How relevant is the Bible to our daily life? Has it anything to offer that is useful in meeting today's major problems of human existence? We can begin to find out by studying the history of one of its characters. What does Moses' experience have to say to us in regard to life as opposed to death?
When he was forty years old, the Old Testament tells us, he killed a man in a fit of indignation and fled to the desert. Then for forty years he learned patience and meekness in the life of a shepherd. When he was eighty, he heard God's call and returned to Egypt to lead the children of Israel to the Promised Land; and for the next forty years he listened to God daily and obeyed His commands implicitly, overcoming all kinds of dangers and rugged discomforts through obedience and humility. He was a hundred and twenty years old when they arrived at the border of Canaan, and we are told, "His eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated." Deut. 34:7;
It is generally recognized by scholars that "forty years" in the Old Testament is commonly used as a round number, the length of time allotted to a generation. Even by this reckoning we must understand Moses to have lived through three generations. And the literal number of one hundred and twenty loses its incredibility today when we read and hear of people in various parts of the world who are in good health and lead active and constructive lives long after their hundredth year.
