Deal with it!

“Now the Lord said to Moses in Midian, ‘Go back to Egypt.’ (Exodus 4:19)

Moses was and still is one of the greatest heroes to the nation of Israel.  He was the deliverer of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt.  He encompasses all the law.  He was a great leader.  But he also was a man who ran from his problems.  In cold blood he killed an Egyptian he saw beating a Hebrew.  After his murderous act, he fled from the land to Midian.  He was forty years old at the time.  He then spent the next forty years, leading sheep and lambs across the desert, while playing bingo on the weekends with his Midianite cronies.  However, at the age of eighty, God told Moses to go back to Egypt and face the problem he had left there.  Deal with Pharoah, the very center of his Egyptian problems.

You see, it was only by dealing with his problem head on, in the power of God’s strength, that he could be free from the Egyptian shadow that hung over him for the past forty years.  Moses had never forgotten about his murderous act back in that land of Goshen.  Oh, I’m sure it didn’t weigh on his mind day and night.  But I am equally sure he would wake up in the middle of the night from a vivid nightmare of what had happened forty years earlier.  And perhaps while he was sitting in the field tending the sheep, multiple times he looked over his shoulder to see if an Egyptian might be trying to sneak up on him with revenge in mind.

You see, the only way Moses could be free from his past was to go back and deal with it head on.  We cannot conquer and solve our problems by avoiding and running away from them.  God never asks us to avoid dealing with our past, our mistakes, our sins.  Denial only damages us spiritually.  David had to deal with his moral failure.  Jonah had to go back to Nineveh and deal with his disobedience to God.  The prodigal son had to go back to his father and deal with his family issues.  Peter had to face Jesus after denying him.  Our God asks us to allow him to give us the power to deal with our past.

We each have a past, and we each have a choice when it comes to dealing with that past.  We can try to live comfortably with it, knowing that the dark cloud of the past still hangs over our head.  Or we can deal with it, bury it, and live a victorious worry-free life in Christ.  God will give us the grace and strength we need when we are willing to confront our past and make right whatever we need to make right.  

Moses never had to go back in to hiding after going back to Egypt.  Moses never had to tend sheep again.  Moses never had to wake up in the night in a cold sweat again.  Moses was too busy watching God’s miracles, building Tabernacles, and meeting with God on mountains.  His days of looking over his shoulder were gone once he returned to Egypt and settled his past.  And so too can yours!

                                                      Darlene