The Moses Factor

From The Desk Of Rev. Joan Krempel

I was awakened one midnight and instructed to rise and write of Moses. Now everyone knows that volumes have filled libraries with books, documentaries and commentaries of Moses so I did not understand what I was to write or why. I simply obeyed, sat in the quiet and quite sleepily began to type...

Moses was born in the midst of a great oppression. According to the Book of Exodus he was born of a people afflicted by hard service by day. The story is well known of Joseph who had found favor with Pharoah, was made second in command of all of Egypt, and had eventually brought his family to Egypt to escape the famine in the land. Not only Egypt, but nations and peoples that surrounded her survived the famine because of the faithful actions of Joseph who heeded the God-given warnings to lay up seven years of plenty for the seven years of famine that would follow.

Jacob had taken his family there to survive the famine. They were never meant to stay, but God knew that they would. God knows the hearts and minds of men better than men do. Israel had been promised a land of her own, a land flowing with milk and honey, but once they saw the beauty and easy riches of Egypt, the vision of their own country was shuffled to the back burner. And so they stayed. God had prophesied to Abraham years earlier that his descendants would be strangers in a foreign land and in captivity for four hundred years. And so they were. One does not have to be enslaved to be in captivity. The beauty and riches of Egypt hadcaptured them long before Pharoah enslaved them.

About eighty years after the death of Joseph, a new Pharoah rose to power. He had not known Joseph nor did he care that Joseph had saved Egypt and her neighbors from the famine. Politics has a way of sweeping favorable alliances under the rug and displacing greatness and gratitude, and this Pharoah was a very persuasive ruler. Of course, the people who had known Joseph or remembered the stories of him, had also died, leaving precious little living remembrance. Still, God had promised Abraham, "I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you."

Egypt was on a spiraling upward climb and Pharoah didn't need any ghosts from the past interfering with his great plans and his proud dreams. In fact, he was very much a strategist, for he decided that the Hebrews of Goshen could very easily pose a threat to Egypt. If another nation should attack Egypt, how could Pharoah know if the people of Goshen would align themselves with Egypt or with her enemies. So, burying this past glory of Egypt, he decided. To avoid labor costs and at the same time secure the laborers needed to build his new and magnificent empire, Pharoah would enslave the Hebrews, and break their will.

Slavery would undermine their unity and deplete their strength. So, the sons and daughters of Israel entered into enslaved captivity.

Their cries pounded Heaven for deliverance but God saw fit to enlarge their numbers instead. The more they were persecuted and driven, the more they increased. The more they suffered, the more they increased. It was all part of God's promise to Abraham, that his descendants would leave the land of their captivity with abundance. But Israel had to be strengthened for her deliverance. She had to be a nation great in numbers to take the land God had promised them. So the Most High God of Heaven and earth kept opening the wombs of man and beast and calling forth increase...

It was during this time of affliction, when yet another and more aggressive Pharoah ordered the Hebrew midwives to drown all the newborn males in the river but the midwives feared God more than Pharoah and brave mothers hid their newborn babies. During this frightening time a son was born into a Levite family who dared to hide him for three months, then gave him up to God's care by putting him in a tiny ark and guiding him through the reeds of the river. Pharoah's daughter found him, gave him his name, Moses, meaning "Brought out of the water", and she raised him as her very own son. She could not have know at the time that it was a name that would live forever...

Moses was prepared in the house of Pharoah to be a man of strong leadership. He was well educated as a royal statesman, greatly loved, trusted  and esteemed by the people, both Hebrew and Egyptian, and he was respected as a prince among men. Then came the day when Moses discovered the truth about his roots. He left Pharoah's palace, resumed residence with his biological family, and accepted his role as slave with his own people.

Learning first hand the cruelty and defenseless shame his people endured, he developed a strong resentment toward his former Egyptian colleagues. He eventually killed an Egyptian guard who was flogging a slave. Hiding the body in the sand, he thought he had done well but two Hebrew slaves had witnessed his deed and confronted him with their fear and distrust of such impulsive violence.

Poor Moses, betrayed by his own brethren. Too much confidence and a headstrong determination to help his people had driven Moses into very real danger and a trouble he had never known before. He had not waited on God, in fact, he did not even know God. He knew about him but he did not know him as the one true God as his family did. So, after forty years of Egyptian training to become a Pharoah, and a brief taste of slavery, God led him into the desert, fleeing for his life.

It was a dry and thirsty land, a harsh environment, sparse of people and certainly no one who knew him or cared about his former fame in Egypt. God led him to the home of Jethro, a kind man, who gave him one of his daughters to wife, and Moses became a shepherd.

He now lived a life of wandering, leading his sheep through the outcrops of desert lands, a lonely and quiet life in exile, cut off from all he had known and those he had loved. He spent the next forty years being emptied of self, his past, and any dependency on his Egyptian training or his former glories as a royal prince. There was no need for pride in the desert and it slowly...slowly...dissipated.

When God called Moses to his holy mountain, to the burning bush, he was like a dusty and forgotten old bottle. God picked up the bottle, poured out the residue of sand and ashes from the past and brought it into the awesome overwhelming holiness of His presence. There, God commanded a trembling Moses to remove the sandals of a self-directed past, and there, in the presence of God's Shekinah Glory, Moses was reshod with an annointing from head to foot for a God-directed future.

Moses had finally met the One True God of Israel mouth-to-mouth and his footsteps would now and forever be committed unto Him. Moses would continue to wander, but now his wandering would have purpose as a new God-given direction opened it's doors to him.

But alas, this once eloquent statesman was now "slow of speech and slow of tongue." Forty years in the desert had humbled him, given him a quiet spirit, and he was now lacking in all of his former charm and confidence. He was so humbled and emptied of self that he insisted unto God that he had no leadership abilities and would not be able to convince the people of Israel to follow him out of Egypt. Why, they wouldn't even hear him! "Send someone else" was his pitiful cry.

So God gave Moses his brother Aaron to be a personal prophet unto him but the annointing and the call was on Moses. God would tell Moses, Moses would tell Aaron and Aaron would tell the people what thus sayeth the Lord. It was adding a link to the chain of command but it would get Moses into the position he was destined for. Nowhere in the Holy Scriptures, neither in the Old Testament nor in the New Testament, neither before nor after Moses, has God appointed one man to another to be a personal prophet to speak for him.

Having told Moses in Exodus Chapter 4:15-16 "And thou shalt speak unto him, and put words in his mouth, and I will be with your mouth and with his mouth, and will teach you what ye shall do. And he shall be thy spokesman unto the people; and he shall be, even he shall be to thee instead of a mouth, and thou shalt be to him instead of God." Then God confirms this appointment in Chapter 7:1 "........and Aaron thy brother shall be THY prophet." Moses surrendered to his destiny and in the weeks that followed his old confidence, long gone, was replaced with a new hope and confidence, not in himself, but in the great I AM for the greatest faith walk ever launched...

The next forty years of Moses' wanderings began with the exodus from Egypt that launched forty years of wandering in the wilderness. These were his forty years of greatness, his forty years of total dependency upon God, the price of such greatness having been fully paid during the forty years in the desert. In the wilderness the children of Israel were divinely fed, watered, sheltered and protected. They were even divinely tolerated, for awhile, in spite of their constant complaining. Then this stiff-necked people managed to provoke Moses into one single act of disobedient disbelief that cost him the prize of leading them into the promised land.

All of his greatness, his annointing, his heretofore faithful obedience, his face-to-face intimacy with the Almighty could not reverse the consequences of that single moment of failure to believe and obey God. It is a constant reminder of our human weaknesses and the dangers of looking to self. After forty years of divine provision, still wearing the same clothes and shoes he started out with, his eyesight undimmed, his natural force unabated, having built a tabernacle in the wilderness, he was not allowed to go the last mile of the journey and enter the fulfillment of the promise.

As a result, the entire first generation of Israelites that left Egypt perished in the wilderness, with the exception of two - Joshua and Caleb. These were God-fearing and God-following young men of approximately 39 years of age when they left Goshen, for Joshua was 79 years old when he assumed leadership after the death of Moses and led the people into Caanan. All the others perished in their complainings. This left the second and third generations that grew up in that forty years of wandering to enter the promised land and take it. Moses had led them to it, now Joshua would lead them into it.

How does one build a tabernacle in the wilderness? It took yards and yards of fabric, may colors of dye and spools and spools of thread. In addition to these necessities, there was the gold that was needed to make the implements for the tabernacle. The people gave and gave until God had to tell them to stop giving. The riches of the wicked had been laid up for the just and Israel had left Egypt with a booty that had provided a tabernacle in the wilderness and furnished it for the Holy God of Israel to dwell in. Such an achievement was in itself a miracle.

At this point in writing, the Lord began to speak to me and this is what He said:

"Unfortunately, too many of my ministers go through the training years, then run for the wilderness, bypassing the desert. No one wants to face the desert, so they enter the wilderness unprepared, lacking the faith to depend on me alone. They covet the greatness of Moses but they have no quietness in the desert and no treasure from their exodus to carry through the wilderness with them.

Even if they manage through some temporary strength to cross the sea, how can they face the dry heat, the deprivations and the deadly snakes of the wilderness? How can they be strong enough to withstand the Godless nations that come against them Even if they survive the wilderness, they still must face the Jordan, the walls of Jericho and the giants in the land. They are unprepared and so, will ultimately fall through pride, compromise or corruption.

The desert is the only way to greatness with God. Do not spurn it's dry and choking invitation to come. It is only by yielding to truth with a totally sacrificed mind and soul that a deep and lasting mutual trust is established between the surrendered and the I AM. Once accomplished, this dried-out vessel is now ready for healing waters to flow into and out of, a nourishing stream of living waters that become rivers, that become seas that never run out of salt. Such a man will build me tabernacles in the wilderness and the gates of hell shall not prevail against him."

I was reminded that even our Lord Jesus Christ had been led apart to His dry and forbidding desert. He spent forty days and forty nights surrendering the temptations of his humanity in the loneliness of separation unto God. The Apostle Paul spent three years in Arabia after he was commissioned by Christ on the road to Damascus. John the Baptist had spent -who knows how many years - in the wilderness separated unto God, and being emptied of all else, before he began his ministry. And Jesus said that no prophet before or since was as great a prophet as John.

Even the 120 spent dry time in the upper room, apart from all but their faith, their prayers and their committment to Christ. He had told them to wait there until they were endued with power from on high. Nothing could have enticed them away and nothing could have empowered them as did the Holy Spirit when, after ten days, they had emptied all and surrendered all.

Moses, Joshua, John, Jesus, the 120 and Paul all received their treasures for the wilderness, the annointing and empowering of the Holy Spirit to endure with a Holy authority whatever came their way. All went on to build tabernacles of souls won for eternity, great spiritual cathedrals of congregations that led the way for others, who led the way for us. Now it is our turn to lead the way. But we must start with the desert...

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