God works in His own way.

He answered, “Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” Then Moses was afraid, and thought, “Surely the thing is known.” When Pharaoh heard of it, he sought to kill Moses. But Moses fled from Pharaoh and stayed in the land of Midian. And he sat down by a well.

Exodus 2:14-15

God will use the people that we might think are not worth considering. Moses is just that kind of person. God sovereignty saved him as an infant from death. He protected this little Israelite baby in the very household of Pharaoh... the king that had ordered the infanticide of Hebrew boys. Moses was raised in the courts of Egypt, but as a young man he indentified with the painful oppression of his enslaved kinsman trapped in state-mandated racist servitude. But Moses was also impulsive and violent. He struck down and killed an Egyptian taskmaster that he saw beating Hebrew slaves. Moses thought that he committed murder in secret and would get away with it.

But evidently by the next day it was public knowledge and Moses impulsively fled Egypt, becoming a fugitive from justice, guilty of murder. From the look of it at this point in his story, he does not seem to be the kind of person we’d respect as leadership material. In America today he’d be just another minority thrown in prison and considered a hopeless statistic. But God had very different plans. In Midian, God would cool down this hot-tempered fugitive by marrying him into a family of shepherds. And in this domestic setting, with a wife and family and his herds to care for, God calmly worked on Moses, turning a murderer into a shepherd whom He would eventually call to lead Israel out of slavery and into the freedom of living as His covenant people.

The lesson learned from the story of the development of Moses is that God graciously builds leaders as He sees fit, despite their past, and despite what others may think. And God will not be bound by human conventions and expectations when He does this! Yes, Moses was trained in Pharaoh’s courts. But it was not Egyptian protocol that made him a leader. One mistake ruined him for leading in Egypt’s estimation. But God would mold Moses despite the world’s rejection of him. God graciously makes new lives from stubborn sinners and He gets the glory when He does this!