Exodus 2:23 – 25 “After a long time, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned and cried out under their burden of slavery, and their cry for deliverance from bondage ascended to God. So God heard their groaning, and He remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God saw the Israelites and took notice.”
It’s been hundreds of years since Joseph saved Egypt from suffering in a world – wide famine and then moved his own family to Egypt. The Pharaoh who gave the command for all Hebrew boy babies to be thrown into the Nile is dead, his only legacy the fact that the Hebrews remain in slavery.
Perhaps in the beginning, slavery didn’t seem SO bad. The work was not that difficult or that different from things that the Hebrews had already been doing. Really, the Egyptians weren’t asking THAT much extra, and after all, the Hebrews were still being allowed to live in Egypt. But the longer the situation continued, the worse things got. Day by day, year by year, things continued to deteriorate. At first, the Hebrews were working along side Egyptian workers, but gradually the Egyptians became the task masters while the Hebrews did all the heavy work. Nobody quite remembers the day the first chains appeared, but within a short time, the work teams were wearing leg irons so that they couldn’t possibly run away. It’s easy to turn a blind eye while your freedoms are gradually being stripped away from you.
Perhaps many of the Hebrews had even begun to worship some of the Egyptian gods – after all, they seemed to help the Egyptians, so why not? But the longer that slavery continued, the more arduous the work became and the more those supervising the slaves demanded. Somewhere there might have been an Egyptian bean counter – type administrator sitting with his papyrus and calculating how many more blocks the slaves could make if they just worked a little longer and a little harder.
One morning the Israelites woke up and realized that they were totally and completely enslaved! There were no options as to when to work or how much; everything was dictated by the slave drivers. The work stretched from sunup to sundown, and it was endless. As soon as one construction project was completed, another would take its place. The Israelites began to realize that they were trapped! In their bondage, they remembered the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph and they began to cry out to the God who had shown himself in so many ways.
APPLICATION: NOBODY chooses to jump into a totally dysfunctional situation! Women in abusive relationships begin by making excuses for their boyfriends or husbands and in the beginning, things aren’t too bad. Politicians may begin their careers with the highest of motives until they compromise just a little bit…and then a little bit more. But the net result is still the same: at the end of the day, you find yourself stuck in a situation from which there seems to be no escape. What can you do?
The Israelites in Egypt had the right idea. Enslaved by the Egyptians, the Israelites realized that their only hope was to throw themselves on the mercy of the God of their fathers. And when the Israelites cried out, God was listening. God remembered His covenant and he took notice of the Israelites.
Are you caught in a terrible situation with no way out? Cry out to God! The same God who delivered the Israelites from slavery in Egypt can deliver you from whatever mess you are in.
PRAYER: Father God, help us! We have made wrong decisions and now we are stuck with the results. Forgive us for the lies we have told ourselves and deliver us! In the mighty Name of King Jesus. Amen.
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