Forty Years on the Back Side of the Desert

The man who would eventually stand in front of the most powerful ruler in the world spent the previous forty years watching sheep that were not his.

Not his flock. His father in law's. He had married into a family in a country he had run to, and he was keeping somebody else's animals in the emptiest place in that region, and the phrase the Bible uses for where he was is one of the best descriptions of a long dry stretch ever written.

The back side of the desert.

Not the desert. The back of it. The part behind the part nobody goes to.

He was eighty years old at the burning bush. He had been forty when he left the palace, which means the middle forty years of his life, the whole span most men consider their working life, went into livestock in the back of nowhere with nobody watching and nothing happening.

And then read what happens after the bush. He leads two million people out of Egypt and into that same wilderness, and he keeps them alive out there for forty years.

He knew that ground. He had walked it for four decades with animals, which means he knew where water was, where the passes were, which routes a large slow group could survive. The forty years that looked like a burial were a survey.

Where the text puts him

Here is the verse, and every detail in it is doing work.

Now Moses kept the flock of Jethro his father in law, the priest of Midian: and he led the flock to the backside of the desert, and came to the mountain of God, even to Horeb. (Exodus 3:1, King James Version)

He led the flock to the back side of the desert, and came to the mountain of God.

Those are the same sentence. The ordinary job took him to the place where God was, and he was not going there to meet God. He was going there because that is where the grazing was that week.

That is how it usually happens. Nobody schedules a burning bush. He was at work.

You are on the road to something while you are doing something ordinary, and He has never once needed you to arrange the meeting. That is not me making a coincidence into a doctrine. Exodus 3:1 puts the flock and the mountain of God in one sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a person alert on an ordinary Tuesday.

What forty years of shepherding actually built

I want to count the skills, because this is not a vague point about patience.

He learned to move a large, slow, complaining group across dangerous ground. He learned where water was in a place with almost none. He learned to spend long periods with no feedback and no audience, which is the exact conditioning required for a man who is about to spend forty more years being complained at by two million people.

And he learned to be nobody. That is not small. The man who came out of that palace at forty was a man who killed somebody in a temper and then checked to see if anybody saw. The man at the bush argues that he is not qualified and that nobody will listen to him.

That is a different man. And the difference took forty years and a lot of sheep.

You have been changed by a stretch you cannot see the point of, and God has never once wasted a decade on anybody. Exodus 3:1 has him keeping a flock right up to the moment of his call, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a person see what a long season actually deposited.

The bush was not a reward for waiting well

I need to say this carefully, because the version of this message people usually hear is a trade.

Nobody says it out loud but the implication is everywhere: endure the wilderness beautifully and God will hand you the bush. Do your hidden years right and the promotion comes.

That is not what happened. He did not wait beautifully. He had run from a killing, he had made a life somewhere else, and by all appearances he had settled. He named his first son a word meaning stranger, because he said he had been a stranger in a strange land. That is not a man on tiptoe waiting for a call. That is a man who has moved on.

And God showed up anyway.

You are not being graded on how well you have handled this, and He has never once made His arrival conditional on your attitude. Exodus 3 has God initiate everything while Moses is simply at work, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a person from turning grace into a performance review.

The wilderness was not the point either

And I have to guard the other side, because there is a version of this that romanticizes a hard stretch and I will not do that.

Those forty years were not glorious. He was not building a legend. He was tired, and he had lost a whole life, and Scripture does not spend one verse telling you he felt fulfilled about it.

I am not going to tell anybody that their long stretch is beautiful. Some of them are just long. What I will tell you is that it is not empty, because it is not possible for a person to spend a decade doing anything and come out carrying nothing.

The question is never whether something was deposited. It is whether anybody has counted it.

You are carrying more than you can name, and it has never once been necessary for a season to feel meaningful to have been useful. Exodus 3:1 records the job plainly with no romance attached, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes an honest look at a hard stretch and finds what is actually in a person's hands.