Scripture Daily

Context No. 499 of 4322 · Exodus

Context · Reflection

Exodus 5:1-9: in context

1Afterward Moses and Aaron came, and said to Pharaoh, “This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says, ‘Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness.’” 2Pharaoh said, “Who is the LORD, that I should listen to his voice to let Israel go? I don’t know the LORD, and moreover I will not let Israel go.” 3They said, “The God of the Hebrews has met with us. Please let us go three days’ journey into the wilderness, and sacrifice to the LORD, our God, lest he fall on us with pestilence, or with the sword.” 4The king of Egypt said to them, “Why do you, Moses and Aaron, take the people from their work? Get back to your burdens!” 5Pharaoh said, “Behold, the people of the land are now many, and you make them rest from their burdens.” 6The same day Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters of the people and their officers, saying, 7“You shall no longer give the people straw to make brick, as before. Let them go and gather straw for themselves. 8You shall require from them the number of the bricks which they made before. You shall not diminish anything of it, for they are idle. Therefore they cry, saying, ‘Let’s go and sacrifice to our God.’ 9Let heavier work be laid on the men, that they may labor in it. Don’t let them pay any attention to lying words.”

This is the very first confrontation, and it goes badly. Moses and Aaron, fresh from the burning bush and God's commission, walk in to Pharaoh and deliver the message exactly as told: the LORD says, let my people go. Pharaoh's answer is contempt. Who is the LORD, that I should obey his voice? I do not know the LORD, and I will not let Israel go. And then he does more than refuse. That same day he orders the slave-drivers to stop supplying straw for the bricks while demanding the same quota as before, so the people must now scavenge their own straw and still meet the impossible number. The first result of Moses obeying God is not freedom. It is that the suffering gets dramatically worse.

This is a hard and important pattern, and it is easy to be unprepared for it. Moses does exactly what God said, and the immediate consequence is heavier oppression, and the people, predictably, turn on Moses and blame him for making things worse. If Moses measured whether he had heard God correctly by whether obedience made things better right away, he would have concluded he had gotten it all wrong. The step of obedience did not open the way; it seemed to slam it shut harder. Deliverance was coming, but the road to it ran first through a deepening of the very trouble he was sent to end.

I need that pattern named, because I quietly assume the opposite. I assume that if I do the right and obedient thing, the situation should start improving, and when instead it gets harder, I take that as evidence I misheard, or that God has abandoned the effort, and I want to quit. Moses' story says the first fruit of obedience can be that things get worse before they get better, and that this is not proof I took a wrong turn. When I obey God and the immediate result is more difficulty, not less, can I keep going, or do I treat the added hardship as a sign to give up?

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