During the Exodus, God intervened to help Moses solve his leadership problem: by adding additional leaders.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the eleventh chapter of Numbers (Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29). This is a part of the Exodus story, where so many of the events seem to follow this general pattern:
- The people of Israel out there in the wild come to Moses with a problem.
- Moses panics and prays to God that horrible things are happening and why on earth did you ever do this to me?
- And then God fixes it.
And that’s pretty much what we have here. The people were hungry. They came to Moses. They said, “We are tired of manna” (miraculous food… I guess you’d get tired of it). Moses went to God and said, Why did you do this to me? Did I give birth to this people that you expect me to take care of them?”
Now, usually at this point in the story, I’d be telling you about what God did in order to relieve the initial problem. But this time, God did something different (later, God did fix the initial problem). Before that, however, God said, Moses, you’re absolutely right. You cannot carry this people all by yourself as if they were a child and you were their mother. You need help.
And so seventy elders were appointed to become a leadership team with Moses. Sixty-eight of them reported for the initial time in which God and Moses would commission them to their work. Two of them, however, were missing: yet even they responded to the presence of the Spirit of God by declaring God’s grace and mercy in the other places in the camp where they were. When people told Moses that they were doing it, Moses replied, finally seeing the wisdom of additional leadership, “Would that everyone would prophesy.”
We tend to think of leadership as being the acts of a single person. There isn’t much substitute, actually, for somebody to step out, to have a vision, to encourage people to participate in it, join it, and support it. There also isn’t a substitute for other leadership. A single person cannot do it all, and particularly not as the group of people they’re leading gets larger. We all have our roles to play as we gather with other people in order to accomplish significant things, whether that be in a family, whether that be in a social group, whether that be in a workplace, whether that be in the Church.
Find your place and role for that particular activity. Because at one moment you might be the senior leader in one group, you might find yourself a junior leader at the same time in another group. And later on you might find yourself being the one who carries on with the work and supports the other leaders to make God’s grace and love and mercy known.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
