I spent a lot of my day recently jumping through bureaucratic hoops. I had calls to make where I listened to a lot of music, forms to fill out online that didn’t work the first time and had to be re-entered, and then I had to take notes and make copies documenting all my progress so that I wouldn’t lose track of anything important.
Wistfully, I thought, the Lord doesn’t have to go through all this annoying red tape.
On the other hand, maybe that’s incorrect. Consider how Exodus chronicles God’s efforts on behalf of Israel’s release from slavery in Egypt and her preparation for self-rule.
I’m sure the generations of Hebrews who had cried out to the Lord to save them from their Egyptian masters thought it was a simple thing they were asking their God to do. But, actually, the Lord had to maneuver through a good number of moving parts to effect Israel’s liberation. First, there was the recruitment of Moses, who wanted no part of the job. Next, it took ten plagues before Pharaoh agreed to let God’s people go. Even then, the Egyptian monarch quickly reneged on his resolve and pursued Israel to the scene of the parting of the sea.
After all this divine exertion, remember the first words out of Israel’s mouth when they heard the Egyptian chariots on their heels: “Didn’t we say to you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone; let us serve the Egyptians’? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!” (Exodus 14:12).
We want God to do things for us, but we also want the divine aid to unfold according to our own script. It’s fine to watch a dramatic rescue in the movies, but we don’t appreciate living through that kind of tension. And it’s hard for us to see all the pieces the Lord is putting together when we’re focusing on our own pain.
But we need to hold on to this: whatever it may look like, God never leads us into the desert to hurt us; God takes us there because that’s where we learn to trust the Lord.
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