Moses

There is no figure in the entire sweep of the Old Testament quite like him. Lawgiver, deliverer, prophet — Moses stands at the hinge of Israel's story, the man through whom God chose to speak a whole nation into being. His life began in danger and ended at a distance, and between those two moments the world was changed.

He came into the world at the worst possible time. Pharaoh had commanded that every Hebrew son be thrown into the Nile, and into that murderous Egypt a boy was born to a man and woman of the tribe of Levi. His mother hid him three months. When she could hide him no longer, she placed him in an ark of bulrushes and set it among the flags of the river's bank. Pharaoh's daughter found him there, drew him up, and took him for her own son. The child his mother could not keep became a son of the very house that had decreed his death.

¹⁰And the child grew, and she brought him unto Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. And she called his name Moses: and she said, Because I drew him out of the water.

Exodus 2:10·KJV

Scripture moves quickly past the decades in Pharaoh's court. What it lingers on is the moment his life turned: a burning bush on the far side of the desert, a fire that did not consume, a voice that named him and sent him. Moses had fled Egypt after killing an Egyptian who had been beating a Hebrew; he was tending the flock of his father-in-law Jethro when God appeared to him at Horeb and declared himself the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob. The ground under Moses was holy. The voice told him he had seen the affliction of his people, had heard their cry, and was sending Moses back to Egypt to bring them out. Moses objected — who was he to go? what name should he give? what if they would not believe him? — and every objection God answered. One senses, in the texture of that conversation, that Moses was not performing false modesty; he was genuinely overwhelmed by what was being asked of him. That quality of spirit, it turns out, was exactly what God had chosen.