I had the pleasure of seeing our church last Sunday and Pastor Andy this week for a lunch and hang. Sometimes in our impatience and suffering we can forget the magnitude of God's power at work, even to comfort us in the waiting.
It’s been over a year since my last note. If I can say life has grown more difficult, know I know God is still good and sovereign and His love and presence are with me as I seek Him in all things.
I’ve been meditating about Genesis detailing Joseph’s and Jacob’s faith in trial juxtaposed with Jesus speaking of the poor in spirit being blessed with a present tense form of the kingdom of Heaven. I’ll tell you, it sure doesn’t look like Heaven until I’m living by faith.
My disability has brought me to a cliff’s edge and sometimes I feel like my prayers are only the echo of my voice.
Exodus comes every year in my reading plan, and yet every year I adore God even more. The cycle of God working miracles in individual lives before a new season brings drought and suffering to retest our faith feels right at home. I’ve read how Joseph was betrayed by his brothers and his master, thrown into slavery, and imprisoned without a fair trial, experienced God’s blessings and presence throughout and saw the goodness of God to make his descendants become many and mighty.
This morning, I read in Exodus how this blessing seemed to fall away when the Pharaoh of Joseph’s day died, and a new terror began.
During those many days the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel—and God knew. — Exodus 2:23-25
This passage shows how God hears our groaning and knows, even when the surface of what we see is hopeless.
I could stop there and plead with you and myself to believe this and be well.
I want to add how God spoke to my fears this morning. He announces His presence to Moses from the burning bush with “Here I am.” (Ex 3:4)
God is here. And He wants us to know Him more than we “know” our problems because at any moment He may change our trial into revelation, power and blessing.
God tells Moses of these blessings and what will happen, but Moses does not believe because he is still searching within and around instead of through God.
To Moses’s question, “Who am I?” (3:11), God delivers a powerful statement. Before He was (and is) merely the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Now He will become “I am who I am” (3:14) and show His power in great works of deliverance.
Moses still has doubts (see Ch 4), yet God gives him signs and he and the people of Israel believe enough that God began His work to set them free.
Unfortunately, but also within the sovereignty and will of God, they face hardship. Finally, this story feels like my life again. I’ve seen God work in my life, yet I am sometimes caught up in witnessing the thorns left to fester.
Then Moses turned to the LORD and said, “O Lord, why have you done evil to this people? Why did you ever send me? For since I came to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has done evil to this people, and you have not delivered your people at all.” — Exodus 5:22-23
My version would be something like, Lord I followed you here to serve and all I have is uncertainty and the potential for disaster. I’m angry like Moses because my plans didn’t work. My daily life is a trench filled with pain and it’s rising to my throat.
How did God respond?
But the LORD said to Moses, “Now you shall see what I will do to Pharaoh; for with a strong hand, he will send them out, and with a strong hand he will drive them out of his land.” — Exodus 6:1
While this verse is a great reminder of watching for God to work, keep reading…
God spoke to Moses and said to him, “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. — Exodus 6:2-3
This is the first use of the LORD as His name, and while He has been a covenant keeping God before, His people are about to witness a newness to His character—the covenant keeping God is here! Or there… then…
I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the LORD your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. I will bring you into the land that I swore to give to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. I will give it to you for a possession. I am the LORD.’” — Exodus 6:7-8
In summary, there was a time when God’s people cried out to see His promise kept, and He kept it. The days and years before, He was at work to keep it, so it wasn’t as though He changed, only their perspective to time and the will of God.
Like Moses, we may spend a few chapters (or 40 plus years) waiting in our unbelief, tormented by focus on ourselves and our problems instead of God’s character and powerful potential. “Rejoice in hope” has been a recent rallying cry from Romans 12:12 because every day we must sacrifice our need to see how and replace it with joy in Him to deliver everything we need.
So, our charge is to believe today that God keeps His promises, regardless of how long we have seen and known the desert. Every moment of suffering where my soul is burdened by Pharaoh’s harsh treatment, I must believe that I Am is here and at work.
In John 12:26 Jesus said:
If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him.
Someday I too will see Him anew when He concludes the time has come to deliver me, and us, from this wretched pilgrimage.
It is an honor to serve this God and His kingdom. In that faith I am comforted that Jesus has already overcome the world (cf Jn 16:25-33); I am only waiting to see it.
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