Are You in a Desert

Well, I know you're all familiar with the story of Moses, and I was reading it again recently in my quiet time. I was spending time in the book of Exodus, and you know how you can read a familiar passage of Scripture, and God can open it up to where something new comes across, and God speaks to you personally through that. Well, that happened to me recently.

The story of Moses in so many words is this. Pharaoh is afraid that the Hebrews are becoming too large a mass of people, so he orders the midwives to kill the male infants so they can multiply without males, and the midwives are to do the dirty job and to kill them. But a Hebrew woman gives birth to a male child, and he is goodly to look at, and she hides it away for three months.

But then, for fear of discovery, she makes an ark out of bulrushes and puts the baby in it and floats it down the river, and she does this through faith. And Pharaoh's daughter comes to the river to wash, and she finds the baby and has compassion on it when it cries, and she keeps it, and she calls the child Moses. And it turns out, in the providence of God, the Hebrew nursemaid who raises the child ends up being Moses's own mother.

So we see, through the sovereignty of God, that not only is Moses preserved, but then promoted. He grows up as Pharaoh's grandson in the lap of privilege and luxury. He attends the finest schools in Egypt, which had the highest learning at the time, and he becomes a statesman.

And one day, he's out walking around, and he sees an Egyptian beating up a Hebrew. And he takes offense to it and decides to become a deliverer to the man, and he kills the Egyptian with his sword, and then he buries his corpse in the sand. And the next day, he's out again, and he encounters two Hebrews fighting among themselves, and he tries to break it up.

And the one says to him, you're going to kill me like you killed the Egyptian? So Moses is afraid that the thing is known, and Pharaoh will find out. So Moses flees to the desert in Midian to Horeb, where it is a wilderness. And he's exhausted from running so long, and he sits down by a well.

And here comes Jethro's daughters to water their father's flock, and Moses helps them. And they return early and tell their father about this Egyptian man who helped them water the sheep. And Jethro says, go fetch him.

So Moses stays in their household, and the text reads in Exodus 1.21, and Moses was content to dwell with the man. And he gave Moses Zipporah his daughter. Well, I chewed on that for a while.

Here was Moses, a fugitive from justice for killing a man. He had it all, and he lost it all. Now he's content with the life he's settled into, tending sheep and being domesticated, being married.

Here is Moses on the backside of Midian in a wasteland, walking over rocks and climbing over cliffs with a flock of bleating sheep, stinking, smelly animals, to where he's their close companion. They rub up against him. He sleeps with them, and he ends up smelling just like them.

He stinks just like a stinking sheep. He's a man in exile, living a life he never chose for himself, and he's become content with the mediocrity and hardship of it all and isolation in it. And there's a quote by F.J. Hegel, which hits the nail right on the head as it sums up Moses in a deserter life.

Hegel writes, For forty years on the lonely slopes of Midian, the fiery Moses is schooled. But there were graves, if I may so speak, scattered all over the mountainside, where hope after hope was buried, until at last self went down in utter annihilation. Well, that sums up the picture all right.

And I looked at my life, that has been in the desert for years. I've known constant hardship and privation and abandonment and suffering and want, isolation and loneliness, as friends have long forgotten me. And hope after hope after hope just seemed to die and be buried.

The most telling aspect of the book of Exodus, friends, in regard to how God builds a man he can use, is found in Exodus chapter three in verse eleven. And it's all wrapped up in just three words. After Moses had an encounter with God at the burning bush and God appeared to Moses and revealed his plan and purpose for Moses, God tells him in verse ten, Come now, therefore, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh, that thou mayest bring forth my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.

And Moses answers God with the first three words that come out of his mouth. He says, Who am I? Moses, the man, had been pulverized to powder. You know, friend, God can use a man in that condition.

Listen to me, brother pastor, maybe you've had it and you're worn out from fighting with your deacons or you're ready to throw in the towel and resign from your church because things just didn't turn out like you imagined they would. And you've been in a barren desert for too long now. Or listen to me, dear fellow Christian, your heart is broken by a person you loved.

They've been taken from you or they betrayed your trust. And now you've been in a barren wasteland and your life is just plain numb. Friends have let you down.

Things didn't turn out like you planned. You're just existing in a desert place and graves are all around you where your hopes are buried. Well, I've got some good news for you, friend.

Often, God does his deepest work in desert places. And it was while Moses was in the desert that he had an unexpected encounter and experience with God. God often reveals his plans for us and is ready to give us his best for us right after a point in our life where we are ground to powder, where we're in a desert.

That's when he can work the best work through us. Who am I, declares Moses. But God declares about Moses what he thought about him over in Deuteronomy chapter 34 and in verse 10.

And there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face. Friend, are you in a desert place? Don't let the devil discourage you. There just may be a burning bush around the next corner where you enter in to a brand new chapter that a sovereign God has prepared you for and has prepared just for you.