Never Enough Series

Have you ever made a bargain with God? Have you ever said, “God, just get me out of this and I’ll never ask for anything again!” Or “God, if you help me pass this test I’ll come to church every Sunday for a year!” Or “God, if you get me this job I’ll never call in sick again!” If you have, you’re not alone. But if you’ve kept your side of the bargain, you’re definitely in the minority.

The Israelites had begged God to help them. If you remember your Biblical history, they moved to Egypt some 400 years before when Joseph was Pharaoh’s right-hand man, but the political climate had changed. The Hebrews were enslaved, and then when forced labor didn’t seem to be enough to keep them down, their male children were killed at birth.

Because they were miserable, suffering, and desperate, God appeared to Moses in the burning bush at the beginning of the book of Exodus. “The LORD said, "I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey...” [Ex 3:7-8]

Now, the Bible doesn’t tell us if the Israelites promised to do anything in return for deliverance, but it does tell us that when Moses came to the Israelites and told them what God had said, and performed the signs that showed them that he really did speak for the God of their ancestors Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, “they bowed down and worshiped.” [Ex 5:31] Which kind of implies obedience. But.

God didn’t perform up to their expectations. Before things got better, they got worse. The first thing that Pharaoh did when the despised, smelly, underclass started demanding their rights - and all they asked for at first was to go out to the desert to worship - was to order them to make bricks without providing the necessary materials. So they would have to gather their own straw from the fields, which meant working harder but getting less done. Which gave Pharaoh an excuse to deny their request for time off.

And what did the Hebrew people do? Well, of course! They blamed Moses and Aaron.

Over the next few weeks or months - we don’t know exactly how long this all took - God brought the 10 plagues down on Egypt, each one worse than the one before, in order to show Pharaoh who was really in charge. Well, by the end of all this even Pharaoh knew that the Hebrews’ God was the hands-down winner in this contest. He knew it even though acknowledging the truth threatened everything he lived by, from his authority to his labor force to his pretensions to divinity. And of course the Hebrews knew it as well. If there was still any doubt in any of their minds, it must certainly have been done away with, you would think, by the time they got to the Red Sea.

But no. There on the shore to which they had been led by pillars of cloud and fire, someone turned around and saw the Egyptian armies coming up on them in the distance. And instead of assuming that God had something equally spectacular in mind to get them out of the trap, what did they say? They said to Moses,

Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, ‘Let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness. [Ex 14:11-12]

Well, you know what happened. The Red Sea parted, the Israelites passed through safely, and the Egyptian armies were all drowned.

When our text begins, a month has passed since Israel departed from Egypt. They had run out of water a few days before, and complained, and God had provided. The tribes had now reached the beautiful oasis of Elim, filled with abundant springs and palm trees. But they were running out of food. And so what did they do? They complained again. And they started to think about the good times back in Egypt. Remember the good old days, when they had cried out to God for help? Remember the whips of their taskmasters, and the murder of the boy babies? Well, the view from under the palm trees of Elim was a little different.

The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger. [Ex 16:2-3]