This was the day when God decided to break a forty-year silence. Pause and let that sink in! Through four decades in Midian, we have no record of God’s speaking to Moses. Not even once. The day that was going to shatter that silence, however, dawned like every other day in the wilderness.

The desert is a place of obscurity. Moses had to cope with being a nobody. All his adolescent and adult life, he had been a big-time somebody. The spotlight followed his every move, much as the contemporary spotlight follows Britain’s Prince William and Prince Harry.

You’d better believe that Moses, though tucked away in a corner of that wasteland, heard the latest news from the travelers in caravans making their way up from Egypt through the Midian desert. When Moses learned the Hebrews were crying out, his heart must have turned over within him.

Pay close attention to that last sentence. “Moses was willing to dwell with the man.” How good that is. Here is a man he had never met; an obscure desert priest and shepherd, who had spent a lifetime raising sheep (and daughters!) in the desolate patch of land known as Midian.

Moses, the Prince of Egypt, alias Prince Charming, watering animals? Why? Because Moses had just choked down the biggest wedge of humble pie you can imagine. By now, the man was ready to do anything. Isn’t it interesting, though, that in this incident Moses was allowed to be a deliverer on an immensely smaller scale?

Spiritual ends are never achieved by carnal means. Back in Egypt, as you may recall, Moses had “looked this way and that,” then murdered an Egyptian and buried him with sand. As we have already noted, Moses may have thought he was following God’s plan in that moment, but he never bothered to check signals.

Moses took a forty-story fall. As we pick up the biblical account, he’s a heavy-hearted, bruised-and-battered soul who has come to a sudden stop at the bottom. In a matter of mere days, he has stepped off the top of the pyramid as Pharaoh-designate and down to a bedraggled, penniless fugitive on the backside of Zipville.

Moses was a frightened and disillusioned fugitive running, escaping for his very life. His vaunted education now meant nothing to him. His knowledge of hieroglyphics and Egyptian culture gave him no comfort.

First surprise. Next confusion, followed by fear, like icy fingers around the heart. When Moses’ well-kept secret hit the prime-time networks, he got the shakes. And acting on fear, the biblical account states that “he fled from the presence of Pharaoh.” Why did he run? Verse 15 tells us, “Pharaoh tried to kill Moses.”