Moses: A Man of Selfless Dedication

by Charles R. Swindoll

Dwight L. Moody gave his own spin on this remarkable biography. “Moses,” Moody observed, “spent his first forty years thinking he was somebody. He spent his second forty years learning he was a nobody. He spent his third forty years discovering what God can do with a nobody.”1

The next verse tells us that “Moses was educated in all the learning of the Egyptians” (Acts 7:22). The original text says, “in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.” In a colloquialism of that day, people referred to a brilliant person as having “the wisdom of the Egyptians.”

boy reared in Egypt with a silver spoon in his mouth attended the Temple of the Sun. Archaeologists and historians have done us a great service in unearthing and bringing to our attention some facts concerning this premier educational center. The Temple of the Sun has been called by some “the Oxford of the ancient world.” The course of study at Sun Temple U began with what we would call Hieroglyphics 101. Some have said that this language is the most difficult ever put into writing. It does not use characters; it uses pictographs— highly stylized symbols that represent complex ideas.

Moses began to learn the language of the Egyptians at the temple. He also would have plunged into the sciences, medicine, astronomy, chemistry, theology, philosophy, and law. He most certainly took the Egyptian equivalent of ROTC, studying the battles, combat tactics, and foes of that nation’s proud military history. On top of that, he would have dabbled in the arts—sculpture, music, and painting. The whole world of Egyptian literature was opened to him. The adopted son of the princess found himself immersed in Egyptian learning. It became his life.

Although it isn’t verified in Scripture, some historians claim Moses was a quick study.

The Bible also tells us that Moses’ diligent study and preparation made him into a man “mighty in words and deeds.” He made a name for himself and earned the Egyptians’ respect. Early on, it became obvious that this son of the princess wielded both power and influence. By the time he reached thirty, extrabiblical historians tell us, he had already led the Egyptian army to a smashing victory over the Ethiopians. A bold military strategist. Highly valued. Bronzed by the sun. Scarred by battle. Wise in worldly matters. Competent as a leader. And inspiring to boot. Competent as a leader. And inspiring to boot.

When the text calls him “a man of power in words and deeds,” it implies an ability to sway the masses. It means he not only possessed intellect, he oozed charisma. He spoke with ease, and his walk backed up his talk. Everyone knew about his courage and heroism. Moses—primed for the throne. The pride of Egypt!

Some teachers suggest Moses did not know the will of God for his life until his encounter at the burning bush, at age eighty. That’s what I heard all through my growing-up years, and I believed it. Everyone assumed that Moses first realized he was to deliver Israel at that amazing moment in the desert of Midian when the voice of God called to him from the flames. I no longer believe that to be true. Though I don’t have a specific verse to back up my position, I believe Scripture strongly implies Moses had begun to understand his destiny while still a young man being educated in the Egyptian court. Before he reached the age of forty, I am convinced God had already put it into Moses’ mind that he would one day, through some as-yet-unrevealed manner, lead his people out of bondage. He knew God’s will. But the problem was, he did not bother to seek God’s way and God’s timing. Instead, Moses began to carry out that plan according to Moses’ way and Moses’ schedule. As he did, sadly, many things came unraveled for him.

He dedicated himself to the will of God, but not to the God whose will it was.

I try, I fail. I trust, He succeeds!

Years ago, in a situation very much like what I’ve just described, I came across these poignant observations. Moses was out of touch with God. So he fled, and crossed the desert that lay between him and the eastern frontier; threaded the mountain passes of the Sinaitic peninsula, through which in after years he was to lead his people; and at last sat wearily down by a well in the land of Midian.2 …………… Such experiences come to us all. We rush forward, thinking to carry all before us; we strike a few blows in vain; we are staggered with disappointment, and reel back; we are afraid at the first breath of human disapprobation; we flee from the scene . . . to hide ourselves in chagrin. Then we are hidden in the secret of God’s presence from the pride of man. And there our vision clears; the silt drops from the current of our life . . . our self-life dies down; our spirit drinks of the river of God, which is full of water; our faith begins to grasp His arm, to be the channel for the manifestation of His power; and thus at last we emerge to be His hand to lead an Exodus.3

Please glance with me at two of my favorite verses in Psalm 119: Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep Your word. (v. 67) It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I may learn Your statutes. The law of your mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver pieces. (vv. 71–72)

What a mature perspective! In his Living Bible paraphrase, Ken Taylor captures the sense of these verses in a startling way: “I used to wander off until you punished me; now I closely follow all you say. . . . The punishment you gave me was the best thing that could have happened to me, for it taught me to pay attention to your laws. They are more valuable to me than millions in silver and gold!”

EXPERIENCING FAILURE PROMOTES AN OBEDIENT LIFE

EXPERIENCING FAILURE PROMPTS A TEACHABLE SPIRIT

Can you name people today who seem to listen carefully to God— people whose hearts are especially sensitive to the Holy Spirit? I can almost guarantee that those are men and women who know what it is to be broken and bruised. They have the scars to prove it.

It was Sir Winston Churchill, in the midst of Nazi bombings, who said to the people of London, “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”1 He was the one who offered the best definition of success I’ve ever read: “Success is moving from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”

The fact is, you cannot sow a fleshly seed and reap a spiritual plant. You cannot plant a carnal act and grow spiritual fruit. If you manipulate and connive and scheme and lie to get yourself to the top, don’t thank God for the promotion! God knows, as you know, that you maneuvered and pulled strings and buried those carnal carcasses in the soil to get yourself promoted. So when you get that bigger office and the key to the executive washroom, don’t give Him the credit. He doesn’t want it. Your fingerprints are all over that scheme, not His.

When God’s in it . . . it flows. When the flesh is in it . . . it’s forced.

Timing is as important as action. I think this is where wisdom comes in. Knowledge tells me what to do; wisdom tells me when to do it and how to carry it out. The longer I live, the more I believe the words of the sage who wrote, “One blow struck when the time is right is worth a thousand struck in premature eagerness.” God has no limitations in His ability to pull something off, but He’s going to do it in His time and not before.

The problem, of course, is not that God is too slow. It’s that we are too fast. Too fast for our own good.

As Mark Twain put it, “We’re all like the moon. We have a dark side we don’t want anybody to see.”

A. W. Tozer says, “A true and safe leader is likely one who has no desire to lead, but is forced into a position of leadership by the inward pressure of the Holy Spirit and by the press of the external situation.”

Author Os Guinness reminds us of Martin Luther’s unusual experience, which vividly illustrates the man’s surprise at being used by God to lead so many others into a reformation that swept across Europe. He writes, Painfully climbing up the steps of a medieval cathedral in the dark, he reached for the stair rope to steady himself and was amazed to hear the bell ring out above him—he had inadvertently pulled the bell rope and woken up the whole countryside. Far from a man with a comprehensive vision of reform and a well-calculated plan for carrying it out, Luther struggled painfully for salvation before God and was surprised to set off the cataclysmic sixteenth-century movement we now simply call the Reformation.

It wasn’t Cecil B. DeMille with a cast of thousands surrounding the hero, it was just one small act of courage. Of this incident, Matthew Henry writes, “He loved to be doing justice, and appearing in the defense of such as he saw injured, which every man ought to do as far as it is in the power of his hand to do it. He loved to be doing good. Wherever the Providence of God casts us, we should desire and endeavor to be useful; and, when we cannot do the good we would, we must be ready to do the good we can. And he that is faithful in a little shall be entrusted with more.”4

Our problem isn’t that we’ve failed. Our problem is that we haven’t failed enough.

God never puts us through the blast furnace in the desert to ruin us. He does it to refine us. And in the midst of that howling wilderness, through the process of time, the stinging sand bites through the rust and corrosion, and we become a usable tool in His hands.

There have been numerous times in my past when I have had the joyful experience of rubbing shoulders with men and women who have been tempered in such a desert. You can always tell—sometimes within moments— when you have met individuals so refined by God. They are some of the most secure, genuinely humble, gracious, honest individuals one can imagine. It took the desert to do it. As the hymn states so eloquently, their dross has been consumed, and their gold has been refined.

The Hebrews had an interesting way of referring to location. They faced east, and everything behind them, the west area, was called “the backside.” North, south, east, and west were determined on the basis of the direction they were facing. They faced east, toward the rising sun, to determine what was north, south, or west. Moses at that moment was in the west or backside of the desert.

One author has wisely stated: “Time is no object with God, who demands quality at all costs. There is therefore no point in chafing under the discipline of the training years, or in endeavoring to take a shortcut. It will inevitably prove to be a cul-de-sac.”3

The truth is, there’s nothing like little children to humble the most advanced in education. A Ph.D. is no help at all when you’re trying to corral a couple of high-spirited lads bent on mischief.

You know, experts can tell you the whole scientific background of the stuff that goes into baby food, how it came to be processed, and how it gets digested. But they still don’t tell you how to get food in the mouth of an infant. You’re on your own when you try to spoon that stuff in there.

Here is the unvarnished truth: If you don’t learn to live peacefully with obscurity, you will repeat that course until you do. You cannot skip this one and still graduate.

In the movie The Hiding Place one scene portrays Corrie Ten Boom telling the Lord she wants Him to use her in whatever way He pleases, even if it means in obscurity. Soon after that, she is taken prisoner by the Nazis, along with her father, from whom she is separated. Her father dies in the death camp, and then she is forcibly removed from her beloved sister. The Nazis shove Corrie into a cold, damp cell in Germany. As the scene closes, she is lying in a corner, shivering. And with tearfilled eyes she whispers to the Lord, “But God, I didn’t know I would have to be alone.” That’s obscurity.

God not only plans the breadth of a test, He plans the length as well. His timing is every bit as significant as His testing. He knows when you need the desert, and He knows when you are ready to move on.

Then He finds us gripped by fear—dread of our past, anxiety over our present, and terror over what may lie ahead—and He uses the passing of time to remove that fear. We learn that things aren’t out of hand at all; they’re in His hand.

V. Raymond Edman was the president of Wheaton College for a number of years, before his sudden death. In a small book called In Quietness and Confidence, Dr. Edman describes a desert experience of his own. Something painful happened to me. This is how I met it: I was quiet for a while with the Lord, and then I wrote these words for myself: First, He brought me here. It is by His will I am in this strait place: in that fact I will rest. Next, He will keep me here in His love, and give me grace as His child. Then, He will make the trial a blessing, teaching me the lessons He intends me to learn, and working in me the grace He needs to bestow. Last, in His good time He can bring me out again—how and when only He knows. Let me say I am here, first, by God’s appointment; second, in His keeping; third, under His training; fourth, for His time.”5

Pain knocked upon my door and said That she had come to stay; And though I would not welcome her But bade her go away, She entered in. And like my own shade She followed after me, And from her stabbing, stinging sword, No moment was I free. And then one day another knocked Most gently at my door. I said, “No, Pain is here. There’s not room for more.” And then I heard His tender voice, “It is I, be not afraid.” And from the day He entered in— Ah, the difference He made!6

As my mentor, Ray Stedman, used to say, “We’re all clay pots, and all of us are being molded. Only some are moldier than others!”

Exodus 3, verses 1 through 10, is a passage that revolves around a day, a bush, a need, and a call. Let’s consider each in turn.

Moses had simply heard his name coming out of a flaming shrub and answered back. “Moses! Moses!” the voice said. And do you know what Moses answered? The original Hebrew reveals that he spoke only one word: hinaynee, which could be rendered, “I’m here,” or, in our terms, “It’s me.”

I am reminded of those times many years ago when our youngest son Chuck would bring me one of his shoes with a knot in the lace. He must have been four, maybe five at the time, and nobody but nobody could get a knot in a shoestring like our little guy. He had this strange approach to dealing with the knot: He pulled on the strings with all his might. He tugged and strained and cinched that knot until it was a hard little ball. You couldn’t tell where one string ended and the other began. Rather than bringing the problem to me earlier, he would bring it to me later . . . after he’d tried to fix it, after the knot was so tiny and tight it would take an act of God to untie it. I had told him time and again, “Son, when you pull the strings and it won’t open like it’s supposed to, don’t jerk harder. Come get me, and I’ll help you.” And he would usually reply, “Well, I keep thinking I can get it out. That’s why I pull harder.” What an appropriate picture of our life with God. We get ourselves into a tangled mess and refuse to admit it’s a self-made knot. So we pull harder and harder, until it takes (literally) an act of God to get us out of it. Some time ago, I came across this apt bit of verse: With thoughtlessness and impatient hands, We tangle up the plans the Lord hath wrought. And when we cry in pain, He says, “Be quiet, My child, while I untie the knot.”1 That’s what God wanted to do with Moses. His life had been one great knot of self-effort—hard, sincere labor in the ene...

When I was a student at Dallas Seminary, President John Walvoord used to say, “We spend too much of our time trying to unscrew the inscrutable.”

“Then you shall say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus says the LORD, “Israel is My son, My firstborn. So I said to you, ‘Let My son go that he may serve Me’; but you have refused to let him go. Behold, I will kill your son, your firstborn” ’ ” (Exodus 4:22–23).

“And the work of righteousness will be peace, and the service of righteousness, quietness and confidence forever” (Isaiah 32:17).

I heard a story recently that reminds me (as if I needed reminding!) of how a day like that can play out. It goes something like this: After just a few years of marriage filled with disagreements and arguments, a young man and his wife decided the only way to save their marriage was to try counseling. Things had slipped from bad to worse as the months passed, turning their marriage into a marathon of misery. They had been at each other’s throats for so long that counseling seemed like their only hope. He was incredibly insensitive and dull, while she was hyperactive and dominant. That’s never a good mix. When they arrived at the designated office, the counselor jumped right in and opened the floor for discussion. “Well,” he began, “what seems to be the problem?” Immediately, the husband slumped in his chair, assuming a defeated posture. He stared down at the carpet, finally managing a shrug of the shoulders. He had nothing to say. In contrast, his wife launched immediately into her script, talking ninety miles an hour, describing all the wrongs within their marriage. And every problem could be traced back to him—his failures, his insensitivities, his failure to communicate. And so it went. After fifteen minutes of listening to the non-stop wife, the counselor stood up without saying a word, walked over to her, and while she was still in mid-sentence, picked her up by her shoulders, gave her a big hug, kissed her passionately, then sat her back down. She sat in stunned sile...

In his book, Spiritual Leadership, J. Oswald Sanders writes, “The leader must be one who, while welcoming the friendship and support of all who can offer it, has sufficient resources to stand alone, even in the face of fierce opposition, in the discharge of his responsibilities. He or she must be prepared to have ‘no one but God.’”1

Right off the top, He repeated the message from the burning bush, saying, “I am” five different times in Exodus chapter 6. • “I am the LORD . . . ” (v. 2) • “I am the LORD . . . ” (v. 6) • “I am the LORD . . . ” (v. 7) • “I am the LORD . . . ” (v. 8) • “I am the LORD . . . ” (v. 29)

After the Lord told Moses “I am” five times, He told him “I will” eight times! • “See what I will do . . . ” (v. 1) • “I will bring . . . ” (v. 6) • “I will deliver . . . ” (v. 6) • “I will redeem . . . ” (v. 6) • “I will take . . . ” (v. 7) • “I will be . . . ” (v. 7) • “I will bring . . . ” (v. 8) • “I will give . . . ” (v. 8)

Circumstances that turn against us force dependence. When you find yourself in a situation that suddenly reverses field and begins going in a direction you did not want it to go, you are humbled, and that forces you into a position of dependence upon the Lord. That’s precisely where God wants you. His wise approach is to keep us within the circle of His protection and provision. Circumstances that force dependence teach us patience.