And Moses was instructed in all [the] wisdom of the Egyptians, and he was mighty in his words and deeds.
Stephen is on trial for his life. Instead of defending himself, he retells Israel's story. Here he stops at the young Moses, raised in Pharaoh's palace with the finest education the world could offer. Do natural ability and training make a person fit for God's work?
Stephen credits Moses with words and deeds, not just learning.
Stephen said: "Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and he was mighty in his words and deeds." This tells us that he was what the world would call a man of genius. Many men are good talkers — they have gifts of speech, but are hardly men of action. Other men show their ability in what they do. Their actions are wise and powerful, but their powers of speech are small. The man who shines in both areas is a rarity.
Egypt's learning was no small thing, and it set Moses up for a brilliant future.
Moses was plainly a very clever man. He was "instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians," and the Egyptians were not fools. It would puzzle our builders to do what they did — to put up the Pyramids… He was a scientific, accomplished, intellectual man; but more than that, "he was mighty in his words and deeds."… That man had everything in his favour. He had the world before him. He was not only the king's favourite, and the adopted son of Pharaoh's daughter, but was within reach of the throne.
Everything looked ready. God sent His man away for forty years instead.
Nature would say, What a fitted, prepared instrument God now has at hand! But this is exactly the thought that falls short of the mind of God. He will not, and does not, accept the qualifications of Egypt. He sends Moses to school (as we would say) for forty years. There he is fitted and prepared and qualified for the work God has for him to do. God's instruments must learn in God's school. There is no buying rank in His army; everyone must rise from the ranks.
The work ahead needed what no education could supply.
All this learning was of no use to him as the deliverer God chose. It was of no use to him as the king in Jeshurun (a name for Israel), guiding the course of the people of God in the wilderness. The "wisdom of Egypt" would have been baffled to make a way through the Red Sea, and had no resource at all to meet the demands of the wilderness. Egypt's learning could not have provided the ability to bring water out of the rock or provide the manna to meet the needs of that vast host in the wilderness.
Moses was well able to weigh his own prospects. That is what makes his choice remarkable.
No one can deny that Moses was capable of rightly judging the situation. He was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and he was mighty in his words and deeds. Yet he looked, not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. His eye was on the kingdom of God. He waited for the Messiah. He knew that the purposes of God centre in Christ, and that Israel was their inner circle on earth. So his affections were not with the court of Egypt, nor on the most brilliant future it could open to a man of his energy.
There is a puzzle here. The man Stephen calls mighty in words later told God he could not speak well. One writer explains it this way:
Knowing something of human nature in ourselves, we think it was not that he had really lost his powers of mighty speech. Instead, the forty years of discipline in the desert had completely broken his self-confidence. But he had also become taken up with himself, and so he was unwilling to answer God's call and commission.
None of this shuts ordinary people out of God's service.
Few of us have had an education like this, but then very few are needed for such great work. The point here is not secular education, but ability for the particular service God has appointed for us… It does not matter how clever we are by nature. If God is not using us, our efforts will be in vain. Nor does it matter how simple we may be. If God uses us, we will do His will. The question is, Are we using what God has given us to serve Him?
- Gifted. Moses had learning, speech and action together — a rare mix in one man. And the wisdom he learned in Egypt was real wisdom, not primitive.
- Positioned. That training put him within reach of Pharaoh's throne, with the world in front of him.
- Rejected. God did not accept Egypt's qualifications for His work. He sent Moses to His own school for forty years.
- Powerless. Egypt's wisdom could not open the Red Sea, draw water from the rock, or feed a nation in the desert.
- Redirected. Moses knew what he was giving up, and still fixed his eye on the unseen kingdom of God. The question left for us is whether we are using what God has given us to serve Him.
And when a period of forty years was fulfilled to him, it came into his heart to look upon his brethren, the sons of Israel;
Stephen is on trial before the council. He answers by retelling Israel's own history — the story of how God's people kept refusing the deliverers He sent. Here the story reaches a turning point. Moses, raised in Pharaoh's palace, reaches forty and looks toward the slaves he was taken from.
The number is not decoration. Stephen's speech splits Moses' life into three blocks of forty years. Some have claimed he invented numbers the books of Moses never give. One commentator does the arithmetic.
It is claimed that Acts 7:23, 30, 36 mentions three separate periods of forty years, and that only the last appears in the books of Moses. But turn to Exodus 7, and we are told that "Moses was eighty years old… when they spoke to Pharaoh" (v. 7). These eighty years agree exactly with Stephen's account. Moses was forty when it came into his heart to visit his brothers, and he spent forty years after that in Midian. Stephen makes the age of Moses one hundred and twenty years altogether. Deuteronomy 31:2 and 34:7 say he died at the age of one hundred and twenty. Now, where is there any discrepancy?
Nothing outside him pushed him toward it. The desire began in his own heart, and one writer says that is the right order.
Then he went out from the palace and looked at the burdens of his brothers among the brick-kilns (Exodus 2:11). This was the second stage in his life of devotion and single-heartedness, while he was still in Egypt and everything outside him was against him. "It came into his heart," we are told, to do this (Acts 7:23). And it is good, and the fruit is pleasant, when affection is the parent of service.
The word for "visit" means more than a friendly call. And forty years in a palace had not erased who his people were.
In all the forty years he had been moving in the court of Pharaoh, it now appears that he never forgot that those despised slaves were his brothers. One may imagine him looking round at the glitter of that court and at those who moved in it. In his heart he was thinking, "these are not my brothers."… We find that the word visit comes from the same root as the word for oversight. It seems as though he was already overseeing his own district, the future sphere of his service.
Moses could have kept his place as the son of Pharaoh's daughter. He refused it. One commentator explains what led him out.
But divine providence is no guide for faith; nothing but the word is. Providence brought him in, and from there faith led him out. "By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter… He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward" (Hebrews 11:24-26).
The visit was right. What came next was too early. One writer separates the zeal from the timing.
This was zeal for his brothers, but it was "not according to knowledge." God's time had not yet come for judging Egypt and delivering Israel, and the intelligent servant will always wait for God's time. Moses "had grown up." He was "instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians." And further, "he supposed that his brothers would understand that God was giving them salvation by his hand." All this was true. Yet he ran ahead of the time, and when someone does this, failure must be the result.
Stephen is not giving a history lesson. He is showing the men in front of him that they have done again what their fathers did.
So Moses was an outcast for many long years. His own unworthy brothers drove him out as much as the angry king of Egypt did. They loved him less the more he loved them. They forgot the promised deliverance, and they set no value on the man who gave up everything for their sake. Israel denied the one who was in that day the type of the Holy and Righteous One. It was nothing new.
Where Moses went next matters too.
All of this is personal history. Yet Stephen plainly uses it as a type of Christ. When Christ presented Himself to His own people as their Deliverer, they rejected Him. Indeed, the flight of Moses into the land of Midian is a marked type of where our Lord stands now toward Israel and the world… But, like Moses, our Lord will return to deliver His people on earth, just as Moses returned from Midian and led Israel out.
- Heart — The move began inside him: "it came into his heart." Affection came first, and service was its fruit.
- Cost — Providence put Moses in the palace; faith took him out of it. He counted reproach with God's people as greater wealth than Egypt's treasures.
- Timing — The desire was right, the hand was early. God's servant waits for God's hour, and running ahead ends in failure.
- Refusal — The more he loved them, the less they loved him. The deep wound came from his own people, not from Egypt.
- Picture — Rejected, Moses withdrew to Midian and came back as deliverer. That is the pattern of Christ, and the pattern Stephen presses on his hearers.