The Life of Moses

God's First Deliverer of Israel

James Montgomery Boice

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781596387546
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

This epic study on Moses teaches us much about faithfulness, prayer, and leadership—yet Boice shows that the narrative's true power resides in its vivid foreshadowing of a greater Deliverer.

PART 1

THE BATTLE OF EGYPT

1

ISRAEL IN EGYPT

Exodus 1:1–14

A GREAT MAN IN HISTORY

Apart from Jesus Christ, no person in history has made as deep or lasting an impression on the world as Moses, the “servant of God” (Rev. 15:3). He was the great lawgiver and emancipator of Israel, born to Jewish parents when they were slaves in a land not their own. He was educated in the court of one of the mightiest empires that has ever existed. He was heir to Egypt’s wealth, prestige, and legendary pleasures. Yet, when he was forty years old, he elected to identify himself with his own oppressed race. He had to flee the country and live outside Egypt for forty years, until God called him to return and lead the people out. He stood before Pharaoh and demanded in the name of God that Pharaoh let the people go, and God did mighty miracles to deliver his people. Moses then led the Israelites in the wilderness for forty years to the very threshold of the promised land.

His was a remarkable career. The exodus from Egypt alone is one of the great stories in history. The law, which contains the Ten Commandments, is one of the great treasures of the world.

Moses’ story is told in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, which he authored alongside Genesis. He also wrote at least one psalm—Psalm 90—and is mentioned nearly seven hundred times in Scripture. We find his name on the lips of Jesus Christ. Paul speaks of him often. Obviously he is important.

One English writer says about Moses, “Take him for all in all, regard him not in one but many aspects, Moses is the greatest character in history, sacred or profane.”¹ I’m a little leery of that kind of statement. But at the very end of Deuteronomy, after Moses’ death, we read God’s own evaluation:

And there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face, none like him for all the signs and the wonders that the LORD sent him to do in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land, and for all the mighty power and all the great deeds of terror that Moses did in the sight of all Israel. (Deut. 34:10–12)

THE CHARACTER OF MOSES

Important as Moses’ achievements are, they are overshadowed by his character. It is Moses’ character that brings him down to us and makes this study valuable. If we think only in terms of what Moses achieved, who could ever begin to dream of doing such things? It is almost inconceivable that God would use anybody today in that way. But if we think in terms of those aspects of his personality that God used, this study becomes very practical for us.

Four traits stand out above the others.

His faith. Moses is praised for his faith again and again. He seems to have never taken his eyes off God after God first met him at the burning bush, and so he went from faith to faith and thus from strength to strength. That is the secret of Christian leadership: faith in God. All the great heroes of the Bible—those who are praised by the Scriptures themselves—are praised because of their faith. They were normal people. They had shortcomings and doubts, just as we do. But because of their faith in God, they became strong and were used by God in great ways. The author of Hebrews says that through faith they “conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises” (Heb. 11:33). By faith they “stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword” (vv. 33–34); they “were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight” (v. 34). If you feel weak in faith, you have something to learn from Moses.

His dedication to prayer. When God used Moses to lead the people out of Egypt and they were trapped, as it seemed—the water of the Red Sea before them and the pursuing armies of the pharaoh behind—Moses instinctively turned to God in prayer. When the people rebelled in the wilderness, Moses turned to God in prayer. The greatest example of intercessory prayer in the entire Bible—greater even, in my judgment, than Abraham’s great plea for Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18—is Moses’ prayer for the people when they disobeyed by making the golden calf (Ex. 32). Moses offered to be sent to hell himself if by his sacrifice he could save the people whom he loved. We learn a lot about prayer from Moses.

His meekness. Moses was a meek man. So many people who become great or get into positions of authority lose humility right away. I’ve not known many of the famous in the world, but I’ve known some. My experience is that generally they’re very much full of themselves; you find yourself thinking that you’d rather go home and be with someone nice instead.

That did not happen to Moses. The greater he became, the more meek, the more humble he became. “Now the man Moses was very meek, more than all people who were on the face of the earth” (Num. 12:3). When you’re thinking of leadership qualities, don’t forget humility. God puts it right up there at the top.

His courage. Moses excelled in courage. He showed it on many occasions, but if we had no other example, he certainly showed courage in marching up before the mighty pharaoh. A Bedouin shepherd from the desert, Moses stood in the splendor of Egypt and said, “In the name of God Almighty, let my people go.” It took courage to do that. He showed that courage throughout his life.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHARACTER

In the few incidents we know from Moses’ early life, these good qualities do not seem prominent. For example, when Moses decided to quit the court of Pharaoh and identify himself with his people, the first thing we know he did was to kill an Egyptian. He saw oppression taking place, so he killed the oppressor. That’s not exactly humility. It may have been courage of a sort, but that courage did not stand him in great stead, because as soon as the murder was found out and he realized that his life was in danger, he fled the country. Then, when he stood before the burning bush and God told him to go back to Egypt, courage was the last thing he showed. He did not want to go. He thought up all kinds of reasons why he couldn’t go and why God had to choose somebody else.

You and I can look at characters in the Bible and say, “I wish I had those great traits, but I don’t.” But it is encouraging to know that these people did not always have those traits. They learned them along the way. Moses learned courage and meekness and prayer, and he grew great in faith year by year as he lived with God. If he did it, you can do it, too.

Moses lived to be 120 years old. He had forty years in Egypt in the court, and when he was forty years old, he had to run away. He spent forty years in the desert as a shepherd, and God met him at the burning bush and called him to be the deliverer when he was eighty years old. Then he led the people for forty years. It has been said that Moses spent forty years in Egypt learning something, then he spent forty years in the desert learning to be nothing, and then spent the last forty years of his life proving God to be everything. This is a good way of describing what the Christian life is all about. Some of us do not prove God to be everything because we’ve never learned that we are nothing. When we come to that point, we are ready to have God work through us as he did with Moses.

MOSES THE AUTHOR

Not only was Moses a great emancipator, but he was also the vehicle by which God gave us the first five books of the Bible: the Pentateuch (“five scrolls”). He was the author, humanly speaking, of a large portion of the Scriptures.

Some people once argued that Moses could not have written the Pentateuch because writing was unknown in Moses’ day. All that has gone by the boards. Six different written languages from the time of Moses have been discovered in the very area where Moses led the people for forty years. Since Moses was educated in the court of the Egyptians, he certainly knew hieroglyphics; and he probably knew Akkadian, the trade language of the day. He was undoubtedly a highly educated man.

That is not the most important thing that needs to be said, however. Let me give you a basic hermeneutic—some guidelines for how our material in the Pentateuch should be approached. Four important things need to be said about the Bible.

THE BIBLE HAS ONE TRUE AUTHOR: GOD

The Bible comes to us from God. It is more than a merely human book. It contains the characteristics of human books; the various authors put the stamp of their personalities on what they wrote, and their vocabularies differ. But the Bible, having come to us from God, contains the one story that God wants to tell us. One passage, perhaps more than any other in the Bible, makes this point:

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. (2 Tim. 3:16–17)

Sometimes we refer to the Bible as being inspired. Inspired means that God, by his Holy Spirit, breathed into human writers so that they wrote what God wanted. That is true, but it is not what this passage says. This passage does not say that the Bible is the result of God’s breathing into the human writers, but that the Bible is the result of the breathing out of God. It is saying that the Bible is God’s Word, “and is therefore perfect and truthful, as God himself is.”²

Two important principles of interpretation follow from this. First, the Bible is God’s book from beginning to end, even though it has come to us through human authors. It is a unity. Second, because the Bible is a unity, it will not contradict itself if rightly understood. Sometimes we read portions of the Bible that seem to contradict. We say, “How can this portion go with this one?” But, if we understand it correctly, we find that the Bible tells a consistent story.

This means that the God we find in the first books of the Old Testament is the same God whom we find in the New Testament. Sometimes people say that the God in the Old Testament is a tribal deity, a God of wrath; they say the descriptions of God in the Old Testament are unworthy of him. We will find as we study that this is not true. The God whom we find at the beginning is exactly the same God who is presented to us by the Lord Jesus Christ—a sovereign, holy, and loving God.

The Bible’s unity also means that we are not misinterpreting it but rather interpreting it rightly when we see that the details given for Israel’s worship prefigure the coming ministry of Jesus Christ. What we find in the tabernacle, the sacrifices, and the plan of the construction itself—all point forward to Jesus Christ.

THE BIBLE HAS BEEN GIVEN TO US THROUGH HUMAN AUTHORS

Sometimes people argue that to err is human; so, if human beings had anything to do with the Bible, it must contain errors. That is a fallacy of logic. Just because it is natural for me to make mistakes doesn’t mean that I have to make mistakes in any given instance. It is possible, for example, even on a human level quite apart from inspiration or anything spiritual, to write an inerrant manual on how to run a dishwasher.

Now for human authors to produce an inerrant book covering so many details over such a long period of history would seem an impossibility. But we are not speaking of a book simply put together by human authors. As Paul states so clearly, “this is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit” (1 Cor. 2:13 NIV).

And Peter states, “No prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:20–21). The word translated carried along is the same word that Luke, the author of Acts, uses when he describes a ship in the midst of a storm at sea. The sailors cut down the ship’s sails to keep them from being torn apart, and the ship was driven along before the wind. It was still a ship, but it couldn’t control its own destiny; the wind took it wherever it would. That is what Peter says happened to the human authors of Scripture. They were still men; they wrote with their own vocabularies; but the Holy Spirit bore them along. In other words, “What Scripture says, God says—through human agents and without error.”³

This view of inspiration has an application for interpretation. Interpretation has to do with understanding the author’s context, his vocabulary, and the situation out of which he was writing. That means, for example, that when we want to understand these books, we can learn something from secular sources. It is helpful, for example, to know about the religion of Egypt, because the plagues were not a case of God’s simply being arbitrary in his choice of scourges. The plagues were all directed against the gods of Egypt. Every single plague showed that the God of the Hebrews—the true God, Jehovah—was more powerful than Apis the bull or Hathor the cow, down through all the gods and goddesses of the Egyptian pantheon.

THE BIBLE’S PURPOSE IS TO LEAD US TO FAITH IN JESUS CHRIST

Jesus taught this himself. Talking to the Jewish leaders, he said,

You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. (John 5:39–40)

The Scriptures of the Jewish leaders were the Scriptures of the Old Testament. Jesus was saying in very clear language that these Scriptures were given to point to himself.

You couldn’t fault the leaders of Jesus’ day for failing to study the Scriptures. They did that. They were diligent in their study. They studied individual w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• PART 1: THE BATTLE OF EGYPT
• PART 2: MOSES' FINEST HOUR
• PART 3: WORSHIPPING IN THE WILDERNESS
• PART 4: THE LONG, HOT DESERT
• PART 5: A COVENANT TO KEEP
• Index of Scripture
• Index of Subjects and Names