MOSES.
MOSES being in a special sense the type of Him who is the servant of all, we should be prepared to find in his history the most peculiar discipline, in order to suppress his nature, and. make room for the expression of that grace and service, which was exemplified in perfection in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Born at the period when Pharaoh's interdict against the male children of Israel is raging, no exception is made in favor of him: he enters on the earth to find that earthly place is denied him. There was no room for the Lord of glory in the inn, and Egypt's king enacts that his type, Moses., should die the moment he is born! By faith only his parents rescued him. “They saw he was a goodly child, and were not afraid of the king's commandment.” They knew by the deep and peculiar conviction which the Holy Ghost effects, that God was to be trusted for this child. Faith in God thus bears him into life. How must he in riper years have derived strength from this godly acting of his parents and have been indebted to them for this their first training him in the nurture and admonition of the Lord! The commencement of our course gives a color to the whole of it; and the earliest tuition we receive in the divine school gives a mold and a tone to our characters, which after years can never obliterate. Moses' first breath on earth was secured to him only through the faith of his parents. He was hid three months. Sorely must their faith have been exercised during these ninety days, but they endured; and then, in the ark of bulrushes, they consign him to the waters. All place on earth being denied him, the older he grew, the more difficult it became to screen him from the ruthless edict.
When we act in faith, and have endured sufficiently so as to establish our souls in the assurance that it is faith, then the Spirit which gives us the faith gives us also wisdom how to act. In this wisdom the parents of Moses now act. Faith is no hindrance to the affections; but it loves to sustain those affections, which, acting alone, would be too anxious and distracted; it supports the heart in quiet, unfailing persistence of the conviction and purpose which it inculcates.
From his perilous position in the ark of bulrushes, Moses, the weeping babe, is taken by no less a person than the daughter of him who would have been its destroyer, but not before the impression of the coldness and desolation of this world had been made upon his tender spirit. We read, “the babe wept.” Thus, in earliest age, before the mind could be intelligently impressed, is he made to taste of that sorrow and pressure to which he must be no stranger throughout his course. The mind of the babe could not recall it, but the soul, nevertheless, consciously entered on that line in which it was afterward to be so exercised, and his tears were no doubt the firstfruits of a sorrow with which, in after life, he was so deeply conversant. But the answer to this is the Lord's tender care and consideration for him; and this we see exemplified in the most touching and interesting way. Not only is the daughter of his enemy made the instrument of his deliverance, but he is consigned to the care of his own mother and then installed in Pharaoh's house in ease and honor. The desolation of the world and the unfailing compassions of God are the first lessons of discipline traced on his unconscious mind, and which are never to be erased; for God teaches early, decidedly, and enduringly.
The interval which intervenes between this first notice and the next, when Moses is “full forty years,” is briefly but significantly summed up as the time during which he was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in word and in deed. He was introduced into all the attractions of Egypt, that in relinquishing them, he might have sympathy with any extent of surrender which the people of God might be called to. Many might have much to surrender, but not so much as he had and did. If the people felt it hard to relinquish the leeks and the onions, how much more should Moses, who had moved in all the luxuries and honors of Pharaoh's court! In God's discipline and education he was being prepared for the leadership he was to be invested with by and by. The great magnitude of his own surrender qualified him to ask others to follow him; the renunciation of all Egypt's attractions entitled him to take the lead out of Egypt; for if he “chose rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin,” he did so, after having participated in their greatest magnificence. And more than this—by this education, he was made conversant with everything that was delectable in nature, and had experiences of what nature could yield, in a way which none of the previous characters which we have been considering could have known. Neither Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, or even Joseph, had such a training as this, and justly so, for none of them was intended for such a mission as Moses; and God's education and discipline with His people is always suitable and preparative to its peculiar end. Solomon tested the vanity of everything on earth; the Lord Jesus at once felt it in His own moral perfection; Moses is surrounded by it to mature age, and then refuses it.
And now it comes into his heart to visit his brethren. A right impulse moves him in a right direction; but we are not always morally prepared for the expression of our impulses, even though they be right ones. Our humanity being the vessel through which they must be expressed, it is often unequal to the trials which the impulse may expose us to. But, if the impulse be right, we may rest assured that the vessel will be prepared for its expression, sooner or later. It may he postponed, and necessarily so, while the vessel is preparing; but this being done, the right and true desire will be owned and gratified.
When Peter first proposed to the Lord to follow Him (John 13.), the Lord warned him that he could not do so then; and, on the contrary, that he would deny Him. But when Peter was fully restored, and had his soul strengthened in the love of Christ, the Lord lets him know that he is to follow Him; and that the desire which he once so fearlessly and ignorantly avowed, he should yet distinctly substantiate. Thus with Moses here. He has got the right idea and desire, but he has not learned from God the right way of sustaining and establishing it. He knows not the trials which beset his path; and, consequently he has no provision to meet them when they occur. His attempt only proves how insufficient are his resources for the work he had entered on; and he has at last to abandon it, and relinquish that on which his heart was set: the inevitable consequence of attempting to carry out a right purpose in our own resources. I think a servant of God is generally acting in his own resources when he engages opponents on a level with himself; he thus aims at the tail instead of the head. Moses now directs his vengeance against an Egyptian, but when he returns in the power of the Lord, it is leveled against Pharaoh; even as Christ, who, in accomplishing eternal deliverance for us, first encountered Satan.
Moses fails, as he might he expected; and not only so, but his own life is in jeopardy, and for very personal safety he must fly. “Moses fled from the face of Pharaoh, and dwelt in the land of Midian, and sat down by a well.” What an accumulation of distressful feelings must have oppressed this zealous servant of God! What anguish to a faithful heart to be thus baffled in its sincere attempts to serve his brethren! May not all his sacrifices and surrender of the glories of Egypt have appeared to him now as useless to others and unprofitable to himself as he sat there, a wanderer and exile, like a blighted, fruitless tree in the desert. But if such were Moses' thoughts, they were not God's. The mission was not forfeited, but only postponed. The vessel was not yet “meet for the Master's rise.” Nature was not sufficiently purged from it. On the other hand, God's time to deliver His people had not come; neither were the people themselves prepared for the deliverance. But one subject is Moses himself; and he, as God's instrument and servant for the work, need forty years' more preparation ere he can be thus used. And already, sitting by the well in the land of Midian, is he under that discipline which will form for the great service designed for him in the counsel of God.
(To be continued.)