While the Israelites suffered in slavery, God had not abandoned them. He arranged for Moses, the man through whom he would work to deliver Israel, to be raised in Pharaoh's household. As Stephen would later tell it, "Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and he was mighty in his words and deeds" (Acts 7:22). One story, related by Josephus, has him become an Egyptian military leader. (It was in this capacity, the story says, that Moses obtained the Cushite wife spoken of in Num 12.)
As an adult Moses chose to embrace his Israelite identity. Heb 11:24-26 states,
"By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward."
Stephen says that he was 40 years old (Acts 7:23) when he saw an Israelite being beaten by an Egyptian (Exo 2:11). Moses then "looked this way and that, and seeing no one, he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand" (v 12).
Verse 12 does not mean that Moses looked around to see that no one was looking. Instead, he was hoping that someone would do something to stop the injustice being perpetrated upon the Israelite.
The Hebrew expression in Exo 2:!2 also appears in Isa 59:16, which says of God. "He saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no one to intercede; then his own arm brought him salvation, and his righteousness upheld him."
Moses' heart was in the right place, but he was not ready to lead Israel's exodus. The death of the Egyptian was probably an accident, but he should not have killed him. When what he had done was discovered, he fled Egypt for Midian, where he rescued a damsel in distress, married her, and settled down as a herdsman working for his father-in-law Jethro. Another forty years would go by before God called him for a special mission.
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