Exodus 5:10-22

Hey, everybody.
Welcome back.
Welcome back.
It’s good to have you with us as we continue pushing through the week here on a Wednesday,
and we are in the fifth chapter of Exodus.
Just a quick recap,
Moses and Aaron have
met with the Pharaoh.
They’ve told the Pharaoh that God has given instructions to let the people go worship.
The Pharaoh has really not only said no,
he has punished them,
in essence, for their
nerve in asking, and he’s now imposed harsher tasks on the people.
He’s making them make bricks
without straw being provided for them.
So, in all,
this is not going well initially.
So, the weight of the Pharaoh’s anger.
So, let me read here verse 10 for a while.
“So the taskmasters and the supervisors of the people went out,
and they said to the people,
‘The Pharaoh says, ‘I will not give you straw.
Go and get straw yourselves wherever you can find
it, but you will not
be lessened in the least in your work.’ So,
the people scattered throughout
the land of Egypt together stubble for straw.
The taskmasters were urgent,
saying, ‘Complete your work the same daily assignment as when you were given straw.’
And the supervisors of the Israelites,
whom Pharaoh’s taskmasters had said over them were beaten,
and they were asked,
‘Why did you not finish
the required quantity of bricks yesterday and today as you did before?’
Then the Israelite supervisor
came to Pharaoh and cried,
‘Why do you treat your servants like this?
No straw is given to your
servants, but they say to us, ‘Make bricks.
Look how the servants are beaten.
You are unjust to your own people.’
He said, ‘You are lazy,
lazy. That’s why you say,
‘Let us go and sacrifice to the Lord.
Go now and work,
for no straw will be given to you,
but you shall still deliver the same number.’
The Israelite supervisors saw they were in trouble when they were told,
‘You shall not lessen your daily bricks.’ They left the Pharaoh.
They came upon Moses and Aaron who were waiting to meet them.
They said to them,
‘The Lord look upon you and judge.
You have brought us into bad
odor with the Pharaoh and his officials,
and you have put a sword in their hand to kill us.’
Then Moses turned again to the Lord and said,
‘O Lord, why have you mistreated the people?
Why did you ever send me?
Since I first came to Pharaoh to speak in your name,
he has mistreated his people,
this people,
and you have done nothing at all to deliver your people.'”
So,
Michael, this is a fascinating conversation.
It’s a little long and I hope it didn’t get
boring, but it’s really an interesting start in that it so wonderfully captures the rest of the book.
This kind of interchange is going to be
just a constant feature of the book of Exodus.
Something bad happens.
The people say,
‘Moses, why did you do this?’ Moses turns to God and says,
‘God, why are you allowing this?
Why are you letting this happen?’ Here it is a response to Pharaoh’s cruelty,
to Pharaoh’s insistence that they do more work with less material or do the
same amount of work with less material.
And the Israelites blame this upon Moses,
and they too claim Yahweh here, ‘The Lord look upon you and judge.
You brought us into stink.
You made us stink
to the Pharaoh and his officials,
and you put a sword in their hand to kill us.’ So,
Moses and Aaron go do the thing that God has asked them to do,
and as a result,
the people are angry with
them and saying, ‘Look, look what you did.
Now Pharaoh’s trying to kill us and it’s your fault.'”
Yeah, I think we have to begin with that word that in many ways this is archetypal of the way
that this story is going to be told throughout the Exodus.
And in some ways,
Clint, I think we’ve already seen the setup for this in how God clearly and explicitly told Moses,
‘I’m going to harden
Pharaoh’s heart.’ Here we see that that is indeed the case.
Pharaoh has turned his face against
them.
One of the things that strikes me in this telling that I don’t think we should miss is the
people who get angry at Moses are the Israelite supervisors of the people.
It is not even like
middle management in Egypt.
It’s the people of Israel,
the leaders who say,
‘You have made things
worse for us.
You’ve not made things better.’ And Moses,
the one who really tried to get out of this
job in the first place when he was trying to come up with excuses why it shouldn’t be him,
now stands with the leaders of the Israelites mad at him.
It sounds like the way that he phrases
this at the end of legitimately feeling bad,
he says, ‘Why have you mistreated the people?’
Right?
So he even uses that language when he addresses God,
that the people had been mistreated
because of his own actions,
because of his own invitation.
And so,
yeah, it’s a fascinating turn.
The strength we saw of the people of Israel in the beginning of this book,
Clint, that they were
growing, that they were strong,
that has really changed up into this point.
They’re now very much
caught between a higher power and their freedom,
and they are in a position where they essentially
want whatever path is easiest or the lightest load.
Yeah,
I don’t want to steal the thunder of
latter parts of the story, Michael,
but
there is just something predictive in these stories.
The people love the idea of deliverance,
they love the idea of intervention,
but when there is a cost to that,
when there is some pain in that,
when there is a valley to go through,
then these are a people who quickly lose heart,
they quickly turn against those who are
leading them.
And we will just see this over and over and over again.
And interestingly,
Moses’
character, I’d be curious what you think of this,
Michael.
Moses’ character, I think throughout this
story evolves to some extent,
whereas he will ultimately nearly always side with God,
and yet here, his frustration speaks up.
Why have you mistreated the people?
And make no mistake,
the basis of that assertion is you have mistreated the people.
It is taken for granted.
You have mistreated the people.
Why have you done it?
Why, O Lord,
have you mistreated the people?
Why did you ever send me?
This is very close to Moses saying you’ve made things worse, not better.
Since I first came to Pharaoh to speak to the Pharaoh,
he mistreated his people,
and you have done nothing at all.
These are harsh words.
One of my favorite parts of this book is this sort of,
we saw a little of this in Genesis with Abram,
but Moses and God have this
very interesting relationship.
Moses gets away with saying things that you would not expect a
biblical character to be able to say to God.
And I think this is one,
maybe the clearest instance
we’ve seen of it so far,
you have done nothing at all to deliver your people.
You said you were
going to do it.
You’ve done nothing.
Those are harsh words to throw at the Almighty who
called you by burning bush.
Yeah, I don’t want to read too much into it,
but also look here,
verse 23,
since I first came to Pharaoh to speak in your name.
Remember that whole inter exchange
with God where he said,
I’m not going to speak.
And God says, well, fine, I’ll send Aaron.
So Aaron’s the guy who goes and talks to Pharaoh.
Well, here,
Moses is taking credit.
I went and spoke to Pharaoh, God,
and you’re, you know, there’s,
I would say it goes to the next level,
Clint, and he’s going to take responsibility for speaking to Pharaoh as if he’s the one who
deserves it.
And he’s going to accuse God saying,
why have you mistreated these people?
When God, from the very beginning,
you know, go back to the last chapter,
God made it clear what was going
to happen.
And it’s obvious that Moses hasn’t believed it or didn’t internalize it.
Didn’t think it was going to play out the way that God told him it was going to play out.
In some ways, it’s easy to dogpile on Moses here.
There’s a real, maybe spiritual lesson for us in that when
things start to get difficult,
we often turn back to God and accuse God of leading us down the right
path or not being with us in a moment of affliction.
Certainly Moses is a person between peoples and here once again,
now he’s caught in between the leaders of the people of Israel and Pharaoh,
just like he was when he was the son of Pharaoh and he was born of the Hebrew people,
his mother and father and sister and brother.
We now find out are all, you know, Israelites.
And here he stands
trying to negotiate the fate of the Hebrew people,
the Israelite people with Pharaoh and Pharaoh
essentially bringing down the hammer upon them.
He’s the guy who kind of gets the worst end of
both sides of that equation.
So yeah, I don’t want to dogpile.
He is in a precarious position,
but what you intuited,
and I think this is really helpful, Clint,
is as the story,
as Moses’ story progresses,
we should be attuned to his own growth of trust
in God’s plan, right?
Ultimately, will he internalize God’s difficult path for the people
or will he be committed to this idea that everything should be quick and happen right away?
And if you’re willing to sort of ask that question of the text,
you’re going to see
that it addresses that as Moses progresses.
Yeah, I think there are two things I appreciate
about a text like this,
Michael.
And the first is that along the lines of some of what we saw
in Genesis, one of the great realities of the early part of the Old Testament is the looseness
of it.
That, you know,
that somebody didn’t clean this up,
that they tell a story in which
the people are mad at Moses.
Moses seems at least not 100% content with God.
There’s some difficult
language here, you know,
why have you done this?
You’ve
mistreated the people.
You’ve done nothing to deliver us.
Very close to calling God out.
And the idea that we get that,
there’s a humanness to this experience that I think most
of us can relate to in the moments
that don’t go as we thought they would,
where we thought there was promise and we end up with
disappointment, when we thought something would be quick and easy.
And it turned out it was hard and lengthy and painful.
I think I appreciate about the story that it doesn’t flinch from those moments.
And the second thing that this is really a foreshadowing,
because this kind of anger and
accusation and bandying back and forth is just going to be one of these shining threads
woven throughout the rest of Exodus.
There is some way in which these few verses are giving us a huge heads up
for the kind of thing we’re going to see and the kind of things we’re going to hear
throughout the rest of the story.
And I think in its own way, it’s a masterful,
somewhat subtle introduction to the character of part of the rest of the tale.
And I appreciate that about it from a literary standpoint as well.
Yeah, some of it is the character of the people,
Clint, because this is going to sound harsh up to this point in the reading.
If you stopped here,
my statement is going to seem harsh.
But when you see here in verse 21,
“Brought us into bad odor
with Pharaoh his officials and then critically and have put a sword in their hand to kill us.”
The text has not given us any evidence that we’ve not heard any language from the Pharaoh.
He’s out to kill them.
By the way, the Pharaoh’s already been killing their sons,
right?
So there is this
movement that happens in the Exodus story,
especially as we move on.
You’re going to see
that the people of Israel are not against twisting language using some hyperbole,
looking for ways to sort of add a bite to their complaint.
There’s going to be times where
they’re going to accuse God of leaving them to die in the wilderness of hunger or starvation.
There’s going to be a lot of statements and accusations similar to this as the story goes on.
And there’s a way in which both this is a reflection upon people who are truly suffering,
and that is the case.
The people of Israel are really being beset by these taskmasters,
and their work, which was already strenuous,
has been made even more difficult.
So I don’t want to
all take that away from the text.
But when they begin to raise the ante like this and they turn
to hyperbolic language, I think the text is giving us a little bit of a nod to this is also going to
be a part of their response to difficult situations in the future.
And we’re going to see
that pattern over and over again.
Things don’t go as quickly or as easily as the people desire.
And then when the people make accusations against God,
they’re not just looking to
solve the problem, but in some ways,
they hyperbolically make the problem even bigger
than what it may be.
And, you know,
I could be reading into that.
That’s my reading of this,
and I don’t have a scholar that I can footnote to say that.
But it strikes me as I read the text.
Yeah, I just think there’s a lot going on here.
You know, even to the
words, you know, you made a bad odor, it stinks.
And, you know,
not to change direction on you,
Michael, but I just think I appreciate a text that says sometimes it is difficult to hang in there
with the promises of God.
It is difficult to be faithful,
particularly in the moments where life stinks,
when it has a stench,
when it is hard,
when there is real pain to your point,
there is true actual suffering.
You know,
it is perhaps easy to be easier to be optimistic and
positive when things are going well,
but to lean into the faith when life is hard,
and when life has some pain in it,
that’s tough.
And I think that will be one of the recurring
themes of this book as these people waver between celebrating good moments and essentially jumping
ship in the bad moments.
This is just a small,
maybe we are overdoing it,
but it’s a small
introduction to what will be a profound theme of the text.
And I also think it’s an introduction to a profound response from God when we continue
tomorrow, because God does as God does,
and that is, He is speaking to humans,
but God’s God, and God’s going to make it very clear that Moses and all of his problems and complaints are small
in comparison to the one whom he’s speaking to,
and to the plan that God is enacting.
And so,
a little bit, consider this conversation maybe part one,
the accusation,
join us tomorrow for part two,
which is going to be God’s response to that accusation,
and as Scripture tends to do,
God makes it very clear who’s in the driver’s seat.
Yeah, I think both biblically and personally it would be my experience that when you ask God
questions that start with why,
you’re likely not going to be satisfied with the response.
There either will be none,
or biblically speaking, sometimes you’ll wish you hadn’t asked.
Be careful.
Yeah.
See you tomorrow.
Thanks.