And Pharaoh’s
servants said to him, “How long will this man be a snare to us? Let the men go, that they may serve the Lord
their God. Do you not realize that Egypt
is destroyed?” So Moses and Aaron were
brought back to Pharaoh, and he said to them, “Go, serve the Lord your
God! Who are the ones that are going?” And Moses said, “We shall go with our young
and our old; with our sons and our daughters, with our flocks and our herds we
will go, for we must hold a feast to the Lord.”
Then he said to them, “Thus may the Lord be with you, if ever I let you
and your little ones go! Take heed, for
evil is in your mind. Not so! Go now, the men among you, and serve the
Lord, for that is what you desire.” So
they were driven out from Pharaoh’s presence.
This portion of Scripture starts off telling us that Moses
was ‘a snare’ to the servants of Pharaoh.
And I am sure this included the magicians. You will remember that they tried to
replicate the miracles God was performing through Moses and Aaron, and they
could only do so to a point. This
frustrated them greatly and by now, they had had enough. There is no doubt that they also felt that
their own country, Egypt, was being quickly eroded and would eventually be
eliminated. We need to be aware that
these ‘servants’ likely included a group of Egyptian civil servants we had not
taken note of before – that is, the Pharaoh’s council, his governmental
ministers, etc. They were the ones that
brought him the ‘state of the nation’ report from their travels across the
land. They had a responsibility to
advise him on the need for action now, before it was forced on them when Egypt would
be reduced to nothing.
Two things were at play here. First, all these ‘servants’ realized that
they stood the risk of losing their positions, their authority, and their own
wealth. Secondly, it appears like
Pharaoh himself, regardless of how strongly he opposed letting the Israelites
go, was now facing growing opposition from his advisors and those that he
needed to run his kingdom. It was
clearly time for him to take some, albeit limited, action.
His advisors urged Pharaoh to just let the “men” go. They were not prepared to let all the
Israelites go, just the grown-up males.
To them, it was the men that counted; it was the men’s worship and
sacrifice that really mattered. That
should be sufficient. In addition, they
only wanted to give up what they absolutely had to and nothing more. The women and girls were still housemaids and
performed other tasks and responsibilities.
They wanted to hold on to them. They
were the “collateral insurance” that had to be put up toe ensure the Israelites
would come back. Are we not ourselves
like that sometimes when it comes to what God wants us to give up? I know I am.
And yet God is patient with me.
But for some reason, we do not rest completely until we have yielded
totally to his will.
I am in the midst of reading again about the life of
Hudson Taylor who discovered the need to fully yield all to God and then to
fully rest in Him, Who is the “All”. The
principle is as simple as that. Taylor
believes that we need to approach that “All” of God’s not to extract it out and
use it for ourselves or our own purposes, but rather we access it by immersing
ourselves into His “All” and abiding there, doing His bidding. And the tool for so doing was and is
“faith”. He writes, “I saw that faith was the only prerequisite, was the hand to lay hold
of His fullness and make it my own.”
And then he says, “But I had not
this faith.” He had some, but not
the faith in terms of quality and
quantity that he felt he needed. In
answer to his own question, “But how to
get faith strengthened?” Hudson Taylor responded, “Not by striving after faith, but by resting on the Faithful One.” There you have it, one of the spiritual
secrets of a spiritual giant. Don’t
strive. Rest (abide, breathe, work,
remain, trust, hope, find real joy) totally in the Faithful One.
With the bad advice in hand, Pharaoh orders that Moses and
Aaron be brought back before him. I
would suggest that Pharaoh was ticked to say the least as evidenced by the
exclamation mark at the end of his first statement, “Go, serve the Lord your God!”
You can just hear the disdain with which those words were uttered.
What happens next is interesting in that while his
advisors had given him the suggested plan to be followed as to who he should
allow to go, Pharaoh decides instead to ask Moses and Aaron, “Who are the ones that going?” Was he being crafty or was he just a good
negotiator? We do not know for sure. My own guess is that he secretly hoped that
Moses and Aaron, on their own, would have suggested that only the men go and
then he could grant them that request happily, having now had the extra push
from his advisors. That would make him
look good.
But instead, Moses, not being fooled by any insincere approach
that the Pharaoh took, sticks to his guns and responds, “All must go.” Of course, for some of us that begs the
question – why do you need everyone including all the flocks and all the herds
to go simply to carry out an act of worship and to hold a feast? A good question and one that God had perhaps
not prepared Moses for. But is that not
life when it comes to doing the business of the Almighty? Sometimes we come to the point where we
cannot answer an adversary’s questions and the only thing we can do is to stick
to the script and rest in Him. God
wanted to have all of Israel go out from Egypt.
As a good intelligence man for the Hebrews, Moses stuck to the plan –
“all of us must go!” And when you have
the power of God behind you, as evidenced by all the miracles performed to
date, there is no effective counter-response to such a demand.
Pharaoh can only get madder and he does. His plan of keeping the women and the
children as hostages to ensure the return of the men was not accepted. David Guzik points out that this was the
second failed attempt at a compromise the Egyptian ruler was making. (The first was in Exodus 8:25-26 when he
offered to give them a day off to worship God right there in Egypt and Moses
had turned that down flatly too.) With
this second compromise, Pharaoh had hoped to do what many of us try to do and
that is as Guzik says, “to find a way to give into God without fully submitting
to Him”. I pray each of us realize that
this is an impossible end-position for an authentic relationship between the Almighty
and us.
In disgust, Pharaoh accuses Moses and Aaron of being evil
when they want to take the children out into the wilderness as he claims that
will be very hard for them. In fact, he
says they will do so at their own peril implying the children may well die out
there in the desert. It is amazing how
evildoers often end up accusing others of being evil. And then again, perhaps it is not so amazing
when we realize it is the devil himself that causes them to do so and to sow
seeds of doubt into our hearts about those we love so dearly. How many potential missionaries has Satan
kept at home because “We can’t do this to the children; it’s okay for us to
have gone, but we could not have taken the children or left them behind; so we
stayed home.”
In the final analysis, Pharaoh orders them to go, but only
the men! It is Moses and Aaron this time
that do not get a chance to respond.
Instead, they were “driven out
from Pharaoh’s presence.” Sometimes
that is all we can have to settle for.
We make our case before the unbelievers.
We state our position. We stick
to our guns. We are told to do otherwise
and then we get sent away, and sometimes by force. And the rest is up to us. Do we take the orders of the Enemy or do we
follow the instructions of our God?
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