To read Part 1, go here.

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We love a story like Moses’s —

A baby born into humble beginnings and sentenced to die, simply for being a boy.

An infant plucked from the jaws of death by a princess and raised in a palace.

A voice for the oppressed, arrogant though he was at the beginning.

A righteous man who still sinned.

A royal son who fled for his life and lived in obscurity for 40 years.

A once wannabe leader who, when finally called into big-time service for God forty years later, begged to get out of it.

We love Moses because he was human and ordinary, just like us. Yet God used him for divine and extraordinary purposes.

Yesterday we explored the educational path of Moses, how his parents used those crucial early years when he lived with them to teach about Jehovah and provide a religious education. But his parents had to release their young child yet again when it was time for Moses to be received as an adopted son into the royal Egyptian palace, a palace that was at the center of knowledge in the ancient world.

And yet completely pagan.

To quote from yesterday,

God used godless people for the formal education of one of the greatest leaders the world has ever known.

And he would need it.

Moses’s story reminds us that God not only supersedes educational paths, he uses each educational path — whether “faith-based” or “pagan” — for his divine purposes. The culture that educated Moses for decades was also the culture he would one day confront as he advocated for the release of God’s people from Egyptian slavery. The most sophisticated diplomats and ambassadors even today could only hope for the type of pedigree that God provided Moses. 

You see, our paths are our preparation. 

And if we truly believe this, we must ask ourselves a difficult question: who are we to dictate which ways are legitimate and usable?

Too many Christians are quick to discount any education where God has been removed. But that sort of thinking makes us much bigger than we really are and makes God much smaller than He really is. It limits the scope of his redemptive work. 

Also? God is not so easily removed.

Rooted in polytheistic idolatry, Moses lived in a culture that would make our heads spin today. If ever we’d rush to homeschool or private school in the name of protecting our children, surely it would be in that situation. But Moses’s parents didn’t have that option.

So God used the palace — with all of its occult practices and unbelief in the one true God — to preserve and prepare Moses for all that was to come.

And God used the brief years young Moses had with his family of origin — a blip on the radar screen of his life — to carve a Hebrew identity into his spirit, to plant the seeds of faith. And it was enough, even against the godless winds that surely buffeted his faith throughout the ensuing decades. It was enough because God is enough.

With God at the helm, it is all sacred. With God at the helm, we begin to see that the sacred / secular divide is a false dichotomy.

Whether in a mathematical equation that invites us to a deeper understanding of the universe, or a work of art that invites us to a deeper understanding of ourselves, the Good, the Beautiful, and the True — they all find their source in God. He is the creator, the architect, the origin. We can declare him as truth or declare him as myth, but we nonetheless bear his image and so does our work in the world — our science, our literature, our math, our art, our myriad vocations.

Let the long-ago life of Moses speak truth and encouragement into our modern struggles today. God is the same. He leads and equips his people through more ways than we can imagine. This means we can do a lot less stressing and a lot more trusting. We can believe that God will use the path we’ve chosen for our children in ways that far surpass our imaginations.

He is always bigger.

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How has your own educational path and life experience prepared you in unique ways? 

For all the posts in this 31-day series, go here. And to read the other posts I’ve written on topic of schooling, you can go here and find them all in one place.

I’m linking up with The Nester and her tribe of 31 Dayers.

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