Moses and the Unexpected Breakdown He Should Have Seen Coming

“What if Moses and God were both having a bad day at the same time?”

I heard a preacher ask this once. If you get the joke, it’s because you remember that Moses had his good days and his bad days.

On one of his best days, Moses interceded for Israel when God was ready to destroy them. Actually, God had made Moses an offer: “Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, in order that I may make a great nation of you.” (Exodus 32:10 ESV)

According to the joke, this was God having a bad day. (It’s a joke!)

God was angry was because the Israelites had just made a golden calf. Moses hadn’t seen it yet. He was still on Mount Sinai, where he had just spent forty days in God’s presence.

Moses turned down God’s offer to make give him a nation of his own. Then he went down to see the golden calf for himself. He was angry as well, but he still interceded for them. Those forty days with God had prepared him.

But Moses had his bad days as well. One of them was when he struck a rock instead of simply speaking to it, like he was instructed to do (Numbers 20:2–13).

And there was another time, before that, when Moses had what I call his “Job moment.”

I say this because the prayer of Moses in Numbers 11:15 looks like it could have been taken right out of the book of Job: “If you will treat me like this, kill me at once, if I find favor in your sight, that I may not see my wretchedness.” (Numbers 11:15 ESV)

What had caused this reaction?

The people were complaining about their diet. They wanted better food.

It was nothing as serious as the golden calf incident, but it was enough to push Moses over the edge.

But if it wasn’t that, it would have been something else. The real reason for Moses’s breakdown was burn-out. His job was too hard. “I am not able to carry all this people alone,” he told God, “the burden is too heavy for me.” (Numbers 11:14 ESV)

Fortunately for Moses, God was having a good day. God told Moses to gather seventy elders from the people of Israel. Moses did so. God “took some of the Spirit that was on him and put it on the seventy elders.” (Numbers 11:25 ESV)

The lesson to take away from this is not that God answers “kill-me-now” prayers. I think God would have fixed that problem for Moses if he had asked earlier, and if he had asked more politely.

Here are some lessons I think we can take away from the story:

• Putting too much of a burden on yourself will lead to a breakdown
• This is not good for anybody, and it can undo some of the good you were able to accomplish by yourself for while
• Solve the problem before the breakdown comes
• It might not be a major crisis that triggers the breakdown, it might just be more of the same for one day too many
• Spend a lot of time with God, and you will be refreshed