Exodus Week 4

Main Focus: We’ll meet adversity and resistance when following God because there is opposition to God. However, God is faithful in the midst of it.

We’ve got three things to look at this week: Moses and Aaron’s initial rejection by Pharaoh, God’s response to Pharaoh’s rejection, and Jesus warning us that we’ll experience rejection too. This will help us see both the through lines between the exodus story and Jesus’s work on earth (i.e. folks have been rejecting God since the beginning) and the ways in which God can comfort us and work through our experiences of rejection for his namesake.

We’ll start in Exodus 5 with Moses and Aaron’s first audience with Pharaoh. Spoiler: it didn’t go well. In fact, Pharaoh was so perturbed that he viewed their request as rebellious, which we already read was an underlying suspicion of the Egyptians (1:10). Thus he increased the burdens laid upon the Israelites to keep them too busy to rebel. You can hear in this a number of bigoted assessments: those Israelites probably want to take our stuff, those Israelites are idle and good for nothing, those Israelites will take a mile if we give them an inch. This is, generally speaking, how a dominant group tends to view a subservient group, as being morally corrupt or inferior enough to deserve their own domination.

You can also hear in Pharaoh’s response a wholesale rejection of Israel’s God. In this era, likely 1500-1200 BC, Egyptian polytheism circled around the Pharaoh, who was considered a manifestation of the creator god, Ra. Natural and political order, called ma’at, was central to the Egyptian worldview, and it was the Pharaoh’s responsibility to maintain ma’at for the people. Thus any challenge of a foreign deity was laughable, since he was a manifestation of the creator himself, and any proposed interference to the order of his realm was abhorrent to him. Suffice it to say, Pharaoh was holistically positioned to reject this request.

So, in exchange for obeying the word of the Lord and requesting release for their people, Moses and Aaron effectively triggered reprisals. As the Israelite foremen say, Moses and Aaron made them “stink in the sight of Pharaoh”(5:21). In this and the following verse we see how the temperature has been turned up on the Israelites and Moses, and now the Israelites will suffer for their allegiance to Yahweh.

But then we’ll read chapter 6 to get God’s response to all of this. Notice that God doesn’t seem too worked up over Pharaoh’s impertinence. He simply reiterates his promises to Moses, reminding him of the covenant relationship he has already established with his people and assuring them that no word of his will fail to accomplish his purposes. Unfortunately, Israel was not in a place to receive this sort of encouragement (6:9), but we’ll discuss how this could have comforted them. Verse 7 is particularly charged with reassurance; there God makes a promise that he’ll repeat throughout the Scriptures: “I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God.”

One scholar, O. Palmer Robertson, has called this the “Immanuel principle,” noting the recurrence of this promise through God’s covenants with mankind. This is what God has been up to ever since creation, through the promise to Abraham and the Mosaic covenant up to the new covenant in Christ’s blood—all along God has been working to make a people for himself and to dwell with them forever (see Rev 21:3). This, among other things, gives us the sort of perspective that can truly comfort us through the consequences we experience for our allegiance to Yahweh.

We’ll then turn to John 15:12-21 to see parallels in Jesus’s teaching. In several places, Jesus describes the cost of following him (ex. Matt 5:11, 10:25, 24:9; Luke 6:22-23), like our thematic verse for the year, Luke 9:23-24. But notice also in John 15 Jesus’s call for us to obey him much like Yahweh called Israel to worship him (15:17), how the initiative is his in choosing us just as Yahweh’s was in choosing Israel (15:16), and how disdain for Jesus’s servants is actually born out of not knowing Yahweh just like Pharaoh (15:21).

All of this will give us some material for considering what it’s like to be rejected because of Christ. This is, on the whole, the biggest fear that keeps us from associating ourselves with Jesus or discussing our faith with others, even though we have far less to fear than Israel did in Egypt. Nevertheless, these fears can’t be easily dismissed. Instead, we should grapple with them and find that God has already given us comfort and strength through his power and promises, through the mission of his son, and through his abundant grace. In fact, he can work through them, just as he did in the exodus, to claim our hearts for himself and to display his glory to a watching world.