October 23, 2016 - God Prepares Moses

TONY AND MICHELLE PAWLAK

MEMORY VERSE

How can a young man keep his way pure?
By keeping it according to Your word.

Psalm 119:9

Have you ever gone through some hard times?  Did you wonder why God was allowing such difficult things to happen to you?  Maybe you even thought that you were being punished.  Maybe you just felt that nothing ever goes right for you.  Sometimes bad things just happen and sometimes God does punish people in order to bring them back to Him.  Sometimes, however, God is preparing you for a special job and He needs you to be ready.  It can be hard to have faith and stay positive in times like this but we must remember to trust God.  

Today's story is about God preparing a man for a very important job.  Last week we talked about how God provided for baby Moses a way to not only survive, but to grow up as a prince in the house of Pharaoh.  Little did he know that this was the start of his preparation.

Moses, as the adopted grandson of the Pharaoh, had the best of everything, food, clothes, house, education, you name it!  Moses, however, never forgot he was a Hebrew, a descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob/Israel.  As he grew up, Moses saw the

awful way the Hebrews were being treated by the Pharaoh.  Pharaoh had made them slaves and forced them to work very hard.  It broke Moses' heart.

One day, when he was

forty years old, Moses saw an Egyptian guard beating one of the Hebrew slaves.  Moses got so angry that, when he thought no one was looking, he killed the Egyptian and buried him in the sand.  The next day Moses tried to break up a fight between two of the

Hebrews.  They turned to Moses and said, "Are you going to kill us like you did the Egyptian?"  Moses knew he had been caught.  He had to run away.

So Moses left Egypt and took off across the desert until he came to a land

called Midian.  There he saw some shepherdesses trying to get water for their animals but some other shepherds came and bullied them away from the well.  Moses came to the women's rescue and chased away the bully shepherds and, like a true

gentleman, help the ladies water their animals.  

Because Moses did this, the ladies' father, Jethro, took Moses in and even let him marry his daughter Zipporah. Moses spent the next forty years of his life being a shepherd in Midian.  His life in Egypt became a distant memory.

Meanwhile, back in Egypt, Pharaoh was still treating the  Hebrews very badly and they began to cry out to God for help.  God heard their cries and remembered His promise to Abraham that He would make his descendants a great nation and that He would bless those who blessed them and curse those who cursed them.  It was time for God to keep His promise.  In fact,  God had spent the last eighty years preparing someone who would rescue the Hebrews from Egypt: Moses.

One day, while Moses was tending the sheep, he saw a

fire on a mountain and went to check it out.  When he got there he saw a burning bush.  The strange thing was, the bush was not burning up!  Moses was thinking this was very strange until suddenly God spoke to him

from the bush saying, "Take off your sandals because this is holy ground."

Moses obeyed.  God then told Moses that He was the same God that his ancestors; Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob/Israel, had worshiped four hundred years earlier.  God then said that

he had heard the cries from His people, the Hebrews, in Egypt and said that he was going to send Moses back to Egypt to set them free.

Moses couldn't believe it!  "I am not important enough to go to Pharaoh.  He would never listen to me! I can't do it!" Moses told God.  "I will be with you." God answered Moses.

"What if the Hebrews won't even listen to me?  What if I tell them You sent me and they ask WHO YOU ARE?" Moses asked.  "I Am Who I Am!" God said. "Tell them that I AM sent you. God also said, “Say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you.’“This is my name forever, the name you shall call me from generation to generation."  (Exodus 3:15)

God then said to Moses that He was going to keep His promise to bring them into their own land flowing with

milk and honey. God then gave Moses miraculous signs to show the people to prove he was sent by God.  First, God changed Moses' shepherd's rod into a snake then back into a rod when Moses picked it up by the tail.  Then He told Moses to put his hand in his shirt and it was covered with leprosy when he

pulled it out.  God then healed Moses when he put it back into his shirt. God also told him to change water from the Nile River into blood.  This would convince the Hebrews to believe Moses.

"But I can't speak very well, God. Can't you send someone else?"  Moses said to God.  This made God angry because He had spent eighty years preparing Moses for this job and knew that he could do it but Moses' lack of faith was getting in the way.  Finally, God said to Moses, "I

will send your brother Aaron to do the speaking for you.  He is already on his way to meet you.  

So Moses took his family and set out for Egypt.  On the way he met his brother Aaron and they all headed back to Egypt.  Moses was

finally about to do the job that God had spent the last eighty years preparing him for and it was going to be spectacular! 

When we go through hard times we must remember that God may be preparing us for something very important.  We must keep our faith strong and keep going.  God has His reasons for what He does and sometimes we don't understand what they are until afterwards.  Just keep plodding on my friends.