Who Was Moses? - Life and Significance

Introduction

A basket of reeds drifts in the reeds of the Nile, sealed with pitch, carrying a baby who should already be dead. Pharaoh has ordered every Hebrew boy drowned in that river. The empire has all the power. The mother has nothing but tar, papyrus, and nerve. And the daughter of the very man who signed the death warrant reaches into the water and lifts the child out.

That is how the story of Moses begins, and it never really stops being that story: someone being drawn out of deep water by a hand stronger than the empire.

Most of us know the highlights. Burning bush. Ten plagues. Sea split open. Stone tablets. But the man himself is stranger and more moving than the highlights suggest. He is a murderer, a fugitive, a shepherd, a stutterer, a man who argued with God and lost, and a man who argued with God for other people and won. By the end of this page you will know his life in order, know his failures without flinching, and see why the New Testament cannot talk about Jesus for long without mentioning him.

The angle of this guide

Moses is usually presented as the great miracle worker. This guide reads him as something else: the man in the gap. His life is spent wedged between a holy God and a hard-necked people, and his greatest moments are not the plagues or the sea but the times he stands between the two and pleads. That is where his glory lies, and it is also where he cracks. Reading Moses as mediator explains his humility, his anger, his exclusion from the land, and why Hebrews sets him next to Christ rather than above Him. The gap is the key to the man.

What does the Bible say about Moses?

Scripture gives Moses more space than any other person in the Old Testament. His life divides neatly into three stretches of forty years, and Stephen's sermon in Acts 7 confirms that structure.

The first forty are Egyptian. Born to Levite parents while a decree of infanticide stood over his people, hidden three months, floated on the Nile, adopted into the palace and named by the princess: "She called his name Moses, and said, 'Because I drew him out of the water'" (Exodus 2:10). He received the finest education of the ancient world. Acts 7:22 says, "Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. He was mighty in his words and works." And then he threw it away. Hebrews 11:24 puts the decision in the language of faith: "By faith, Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter." He chose slaves over status. But he chose badly how to help them. Seeing an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, "He looked this way and that way, and when he saw that there was no one, he killed the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand" (Exodus 2:12). The looking this way and that tells you everything. This was not holy courage; it was a private calculation that went wrong. The next day his own people rejected him, Pharaoh wanted him dead, and the prince became a runaway.

The second forty are Midianite. He marries Zipporah, daughter of the priest Jethro, and names his firstborn Gershom, "for he said, 'I have lived as a foreigner in a foreign land'" (Exodus 2:22). For four decades the man trained to govern an empire keeps somebody else's sheep in somebody else's desert. Nothing in that seems strategic. It was.

Then the bush burns without burning up, and God speaks. Moses raises five objections in a row, starting with "Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh, and that I should bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?" (Exodus 3:11) and ending with a plain request that God send anybody else. In the middle of the argument comes the verse everything else rests on. Moses asks for a name to bring back to the slaves, and God answers: "God said to Moses, 'I AM WHO I AM,' and he said, 'You shall tell the children of Israel this: "I AM has sent me to you"'" (Exodus 3:14). The name is not a definition; it is a presence. The God who sends him is not a local deity to be managed but the One who simply is, self-existent, unbound, already there before Egypt was a nation and still there when it is dust. Moses does not get a strategy. He gets a Name.

The third forty are wilderness years, and they open with confrontation: ten plagues dismantling Egypt's gods one by one, then Passover, then the exodus itself. At the sea, trapped, the people panic, and Moses lifts his staff: "Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and Yahweh caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided" (Exodus 14:21). Notice how the verse splits the work. Moses stretches; Yahweh divides. The man in the gap holds up a stick all night while God does the impossible.

At Sinai the nation receives its covenant, and the text is careful about who is speaking: "God spoke all these words, saying" (Exodus 20:1). The Ten Commandments are not Moses' legislation. He is the courier, not the author. The people hear the thunder and beg him to go up alone, and from that day forward he lives in the gap by appointment.

The thread running through the Bible

Moses is stitched into the whole of Scripture. The Torah, the first five books, carries his voice; the prophets measure Israel by the covenant he delivered; the psalms sing the exodus centuries later; and the New Testament mentions him roughly eighty times, more than any other Old Testament figure.

What gets carried forward is the pattern of mediation. In Deuteronomy 18:15 Moses tells the people what to expect after him: "Yahweh your God will raise up to you a prophet from among you, of your brothers, like me. You shall listen to him." Israel waited for that prophet for fourteen centuries. And the book of Deuteronomy itself closes with an ache, because the successor had not yet come: "Since then, there has not arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom Yahweh knew face to face" (Deuteronomy 34:10). That verse is a tombstone and a promise at once. It says the office is empty. Someone is still expected.

The Gospels answer it deliberately. Jesus is carried into Egypt as an infant while a king slaughters little boys, comes out again, passes through water at His baptism, is tested forty days in the wilderness, and then climbs a mountain to teach with authority about the law. John states the relationship without embarrassment: "For the law was given through Moses. Grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ" (John 1:17). Not law bad, grace good. Law through a servant; grace and truth in person.

On the mountain of transfiguration, Moses stands beside Elijah and talks with Jesus about "his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem" (Luke 9:31). The Greek word behind "departure" is exodos. Moses is discussing the exodus that his own exodus was only a rehearsal for: not out of Egypt but out of death.

Hebrews draws the final line: "Moses indeed was faithful in all his house as a servant, for a testimony of those things which would afterward be spoken, but Christ is faithful as a Son over his house" (Hebrews 3:5-6). Faithful servant, faithful Son. And where Moses could plead in the gap but never close it, 1 Timothy 2:5 says the gap is closed: "For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." Moses stood between God and Israel and survived by grace. Jesus stood between God and sinners and did not survive; He died, and rose, and the gap became a road.

Even in the last book of the Bible Moses is still singing. The redeemed in Revelation 15:3 sing "the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb." Two songs, one melody.

The heart of his life

Three moments define him, and all three happen in the gap.

The first is the golden calf. Moses is on the mountain receiving the covenant while the people at the bottom are already breaking it. God's verdict is devastating, and He offers Moses the deal any ambitious leader would take: step aside, let this nation be destroyed, and I will make a great nation of you. Moses refuses. He reminds God of His own reputation and His own promises to Abraham, and then he offers something breathtaking: "if not, please blot me out of your book which you have written" (Exodus 32:32). Erase me instead of them. That sentence is the summit of Moses' life. He would rather lose his own place with God than watch the people he has every reason to despise be lost. Paul echoes the same anguish for Israel in Romans 9, and Christ fulfils it, because He actually was cut off for a people who had earned it.

The second moment is the request for presence. After the calf, God offers escort and blessing but hints at distance. Moses will not take it: "If your presence doesn't go with me, don't carry us up from here" (Exodus 33:15). He does not want the land without the Landowner. He wants God Himself, and God answers by hiding him in a cleft of rock and passing by in glory, so that Moses comes down with a face that has to be veiled. Of that intimacy Scripture says, "Yahweh spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend" (Exodus 33:11).

That intimacy explains the strange note in Numbers 12:3: "Now the man Moses was very humble, more than all the men who were on the surface of the earth." The Hebrew word carries the sense of being bowed down, worn low, dependent. This is not a man boasting about his modesty; it is the narrator's verdict on a leader who has stopped defending himself. When Miriam and Aaron attack his authority, Moses says nothing. When God strikes Miriam with leprosy, Moses prays for her: "Heal her, God, I beg you!" (Numbers 12:13). Humility here is not low self-esteem. It is what forty years of sheep and forty years of complaints do to a man who has learned that the Name, not the man, holds the nation together.

Humility is not thinking little of yourself. It is thinking little about yourself.

The third moment is his failure, and it is the gap that breaks him. At Meribah the people are thirsty and vicious again, and God tells him to speak to the rock. Instead Moses calls them rebels, and strikes it twice. Water comes anyway. But the verdict is final: "Because you didn't believe in me, to sanctify me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land which I have given them" (Numbers 20:12). It looks like a small thing. It was not. For forty years Moses had represented God to the people, and in one blaze of temper he misrepresented Him, making the God who gives water look like a God who has finally had enough. The mediator who carried everyone's sin at last carried his own.

What we learn from Moses

First, God calls people at the end of their competence, not the height of it. The Moses who was "mighty in his words and works" at forty is the Moses who says at eighty, "I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue" (Exodus 4:10). God did not use the prince; He used the shepherd. Those forty silent years in Midian were not wasted time between callings; they were the calling. If your résumé has quietly collapsed, you may be closer to usefulness than you were when it was impressive. God gave Moses no ability at the bush. He gave him a Name, a brother, and a stick.

Second, faith looks like a refusal before it looks like a miracle. Hebrews 11:24-26 says Moses "refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to share ill treatment with God's people than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a time, considering the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt." Note the ledger. He did not deny that Egypt had treasures; he weighed them and found them light. Faith is not pretending the world is worthless. It is doing the arithmetic honestly and walking away.

Third, intercession is the highest form of leadership. Moses' résumé is full of signs, but his glory is that he kept asking God to spare people who were actively slandering him. He pleaded for Israel after the calf, after the spies, after Korah, after the serpents. He pleaded for his sister who had undermined him. When he finally lost his temper, it was because he had carried that weight until he said, honestly, "I am not able to bear all this people alone, because it is too heavy for me" (Numbers 11:14). It was too heavy. That is exactly the point. The load he could not carry was carried to the cross by a stronger Mediator, and that is good news for everyone who has ever prayed for a family member until they were empty.

The Mirror

You are standing in a gap somewhere. Maybe it is a marriage where you are the only one still praying. Maybe it is a workplace where you are the only one who will not shade the numbers. Maybe it is a family where you have become the person everyone complains to and nobody thanks. Moses knows that address. He spent forty years there, and he will tell you two things.

The first is that the load you are carrying is genuinely too heavy for you, and admitting it is not unbelief. Moses said it out loud to God, and God did not scold him; He gave him seventy elders. If you are trying to be the mediator for your household, your team, your church, your aging parents, and quietly resenting all of them, the problem is not that you care too much. It is that you have taken a job that belongs to Christ. There is one Mediator. You are not Him, and you were never asked to be.

The second is harder. Meribah did not happen because Moses stopped believing. It happened because he was exhausted and angry and let his anger speak for God. Look at the last argument you had with your spouse or your teenager, the one where you were technically right. Did you make God look like He gives water, or like He has finally had enough of them? Most of us do not deny God in front of the people we love. We misrepresent Him. We strike when we were told to speak.

And yet. Moses struck the rock, was refused the land, and still stands on the mountain with Christ in glory. Discipline was real; disqualification was not. God buried Moses Himself, and then raised him honoured. If your record includes a Meribah, that is your comfort too.

Explained for children

Children meet Moses early, usually as the baby in the basket and the man who held up his stick at the sea. Both images are worth keeping, because both say the same thing in a way a four-year-old can hold: God rescues His people from water and from slavery, and He does it through someone who was scared.

When you explain Moses at home, start with the rescue, not the rules. Say that God's people were slaves and very sad, that God heard them crying, and that He chose a shy man with a shepherd's staff to go and say to the most powerful king in the world, "Let my people go." Then say the part children love most: God told Moses His name, I AM, which means God is always there, and He never runs out.

Older children can handle more. They can hear that Moses killed a man and ran away, that he made mistakes as a grown-up too, and that God still used him and still loved him. That combination, honest about failure and confident about grace, is exactly what a ten-year-old needs to hear about himself.

Teenagers can go further still, into the golden calf and Moses' willingness to be blotted out for people who had betrayed him, and into the question of why he was kept out of the land he had walked toward for forty years. That is where Moses stops being a flannelgraph figure and starts pointing to Jesus.

Faith.network offers separate Moses explanations written for different ages, for preschoolers around three to six, for elementary children roughly seven to twelve, and for teenagers twelve and up, so you can pick the version that fits the child in front of you rather than translating on the fly.

Frequently asked questions

In closing

Read Moses as a miracle worker and you will admire him from a safe distance. Read him as the man in the gap and he comes uncomfortably close, because most of us are standing in some gap we did not choose, praying for people who do not always thank us, holding up a stick over a sea that has not opened yet.

His life says two things at once. The gap is holy ground; God meets people there, speaks His Name there, and shows His back-glory there. And the gap is too heavy for you; the one man who filled it best still broke under it, still struck when he should have spoken, still died outside the land.

Which is exactly why Deuteronomy 34:10 leaves the door open. The prophet like Moses came, took the whole weight, and did not crack. If you want to follow this further, read Exodus 32 through 34 slowly with Hebrews 3 beside it, and watch a faithful servant hand the house over to the faithful Son. Then put down the load you were never strong enough to carry, and let the one Mediator carry you.