Exodus 18:2-5

Exo. 18:2-5. What is here related, if that clause in 2d verse, "after he had sent her back," had not been inserted, would have been much such a difficulty as there is in some other parts of the Scripture history through the brevity of the relation. We have an account that Moses, when he went from Jethro into Egypt, took his wife and his children with him; and yet here we have an account of Jethro's bringing of them to him in the wilderness from his own house, as if Moses had not taken them with him when he went away. We should have been ready to suspect that this was a blunder in the Historian, had it not been here hinted that Moses had at some time sent her back, for we have no account of her being sent back anywhere else. We may here observe the remarkable self-denial Moses subjected himself to, whereby he was fitted for those privileges he afterwards received of God, and which was rewarded by these privileges. First, he refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter; he renounced the wealth and glory and pleasures of the kingdom of Egypt, that he might have had as the heir of Pharaoh's crown, choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God. All this he forsook for a share with God's people. And then he met with another great trial; he was banished away from those whose company he preferred to all the glory of Egypt; yet he might not enjoy that, but was driven away alone into the wilderness, wandering in a poor disconsolate, desolate condition, he knew not whither; and now, after he had dwelt forty years in the land of Midian, in the family of Jethro, into which he had married, and had a family and a place of rest there, he was called on God's errand to forsake his wife and children without ever expecting to see them any more, and once more to leave all that he had to follow Christ.

Corol. Hence we may learn that ministers, in order to fit them for the service of Christ, should be brought to be willing to be cast off even by their own people, by saints, by those to whose good especially they are ministers. Moses was cast off by his brethren the Midianites.