Grumbling or Trusting?

Exodus 5 to 7 When God calls us to His work do we immediately respond or are we like Moses with his many excuses: I can’t speak eloquently; send someone else or why me? God wants us to trust He will equip us for the task. For Moses, God gave him his brother Aaron to walk beside him. For us, He has given us the Holy Spirit.

Forty yrs. had passed and we find Moses sharing God’s plan to release the Israelites from slavery and the people bowed in reverence forgetting to ask: when will this happen. And so when the sticky-wicket Pharaoh exclaimed:  “I don’t know the Lord!” they were dumbfounded to hear not deliverance but: slave masters increase the workload of the Israelites!

They said: What happened to our deliverance? “You have made us stink in the opinion of Pharaoh and his servants!”  Like us, they had a mindset that it would happen right then and when it didn’t, they complained. Moses wasn’t much better at hearing this news either. “Lord, why have you caused trouble for these people? You have not rescued them!”

When things don’t go as we think they should, we find ourselves wallowing in the pit of grumbling. The Israelites and Moses fell into that trap and we do as well because we are an instant gratification people.

There is an important lesson here for us: God does not work on our timetable! He only asks us to trust in Him with all of our heart and not rely on our own understanding. How are we doing?

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Three Extraordinary Women

Moving on from Genesis to Exodus 1 to 3, we meet three extraordinary women; Shiphrah and Puah and the mother of Moses. These heroines lived righteously in an evil and perverse nation ruled by a man “who did not know Joseph” and what he had done to save the nation of Egypt.  Shiphrah and Puah were Hebrew midwives who were ordered by the new Pharaoh to kill all male babies. Courageously they found a way to circumvent that order and save the new infants. They feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them… “because the midwives feared God”  He blessed them with households of their own.  Jochebed, the mother of Moses, saw her beautiful son and made a plan to save him from the Pharaoh’s order. She demonstrated courage, determination, and cleverness to save her son from this evil law of infanticide.  She trusted God to provide for this precious child and so it was that God moved Pharaoh’s daughter to bathe that very morning in the Nile. Hearing an infant’s cry she felt compassion for him; adopted him and named him Moses “because I drew him from the water.”  Her compassion overruled her father’s infanticide law even though she could not foresee God’s plan already being set in motion to redeem the children of Israel from bondage through Moses. These three women were used by God to save an entire nation.

These heroines had no Bible but they had God and they feared God more than this Pharaoh.  This teaches us a principle: no matter what century you live in or where you live, God speaks and reveals Himself to His people.  [Rom 1:20] Secondly, like the disciples in Acts, these three women believed and live by this truth: we must obey God before man. [Acts 5:29]

You may be just one person but God has a plan and a purpose for you to be a real hero/heroine for God. Real people in real circumstances can live a godly life in the midst of an evil and perverse nation. God protects, provides and blesses those who fear Him: “The fear of man is a snare but he whoever trusts in the Lord will be safe.” [Prov 29:25]

• Real people in real circumstances can live a godly life in the midst of an evil and perverse nation. 

QUESTION FOR US TODAY: What is God preparing us to do for Him and His people?