Now the man Moses was very humble, more so than any man on the face of the earth.
Into the Text
For a long time, I associated gentleness with weakness, or being a pushover, or shrinking back. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Gentleness is not weakness. It is strength that has been fully surrendered to God.
Nobody illustrates this more powerfully than Moses. When we think of Moses, we think of a leader. We think of a man who stood before the most powerful ruler in the world and said, “Let my people go.” We think of a man who stretched out his staff and watched the Red Sea split in two. We think of a man who climbed a mountain and came back down with the very words of God carved in stone. Moses was bold and courageous, yet he was also more than that.
The word translated as “humble” in our SOAP verse carries the same meaning as “gentle.” Moses, one of the most powerful leaders in Israel’s history, was also one of the gentlest. How do we hold those two things together? The world tells us gentleness and strength are opposites. Moses’ life says otherwise.
We can see it so clearly in Numbers 12 when his own brother and sister speak against him publicly. Moses doesn’t defend himself. He doesn’t retaliate. He doesn’t use his position to put them in their place. He simply remains quiet and lets God handle it.
That is exactly what God is growing in you. He’s not growing a timid, shrinking back kind of gentleness but a strong, settled, surrendered gentleness that doesn’t need to prove itself.
So what does this look like in your everyday life? It looks like pausing before you respond when someone pushes your buttons. It looks like choosing a soft answer in a tense conversation. It looks like letting God defend you instead of scrambling to defend yourself. And sweet friend, the world around you is desperately in need of women who are gentle, just like Moses.