Exodus 3:1

A Famous Training Ground

Now Moses was keeping the flock of Jethro his father in law, the priest of Midian: and he led the flock to the back of the wilderness. Exodus 3:1.

Not very long ago a wonderful religious poem appeared. When people read it, they all wanted to know who the writer was, and where he had got such a deep knowledge of the heart of man. After his death, the story of his life was told. It had been a very, very sad life. He had been for a long time “at the back of the wilderness.” But God had spoken to him there, and he could not keep silence: he wrote poems that made the world wonder. You try to think where the poet's wilderness could be, I daresay. It was the streets of a great city and that poet's name was Francis Thompson. And the poem that he wrote is called “The Hound of Heaven.” You will read it some day when you are a little older, and then you will marvel too.

The wilderness that Moses knew was the side of a rugged mountain. You remember how he came there. One day he was so angry at an Egyptian for ill- treating one of the Hebrew slaves that he forgot everything except that he also was a Hebrew, and slew the man. After that the palace where he had been brought up by Pharaoh's daughter was unsafe for him, and he had to flee from the wrath of Pharaoh.

He travelled and travelled until he came to a weird mountain region. The loneliness and desolation of it seemed in keeping with his state of mind, so he settled there and became a shepherd. It was a place with no outlet for his learning or his ambitions. Moses had had the best education that Egypt could give. He had had opportunities of studying science, art, and philosophy everything in fact that would fit him for the position of an Egyptian noble and statesman. And now he, who from childhood had known what it was to wear only the finest linen, was clothed in the coarse hair-cloth of the mountain shepherd!

We cannot tell what his thoughts were, or what struggles he went through in his mind. But we know this. He went into the desert a young man apparently born to command, ready to smite down if he were not obeyed; and after a long time he came out of it one of the meekest men that ever lived. The wilderness, where day after day he led his flocks to the little fertile places near the streams on the mountain-side, was his training ground. It was Moses the meek man that God needed. When Moses had learnt his lesson God called him, and called him in this very wilderness

Men in the loneliness of the prairies of America have felt conscious of what they called an “Awful Presence,” and have come out of the great solitude different beings. We can imagine that for Moses every bush blazed with glory, and that the voice of God calling him to go forth to help his brothers brought him no surprise. Moses' wilderness was a great wilderness, and his call a great call.

But even boys and girls may have their time of being in the wilderness. One of my earliest recollections is of peeping in at the door of a homely parlor and seeing a boy of seven or eight years old he seemed big to me then leaning with his elbows on a table, his hands covering his face. He had met with an accident at school; he knew that his eye was badly hurt, and he was thinking, “Perhaps I shall be blind all my life.” To one who was the very spirit of fun in the playground, that seemed a hard lot indeed. He was in the wilderness. Many years afterwards I came to know that God had spoken to him there.

Your wilderness may be quite near home in a plain little parlor, at a kitchen fireside. A girl may feel a call to remain by her father and mother, when she would fain be out in the world working. A boy's wilderness! What could it be? He has so much to make life happy. “I would like to be a minister like father,” said a boy to his grandmother the other day; “but but Granny and his voice broke why is it that I can't speak properly like Jim?” His heart was sore because of a stammer with which he had been born. You understand how he felt, don't you, boys? He was at “the back of the wilderness.”

Why has the wilderness become such a famous training ground for men and women and boys and girls? It is because the wilderness is a place where God often meets with people. Then it becomes holy so holy that we feel we must “take off our shoes from off our feet” when we hear Him saying, “Take courage, I will be with you and help you.” Boys and girls, we need not fear the wilderness. God is our Friend there and everywhere.