And Moses said unto God, Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt?- Exo_3:11.
1. The discipline through which Moses has passed has been almost too effectual, for, through extreme diffidence, the prophet of God wants to decline his providential life-task and has to be thrust forth into the path of public service. The reaction from the error and miscalculation of youth verges upon a desire for seclusion and retirement scarcely distinguishable from selfishness. Moses now shows a shyness of temper not altogether admirable, which makes him unwilling to touch the problem of the enslavement at all; and he might seem to have a show of reason on his side. In his own view he is less fitted now than he was forty years ago for the work of freeing God's people from their evil conditions. He feels as an English nobleman might conceivably feel who has spent half his life in the bush, and who is told that, within six weeks, he must be presented at Court and move an address to the Throne from his place in the House of Peers. Moses had forgotten the language and etiquette of courts. He may have been eloquent in his youth, but if so the adventures of the wilderness have cooled his temperament and robbed his speech of not a little of its force and readiness. The missionary philanthropist who has passed half a century in jungle, or in Kaffir kraal, may have been a Demosthenes when he embarked for his field of service, but he comes back a man of slow speech and stripped, by the grim realities through which he has lived, of the last shred of rhetorical art.
The call of Moses is the prototype of all calls in the Biblical history of Revelation. All other calls are like it. They all tell us that, contrary to what took place in other religions, the men who led Israel in the search for God did not owe to their own initiative or their own genius the internal light which impelled them. See rather how they struggle in the grasp of God, who steps into their life, turns them back and sends them forth shuddering to face humanity. Not one of them offers himself; they are all taken by force. Not one pursues the normal tenor of his destiny; the revolution they herald begins with their own lives. All have something to leave. Abraham must give up his home. The rest must deny themselves. “Do not send me!” entreats Moses. “Go!” says Jehovah. “Take away my life,” cries Elijah in the desert. “Go!” says Jehovah. “I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet,” exclaims Amos following his flock. “Go!” says Jehovah. “I am but a little child; let me go!” implores Jeremiah. “Go!” says Jehovah. “Save me from my infirmity!” prays St. Paul. “Go!” says Jehovah. And that one imperious word “Go!” occurring from end to end of the Bible epic, shatters all resistance, overcomes every obstacle, stimulates every heroism, and explains every miracle. It presents to a bewildered world the spectacle of heroes vanquished but victorious, bending under the weight of their Divine mission, from Moses and his righteous indignation to John the Baptist in the anguish of the dungeon: to St. Paul in his tribulations: to, if I dare say it, Jesus Himself crying out in His agony: “Father, save me from this hour,” but “not my will but thine be done.” Such is the procession of victims through whom God conquered the world. But in their martyrdom they gave the supreme proof that human nature, left to its own unaided strength, unaided inspiration, could never by its own initiative have given to the world “the salvation that cometh of the Jews.”1 [Note: A. Westphal, The Law and the Prophets, 164.]
The prospect of so weighty a work, and of being so distinguished from many whom I esteem before myself, brought me very low, and such were the conflicts of my soul that I had a near sympathy with the Prophet, in the time of his weakness, when he said: “If thou deal thus with me, kill me, I pray thee, if I have found favour in thy sight” (Num_11:15). But I soon saw that this proceeded from the want of a full resignation to the Divine will. Many were the afflictions which attended me, and in great abasement, with many tears, my cries were to the Almighty for His gracious and fatherly assistance, and after a time of deep trial I was favoured to understand the state mentioned by the Psalmist more clearly than ever I had done before; to wit: “My soul is even as a weaned child” (Psa_131:2). Being thus helped to sink down into resignation, I felt a deliverance from that tempest in which I had been sorely exercised, and in calmness of mind went forward, trusting that the Lord Jesus Christ, as I faithfully attended to Him, would be a counsellor to me in all difficulties.2 [Note: The Journal of John Woolman.]
2. From the midst of the bush there came a voice of rebuke, and the message was followed by the miraculous sign of the rod changed to a serpent, and of the serpent becoming a rod again as Moses seized it; and also of the healing of the leprous hand. Perhaps the serpent symbolized the Egyptian power which, at God's word, should become helpless against the life of Moses and the chosen people he was appointed to lead. Confronting once more this virulent tyranny in God's way and at God's express word, he should have no further need to flee from before it in sudden terror. The leprous hand, cleansed at the Divine bidding, seemed to suggest the healing and purifying change which would yet be wrought upon a corrupt and unholy Israel, contaminated and debauched by its sojourn in the land that was morally unclean. The wonder-working God would be with Moses in the second mission upon which he was sent, and henceforth he should no longer have to deal in the strength of nature alone with Pharaoh's taskmasters and their oft-sinning and unhappy victims.
3. In spite of these signs and the Almighty's own asseveration of the fact that He was the Maker of man's mouth, Moses still shrinks from his predestined work and shirks its burdens. The Redeemer of Israel has to take away part of the responsibility belonging to Moses and to put it upon Aaron; and Aaron did not always discharge his trust as well as the man would have acquitted himself for whom the undivided burden was meant. It might have been better for Moses, for Aaron, and for the ignorant and peevish people themselves, if the shepherd in Midian had accepted God's terms without compromise. Let us see to it that God does not have to put upon others the work and the honour prepared for us. In these last days He has many servants, who, if unlikely to achieve things memorable in this world's history, may yet make brilliant chapters for the chronicles of the world to come. This excessive diffidence, this extreme reaction from the mistakes of youth, this ill-disguised sullenness because of past failure, this sore offence caused by the slowness of others to appreciate our aptitudes and our vocations, may defer the purposes of God among men and rob us of our appointed honour. The former failure is a part of our spiritual education for the later victory.
In the end Moses forgot the shyness bred by his wilderness career, and the discouragements of bygone years, and consented to God's word. He was accepted for the mission to which he dedicated the remnant of his days, and, after many vicissitudes, fulfilled his work. Rejected at first, and welcomed by the families of Israel in the end of his days, he was regarded by Stephen as a type of Christ in everything but his infirmities, who also in the end of the years would find acceptance at the hands of those who once clamoured for His blood. The faith of Moses was made perfect in the wilderness for its coming triumphs, and he failed at the outset through the meagreness of his trust in the invisible. “By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king.”
“Send whom Thou wilt! All choice is Thine,
Thou canst fulfil Thy set decree
Through other hands more meet to be
Upborne in Thy so vast design;
Lord, I beseech Thee-send not me!”
Had Moses failed to go, had God
Granted his prayer, there would have been
For him no leadership to win-
No pillared fire, no magic rod,
No wonders in the land of Zin;
No smiting of the sea-no tears
Ecstatic shed on Sinai's steep-
No Nebo, with a God to keep
His burial! only forty years
Of desert-watching with his sheep!1 [Note: Margaret J. Preston.]
