There are times in the life of the world or of a nation when one individual changes the whole course of history. Perhaps we might say that such a change occurred when the Emperor Constantine declared Christianity to be the official religion of the Roman Empire. Certainly we could agree that Martin Luther introduced an entirely new era when his actions initiated the Protestant reformation. And we might say that Mahatma Gandhi began the fall of the British Empire, or that Gorbachev began the dissolution of Soviet communism. Great sea changes in world history cluster around some individual.

 

The same is no less true in the biblical history. When Moses gave up his life as a common shepherd and went back to Egypt to demand that Pharaoh Rameses II let the enslaved Hebrews go, a new nation was b…