Character and Competence in Choosing Leaders Exodus 18:21, Matthew 10:1-4
Author Rod Reasen II
Jesus handpicked an ordinary team and commissioned them to an extraordinary mission. This series for leaders breaks down how we can view our stewardship responsibility in team building.
Every leader carries a hire that still stings. The résumé was strong, the interview went well, even the references were nearly perfect, and then months later, you found out you may have overread your hopes onto them. By then, the choice had already been made, and you were deciding what to do next.
Perhaps you could write this story of a decision you made or one you were part of. Or maybe you watched as the role you wanted went to somebody else. Then a person with fewer years and a thinner track record walks into the office you had been circling, and nobody ever explained the decision of why not you.
Both of those experiences give us real-life applications as people and leaders.
Fortunately, scripture gives us two examples and a formula to follow for both choosing the team and for what you should consider for yourself if you want to be chosen. We’ve been studying Jesus’ choice of the disciples, and I want us to go back to one of the greatest leaders in Biblical history, Moses, for additional context on this topic.
After a series of miracle plagues upon the face of the Egyptian nation, Pharaoh reluctantly gives in to the command God delivered through Moses and lets His people go. They pack their belongings and the spoils the Egyptians pressed on them while pleading for them to leave, heading toward God’s future promised land. But the relief from exile quickly turns to panic as the people suddenly see the dust of Pharaoh’s army chasing them down, just as they meet a literal rock and a hard place. Stuck between the wilderness, the Red Sea, and an angry army, the people accuse Moses of bringing them out to die. You know the rest. God intervenes with a miracle of staggering size, parting the sea, allowing the nation of Israel to cross on dry ground, and then subsequently crushing their mortal enemies.
You would think the sheer size of the victory would have carried the people and their leader for years, but it did not last. The Bible tells us in Exodus 18:13 that not long after crossing the sea, Moses was settling disputes from morning until evening.[^1] His father-in-law, Jethro, hears of their deliverance and comes to Moses, bringing Moses’ wife and two sons with him. Witnessing this newly appointed leader of millions handle daily disputes, he lays out our lesson for today.
Exodus 18:14-22
“When Moses’ father-in-law saw all that he was doing for the people, he said, ‘What is this that you are doing for the people? Why do you sit alone, and all the people stand around you from morning till evening?’
And Moses said to his father-in-law, ‘Because the people come to me to inquire of God; when they have a dispute, they come to me, and I decide between one person and another, and I make them know the statutes of God and his laws.’
Moses’ father-in-law said to him, ‘What you are doing is not good. You and the people with you will certainly wear yourselves out, for the thing is too heavy for you. You cannot do it alone. Now obey my voice; I will give you advice, and God be with you! You shall represent the people before God and bring their cases to God,
And you shall warn them about the statutes and the laws, and make them know the way in which they must walk and what they must do.
Moreover, look for able men from all the people, men who fear God, who are trustworthy and hate a bribe, and place such men over the people as chiefs of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties, and of tens.
And let them judge the people at all times. Every great matter they shall bring to you, but any small matter they shall decide themselves. So it will be easier for you, and they will bear the burden with you.’”[^2]
Two main principles we will see here laid out by Jethro. The first is in the qualification of leaders, and the second is the span of control, which turns out to be the first one applied. Notice the language of Jethro and Moses. Real issues were being brought to him, but he simply could not get through them all in the time he had in a single day. Jethro steps in and says, “You will teach them the statutes and laws,” referring back to our last lesson. You want to be a leader, you must first find yourself a learner. Then Jethro goes on to lay out the four qualifications for Moses.
Jethro then gives us a list. Able, God-fearing, trustworthy men who also hate a bribe. We will split Part 2 into briefings to keep our devotional tight, taking them one at a time over the next four entries, grouping them by what they measure rather than by where they fall in the sentence. Two of the four speak to competence. Two of them speak to character. No surprise to anyone, the whole standard falls apart if you take either half without the other.
We start where Jethro started.
Able
The Hebrew word is chayil, which carries strength, capacity, the ability to actually bear the load.[^3] Literally, does this person have the ability to do the job? You don’t put 185-pound wide receivers on your offensive line. You match physical ability, can they block and tackle, or run like lightning and catch, to the role of the position. Sports analogies offer easy parallels and a dose of reality.
Ability matters. Nothing in this passage argues for putting incapable people into seats that will crush them, and a leader who staffs on affection instead of capacity will wreck an organization just as thoroughly as one who staffs on credentials alone. I’m not negating what God can do through the people He uses, but we must also understand the process of getting them there. We will see this in part three: training. For now, Jethro says able, and he means it.
Jesus taught the same principle in the parable of the talents, where the master hands out the money to each servant according to his own ability before he leaves.[^4] Not equally. According to capacity. The load was matched to the man on purpose, and that parable has more in it than we can take today.
Paul will later lay out the qualifications for overseers and deacons in 1 Timothy 3:1-13 and for elders in Titus 1:5-9, requiring, among other things, that a man be able to teach, that he manage his own household well, and that he be tested first, which confirms the same danger in selecting the unproven for both the chosen and the chooser.[^5]
Span of Control
The second and immediate assignment Jethro tells Moses gives us a modern-day term we use, “span of control,” and matches ability to the visible. He tells him where to put them. Chiefs of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties, and of tens.
Four tiers. An organizational chart based on ability. Not every able person gets a thousand. The number of people a man is handed is sized to what he can actually carry, and Jethro assumes those numbers will differ from man to man because the men differ.
That is the practical output of the first qualification. Able is not a pass-fail gate that a person clears on the way in. It is a measurement that determines how much they are given.
The master in the parable of the talents measured it similarly. Talents of five, two, and one, distributed to each according to his own ability. The servant who received one was not insulted, and the servant who received five was not favored. Each one was assessed, and each one was handed a load that matched.
Skill Is Not the Opposite of Spiritual Strength
Somewhere along the way, church culture picked up a bad habit of treating competence as the worldly consideration and character as the spiritual one, as though asking whether a person can actually do the work is a lapse in faith.
Scripture does not make that split. When God commissioned the building of the tabernacle, He named the man Himself and said He had filled Bezalel with the Spirit of God, with ability, intelligence, knowledge, and all craftsmanship.[^6] Remarkable gifting to the man by God to do His will. Ability, intelligence, knowledge, and craftsmanship are named as the content of what the Spirit supplied. Skill is not the thing faith overcomes. In that passage, it is the thing God gives. I’ve seen it personally and witnessed it in others. Gifting from God to do the job.
So when Jethro says look for able men, he is not conceding ground to practicality. He is telling Moses to look for what God distributes. Talents are found in people.
The Men Jesus Picked
Now look back at the roster in Matthew 10. We tend to read “fishermen” as a synonym for “unskilled,” and that is not what the text describes.
Zebedee ran an operation with people working for him, and James and John were partners with Simon in the trade.[^7] These were working men running a business on the water, reading weather, managing crews, and moving product before it spoiled. Matthew sat at a tax booth that required literacy, numeracy, and recordkeeping in a region where most people had none.[^8]
Jesus did not pick men who lacked ability. He picked men whose ability would be trained and transformed to meet the mission. Here is the thing to set on as both leaders and those looking to lead. Ability is always given by God and is always a gift for mission. Therefore, when Jethro leads with “able,” he is not asking you and me to look for theit. inner gifting of the people, matching their abilities to the tasks at hand.
One qualification out of four and the first to be mentioned. Yet, as we will see in the coming lessons, ability simply gets a person into consideration. It has never once been what makes them worth choosing.
Two questions to sit with.
First, when you last filled a seat, what percentage of your actual evaluation was about ability?
Second, is there a role you have been quietly avoiding pursuing because you assumed capability was a worldly concern rather than something God hands out?
Stay on Mission
Jethro tells Moses to look for able men who fear God, who are trustworthy and hate a bribe, and to place them over the people as chiefs of thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens. Four qualifications, and only the first one deals with capability. The other three describe who the person is rather than what they can do.
Chayil carries the sense of strength, capacity, ability and valor. In Exodus 18:21 it describes a person’s capability to actually bear the load of the role. The Greek counterpart appears in the parable of the talents, where the master distributes to each servant according to his own ability, using the word dunamis.
The concept appears in Exodus 18, roughly three thousand years before anyone wrote a management book about it. Jethro tells Moses to place leaders over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens, which sizes each leader’s scope to what that person can actually carry. The four tiers exist because capability differs from person to person.
In Matthew 25:15 the master distributes five talents, two talents and one talent to each servant according to his own ability. The amounts differ deliberately. Note that a talent in that parable is a unit of currency worth roughly twenty years of a laborer’s wages, not a natural aptitude, though the modern English use of the word talent comes to us from this passage.
Scripture does not treat competence as the unspiritual consideration. In Exodus 31:1-5, God says He filled Bezalel with the Spirit of God, with ability, intelligence, knowledge and all craftsmanship for the building of the tabernacle. Ability, intelligence and craftsmanship are named as the content of what the Spirit supplied, which means skill is described there as something God gives rather than something faith overcomes.
They lacked religious credentials, not ability. Zebedee ran a fishing operation with hired servants, and James and John were partners with Simon in the trade, which means they were running a business that required managing crews, reading weather and moving product before it spoiled. Matthew worked a tax booth for Rome, a role requiring literacy, numeracy and recordkeeping in a region where most people had none of the three.
Exodus 18:21 asks for both and weights them unevenly. Ability is named first and never mentioned again, while the remaining three qualifications describe character. Ability determines how much a person can be handed, which is why Jethro pairs it immediately with span of control, but it is not what makes a person worth choosing in the first place.
Footnotes
[^1]: Exodus 18:13. All Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version unless otherwise noted.
[^2]: Exodus 18:14-22 (ESV).
[^3]: Hebrew chayil, Strong’s H2428, strength, capacity, ability, valor.
[^4]: Matthew 25:15. The Greek is dunamis, Strong’s G1411, power or capability, the Greek counterpart to the Hebrew chayil in Exodus 18:21.
[^5]: 1 Timothy 3:1-13 and Titus 1:5-9. Note that both lists are predominantly character requirements, with the ability to teach in 1 Timothy 3:2 and Titus 1:9, household management in 1 Timothy 3:4-5, and testing before appointment in 1 Timothy 3:10.
[^6]: Exodus 31:1-5. See also Exodus 35:30-35, where Bezalel and Oholiab are described as filled with skill to do every sort of work.
[^7]: Mark 1:20 records that Zebedee had hired servants in the boat. Luke 5:7 and 5:10 identify James and John as partners with Simon in the fishing business.
[^8]: Matthew 9:9 and Matthew 10:3. Tax collection under Rome required written records and calculation.
Leave a Reply