It was way back in Genesis that we read how the nation of Israel came to be. Abraham was the first of three great Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) and God promised Abraham that he would be the father of a great nation, with descendants as numerous as the stars. Through them God planned to bless all the nations of the world and he sealed his promises with a covenant ritual in Genesis 15:13-14.

“Then the Lord said to [Abraham], ‘Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves and afterward they will come out with great possessions.’”

Abraham’s son Isaac became his first descendant and Isaac’s son Jacob was the second. Jacob had twelve sons and God sent his clan to Egypt, where they were to stay for four hundred years. On the way out of Canaan, God met Jacob in the night and made one more promise.

“And God spoke to [Jacob] in a vision at night and said, ‘Jacob! Jacob!”

‘Here I am,’ he replied.

‘I am God, the God of your father,’ he said, ‘Do not be afraid to go down to Egypt, for I will make you into a great nation there. I will go down to Egypt with you, and I will surely bring you back again.” Genesis 46:2-4

Millions of Descendants

Jacob and his twelve sons lived the rest of their lives in Egypt, and their descendants multiplied so quickly that they spread all over Egypt. Exodus 1:7 emphasizes four times how prolific they became, “exceedingly fruitful . . . multiplied greatly . . . increased in numbers . . . so numerous the land was filled with them.”

New Pharaoh, New Policies

Centuries after Jacob and his sons were gone a new Pharaoh arose who didn’t care about the great story of the Israelites and how they came to Egypt. After four hundred years of relatively peaceful co-existence he called upon Egypt to enslave and use the Israelites as free labor in his ambitious building projects.

Harsh treatment and ruthless work conditions didn’t slow the rate of Hebrew proliferation, so Pharaoh decided to institute population control through infanticide. First he ordered the slaughter of all baby boys at birth. The Hebrew midwives refused to be part of that.

Then he ordered all Egyptians to throw the Hebrew’s baby boys into the Nile. There was resistance to that policy, too. One of those Hebrew boys ended up living in Pharaoh’s own household because his daughter found him floating on the Nile in a basket and adopted him. She named him Moses, which meant “draw out” because she drew him out of the Nile.

Hebrew to Egyptian

Moses’ first three years or so were spent in the company of his Hebrew mother after she was hired as his wet-nurse. She must have used that time to tell Moses the stories of his people and he probably played with his brother Aaron and sister Miriam in their home, so Moses grew up knowing he was a Hebrew.

But Moses was also educated as a prince in Egypt. His training would have included math and science, engineering, astronomy, military strategy – everything that a leader in Egypt was expected to know. Because of its rich agriculture along the Nile Valley, Egypt was a major trading partner with the rest of the world. Nations brought their goods and products to Egypt, along with their knowledge and inventions, and Moses was exposed to the most sophisticated ideas in the world at that time.

Choosing a Side

Moses grew up belonging to two worlds. He was an adopted member of the oppressive Egyptian ruling class, but his family of origin were Hebrew slaves. In the end Moses sided with the Hebrews against the injustice of Pharaoh, but he exercised poor judgment when he acted, and ended up a murderer on the run.

Shepherd in Midian

Moses was a forty-year-old man when he fled Egypt. He was at the height of his powers, but he was suddenly reduced to tending sheep in the desert of Midian, a bleak and sparsely populated place, for the next forty years. Moses lived like a nomad in his father-in-law’s home.

What did Moses think about during those forty years? He had given up everything when he ran for his life from Egypt and he must have wondered how things were back in Pharaoh’s palace and in the home of his Hebrew family. He was a prince trained for leadership, but tending sheep was now his only responsibility.

God Intervenes

When the time was right God intervened in Moses’s life. Moses was leading Jethro’s flock around the foot of Mount Horeb, the mountain of God, when he came across a burning bush.

“There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire, it did not burn up  . . . When the Lord saw that [Moses] had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, ‘Moses! Moses!’ And Moses said, ‘Here I am.’” Exodus 3:2, 4

Moses wanted to find out who had called his name, but when he heard it was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and “Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God.” Exodus 3:6b

Moses knew who Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were and he knew the promises the one true God had made to them. Moses discovered he was standing before the Creator and Judge of all the earth.

God’s Concern for Israel

But God had not come to judge Moses, he had come to ask him to bring Israel out of Egypt. It must have touched Moses’s heart when he heard God say,

“I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey – the land of the Canaanites . . . so now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.”                                                                Exodus 3:7-8,10

God was ready to do what Moses had not been able to do. He was going to set his people free.

The Great I AM

Moses needed a name for God that would give the Israelites confidence when he asked them to follow him out of Egypt.. The name God gave him was: I AM WHO I AM. This name told Israel that their God was the only God; there could be no other god than the great I AM. Around them were hundreds of made up Egyptian gods, but Israel’s God was self-existent, the only true God of the universe.

Delivered from Fear

Moses was afraid to return to Egypt, afraid that no one would believe God had sent him, so God gave him two demonstrations of power. He turned Moses’s shepherd staff into a rod of power and authority, and then he demonstrated the power of life and death by giving Moses leprosy and taking it away again. When Moses felt disqualified because he was slow of speech, God promised to help him and teach him what to say. He even gave Moses his brother Aaron to assist him.

Moses was transformed by this encounter. He was no longer a fugitive hiding in his father-in-law’s household, traipsing around after sheep. God had transformed Moses into a deliverer and he was on his way back to Egypt.