“The next day Moses sat down to judge the people, and they stood around Moses from morning until evening. When Moses’ father-in-law saw everything he was doing for them he asked, ‘What is this you’re doing for the people? Why are you alone sitting as judge, while all the people stand around you from morning until evening?’ Moses replied to his father-in-law, ‘Because the people come to me to inquire of God. Whenever they have a dispute, it comes to me, and I make a decision between one man and another. I teach them God’s statutes and laws.’ ‘What you’re doing is not good,’ Moses’s father-in-law said to him. ‘You will certainly wear out both yourself and these people who are with you, because the task is too heavy for you. You can’t do it alone.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Have you ever had someone tell you that you were wrong? Let me be more specific. Have you ever had someone tell you that you were wrong who was in such a position in your life that you were willing to trust their counsel, listen to their perspective, and genuinely consider making changes in light of their observations? One of those life truths that we know is true, but don’t care all that much to think about its being true, and which we certainly don’t want to hear from someone else that it is true is that we don’t do everything right all the time. Because of this, we need people in our lives willing to tell us. Let’s talk today about Moses’ experience with this and how it went.

We will get to the substance of Jethro’s counsel to Moses next week. Today, we are just going to focus on the counsel itself. Moses had enjoyed a really sweet time the night of his reunion with his wife and kids and especially his father-in-law. We didn’t talk about it at all yesterday, but part of Jethro’s response of praise for what God had done to Egypt and for Israel was to offer a burnt offering of praise and thanksgiving to God. This sounds like a religious thing, but while there would have been some liturgy to it, it was more of a social thing. These kind of burnt offerings were more like community barbecues than worship services in terms of their structure.

As a quick aside, rest assured, though, that community fellowship can be an act of worship if it is done to God’s glory. My own church community has a profound and powerfully good community time each week on Wednesday nights. For those who come, that is undoubtedly a time of worshiping the Lord together. Many of them may not be consciously thinking about it as a time of worship (something I probably need to address as the pastor), but by their regular loving fellowship with one another that fairly quickly and easily embraces new people, they are acknowledging God’s fundamentally relational character. By the joy of their fellowship they are celebrating it. And by being there in the first place, they are participating in it. Well, worship is nothing less than the acknowledgement of, celebration of, and participation in God’s character. We can explore that in more detail another time. Back to our story…

Moses really enjoyed this time of fellowship and celebration, but the next morning he had to get back to work. Have you ever wondered what Moses did on a day-to-day basis? We get a glimpse of it here. He sat as the primary judge over the people. The people had gotten used to his being their leader. They had grown accustomed to thinking about his being in a close and personal relationship with God – a closer and more personal relationship than they had. We touched on this briefly yesterday, but given that this story probably takes place after the initial giving of the law, establishing Moses as God’s lawgiver, but before they had moved on from Mount Sinai, they had grown used to his being the one to tell them what it looked like to live within the boundaries of God’s covenant with them (especially after their rather wildly breaking it early on in the process and facing the awful consequences of that, assuming for the moment this reunion came that late).

As a result of all of this, Moses spent his days helping the people solve their problems. I suspect this was the context of many, if not most, of the laws we see given to the people later on in the narrative. Because of how the text is presented, it is easy for us to imagine Moses’ standing there simply reciting lists of laws for the people to keep, but I suspect what we see here as a typical day for Moses (at least before his father-in-law intervened to set him on a better path) was their real source. The people brought a problem to Moses, and in the process of his helping them resolve it, he set in place a rule for what it looked like to live life inside of their covenant with God. This probably didn’t happen with all of the disputes he resolved, but big cases resulted in big decisions that were widely applicable. It’s the same way big Supreme Court cases today result in policy changes that apply to the whole country (Brown v the Board of Education, Obergefell, Dobbs, and etc.).

Well, while God used all of this to lay down laws for the people to help them understand what it looked like to live within His covenant relationship with Him, it was not a sustainable pattern for Moses to continue. He was slowly working himself to death, and the people were becoming lazy by having someone else make all their decisions for them. Furthermore, the real leaders among the people were not being developed and allowed to lead which was not going to be a long-term contribution to their health and development as a people. This was yet another example of God’s working with us where we are and moving us slowly in the direction we needed to go.

After watching this whole pattern play out for a couple of days, Jethro had seen enough. He could see that Moses was in a pattern that was ultimately going to lead to his undoing. He was going to burn out and the people were going to tire of having to keep coming to him to get all their problems resolved. This was not good for the people. It was not good for Moses. It was not good for his daughter and grandsons (and possibly great-grandsons). So, like any good father-in-law, he shared his concerns with Moses. He gave Moses the chance to explain why he was operating like this. Moses, for his part, partially throws the people under the bus and puffs himself up just a bit. Then, Jethro drops the truth bomb on him: this isn’t good. You’re not doing this right.

Can I speak personally for just a second? Guys like to be right. When that desire is healthy, we can become good and effective leaders. When it’s not, the effect of the curse in Genesis 3 comes powerfully into play. This desire out of balance becomes a desire to rule over others in a way only God has the right to do. This can obviously manifest itself in large and broadly significant ways, but it can also manifest itself in much smaller and petty ways. One of those ways is in the relationship between a son-in-law and father-in-law. If you happen to occupy one of those social positions, I suspect you know exactly what I’m talking about. There were a lot of people who could have perhaps given Moses this counsel and he would have been happy to receive it. Jethro doesn’t seem like one who would have been toward the top of that list.

When I am at my humblest point (something that, admittedly, doesn’t happen very often), I greatly appreciate the wisdom and insight of my two fathers-in-law. The two men could hardly be more different from one another, and yet they are both filled with a lifetime of wisdom and experience from which I can benefit a great deal if I’m willing to receive it. At my worst, I’m less gracious. The same thing is true in a similar but different way in the relationship between daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law. The fact that Moses not only doesn’t get upset at Jethro’s uninvited counsel, but heeds it, speaks rather highly of his personal humility. The fact that he was willing to take this counsel when he was the leader of a whole nation speaks even more highly of it.

Regardless of where hard-to-receive but godly counsel originates, though, we are wise to take it. This isn’t easy as it means acknowledging the thing we are perhaps most loath to acknowledge: that we aren’t always right. And God has a funny way of presenting this counsel to us in ways that require humility (and sometimes humiliation) in order to receive it. Yet if we will listen and receive, there is much grace and good that can come of it. If Moses could do it, so can we. Be on the lookout for times and places when God is giving you needed guidance, even if that guidance happens to be coming from an unexpected and even unwanted source. If you will listen and listen well, you’ll absolutely be glad that you did.