"My brethren, take the prophets, who spoke in the name of the Lord, as
7. THE PATIENCE OF MOSES
"My brethren, take the prophets, who spoke in the name of the Lord, as an example of suffering and patience" (James 5:10 NKJV).
If we select the most patient individuals found in Scripture, Moses has to be one of them. The patience of Moses is clear in the biblical accounts of his life, but we need to piece together the information we are given in order to see the lessons that are there for us. Fortunately, the Bible gives us chronological signposts in Moses' life that can help us to do this.
The book of Acts tells us that Moses was forty years old when he fled in fear from Egypt after killing the taskmaster who was abusing a Hebrew slave (Acts 7:22-29). Acts also tells us that Moses then lived forty years in the wilderness before God called him: "After forty years had passed, an angel appeared to Moses in the flames of a burning bush in the desert near Mount Sinai" (Acts 7:30).
The book of Exodus confirms these figures when it tells us Moses' age when he first spoke to Pharaoh: "Moses was 80 years old and Aaron 83 when they spoke to Pharaoh" (Exodus 7:7). As we know, after Pharaoh finally released the Israelites, Israel spent forty years wandering in the wilderness (Number 32:13). Finally, Deuteronomy tells us that at the end of that time Moses died at age 120 on the edge of the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 34:7).
A Chronology of Patience So, we have a clear chronology for Moses' life. What it shows us is that Moses spent forty long years living in the wilderness before God called him. As Moses was raised in a royal household, God could doubtless have worked it out for him to have been acquitted or exonerated after the incident with the taskmaster – so that he could have stayed in Egypt until it was time to lead the Israelites out of that land. But God did not do that. He let Moses flee and let him live miles from anywhere – with nothing to watch but the flocks and the sand – for four decades. Could it be that Moses was given the opportunity to learn patience in those long, slow desert years? Moses then spent forty excruciating years leading the Israelites through more desert – during which his patience was tried endlessly.
The Israelites in Moses' care complained continually, and on a number of occasions they are said to have grumbled against Moses directly – blaming him for their self-caused problems with an ongoing refrain of "Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?" (Numbers 21:5).
Yet throughout this continued provocation, Moses was almost unfailingly patient with the Israelites, often pleading with God on their behalf and asking God, in effect, to be patient with them. We see this especially on the occasion when God threatened that he would wipe out the Israelites for their sinfulness and make a new nation through Moses (Exodus 32:9-10; Numbers 14:19). Moses exhibited incredible patience throughout those years of problems. At the end of Moses' life, after waiting forty years to see the Promised Land, Moses displayed supreme patience in humbly accepting God's will; he would not, at that time, enter the land for which he had worked and waited so long. In that sense, Moses truly learned to act like God – who was patient with Israel that whole time, too.
No one's patience is perfect, of course, and the Bible indicates that Moses may have become impatient at times. His striking the rock twice at Meribah (Numbers 20:8-11) may have been the result of a moment of impatience when water did not appear immediately – the event that led to Moses being denied entry into the Promised Land (Numbers 20:12). But in this we see that God was holding him to an exceptionally high standard – perhaps because patience was the quality needed above all else in the job God had called Moses to do.
Pride, the Present, and Preparation
What was the secret of Moses' patience with people? The Bible gives us a very clear indication. As we saw in Chapter 4, the book of Ecclesiastes directly contrasts patience with pride (Ecclesiastes 7:8). In that chapter we concluded that no one compares or contrasts unrelated things – only things that have some kind of relationship. And as we also saw, pride and patience are indeed conversely linked. The more we have of one, the less we will have of the other. This is particularly relevant to the extreme patience exhibited by Moses because we are told that he was: "... a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth" (Numbers 12:3). It is doubtless because of Moses' deep humility that he was able to exercise the patience he did – and "people patience" is even
more clear in his life than it is in what we are told of the life of either Joseph or Job.
Moses' patience was also primarily applied not to past events (as we saw in the life of Joseph), but to the events of the present. That is often the hardest application of patience to master – patience with those who disappoint us, hurt us, raise our blood pressure, or otherwise affect us in the now in which we live and react. Moses is a model worth studying in this regard.
There is a final aspect of Moses' patience that can encourage us all. Moses seems to have learned patience over forty years in order to do a supremely patience-requiring job for a further forty years. There is perhaps a lesson in this aspect of Moses' life for all of us. Just as Moses doubtless did not realize he was being prepared to be patient, so we may not realize that some of the things that we feel impatient about may be being used to prepare us, also. Next time your patience is tried, remember Moses – it can be an encouraging thought.