Exodus 2:11-12

MOSES’S FAILURE, AND FLIGHT FROM EGYPT, Exodus 2:11-22.

11, 12. Looked on their burdens Looked with sympathy and longed to help . St . Stephen says (Acts 7:23) that he was now forty years old . In the prime of his powers, with the culture of Heliopolis and the faith of Jochebed seeing his great mission dimly rising before him with the quick sympathies of a kinsman and a patriot, and with a fiery soul that pined for action, he offered to cast in his lot with his brethren, and put himself at their head, “esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt . ” But neither he nor the people were yet ready . He was too precipitate and self-confident, nor did he yet see the immensity of his real mission. He needed the forty years’ desert chastisement and the solemn converse of the solitudes of Horeb. Nor had Israel yet felt the throe in which a nation is born. He felt that he was the born and commissioned leader to break the Egyptian chain; he felt that he had the revolutionary right to strike; but erred in thinking that the hour had come.

He looked this way and that way Not from criminal guilt, but with soldierly wariness. He looked on the war as begun, and himself as the captain in the field, and “supposed that his brethren would have understood how that God by his hand would deliver them.” Acts 7:25.