T H E  C L A R I O N  C A L L

          Most believe that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, the crowning achievement of his life. What he is best known for, however, is the deliverance of the children of Israel from Egypt to the very edge of the Promised Land. From beginning to end of his history, we can trace the track of his royal conceit to a place of incomparable meekness and humility. By all accounts, he did not start out as a meek man. The truth is, no genuinely meek person ever does. The person who appears meek from the beginning may be soft or indifferent, easygoing or calculated, but the person is not truly humble. Meekness begins as a seed in the heart. Then, as in Moses’ case, it must be watered, pruned, fertilized, beaten by the winds of God, sliced by the sleet of God, and rooted deeply in the Spirit of God.

 

          It would be nearer the truth to say that Moses started out as a hasty, hot and impatient man. It was but a word and a blow with young Moses. With a word and a blow he would lay you in your grave in the sand. When Moses violently defended his countryman against the Egyptian, it may be that the Egyptian slave driver deserved what he received. It appears, in any case, that all the learning, all the luxury, all the dazzling prospects of Egypt did not blind Moses or make him ashamed of his own oppressed brothers. Some of us may have spurned involvement in a combustible situation and quickly moved on. Moses, however, tried to save the countryman and had to pay with a forty-year banishment in a God-forsaken wilderness.

​

          Moses was a plagued individual. He had never aspired to leadership, yet he was chosen and pressed into it by God. He disliked administration and hated confrontation and conflict, yet he faced it throughout his later life. Leading a multitude of Hebrews across a barren wilderness for four decades would be a daunting challenge for the most experienced leader. Moses had to judge their disagreements, intercede in their rebellions, supervise the construction of the Tabernacle, and move the unwieldy multitudes in a nomadic trek that never seemed to end.