Passover to Pentecost – Moses and His Second Chance    Week 5 Day 5

So now, go.  I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.  Exodus 3: 10 (NIV)

When I read the accolades of Moses in Deuteronomy 34: 10 + 11 I forget that he was not always like that.  He knew God face-to-face, he did miraculous signs and wonders, and he led a captive people out of their bondage.  But that is not the Moses you meet in Exodus 3 when he first talks to God at the burning bush.  When he left Egypt at the head of a million people he was a different man than when he left ahead of an execution squad.

Moses left Egypt the first time when he was forty so he may have lived in the palace or among the royals for thirty-five years.  He should have received a royal education and knew the Pharaoh who tried to kill him. Whatever his intent was he apparently had not forgotten the five or six years he spent with his family as a child.  Jochebed, his mother, surely told him of his miraculous beginning and told him that God had something important for him to do.

The next forty years of education/living must have been a shock for the “prince” of Egypt. Instead of leading people he was leading sheep.  But by the time he was eighty he had settled in; so when God called him he did not want to go.  He had left Egypt and the Hebrews and seemed to have made no plans to go back.  He was circumcised but had not performed the rite on his sons.

In Exodus 2: 14 a man asked Moses who made you ruler and judge over us, by chapter 5 Moses could say God did.  It truly was a second chance for Moses.  How do you go from Exodus 3 to Deuteronomy 34?  Every time Moses performed one of his signs, every plague started and stopped, every test and trial the Israelites did against God, and that cloud over his head day and night transformed him from fainthearted to fearless.

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