Moses.

The baby who should not have lived

Pharaoh had ordered every Hebrew baby boy drowned in the Nile. The midwives disobeyed. One woman hid her son for three months, then put him in a reed basket and set him on the river. His sister Miriam watched from a distance. Pharaoh's daughter came down to bathe, saw the basket, pitied the crying child, and had him raised as her own. Miriam offered to find a Hebrew nurse. The mother was paid to nurse her own son.

He grew up in the palace. He was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, as the book of Acts will later say. He wore the clothes of the empire. He had a name — Moses, “drawn out” — and a princess for a mother and the richest house in the ancient world for a home.

The afternoon that ended it

When he was forty, he went out one day among the Hebrews. He saw an Egyptian overseer beating one of them. He looked this way and that, saw nobody, and killed the man and buried him in the sand. The next day he tried to intervene between two Hebrews fighting each other, and one of them turned on him: “Who made you a ruler and a judge over us? Do you want to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?”

He knew in that moment that it was over. The deed was known. Word would reach Pharaoh. He had tried to help his own people and he had done it in the way of the empire — quickly, violently, by his own strength — and now he had to run. He left behind the palace. He left behind the name “prince.” He left behind the clothes, the meals, the attendants, the title, the people he had grown up calling family, the people he had just tried to rescue and failed. In a single day he lost every comfort a man could have.

“By faith Moses, when he was grown up,
refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter,
choosing rather to share ill-treatment with the people of God
than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin.”

Forty years as a shepherd

He fled east, across the Sinai, into the land of Midian, about 470 kilometres on foot, to the far side of the Gulf of Aqaba. He sat down by a well, tired and far from everything he knew. Seven sisters came to water their father's flock and a group of shepherds tried to drive them away; Moses defended them. The father — Jethro, also called Reuel — invited him home. Moses stayed. He married Zipporah, one of the sisters. He kept Jethro's sheep in the wilderness around Mount Horeb.

When his first son was born he named him Gershom. The name sounds like the Hebrew for “a stranger there.” Moses said it himself: “I have been a sojourner in a foreign land.” Every time he called his son in for dinner, he was pronouncing out loud, in front of his wife and his father-in-law and the hills, who he had become. Not a prince. A stranger.

He kept the sheep for forty years. Forty. Longer than the span he had already lived in Pharaoh's palace. The man who had been taught to read in three languages and trained to govern an empire was learning something the palace had never been able to teach him: how to be nobody in particular. How to walk the same hills every month. How to be patient with animals. How to wait on something he could not see. The desert emptied him of the version of himself the palace had built, and God, in that silence, was slowly refilling him with another.

The bush that burned

One day, in the far side of the wilderness, he led the flock to the mountain of God, Horeb. He saw a bush that was on fire but was not burning up. He turned aside to look. God called to him out of the bush — “Moses, Moses” — and told him to take off his sandals, because the ground where he was standing was holy. He hid his face. God said He had seen the suffering of His people in Egypt and had come down to rescue them, and that He was sending Moses to Pharaoh to bring them out.

Moses argued. He had become good at being small. “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?” he said. “Who shall I say sent me? What if they don't believe me? I have never been eloquent. I am slow of speech and of tongue. Please send someone else.” God answered every excuse, and when Moses had run out of excuses, God sent him anyway.

“I will certainly be with you.”

Back to the empire

He walked back the way he had run forty years earlier. Not as a prince this time. As a shepherd carrying a staff. He stood in front of a new Pharaoh — the one he had grown up with was long dead — and said in the name of a God the Egyptians did not know, “Let my people go.” Ten plagues followed. Then the Passover. Then the night the Hebrews walked out of Egypt in haste, carrying the dough that had not had time to rise. Then the sea that split in two for them and closed over the army that chased them. The man who could not run away from Egypt without killing someone with his bare hands was now bringing a nation out of it without lifting the staff more than once.

He led them for another forty years in the desert. He gave them a law. He prayed for them when they built a golden calf behind his back. He broke the tablets. He got new ones. He sometimes shouted at God and sometimes threw himself on the ground on their behalf. He never entered the land he had been promised. God took him up a mountain at the age of a hundred and twenty and showed him the whole country he had spent half his life walking toward, and he died there, and God Himself buried him in a valley no man has ever found.

The roads he walked

Put every journey on one map and it comes to about 3,100 kilometres, most of it walked after he turned eighty. The Bible names the stops but rarely the roads, so the lines follow the traditional identification of each site.

1. 40Egypt to Midian, running from Pharaoh, about 470 kmExodus 2:15; Acts 7:29
2. 80Midian to Horeb with Jethro’s flock, where the bush burns, and home again, about 630 kmExodus 3:1–4:18
3. 80Midian back to Egypt, meeting Aaron at the mountain of God, about 660 kmExodus 4:19–31
4. 80The Exodus: Rameses, across the sea, to Mount Sinai, about 330 kmExodus 12–19
5. 81Sinai to Kadesh Barnea, where the spies are sent out, about 250 kmNumbers 10–13
6. 81–119The thirty-eight years: around Kadesh, down to the Gulf of Aqaba and back, about 270 kmNumbers 33; Deuteronomy 2:14
7. 120Around Edom, across the Zered and the Arnon, to Mount Nebo, about 500 kmNumbers 20–21; Deuteronomy 34

Midian was the land east of the Gulf of Aqaba, in what is now north-west Saudi Arabia. It is not Madinah. The names look alike in Arabic, Madyan and al-Madinah, but Madinah lies about 640 kilometres further south-east. The oasis most often linked with Jethro is al-Bad', where tombs cut into the cliffs are still called the caves of Shu'ayb, the Quran's name for the prophet of Midian.

A life in three forties

Exodus gives his age only twice: eighty when he stands before Pharaoh, and a hundred and twenty when he dies. Stephen's speech in Acts fills in the rest, splitting his life into three equal parts.

1. 0Born in EgyptHidden for three months, set adrift in a basket on the Nile, raised by Pharaoh’s daughter.Exodus 2:1–10
2. 0–40In Pharaoh’s household“Educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.”Acts 7:22
3. 40Kills an Egyptian and flees to MidianMarries Zipporah, daughter of Jethro. Two sons, Gershom and Eliezer.Exodus 2:11–22; Acts 7:23–29
4. 40–80Shepherd in MidianKeeps Jethro’s flocks for forty years.Acts 7:30
5. 80The burning bush, Pharaoh, the Exodus“Moses was eighty years old and Aaron eighty-three when they spoke to Pharaoh.” Then the plagues, the Passover, the sea and the law at Sinai.Exodus 3–20; 7:7
6. 81The spies at KadeshThe people refuse to enter Canaan and are sentenced to forty years in the wilderness.Numbers 13–14
7. 81–119Thirty-eight years in the wildernessThe generation that left Egypt dies out.Deuteronomy 2:14
8. 120Death on Mount NeboMiriam and Aaron die first. He gives the speeches of Deuteronomy, sees the land from Nebo, and dies there. “His eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated.”Numbers 20; Deuteronomy 34:1–7

What this says to us

God did not use the prince. He used the shepherd. The man who could speak three languages and quote the wisdom of Egypt was not the man who stood on a mountain trembling in front of a bush. Forty years of silence in a desert sat between them, and God needed every one of them.

If you are reading this and you have, in the last few years, lost comforts you thought were yours — a career, a city, a certainty, the version of yourself that lived in a bigger house — do not assume that the loss is the end of the story. It may be the only way God can get you free enough from the person you were to become the person He has been waiting to use.

The desert is not punishment. The desert is preparation. And when the bush finally burns — and it will burn — you will be the kind of man who turns aside to look.