
This was creature-strength, wrought on by creature-passion, and ending in  creature-failure. Moses stood on an eminence, and reached down to these poor  brethren of his with a passing spasm of pity. He was very careful to look this  way and that, so as not to invalidate his own position at court. And fear for  himself carried him swiftly from the scene of his people's woes. It was a brief  effort to do the Divine work of redemption in his own energy. Long years must  pass, during which God would drain away drop by drop his strength, his  resolution, and his very desire to be an emancipator; that when he had become  nothing, God through him might effect His almighty will.
We sometimes  smite the Egyptian within. - We rise up against some tyrant passion, and strike  two or three vigorous blows. Our efforts to rid ourselves of its thrall  originate and are prosecuted in our own resolve. At first the conflict seems  easily our own; finally the dead weight of all the Egyptians within is more than  a match for us.
We often smite the Egyptian without. - We make an assault  on some giant evil - drink, gambling, impurity. It seems at first as though we  should carry the position by our sudden and impetuous rush. But Egypt conquers  in the end, and we flee.
No: we need to learn for the inward and outward  conflict the lesson that forty years in Midian taught Moses, that only the  Spirit of God in man can overcome the spirit of the world. By disappointment and  repeated failure, by the silence of the desert, we are taught that we are  nothing - then God becomes our all in all: and all things become possible to us  as we believe.