Sunday
Sunday
A Cruel Oppression
The Israelites groaned in their slavery…. God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant.
Exodus 2:23–24
The book of Exodus opens with a vivid description of the oppression of the Israelites by a new pharaoh (probably Rameses II), who did not know about Joseph. The Egyptians “made their lives bitter with hard labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields” (1:14). Their oppression lasted 430 years. But they cried to God for deliverance, and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Indeed, he was already preparing their deliverer.
As a child Moses narrowly escaped being drowned in the River Nile. Then he was brought up first by his own mother and then by Pharaoh’s daughter. We can only guess the conflict he experienced between the Egyptian and Hebrew cultures. But he never lost either his sense of Hebrew identity or his hot indignation over his people’s sufferings. At some point he made a costly and courageous decision: “By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time” (Heb. 11:24–25).
But although his love for his people and his resolve to identify with them were admirable, he was reckless enough to take the law into his own hands. He killed an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew, and the following day he tried to arbitrate between two fighting Hebrews. His intervention was not appreciated. What he had done had become known, and he had to flee to the land of Midian (the Sinai peninsula) to cool his heels for forty years. He had to learn that God’s will must be done only in God’s way.
For further reading: Exodus 2:11–15, 23–25