Nature is what people think of as pre-wiring and is influenced by genetic inheritance and other biological factors. Nurture is generally understood as the influence of external factors in the environment in which we live that exposes individuals to new experiences daily that form their thinking and ultimately their responses to life. In other words, experience is a good teacher no matter who you are “wired.”  From a scientific perspective, “nature” refers to the biological/genetic predispositions that impact one’s human traits — physical, emotional, and intellectual. “Nurture,” in contrast, describes the influence of learning and other “environmental” factors on these traits.

But God’s perspective comes from a much higher thinking—higher than humans!

God’s Word, our teacher about God, tells us how God created all of us.  God knows us from the inside out and outside in.  God knew us before we were born. God shaped us in the womb.  God sees and knows what is in our hearts.  God created us with purpose.  God created us to worship Him and love Him back. God’s love for us in unchanging and his mercies are new each day.  God provides for His created who believe and trust Him.  God will use unbelievers in his work to protect us as His will is fulfilled.  The Psalms are filled with this truth about God! 

God, who created all, is in and over all, is involved.  He uses all our experiences in life to teach us as he leads us to his perfect and pleasing will and purpose for our existence on earth—all for His glory and our good!  The nature versus nurture thinking is merely the means to greater wisdom and thinking. God uses all to guide us to all He is and wants us to be!  

God will use everything in the life of Moses to lead Him to a much greater purpose with a plan to rescue the Hebrews from tortuous slavery.  As we read, observe the life of Moses from God’s perspective.  God is in all the details!  Watch as he steers Moses to where He needs to be with what God wants Him to do. With God, everything changes in the life of Moses, born a Hebrew but raised an Egyptian.  With God, both nature and nurture instilled in Moses will be used as influencers; but it is the power of God who will work through Moses to lead the Hebrew nation out of bondage to worship Him freely.

Moses might have been born of a Hebrew couple, but he was schooled as an Egyptian. Watch and learn how the story of God in Moses displays the awesome power of our sovereign God Almighty!  God has a plan. God will see to it that the plan is fulfilled. 

Exodus 2

The Birth of Moses

Now a man of the tribe of Levi married a Levite woman, ² and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. When she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months. ³ But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. ⁴ His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him.

⁵ Then Pharaoh’s daughter went down to the Nile to bathe, and her attendants were walking along the riverbank. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her female slave to get it. ⁶ She opened it and saw the baby. He was crying, and she felt sorry for him. “This is one of the Hebrew babies,” she said.

⁷ Then his sister asked Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you?”

⁸“Yes, go,” she answered. So the girl went and got the baby’s mother. ⁹ Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this baby and nurse him for me, and I will pay you.” So the woman took the baby and nursed him. ¹⁰ When the child grew older, she took him to Pharaoh’s daughter and he became her son. She named him Moses, saying, “I drew him out of the water.”

Moses Flees to Midian

¹¹ One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to where his own people were and watched them at their hard labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people. ¹² Looking this way and that and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. ¹³ The next day he went out and saw two Hebrews fighting. He asked the one in the wrong, “Why are you hitting your fellow Hebrew?”

¹⁴ The man said, “Who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian?” Then Moses was afraid and thought, “What I did must have become known.”

¹⁵ When Pharaoh heard of this, he tried to kill Moses, but Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian, where he sat down by a well. ¹⁶ Now a priest of Midian had seven daughters, and they came to draw water and fill the troughs to water their father’s flock. ¹⁷ Some shepherds came along and drove them away, but Moses got up and came to their rescue and watered their flock.

¹⁸ When the girls returned to Reuel their father, he asked them, “Why have you returned so early today?”

¹⁹ They answered, “An Egyptian rescued us from the shepherds. He even drew water for us and watered the flock.”

²⁰ “And where is he?” Reuel asked his daughters. “Why did you leave him? Invite him to have something to eat.”

²¹ Moses agreed to stay with the man, who gave his daughter Zipporah to Moses in marriage. ²² Zipporah gave birth to a son, and Moses named him Gershom, saying, “I have become a foreigner in a foreign land.”

²³ During that long period, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. ²⁴ God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. ²⁵ So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them.

WHAT DO WE LEARN—HOW DO WE RESPOND?

Moses is not perfect.  He has lived the privileged life in the palace as the adopted son of Pharoah’s daughter.  While out strolling the grounds, he sees up close the horrid acts of torture on his people of birth held in bondage and his heart goes out to them.  Moses kills the Egyptian bully and hides him in the sand.  Oh, young Moses, did you really thing that would work?  The Hebrews know that his act of murder, though well intentioned, will serve to make matters worse for them. 

Do we jump into arguments, “following our hearts,” thinking we have the power to “fix” the situation?  Yes, we all do it.  What do we learn from God about ourselves?

God does not give up on Moses.  Moses may be “on the run” from the Hebrews and the Egyptians who are angry with him but God knows what Moses needs before Moses knows!  God guides Moses to another, non-Egyptian environment to work on his inner being among those who love God and follow in His ways.  What do we learn?  God does not give up on us!  When we think all is lost, that is the time God does His best work in us!

ICYMI—God’s involvement began from the birth of Moses to his marriage (so far):

• God used a baby’s tears to control the heart of a powerful princess, and He used Miriam’s words to arrange for the baby’s mother to raise the boy and get paid for it! When the Lord wants to accomplish a mighty work, He often starts by sending a baby. 😉
• Moses spent his first forty years (Acts 7:23) serving in the Egyptian bureaucracy. (Some students think he was being groomed to be the next pharaoh.) Egypt seems the least likely place for God to start training a leader, but God’s ways are not our ways.
• Moses’ failure to help free the Israelites must have devastated him. That’s why God took him to Midian and made him a shepherd for forty years. He had to learn that deliverance would come from God’s hand, not his own hand.
• The man who was “mighty in words and deeds” is now in the lonely pastures taking care of stubborn sheep, but that was just the kind of preparation he needed for leading a nation of stubborn people. Israel was God’s special flock (Ps. 100:3) and Moses his chosen shepherd. 
• Moses’ forty years of waiting and working prepared him for a lifetime of faithful ministry. God doesn’t lay hands suddenly on His servants but takes time to equip them for their work.
• God is not done with Moses yet—there’s much more to come!

How do we respond?  Be still, let go, and let God do his work in us today as our humbled response to His good, pleasing, and perfect will.

“^1-2 So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.” Romans 12:1-2, MSG

When the right time comes, God immediately goes to work.  God is not finished with us yet, either!

Lord, God,

You are our amazing God who hears, leads, protects, provides, heals, teaches, and equips us for life here until we get there with you!  After reading how you lead a princess to the tears of a baby who needed to be protected, I know there is nothing you do not notice in our lives.  There is nothing you will not do in protection of us as we seek you and your purpose for our lives!  There is nothing you do not notice because you are our God who sees!  Wow.  Mere words cannot express the gratitude I have right now!  To you be the glory, honor, and praise.  I give you my life for you are Life to me!

In Jesus Name, Our Rescue and our Lord, Amen