The Israelites – Exodus 2:23-25 - ‘Now it happened in the process of time that the king of Egypt died. Then the children of Israel groaned because of the bondage, and they cried out; and their cry came up to God because of the bondage. So God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. And God looked upon the children of Israel, and God acknowledged them.’
The answer to this prayer has to be one of the most famous events in the whole Bible, and it takes place in response to a corporate prayer from the people of Israel – and not some nice organised prayer meeting type of prayer but simply from the cries and the groans of the people because of the bondage they were in at the hands of the Egyptians. Their work was hard, their opressors were strong, and their male children were being killed – was there any hope for these people? We don’t know how well they knew the things that had taken place between God and their anscestor Abraham, but if they did know something, they would have known that this situation had already been predicted, and that hope was on its way – if the account of the Exodus from Egypt teaches us anything about God it teaches us this incredible truth:
It doesn’t matter how dark it gets, with God, hope is never lost!
In Genesis 15:12-14 this is what happened to Abraham: ‘Now when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and behold, horror and great darkness fell upon him. Then He said to Abram: “Know certainly that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and will serve them, and they will afflict them four hundred years. And also the nation whom they serve I will judge; afterward they shall come out with great possessions.’
God had already told Abraham that this time of ‘horror and great darkness’ would come upon his descendants. Abraham knew that there would be a time when he was dead and gone when the promise that God had made to him would look incredibly far away from being fulfilled. God had promised that his descendants would become a great nation and that his seed would be a blessing to the whole world – and here they were in slavery to a pagan people and subject to some incredibly intense suffering. Yet in the midst of all of this God was at work – He was bending low to listen to the cries of His people, and was preparing a rescue plan that would never have been thought of by anyone but Him. 320 years in to the captivity, God began to prepare the man who would eventually lead the people out of Egypt in the most unlikely circumstances. We too need to understand that with God, no matter how dark things may be, He is always able to give a way of escape – the experience we go through may be a terrible one, but we can always cling to the fact that our God is never out of control, and is always working what is best for those who love Him. The second incredible thing we can learn from the account of the Exodus from Egypt is this:
The rescue may come from the most unlikely source.
I think that the impact of the way in which God brought about the Exodus is completely lost on a lot of us – especially those who have heard the story for a long time. I still remember the first time it really came home to me as a Pastor portrayed it in his sermon – God in all of his wisdom decided to call a murderous failure who had just spent 40 years in the wilderness looking after sheep to go down to Egypt and free His people! Can you imagine the scene as Moses set off with his family staff in hand, donkey laden with the belongings they had – someone turns to Moses and says, ‘so why are you going down to Egypt?’ Would Moses have replied ‘oh, just to free all the Israelite slaves from the most pwerful nation on earth!’ What kind of a reaction would he have got if he had said that? It was ridiculous to even contemplate one man travelling to Egypt and freeing all of the slaves from Pharoah’s grasp, let alone a man like Moses. Yet that’s exactly how God chose to answer the cry of His people, and we too need to recognise that deliverance may not come in the form that we are expecting. God’s plan may look nothing like we want or hope it will look like, but God has a way of taking the foolish things of this world and putting to shame the things which claim to be wise – how awesome to be able to put our trust in a God like this and to cry out to Him at our own point of need.