Somethings leave a lasting impact on you very early in life, you carry it forward weightlessly into all the abyss you are privy to. The Prince of Egypt was a spiritual atom bomb in my childhood that shattered my ideas of adulthood.
I have never read the Bible in full but there are some excerpts that are great inspiration to me. The overarching story or mystery of the Bible (Canon) itself is a motivation for me to be closer to the word than any other medium of communication we have advanced till date.
The Weight of Calling
Moses didn't ask to be found floating in a basket among the reeds. He didn't volunteer for the burning bush experience, didn't raise his hand when God was looking for someone to confront Pharaoh. Yet there he was, stammering before the most powerful man in the known world, armed with nothing but a staff and a promise that seemed too impossible to believe.
This reluctance resonates deeply with me. How many times have we felt called to something that terrifies us? The corporate presentation that could change everything, the conversation that needs to happen, the creative project that whispers to us in quiet moments. Moses shows us that readiness isn't a prerequisite for purpose.
The Plagues of Modern Life
The ten plagues weren't just ancient spectacles. They're metaphors for the systems that hold us captive today. The plague of blood speaks to how we've contaminated our sources of life: relationships turned toxic, work that drains rather than fulfills, social media streams that poison rather than nourish.
The plague of frogs represents the overwhelming noise of modern existence: notifications, obligations, the constant croaking of a thousand urgent but ultimately meaningless demands. Like Pharaoh, we often harden our hearts to the obvious solutions, choosing familiar misery over uncertain freedom.
Wilderness Wandering
The Israelites complained in the desert, longing for the "good old days" of slavery because at least then they knew where their next meal was coming from. This strikes me as profoundly human. We cling to our comfortable prisons, afraid of the vast uncertainty that freedom demands.
I think about my own wilderness periods. Those stretches between jobs, relationships, or life phases where everything feels suspended. The desert isn't punishment; it's preparation. It strips away everything non-essential until we're left with only what matters: our relationship with the divine, with ourselves, with our true calling.
The Side of The Pharaoh - Something I Wonder About Always
We always cast Pharaoh as the villain, but there's a tragic dimension to his story that haunts me. Here's a man watching his entire world collapse, and we rarely pause to consider what he was truly experiencing.
From his perspective, Moses wasn't just demanding freedom. He was asking Pharaoh to voluntarily destroy Egypt's foundation. The Hebrew slaves built the monuments, the cities, the infrastructure that made Egypt a superpower. Their labor was the bedrock of the economy, the source of national wealth and prestige. Moses was essentially saying: "Tear down everything you've built. Bankrupt your nation. Do it willingly."
But there's an even deeper tragedy. Pharaoh wasn't just a political leader; he was considered divine, a god-king whose authority came from the cosmic order itself. When Moses's God began demonstrating superior power through the plagues, it wasn't merely a political challenge. It was an existential crisis. Everything Pharaoh believed about himself, his divine status, his role in the universe, was being systematically dismantled.
The plagues themselves were psychologically brutal. Imagine watching your nation's water turn to blood, knowing you're responsible for your people's suffering, yet feeling trapped between two impossible choices: maintain your divine authority or submit to a foreign God. Each plague was an escalation, a tightening noose around not just Egypt, but around Pharaoh's very identity.
And then came the ultimate tragedy. The death of the firstborn. Pharaoh lost his own son, his heir, his future. In that moment, he wasn't a god-king anymore. He was just a father who had lost his child because of his own inability to yield. The divine authority he had clung to so desperately had cost him everything that actually mattered.
Even his final pursuit to the Red Sea reads differently through this lens. Not the rage of a tyrant, but the desperate act of a broken man making one last attempt to salvage something from the wreckage of his reign, his identity, his world.
There's something almost Shakespearean about Pharaoh's fall. A powerful man undone by his own inability to bend, to recognize when he was beaten. His tragedy wasn't that he was evil, but that his understanding of his role in the cosmic order made the right choices impossible for him to see. He had multiple opportunities to choose differently, but each time, his pride and his divine identity created a prison as real as any physical chains.
Perhaps Pharaoh's story is a warning about the dangers of believing too completely in our own authority, our own righteousness, our own version of divine appointment. How many times do we, like Pharaoh, harden our hearts against obvious truths because accepting them would require us to admit we were wrong about who we thought we were?
The Red Sea Moment
Everyone faces Red Sea moments. Times when the only way forward requires stepping into the impossible. The water doesn't part until your feet touch the waves. This is the terrible, beautiful paradox of faith: it demands action before evidence, commitment before clarity.
I've learned that most transformation happens not in the dramatic parting of waters, but in the daily decision to keep walking through the muddy seabed, trusting that the walls of water will hold until you reach the other side.
Tablets and Broken Hearts
Moses broke the first tablets in anger when he saw the golden calf. Sometimes I wonder if this wasn't failure but wisdom. Recognizing that some revelations are too pure for our current state of readiness. The second set of tablets, carved in the aftermath of betrayal and forgiveness, perhaps carried a different kind of holiness.
Our own broken tablets (failed relationships, abandoned dreams, moments when we've fallen short of our highest aspirations) these aren't endings but raw material for something more beautiful. The crack is where the light gets in.
The Promised Land We Never Reach
Moses never entered the Promised Land he spent forty years pursuing. At first, this seemed like cosmic injustice. Now I see it differently. Perhaps the journey itself was the destination. Perhaps the promise isn't a place but a way of being—always moving toward something greater than ourselves, always becoming rather than simply being.
The Book of Exodus taught me that liberation isn't a destination but a continuous choice. Every morning, we decide whether to remain in Egypt or take another step through the wilderness. Every day, we choose between the familiar chains of yesterday and the terrifying freedom of what might be.
In a world of instant everything, Exodus reminds us that the most meaningful transformations take time, that the desert has its own curriculum, and that sometimes the most profound act of faith is simply to keep walking when you can't see the destination.
The Original Template
I've come to see Moses as the original prophet, the archetypal template from which all other prophetic stories are drawn. This isn't just my observation. The Abrahamic faiths themselves recognize Moses as one of the foundational prophets. In Islam, Moses (Musa) is mentioned more than any other figure in the Quran, and his story of confronting Pharaoh and liberating the enslaved is seen as part of the same divine tradition that includes Muhammad. Christianity views Moses as the great lawgiver who prefigures Christ. Judaism, of course, sees him as the deliverer and the one who received the Torah at Sinai.
Every era seems to remake his story, adapting the core elements to their own time and context. Consider the essential pattern: the reluctant calling, the divine encounter, the confrontation with earthly power, the message of liberation, the wilderness journey, the giving of law or wisdom, and ultimately the sacrifice of never quite reaching the promised destination. These beats echo across cultures and centuries.
Jesus in the wilderness, Buddha leaving his palace, Muhammad in the cave, even secular prophetic figures like Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. All face down empires with nothing but moral authority and an unshakeable sense of divine purpose. The burning bush gets remade as the road to Damascus, the Bodhi tree, the cave of Hira. Different settings, same essential encounter with the divine calling.
The parting of the Red Sea becomes walking on water, or the more metaphorical partings of impossible barriers that prophets seem to specialize in. Every prophetic story needs its miracle moment, its demonstration that the natural order bends to higher purpose.
Even the tragic Pharaoh figure gets recycled. Every prophet faces their own version of entrenched power that cannot bend, cannot see, cannot yield even when the cost becomes unbearable. The Roman Empire, the British Raj, the systems that would rather destroy themselves than admit they were wrong about the cosmic order.
And that forty years in the wilderness appears to be the universal price of prophecy. The space between the old world and the new, where the prophet must wander, teaching and preparing people for a promised land they themselves may never enter. Moses established this pattern: the leader who liberates but doesn't arrive, who gives everything to a vision they'll never see fulfilled.
It's as if Moses established the grammar of prophecy, and every era since has been writing new sentences with the same essential structure. The details change, the costumes are different, but the fundamental story remains: ordinary people called to extraordinary purpose, standing against the systems that enslave, leading others toward freedom they may never taste themselves.
The story continues, and so do we.