Moses: The Lost Years

The days of our lives are seventy years;

and if by reason of strength they are eighty years,

yet their boast is only labor and sorrow;

for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

Moses, Psalm 90:10, NKJV

What was Moses doing during those forty years of exile in the deserts of Midian?  He married and had a couple of kids.  He tended sheep.  Perhaps it was here that he began to compile the book of Genesis, based on oral histories learned from his mother and his father-in-law (for Jethro was a descendant of Abraham, too), from visions and divine revelation given directly by God.  If Moses was responsible for writing the story of Job, it might have been here in the Arabian deserts that he first heard the tale of a great man of faith and how God allowed him to be tested to prove that his faith and perseverance were real.  And Moses dabbled in poetry, writing this powerful yet grief-stricken psalm of a wasted life.

Moses was schooled early by his mother's teachings--not the daughter of Pharaoh who adopted him from the Nile, but the daughter of Levi who bore him, nursed him at her breast, and taught him at her knee.  He learned the stories of his people, how in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth; how after the fall of man became so complete that every life on earth was corrupted, save one; how a faithful man and his family built a great ark in which all life was preserved through those on board; how God called the patriarch Abraham out of a family and land of idolatry to follow Him to a land that He would give him; how God used the evil machinations of Abraham's great-grandchildren to affect the salvation of His Chosen People.  

I'm sure dwelling in the desert gave Moses lots of time to think about his life, the opportunities he had been given, the choices he had made, all of the steps along life's pathway that had led him to here.  And I'm sure Midian was not where he had envisioned spending the best years of his strength, tending someone else's sheep in someone else's pasture.  At forty he had been in his prime, positioned for power and prestige in the most powerful kingdom of the age.  And in a single day, he lost it all to become the most hated and hunted man in known civilization.  Thirty years had passed him by, and like a melancholy scribbler with too much time on his hands, he laments his stage in life.

His mistakes had cast him into the hands of the eternal and everlasting God, the sovereign over all creation who regarded time as irrelevant and next to whom man was immaterial.  Human weakness gave way to sin, sin incurred wrath, wrath resulted in death.  Moses must have sensed his own mortality, a seventy-year-old shepherd with no dreams, no potential, no desires, only memories saddened with mistakes and shadowed by the passage of time, expectation of impending death looming near every thought.  

Life had already been long, and the years to eighty made it seem longer still.  He had started out with a bang, only to end as a beat-up, busted-up, broken down old man.  His years, his education, his training, his potential, his ability to do anything significant for his people or contribute anything significant to their deliverance had all come to naught, dried up in the desert, baked by the sun, stalked by the vultures that feasted on fallen prey.  His life was practically over.

But here was the cry of his heart:  Come back, O Lord!  Come back!  Hasn't it been long enough?  Have mercy on your servants and satisfy us with your mercy!  Moses wanted to rejoice again in the goodness of God, to experience gladness that would make up for the heartache.  In his old age, Moses wanted to see the work of God's hands, experience the glory of God's presence.  Moses still wanted to be used by God, even if he considered himself all used up.

At seventy, Moses was still ten years away from receiving the answer to his prayers.  But God was listening.  God knew exactly where Moses was, confident that Moses would still be there when God's plan was ready for him.  Because even if Moses felt like the years of his life, numbered three-score-and-ten, had been wasted, God still had a plan for his life.  God still had a destiny for Moses to fulfill.  We who serve the Lord should never consider our life a loss, even if we haven't lived up to our perceived potential or seen our dreams come to pass.  If we are still alive, it is because God still has something for us to do.

Let us be found faithful in what we've been given to do, until God comes along and calls us to something else!