“Later, Moses and Aaron went in and said to Pharaoh, ‘This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: Let my people go, so that they may hold a festival for me in the wilderness.’ But Pharaoh responded, ‘Who is the Lord that I should obey him by letting Israel go? I don’t know the Lord, and besides, I will not let Israel go.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Stepping out in obedience to God’s command often takes a lot of courage. He occasionally calls us to big and bold actions to advance His kingdom. Perhaps you have taken just such a step of faith before. And perhaps when you did, everything fell right into place, and you enjoyed success and the blessing that comes with faithfulness. But maybe things didn’t go quite as you were planning. In fact, maybe they went the opposite of that. If that was your experience, you have something in common with Moses and Aaron. Let’s talk about their first encounter with Pharaoh and when things don’t go according to plan.

There was once a day when there wasn’t a fence around the White House. If you wanted to have an audience with the President of the United States, you only needed to go to Washington, knock on the door, and hope he wasn’t in a meeting at the moment. Today, someone like you or me (unless you happen to be a high-level cabinet secretary) could not even dream of getting a personal, much less private audience with the President. And don’t even think about walking up to the White House on your own. You couldn’t even get inside the fence without a ticket obtained months in advance and only after a thorough screening process. Rulers of a sufficient stature are generally separated from their people. That has pretty much always been the case.

That’s what makes this next part of the story of the Exodus a little hard to swallow. The way Moses wrote it, it sounds like he and Aaron simply sauntered into Pharaoh’s throne room, made their demands, and walked out. My guess is that there are a few details left out for the sake of brevity. This was probably a meeting arranged sometime in advance. It may not have even happened between these actual people, but through their representatives. Moses likely did not say a word. Aaron was his mouthpiece and would have needed to function as such to give Moses the proper credibility to even be taken seriously by Pharaoh. Pharaoh almost certainly didn’t say a word himself, but only spoke through his mouthpiece.

(By the way, I make observations like that not to undermine the credibility of the Scriptures. As I have said numerous times over the years, I am fully committed to the reliability of every word contained in the Scriptures. The doctrine of inerrancy is correct. Rather, I make those kinds of observations to help you see and understand that the various biblical authors not only didn’t include every detail of every story they experienced, but that that is okay and doesn’t take away from the credibility of any single story, much less the whole thing. God preserved through them what He wanted preserved. Our wanting more details because of the cultural expectations we now bring to historical storytelling doesn’t have any bearing on the credibility of the ancient stories themselves. They are what they are. What we do with them is on us.)

However exactly it played out, though, Moses and Aaron dutifully followed God’s instructions and made a formal request to Pharaoh to allow the people of Israel to go into the wilderness and hold a festival in His honor. This was the big moment that they had been preparing for. At least, that would have been the case for us. We build up to something like this and expect everything to go our way. We are a generation unaccustomed to failure because so many of us had parents who mowed down any obstacles that rose up in our paths for us. We now do the same thing for our kids, leaving them similarly unprepared for the initial failures that always accompany eventual success.

Pharaoh looked at this presumptuous pair, and gave them a rather unceremonious, “No.” Actually, it was more than that. He said, “I don’t know who this God is your people want to worship. All I know are the gods of Egypt, among whose number I myself am counted. And even if this God of yours happened to be real, I am a greater God than He is. After all, if He were the kind of God who deserved to be heard and obeyed, could I have enslaved His people so easily? I will be no means consider this ridiculous request. The people of Israel stay where they are.”

Okay, I may have added a bit to the story there, but that’s what he was communicating by the response he gave to Moses and Aaron. In other words, they did what God told them to do…and it didn’t work. They failed. At least and again, that’s how we are primed to think about such things today. If we set out to follow God’s commands and things don’t go as planned, that means we failed. End of story.

Except…what if it doesn’t?

Moses and Aaron didn’t fail at all. In fact, they succeeded wildly here. They succeeded because they did what God said. In this world, we measure success based on visible results. If you do something and something else happens because of it (at least, something else happens that falls within the general vicinity of what you wanted to happen), then you succeeded. If it doesn’t, you failed. Simple. But in the kingdom of God, success is measured by an entirely different rubric. Success there is measured by faithfulness. If you do what God says, even if the results you were expecting are not the immediate result, you succeeded. This is because if we are doing what God says, the results are on Him and will come in His time. We may be only a single part of a much larger process. As long as we play our part faithfully, everything else stays on track and our work counts as a success.

Another reason Moses and Aaron didn’t fail here is because things were actually unfolding just exactly like God had told them they would. God had told them ahead of time that Pharaoh was going to respond exactly like he did. He was going to respond like that (or, rather, God was going to allow him to respond like that) because He had bigger plans to reveal Himself to the world in a very powerful way. God was using the occasion of Pharaoh’s rank stubbornness to give the whole world a glimpse of the kind of God He was.

It could be that the failure you experienced when faithfully pursuing the path of Christ in your life came not because you did anything wrong, but because God was allowing opposition in order to later take it down in a way that helped lots of people see who He really is. When you have been faithful to His call and command, the immediate and apparent outcome is not on your shoulders. No less than Jesus Himself assured us that in pursuit of the advance of His kingdom we would experience all manner of things the world deems to be failure. Yet when we stand firm, our humble faithfulness will be recognized and rewarded. The world will respond like the world. God will respond like God. And in the end, His kingdom will advance. Let us make sure we’re standing there with Him when it does even if that seems to be a position of failure in a moment.