Godbey's Commentary - Acts - Romans - Enter His Rest

are everywhere getting sanctified and leading the embattled host to victory. The life of Moses, one
hundred and twenty years, is divided into three periods of forty years each, so wonderfully
contrastive either with other. The first forty years in the royal palace of the proudest kingdom
beneath the skies, actually living at the top of creation, emblemating the mediatorial Christ on the
throne of heaven before He condescended to become “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief,”
to redeem the world from sin, death and hell. We now reach the second period of Moses’ wonderful
life.
24-29. Cultured all his life in the Egyptian idolatry, flooded with all the learning of the world, the
greatest military general on the globe, born with redoubtable physical courage, and a total stranger
to fear, Moses unhesitatingly dashes away to the brick kilns and mortar-yards, quarries and mines
of his toiling consanguinity, proclaiming his kinship, espousing their ruined estate and doubting not
that they will rally around him by millions, fly to arms, rise unanimously in rebellion against their
masters, and thus give him an opportunity, vi et armis, to lead them out of bondage back to their
native land. In this he is utterly discomfited. Like the rest of us, having attempted to achieve victory
by human power, he signally fails. Not only is his enterprise of Hebrew emancipation a hopeless
failure, as they were then a race of cowards, utterly uncultured in military tactics, but the Pharaohs,
looking upon him as a royal rival, and now even attempting an insurrection of the slaves, as they
think in that way seeking a passport to the throne, the palace fulminates death and destruction for
the vile insurgent; they are hot on his track, so that he narrowly and providentially escapes with his
life. When I was there, I visited the scene of these stirring events so far as locations after thirty-five
hundred years can be identified. I looked down into Jacob’s well in the citadel of Cairo, which
tradition says Prince Joseph dug for his father, two hundred feet deep, the walls sixteen feet square
at the top, each side a monolith, contracting slightly as it descends; the sparkling water in that deep
well surviving to this day. At the location of the ancient city of Memphis, the capital and metropolis,
in the alluvial valley of the Nile, the great eastern desert is very nigh, having no permanent
habitations, always roamed over by the Bedouin Arabs and traversed by caravans of camels. Moses
quickly dashes away into this desert, travels northward to the Isthmus of Suez, crosses out of Africa
into Asia, doubles round the west end of the Red Sea, travels eastward into Arabia, enters the wild,
rugged regions of Mt. Sinai, the hand of the Almighty leading him to the home of Jethro, the
Midianitish priest and prophet of the Most High in the normal succession of Noah and Shem, a true
preacher of righteousness, orthodox and faithful in his dispensation, i.e., the Patriarchal. He was the
very man Moses needed to teach him the things of God. That he was a true and orthodox prophet of
Jehovah, we see illustrated when in after years he visited Israel in the wilderness, spending a
fortnight with his son-in-law; meanwhile God used him to institute the eldership of Israel, which the
apostles transferred to the Christian dispensation, and this day under God is the custodian of the
Church militant. This, to Moses, was like entering a new world, as he left all the people he had ever
known and came to others whom he had never seen. Of course he was lonesome. Therefore, Jethro
not only received him kindly into a shepherd’s tent, became his faithful teacher and spiritual father,
but he comforted his bereavement by giving him his daughter Zipporah in wedlock. Thus Moses
comes down from the top of royalty to the bottom of poverty and simplicity, beginning life de novo,
like every newborn soul. Now he enjoys God’s theological college, that old burning desert, with the
sheep to entertain him, the stars to watch him and the sand for a bed, forty years, while he gets down
to the bottom-rock of humiliation, sitting meek and lowly at the feet of the prophet Jethro and taught
of God the deep things of the kingdom. Thirty years have rolled away in this primitive prophetical