Exodus 2:11-25
Moses Flees to Midian (Hebrews 11:24-25)
11 Now it came to pass in those days, when Moses was grown, that he went out to his brethren and looked at their burdens. And he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his brethren. 12 So he looked this way and that way, and when he saw no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. 13 And when he went out the second day, behold, two Hebrew men were fighting, and he said to the one who did the wrong, “Why are you striking your companion?”
14 Then he said, “Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you intend to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?”
So Moses feared and said, “Surely this thing is known!” 15 When Pharaoh heard of this matter, he sought to kill Moses. But Moses fled from the face of Pharaoh and dwelt in the land of Midian; and he sat down by a well.
16 Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters. And they came and drew water, and they filled the troughs to water their father’s flock. 17 Then the shepherds came and drove them away; but Moses stood up and helped them, and watered their flock.
18 When they came to Reuel their father, he said, “How is it that you have come so soon today?”
19 And they said, “An Egyptian delivered us from the hand of the shepherds, and he also drew enough water for us and watered the flock.”
20 So he said to his daughters, “And where is he? Why is it that you have left the man? Call him, that he may eat bread.”
21 Then Moses was content to live with the man, and he gave Zipporah his daughter to Moses. 22 And she bore him a son. He called his name Gershom, for he said, “I have been a stranger in a foreign land.”
23 Now it happened in the process of time that the king of Egypt died. Then the children of Israel groaned because of the bondage, and they cried out; and their cry came up to God because of the bondage. 24 So God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. 25 And God looked upon the children of Israel, and God acknowledged them.
Moses grew up and still remembered his heritage as one of God’s chosen nation, so when he went for a walk to see how they fared as slaves there in Egypt, he encountered a sight. He saw their overbearing burdens of hard labor to make the bricks for the Egyptian cities and saw a beating firsthand. His sense of injustice railed up within his soul for his people that he had been isolated from in the king’s palace and lashed out to deliver his brother by killing the oppressor and burying his body. The next day he tried to stop a fight between two Hebrew men and they angrily retorted, “Do you intend to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” and defied his authority over them. Moses ran away as fast as he could because Pharaoh also knew this rescued son of his daughter was both slave born and a murderer of an Egyptian. Moses kept running until he arrived at Midian, a place in the desert just north of the present-day Arabian peninsula where Mount Sinai lies. He met and married a priest’s daughter named Zipporah there and settled down to find peace and try to forget the suffering of his people back under their harsh bondage in Egypt where he was born and raised. God did not forget His people or their suffering, though. He looked back and considered himself a stranger in a strange land, both as a Hebrew in Egypt and now in a land he never knew. Meanwhile, God remembered His promised covenant to bless and multiply the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and was ready in His time now to intervene. He acknowledged their suffering for the four hundred years they were promised to glorify Him in their deliverance from bondage and had already predetermined who and when they would be set free. Moses just did not yet know it was through him. We who are in Christ also have been chosen as instruments of grace through the gospel to set men free as well and too often we run away instead of standing firm with the message from God as His spokesmen of deliverance from the bondage of sin (John 8:34-36, Hebrews 2:14-15) and the hope of the Deliverer through faith in His work on the cross of our sin’s curse (Galatians 3:13-14, Revelation 22:3) to die in our place and take our deserved consequences for sin. For God looks on His chosen children and acknowledges us in our lost state that Jesus may open the eyes of our hearts and see His grace to set us free from the burden of sin and death. May we acknowledge our role to make disciples (Matthew 28:19-20) as we bring the message of hope for freedom from the bondage of sin and share together in eternal life with Him, even if we have temporarily fled the scene as Moses did when we used the wrong approach to set others free. When we do find ourselves gone from the world, when we are grown in maturity in Christ, we can then return to the mission at hand.
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