Read with Me
Exodus 2:23-25 (HCSB)
After a long time, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned because of their difficult labor, and they cried out; and their cry for help ascended to God because of the difficult labor. So God heard their groaning, and He remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God saw the Israelites, and He took notice.
Listen with Me
Moses spent the next 40 years in Midian, learning the trade of a shepherd and raising his family. It wasn’t true that he never thought about his people back in Egypt, but news about Egyptian slaves didn’t usually make it as far as Midian on the east side of the Red Sea.
But with the rise of a new Pharaoh who had his focus on building his own legacy and repressing any perceived threat, the situation of the Israelites went downhill quickly. One of the key ways that rulers tended to keep foreign populations under control was to increase their workload. The idea was that if they were kept working hard during every daylight hour, they would be too exhausted to revolt.
And that strategy worked with Israel. The people had no will to stage a revolution. But in their distress, they suddenly remembered the God of the old stories. It had been around 400 years since Jacob had brought his family into the country, and in that time the people had been thoroughly “Egyptianized”, taking on the culture and even the religion of Egypt. But the old stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and of the God who had promised them a home, continued to be circulated from father to children, and from house to house. If that God really existed, and if His promise was still good, they figured that the time for Him to act was now.
But God had not forgotten them. He had been working for eighty years, a whole lifetime at that time (Psalm 90:10) to prepare the one who would act on His behalf to deliver them. Moses had gained vital skills as a member of Pharaoh’s household, among them literacy in several languages and scripts, and an understanding of diplomatic procedures and of the workings of the royal household.
Now God was teaching Moses patience and the varied skills needed to guide and protect a flock of helpless sheep. These were skills that would serve him well as a shepherd of God’s people, Israel.
Pray with Me
Father, we are an impatient people, likely because our lifespans are so short. You can take eighty years to prepare a person for leadership, but we want to see results in what seems to us a more reasonable timeframe. Help us, Lord, to be patient in waiting for Your promises, knowing that You are always working your plan, even when we can’t see it, and secure in the knowledge that You always keep Your promises. Amen.