One shepherd, and the Good Shepherd

Moses the Shepherd

Moses spent the first forty years of his life as a prince in Egypt and the last forty leading a nation through the wilderness. Between those two seasons lay forty quiet years that we too easily overlook, years in which the man who would confront Pharaoh was doing nothing more remarkable than keeping sheep in the desert. Scripture does not treat those years as an interruption. They were preparation.

“Now Moses kept the flock of Jethro his father in law, the priest of Midian: and he led the flock to the backside of the desert, and came to the mountain of God, even to Horeb.”Exodus 3:1

The shepherd in Scripture

The setting is given at the opening of Exodus chapter 3. Moses had fled Egypt after killing an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew, and after Pharaoh sought his life. He had come to the land of Midian, sat down by a well, and there defended the daughters of a priest named Reuel, also called Jethro. Jethro gave him his daughter Zipporah, and Moses settled into the life of his father in law's household, a stranger in a strange land. Exodus 3:1 tells us that Moses kept the flock of Jethro his father in law, the priest of Midian, and that he led the flock to the back of the desert, and came to the mountain of God, to Horeb. Every detail matters. The former prince is now a shepherd of another man's flock. He is not in a palace or a city but in the far reaches of the wilderness, driving sheep to whatever pasture the harsh land afforded. He is, by any worldly measure, a forgotten man doing humble work. It is precisely there, in the ordinary act of leading sheep to distant grazing, that the extraordinary breaks in. The angel of the LORD appears to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush, and the bush burns yet is not consumed. Moses turns aside to see the great sight, and God calls to him out of the bush by name, telling him to remove his shoes because the ground is holy. The shepherd of Midian is being summoned to shepherd a nation. God then reveals himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, declares that he has seen the affliction of his people in Egypt and heard their cry, and announces that he has come down to deliver them. He commissions Moses to go to Pharaoh and to bring the people out. Moses, who had once tried to deliver by his own hand and failed, now hesitates and objects, asking who he is that he should go. The man who tends sheep at the back of the desert will be sent to lead the LORD's flock out of bondage, and the staff in his shepherd's hand will become the rod of God.

What it comes to mean

What the passage plainly states is straightforward. Moses was employed keeping his father in law's flock. He led those sheep to Horeb. There God met him in the burning bush and called him to deliver Israel from Egypt. The text does not editorialize about the shepherding; it simply reports it as the setting in which the call came. That is the stated meaning, and it is enough to establish that Moses was a shepherd before he was a deliverer. Yet the placement of the call is too pointed to ignore, and here we draw out what the wider Scripture confirms. God did not summon Moses in the flush of his palace strength, when he tried to rescue a Hebrew by killing and failed. He summoned him after forty years of desert obscurity, when the self reliant prince had become a patient herdsman. The wilderness that would later swallow Israel's fears was the country Moses had already learned to cross with a flock. God trained the deliverer by first making him a shepherd. We should be honest that Exodus does not say in so many words, God made Moses a shepherd in order to prepare him to lead Israel. That is an inference, but it is a well grounded one. The skills overlap plainly: guiding a flock through barren land, finding water and pasture, protecting the weak, enduring heat and hardship, and above all learning patience with creatures that stray. The nation Moses would lead behaved much like a difficult flock, and he would need every lesson the desert had taught him. There is also a lesson in the humbling itself. The forty years in Midian stripped away the confidence of Egypt and left a man who protested that he was not eloquent, that he was slow of speech, that he was unfit. That very lowliness was part of the preparation, for God's deliverer had to lean on God rather than on his own power. The shepherd's staff, an emblem of ordinary weakness, became in God's hand the instrument through which plagues fell and a sea divided. The meaning the story invites is that God forms his servants in hidden, humble places before he uses them in great ones.