Posted in Pastoring
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In part one, I briefly introduced how patient God had set out to be with Moses regarding his newly revealed assignment from God. Moses seemingly takes a humble approach by admitting he is not worthy of such an honorable task as stated in Exodus 3:11, however, when contrasted with the scripture we’ll look at in part three, we’ll begin to see what the true root of Moses’ problem is: his faithlessness. We will first begin by looking at the psychology of the ordeal that led to Moses’ predisposition. We find that in chapter 2 verse 12b Moses is a murderer, “he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.” and a coward in verse 15a of the same chapter, “But Moses fled…” He does what he believes to be justice – killing another human being – then runs from the same justice he dealt out once it befalls on him. He runs not only as a murdering coward, yet also as an afflicted slave. Let’s look at Hebrews 11:24-26 says about Moses being a son of the Pharaoh’s daughter: “By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to endure ill-treatment with the people of God than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin,” Think about the wonderful things he must have been built up with on a daily basis being a slave in a foreign land! Granted, Moses chose a noble walk by enduring hardships for his brothers’ sakes, but he still lacked integrity by running. So, he takes off, runs to Midian and finds this girl and marries her. Now, he’s got all this baggage we uncovered from the earlier passages and now he was interracially married. He becomes a shepherd to his father-in-laws flock (nothing like working for the family business!) when God appears to him. It would seem to me that Moses doesn’t have the greatest self image. He surely isn’t seeing himself as a child of God. Sure, he knows right from wrong and even his cowardly shell is cracking away as he stands up to many shepherds at a well to defend the maidens, “Then the shepherds came and drove them away, but Moses stood up and helped them and watered their flock.” I could just see Charleston Heston standing there in his robe after chasing off the other shepherds and say with a half grin and wrinkled brow, “It’s all in a day’s work, m’ ladies.” But Moses was a far cry from Charleston Heston, but then again, that’s Hollywood for you in 1956. God, in all His glory, power, might, omniscience, wisdom and goodness, decides to pursue this ordinary man to do His extraordinary task. In part 3, we'll look at God's methodology for getting Moses to do this task; how He went about enlisting such a man to pluck God's people from Pharaoh and his oppressive lands and what Moses’ reaction was to this assignment. |
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