In Acts 7 :23, we are told by Stephen, “And when he was full 40 years old, it came into his heart to visit his brethren the children of Israel.” In all Probability Moses had kept up friendly relations with his kindred and was in frequent communication with them. The reason for the special mention of this visit is that a crisis came which abruptly changed the course of his life.
He saw a previous wrong being inflicted on a Hebrew. The word used in other places implies to kill. The subtle influence of his princess mother had changed him. He measured himself by her standards and judged himself ready for his work. He decided to announce his reaffirmed allegiance.
Impulsively Moses’ spirit flamed out, he resented the injustice being done to the slave. His temper probably carried him beyond what the occasion demanded. He slew the Egyptian, and buried him in the sand. The thing could not be hid, it could not be kept secret, that he who had been educated and fitted for the throne, the adopted son of Thermuthis, had interfered to protect a Hebrew from wrong and had slain the Egyptian oppressor.
The slave would tell his fellows, but Moses’ people did not see the message that he expected them to read in his actions. They simply did not understand, and they were afraid. The story spread, the king heard of it, and the court was aflame with indignation. Moses was a fugitive.
It seems that the apron strings were twisted after all. The slave mother’s teachings had led him to choose “to suffer affliction with the people of God.” The royal mother’s influence made him try to do God’s work in his own strength. What a blow it must have been to Moses when his good intentions ended in nothing hut failure and alienation—both from his own people and the Egyptians.
He fled the land of Egypt and found a hiding place in Midian, where he became a shepherd. A slave, a prince, a general, all too briefly a deliverer, and now a shepherd. The impulse of Moses to resent the ill-treatment of his brethren was a high and admirable one, but it was not wisely carried out or prudently considered.
He had to undergo a long and trying discipline before he was fit for the great task God was preparing him for. The treatment he received from the Hebrews he tried to aid, showed that they were by no means ready for freedom or nationality. Great movements of the human mind and revolutions of progress move slowly, and all must wait until God’s appointed time.
For 40 years Moses led a shepherd’s life in Midian. For 40 years he struggled with the two philosophies he had learned from the two mothers who loved him. It was a time of discipline and preparation. The loneliness, the quiet, the opportunity for prayer, for meditation on great subjects, all helped in the education and preparation he needed for the work before him.
The spell of the stately court was slow in wearing away. But gradually he came to see in the craggy mountains the work of a better architect. Slowly the gloss of court life faded from his eves. The influence of the royal mother began to die out. The teachings of Jochebed came sharply into focus.
Pride, ambition, scorn of simple things were weeded out of his heart in a painful uprooting. How much revelation God had made of Himself to him we do not know, but his mind was such that he could not but reflect upon the great truths and promises made to his fathers, which had been handed down to him by his parents. His scholastic training in Pharaoh’s palace would intensify the tendency toward tie consideration of deep subjects, perhaps unconsciously to himself spiritual truths would occupy his mind. and communion with them would become a habit.
The power of armies and horses and iron chariots would begin to seem small beside the power that draws a billion blades of grass from the earth—beside the power that makes a prince “the meekest man on earth.” God uses only well prepared tools for His greatest purposes. The apostles had their training with Christ. Paul took his in the deserts of Arabia. Christ himself had 30 years in the carpenter’s home, and there exercised himself in all righteousness.
Moses had his long period of preparation in Midian, and the foundation was laid, so that when the call for action came he could answer, “Here am I, send me.”
The call came in a startling manner Another Pharaoh sat on the throne in Egypt and oppressed the people beyond their endurance. Their cries for relief and deliverance were heard by God. Moses was waiting in Midian and three million slaves in Egypt were waiting for Moses.
Then God appeared in the symbol of fire. What the emotions of the shepherd, watching his flocks at Mount Horeb, must have been when the bush burned in flame but was not consumed, we can only imagine. Perhaps beside the burning bush, it dawned on Moses that it would not be as a general that he would lead the children of Israel to liberty. He would do it as a shepherd. A simple shepherd’s rod would be the symbol of God’s power.
Moses went back to Egypt. The prince went home to do the job that the slaves’ long faith had seen for him. It must have been an impressive scene when Moses and Aaron, probably accompanied by a few venerable heads of the Hebrews, walked into the palace that might have been Moses’ own.
Moses stood before the throne on which he could have been sitting. He saw the crown that could have been his if he had not chosen to cast his lot with the people of God. He stood there in a shepherd’s robe, with his rod his only sign of authority, knowing that “every shepherd is an abomination unto the Egyptians.”
The long conflict was ended. Moses had completely rejected the standards of one mother and allied himself with the God of the other. He was ready at last to begin the greatest task of leadership ever given to a man.
While the princess knew more of art and beauty, Jochebed was the wiser artist in the end. For a mother, as was once written,” . . . has not to paint a form of beauty upon canvass or chisel it from marble, but to impress upon a human soul the image of the divine.”
Perhaps the case of the man with two mothers will help us today to teach the true spiritual values of the Truth to our young people. What better work can we find than the daily training that will make our children men and women fit for God’s use?
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One