’t trust him because of the Jew in him. Jesus said, “I wish you were either hot or cold, but because you are lukewarm I will vomit you out of my mouth.” (Revelation 3:16) Double-minded people are unstable because they haven’t decided who they are. They shift with the changing tide of public opinion. People won’t long follow leaders who aren’t centered. That’s why Moses has to wait 40 more years. Verse 16 says, “…but Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian.” Moses has to be laid on the anvil of failure and loneliness, and pounded until he has become a single, unified godly person. It’s never easy to wait in the desert.
Tolstoy said: “The two greatest warriors are patience and time.” Time develops patience, and patience rewards time. They always work in tandem. It couldn’t have been easy for the Prince of Egypt to spend the next 40 years on the backside of a desert. He who commanded men now herds sheep. He who dined with Pharaohs now travels as an alien among a ragtag band of African nomads. Of those 40 lost years when Moses trekked aimlessly across the backside of the Sinai, verse 23 says, “The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out…” The clock is ticking, and Moses is now an 80 year-old man. His oratory skills are gone. Sheep are not good conversationalists. His strength has diminished with the advancing years. All the strategic skills he was taught by the management gurus of Egypt have rusted. Some of you know what Moses feels like. Your dreams have been dissipated by seemingly-wasted years.
Hebrews 11:25 says that Moses walked away from “the pleasures” of Pharaoh’s palace. But, he didn’t walk away from the pleasures of spiritual pride. He still wanted to do God’s work in his own way, according to his own timetable. Sometimes there is more sin in God’s house than in Pharaoh’s palace. It is worse for the fact that it hides behind the self-serving mask of “god” language. During the Civil War both Southerners and Yankees said that they were fighting for a holy cause. Someone asked President Lincoln which side God was on. He famously replied, “Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side, but whether we are on his side—for God alone is right.” When I live for God’s pleasure rather than my own, I will no longer say, “What did I ever do to deserve this shoddy treatment?” Instead, I will sing the words of an old hymn, “Whate’er my God ordains is right!”
At age 40, the Prince of Egypt saw leadership as the exercise power. That’s how palaces everywhere— see leadership. It is not at Harvard, or West Point, or even Evangelical Seminaries where greatness is forged. It is found on the desert, where an 80 year-old shepherd (who once known as Prince) sees the glory of God and says in Exodus 3:11, “Who am I have I should go to Pharaoh…” In short, who am I that I should dare do the work of the Great I AM? And for the rest of his life, he will say, “We will not go unless your Presence goes with us.” (Exodus 33:15). The palace creates tin men without hearts, but the desert strips us of pretence and reduces us to depend on God’s heart.
Moses surely thought the prime of his life had been wasted on the Sinai. Forty years dulled his palace edge. But he also learned how to lead sheep across a wilderness. He needed that training because he would lead 3.6 million cantankerous Jewish sheep across the same desert. At the end of those “wasted” years he knew the Sinai like the back of his hand: every star, ever water hole, the patterns of the seasons, the migrations of the desert tribes, and every inch of the most desolate moonscape on planet earth. God was preparing him for the greatest assignment of his life. God doesn’t waste time—not his nor ours.
Thank God for his wasted days. God is preparing you to lead others across the same deserts that you have crossed. Don’t you dare give up on one of the greatest doctrines of the Reformation: the perseverance of the saints! Keep your eyes on Jesus who persevered to the end with a single heart to please his Father!
(Adapted from a message shared by Peterson}.
Erick Chepkwony, TH.D 