“Where is God in our Suffering?” (Exodus 2:23-3:12) | 2/5/23
Exodus 2:23-3:12 | 2/5/23 | Will DuVal
But to dive right in headfirst this morning, I want to invite you to reflect back on your life and consider with me: Have you ever gone through something so difficult that you were left wondering: “Where is GOD in this?” “Why would… How COULD God ALLOW me to go through something like this?”
Perhaps you were suffering EMOTIONALLY, a spouse left you, a parent abandoned you, a cancer diagnosis, fear, anxiety, depression.
Perhaps you suffered SPIRITUALLY - it felt like GOD had left you, or perhaps more likely, as if YOU had left GOD.
I met with a young man this past week who shared that for YEARS now, every few months, he’ll have these stretches where he can barely sleep or eat, sometimes can’t even bring himself to leave the HOUSE, because he’s so terrified of DEATH, and what comes next. “Is there really a heaven, and if so, can I really be sure that I’m going there?”
Thanks to Facebook, I found out this week that two of our congregants who had been regular attenders here about a year ago, but who we haven’t seen since then, who I’ve been trying to reach out to and track down… I finally found out why: apparently they’ve been having an affair with one another. It must be hard to come to church - face the Lord - when you’re in the middle of an adulterous relationship.
Or perhaps your suffering was PHYSICAL - my poor daughter caught the stomach bug this past week, and I was reminded of probably the low point of my OWN life, physically. About 10 years ago, I developed this bizarre neurological condition called Bell’s palsy, which essentially paralyzes half your FACE. Around the same time, I broke my thumb, playing basketball. And shortly thereafter, I caught the stomach bug. So there I sat, on the toilet, rapidly losing fluids out of BOTH ends, yet struggling to vomit because of the face paralysis… and struggling even MORE to hold the trash can with only one good hand! And in that moment, all I could think was: “God… WHY?!”
It’s humorous NOW to look back, but I can assure you, it wasn’t so funny at the time! And maybe the question isn’t AT ALL funny for some of you right now, because you don’t have to look BACK to find your time of greatest suffering; perhaps you’re right in the THICK of it this morning.
WHERE IS GOD in our suffering? That had to be the question on the Israelites’ minds and hearts, in Exodus ch2, when they had endured not weeks, not years, but CENTURIES - 400 years of suffering; they suffered FAR longer than our country has even EXISTED! - at the hands of the Egyptians. “Has God FORGOTTEN all about us?”
Well, God is going to assure them this morning, and assure US, that He does NOT forget His people in our suffering; quite the opposite. And these 15 short verses offer us 6 assurances about God’s response to our suffering, and each of these assurances tells us something about God’s overarching PURPOSE in allowing us to suffer as well. So we’re going to be simultaneously answering BOTH of those big questions related to suffering this morning, in 6 different ways EACH: “What is God’s reaction to suffering?” and “Why does God allow us to suffer, in the first place?”. 6 Responses TO suffering (in your bulletins; I alliterated those to help you remember them), and 6 Reasons FOR suffering (that I added later and gave up on finding a pattern 🙂). But we should also acknowledge: this list is by no means EXHAUSTIVE. The Bible has MUCH more to say about both these questions. But we’ll save those for another sermon.
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SCRIPTURE: I invite you to stand… Exodus 2:23-3:12:
“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. 24 And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. 25 God saw the people of Israel—and God knew.
3:1 Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Midian, and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. 2 And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. 3 And Moses said, “I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.” 4 When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” 5 Then he said, “Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” 6 And he said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
7 Then the Lord said, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, 8 and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. 9 And now, behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. 10 Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.” 11 But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?” 12 He said, “But I will be with you, and this shall be the sign for you, that I have sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain.””
This is the word of God… Let’s pray…
#1 - God’s first RESPONSE to suffering: God CARES. (2:23-25)
When we left OFF in ch2, examining Moses’ backstory last week, his preparing to lead God’s people, Moses was down in MIDIAN. But vv23-25 take us back to EGYPT now; this is a “meanwhile, back in Egypt” cutaway of sorts.
And we’re informed first of the historical context, in v23: ““During those many days the king of Egypt died” - I told you 2 weeks ago that we think the Pharaoh at the time of their actual Exodus in ch14, who succeeded this Pharaoh, was Thutmose III; that would make the Pharaoh who dies here, who killed all the babies back in ch1, and preceded him… [any guesses?] Thutmose II. :)
But the Bible is actually making a theological point by NOT naming these pharaohs: that the most presumably important, powerful man on the PLANET isn’t even worth NAMING compared to the all-surpassing greatness and glory of GOD. And God, who has been operating behind the scenes in chapters 1 and 2, barely even mentioned, is about to take front and center stage. And what DRAWS God to the middle of the action? It’s His people’s SUFFERING. And more specifically, it is their CRIES for HELP amidst it. They’ve been suffering for 400 years now. But this is the first mention we hear of them actually calling OUT to God, for deliverance: “the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help.”
And when their cries for rescue come up to God, He has FOUR distinct responses here; God CARES about us in 4 ways:
First, “God HEARS” our cries, because He cares about our FEELINGS. God WANTS to hear what’s on our hearts - the good, the bad, and the ugly.
He invites us in Philippians 4: ““Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” (vv6-7) Now, he doesn’t promise to GRANT them. God’s not our magic genie, our cosmic vending machine. Instead he promises us “peace which surpasses understanding.” But He wants to KNOW our requests, our thoughts, our feelings. And He LISTENS.
God invites us in Jeremiah 33, v3: “Call to me and I will answer you”. Again: He doesn’t promise us the answer we WANT. I’ve been asked many times about “unanswered prayers”; did you know there’s no such THING as unanswered prayers? There are un-DESIRED answers; but that’s different from being “unanswered”. God may be saying “NO”. Or He may just be saying “Not yet”. But regardless of his answer, He still invites your petition. Because God CARES what’s on our hearts, our feelings.
Now, we have to be careful, because we can’t always TRUST our feelings, can we? The world says, “Trust your heart. If you feel it, it’s true.” God says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?!” (Jer 17:9) Just because our feelings are important, even important to GOD, that doesn’t make them reliable. So sometimes we have to FIGHT our feelings, with FACTS.
This is ESPECIALLY true in the midst of our SUFFERING, isn’t it?
You may FEEL like God has forgotten you, but the FACT is “Though [even] my father and mother [may] forsake me… the LORD will never leave or forsake me.” (Ps 27:10; Dt 31:8)
You may FEEL like nothing good could possibly come of this, but the FACT is: “God works ALL things together for good, for those love Him and are called according to his purpose.” (Rom 8:28)
You may FEEL like God has finally let you down; like He made a mistake this time. But the FACT is: “[God’s] work is perfect, for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is he.” (Dt 32:4) So if He’s allowing you to go through it, God must know something that you DON’T know just yet.
But WHILE you’re going through it, God wants to HEAR from you. Because He cares. Psalm 34:15 “The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous and his ears toward their cry.”
Second, God “REMEMBERS”; specifically, He remembers His covenant FAITHFULNESS. Christopher Wright explains (84): “[This does] not imply that [God] had forgotten. Rather, it means that he is now preparing to take action in relation to what is remembered.” Specifically, His covenant promises to ABRAM. I told you Genesis was all about God’s promise to His people, and Exodus is all about God making GOOD on that promise by MAKING them into a people? Well in case WE’VE forgotten, from our study of Genesis 2 years ago, there was one NOT-so-fun part of God’s promise, that God’s PEOPLE seem to have selectively forgotten here: that God had actually promised they would suffer in Egypt! Way back in Genesis 15, he had warned Abram, some 6 ½ centuries BEFORE: “Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions.” (vv13-14) So in order to make good on His promise to deliver them, God first had to make good on His promise to let them SUFFER.
Now, I want to make one quick but important point here: God did not in fact WAIT until the Israelites cried OUT to Him to take action for them. I think it’s significant that these pivotal verses 23-25 come at the END of ch2, not the beginning - why? Because it shows us God was already PREPARING Moses for the rescue mission He would be called to, 80 YEARS before Israel even cried OUT for it! God didn’t just think this plan up on the fly; it had ALWAYS been His plan to deliver His people, and to use Moses to do it. But nevertheless, v24 does mark a turning point: Israel’s promised suffering is now complete; her promised salvation can now commence.
Third, God HEARS our cries, He REMEMBERS His covenant; and now God SEES our CONDITION.
Jesus remarked, “What do 2 sparrows cost? A PENNY?! And yet, not one of them falls to the ground apart from God’s NOTICE… Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.” (Matt 10:29-32) God SEES your pain. And He CARES.
David wrote: “You have kept count of my tossings;[c]
put my tears in your bottle.” God promises: our tears aren’t wasted; He keeps every single one of them, collected in a jar in heaven, just WAITING to turn it to JOY. “Weeping may last for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” (Ps 30:5) Jesus promised: ““Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” (Matt 5:4) God SEES our condition, and He CARES.
Lastly: God HEARS our cries, REMEMBERS his covenant, SEES our condition, and God KNOWS our concerns.
The verb used for “know” here - yada - is the same word used elsewhere euphemistically for “knowing INTIMATELY”, as in “Adam KNEW his wife Eve, and she bore him a SON.” Obviously that’s not what Moses means here, when he says, “And God KNEW”. But he IS making the point that God knew Israel’s suffering INTIMATELY, even personally. Wright interprets (102): “The Hebrew suggests not just that God is cognitively aware of what is being inflicted upon his people but that he, in some sense, experiences it himself. He knows it from the inside.”
Here’s how the prophet Isaiah reflected back on Israel’s time in Egypt; he said: “In all their affliction [God] was afflicted” (63:9a). Did you hear that? Some theologians who would say, “Well, that’s just an anthropomorphism, a word picture; you can’t take that LITERALLY; GOD can’t suffer…”
The Bible says: “In all their affliction [God] was afflicted”.
That’s reminiscent of how Isaiah wrote about ANOTHER co-sufferer, just a few chapters earlier, when he prophesied of Israel’s MESSIAH to come, the “Suffering Servant”; of him, Isaiah wrote: “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isa 53:3); exact same word, in Hebrew: the Messiah would YADA our grief. He would KNOW it, EXPERIENCE it, personally.
In fact, Jesus would BEAR our suffering, on the cross: “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows… he was pierced for our transgressions;
crushed for our iniquities… and by his wounds we are healed.”
Friends, why does God allow us to suffer? Well, for starters, to DRAW US to Himself. As C.S. Lewis said: “Pain is God’s megaphone, to rouse a deaf world” (The Problem of Pain). That was certainly true for ISRAEL here; Philip Ryken notes: (37): “[One] reason God allowed his people to suffer was to show them their need for salvation… If God hadn’t let them suffer, would the Israelites have ever desired to leave Egypt? It was hard enough to get them to leave even when they WERE suffering!” (Dan McCartney, cited in Ryken, 27) …This teaches us an important lesson about our own spiritual pilgrimage: Suffering helps us look for our Savior.” (37) “It is hard enough for us to leave aside the treasures of this evil world even though we suffer in it. How much harder is it for us to desire the new heavens and new earth when our lives here are comfortable?” (McCartney, in Ryken, 37-38)
Is it possible that God is SPARING you the deceitfulness of comfort right now, and allowing you to go through the difficulty of SUFFERING instead, to help you look for your SAVIOR? I know I, for one, can personally attest that nothing jump starts my prayer life like a little SUFFERING! Nothing causes ME to “draw near” to God, like going through a really tough season of life where it feels like every OTHER possible place I would usually turn for comfort and hope and security is being systematically STRIPPED AWAY from me! When we’re on our knees and the only place left TO look is the place we should have been looking from the START: UP, to the SAVIOR.
God CARES about our suffering, and He wants to USE it to DRAW US to Him.
#2 - God’s SECOND response to suffering: He COMES DOWN. (3:1-4)
Ch3 opens back in MIDIAN, with Moses “keeping the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro”. He was introduced to us in ch2 as “Reuel”; scholars think “Jethro”, which means “his excellency”, was actually his TITLE, as the “priest of Midian” (Ryken, 80).
There’s also some debate about the MOUNTAIN - are Horeb and Sinai different names for the SAME mountain? Or is Horeb the name of the region, and Sinai the mountain? It’s unclear. It’s also unclear where this mountain actually IS; it’s most often identified today with Mt. Jebel Musa, which is still called ‘Moses’ mountain’ today by the bedouins in that region” (Ryken, 80).
But the third and most consequential question of identity comes in v2, when this “angel of the Lord” appears to Moses “in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush”. But then, just 2 verses later, appears to be replaced by God HIMSELF “calling to Moses out of the bush”. What’s going on here?
We read SIMILAR encounters all throughout Genesis: Hagar (16:13), Abraham (22:15), Jacob (32:30) - ALL saw an “angel of the Lord”, that was subsequently identified as God himself. Textually, we could note that the Hebrew phrase literally just reads “the angel, YHWH” (DeYoung, “But I Will be with You” sermon, Oct 4 2015). So perhaps God is showing up AS an angel. The early church commentators were quick to identify this as a “theophany” of the preincarnate CHRIST! This is Jesus in the OT!
But in one way, shape, form, or fashion, what IS clear, is that GOD showed up in the Sinai wilderness that day. Because not only does God CARE about our suffering - God could sort of PASSIVELY care, up there in Heaven, “Gosh, that really stinks. I feel for ya; I mean not LITERALLY, cuz I’m up here in heaven, where there’s no pain or tears…” - but NO; our God COMES DOWN to us, to be WITH us in our suffering. He makes it clearest in vv7-8, when God announces: ““I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them”.
That’s the significance of the BURNING BUSH. Some commentators think it symbolizes ISRAEL, “burning yet not consumed” because they were SUFFERING yet not destroyed in Egypt. Others think it symbolizes JESUS; they speculate it was a THORN bush, prefiguring the one who would wear the CROWN of thorns and undergo the fiery trial, yet not be extinguished.
Maybe. But what we know for CERTAIN is that fire represents God’s presence all OVER the place in the OT - remember how God SEALED his covenant with Abram? He appeared as a “blazing torch and a smoking firepot” (Gen 15:17-21); in Deut 4:24, God will be called “a consuming fire”; we need look no further than the rest of EXODUS, where God will descend on Mt Sinai “in FIRE” in ch19 (v18); He leads them TO the mountain by guiding them as a “pillar of fire” (13:21). And spoiler alert, Exodus is gonna END with God descending on the TABERNACLE they build Him in the form of FIRE (40:38). So as much as anything else, the symbol and significance of the burning bush was that God was WITH Moses, and He would soon be WITH His people, in their suffering.
But it did have the BONUS effect of proving that God can do the IMPOSSIBLE! That God can take the extremely ORDINARY (a bush) and make it EXTRAORDINARY - which is exactly what He’s about to do with Moses, by the way, and indeed, with the entire nation of Israel.
And friends, God is STILL in the miracle-working business today. Because God still DRAWS NEAR to us in our suffering. That’s the second reason we see here, why God allows suffering; not just to draw US to HIM, but GOD also promises to draw near to US as well, when we’re hurting.
Psalm 34:18 is one of the most encouraging promises in all of Scripture, for those who are hurting: “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit”.
Psalm 147:3 “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.”
Ps 23:4 “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,[c] I will fear no evil, for you are with me”
I could go ON and on, Scripture after Scripture, all promising the same thing: GOD MEETS US, in a UNIQUE way, in the WILDERNESS moments of our lives. It was true for JACOB, when HE was running for his life out in the desert, and God showed up on the ladder… It was true for HAGAR, when she was exiled out into the wilderness and God met her there… when ELIJAH was running for his life from Ahab and Jezebel out into the desert… time and time again, God proves that He MEETS us in a special way in our times of greatest need. I don’t know about you, but speaking personally, I’ve only felt like I heard God’s voice, almost audibly, and felt God’s presence, really palpably, only a FEW times in my whole life. And it’s been almost exclusively when I was really HURTING.
What God wants FAR more for us than COMFORT, is that we would be COMFORTED, by Him. God wants to draw near and comfort us in our pain. Cuz He wants RELATIONSHIP with us. We draw near to Him… He draws near to US… and if He has to use SUFFERING to accomplish it, then so be it.
#3 - At the same time, God CAUTIONS us in our suffering (3:5-6).
Notice the stark CONTRAST here from v4 to v5. In v4, God beckons him over, “Moses, Moses”; now in v5, God WARNS him: “Don’t come any closer! And while you’re at it, take your shoes off; you’re standing on HOLY ground.”
Really? In the middle of the desert? Yeah, cuz GOD’S there. I haven’t BEEN to the “Holy Land” yet, modern-day Israel, but when you see the pictures, don’t you sometimes wonder: “Y’all have been fighting for thousands of years over THIS?! This sad little patch of dust”.
But God chooses the weak to shame the strong, and it’s the HOLY Land because GOD was there, and God will RETURN there to reign in the NEW Jerusalem at the end of history. The point is that God can make ANY land holy. It’s the same reason God raises up leaders like Moses and David and Paul - all 3 of them MURDERERS! - God does it to prove He can use ANYBODY in order to accomplish His own good purposes.
But He WARNS us, in the process: “Watch out; I am HOLY. I’m not LIKE you; I am totally SET APART in my perfection and my glory. So if you’re GONNA draw near to me, Moses, it’s gonna be on MY terms.”
You know, the “problem of evil” as it’s sometimes called - this question of how a good God could allow us to suffer - it really hasn’t been much of a question at ALL for most of human history. Any student of philosophical history will point out that it really wasn’t until 18th c. Enlightenment, when humanists tried to dethrone God and make MAN the center of the universe, that this question really became popular. For thousands of years BEFORE that, people mostly just assumed that suffering was inevitable in a fallen world, and that God didn’t really OWE us anything OTHERWISE.
That’s certainly what SCRIPTURE teaches. Think of the book of JOB. The quintessential test case in so-called “unwarranted suffering”. Job was a righteous man, “BLAMELESS” even, we’re told. And yet, God let him endure IMMENSE suffering. And for the better part of 37 chapters, Job cries, “WHY?! God, how COULD you?!” And do you remember God’s ANSWER to Job, when He finally replies in ch38? God doesn’t say, “I wanted RELATIONSHIP with you… to draw CLOSER to each other…”
No, this time, God says, ““Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” “Tell me: Are YOU the one who brings the sun up every morning and the moon out at night?” God says, “I’LL be the One asking the questions from now on, Job…”
In other words, as God puts it in Isaiah 55: “my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (vv8-9)
I’m HOLY! I’m utterly set apart, UNLIKE you. And I’m not your magic genie, here to do your bidding; I don’t exist for YOUR pleasure - YOU exist for MINE! And if I have greater purposes in mind, a bigger plan at work, that you can’t yet SEE and understand, but which includes you going through a “light momentary affliction [because it’s] preparing you for an eternal weight of glory [that’s gonna be] beyond all comparison”, then maybe instead of “God - how COULD you?” a simple “THANK YOU” would suffice. “We rejoice in our sufferings,” Paul said, “knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame” (Rom 5:3-5).
So if you come to me, God says, you must come on MY terms, ready to accept MY will, my WAYS, which are “higher than yours”.
And yet, if the point of v5 is how UNLIKE God we are, the point of v6 is to remind us of how VERY much we are alike one ANOTHER. God tells Moses: ““I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”” In other words: “This ain’t my first rodeo, Moses! I’ve been in the redemption business - bringing good out of evil - for CENTURIES now”. So God cautions us against thinking that our suffering is somehow UNIQUE. God is repeating almost verbatim here his words to JACOB, from Genesis 46:2-4; we don’t have time to look at all their similarities. But Philip Ryken points out the FUNCTION of these similarities is to remind us that the same God who has proven Himself faithful in the PAST, is still OUR God today (76): “Like Moses, Jacob was running for his life when he met a young woman, watered her flocks, and was invited to meet her father (Gen 29)... [Such] connections remind us that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is also the God of Moses. The God who made his covenant with the patriarchs is the very same God who [will lead] his people out of Egypt”.
But friends: God will do it His OWN way, and in His OWN timing. What happened last week, when Moses tried to take matters into his own hands, and start the revolution early, by killing the Egyptian slave master? Not only did the Israelites not follow his lead, they TATTLED on him! Moses had to run for his life, and wait another FORTY YEARS before God had prepared Him, thoroughly HUMBLED him enough, for the job.
And that is the THIRD reason God sometimes lets us suffer: to HUMBLE US. God’s word informs us that “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” And nothing humbles us, brings us back down to earth, and more importantly, brings us back to GOD, and reliance on HIM, when we’ve become a little too SELF-reliant, nothing does that quite like SUFFERING, does it? So what did the apostle Peter exhort his churches to do, in the MIDST of their suffering? “Humble yourselves… under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.” (1 Pet 5:6-7)
#4 - God’s FOURTH Response to Suffering (and I’m gonna have to hurry and be WAY too brief with the LAST half of these, but…): God COMES THROUGH. (3:7-8)
In vv7 & 8 here, God doesn’t just see, hear, remember, know… He ACTS! God says, “Yeah, I’ve SEEN my people, I’ve HEARD their cry, I KNOW they're suffering, and NOW, I’ve COME DOWN to DELIVER them!
And friends, when God makes a promise to His people, NO amount of suffering can stand in the way of Him coming THROUGH, and making GOOD on that promise.
Psalm 34:17 promises “When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears
and delivers them out of all their troubles.”
Here is JESUS’ promise to you, if you are a sheep of his flock, if He is your Good Shepherd: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me,[a] is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand.” (Jn 10:27-29)
Friends, God will make good on his promise to “deliver us out of ALL our troubles” - even if He doesn’t do it in THIS lifetime… even if He doesn’t answer your prayers the way you want Him to on THIS side of eternity… even if God allows you to CONTINUE suffering for reasons BEYOND you for the next 10, 20… 50 years - you can be confident that God WILL one day deliver you from EVERY trouble, because JESUS, your SAVIOR, came THROUGH for you on the cross, and he PURCHASED your deliverance, and now he offers you ETERNAL life, and promises that NO ONE can snatch you from His hand. The hands that made the entire UNIVERSE are MORE than capable of holding YOU, and keeping you, preserving you, sustaining you, all the way to the finish line, when He at last brings you home, to eternal joy with Him.
And why does he DO it? God’s fourth REASON for suffering: to SHOW OFF. To display HIS great power to save, to deliver, to “come through” for us, for ALL people to see. Ps 106:8 “when [our fathers] were in Egypt… [God] saved them for his name's sake, that he might make known his mighty power.”
#5 - FIFTH Response to Suffering: God CALLS. (3:9-10)
All of this is sounding GREAT to Moses… until v10, where God tells him, “Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.”
And Pastor Thad is gonna pick up this conversation next week while I’m in FL, with a whole SERMON on when God CALLS us, and how NOT to respond like Moses, who tries not one, not two, but FIVE different excuses to get OUT of his assignment.
But the point I want to make here for our purposes this morning is simply that while God promises ultimately to DELIVER us, He DOESN’T promise to make it EASY for us. In fact, he may be CALLING some of you this morning, to step up and play the part He has assigned YOU in taking responsibility, AGENCY, to help alleviate your own suffering.
Maybe you suffer from health problems that are TOTALLY preventable, and God’s calling you to get off the couch and exercise, watch your diet.
Or you suffer from relationship problems of your OWN making; you keep wondering when God’s gonna bring you that spouse, but GOD’S saying: “Maybe when you DESERVE her; why don’t you focus on YOURSELF, and your relationship with ME, and becoming the kind of person who’s WORTH marrying, and I’ll take care of the rest when it’s time; you’re not ready yet.”
And that brings us to God’s FIFTH reason for allowing us to suffer: to GROWS US thru suffering.
James 1: “Count it all joy, my brothers,[b] when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. 4 And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” (vv2-4)
You grow TWICE as much during the hard times as you do the easy ones, don’t you? Perhaps God is letting you STRUGGLE right now - like the butterfly who has to push out of its cocoon, but in so doing, develops and strengthens its wings for flight - maybe God is calling you to GROWTH through your pain; “No pain, no gain”, right?
But lastly, #6 - God promises to respond to our suffering by COM[ING] WITH us, THROUGH it. (3:11-12)
Here’s Moses’ FIRST excuse, that Thad will pick up next week, in v11: ““Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?””
What a BAD question! Because the answer, of course, is: NO ONE! Moses was a nobody. But what’s important isn’t who MOSES was… or who you or I am today… friends: what’s important is who GOD is!
You may be a nobody; but take heart: GOD is a Somebody.
You’ve heard that “God won’t give you more than you can handle”? NOTHING could be more unbiblical. Listen: you and I can’t survive a trip to WAL-MART without God’s help! No, the BIBLICAL truth is that God won’t give us more than HE can handle.
And in Hebrews 13:21, God promises to “equip you with everything good that you may [be able to] do his will”; how? By equipping you with HIMSELF! God has given us his very own Holy Spirit, to come WITH us, through EVERY trial we face in this life.
But here’s the thing: did you catch v12? The “sign” that God has been with us through the storms of life? “this shall be the sign for you, [Moses] that I have sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain.”
Moses: you’re gonna know that I was WITH you all along, EMPOWERING you every step of the way, just as soon as the suffering is OVER! In HINDSIGHT. Speaking of answers we might not like!
As Christopher Wright notes (110): “There are times in life when God calls us to step out in faith and obedience, trusting in his promises. But sometimes the proof of his presence and the ‘sign’ that it really was God who thus called us lie ahead in an unknowable future... Sometimes only with retrospect can we declare and celebrate, with the certainty of faith transformed into the reality of SIGHT, that God has indeed been and done all he said he would.”
Which brings us to God’s FINAL reason for suffering: to TEST US. Will we truly trust him through it? LEAN on him, as our sustaining strength, in our weakness (2 Cor 12)? Will God really be “enough” for us, even if He is all we have? If like Job, EVERYTHING else, is stripped away - where does our hope and security ultimately lie?
Friends, there is only one foundation you can build on this morning that is firm enough to withstand ANYTHING this life can throw at you, and His name is JESUS.
The One who beckons you to “Come to me, and I will give you REST” this morning.
The One who draws near to YOU, in your suffering - who came all the way from Heaven, all the way to the CROSS, to prove it.
The One who is HOLY, yet emptied himself to die for you and DELIVER you.
The One who now CALLS you to FOLLOW Him, and promises if you will, “Behold, I will be with you ALWAYS.”
His name is JESUS. And if He is FOR you, then what on earth could possibly stand against you? You have no reason to fear.”