After 40 years of Moses being in the desert, God hears the cries of His people under their Egyptian bondage. The Bible says that God acknowledges their cries and plight under the Egyptian rule and decides He will deliver them out of their bondage because of the previous covenant that He had made with their earlier forefathers – Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

God first makes contact with Moses through a burning bush. Initially an angel of the Lord appears to Moses in a “flame of fire from the midst of a bush.” This bush is burning with fire, but the bush itself is not being consumed by the fire!

God then starts to speak directly to Moses. He tells Moses that He has heard the cries of His people in Egypt and that He is calling Moses out to be the one who will go in there and deliver them from their plight with the Egyptians. God is thus going to deliver the Israelites from the Egyptians through Moses! God then proceeds to tell Moses that he will be the one to deliver and lead them out of their captivity, and that he will then lead them into a “good and large land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites and Hittites.”

Moses’ initial response to God was that who was he to go down and bring the children of Israel out from their Egyptian bondage? God then tells Moses that He will be with him during this entire deliverance and for him to tell the children of Israel, when they ask the name of their God, that His name is:

“I AM who I AM.”

He further tells Moses to tell His people that He is the God of their fathers – Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – and that He is going to deliver His people and bring them into a Promised Land flowing with milk and honey. God then tells Moses to approach the Pharaoh after he has pulled his people together for this deliverance, and to tell the Pharaoh to let the Hebrew people go into the wilderness for their three day journey into the Promised Land.

God then tells Moses that the Pharaoh is not going to let them go on this first request. He then tells Moses to tell the Pharaoh that if he does not let His people go, that He will stretch out His hand and strike Egypt with all of His wonders. God tells Moses that after He stretches out His hand with all of these wonders against the Pharaoh, that the Pharaoh will then let them go.

After receiving all of the above instructions from God, Moses still questions the Lord about all of this. He then asks God – “But suppose they will not believe me or listen to my voice; suppose they say, ‘The Lord has not appeared to you.”

God then proceeds with miracle #1.

He tells Moses to take the rod that he is holding and to cast it onto the ground. Moses does so, and the rod turns into a serpent! God then tells Moses to pick up the serpent by the tail. When he does, the serpent turns back into the rod!

God then moves into miracle #2. He tells Moses to put his hand into his bosom and then to take it back out again. When he takes his hand back out again, his hand then becomes like leprous snow. He then tells Moses to put his hand back into his bosom and to take it back out again. He does, and when he pulls his hand back out again, his hand is restored back to its original condition.

God then tells Moses that if they still will not believe him, that he is to take water from the river and pour it on dry land, and the water will then become blood on the dry land. After God shows Moses all of the above, Moses still questions God as to whether He has chosen the right man for the job. He proceeds to tell the Lord that he is not eloquent enough, and that he is too slow of speech and tongue. God then responds back saying to him:

“Who has made man’s mouth? Or who makes the mute, the deaf, the seeing, or the blind? Have not I, the Lord? Now therefore, go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall say.” (Exodus 4:11)

After God makes this powerful statement to Moses, Moses still questions God on choosing him and says to God – “O my Lord, please send by the hand of whomever else You may send.”

At this point, the Bible says that the anger of the Lord was kindled as a result of Moses questioning His decision to call him out for this task. However, seeing Moses’ lack of self-confidence in himself, God then proceeds to tell Moses to take his brother Aaron with him. God says that Aaron can speak well and for Moses to convey God’s message to Aaron, and that God will be with the both of them and will teach them both what to say and what to do.

God tells Moses that Aaron will be the spokesman to the people, and that Moses shall be to Aaron “as God.” What God just did, in order to help Moses out with his lack of self-confidence, was to make Aaron his spokesman for when he would be too afraid to speak out to the people, but that God would still deliver the orders and instructions as to what was to be done directly to Moses.

There is an awful lot to learn from this dialogue that had just occurred between God and Moses. I will touch more on this in part 2 of this story.

Before Moses was born, the children of Israel were living in slavery in Egypt. The Pharaoh was afraid of the numbers and might of the growing Israelites during this time, so he had all of them put under extreme bondage and slavery so they could not rebel against him. It got so bad at one time, that the Pharaoh had put out an order to have all of the male children killed that were being born by the Israelites.

It was during this time that Moses was born. His mother was a “Hebrew,” which is another name for Israelite. When Moses was first born, his mother hid him for 3 months so he would not be found and killed by the Pharaoh.

After 3 months, his mother then placed him in an ark made out of bulrushes, and then placed him down by the reeds along the river banks hoping someone else would find him and raise him up safely. It just so happened that the daughter of the Pharaoh was the one to actually find him down by the river as she was getting ready to wash herself in the river.

Once she found him, she found out who the mother was, and then asked the mother to nurse him during the nursing stage. Once the nursing stage was over, the mother then gave the child back to the Pharaoh’s daughter in order that she raise him up as one of her own so the Pharaoh would not find out who he was and have him killed. Moses was thus raised up in the Pharaoh’s house.

When Moses became full grown, he became very distressed at seeing his own people suffer under the hands of the Egyptians. During one of these times, he saw an Egyptian beating one of his fellow Hebrew men. Moses became so furious at seeing this injustice, that he killed the Egyptian who had been beating up his fellow brother.

After killing this Egyptian man, the Pharaoh then finds out about it and seeks to have Moses killed. At this point, Moses flees into the desert into a place called Midian. He then lives in the desert for 40 years until God calls him out to deliver His people from their slavery to the Egyptians.