Who am I?

Exodus 3:11

“But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”

If you remember the 1st Terminator movie, Sarah Connor is hunted by the Terminator from the future. She has no clue as to why she is being hunted. All she knows is if she does not run, she will be killed by this future robot who looks like a man. The following Terminator movies depict Sarah Connor as a woman on the run protecting her son who will, in the future, save the humans from complete destruction. As they say, “greatness is sometimes thrust upon us.”

Moses was not as clueless as Sarah Connor. He knew very well the reason he was in Midian. Hiding from a past that he would love nothing more than to forget and never be reminded of again. A quick run down goes like this. After being raised by his own mother until the age of at least 2 (maybe 4 depending upon what you read) he was placed in a basket to float down the Nile river to be hidden from from the hand of the Pharaoh who, at that time was killing all the male Hebrew children. Plucked from the Nile by none other than the Pharaoh’s daughter as an infant he is saved from death. Then he is raised in the palace of Pharaoh as royalty, all the while knowing he is Hebrew. He most likely remembers what his mother told him as a young boy like he was a chosen person, an Israelite, who follows the God of the Hebrews and not the gods of Egypt. Feeling out of place in the palace while seeing his people suffer day in and day out was too much for this young man.

What was even worse is that Moses must have been well known by the Israelites as a Hebrew in the palace with all this special treatment while they were being enslaved every day. He finally breaks and sees an Egyptian beating one of his own, kills him and buries him in the sand hoping to cover it all up. Word gets out of what he did and Moses is a marked man, wanted dead by the people he grew up with, all the while being hated by his own people because they saw a privileged young man who did not deserve such pleasures while they were in slavery. So he runs to Midian and escapes this spiral of crap called his life in Egypt never to return, or so he thinks.

God shows up in form of a burning bush and tells Moses that he is the chosen one, to go back to Egypt, and to set the people free. Our verse is something a broken man would say. Who am I? Moses was a shell of man tending sheep in some desert country so far from God that it would take a burning bush to snap him back into reality. He was chosen and he is the man God will use to bring a slave nation out of Egypt and turn them into the people of God that we still know today.

Most of us just run, like Sarah Connor. We run from God for the fear of what punishment might await us. We run because of our past is so broken that our hearts are callous and hard. We won’t let anyone in or deal with our past. We just shove it in a closet and keep it under lock and key so that no one will see it or have a chance to review it. Moses would have to go back to the very place where everyone did not want to see him or remember him. The only difference is, God was with him when he returned. On his own, Moses was not enough. He was a shepherd in the desert avoiding his past, but with God, he freed a nation and has gone down as one of the mightiest men of God to ever walk the earth. You are more than a conquer through Christ who saves you! It is time to approach the burning bush in your life and hear that God loves you and that you are chosen for such a time as this. A warrior for God. Without God you will always say, “Who am I?”, but with God you will stand before mighty kings and tell them to let my people go!