Acts 6:3
Look ye out among you seven men of honest report,
full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business.
Flabbergasted
Jethro looks at Moses single-handedly dealing with every problem in the camp. He
foresees problems, and even danger in that kind of leadership. Jethro conjectures
that eventually people will learn to lean too heavily on Moses ,
and that His son-in-law will not last very long. At that rate, he will burn out
quickly. Jethro, who is a spiritual leader in his own rights, suggests a lower
court to be established to care for simpler cases. Moses would then share the
load of leadership with others.
God’s
leadership is not autocracy. In God’s Kingdom even a King has advisors, and a
wise king leans on the council of his advisers as a cripple does on a cane.
God’s style of government is not democracy either. The ‘will of the people’ is
not supreme; the will of Hashem is! God’s government is usually made up of a leadership
teamwork; a group of upright people elected by the congregation. It is to be no
less than three people, so a tie vote between them is less likely. Also a man
and his wife either tend to have a dominant party or they fan each other, so a
couple generally does not provide a good balance for judgment. Also, no one
person is perfectly well-rounded so this leadership teamwork should be composed
of people exerting different views and ways of looking at things. They should
also be filled with a spirit of humility so they can yield to each other’s
counsel and advice.
We
can see this pattern as God’s leadership all throughout the Scriptures. Even
Yeshua used it. He did not keep the whole burden on Himself but established a
group of disciples, who also went to preach, exhort, exorcise, and heal people.
He even said that they will sit on twelve thrones judging the tribes Israel, so
even Yeshua shared the responsibility of judgment. Peter and the disciples
later followed that same example and asked the congregation to submit seven
people that they could ordain as leaders (Acts 6:1-7). These forms of
congregation leadership follow the ‘Jethro’ pattern, and if Yeshua Himself did
it, why shouldn’t we?
The
answers to that question are varied and can be scary. We will try to answer
them in later articles. In the mean time, may God give us leaders, men and
women of integrity whose sole desire is to do whatever needs to be done, either
it be to step in or to step aside, that His Kingdom be established on earth as
it is in Heaven.
