This edited podcast transcript is based on an article I wrote for Revive Our Hearts Ministry. Read it here.
Podcast Transcript:
Of all the people in the Bible, who would you say experienced the most surprising (and unwanted) twists in their lives?
I struggled to choose between Adam, Moses, and Joseph. As hard as it was to pick, I chose Moses.
In today’s episode, I’m going to recap some of those twists, and then I’m going share how his surprises help us when our life twists and turns in directions we’d rather it not.
The First Twist
Moses was only a few months old when his life took its first twist—and it was a shocking and traumatic twist.
Moses’s family were Hebrew slaves in Egypt when Pharaoh ordered the Egyptian people to toss every Hebrew baby boy into the Nile River.
Moses’s mother hid him for three months. Then she tucked her infant son into a basket, prayed for his safety, and floated him among the reeds in the river.
Ironically, Pharaoh’s own daughter discovered the basket, drew Moses out of the water, and adopted this Hebrew baby as her own son.
As an infant, Moses hadn’t chosen his new royal identity. God ordained this shocking twist according to His good and eternal purposes for Moses and His people.
So, instead of growing up as a brick-making slave like all the other Hebrews, Moses grew up as a prince of Egypt. He enjoyed a lavish lifestyle and the finest education.
Twist After Twist
Forty years later, his life took its next surprising twist—a violent one.
Moses was visiting his people—the Hebrew slaves—and as he was watching them labor under Pharaoh’s cruel oppression, he witnessed an Egyptian taskmaster beat one of the Hebrew slaves.
Moses killed the taskmaster and hid his body in the sand. Unfortunately, Moses’ actions didn’t go unnoticed.
The next day, he saw two of the Hebrew slaves fighting. He asked the man who was in the wrong why he was attacking his fellow Hebrew. The man did not appreciate Moses’s peace-making attempts. He said, “Who made you a commander and judge over us? Are you planning to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” (Exodus 2:14).
So, Moses, in an unexpected and quite unwanted twist, fled Egypt and Pharaoh’s murderous rage. He exchanged his royal robes for a shepherd’s staff far away in the land of Midian.
Moses had chosen his sin, but God had purposed Moses’s twist (and his new life as a shepherd) according to His good and eternal purposes for Moses and His people.
A Burning Bush and the Ultimate Twist
So now another forty years goes by, and Moses is tending the sheep in Midian when an extraordinary sight interrupted his ordinary routine. Flames are engulfing a bush, but the fire did not consume it. Moses’s curiosity led him to investigate—and to discover the next big twist in Moses’ life.
God spoke to Moses from the fire and instructed him to go back to Egypt because the time had come for God to set His people free from their cruel slavery in Egypt. And Moses was to be their leader. He was the one who was to command Pharaoh to let God’s people go.
As God spoke, you can imagine that fear engulfed Moses like fire had engulfed that bush. And like that bush, the fear did not consume Moses. But he did tremble.
And after much trembling and even pleading for God to send someone else, Moses finally made the most important decision of his life. He chose to humble himself before the Lord and become God’s willing servant.
Moses chose to surrender his will to God’s will and to embrace the mission, which God been preparing Moses for in—not despite—every twist and turn of his life.
God Prepared Moses
So, let’s consider how God prepared him:
As we talk about how God prepared Moses, I want us to think about the twist and turns in our lives, and what God might have ordained and purposed those twists and turns in our lives to prepare us for today or in days still to come.
First, during Moses’s forty years growing up in Egypt, he’d gained training that made him “powerful in his speech and actions” (Acts 7:22). Moses needed these qualities to be able to stand before Pharaoh, to lead a brand-new nation, and to write the first five books of the Bible.
Then during Moses’s next forty years, when he was a shepherd in Midian, Moses learned how to care for helpless sheep. He needed this training if he was going to shepherd God’s unruly people through the wilderness for another forty years.
So, at the ordained time—and with Moses now properly trained by what he’d suffered—God was going to use him to play an important part in the continual unveiling and unfolding of His eternal plan of salvation. His eternal plan of redemption.
Before the whole world, Moses would serve God as God would send ten plagues, part the Red Sea, and lead His people out of Egypt, and out of slavery, and into the Promised Land. Into a land of their own.
What Will You Do with the Twists in Your Life?
So, let me ask you: What will you do with the twists in your life?
If you belong to Christ, then, like Moses, you’re His beloved and chosen servant. And you can be certain—absolutely certain—that He has ordained twists and turns in your life for His glory and your good.
So, does that make you excited? Nervous? A little bit of both?
Maybe you’ve already experienced life-changing twists. Do not fear. And do not forget. The truth remains eternally the same: God has ordained every twist—even the agonizing ones—to work out His wise and eternal purposes and to ultimately serve us for our great good and to bring Him glory. (Isaiah 46:10, Romans 8:28, Ephesians 1:11).
God Knows What He’s Doing
Think about it. When Moses’s mother placed him in the basket, she knew Moses was special, and she knew God was great, but you know she had no idea what would happen to her baby boy in the next few minutes, much less that in 80 years, he was going to lead their people out of Egypt as one of God’s greatest prophets. She had no idea.
When Moses killed the Egyptian slave master and fled for his life, he had no idea when he woke up that morning that that day was going to change his life forever. And when he fled, he had no idea if he would even survive the rest of that day, much less forty years later talk with God through a burning bush, and then actually become Israel’s promised deliverer.
I’m sure in that forty years in Midian, he gave up that idea that he was going deliver his people.
He had no idea that one day he be the one who would fulfill God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 15, when God told Abraham, “Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. But I will judge the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will depart with many possessions” (v. 13–14, BSB).
God fulfilled that exactly as He said He would to Abraham, and He fulfilled it through Moses. And Moses had no idea that his twists and turns were going to accomplish historic, miraculous events that would lead and point to Christ.
God Is With You, and He Fulfills His Promises
Through out history, God has not called many people to live lives as Moses did—or as Adam or Joseph. But He calls all of us who belong to Him to serve Him and to follow Him wherever He leads—twists and all. And you can be sure there will be twists.
So my friend, do not fear. And do not forget that just as God promised Moses at the burning bush, “I will certainly be with you,” if we belong to Christ, He has promised us, “I am with you always” (Exodus 3:12, Matthew 28:0).
So, even if—no, I mean even when—God leads you to places you would never choose, or He permits you to stumble into even the most serious sin as Moses did, you can rest in the truth that He has been preparing you, and none of His promises will fail.
Thank you for joining me today. This episode is based on an article I first wrote for Revive Our Hearts ministry.
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I’m Jean Wilund, but It’s All About Him!
