Jethro’s Advice

Story:  Jethro’s Advice

Passage: Exodus 18

Characters:  Moses, Aaron, Jethro

Summary:    Jethro met Israel with Moses’ wife and children.  Moses met with him and filled him in on all that had happened.  Jethro worshipped God.  Moses sat down to be a judge for the people and Jethro suggested he set up people who could do that for him.  He followed Jethro’s advice.

  

Notes:  I find it interesting that Moses did not have his wife and kids with him this whole time!  Apparently at some point he had sent them home.  I suspect it was because he expected some resistance from Pharaoh and he thought it would be safer to send them on.  When Moses told Jethro what had happened, he worshipped God.  Jethro realized that these events showed that God is greater than all other gods.  When Moses told him about the events, he started with what God had done to Egypt, then he talked about their hardships in the wilderness, and then God’s deliverance.  Unlike Israel, Moses did not stop his story with the hardships but continued on to God’s deliverance from the hardship.  This is significant because we all face hardship and it is easy to focus on that.  But if we don’t focus on how God dealt with the hardship, we will end up as depressed negative people with no trust in God.  The whole episode with the judges is interesting as well.  Moses was handling all of the cases Israelites had with each other.  Can you imagine the tens of thousands of people having only one judge?  This is obviously something Moses had not received a structure for.   As a go between between them and God, Moses was taking all of the authority on himself to interpret God’s laws for the people.  Jethro was a little more practical.  He suggested a structure with judges over ten, fifty, a hundred, and a thousand people.  These judges would handle smaller cases within their own groups.  Larger cases would be brought to Moses.  This allowed him to focus on leading the nation and communicating with God.  Jethro claimed that God would be with this plan and Moses obeyed.  Jethro is therefore the father of our judicial system!  Not really, but it is a similar setup.  Moses was the equivalent of the Supreme Court.  These judges had the responsibility of hearing a case and interpreting God’s laws for the people in reference to the case. 

Questions:  How long was Moses’ family with Jethro?  Did Jethro believe in God?  Where did Jethro get his idea?  Did it come from God?  How did Moses choose these judges?

Lessons:  One lesson I can see here is to not focus on your hardships but to trust God and when he delivers you, to focus on His deliverance.  The other lesson I see is to share the load.  Moses took the full load of judging the people on himself.  This would have worn him out and rendered him incapable of leading the nation the way he needed to.  It was not wrong for him to give that authority to others.  It just allowed him to focus his efforts on his own calling.