d the
Hebrews in their wanderings. Here he had opportunity to learn patience
and meditate and gain the ability to wait on God. Here God finally
appeared to him and gave him definite and ample instructions for his
task of delivering out of bondage this crushed and ignorant slave race
and for making of them a nation of the purest spiritual and moral
ideals the world has ever known. (3) _Forty years as leader and
lawgiver for Israel_ while they tabernacled in the wilderness.

Perhaps three reasons led Moses to undertake the task of leaving
Midian and championing the cause of Israel. (1) He had a vision of God
the holy one of all power who would be with him. (2) The conviction
that the time was ripe, because of the death of the king of Egypt and
the years of weak government that followed. (3) By over-ruling all
objections God gave him an overwhelming sense of his responsibility in
the matter. He saw it as his personal duty.

The call of Moses consists of two elements. (1) _The human element_
which consisted of a knowledge of the needs of the Hebrew people. To
him, as to all great leaders and benefactors of the race, the cry of
the oppressed or needy constituted the first element of a call to
enlist in their service. (2) _The divine element_. God heard the cry
of his people and remembered his covenant with Abraham and appeared to
Moses in a burning bush and sent him to deliver them from under the
tyranny of Pharaoh. Like Isaiah (Is. Ch.6) he not only saw the need of
his people but also the holy God calling him to supply the need.

Moses task was three fold: (1) Religious: He was to show in Egypt
weakness of the idolatrous worship and to establish in the wilderness
the true worship of one and only God who is ruler of all. (2)
_Political:_ He was to overcome the power of the mighty Pharaoh and
deliver a people of 600,000 men besides the children with their herds
and flocks out of his territory. Then, too, he was to give them laws
and so connect them together that as a nation they would survive the
hostile nations around them and the civil strife and dissensions
within. (3) _Social_: He was also called upon to provide rules by
which, to keep clean not only the individual, but his family, and to
teach them right relations to each other. In carrying out this
program, it devolved upon him to provide an elaborate code of civil,
sanitary, ceremonial, moral and religious laws.

The Great Deliverance. The deliverance may be proper