Deliverance

Morning, Church.

Uh reading from the book of Exodus.

During these many days, the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help.

Their cry for rescue for slavery came up to God, and God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.

God saw the people of Israel, and God knew.

This is the word of our Lord.

Please be seated.

Good morning, everyone.

Sure did for me.

Well, good to see you all.

My name is Jacob.

I'm one of the lay elders here at Redemption.

And uh today we will be looking at Exodus uh chapter 2, verses 23 through 25.

Um, so I'm gonna go ahead and pray for us all, and then we can go ahead and just jump right in and get started.

So uh, Father, thank you that we can gather here as your people.

And um, Father, I pray today that we acknowledge that your word is the authority in our lives.

I pray that we humble ourselves under it.

I pray that I humble myself as a speaker under it as well.

And Father, I pray that in all of our hearing today, um, that we glorify you with our hearts and we realize just how wonderful and amazing you are.

I pray today that we come with eager expectations, that we will hear you speak to us through your word.

I pray that you minister to the hearts of everyone here this morning.

Thank you, Father, that uh we can gather here.

In your name we pray.

Amen.

So we are going to start today in verse 23, and uh I will read it again for us.

During those many days, the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help.

Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God.

As we look at this passage today, we must understand that from the view of an Israelite slave in Egypt at this time, these are the darkest days they had endured yet as a people.

At this point, they'd been living in Egypt for almost 400 years, and they have been enslaved to do harsh manual labor by building Egyptian cities and working in their fields.

They had been subjugated to genocide for a period of time by being forced to throw their baby boys under the age of two into the Nile River.

And we saw last week that their only real hope of the situation changing was Moses.

Could he be Israel's rescuer?

Finally, after decades of harsh slavery and genocide, having no rights, a Hebrew becomes a prince in Egypt.

One of their own in a position of power, who has the ability to influence and possibly change the king's minds and policies, one who has the ability to advocate for his people, a new Joseph, so to speak, who could bring them back into the favor of Pharaoh and relieve them of their unbelievable burden of slavery.

Or maybe he could have been the one to lead a rebellion and lead the escape of the people of Israel out of Egypt.

He was, after all, trained in all the wisdom that the Egyptians had to offer.

Must have included military training.

Could Moses use this to save his people?

The answer is no.

Last week we saw that instead of rallying around Moses, the people of Israel rejected him.

Stephen, in his speech to the Sanhedrin in Acts, says, Moses thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them, but they did not.

So Moses flees to Midian, where he will stay for 40 years.

From a worldly perspective, the people of Israel have no hope of change at this point.

So what's God doing?

Why is he letting his people endure centuries or decades of slavery at the hand of the Egyptians?

Why would he allow them to suffer for such a long period of time?

This passage gives us two reasons today.

Firstly, we see that God uses suffering and hardship to turn the hearts of the Hebrews so that they pray to him.

And secondly, he uses hardship to show the Hebrews that it is only he who can be their rescue.

So let's look again at verse 23 and see how God uses hardship to turn the hearts of the Hebrews so that they pray to him.

During those many days the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help.

Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God.

Notice how Moses begins verse 23 by saying, During those many days, days with no hope, days filled with misery, a time period that was so difficult, it would almost do it an injustice to measure it in years.

Years are what you use to measure your goals.

Years are what you are something you use to measure your progress.

Years are what you do to look back at milestones that you achieved in your life.

But those of you who had suffered, who have suffered for long periods of time, know that suffering is much better measured in days.

Because what is a year of suffering rather than 365 days of trying to find the will to get out of bed?

365 days of trying to find the motivation and the will to live.

365 days of wondering when will this end?

For Israel, what's the point of measuring time in years when every day is the same?

Wake up, perform backbreaking labor all day, fearing the harsh whips of your masters, go to bed exhausted, wake up, do it all again.

During those many days of suffering, Moses also tells us that the king of Egypt died.

The king who wanted Moses dead is now gone.

And this tells us two things.

Firstly, it opens the door for Moses to return.

The king who have been who would have killed Moses as soon as he stepped the foot on Egyptian soil is now gone.

And the second thing it tells us is that maybe the oppression of the Hebrews could have gotten better.

Maybe a new king who looked more favorably upon them could have taken a little bit easier on them.

But things did not get better under the new king.

Nothing changed for them.

Verse 23 also tells us that Israel was groaning under their slavery.

This word groaned elsewhere is used to describe a broken bone, the sound somebody makes when they break a bone.

No words could describe the pain and suffering that they were under.

They could only groan.

So I don't know what type of pain it is, but I do remember the first time I dislocated my shoulder.

That hurt a lot.

I don't even remember how it really happened.

I was in football practice, I hit a guy at this weird angle, and then all of a sudden I heard a loud crack and a pop and like a grinding noise, and I couldn't move my right arm.

And I totally panicked.

I don't know why.

I actually actually thought I was dying.

I was like, so this is what death feels like.

And I don't remember why.

I just panicked and I grabbed my arm and I just pulled on it as hard as I could, and I felt it go back in.

And then it immediately got better.

I was like, oh, this isn't so bad.

And I actually just kept practicing.

Um I was like, oh yeah, I could do this.

But let me tell you, the next day, you learn some real interesting things about human anatomy because you find every single muscle and tendon and ligament that was attached to your right shoulder, you can now feel it.

I remember I was so sore I could barely move my neck.

And uh I actually was sore like up here.

Like, have you ever been sore up there?

I never have, but I found out there's muscles up there and they got bold and it really hurt.

This is the kind of pain that the nation of Israel is collectively feeling.

A pain that can only be fixed by immediate action.

The people of Israel need deliverance.

They need a rescuer to come and save them.

So, what does Israel do?

What else can they do at this point but pray?

So, for the first time we see in Scripture, we see the people of Israel collectively cry out to God for the first time.

Based on the lack of description with this prayer, we can gather that it was not a very articulate prayer.

There was nothing structured about it, probably, but rather it was a prayer that was nothing more than a cry for help, a prayer filled with emotion and heartache, a prayer from the lips of a people who were groaning in pain.

These types of prayers cannot be faked.

And these prayers are not taught, but they come deep from within.

And the will and the desires of the person, when they have no place left to turn, turn to God.

They are prayers filled with raw emotions of desperation, frustration, and hopelessness.

We can see that finally, after decades of suffering, the hearts of the Israelites finally turn to God.

And only God to cry out for rescue.

Without this suffering, the people's hearts, they have never turned to him.

If their lives were one of comfort and ease, they would have never seen a need for their rescue.

God uses this suffering to show them their need for him.

Oftentimes, we view suffering in our lives in the wrong light.

And we don't realize that God is actually using suffering to draw us to him.

We may see suffering in a moralistic view, meaning that suffering only comes as a consequence of your actions.

Our culture loves the idea of karma, seeing suffering and reward purely as a mathematical equation based on your actions.

And while it's very true, sometimes you will suffer from your bad decisions.

I've had a couple in my life.

It's far too simple to reduce all suffering to merely as cause and effect from your actions.

This moralistic view denies the omnipotence of God, and it is a weird way of saying that actually I am the one who has ultimate control over my life.

The second way we may see suffering is nothing more than an object that if we just thought about it differently, it would go away.

Scott Peck articulated the Buddhist view, excuse me, of suffering, saying, life is difficult.

This is a great truth.

One of the truest truths.

It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it.

Once we truly know that life is difficult, once we truly understand and accept it, then it is no longer difficult.

I must admit that the way we think about suffering can make a huge difference in your life and how we handle it.

And suffering oftentimes does challenge our current modes of thinking.

But changing the way you think about suffering does not change reality.

Some suffering is just awful.

And no matter how you perceive it, it is bad.

For the people of Israel, going to them and saying, you know, if you just thought about this a little bit differently, it wouldn't seem so bad.

It's like going to a person with a broken bone saying, you know, it wouldn't hurt so much if you looked at this from a new angle.

The third way we can view suffering wrongly is that it is something to be avoided at all costs.

This view says that all suffering is bad, and it is your job to build your life in such a way that you have complete comfort.

While there is wisdom in avoiding suffering, you should never just suffer for the sake of suffering.

Hear that today.

But subscribing to this view that all suffering is bad will lead you to seek out comfort as your ultimate goal.

This view denies the fact that sometimes you may suffer for doing the right thing.

And sometimes doing the wrong thing actually brings comfort.

All three of those incorrect views of suffering actually tend to drive us away from God.

They view suffering as something that we control rather than what God controls, or something we can change just by viewing it differently rather than suffering through a biblical lens.

Or something that has no purpose and must be avoided at all costs.

None of those views understand that God uses suffering as a tool to turn our hearts to Him.

Ultimately, God uses suffering as a wake-up call to draw us back to Him.

So if you're suffering, pray.

Your suffering can be physical, or you're sick or in pain.

This can be a relationship where another person is involved.

You've lost all hope of reconciliation, and you just can't figure out how things could ever get better.

Or it can be your own sin.

You know the one that you're doing the thing that you promised you would never do again.

Yeah, that one.

Cry out to God for help.

We are really good at trying to solve these problems on our own before turning to God.

God is using this to draw us closer to Him.

I just pause here and say one of the main reasons, I was thinking about this.

One of the main reasons we don't turn to God in suffering and pray to Him is because you feel guilty that maybe you haven't prayed in a while.

I know, I know I'm not the only person here, right?

That that has had that.

Has anybody been a Christian in here for over a year?

Alright, cool.

I know I'm not the only person that has that.

I know when I encounter a difficult situation and I can't see a way out, I know I should pray, but I actually feel too guilty too.

I feel guilty because it took me so long to even think about it.

I think really now I just thought of praying after going through this for the last four weeks.

That should have been the first thing I did.

Or maybe I might have skipped my quiet time for a couple days.

Maybe I haven't prayed for a couple days, and I just feel distant from God.

And so rather than praying about the difficult situation that I'm suffering through, I'll tell myself, well, let's get quiet time rolling again, right?

Let's get my prayer life going again.

And then after a few days, I can go to God and pray for the thing that I'm suffering about and not feel guilty about it.

That attitude is so anti-gospel.

That's works.

When we do those things, when we are not going to God in our suffering and prayer first, we are saying that the perfect work of Jesus is not sufficient for me to approach God in my time of need.

I have to do my checklist, I gotta do my works of quiet time, prayer, and other good things before I can approach God with my situation.

Then once all those are out of the way, I feel pretty good about praying to God now.

When you run through your checklist, you need to realize that those types of thoughts and actions, they actually lead you away from repentance.

Because when I do all those things that I felt guilty about, I can then go to God without acknowledging that I've actually been incredibly distant from him for the last few days.

I'm justifying myself by my actions so that I don't have to go to God and say, I screwed up again.

Can you forgive me?

That's anti-gospel.

God is actually using that difficult situation to draw you back to him.

I remember growing up, we had a puppy.

And when the cup when the puppy peed on the carpet, you always took the puppy to the spot where they peed.

And then you hold their little head over the carpet where the pea stain was, you'd say no, and then you take them outside to go pee.

Since we're in Colorado, I know I'm gonna get reprimanded for doing that.

I am sure there's somebody here who's like, that's dog abuse.

Just writing notes.

You know, back in those days, we saw dog as animals, not as family members.

Just, I know this is a get off my lawn moment, just let me have it, and then we're gonna go straight back to it.

When we are afraid to turn back to God for our distance from Him, excuse me, when we are afraid to return to God because of our sufferings, we think that God is just gonna take us to the peace stain on the carpet and say, Oh, Janet, you're suffering.

Before you come to me in prayer, you need to make sure you're peeing outside.

Before you can even approach me, you have to run through the checklist, Janet.

You didn't do your quiet time, you haven't prayed to me about other things, you haven't said all those nice things to the people that you feel guilty about.

Go do those before you even think about coming to me in prayer.

I just say, I know how horrible of an analogy this is.

But you're gonna remember it.

I would love it if somebody was here for the first time and they weren't paying attention for the whole sermon.

And then they just started listening to the pee on the carpet analogy, they'd be like, this is weird.

This church is crazy.

Don't worry, they only let me preach two to three times a year.

So if you didn't like it, come again next week.

I won't be up here.

But but all this is to say that God is actually using that difficult situation in your life, your suffering, and he wants you to go to him.

When you come to him, then God, who is the great physician, can begin working on your heart and getting you to a place of repentance and faith.

He wants you to come to him.

This is exactly what God does with the people of Israel.

He does not waste the suffering of the Israelites during these harsh decades.

He does not tell them that they need to clean themselves up first before running to him.

Rather, he's saying, Come to me.

The suffering is wake-up salts.

Come here.

Ultimately, he uses their suffering for the ultimate good, which is to draw them into a relationship with him so that he may be glorified.

So we can see that God uses suffering to draw us near to him in prayer.

Now we'll see that God uses our prayers to teach us new things about him.

Verse 24.

And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob, and God saw the people of Israel, and God knew.

Moses, who wrote the book of Exodus, gives us four verbs.

God hears, God remembers, God sees, God knows.

In Hebrew, all four of these verbs are pregnant with action.

Okay?

They're saying, brace yourselves, because when God, uh, when God hears, remembers, sees, and knows, he's about to do something.

He's about to act in a very powerful way.

These these descriptions of God, they're not, they're not passive.

Right?

Like if you were to drive by a car accident, you could see it, you could hear it, you could know it.

But that doesn't mean you're going to do anything about it.

You're just going to drive by, probably.

But that's not the case here.

When God's people cry out to him in their suffering, he prepares for action.

Because God wants to show his people that he and only he is their rescuer.

When God's people come to him with their suffering, he is eager to draw them to him and show them that only he can be their savior.

The first verb is God hears.

He hears their cries for help.

We covered it earlier, but this prayer was not an articulate prayer.

Rather, it comes from a place of suffering and is nothing more than a cry.

In Matthew 6, Jesus tells us, followers, that when we pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words.

God is not in heaven listening to us thinking, I really wanted to hear that prayer, but the structure was all wrong.

They didn't do enough chanting for me.

They know I love chanting.

There was no chanting.

God wants to hear our prayers.

God wants to hear our cries for help.

God desires our hearts to run to him in times of trouble.

So if you're if you're thinking like the suffering in my life is actually so complicated, I don't even know how to start, right?

It's got a little bit of me mixed into it.

It's got a little bit of another person mixed into it.

And then it all started because of this really complicated situation that had never happened before.

And at this point, I don't even know the right prayer to pray, right?

Like, do I pray to get out of this?

Do I pray for that person?

Do I pray for me?

And I don't even know the right things to say.

Start with help.

Just start with help.

Please help me.

God hears those prayers.

I remember uh back in September, uh I was going through a horrible time at work.

Thank you for all of you that listened to me complain about it.

I really appreciate it.

You know who you are.

You're the real champs here.

Um going through a horrible time at work.

And I remember it it was it was just the worst period of work I've ever had in my life.

I remember I couldn't sleep.

I was so stressed out.

And I was lying in bed one night.

I woke up at two, my heart was racing because I knew I had to get on a call with an angry customer who yells at me for an hour, and I was like, I just can't do this.

I just can't do this.

And and I remember lying in bed and I just said, Help.

I I got nothing else.

I don't even know what to say.

I'm too tired to say anything.

I don't know the right words to say, but just help.

Just help.

And God in that situation was very gracious to me.

And he answered my prayer and said, How about I give you a new job?

Two weeks later, somebody called me up that I worked with and said, Would you like a new job?

And I was like, I don't care what it pays.

I'm I'm in.

I didn't say that.

I'm a little bit better at negotiating than that.

But in that situation, I I had nothing.

I had nothing to give other than just help.

Nothing articulate.

And God here heard that.

The second verb, excuse me, is that God remembers his covenant.

God remembers.

God, who is always faithful, remembers the promise he made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to bring their descendants to the land of Israel.

And that is the reason he moves to save them.

It's important to note that as God acts to rescue his people, it is solely because of the promise he made to them.

God does not save Israel because they had some innate goodness in them.

It's not like God had these giant cosmic scales and he put Egypt on one side and he put Israel on the other side and is like, hmm, who, what should I do here?

Who's better?

Do I keep Israel enslaved or do I rescue them?

And he's like, oh, Israel barely inches out Egypt.

All right, they win.

I'm gonna save them.

On the contrary, the people of Israel at this time were thoroughly Egyptian.

They worshiped the gods of Egypt as fervently as the Egyptians did.

Ezekiel 20, 5 through 7 says, On that day I swore to them, there's that covenant language, I would bring them out of the land of Egypt into a land that I had searched out for them, a land flowing with milk and honey, the most glorious of all lands.

And I said to them, Cast away your the detestable things your eyes feast on, every one of you, and do not defile yourselves with the idols of Egypt.

I am the Lord your God.

God hears their prayers and moves to act while they are still worshiping other gods.

I mean, praying to God at this time, he was probably the last God on their list.

They'd run through them all at this point, you know, the crocodile god, I don't know the gods, the Nile God.

I'm sure some fifth grader would be like, I know them all.

Yeah, I know you do.

You know, the mis, whatever, you know, all these different gods.

I'm sure he was the last one.

Their hearts were far from him.

But in all of Scripture, there is always one prayer that God promises to answer with a yes, and that is a prayer of repentance.

The suffering that the people of Israel have gone through to this point has finally moved their hearts to God, where they realized they had no place left to turn.

There was no relief coming from the gods of Egypt.

Everything to this point was a dead end, so they approached God and they said, Can you help us?

Can you save us?

It's almost like a question.

You know, it's a Hail Mary, not, I should have used a different word for that.

It's like a Hail Mary we say in football, you know, like it's your last chance, not the other Hail Mary, the real one.

This is a let's walk that back.

Okay.

You guys know what I mean, right?

They they almost can't comprehend.

Like, can you do this, God?

Are you there?

Are you capable?

Can you save us?

And because of God's faithfulness to his people, he answers, yes.

Yes, because of a promise I made to you.

Yes, I can save you and I will.

When we come to him as his people, and our hearts are full of just sins and idols and all that stuff, the people of Israel were doing.

We come to him with our burdens, and we hold them before him and we ask, can you deal with this?

Can you save me?

Is my heart so far gone that I can't return to you?

That prayer moves God to action because of what Christ has done, and his answer is always, Yes, I can save you.

Yes, I forgive you.

I know your heart was chasing after other gods, but I save you when you come to me, and I forgive you when you ask for it.

God hears them because of his covenant that he made with them, not because of their own righteousness.

The last two verbs are God sees and knows.

God sees and knows.

When God's people come to them with their suffering and in their prayers, he's already aware of what's going on.

This is not a surprise to him.

He knows that the situations we face, we are weak.

He knows we cannot save ourselves.

None of that is a surprise to him.

Your own weakness is often a surprise to you, right?

Ah, can't believe I couldn't figure that out.

Can't believe I did that thing I said I wouldn't do again.

And we're always like shocked.

And God's never shocked because he's like, Yeah, I know you, I know your heart.

I was expecting that.

And whatever you're going through, God knows it.

He knows it intimately.

This isn't a I know of facts, you know.

He's like, I know you as a person.

I know the cry of your heart.

I know what's going on inside of you.

I know the difficulty you're facing better than you do.

And he hears those prayers and he knows what's happening.

You know, I'm gonna conclude with this.

God uses suffering and prayer to show us new things about himself.

He wants to show us how faithful he is, he wants to show us how he can handle difficulties.

Because remember, I said Israel like probably wasn't even expecting an answer back when they prayed to God.

There was a concept of God as a rescuer that just didn't exist for them.

They knew God had made promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but after 400 years and the most powerful man in the world oppressing you, can can he really rescue us?

I mean, maybe he made that promise too hastily.

Maybe he didn't know the situation we'd be in.

Can God really do this?

Psalm 81 describes this beautifully.

I'll read verses uh one through seven.

Sing for joy to God our strength, shout aloud to the God of Jacob, begin the music, strike the timbrel, play the melodice harp and lyre, sound the ram's horn at the new moon.

And when the moon is full on the day of our festival, this is a decree for Israel, an ordinance of the God of Jacob.

When God went out against Egypt, he established it as a statute for Joseph.

I heard an unknown voice say, I removed the burden from their shoulders, their hands were set free from the basket, in your distress you called, and I rescued you.

The psalmist describes this in such a beautiful way.

Verse 5 says, I heard an unknown voice say, I removed the burden from your shoulders, their hands were set free from the basket, and in your distress you called and I rescued.

He's describing the people of Israel crying out to God in their suffering, and a voice that they didn't even know answered back.

They weren't expecting an answer.

It's almost like they had no concept that God would save them.

It's an unknown voice.

You're just like shouting, okay, uh number God 17 on the list, God of Abraham and Isaac, please help us.

And then all of a sudden a voice comes back.

And they had no idea that God could do this.

This was something new to them.

And they never would have learned this about God.

They never would have learned to trust him.

They never would have learned to turn to him, they never would have learned about his faithfulness, about the fact that he can hear them if it wasn't for their suffering.

They never would have learned it.

God uses the suffering in our lives to draw us to him and teach us new things about him.

So run to him in prayer.

Let me pray, and then we can uh do some communion.

Father, thank you that you use suffering to draw us close to you and teach us new things about you.

You know, God, I was just thinking, if you didn't use suffering, what hope would we have while we suffered?

There would be no hope.

So thank you that you use it.

And you love us and you draw us near to you because of it.

Teach us to pray more.

Teach us to rely on you more.

I know you're jealous for our hearts, Lord.

Let us have no other gods before us.

Let us trust you and only you.

Your name we pray.

Amen.