Acts 7:23-29 (NIV)
“When Moses was forty years old, he decided to visit his fellow Israelites. He saw one of them being mistreated by an Egyptian, so he went to his defense and avenged him by killing the Egyptian. Moses thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them, but they did not. The next day Moses came upon two Israelites who were fighting. He tried to reconcile them by saying, ‘Men, you are brothers; why do you want to hurt each other?’
“But the man who was mistreating the other pushed Moses aside and said, ‘Who made you ruler and judge over us? Do you want to kill me as you killed the Egyptian yesterday?’ When Moses heard this, he fled to Midian, where he settled as a foreigner and had two sons.
Once again, Stephen was bringing forward a witness in his defense, a leader, a deliverer that God had raised up to free His people, but whom His people initially rejected. This time it was no less a personage than Moses himself!
Moses had been insulated from the hardships being experienced by his fellow Israelites, because he had been adopted into Pharaoh’s household. But he never lost his identity, and never lost his heart for his people.
When he decided one day to go down to a worksite where the Israelites were being forced to work, he saw an Egyptian beating one of them mercilessly. Since the two were off to one side, not visible to others, he struck down the Egyptian and killed him, then buried him in the sand. He assumed that no one would be the wiser. No other Egyptians were nearby, and the Israelite whom he had rescued was unlikely to accuse him in something that he could also be seen as complicit in.
But the very next day, the ugly truth came out when Moses tried to break up a fight between two Israelites. One of them sneered at him and asked if Moses was going to kill him like he had the Egyptian the day before. Moses knew that the word of his capital offense was spreading, and would soon reach the ears of Pharaoh himself, and he would be a hunted man.
So, Moses fled the country. To escape Pharaoh’s reach, he had to go clear around the Red Sea to Midian, the west edge of what is now known as Saudi Arabia, because the entire Sinai Peninsula was Egyptian territory. There he remained as an exile for forty long years.
Stephen’s point was that God’s people had even rejected Moses before they finally recognized that he was the deliverer that God was sending to them and allowed him to rescue them forty years later. They were just not good at recognizing God’s deliverers. So, they would be wise to no make too hasty a decision about who Jesus was!
Father, all of us have very limited forward vision, and very little knowledge and wisdom on our own. So, we need to think carefully and be humble enough to know our limitations before we make decisions, especially about things that have eternal implications. I know that I rejected Jesus for many years before I was humbled and brought to my knees, a position from which I could see many things much more clearly. We also need to keep Moses in mind when we are dealing with other people who reject Jesus. It took Israel forty years to see the light. That is encouragement for us to not give up on others, but to just keep working. Amen.
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