I don’t know if the television station was local to Chicago or one of the national news networks, but I can’t forget what I saw. It wasn’t my television. I was just walking by, but I can’t get the image out of my mind. A large moose had fallen through thin ice and was freezing to death because its lower two-thirds was in the icy water below the surface of the ice. It took wildlife experts and more to haul the animal out of its predicament before it could have any hope of survival. And, of course, the animal was making pathetic noises that were quite audible, even over the jabbering talking head of the newscaster.
How could you not have seen the plight of that moose and heard those sounds and not have instigated a rescue as soon as possible with all the resources at your disposal? I know it would have been impossible for me and I simply can’t imagine anyone sitting around complacently viewing the poor moose and watching it die.
At the same time as I was aware of this “big news story,” God was showing me something important in the Bible. I’ve preached on Exodus 2 before and I’ve preached on Exodus 3 and the call of Moses a lot. In fact, I love doing a monologue of Moses’ call as though it’s an exaggerated Jimmy Stewart playing Moses. After all, we think of the Jimmy Stewart stammer and Moses said that he wasn’t eloquent, right? But this week, I was touched by something else in this passage. I was affected by God’s awareness of human suffering. In much the same way that seeing that poor moose’s plight inspired wildlife experts into action, I was almost overwhelmed to see what triggered God’s redemptive action through Moses.
[Read the text.]
The Hebrew text of verse 23 has the idea of something happening in the fullness of time (more literally, “And it happened in the greatness of days”) such that the Pharaoh (“King of Egypt”) died. But instead of things getting better, things must have gotten worse even though they changed. The people “groaned” in their servitude and they “cried out for help.” The Hebrew verb used here is pronounced “tsuh-ahkh” and it can mean “send out a call to arms” as in II Samuel 19:29 or 20:4 or as a call for help in Hosea 8:2. In its noun form, it is used for a powerful play on words in Isaiah 5:7 where it says that God looked for justice (pronounced “mish-paht”) and found bloodshed (“mish-pahkh”) and expected righteousness [or “just dealings”] (pronounced “tsuh-dheh-kah”) but heard a cry for help (“tsuh-ak-ah”).
Then, the verse uses another word for “cry for help” to say that their cries of help from their servitude went up to their God. Of course, the interesting thing here is that we have God identified by the generic divine name, much like some people say, “Oh, God!” today without having any personal relationship with God. Of course, Israel had some relationship with God by virtue of the covenant with their ancestors, but we realize that they don’t have the benefit of God’s personal name until God reveals Himself to Moses in Chapter 3.
So, I want you to get the full picture here. The events leading to Israel’s deliverance happened after time had passed. God allowed the situation to degenerate until the people themselves wanted help, until the people themselves realized that this kind of bondage, oppression, and servitude was not intended to be their destiny. Mere social change, substituting one leader for another, was not adequate to bring about their liberation. A change in circumstances may seem like a solution, but in this case (as in most cases) the change of circumstances was not enough to relieve Israel from her distress.
The truth is, even for modern believers, mere social change or a change in circumstances isn’t going to set us free from the things that weigh us down or cause us to suffer. But there is good news and that good news is found in verse 24. “And God heard their groans…” Now, I take great hope in this phrase because it doesn’t seem to indicate that God merely heard their crying out for help, though I am certain that God heard that, but God heard the emotional outcry of their condition. God heard how they felt. And though the text gets even better in this regard, I find that tremendously comforting to me because it suggests that when I hurt, when I’m victimized, when I’m wronged, when I’m persecuted, when I’m treated unfairly, and when I’m in physical or psychological agony, God hears and understands my hurt.
It goes on to say: “And God heard their groans and God remembered HIS covenant with their fathers—with Abraham (Great Father), with Isaac (“He Laughed” or I like to say, “God’s Last Laugh”), and with Jacob (“Heel Grabber”).” Not only does God know how we feel when we feel wronged or hurt, but God is cognizant of our relationship with Him. There is a tie. God doesn’t merely point us to another cosmic department and say that it isn’t His job. God takes responsibility for our situation and God makes sure that we are brought into a relationship with Him that can address our future in a positive way. God has a purpose for us and it isn’t to be continually mired in oppression and futility. God may allow us to suffer, even as He allowed Himself to suffer in the incarnate Christ, but that suffering will have purpose. It won’t be futile.
But it gets even better. Verse 25 goes on to say that God saw the children (lit. “sons”) of Israel and God knew. It wasn’t enough for God to hear the emotional pain of His people. It wasn’t enough for God to acknowledge that there was a relationship, a partnership, a deal between Israel and the divine. Rather, God observed all there was to observe about their characters and their circumstances and God understood all they were going through. The verb “to know” in the Old Testament is a very powerful word. This is the same verb where Adam “knew” his wife sexually—they were physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually one—and as a result, she conceived and gave birth to a child.
To say that God knew here is an emphatic way of stating that God went through the physical suffering with Israel, that God understood the helplessness and hurt the children of Israel were feeling, that God experienced the hurt with them, and that God was with them in a way that cannot be fully explained. In the Hebrew text, the verb “knew” has no direct object. It doesn’t say that He merely knew their suffering and their circumstances. It says that He “knew” and without that direct object, it reminds us that He knew all He needed to know about all aspects of their being and their plight.
And, of course, this is a tremendous assurance to us. God isn’t “up there” and isolated from what we feel and what we’re going through. God isn’t some stoic judge in the heavens who is waiting for us to come up with the right password to get His attention or to offer the right deal to get Him to act. God knows when we feel betrayed. God knows the pain we’re experiencing. God knows when we feel our efforts are futile and when we are sinking into a seeming hopeless depression. God knows when we’re wronged. God knows when we’re cheated.
And that’s where I want to zero in, this week. You see, Moses “saw” injustice earlier in the chapter. Moses went out to his brother Hebrew and he tried to do something about it. In verse 11, we see this verb for “he saw” used twice. First, he “saw” the general burdens of the Hebrews and second, he “saw” an Egyptian strike one of his Hebrew brothers. Upon “seeing” the problem, Moses “solves” the problem by killing the Hebrew—taking vengeance, liberation, or justice into his own hands.
But he doesn’t solve the problem. He not only creates a problem for himself when he realizes that his action was observed and that his Hebrew brothers aren’t on the same page with him, but the subsequent reaction from His so-called “brother” is one of ingratitude and resentment. The Hebrew asks Moses who he thinks he is to judge between two Hebrews and indicates that he knows Moses killed the Egyptian and implies that everything can’t be solved with violent solutions. As a result, the Pharaoh seeks out Moses with the intent to kill him (using the same verb “to kill” as used when Moses “kills” the Egyptian) and Moses flees to Midian to save his own skin rather than having the face-to-face confrontation with Pharaoh we might expect (at least, we might expect it if the story wasn’t so familiar to us) to lead to Israel’s liberation.
I have a very old commentary that summarizes these incidents quite succinctly. In it, Dr. Robert Jamieson states: “These two incidents prove that neither were the Israelites yet ready to go out of Egypt, nor was Moses prepared to be their leader (James 1:20). It was by the staff and not the sword—by the meekness, and not the wrath of Moses—that God was to accomplish the great work of deliverance.”
So, while neither Israel nor Moses was ready for God’s purpose to be fulfilled in the earlier part of this chapter, we see that time has elapsed and God is ready to act by the end of the chapter. God knows! Of course, I am reminded of that wonderful line in Archibald MacLeish’s J.B., the Broadway version of the Book of Job as told in verse. Before the great businessman, the J.B. of the play’s title, is brought down by the desperate circumstances recounted in the first two chapters of Job, one of J.B.’s friends asks for the secret of J.B.’s success. J.B. points out the window and asks his interviewer what the man sees. The man answers that he sees a road. J.B. tells him that he is correct, but goes on to ask where the road is going. “God knows!” exclaims the man as though to say that the knowledge was beyond him. Again, J.B. tells him that he is correct and claims the road to success is finding out what God knows about the road and where it is going.
In this answer, J.B. is both right and wrong. He’s right that God knows, but as he (and the biblical Job) discovers, God’s knowledge isn’t always passed along to us. We aren’t always ready to see the whole “cup” as Jesus described it. We aren’t always ready to see the “big picture” or even capable of seeing the “big picture.” There are times that we simply need to be reassured that “God knows” and, if we truly believe in faith that God wants what is best for us, sometimes it has to be enough. Yet, sometimes, we need to strive to understand what we can because God has revealed what He knows in the Bible and in Christ.
At the conclusion of Exodus 2, we see that the change for the worse in terms of their circumstances has prepared the Hebrews to cry out for help and that God is ready to help them. At the beginning of Exodus 3, we see that God seeks out Moses in the midst of his “secular work” in the Land of Midian and reveals Himself as a fire burning in the midst of a bush. Moses finds himself curious about this bush that is burning without being consumed and he “sees” the angel of the Lord, the presence of God Who he is to know personally and he “sees” and “check it out,” the bush is burning but not consumed.
There are times when I’m preaching and teaching on this passage that I emphasize the fire and the miracle. The fire is a great metaphor for the presence of God because fire can warm, fire can transform (cook or harden), fire can cleanse, and fire can consume. Sometimes God comforts us. If we are willing, God changes us for the better. Just as fire can cauterize a wound or sterilize an object, God cleanses us from sin. And if we don’t respond positively to God, sometimes God has to destroy the destructive things in our lives or our rebellious attitudes themselves.
I also like to point out the miracle of the bush not being consumed and the promise that should be for us. When we allow God’s Presence and God’s Power to operate in our lives, God brings that cleansing, cauterizing, transforming power into our lives without consuming us, annihilating our personalities into the ashes of our past. God allows us to be, but God is in us and lights our fire for His glory without destroying us in the process. That doesn’t mean that we won’t occasionally get tired, weary, and discouraged. I had a church member once who said that because I was often mentally and physically exhausted on Sunday nights, I must be preaching in the “flesh” instead of preaching in the “Spirit.” That’s just silly! To be sure, I’ve experienced times when God gave me extra strength and stamina to accomplish His will, but even with His Presence, I put all I have into my preaching. I may get tired, but I’m not completely used up! And that’s the difference!
But in sharing that (and I think it’s significant), I’ve strayed from the main truth that God has engaged me with during this week. God drew Moses to Himself with the living metaphor of the burning bush that was not consumed and, after commanding Moses to shed his man-made protection, his shoes, brought Moses to the “ground of holiness.” Moses experienced an unbuffered encounter with God’s holiness. Nothing stood between him and “the place” where God told him to stand.
By the way, the rabbis considered this term, “the place” as we find it in verse 5, to be another name for God. They recognized that there is an importance in finding ourselves exactly in the “sweet spot,” exactly in THE PLACE that God wants us to be. And that’s where Moses was when he approached the bush where God saw fit to reveal Himself.
And what does God say? In verse 7, God says literally, “seeing, I have seen.” This is a strange grammatical construction in Hebrew that doesn’t translate easily into English. The Hebrew essentially uses the verb twice in order to emphasize the intensity of what was happening. In this case, it was the intensity of what God “saw.” “Seeing, I have seen” means that if God had eyeballs, the image of the suffering of His people would have been indelibly etched into those eyeballs. God saw vividly, intently, clearly, and emotionally what was happening to His people in Egypt. Remember the helpless moose at the beginning of this message? How could you see that and not care? In the same way, there was no way for God to allow Israel’s suffering to go on without caring and getting involved—only more so! And if that was true about Israel, I believe that whenever we’re going through tough times, injustice, uncertainty, illness, or oppression, God is “seeing, He shall see” our plight like each one of us was a moose stuck in the icy lake and in need of rescue.
Verse 7 goes on to use another grammatical construction for emphasis. In Hebrew, the verb usually comes first unless the text intends to emphasize the subject or object of the verb. And here, it emphasizes the object—“THEIR CRIES FOR HELP” I have heard, God said in this verse. They didn’t have to placate God. They didn’t have to say a magic word. They admitted that they needed help and God heard. Why do we think God would do any less, today?
To me, though, it gets even better. God said: “Because I know their feverish wounds” or “Because I know their anguish.” There it is again. God said, “I know” but this time, there is an object. He doesn’t just know all they are experiencing and experiences it with them as in Chapter 2. Here, God knows their pain. God experiences in His miraculous union with His people, their pain. And God knows our pain, our anguish, our feverish wounds. And God knows the feverish wounds of those around us.
But He not only knows, but He does something about it. Verse 8 goes on to say that God will “come down to deliver them from the hand of Egypt.” God gets involved. God intervenes. God is not disinterested. God cares enough to come down into our midst.
Yet, the intriguing thing to me is that as soon as God expresses His intent to become involved in Israel’s deliverance and reiterates His purpose in delivering, verse 10 shows us God commanding Moses to come into God’s special presence because God is going to send Moses to Pharaoh. Now, usually when I’ve preached or taught this passage, I’ve focused on Moses’ excuses and God’s miraculous signs. At times, I’ve built the sermon around God’s revelation of Himself as He who caused to be, He who continues to be, and He who always will be (the root idea undergirding God’s personal name as Yahweh).
But this week, God has challenged me with the realization that when God hears, sees and knows what people are experiencing, God intervenes by calling people to engage in His redemptive ministry. Oh, we have the same excuses. We have an identity crisis. We don’t express ourselves well enough or know exactly what to say. We don’t want to be presumptuous. We aren’t theologically sophisticated enough.
Yet, when God knows what people are going through, it is God’s identity that is important. It is God’s message that will truly be eloquent. It is God’s calling that will put us in the right place, be our “ground of holiness” if you will. And the only real theological sophistication we need is an ongoing and ever-growing relationship with God.
When we see that marriage falling apart, when we see that addict or abuser falling into the old trap, when we see someone hurting, wronged, or depressed, WE are called to be God’s instrument of deliverance. God knows.
