Imagine that the Lord speaks audibly to you this morning during the offering telling you to hurry to Paw Paw. After worship, you get on 94 and find it closed at 9th st. You are frustrated to find that the detours take you all the way down to Three Rivers then to Dowagiac and up to Decatur before you finally get to Paw Paw. What should have been a twenty-minute drive takes an hour and forty-one minutes. You would be confused and frustrated because if God told you to do something, He should make it simple and straightforward, right? After all, He’s got the power to make it easy. He’s the Lord.
Please bring up the map.
The Lord told Israel to go to the Promised Land. Is this this most straightforward path there? That’s often what following the Lord looks like. It’s not straightforward. Why not? You’ve almost certainly asked that question. A wife tries to reconcile with her husband after a fight. She knows that God wants her to own her sin in the matter. She confesses her part in the conflict and it blows up in her face. Why wouldn’t God make it straightforward? She did what was right. Why didn’t God make it go well? Why can’t the line you walk between two points be a straight one? That’s what we will think about with this morning’s passage. We’ll see that following the Lord isn’t straightforward but every twist and turn has its purpose. That’s the claim of this sermon: following the Lord isn’t straightforward but every twist and turn has its purpose.
We will study this in three points. First: bricks without straw. Second: bringing trouble. Third: speaking up again. We see bricks without straw in verses 1-21 of chapter 5, bringing trouble in 5:22-6:9, and speaking up again in 6:10-7:7.
We first see the twists and turns in our first point: bricks without straw. Last week we ended on a rare harmony. The Lord, Moses, and the people were all on the same page. The Lord had spoken to Moses. Moses through Aaron shared what the Lord had said, and the people believed. That’s rare and beautiful. Now it goes wrong.
The Lord had told Moses and Aaron to tell Pharaoh to let the people go and so they did—more beautiful obedience. It’s not surprising that Moses and Aaron gained entrance to Pharaoh. Ancient kings made themselves available to their subjects. It’s how they ruled. Remember Solomon hearing the case of the two mothers? Kings were available. Moses and Aaron met with Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and told him what the Lord had said. It didn’t go well. Sometimes it’s our sin and foolishness that leads to trouble. Sometimes, though, we, like Moses and Aaron, obey, and it blows up in our faces. Remember Jesus. It rarely went the way you would expect with him, and he obeyed perfectly. The cross is the perfect symbol of that and it is the Christian symbol—the symbol of God bringing great good out of seeming failure.
Moses and Aaron told Pharaoh to let the people go. Pharaoh’s scoffed, “Who is the Lord, that I should obey Him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord and I will not let Israel go.”
Pharaoh didn’t care about Joseph as we saw in our first study. Now we see he doesn’t care about the Lord. Put yourself in his place, though. Why would he? How powerful can this Lord be? His people are your slaves. Pharaoh was about as intimidated by the Lord as the U.S. State Department is intimidated by saber rattling from the army of Paraguay.
Pharaoh said that he didn’t know the Lord and he didn’t care to know Him. Moses and Aaron restated their request making clear that if Pharaoh didn’t let the Hebrews go, “the Lord may strike us with plagues or with the sword.” Pharaoh saw no threat there. What did he care if the Hebrews’ apparently third-rate deity struck them? He decided the best way forward was to put these slaves in their place. To this point it seems some other group had been supplying them with straw to make their bricks stronger and more pliable. There was a division of labor like a factory line. Now thanks to Moses and Aaron’s meddling, the Hebrews would need to do it all. Now in time, Pharaoh likely planned to grant relief, the slaves would be happy that they didn’t need to find their own straw anymore, they would be back to where they started before Moses and Aaron got involved, and he would have driven a wedge between Moses and Aaron and the slaves. “Moses and Aaron are outclassed and overwhelmed by this Pharaoh,” as one commentator put it.
We will see, though, that it will actually be Pharaoh who is outclassed and overwhelmed. Pharaoh gave the order in verse 9 to, “Make the work harder for the men so that they keep working and pay no attention to lies.” Moses used this same word for “harder” to describe what the Lord will do to Pharaoh’s heart. Pharaoh made the work hard. The Lord made Pharaoh’s heart hard. We are always dealing with the Lord whether we see it or not. It is His world.
For now, though, Pharaoh institutes his plan and soon the Hebrew foremen go to him to explain why they can’t reach their quotas. Pharaoh knew they wouldn’t be able to do so. He designed it so they couldn’t, but since his plan was to sideline Moses and Aaron, he calls the slaves lazy and tells them to get back to work.
Moses and Aaron had gone along with these Hebrew foremen perhaps for moral support; they were waiting outside to see how it went. It went exactly as Pharaoh planned. The Hebrews had decided that Moses and Aaron were the cause of all their troubles; verse 21, “May the Lord look upon you and judge you! You have made us a stench to Pharaoh and his officials and have put a sword in their hand to kill us.”
This was Moses’ great fear—that his people would turn on him as they did the first time he tried to rescue them. Moses had to feel just as he felt before the burning bush—like a failure for trying to help. The Lord sometimes arranges life so that our chief fears come to fruition. He does so, so that we might learn to trust Him more than we fear trouble. We don’t learn to truly trust when everything is straightforward. Learning to trust requires detours on the path, which is still the right path.
That’s not necessarily a sign of fault on our part. Moses has done nothing wrong. Not even Jesus’ life went as he wanted in everything. You see that in Gethsemane, and that is no sign of fault in him. The strange fact of life is that the Father’s plan is quite different than we would have it. We are to learn to let go of many expectations and to trust Him rather than our own understanding. That’s a life-long lesson for us all. The Lord has us exactly where He wants us just as He had Pharaoh and the Hebrews exactly where He wanted them in this tension.
We rarely, though, live that out. We rarely live our lives as if the Lord knows what He is doing. We don’t say that aloud. Rather, we tend to take our frustrations with Him out on others—those whom we can get our hands on—in the slaves’ case Moses and Aaron. We humans have an unhelpful but nearly insatiable need to blame and we sometimes blame the very people the Lord placed in our lives to help us—our fellow church members, our family, our friends. That’s unhelpful, unproductive, and unwise. “This Moses, whom they treat so disrespectfully now is not the reason for their oppression, but God’s instrument to end that oppression,” as one commentator put it. In the Bible, as in life, the story often seems at a dead end, and it seems the Lord has allowed it all to fall apart. We can blame or we can trust. The people thought Moses brought trouble on them, but it was all part of the Lord’s plan to bring trouble upon Egypt. That’s our second point: bringing trouble.
Moses was in trouble, but unlike the people, He didn’t blame. He cried out to the Lord. There’s a big difference. Moses went right to the top in verse 22, “O Lord, why have you brought trouble upon this people? Is this why You sent me? Ever since I went to Pharaoh to speak in Your name, he has brought trouble upon this people, and You have not rescued your people at all.”’ That’s prayer. That’s talking with the Lord. There is no dressing it up to make it sound religiously appropriate. There is no filler or filter. This is a man speaking with the Lord as if the Lord could do something about the situation in which the Lord placed him. This is what the Lord is after in prayer. “You Father knows what you need before you ask him,” as Jesus said and that’s what we will consider tonight.
The Lord can take such honesty. He is supremely confident in what He’s doing in every situation as you see in verse 1 of chapter 6, ‘Then the Lord said to Moses, “Now you will see what I will do to Pharaoh.”’ In other words, “I’ve got everything right where I want it. I always do.” We need to submit to that; anything else will drive us crazy.
Now this is difficult because the Lord timing often seems off and the hardship of the slaves was a real trial, but, as Doug Stuart put it thinking about this part of Exodus, “God’s timing only sometimes coincides with our expectations, and His idea of the hardships we need to go through only sometimes coincides with our idea of how much we can take.” You can offer up “Amens” from your own life.
The good news is that the Lord knows, and He knows how He will work it all out regardless of what we understand in the moment. “Now you will see what I will do to Pharaoh,” as He said to Moses. “You will see,” is His word to you and me about the future.
Moses cried out to the Lord. The Lord responded by reminding Moses about who He was. That’s what we need when we face the trouble in this world; we need to know the Lord better. ‘God also said to Moses, “I am the Lord. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as God Almighty, but by my name the Lord, I did not make myself known to them.”’ Knowing the Lord—who He is, what He can do—is how the courage to trust is fostered. Exodus gives us a picture of a big, powerful, evil world and an infinitely bigger, more powerful, good God. Get a bigger picture of God.
That’s what the Lord gave Moses. The Lord then reminded Moses of what he already knew; verse 6 of chapter 6, ‘Therefore, say to the Israelites: “I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment.” There was nothing new in these words. That’s often how it goes with God, though. What He has already told you is sufficient. “What more could He say than to you He has said?” as the hymn puts it. It’s odd. We tend to treat repetition in the Bible and in church as a bother when it is often what we need. We need to hear it again because apparently we stopped believing it.
Moses told the people yet again, and yet again they didn’t believe; verse 9, “Moses reported this to the Hebrews, but they did not listen to him because of their discouragement and cruel bondage.” The word “discouragement” may be too weak of a translation. The Israelites had more than they could take. One commentator described what they were feeling as, “inward pressure caused by deep anguish that prevents proper breathing—like children sobbing and gasping for their breath.” This suffering doesn’t excuse the Hebrews’ refusal to trust, but it helps explain it. That’s an important distinction if we want to understand we humans. Explaining why we sin doesn’t excuse our sin, but it does give us a fuller picture of what’s going on. It is no coincidence that in the gospels we hear Jesus asks so many questions to draw out intentions, shortcomings, and the way forward. Jesus never excuses sin but he is very interested in explaining it. The same goes for Moses and his fear. We can judge Moses for feeling ready to give up, or we can seek to understand him and see God’s grace in helping him move forward. That’s our last point: speaking up again.
Moses told the people what the Lord said to encourage him and them, but they didn’t listen to a word of it. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” So the Lord tells Moses to go back to Pharaoh; verse 10, “tell Pharaoh king of Egypt to let the Israelites go out of his country.” You can almost feel Moses’ despair. The Hebrews who were supposed to be on his side weren’t listening to the Lord. Why would Pharaoh who certainly wasn’t on his side listen? Moses felt as if the Lord was marching him into a spinning buzzsaw, and so he goes back to the sort of excuses we saw for two weeks; verse 12, “if the Israelites will not listen to me, why would Pharaoh listen to me, since I speak with faltering lips?” We all have our blankets of shame with which we cover ourselves when hurting.
And now for something completely different. If you look at verses 10-12 and then at 28-30, they are nearly identical. In between them is a genealogy. It is a break in the tension—“will Moses go on? What will the Lord do? More after this brief message.” This is the genealogy of Moses and Aaron. It shows that they came from Levi—the priestly family. It shows holy men of God like Phinehas who did good after the Exodus. The message of this genealogy is that Pharaoh and the Hebrews were wrong about Moses and Aaron. They thought Moses and Aaron were nobodies. This genealogy is a reminder that these two were the men the Lord would use. They were His men. They were the ones He called. It’s always and only the call of God that keeps you going in a long obedience filled with detours and seeming dead ends. That will be true for anyone who wants to serve God including me and you.
Moses, in this moment, though wanted out, but that didn’t factor into the Lord’s plan. He was moving forward and that’s what keeps us moving forward—not ultimately our will power but His; verse 1 of chapter 7, ‘Then the Lord said to Moses, “See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh.” We’ve seen what it meant for the Lord to make Moses like God to Aaron. Moses told Aaron what to say and do. Now we see the Lord making Moses like God to Pharaoh. Pharaoh, and all of Egypt, thought the Pharaoh was the human representation of the gods; when you deal with Pharaoh, you deal with the gods. “Don’t anger the Pharaoh or the gods might withhold rain. Do everything Pharaoh says and it will go well with you.” Pharaoh and Egypt were about to deal with the only God and they would do so through Moses. “Don’t lie to Moses, Pharaoh, saying that you will let the people go and then changing your mind once a plague stops because when you do that, you are actually lying to the Lord. Do everything Moses says, Pharaoh, and it will go well with you.” This continues what we saw with those blessing Abraham being blessed and those cursing Abraham being cursed.
Jesus is the perfection of this. When men and women dealt with Jesus of Nazareth in Roman occupied Palestine, they were dealing with the Lord of the Exodus. Look at how you treat Jesus—ignoring him, adoring him, dismissing his words as largely irrelevant for the 21st century, following his words as the guide for your life. That is how you treat God. He is the Lord to you, or he isn’t. That’s still how it works.
It’s all about Him. The Bible is all about God because that is what life is all about. This passage ends by pointing out that Moses was 80 and Aaron was 83. The message there is that these old men were not the heroes. The Lord used men well past their prime to show His power. This is about Him. Please bring our slide back up. This is the story of Him bringing His people through detours and seemingly dead ends because He knew better and still does. “Not all who wander are lost,” as Tolkien put it. Sometimes they feel lost even as they are guided down frustrating detours and seeming dead ends; these will actually prove to be the path of our salvation. Amen.