The shaping of character (Exod 2:15-22)

It always amazes me how patiently God shapes our lives for His service. We might feel that we have missed the boat and it is too late to start anything new, but the Lord’s perspective is different. Jesus lived quietly for thirty years and ministered publicly for three. Moses will be eighty when God calls him (Exod 7:7). Those who prepare for a marathon know that before that one day of the race are weeks and months of training building up strength and endurance. Moses’s shaping started with his early childhood, his bi-cultural experiences, his potential royal education and the choices he made along the way. Taking the law into his hands and becoming a murderer made Moses a fugitive, yet his very mistake in administering justice created the conditions that would become a corrective and a training ground for the future. He now settles in the territory of Midian (Exod 2:15) in the south-eastern part of the Sinai Peninsula sufficiently removed from Egypt to be safe and likely outside of its jurisdiction. Time in the wilderness alone will give Moses ample opportunity to ponder what went wrong and while we cannot know much about how he processed his life’s events, we can observe the leadership qualities that he later demonstrated.

Many of our character traits, like Moses’s, have the potential to be used as a blessing or a curse. Positively, a burning sense of justice may be zeal in the right cause, as we see in Moses’s defence of the Midianite women against the aggression of male shepherds (Exod 2:17). Negatively, it can deteriorate into senseless violence. Moses’s own forefather, Levi demonstrated the latter when he and his brother massacred all the males in a city because its prince raped their sister, Dinah (Genesis 34). Moses’s killing of the Egyptian reflects that violent heritage and reveals something of an unstable temper. Later, he will deal admirably with a rebellious and stubborn people oftentimes showing great patience and a willingness to forgive personal hurt and to intercede on their behalf. His wilderness years will not be spent in vain. Nevertheless, one day that temper will flare up again, when in anger he will strike the rock at Meribah precluding him from entering the Promised Land (Num 20:8-13). The destructive aspects of our characters never fully go away and so we live not by self-improvement but by daily entrusting ourselves to God.

We get a small glimpse into these wilderness years when Moses marries one of Jethro’s daughters and has a son by her called Gershom (Exod 2:21-22). The name is a variant on the name of Levi’s firstborn (cf. Exod 6:16) and indicates that Moses holds on to his Hebrew heritage. Yet it also expresses his sense of displacement, since Gershom sounds like the Hebrew for ‘sojourner there’ (ger sham). He is a stranger in a foreign land and taken to be an Egyptian (Exod 2:19), so that his true (Hebrew) identity is not understood. He is also no longer a prince. As so often, the road to exaltation (and true power) leads through humiliation, as it did for Joseph, David and ultimately Jesus.

Moreover, Moses has to work through his rejection by his own people. ‘Who made you a prince or a judge over us?’ (Exod 2:14), the Israelites say, which anticipates their future response. For the rest of his life, Moses will be an outsider, his authority questioned by the people repeatedly (e.g., Num 14:2; 16:3; 20:2-5), and even by his own family (Num 12:1-2). It is foreigners (in today’s reading, the Midianites), who appreciate his sense of justice and help and give him a home. In both his rejection and in his acceptance by non-Israelites, he prefigures Jesus’s reception. Through it all, Moses will have to learn that leadership involves dealing with unjust criticism and keeping going in God’s ways with integrity.