Scripture Daily

Context No. 201 of 4322 · Exodus

Context · Reflection

Exodus 3:7-11: in context

7The LORD said, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters, for I know their sorrows. 8I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and large land, to a land flowing with milk and honey; to the place of the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite. 9Now, behold, the cry of the children of Israel has come to me. Moreover I have seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. 10Come now therefore, and I will send you to Pharaoh, that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.” 11Moses said to God, “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh, and that I should bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?”

Moses is eighty years old, keeping his father-in-law's sheep in Midian, forty years after fleeing Egypt for killing a man. A bush is burning without being consumed, and God has just called him by name. This passage is what God says next.

The first part is a sequence of verbs, and each one is deliberate. I have surely seen the affliction of my people in Egypt. I have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings. Seeing, hearing, knowing, and then the decision: I have come down to deliver them and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey. God states the whole rescue in the first person. He has seen it, he has come down, he will deliver.

Then verse ten, and the grammar switches. Come, I will send you to Pharaoh, that you may bring my people out of Egypt. The deliverance God just described himself doing arrives as an assignment. Moses's reply is the honest one, and it is a question about himself: who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt? The answer he gets is not about him at all. It is: I will be with you. When I have prayed for something to be dealt with, how would I take being told to go do it?

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