Exodus 3:1: The far side of the wilderness, and a shepherd at the mountain of God

Here we see an amazing change of circumstances. In Genesis 46:31 we read that "every shepherd is an abomination to the Egyptians." Yet God takes Moses, who had learned all the wisdom of the Egyptians, from the Egyptian court to the back of a mountain, to mind a flock of sheep and to be trained for God's service… To find such a man, with such gifts, called away from such a position to mind sheep at the back of a mountain, is far beyond what human thought or feeling can reach.

Forty is the number of testing. You see it in Israel's forty years in the wilderness, and in the forty days of our blessed Lord's temptation. So this was a time of testing. It tested what Moses was, and it gave him time to prove what God was. We must always learn both before we are fit for service. So God always sends His servants into the wilderness before He uses them… There, alone with Him, we discover how empty our own resources are, and how completely we depend on Him.

If any educated man in his natural state could expect success in God's service, Moses could have counted on it. He was grown up, he was learned, he was mighty in word and deed. Yet at the back of the desert he had to learn something Egypt's schools could never have taught him. Paul learned more in Arabia than he ever learned at the feet of his teacher Gamaliel. No one can teach like God, and everyone who will learn from Him must be alone with Him.

Moses had become a shepherd, the job the Egyptians despised (Gen. 46:34). It was part of God's training, and through it he became "very meek, more than all people who were on the face of the earth" (Num. 12:3). As a shepherd he is a picture of Christ.

At the end of the 40 years in Midian, Moses had led Jethro's flock close to Horeb. Horeb seems to be the wider name for a group of mountains, and Sinai was its chief peak. God appeared to him at that spot. So he received his commission at the very place where he would bring the people after he led them out of Egypt, and where God would give the law that is for ever linked with his name.

The scene is at Horeb, called the mountain of God here, a name given ahead of time.

In the ordinary run of his work, he leads the flock to the far side of the desert and comes to Horeb, the mountain of God. No doubt he had no idea that his years of exile were about to end… Then something catches Moses' attention. His everyday duties did not stop him recognising the Lord when He showed Himself. They never need to… One of the greatest proofs that a man is subject to God is this: he does his daily work with care and patience, and still keeps his eye ready to watch the ways of God.

Horeb is the starting post for everyone God sends out to act for Him… Forty years earlier he had gone to work, but he moved too soon… Here was real authority. There is a huge difference between God sending a man and a man running unsent.