1. Exodus 2:15 (ESV)
  2. Exposition

Did Moses flee from Pharaoh out of fear?

Exodus 2:15 (ESV)

15 When Pharaoh heard of it, he sought to kill Moses. But Moses fled from Pharaoh and stayed in the land of Midian. And he sat down by a well.

Hebrews 11 tells us that by faith, Moses endured as seeing him who is invisible. In the first place we learn that Moses was not afraid of the king, and that he left Egypt by faith (Hebrews 11:27). He had not fled from the king because he was in despair, or in order to flee his office. He named his son Gershom (which means, stranger there), to identify himself as a sojourner in a foreign land (Exodus 2:2) who intended to return to his task in God’s time. In the second place we see Moses had learned that the time of God’s remembering had not yet come. The king of the oppression had not yet died, the people were not yet crying out to God for help and rescue from slavery (Exodus 2:23), and he himself need to be refined for God’s service.

Although Moses had been trying to accomplish deliverance by his own strength, he came to see that instead of running ahead of God’s timing, he had to learn to say that his time had not yet come, just like his Lord Jesus so often said in his ministry. Moses had been zealous but impatient, and it was God’s plan to give him more knowledge (see Romans 10:2). Moses had to learn contentment. He had to learn to endure as seeing one who is invisible at work in the world.