There’s a phrase that’s used in Old Testament and New Testament scholarship that you may have heard; it’s the phrase, “the silent years." What that refers to is the period between the last of the Old Testament prophets, Malachi, and the appearance of God to Zechariah in the New Testament to announce the birth of John the Baptist—four centuries in which there was no new revelation from God. God was silent. Now there’s a period like that in the early history of Israel, and about the same length of time. 

The last verses of Exodus 2 say, “The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. And God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them” (vv. 23-25). The Bible startles us from time to time by these understatements. God was concerned about them. I’ll say He was! He was about to shake heaven and earth to get them out of Egypt and bring them into their own land.

When Moses was forty years old, there came this momentous turning point in his life. We all have turning points in our lives, decisions we make that affect what happens afterward. But it is hard to imagine any turning point in anyone’s life more monumental than what happened with Moses when he threw in his lot with his people and turned his back on the pleasures of Egypt.

Get into the habit of learning to think like God. If you get into the habit of looking for the remnant, you’re going to find it. They will not be the people the world is generally looking to for doing important things. It says in the Bible that the people God uses are the foolish, the weak, and the despised. And the reason He does that is because it’s through them that He can display His wisdom and reveal His righteousness. So look for people like that. And then when you’ve found them, get alongside them and work with them to see what God will do.

This princess came down to the water, where she saw the little ark. Her slave girls were there, and she sent them to fetch it. When they opened it up there was a child, and the child was crying. Seeing this touched the heart of this woman. And so the God of providence, who had ordered the steps of the princess to the Nile at the very time that Moses was there in the basket (having been placed there by his mother), caused the baby to cry and touch the heart of the woman. And He softened the heart of this high-born lady toward the Hebrew child. Proverbs 21:1 says, “The king’s heart is in the hand of the LORD, and he directs it like a watercourse wherever he pleases." It’s not only the king’s heart, it’s the king’s daughter’s heart, too. And that’s what He did on this occasion.