As we gaze into the future – as we all do sometimes – and think what God wants to use us for… How does He prepare someone – you, me – for really significant life and ministry?
In Exodus’ first 4 chapters we watch how God trains a prophet to lead Israel out of Egypt. It’s relevant; God desires to use each of us to carry His liberation to people in their various forms of slavery. So how does He train us? What things in our lives are – perhaps without us realizing – His training?
Well, first God’s messenger has to be protected from the influences Satan would use to wipe him out (ch1). He may use individuals whose names none of us remember, as He did here. (People like sunday school leaders or youth leaders, that God uses to protect, through the teenage years, someone He will use mightily in the future. Perhaps God put someone like that in your life, or mine. If so, thank Him!)
Then, providentially, God gets his messenger a solid secular education; something else many of us can thank Him for. Moses was trained in `all the wisdom of the Egyptians’ and became `powerful in speech and action’ (Acts 7:22). He would need all that `power`, all those leadership skills, as he led Israel through the desert.
Such a training is not without its dangers. Moses must have been tempted to forget his despised people, given that he himself had escaped into the palace. (That can happen with us too, as our careers take off.) But instead he chose to identify with Israel in their wretchedness (as Hebrews 11:24-25 emphasizes). A good, risky, and (as it proved) costly choice, a choice that reflects God’s way of liberating; Christ didn’t liberate us from a distance, rather He did it by coming & suffering with us. (As the saying goes: No other God has scars. A huge reason to worship!)
Moses got that bit right. But as we saw last time, he got the next thing massively wrong. A person God has made `powerful in speech and action` will always be in danger of trying to do things in their own strength and their own way – or, as in this case, that of the surrounding godless culture in which they’ve been trained. Moses did, as we saw last time, and his rashness meant he had to abandon Egypt and all he might have achieved there and flee into the desert. And there he turned 50, 60, 70; and finally we reach the poignant moment where this old man, eighty years old, with all the enormous potential he had had for his people, has nothing to show for his life but a flock of skinny sheep he is leading through the desert. Of course he’s been learning the desert like the back of his hand, a vital training for how God will use him later, but he doesn’t know that. Sometimes (thank God!) we too may be being equipped for the future in ways we don’t realise; see eg 2 Corinthians 1:4. But all Moses knows is that in one moment of rashness he has wasted his life.
But that wasn’t the whole story. If we’ve given our lives to Him, God works through our sufferings (He loves us and wouldn’t let them happen otherwise), and even through our follies, and the long ways round that we’ve condemned ourselves to go. God is not in a hurry; He loves us enormously and has great plans for each of us, and so He trains us – lifelong, longterm – because He has major, glorious things for us to do for the next million years. (Reflect on what Matthew 24:47, 25:22-23 and Luke 19:17 say about that!) This is how we should see our lives, as a continual time of learning (so investing effort in learning more and more about His Word, about prayer, about sharing His gospel, about how His church can be healthy and grow). We’re each God’s `workmanship` (see Eph 2:10), and He has bigger dreams for us each than we can imagine – which means we have more growing to do than we can imagine, because in the end He has more glory awaiting us than we can imagine; and He knows what He is doing even in the hard or futile times. So God is taking Moses, unaware, through an unhurried training: learning the desert, and learning too, deep down, just what it means to feel as all the Israelites must have done that they were exiles, living futile lives as strangers in a strange land (2:22; cf 1 Cor 9:19-22). And finally He reveals Himself to Moses in a burning bush, and Moses’ story starts again, with a long, life-changing interaction with God that will leave him prepared for the huge things God has for Him to do.
This focuses at least six key issues, and since each one is relevant to how God draws out the potential of each of us, we’ll leave them to next time. Besides, for myself at least there are enough implications in this story of Moses’ training so far – both serious warnings and serious encouragements – to turn into prayer…
