1. Moses had a number of serious challenges as a leader from the very beginning.

a. He didn’t want to do it. “O, Lord, please send someone else to do it.”

b. He didn’t have the talent or gifting he thought necessary. “I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue. Since I speak with faltering lips, why would Pharaoh listen to me?”

c. He had no credibility with the people. He was not one of them. He was privileged and they were slaves. He had escaped the consequences for what he had done and they were still enslaved for another forty years.  He had endangered them with his uncontrollable anger by killing an Egyptian and had then run away leaving them exposed.

d. He had no mandate, had not been elected, brought no army with him, stuttered when he talked, had no base of support, and spoke for a god not even accepted by the Hebrews. They only knew of a God named El Shaddai and had not heard from Him in 400 years. Moses was coming in the name of Yahweh. What if Billy Graham had come in the name of Allah? What if the man who had jeopardized your own life now came back forty years later claiming to be your deliverer in the name of a strange god? 

Moses would have been the Bobby Kennedy of his day coming to the South. Remember what Bull Connor said in Birmingham? “If the North keeps trying to cram this thing down our throats, there’s going to be bloodshed.” In a way, it’s surprising the Hebrews did not kill him before Pharaoh did.

e. In fact, Moses had no support from the slaves even though he was “highly regarded in Egypt by Pharoah’s officials and by the people.” Exodus 11:3 He was highly regarded by the very people who had enslaved the Israelites. The very thing that made him highly regarded would make him a traitor to the Egyptians and to the Israelites. He had nothing going for him.

f. There is nothing but failure and things becoming worse at the beginning. The Hebrews are made to work even harder and to find their own materials. “Make the men work harder for the men so that they keep working and pay no attention to lies.” For every Pharoah since the truth has been considered lies and fake news that the people should not hear. God told him he would make it hard on Pharaoh but he didn’t say he would make it hard on Moses or the Hebrews. What kind of deliverance is this? In fact, the people even suffer through the plagues right along with the Egyptians at first.

We participate in God’s process with others. We are sometimes innocent but included. It is only later that the people are exempted and the Lord makes a distinction between Israel and Egypt. Everyone suffers together at first.  It is easy to think only the Egyptians in our lives will suffer and we will somehow be spared but sin does not work that way. It infects the whole body.

Moses had only one advantage – God.

2. God is after more than releasing slaves from Egypt.

Hardship does not destroy our identity but syncretism will. What is syncretism? Syncretism means the gradual fusion of two or more religions or beliefs. It usually involves the addition of a few essential parts of one religion to a dominant religion, resulting in a new religion that is a mixture of the two. From the beginning the Christian church has battled it when we have added elements of other beliefs and practices to our own. Christian Nationalism is a good example of syncretism. It is combining Christianity and patriotism in a way that distorts both at the same time. All through Scripture we see where the people outwardly worshiped God but had idols in their homes and had no conflict with that. They combined elements of Canaanite religion with their own beliefs and ended up with a mixture that was convenient and easy. American religious history scholars, like Robert Bellah, have called this our civil religion. It happens when non-sacred beliefs and symbols come alongside our sacred beliefs and they support each other. 

No one is quite sure who coined this phrase but it rings true: “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” The Church is always in danger of worshiping false gods while believing them to be true.

It is often called “common faith” and it provides a religious sanction for the political order and a divine justification of and support for civic society and a nation’s practices. It functions as a social glue to bind people together and give them a sense of spiritual unity.

Syncretism happens when there is no sharp distinction between two beliefs and we are easily led to combine them thinking they are not contradictory and may even complement each other. It may be Christianity and Capitalism or Christianity and Socialism or Christianity and Patriotism. It is easy to combine them into one belief – especially when the culture around you is moving in the same direction.

Historians who have studied this period in Egyptian history write about the move away from the belief in many gods (polytheism) and the move toward one god (monotheism) in Egypt. This was also the time of the rise of Egypt as a regional power so monotheism was not only acceptable but was seen as part of the reason for their rise. Monotheism was acceptable. The Pharaoh would not have argued with their belief in one God. In fact, the Egyptian version would have been, “There is but one God and Pharaoh is his chosen one.” The Hebrews were not persecuted because of their belief in one God but because of their threat to the State. They were not persecuted because they were heretics. Their belief in one God did not put them at risk except in one way. The risk of misguided belief. Slavery would not destroy them as a people but an Egyptian religion that was close enough to theirs would have. 

We are often deluded by ideas about God that are close enough to our own to blur the lines. We are not led astray by outright lies but by something looking like the truth. Our defenses go up when we confront totally different beliefs but when the beliefs of a powerful culture around us seem enough like our own we move in that direction. And, that is what was happening after 400 years of God being silent. They were moving from what had made them distinct (monotheism) to something close enough. This would not be the last time. No one could imagine Abraham, Isaac or Jacob worshiping a golden calf but their descendants did  

3. God’s intention in delivering them from slavery is combined with His intention in delivering them from syncretism as well. In doing so, He was determined to show His glory not only to Pharaoh but to the people who were in danger of melting into the civil religion of Egypt.

“Therefore, say to the Israelites: I am the Lord (Yahweh) and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves to them and will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgement. I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God. Then you will know that I am the Lord your God, who brought you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians.” 

“Then I will lay my hand on Egypt and with mighty acts of judgment I will bring out my divisions, my people the Israelites. And the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring the Israelites out of it.”

See how His purpose is the same for both the people and the Egyptians? It is to show the people the glory of a God they have begun to forget. He is more than they imagined. He even says he will take a new name for them to follow. “I am the Lord. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as God Almighty (El Shaddai), but by my name the Lord (Yahweh) I did not make myself known to them.”

Glory is not boasting or ego. It is the Hebrew word “kabod” which means weight or substance. Weight can mean simply heavy or it can mean “something that carries weight” because of the person who says it. They have substance and therefore influence and respect. They have mass – not just inflated weight. I was reading a description of a dark star recently and the author asked the reader to imagine compressing the mass of the sun into a mass with a radius of two miles. That compressing something with the radius of 430,000 miles into a two mile square. That is substance. We are made to reflect God’s substance – not his ego.

That is what God is after in our lives – substance – and He sometimes takes us through suffering to get there.

 

4. The Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart.

a. If you read each instance in which Pharaoh responds to a plague you’ll see that there are more times when he hardened his own heart than God did. Five times it says the Lord hardened his heart and yet he hardened his own heart – even after declaring he had sinned – six times. In “The Great Divorce” C.S. Lewis writes: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.”

b. Let’s read Romans 9:14-24:

What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! For he says to Moses,

“I will have mercy on whom I have mercy,

and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”

It does not, therefore, depend on human desire or effort, but on God’s mercy. For Scripture says to Pharaoh: “I raised you up for this very purpose, that I might display my power in you and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden.

One of you will say to me: “Then why does God still blame us? For who is able to resist his will?” But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’” Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use?

What if God, although choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for destruction? What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory— even us, whom he also called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles?

It sounds like someone you would want to avoid. “Go play quietly. Daddy’s having a bad day.”

Or, like a child making a toy only to destroy it. If we misread Paul or Exodus we can hear, “Don’t ask any questions. God will do what He pleases.”

That’s how we sometimes are taught to understand the idea of sovereignty – someone who has the power to do what they please. Sovereignty is a natural right.

“The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is responsible to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

Or we are taught that sovereignty is flawed:

“What seems to be one of the disasters of our time is that we all appear to agree that the sovereign nation-state is the norm… Whether the state be Marxist or capitalist, it makes no difference. The dominant ideology is that of sovereignty.”

― Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity

No matter, we have trouble understanding it because history has taught us that the “divine right of kings,” their whims, excesses of power and displays of sovereignty are not to be endured. Even Scripture warns us of the danger of kings and power. Sovereign power does what it pleases – and everything in us rises up against that. It offends us. So, when we read that God is sovereign we often read, “I am God and I will do what pleases me.”

But what if we change the phrase to say, “I am God and I will do whatever is necessary. It is not what pleases me but what accomplishes my purpose. It will not be comfortable for you or for me but I will do what it takes.”

I often think about Winston Churchills’ address to House of Commons when he said:

“I say to the House as I said to ministers who have joined this government, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many months of struggle and suffering.

You ask, what is our policy? I say it is to wage war by land, sea, and air. War with all our might and with all the strength God has given us, and to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.

You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory. Victory at all costs – Victory in spite of all terrors – Victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.”

God is saying I will do whatever it takes to the point of my own sacrifice to accomplish my purpose. Without a purpose God’s sovereignty is purely raw power in the hands of a childish autocrat. His purpose is His glory – whatever it takes. He is changing His relationship with them and changing them as well. It will take something this extreme to do that. It did change them in time, didn’t it? Their deliverance was not only from physical bondage but from what could have been even worse – bondage to the appealing beliefs that would keep them there and turn them into Egyptians in time. It is the goal of every State and Empire – Roman, British, American, Russian – to absorb Christians into the civil religion. To worship false gods.

When I question God’s purposeful sovereignty and see it as unfairness or something he needs to explain to me, I go back to Job 40:8-14:

“Would you discredit my justice?

Would you condemn me to justify yourself?

Do you have an arm like God’s,

and can your voice thunder like his?

Then adorn yourself with glory and splendor,

and clothe yourself in honor and majesty.

Unleash the fury of your wrath,

look at all who are proud and bring them low,

look at all who are proud and humble them,

crush the wicked where they stand.

Bury them all in the dust together;

shroud their faces in the grave.

Then I myself will admit to you

that your own right hand can save you.”

And what is Job’s response? “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know. My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.”

That is my response as well. I cannot look at all who are proud and bring them low. I cannot humble them or crush the wicked where they stand. I cannot bury them all in the dust together or shroud their faces in the grave. Only God can do that.

This is the wonder of God’s sovereignty and his intent to accomplish His purposes for the whole of creation even at the sacrifice of Himself. It is not the destructive whims of a child or the defensiveness of an insecure autocrat.

“I am God and I will do whatever is necessary to save what I have made.”

I pray the same for the Church today. I pray that God would save us from wickedness, idolatry and false gods.