A Moses Model for Twenty-First Century America

Volume 13, Issue 4

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The founders of the American Republic had a thing about the Biblical personality of Moses, as reported in “America’s Prophet: How the Story of Moses Shaped America” by Bruce Feller. In a somewhat similar concept many of today’s evangelical Christians look toward Moses as a leadership model for ministry.

What if Moses were to appear on Wall Street? Speaking to all the brokers and other financial barons he might say, “I have come to lead you out of the bondage of money and atheistic materialism. You have been enslaved too long by the Pharaohs of greed, lust, and false gods.”

They would probably assume he was some sort of robotic illusion, for all the truly enlightened movers of the worlds of trade, commerce and finance know that the Bible is just a collection of stories and myths fabricated by primitive Jewish ancestors, to bring a sense of morality to the ancient world. That story about plagues in Egypt, the parting of the Red Sea, giving of some law on some mountain, and forty years of wandering in the wilderness eating manna, are just a bunch of twaddle.

“They, those Jews, were just so primitive; we have evolved way beyond that!”

Thus rejected, a modern day Moses might find a bit more influence by going directly to the people whom the Wall Street elite think are already in the wilderness, and have no chance of ever evolving to anything other than some hybrid consumptive-service debt-burdened droid (of course with the appropriate technology gadget and the right apps).

In that ecosystem where green is a color and not a religion, the evangelical Christian is taught to believe that Moses is a type of Jesus. I suppose the analogy goes, since Jesus was perfect, and Moses and we are not, if we just say that Moses was a type of Jesus, then we can lead the sheep to the Promised Land, or at least to The Rapture.

“That is- -just like Moses, we alone know the way, and if you do not agree, it is a big bad world out there you might consider exploring.”

However on further critical open highway exploration, it is quite apparent that the Moses being a type of Jesus is sort of a twentieth century creation. Orthodox Christian theology describes Jesus as holding the threefold office of Prophet, Priest and King.

In the wandering in the wilderness however Moses was truly a prophet of great historical significance, but he wasn’t the local Priest; Aaron was. Furthermore on the Sinai journey there was no king, but God himself was the leader providing a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.

But Moses was something else that perhaps the founders of the American Republic understood, and is way too complicated for our current desires for continual cognitive dissonance. Moses was a geopolitical leader, perhaps like no other in history. Whether you attach great merit to Moses as the giver of God’s law, you must admire someone who can take a couple of million homeless people into the desert, and after forty years of wandering, get a great majority of them to the destination.

The teaching point for us today, is out of the couple of million that left Egypt, only two of the old fuddy-duddies were seen to be acceptable to enter the Promised Land. Something that not even Moses and his brother Aaron were able to accomplish. One of those two was Caleb, the other was Joshua, a real Jesus type, not just in name only.

Let us look at Moses as a geopolitical leader for America, and for that matter evangelical Christianity.

Moses was born a Jew, but because of geopolitical reality he was raised by Pharaoh’s daughter. At the mature age of forty, he attempts to help his people, and because of geopolitical reality he must flee Egypt proper, and spent the next forty years in Midian on the exile side of the desert. There he marries Zipporah, the daughter of Jethro, the priest of Midian.

In the fullness of time, God speaks to Moses from the burning bush, telling Moses to go back to Egypt and free the Jews from their geopolitical ties. Because of his humility and knowing about the geopolitical realities of Egypt, Moses isn’t too keen on the whole idea, so God calls Aaron his brother to eventually become the priest of the exodus.

Now in Egypt, we see the ten plagues that God brought upon the country through the prophesies of Moses, the eventual release of the Jews to flee Egypt via the Passover, the crossing of the Red Sea and the drowning of Pharaoh’s army. We the enlightened people of today, know none of that ever happened in reality, because we are so unbiased in our secular beliefs. But this does set up the opportunity to bring us to the point where we can begin to understand the geopolitical skill of the prophet Moses. Those skills, at this point, multiplied by infinity; still essentially equal zero.

So we see here that Moses is a type of geopolitical and religious leader we have today, with the exception that Moses was a humble man and willing to learn from his mistakes and take suggestions from those who have more experience actually leading people.

At the mountain of God, which may be Mount Sinai, Jethro and Zipporah join Moses. After all the niceties are exchanged, Jethro notices that Moses geopolitical skills lack the ability to delegate. It is sort of like Moses says to Jethro, “God gave me this impossible job, and by God I am going to do it!”

To which Jethro replies, “Moses, you have spent way too much time with the sheep and goats, you need to lead people by treating them like human beings. As such their combined intelligence and ability to solve problems will always exceed your own. You must teach good men ‘to be rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens’.”

If we were to use this rule in evangelical Christianity, we could summarize these admonitions as the principles of Biblical Eldership properly applied. Amazingly just like Moses, today’s leaders have a book almost totally ignored called, “Biblical Eldership: Restoring the Eldership to Its Rightful Place in Church,” by Alexander Strauch.

Today’s church and geopolitical leaders are so entrenched in either the church congregational model, or the collective elitism leadership of virtually all business and political organizations, they think they can change the world in their own image. It didn’t work for Moses and it won’t work over the long term for you.

There are a few exceptions however, all successful militaries throughout history use Jethro’s model that was learned by Moses. The same is true for all those primitive people groups that must work together to survive. Finally all team sports are basically that same Moses model, tens, fifties, hundreds, and thousands.

In less than two weeks in the Super Bowl on the field we will see two groups of ten, led by one person, trying to win the championship. There are two of those tens, one for offence- -one for defense, then there are two special teams, and within practical business restraints, the total of active players will be about fifty, with about ten coaches, trainers and others providing leadership and support. Then the whole organization with office people and practice players, will be about a hundred. When you add the people needed to put on a home game you are literally in the thousands stadium.

Let us break this down further, in the military you learn that one person can lead between two and seven people. The two is basically for someone just starting out in leadership, seven is reserved for someone with much experience and some very good people skills. For an average, most people can be trained to lead about five people with a reasonable degree of success.

Now go back to the football teams and look for those player position groupings. Basketball is basically the prime sport, five on the floor at a time, led offensively by a point guard, but no more than ten really ever get in the game. There are about five coaches you see milling around during every time out. Baseball, hockey, lacrosse, even that grass growing wonder, what we call soccer and the rest of the world calls football, works the same way.

The real important concept with this Moses model however is the inclusion of a fifties grouping. In the Bible other than Moses, only Samuel and Jesus use this grouping. We know from empirical evidence in indigenous people groups that this is about as large as a group can get before it begins to lose what we call in business management, the economy of scale. Furthermore we also know that when a group gets to be about twenty five there is enough diversity of personalities to make the group self sustaining if properly trained and led.

So it really isn’t all that complex to understand by training and the proper management of people as unique human personalities, groups should be naturally allowed to grow to about fifty people. Then it is broken down into two groups of twenty-five and the process repeated.

In the military a platoon is normally forty to fifty men, each broken down into teams of three, which are combined into squads of six to nine. These squads are combined depending upon the mission to get to the platoon size. Three to five platoons generally make up a company and so on up the chain of command.

In the military you have the officer corps, people who are especially trained in leadership and bring command authority from above down to the platoon level. A good platoon leader should quickly understand that while he may have been given the authority of the government or Jesus; that is only half of the leadership equation.

Jesus always said, he had all authority, he never really used or spoke of his power, because that degrades the uniqueness of the human individual. The successful military officer quickly should learn that his personal security, together with the power to accomplish the mission, is built upon the respect that he has from the people below him on the chain of command, especially his NCOs.

The current failure of the United States can be basically traced to the misapplication of the Moses model, in that the would be leader thinks he is better than Jesus and has the power to impose his will upon the flock, the less fortunate, the stupid, the common man.

For some perspective, to watch the Super Bowl in person it will cost you a few to many thousands of dollars. To watch it with your friends on your new 3D flat screen, it will cost you half of that. The players that will be playing in the game will be making at least a half a million dollars, most multiple millions, some tens of millions.

For what?

For you to transfer and attempt to satisfy your quenched and suppressed desire to do something you have never had the opportunity to obtain, because our system never gave you the chance. You want to be a winner and the only venue open to you is to support your team. Stated another way, all you really want out of life is to play the game on a team that has the opportunity to achieve something highly rewarding. It doesn’t have to be sports, it could be building birdhouses. People were created by God uniquely diverse, to live this life distinctly contributing their gifts to the greater purpose of human society.

This potential has been slowly been eroded over at least the last generation, by bad people who thought they were doing good things, and we were too timid to say: “ENOUGH!” While some of the corrupters would like to see the current system fall apart and replace it with one even less friendly to true humanity, they will not succeed, because their plans are contrary to the natural laws of the universe.

People are people, they find fulfillment in that, not in being a sheep, or some hybrid consumptive-service droid, or a mud brick in the scheme of global governance and the redistribution of wealth.

The American founders thought they had a better idea. That God had endowed people with rights to try to achieve individual uniqueness without the interference of the historic geopolitical structures.

Once Moses grasped these natural law principles he was able to train the youth that grew up in the wilderness, not the old geezers that left Egypt; (except for Joshua and Caleb) that God had set them free. That leadership struggle is the real reason for the troubles we see in the United States and around the world today.

“Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring—when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics—will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'"
Martin Luther King

Tags: Moses Model, Wall Street, Christianity, Jesus, USA, Super Bowl, leadership