The Deliverer, Part 2. On forty years in the wilderness.
And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel—and God knew.— Exodus 2:24–25
Moses sat down by a well in Midian (Exod. 2:15). He had left Egypt with nothing but his life. Then seven sisters came to draw water for their father’s sheep, and some shepherds drove them away. Moses “stood up and saved them” and watered their flock himself (2:17).
It was the same instinct that had moved him in Egypt. He still could not stand by while the strong pushed the weak around. This time, though, nobody ended up buried in the sand. He drove off the shepherds and then did the plain work of drawing water for someone else’s animals.
The sisters’ father, the priest of Midian, invited him home. Moses stayed, married one of the daughters, Zipporah, and had a son. He named the boy Gershom and explained why: “I have been a sojourner in a foreign land” (2:22). He had been an outsider in Pharaoh’s palace, an outsider among the Hebrews who rejected him, and now an outsider in Midian.
His work said the same thing. The man raised in Pharaoh’s court now spent his days keeping his father-in-law’s flock (3:1), and Egyptians looked down on shepherds (Gen. 46:34).
When Stephen retells Israel’s story, he marks Moses’ life in three spans of forty years. Moses was forty when he left the palace to visit his people (Acts 7:23). Forty more years passed in Midian before God spoke to him from the burning bush (7:30). Then for forty years he led Israel out of Egypt and through the wilderness (7:36). By the time he stood before Pharaoh, he was eighty years old (Exod. 7:7).
The middle forty can look like a gap in the story. Egypt took forty years to raise a prince, and God took forty more to make a shepherd. He did not rush the work, and He did not abandon it halfway. Through every one of those years, Moses was in His hands.
Scripture does not walk us through those quiet forty years. What it shows us is the man who came out of them. The prince who had once settled things with his own fist spent them among sheep, and he came out a humble man. Much later, the Bible would say that Moses was “very meek, more than all people who were on the face of the earth” (Num. 12:3).
Egypt had trained Moses in all its wisdom (Acts 7:22), and that training would serve him later. But the palace had also taught him to take matters into his own hands. To lead God’s people, he needed the humility to let God work His way, and no palace could teach him that.
Anyone who has worked with a flock knows sheep cannot be hurried. A shepherd learns to move at their pace. For forty years Moses led animals that could not be forced, in a place where there was no one to impress. God was teaching him to shepherd people. One day Moses would lead a whole nation through the wilderness, and a psalm would remember it this way: “You led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron” (Ps. 77:20).
Where is our Midian? It may be a place we never would have chosen, a long stretch where our plans seem to be on hold and no one sees what we do. Those years can feel wasted. Moses’ story suggests they may be the years in which God is shaping us and preparing us for a calling larger than the one we had in mind.
While Moses kept sheep, Israel stayed in chains. The king of Egypt died, but the slavery did not die with him. The people groaned and cried out, and “their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God” (2:23).
Then the text gives four short statements about God. He heard their groaning. He remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He saw the people of Israel. He knew (2:24–25).
“Remembered” does not mean God had forgotten them and suddenly recalled them. In Scripture, when God remembers, He acts. When the flood covered the earth, God remembered Noah, and the waters began to go down (Gen. 8:1). Here, too, God’s remembering means the long wait is about to end. In Hebrew the last sentence stops there: God knew. Nothing about their suffering was hidden from Him.
Neither Moses nor Israel could see what God was doing in the other place. The slaves did not know their deliverer was alive in the desert. Moses did not know the cry of his people had reached God.
Forty years of keeping sheep and forty years of slavery both looked like time God had lost. In Midian, He was turning a prince into a man humble enough to lead His people God’s way. In Egypt, He was hearing every groan.
Our own steps back can look like failure. They may be how God gets us ready to go forward. If we are waiting a long time for something, He may be at work in a place we cannot see yet, in us or in someone we are praying for.
Israel thought God had forgotten them. He never had. All those years, He was getting a shepherd ready.
Next time: a bush that burned without burning up, and the call that came to a shepherd.
© 2026 Bible Portal. Free to share with attribution. Please keep the source and a link to Bible Portal intact. For other uses, contact us.
