In wrestling with God’s providence, one thing we particularly struggle with is God’s timing.  We want God to change things NOW, and we do not understand why God seems to be so laggard, so willing to let evils persist or even intensify without addressing them.  We need to remember that God is neither passive nor laggard.  How He is working is as important as what He intends to accomplish.

We can see this in the first encounter Moses and Aaron had with the Israelites in Egypt and then with Pharaoh. The meeting with the Israelites went well; that with Pharaoh did not. When Moses engaged God at the burning bush, his three questions centered on the Israelites not heeding his voice, as had been the case forty years earlier when he sought to lead the Israelites. Yet Scripture records that “Moses and Aaron went and gathered together all the elders of the children of Israel. Then he did the signs in the sight of the people. So the people believed; and when they heard that the LORD had visited the children of Israel and that He looked on their affliction, then they bowed their heads and worshiped” (Exod. 4:29-31) That was easy.

When Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh, they asked him to allow the Israelites to go three days journey into the wilderness (probably about a week round trip) to worship the LORD.  This was just as the LORD commanded (Exod. 5:1 cf. 3:18).  Pharaoh responded to the request contemptuously: “Who is the LORD that I should obey His voice to let Israel go?  I do not know the LORD, nor will I let Israel go” (Exod. 5:2).  Such a response was inevitable: Pharaoh led a civilization that by that point had been in existence for more than 1,500 years, and which held to an ideology centered on the permanence of the existing order of things.  Moreover, the LORD was not part of the pantheon of Egyptian gods, and Pharaoh himself was considered a near divinity.  From Pharaoh’s perspective, the request was absurd and reflected laziness on the part of the Israelites.  Thus, he increased their burdens.  The Israelites reacted with bitterness toward Moses and Aaron for getting them into the situation in the first place, and Moses and Aaron, in turn, cried out in anguish to God, asking why the people had not be freed.  They should not have been surprised though—God had told Moses beforehand that Pharaoh would refuse the request, indeed because the LORD Himself would harden Pharaoh’s heart (Exod. 4:21).  Things had turned out exactly as God said.  Freeing the Israelites was not going to be easy.

The reaction Moses, Aaron, and the Israelites is typical of the expectation we often have that if we just say a short prayer or make some small deference to God, then he will make everything all better quickly, like a parent kissing a child’s scrape.  But that is not how the LORD typically works.  Why was the LORD making it harder?  Certainly the greater Pharaoh’s resistance to releasing the Israelites, the greater God’s glory when He does free them.  But that is probably not the full reason.  God is in the process of working on shaping people even as He is working toward a particular end result.

First, Moses and Aaron needed to grow in trusting Him if they were going to lead the people.  Their initial response notwithstanding, the fact that God told them Pharaoh would resist their request and that that is exactly what came to pass strengthens the credibility of God’s word.  In the ensuing confrontation with Pharaoh, they do not come back to the LORD and make that same complaint again.

Second, God is working on Pharaoh.  God’s purpose is not only in His glory, but He is bringing judgment upon Egypt.  Covenantally, God had promised to Abraham that He would bless those who bless His people and curse those who cursed His people.  Pharaoh and Egypt were convinced of their own superiority and their ability to act toward God and toward His people with impunity.  They were due for the LORD’s judgment and the harder Pharaoh’s heart became, the more clearly the righteousness of God’s judgment will be seen.  Through the confrontation with Pharaoh and Egypt, God is demonstrating His superiority over the kings of the earth who stand in resistance and rebellion toward Him.

And that is a relevant lesson for God’s people as well.  While they acknowledged the LORD as their God, having been in Egypt as long as they had they probably saw Him as merely just one of a host of gods, albeit one who historically had been favorable toward them.  In this sense, they acted as if God was their mascot.  He was not.  Pharaoh’s rhetorical question was, in a sense, their question as well: Who is the LORD, that they should obey Him?  They needed to realize that that the LORD was the only true God, sovereign over all of creation—and for that reason, they should obey Him.  By making things harder, God was setting up the situation and shaping the attitudes of those participating in it.  With His people, He was shaping them to obey Him, and with His enemies He was showing Himself as the God to be feared.  The process God was working through met these supplementary goals.  As we struggle with things in our lives, the process that the LORD works through He is using to shape our attitudes as well, that we will truly become a people who will honor, glorify, and obey Him.

In this chapter we have three vignettes of Moses’s life: how he was saved from the genocide being perpetrated against his people; his failed attempt at delivering his people, and his flight to Midian (today in northwestern Saudi Arabia).  Interestingly, when Stephen the Deacon recounts Moses’s role in redemptive history in Acts 7:17-43, he spends more time on this than on the Exodus and the forty years Moses led the people in the wilderness.  This is curious, since it is a truly anti-heroic narrative: Moses is saved by women at birth, fails at leading his people in Egypt, and in fleeing Egypt is reduced to helping shepherdesses in the wilderness.  The combination of these vignettes, however, highlight the glory of God in preparing Israel’s deliverer.

The Pharaoh at the time of Moses’s birth most likely was Amenhotep I, the son of Ahmose, the founder of the 18^th Dynasty, and the decree to kill the male children of the Hebrews probably was in effect only for a limited time.  Moses’s brother Aaron was three years older than him and was not affected, and there is no indication that the persecution either escalated or went on.  Moses was probably born in 1526 BC, the last year of Amenhotep I’s reign (r. 1546-1525), and when Thutmose I (r. 1525-1512) took over he probably ended the persecution; he would have enough to deal with in securing his position as Pharaoh without provoking a large alien ethnic group within his realm.

Commentators have speculated that the daughter of Pharaoh who drew Moses from the water was Hatshepsut, who would later go on to exercise kingship in her own right (r. 1504-1483).  She certainly would have had the force of personality to defy Pharaoh’s edict, but depending on how one calculates the chronology, she may not have been much older than Moses himself, and thus unlikely to have adopted him.  In any event, Moses’s mother probably reared him for several years before presenting him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and in that time impressed upon him his covenantal heritage.

When he became part of the Egyptian court, he would enter a new world.  In ancient Egypt, Pharaoh’s were considered nearly divine and typically were deified upon their death.  To be a member of the royal family, then, would almost be tantamount to being the son or daughter of a god.  In addition to being given the best education then possible, most of Moses’s mature years would be under Hatshepsut’s reign, which was marked by diplomatic embassies to Punt (modern day Somalia) and other parts of the Near East.  Moses certainly would have known about these trips and may even have participated in some.  That would have given him insight into how covenants functioned as treaties at time when diplomacy was beginning to flourish in the ancient Near East.

One other thing in Hatshepsut’s reign may also have shaped him, indeed, may have radicalized him: Hatshepsut boasted in her official inscriptions that she finally eliminated the Hyksos as even an external threat.  Knowing that his people had flourished under the Hyksos and were now oppressed, he almost certainly had to have been disturbed by this boast.  It is probably in 1486 BC, then, that he killed the Egyptian who was beating one of the Hebrews.  Moses’s action certainly bespeaks a righteous indignation, but there may also have been some political calculation as well: if people saw him as a judge, then he could lead them and throw off the Egyptian yoke—except the people did not follow him.  Found out, his actions certainly would have been seen as treason by the royal court, which is why he fled.  The Pharaoh from whom Moses fled was probably Thutmose III, the long-ruling and greatest Pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty (r. 1504-1450), who died just before the Exodus (Exod. 2:23).

While we can comprehend the fall from privilege that Moses experienced, the full depth of it is not readily obvious to most Western readers.  When we think of shepherds, we typically think of bucolic pastoralists, gently caring for white fluffy sheep.  In the ancient Near East and even to this day, however, shepherds engaged in tedious, hard labor in the heat and in the cold throughout the year, living as nomads on the edge of society.  By settled peoples, they were typically seen as neither committed to one place nor one king, and often only a step or two away from open brigandage.  Thus, Moses went from being almost as high as he could possibly be to being almost as low as he could go.  And even then, Reuel’s daughters did not think to invite Moses to come to their family’s tent until berated by their father, despite the help he rendered to them.

Why did God have Moses go through what he did?  Moses was certainly destined to lead God’s people and God had prepared him expressly for that purpose, but it was God who promised to deliver His people.  For Him to receive the full glory for fulfilling His covenantal promise He needed Moses to be at a point where he was not trusting in himself or his abilities, but trusting in God.  Moreover, God used Moses to prefigure Christ Himself.  This is probably why Stephen spends so much time on Moses’s backstory in Acts ch. 7.  After recounting Moses’s background, Stephen says, “This is that Moses who said to the children of Israel, ‘The LORD your God will raise up for you a Prophet like me from your brethren.  Him you shall hear” (Acts 7:37).  The one that the Jews of Stephen’s day claimed to follow pointed them toward a deliverer better than himself.  Christ was not simply like a Son of God, He was the Son of God who Himself was fully God.  Ascending from the of the Father, He was humiliated in His life on earth, culminating in His death.  Humiliation, however, precedes glory, and just as Moses’s humiliation preceded the glory of the Exodus, so Christ’s humiliation in death preceded the glory of His resurrection on the third day.  To God alone be the glory!