Moses: A Man of Selfless Dedication

by Charles R. Swindoll

Most of the centenarians I do know of aren’t in the best of health. They’re blind, crippled, deaf. Not many mountain climbers are in their nineties. And Moses was a hundred and twenty! We think, My, he must really have been crippled up. But that’s not what the record states. Scripture reports that “his eye was not dim, nor his vigor abated” (v. 7). The Living Bible says that “his eyesight was perfect and he was as strong as a young man.” My reaction? What a way to live! A hundred and twenty and you don’t need glasses; a century and a fifth and you don’t need crutches. Moses never did sit around in a rocking chair rubbing on liniment and drinking Ensure. He kept moving on, just as Caleb did, staying fit right up until the end. You know our problem? We get old before we’re old. We start living as if we’re ancient before we turn seventy. It’s a crime! A guy will get a Ph.D. and feel that he’s over the hill because he worked on his degree for a number of years. You’re in a going business, doing your part, and your sixty-fifth birthday rolls around. You ask yourself, Am I getting too old for this? Nonsense!

Longfellow wrote, “It is too late!” Ah, nothing is too late— Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides Bore off the prize of verse from his peers When each had numbered more than fourscore years; And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten, Had begun his Characters of Men. Chaucer, at Woodstock, with his nightingales, At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales.

Goethe, at Weimar, toiling to the last, Completed Faust when eighty years were past. What then? Shall we sit idly down and say, “The night has come; it is no longer day”? Why, age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress. And as the evening twilight fades away, The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.

The late Jim Elliot said, “Wherever you are, be all there. Live to the hilt every situation you believe to be the will of God.” If you’re a student, live it up! If you’re in business, go for it! If you lose your job, have at it! Really be unemployed. If you’re having a baby, throw a party! If you release your only child to marriage or business, let her go! Live on! Be “all there,”

Even more important than the physical, however, is the spiritual. What did God write on Moses’ tombstone about this category of His servant’s life? What does Moses’ heavenly obituary say? “Since then no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face” (verse 10). When Moses’ successor, Joshua, wanted to get direction from God, he had to go to the high priest. Not Moses. Amazingly, he got hold of God’s direction through eyeball-to-eyeball contact with the living Lord. His life of one hundred-twenty years was a face-to-face walk of dedication.

After a death comes a burial, and so it was in the case of Moses. But verse 6 contains one of the most remarkable statements about the whole remarkable career of Moses: “And He [God!] buried him in the valley in the land of Moab, opposite Beth-peor; but no man knows his burial place to this day” (Deuteronomy 34:6, brackets mine). Moses is the only person in the Bible whom God personally buried. Did you know that? And then the Lord hid the tomb. Why did He do that? Because that grave would have become a second Mecca. They would still be beating a path up Nebo to this day, building shrines, selling popcorn and peanuts, offering all sorts of rides, maybe running a tram up there, with big banners announcing, “Moses’ burial place!” “No way,” the Lord said. “Put him in that grave, seal it over, and conceal it, so they’ll never know where it is.” This was so crucial to the Lord that it even sparked an angelic confrontation. Jude 9 contains one of the stranger accounts in the Bible concerning this event. Jude writes, “But Michael the archangel, when he disputed with the devil and argued about the body of Moses, did not dare pronounce against him a railing judgment, but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you.’” Apparently the devil had his own plans for Moses’ body, but God said, “Nope. His body is mine just as much as is his soul, and I’m burying the corpse where no one will ever find it. End of story.”

All things have their proper wrap-up, as does the story of Moses: Since that time no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face, for all the signs and wonders which the LORD sent him to perform in the land of Egypt against Pharaoh, all his servants, and all his land, and for all the mighty power and for all the great terror which Moses performed in the sight of all Israel (34:10–12).

Joseph Renan, the famed French philologist and historian, said of Moses, “He is a colossus among figures of humanity.”

The secret of fulfillment in life is involvement. Don’t let this first observation fall on deaf ears, even if your hearing isn’t what it used to be. One of the worst curses that has ever struck our country is the curse of a retirement attitude. It’s not retirement as such, but the attitude that says, “Do not disturb; I’ve earned my rest,” or “I’m finishing my years; don’t bother me.” Sometimes that comes out in the thought, I really don’t have much more to contribute. No wonder the suicide rate of the over-sixties is so high, and that includes many who have plenty of money. The secret of fulfillment is involvement—pitching in, getting busy in God’s many-faceted work. As we’ve already discovered in this study, only two things on earth are eternal: people and the Bible. When you’re planning on retirement, don’t plan on checking out with people or with God’s Word. If you do, you’ll be moving away from that which is eternal, and that’s the wrong direction, my friend. So stay in touch. Give until you don’t have anything else to give, and then tap into God’s reservoirs and give some more. This is what lengthens the meaning and purpose—and sometimes the years—of life.

Praise may come, but don’t let it come from your own voice box.

When I first began driving to my hospital office in 1966, I noticed a nice-looking young man who invariably stood at the window of an old apartment house, which is located across the street from the doctors’ parking lot. Morning after morning this same man, whom I would judge to have been in his middle forties, appeared at the same open window as I drove past. He was always there when I went home at the end of the day as well. I began to wave or smile to the man in the window, and he would return my greeting with a similar gesture. Though it seems unlikely, we developed a friendship in the absence of any personal knowledge of one another, without a single conversation between us. My curiosity finally compelled me to get better acquainted with the man behind the smile. One noontime I walked from my office to the building where my congenial friend lived and climbed a dark stairway to the second floor. I knocked on the door, and it was opened by “the man in the window.” He introduced himself as Tommy and invited me to come into his two-room apartment. During the next hour he told me his story. He had been a successful executive until devastated by a massive coronary thrombosis about six years earlier. His heart ailments were compounded by emphysema and other physical disorders, which prevented his engaging in any form of work. I also noticed that his right arm was deformed, being much smaller than his left. Tommy, I learned, was rarely able to leave that tiny apartment. He wa...

Here is the man who led the Exodus, witnessed the parting of the Red Sea, led a congregation of two million through a trackless wilderness, sustained himself on “the bread of angels” for years on end, followed a towering pillar of cloud by day, and sat beneath the fire of God hovering over the camp at night. “He was mighty in word and deed,” declares Stephen. As we saw in one of my earlier chapters, Moses’ parents so inculcated godliness in their son that even at the height of his political stature, he refused to depart from his childhood training. He had great roots. A friend of mine likes to say, “When he grew up, he even looked like Charlton Heston.” He was a man who had everything going for him.

Yet, isn’t it strange? There is no sphinx in Egypt erected to Moses’ honor. There is no impressive pyramid, no mortuary temple of stone that bears his name. Remember, these people honored their dead. The Egyptians had a saying: “To speak the name of the dead is to make him live again.”

The Prince of Egypt was the Pharaoh-elect.

Verse 25 says he made a choice. The word translated “choosing” comes from a Greek term that means “to take for oneself a position.” In other words, Moses came to that epochal fork in the road and had to “take for himself ” a position before he could go to the right or the left. Without taking a position, he would have remained paralyzed by neutrality.

The word “considering” in verse 26 helps us to understand Moses’ rationale. The term means “to think beforehand.”

your place burned down today to a concrete slab and smoldering black rubble, nothing of real value would have been destroyed as long as all the lives in your home had been saved. Why? Because you have relationships and memories, and you build everything from there.

Remember Corrie ten Boom’s words? “I’ve learned to hold precious things loosely, because it hurts when God pries my fingers and takes them from me.”

Elton Trueblood said it best: “Faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation.”

Clarence Macartney’s words speak eloquently of such moments: “I have no dread of a cemetery,” he wrote. “Sometimes it is better to be there and have fellowship with the dead who are buried than to walk down the streets of our cities and meet the unburied dead; that is, those in whom faith and hope and love and purity have long been dead, leaving only the animal alive. In the cemetery the Bible of life is open and a passionless voice reads to us its great lessons and tells us to apply our hearts unto wisdom. Sometimes we can learn more from the silence of the dead than from the speech of the living.” He continues, “Whether it be a little churchyard, where under ancient elms the dead lie close to holy walls, or the dark spaces of some hoary cathedral, where the dead sleep under sculptured sarcophagus and lettered marble, or some wilderness battlefield where the nation had gathered the bodies of the soldiers who there gave their last full measure of devotion, or some rural hillside where the wind blows free, or some quiet acre by the banks of a river that flows silently and swiftly away like man’s life—wherever it may be, the resting place of the dead has always something worthwhile to say to the living.”1