Exodus 4:27-5:9

Hey, everybody.
Welcome back.
Thanks for joining us on this Tuesday as we continue through Exodus.
We pick up the story late in chapter 4.
Moses has now been joined,
just in this verse that
we’re about to read,
been joined by Aaron,
who God has said he would send with him,
and they make their way – they begin to make their way back to Egypt.
So let me read here, verse 27,
then we’ll have some discussion.
“The Lord said to Aaron,
‘Go into the wilderness to
meet Moses.’ So he went,
met him at the mountains of God, and kissed him.
Moses told Aaron all the
words of the Lord with which he had sent him,
and all the signs with which he had charged him.
Then Moses and Aaron went and assembled all the elders of the Israelites.
Aaron spoke all the words the Lord had spoken to Moses,
and performed the signs in the sight of the people.
The people believed,
and when they heard that the Lord had given heed to the Israelites,
and that he had seen their misery,
they bowed down and worshipped.”
So this is really – we’ve had the name before,
but this is the first we get of the character Aaron,
Moses’ brother, a Levite, which means he’s of the priestly tribe.
He is spoken to by God, go meet Moses.
He sees them.
He greets him.
They join together.
Interestingly enough, we don’t know Aaron’s backstory,
perhaps older before the threat of being thrown in the river,
perhaps hidden in some way like Moses.
Well, whatever that story is,
we don’t know it.
We do know these men meet and Moses tells Aaron the story,
and Aaron is moved by it,
is affected
by the signs, the miracles that Moses can do.
And together, they go and speak to the elders of the Israelites.
And Michael, I just think this is really interesting,
sort of indicative of the
rest of the story.
This story, the whole rest of this book is just going to pivot on the ground
between belief and doubt.
And here,
the Israelites have this moment.
They hear that God has remembered them.
They hear that God has a plan.
They listen to Moses and Aaron.
They believe
this thing can be possible,
that they may have freedom.
They dare to hope that that could be the case.
And really,
a celebratory moment here,
I think, on the front end of this.
And I just think it’s interesting that this story starts off on such a high note.
A note here, verse 27,
that the Lord sends Aaron into the wilderness to meet Moses.
The wilderness becomes a key place as we first go to Egypt.
And then, of course, the people, when they rescue,
they spend the rest of their time in the wilderness.
The wilderness is this place of barrenness and a place in between.
A note here that the text is so simple,
just as the Lord said to Aaron, as if we
now just suddenly take for granted that not only does Aaron exist,
but the Lord is speaking to
him.
And when the Lord says, “Go,” he goes.
And as we see,
he meets Moses at the mountain of God
and kisses him.
It’s just an aside.
He’s just like, “Yep, God said it,” so Aaron did it.
And we’re moving the story forward at this point.
And it’s interesting because Moses tells Aaron,
God tells Aaron, “Go to Moses,” but then Moses recounts this revelation with God.
And it’s in that he tells him what God wants him to say and shows him the signs.
And I think it’s striking
as you look closer at the text here in verse 30,
it’s Aaron who speaks all the words and it’s
Aaron who performs the signs in the sight of the people.
The thing that Moses was explicitly called
to do to speak these words and to perform these signs,
he doesn’t end up actually doing.
There’s a sense in which God has made the accommodation with Aaron.
Moses doesn’t at the last hour decide to change course.
Aaron is the one who’s going to do it.
And by the way,
the first thing that we see, verse 31,
the people believed.
So whatever Moses was worried about is very clearly now shown to not have weight.
As God has been faithful,
the message has been heard.
Yeah, we’ve seen some foreshadowing of that.
Earlier in chapter 4,
God said, “I’ll send Aaron.
You’ll put words in his mouth and he’ll speak to the people.” And that is literally the case on
the front end here.
It won’t always be the case,
but it begins there.
And the people,
the response is they bow down and worship.
And I think it is an interesting barometer of where the people are
when they bow down and when they do not.
And so throughout this story,
there will be moments where
the people are moved to praise.
And there’ll be other moments where they’re kind of stubborn and
hard-hearted.
And really to some extent,
that is the temperature of how things are going for the Israelites.
I was just going to say,
Clint, you’ve got the Levite Aaron.
It’s interesting to note
here the inclusion of end of verse 31,
that the people bowed down and worshiped.
It’s interesting that when we introduce the Levitical tribes here,
we’re also introducing a moment which the people
are worshiping.
And the Levitical priesthood becomes the people who oversee the worship
of the Israelites going forward,
farther down the road.
And I think it’s fair to see in that
somewhat of a right pairing.
I mean, we will see later that these two things go together,
the worship of the people and Aaron and those that follow him.
And it’s interesting that they’re
paired here in this story itself.
Yeah.
Now we move very quickly to the next part of the story,
which is the first initial audience with Pharaoh.
Moses and Aaron approached the Pharaoh.
How it is that they gain an audience with him, we’re not told.
It doesn’t matter to the story.
What matters is this kind of showdown,
this negotiation, perhaps, you could say, that has started.
So let’s get into chapter 5 here.
“Afterward Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh.
They said, ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel,
let my people go so they may celebrate a festival to me in the
wilderness.’ But Pharaoh said,
‘Who is the Lord that I should heed him or let Israel go?
I do not know the Lord and I will not let Israel go.’ Then they said,
‘The God of the Hebrews has revealed
himself to us.
Let us go a three days journey into the wilderness to sacrifice to the Lord our God,
or he will fall upon you with pestilence and sword.’ But the king of Egypt said to them,
‘Moses and Aaron,
why are you taking the people from their work?
Get to your labors.’
Pharaoh continued,
‘Now they are more numerous than the people of the land and let you want them
to stop working.’ That same day,
Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters of the people as well as their supervisors,
‘You shall no longer give the people straw to make bricks as before.
Let them go gather straw for themselves,
but you shall require of them the same quantity of bricks as they have made previously.
Do not diminish it,
for they are lazy.’ That’s why they cried,
‘Let us go sacrifice to our God.
Let heavier work be laid upon them.
Then they will labor at it and pay no attention
to deceptive words.’ So clearly,
initial meeting doesn’t go so well.
Moses and Aaron go and deliver
this message to the Pharaoh.
The Pharaoh says, ‘Look, I don’t know what God you’re talking about,
what Lord you’re talking about.
It means nothing to me.
You’re not going.’ In fact,
the Pharaoh ups the ante and says,
‘Not only are you not going,
I’m going to make the labor harder.
I’m going to take away some of the process that had been being done for you,
and now the Israelites are going
to have to do it themselves.’ And so this is an unfortunate step one,
probably an indication to
the people that things were not going to be easy,
but it is going to affect the people who had hoped
that this would be a much shorter and straightforward process.
Yeah, we the reader are not surprised.
We were actually explicitly told that the Lord was going
to harden Pharaoh’s heart,
and so we’re not surprised when we see it happening.
Maybe we are a little surprised to see how quickly it escalates,
how quickly we go from essentially a
refusal to upping the ante to use your language claim.
I think that it’s worth seeing in this
that the moment that we saw just previous where there was celebration and even worship,
we now have the people already feeling the weight of things being harder, that this
move by Moses and Aaron to go and to make a case that the people should go worship God,
or else they make this statement that the Lord himself might fall upon us with pestilence or sword.
Here,
Pharaoh obviously doesn’t care about that.
He, in fact, is so unafraid
that somehow the Lord of these people is going to impact him in his own kingdom,
that he doubles down on his own authority and power and makes it clear that,
you know, maybe I can work this stupid thought out of you.
Maybe if you are working harder,
you will stop playing around with these fantasies of some God who you need to worship to,
you know, with the implicit idea being aren’t I God enough for you?
And I think that we knew that this was
coming, but it doesn’t really in that way necessarily change the shocking nature of how
quickly this is ramping up.
Yeah, I think perhaps, Michael,
we see in the Pharaoh an example of
might makes right,
the idea that the Pharaoh doesn’t believe himself to be accountable
to anyone or to anything,
that he has authority,
he has the power to make these people do what he
wants and to force them to whatever he sees fit.
And so when he lays this extra burden upon him,
upon them, he does so very intentionally with the idea of breaking their spirit.
You know,
how dare you come and ask me for a break?
How dare you come and say you need to go worship?
I call the shots around here.
We do things my way.
And the Pharaoh represents in this story,
that kind of unchecked power that is going to be challenged by religious power,
by faith power.
But at this point,
seems clearly to be in control over the Israelites.
And that’s one of the
questions the Israelites are going to have to struggle with,
is who do they believe ultimately
to be an authority over them.
And here,
at least in the first volley,
it is a nod to the Pharaoh.
And by the way,
it’s not an idle threat.
As the text goes on,
it’s going to become clear that
this is actually enforced.
So this is important backstory,
because the same Egypt,
who is willing to kill the firstborn,
now a new Pharaoh,
but the same Egypt,
is also willing to bear down quickly.
And note that the thing that Moses and Aaron were asking for was not complete freedom,
but rather the opportunity to take a few days to worship God.
And that small request is enough
to bring down the might of Pharaoh upon them.
It’s a striking increase of the seriousness of the situation.
And quite frankly,
that idea of might makes right is at its core a narrative of
God versus Pharaoh, a narrative that we’ve already seen before,
is who’s stronger and who brings the
weight to the, who brings the ultimate authority in the midst of the conversation.
And it’s striking
here that Pharaoh responds so violently and so quickly as to almost intuit for us the reader, or to,
as we are reading this,
it leads us to ask the question, you know,
to what extent will Pharaoh be able to hold out against God?
Yeah, I think from the Pharaoh’s perspective,
he has no reason to negotiate.
He’s in control.
He sits on the throne.
He has power.
He has authority.
People do his bidding.
He has the
force to make these people do what he wants them to do.
And why in the world would he care
about what they want?
It’s an interesting scenario.
It’s an interesting commentary,
I think, on power,
on humility,
on responsibility as a leader, as a person.
And very much this
continues this idea of the Pharaoh challenging God.
I mean, he says it straight out,
“I do not know the Lord, and why should I heed him?” That is a question that is unfortunately for the Pharaoh
going to get answered.
In a few chapters down the road,
he will no longer be able to say those
things.
But he begins brash and confident and aggressive,
and that is the lot that is cast at
the beginning of the story.
Note that this is the kind of story that’s not told in the children’s
Bibles.
And I think that it’s actually really important context, Clint,
because if you only
read the Exodus stories,
it gets told in the children’s Bibles.
You have maybe Moses fleeing
from Egypt.
You have the burning bush, obviously.
Then you have the ten plagues.
Then you have the
crossing the Red Sea.
Sometimes you’ll have that tenth plague.
And I think what’s important with
this context is this is all setting up the justification.
They wouldn’t use the word
justification.
It’s giving us the context and the backstory as to what makes God’s righteous
judgment make so much sense.
When you come to the furthest end of what God is willing to do
to free the people,
that is really rooted in this here,
which is Pharaoh making it very clear this
is not an issue of a slight disagreement.
This is Pharaoh taking his position against God at the
continued expense of the people.
And so I know I’ve said this before,
but I think it’s just worth
pointing out as the story goes along.
All of this is here is to give us a sense for the severity of
the problem, and that is the thing that’s going to help us make sense of the severity of the
judgment on the other side.
Yeah, if you can, join us tomorrow as we continue seeing what
Pharaoh does and how Israel responds,
which sets the stage then for Moses and Aaron to begin
their task, their mission.
Thanks so much, friends.
We will see you tomorrow.