I Am Come Down to Deliver Them

And the LORD said: “I have surely seen the oppression of My people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters, for I know their sorrows. So I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up from that land to a good and large land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites and the Hittites and the Amorites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites (Exodus 3:7-8).

God’s timing was, and is always, perfect. He had told Abraham, “They will afflict them four hundred years” (Genesis 15:13); that his descendants would be slaves; that He would judge the afflicting nation; and that they would come out with great substance. That time had come.

Israel suffered under Egypt’s brutal, harsh and savage task-masters, (Exodus 1:11-14). They cried and their cry came up to God. He heard their groanings and at the right time He summoned His deliverer whom He had prepared—Moses. “Come now therefore, and I will send you to Pharaoh, that you may bring my people . . . out of Egypt” (Exodus 3:10). To Moses this was an impossible task. Pharaoh was the most powerful ruler on earth. Who was he to perform the impossible? But although Moses may not have realized it God had prepared His servant well.

Moses’ first forty years were as an Egyptian prince in the palace of the late Pharaoh. Pharaoh’s daughter had adopted him as her own son after finding him at the river’s brink in an ark of bulrushes. He had been placed there by his natural mother, a Levite, who after nursing him for three months, could no longer hide him from the Egyptian executioner of new-born males.

Now God had placed Moses right in the royal courts. There he became “learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and deeds” (Acts 7:22). Who other than Moses, “a prince and a judge,” not a slave, could confront Pharaoh fearlessly as an equal, and demand the Israelites’ release?

For the next forty years he was in Midian, taking care of sheep in the desert, enduring the rigors of the wilderness, and learning patience and humility. Now meeting God (the Angel of the Lord) he was told that God would teach him even more, by preparing him spiritually, the most important element to complete his training, so that he might fulfil God’s promise to Abraham four hundred and more years before. He was now ready and able.

So God called him from the burning, un-singed bush, “Moses, Moses.”

Adapted and modified excerpts from Day by Day: Bible Promises
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture taken from the New King James Version®, NKJV © 1982 by Thomas Nelson.
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