Our Fifth Companion: Moses
...who learned the value of a detour
Then we turned and journeyed into the wilderness... as the LORD told me...
(Deuteronomy 2:1)
Moses! Sublime, awe inspiring - can you and I really walk beside this greatest figure of the Old Testament? Won't we be like pygmies trying to keep pace with a giant?
Actually, our very hesitance to join such grand company can be our first step together. Moses was very meek, more than all men that were on the face of the earth, and when this humble and unassuming person heard that God had tapped him for a supremely important journey, his response was exactly what ours would be:
Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?
Of course God knew all about Moses' poor self-image and his speech impediment - as He knows each of our shortcomings - and so He heaped encouragements and reassurances on him, as He does on us. God himself would go with him, He would deal with the opposition, He would work signs and miracles on Moses' behalf. And Moses, after hearing it all, answers:
Please, Lord, send someone else.
This is the kind of man you and I can walk with. The Journey into Freedom - this is the central theme of Moses' life. Whether our slavery is literal, as it was for the Hebrews in Egypt and blacks in America, or figurative; whether it's physical - to drugs or cigarettes or chocolate - or emotional, we can follow the road that Moses pioneered.
But... what a strange road, filled with false starts and seeming dead-ends!
Why detours?
Some years ago when my own bondage took the form of an incapacitating depression, friends kept urging me to "snap out of it." Look on the bright side! they'd say. Stop being negative.
Like saying to an alcoholic: stop drinking! Or to a chronic worrier: be confident! Go from wherever your Egypt is, directly into the Promised Land!
Over and over I tried to follow such well-meaning advice. I wore a determined smile, I made lists of all the things I had to be thankful for, I denied the misery that engulfed me. And of course the depression only deepened.
For me the true route out of depression was a circuitous one, involving repeated journeys into the wilderness of memory, a confronting of my own wild beasts.
It often seemed that I was making no progress - was even going backward, toward the very darkness I wished to escape. And yet this painful and seemingly indirect approach proved the path to lasting freedom.
So it was for the Hebrew slaves of Pharaoh, and so it may be for you, whatever form your own bondage takes. Instead of chafing as I did at the detours in your path, ask yourself this month how God is using them.
1. To enlarge our vision
Moses was an idealistic young man. He hated bullies, whether it was an Egyptian brutalizing a Hebrew, or a group of men shoving a woman away from a watering trough. Perhaps he dreamed of using his influence as the foster son of the Egyptian princess to outlaw the use of the whip, or shorten the working day.
Instead, with one hasty ill-timed deed he found himself, at age forty, exiled from the people he'd meant to help. To him it must have seemed as if he'd thrown away his chances to be of use, given up whatever leverage he had at court, to come to some godforsaken wilderness and herd a bunch of silly sheep.
How could Moses know that the trouble with his original goal was not that it was too big, but that it was not big enough! That he was called not to improve working conditions in a particular slave labor camp, but to lead an entire people away from slavery forever.
2. To give us specific training
God knew that the skills of the desert sheepherder ... knowledge of the weather... the location of oases... the secret of water trapped in limestone... were precisely the know-how Moses would need to lead not sheep but men, women and children through this same wilderness. What must have seemed to Moses years of tedious routine - wasted years in terms of his youthful dream - were in God's all-seeing economy the perfect preparation for the work that lay ahead.
3. To temper our Faith
After harrowing confrontations with Pharaoh, Moses led his people out of Egypt. But what a strange roundabout route they traveled! Their destination - our destination - was the Promised Land, where the good things of God were waiting. But God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near.
The way of the Philistines was the coastal highway patrolled by Pharaoh's army. It was the shortest way to the Promised Land, but one where the escaping slaves might face a battle around any bend ... before they were toughened and disciplined by the wilderness experience.
Why aren't our lives a straight line? Why does a medical student have to interrupt his education to work as a taxi driver? Why does an artists starve for years before he sells a painting? Why, with prayer, couldn't I "snap out" of depression? Why doesn't God make His guidance clearer? Probably because the success that comes too easily, the faith that encounters no obstacles, is the one that crumbles with the first opposition.
4. To give us another chance
Turn tomorrow and set out for the wilderness. Finally came the longest detour of all, the most heartbreaking. On the very threshold of the Promised Land, within sight of all that God had for them, God's people panicked. His miracles of provision and protection forgotten, they clamored only to return to the slavery and safety of Egypt.
A year and a half in the wilderness had not sufficed for basic training: this detour was to last forty years and see the deaths of all those whose faith had wavered.
It was a devastating blow to Moses, and yet it corresponds to our own experience. We cannot receive the freedom God holds out to us while any part of us longs to return to Egypt ... to the old dependent, enslaving patterns. Only the children - the new life in us - the qualities nurtured and strengthened on the desert marches, will prove fit for life in His Kingdom.
Lord of the Journey, let me learn well the lessons of the wilderness through which I am passing... so that I do not have to retrace these steps again!
Meet our next companion now >
Then we turned and journeyed into the wilderness... as the LORD told me...
(Deuteronomy 2:1)
Moses! Sublime, awe inspiring - can you and I really walk beside this greatest figure of the Old Testament? Won't we be like pygmies trying to keep pace with a giant?
Actually, our very hesitance to join such grand company can be our first step together. Moses was very meek, more than all men that were on the face of the earth, and when this humble and unassuming person heard that God had tapped him for a supremely important journey, his response was exactly what ours would be:
Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?
Of course God knew all about Moses' poor self-image and his speech impediment - as He knows each of our shortcomings - and so He heaped encouragements and reassurances on him, as He does on us. God himself would go with him, He would deal with the opposition, He would work signs and miracles on Moses' behalf. And Moses, after hearing it all, answers:
Please, Lord, send someone else.
This is the kind of man you and I can walk with. The Journey into Freedom - this is the central theme of Moses' life. Whether our slavery is literal, as it was for the Hebrews in Egypt and blacks in America, or figurative; whether it's physical - to drugs or cigarettes or chocolate - or emotional, we can follow the road that Moses pioneered.
But... what a strange road, filled with false starts and seeming dead-ends!
Why detours?
Some years ago when my own bondage took the form of an incapacitating depression, friends kept urging me to "snap out of it." Look on the bright side! they'd say. Stop being negative.
Like saying to an alcoholic: stop drinking! Or to a chronic worrier: be confident! Go from wherever your Egypt is, directly into the Promised Land!
Over and over I tried to follow such well-meaning advice. I wore a determined smile, I made lists of all the things I had to be thankful for, I denied the misery that engulfed me. And of course the depression only deepened.
For me the true route out of depression was a circuitous one, involving repeated journeys into the wilderness of memory, a confronting of my own wild beasts.
It often seemed that I was making no progress - was even going backward, toward the very darkness I wished to escape. And yet this painful and seemingly indirect approach proved the path to lasting freedom.
So it was for the Hebrew slaves of Pharaoh, and so it may be for you, whatever form your own bondage takes. Instead of chafing as I did at the detours in your path, ask yourself this month how God is using them.
1. To enlarge our vision
Moses was an idealistic young man. He hated bullies, whether it was an Egyptian brutalizing a Hebrew, or a group of men shoving a woman away from a watering trough. Perhaps he dreamed of using his influence as the foster son of the Egyptian princess to outlaw the use of the whip, or shorten the working day.
Instead, with one hasty ill-timed deed he found himself, at age forty, exiled from the people he'd meant to help. To him it must have seemed as if he'd thrown away his chances to be of use, given up whatever leverage he had at court, to come to some godforsaken wilderness and herd a bunch of silly sheep.
How could Moses know that the trouble with his original goal was not that it was too big, but that it was not big enough! That he was called not to improve working conditions in a particular slave labor camp, but to lead an entire people away from slavery forever.
2. To give us specific training
God knew that the skills of the desert sheepherder ... knowledge of the weather... the location of oases... the secret of water trapped in limestone... were precisely the know-how Moses would need to lead not sheep but men, women and children through this same wilderness. What must have seemed to Moses years of tedious routine - wasted years in terms of his youthful dream - were in God's all-seeing economy the perfect preparation for the work that lay ahead.
3. To temper our Faith
After harrowing confrontations with Pharaoh, Moses led his people out of Egypt. But what a strange roundabout route they traveled! Their destination - our destination - was the Promised Land, where the good things of God were waiting. But God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near.
The way of the Philistines was the coastal highway patrolled by Pharaoh's army. It was the shortest way to the Promised Land, but one where the escaping slaves might face a battle around any bend ... before they were toughened and disciplined by the wilderness experience.
Why aren't our lives a straight line? Why does a medical student have to interrupt his education to work as a taxi driver? Why does an artists starve for years before he sells a painting? Why, with prayer, couldn't I "snap out" of depression? Why doesn't God make His guidance clearer? Probably because the success that comes too easily, the faith that encounters no obstacles, is the one that crumbles with the first opposition.
4. To give us another chance
Turn tomorrow and set out for the wilderness. Finally came the longest detour of all, the most heartbreaking. On the very threshold of the Promised Land, within sight of all that God had for them, God's people panicked. His miracles of provision and protection forgotten, they clamored only to return to the slavery and safety of Egypt.
A year and a half in the wilderness had not sufficed for basic training: this detour was to last forty years and see the deaths of all those whose faith had wavered.
It was a devastating blow to Moses, and yet it corresponds to our own experience. We cannot receive the freedom God holds out to us while any part of us longs to return to Egypt ... to the old dependent, enslaving patterns. Only the children - the new life in us - the qualities nurtured and strengthened on the desert marches, will prove fit for life in His Kingdom.
Lord of the Journey, let me learn well the lessons of the wilderness through which I am passing... so that I do not have to retrace these steps again!
Meet our next companion now >