I can see it so much clearer from here than from where I was when I first started inching my way toward God. Life got harder. The rope I was holding onto started slipping through my hand a little faster. Hope got smaller and despair got bigger. And from here, 35 years down the road, I can see that it was what both God and the enemy wanted, but for different reasons. I think the enemy saw God coming and wasn’t about to let me go without a fight. And I think God wanted me to come to the end of myself, to see that I just couldn’t keep living my life on my terms, because my terms were destroying me.
When God began His movement toward delivering the Israelites from their oppression, life got much harder for them. The demand given to Pharaoh to let them go into the wilderness so they could worship God served only to rouse his anger.
That day Pharaoh commanded the overseers of the people as well as their foremen, “Don’t continue to supply the people with straw for making bricks, as before. They must go and gather straw for themselves. But require the same quota of bricks from them as they were making before; do not reduce it. For they are slackers—that is why they are crying out, ‘Let us go and sacrifice to our God.’ Make the work harder for the people so that they keep working and pay no attention to lies.” (Exodus 5:6-9)
And so it had begun. God was moving and the grip of oppression tightened. The only word I can think of to describe my very first reading of the book of Exodus is stunned. I was seeing my spiritual rescue story in the shadow of their physical rescue, and I think I fell in love with the Old Testament right there, as I wept.
Once Pharaoh made the work harder, the Israelites did what we all do. They blamed and complained. Who could expect any different from them? It’s part of our frailty, don’t you think? To want someone to be accountable for our suffering. To rage at something or someone for the pain we’re in.
They didn’t know that their Deliverer was coming for them. They didn’t know that He was about to do things they could not have imagined. God was doing a glorious thing, but it couldn’t be seen from this side of the veil, from this side of hard things that just got harder.
So Moses went back to the Lord and asked, “Lord, why have you caused trouble for this people? And why did you ever send me? Ever since I went in to Pharaoh to speak in your name he has caused trouble for this people, and you haven’t rescued your people at all.” (Exodus 5:22-23)
Right here is a good place to release a good word to someone who needs to hear it –
You can’t measure God’s faithfulness by whether or not He moves at the pace you set for Him to move.
When we trust God, our reality is this: If He said He will do it, He will do it.
What I have said, that I will bring about;
what I have planned, that I will do. (Isaiah 46:11)
He does not change. He is still the faithful God who rescues us from an enemy who does not want to let us go.
Karla Jo Wasion 