“So the Israelite foremen went in and cried for help to Pharaoh: ‘Why are you treating your servants this way?’ . . . But he said, ‘You are slackers. Slackers! That is why you are saying, “Let us go sacrifice to the Lord.”‘ . . . When they left Pharaoh, they confronted Moses and Aaron, who stood waiting to meet them, ‘May the Lord take note of you and judge,’ they said to them, ‘because you have made us reek to Pharaoh and his officials – putting a sword in their hand to kill us!’ So Moses went back to the Lord and asked, ‘Lord, why have you caused trouble for this people? And why did you ever send me?'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

We like stories that have a happy ending. Just nearly all of our stories do too. In order to get to that happy ending, though, there is often a journey involved. And while sometimes that journey is short and smooth, there are other times when it is anything but that. Sometimes, in the beginning, it looks like there won’t be any journey at all. Instead, it appears that we are simply bound for failure, and everyone around us is worse off for our efforts. Let’s talk today about Pharaoh’s reaction to Moses and Aaron, and when our best efforts just seem to make a mess of things.

We talked yesterday about the potential for Moses and Aaron to have felt like failures when Pharaoh responded to their request for the people to take a three-day holiday into the wilderness to hold a festival in the Lord’s honor with a rather vigorous, “No.” That could have been the end of the story, but God had other plans and Pharaoh was unknowingly going to play right into them. How this was going to unfold was through the fact that Pharaoh was an insecure, petty, prideful, and vindictive tyrant. And he thought just like every other similar tyrant across history has thought. If these two were making this kind of request, then there was a rebellious spirit germinating in the hearts of the people that needed to be put down. Ruthlessly.

So, Pharaoh didn’t stop with merely telling Moses and Aaron to forget about it and get out of his sight. When they left, Pharaoh gave instructions to his foremen to make life exponentially worse for his Israelite slaves. They were to continue to meet their brick-making quotas, but the Egyptians weren’t going to provide them with the straw they needed to do it any longer. Instead, they were going to have to get it themselves. And, if they started slipping from their daily brick totals, they would be punished severely for their failure.

This rather naturally prompted the Israelite foremen – who knew they were going to be the first ones beaten when this now-impossible directive was not fulfilled – to demand an audience with Pharaoh to appeal for relief. Pharaoh, who was a shrewd politician in spite of all his other character flaws, pointed his finger right straight back at Moses and Aaron’s request for time off, essentially saying, “If you have all this time to be planning these religious “vacations” you want to take, you obviously don’t have enough work to do. You are not attending to your real work well enough. Get back to work and be grateful that I’m even feeding you.” Like so many other tyrants across history, he concluded that the best way to respond to this potential uprising was with a soul-crushing exercise of power.

Well, the Israelites, who did not have any kind of a developed or nuanced faith in God, nor any real clue as to the larger nature and intent of the work He was setting up to unfold through the coming drama, responded about like anyone would have expected them to respond. They marched straight back to Moses and Aaron and blamed them for their troubles. Their total lack of faith or understanding of God is laid bare when they appeal to Him to judge them for what they had done. He was going to judge Moses and Aaron, but the results of that wouldn’t be what the Israelites were expecting. He was going to bless and reward them for their faithfulness. But no one really understood any of that yet. All anyone could see at this point was that they had tried, failed, and made things worse by their efforts.

For his part, even Moses wasn’t yet where he understood what was going on and why it was happening beyond what he could see. He had done everything God had asked him to do and now everything was worse than it had been before. What was God’s plan, because this certainly didn’t seem like a good one. This plan was causing more harm to and pain for the people. They had all been operating under the assumption that God’s plan was to make things better. His plan was failing rather badly. And why, oh why, did God send Moses to do all of this? “Why did you ever send me?” he complained. If you were going to make someone be the fall guy for wildly increased persecution and oppression of an entire nation, why didn’t you send someone else? I didn’t sign up for this.

Have you ever been here before? You stepped out in faithfulness to God’s command, and instead of making any kind of a positive change in the world, you made things worse for everyone within the blast range of your actions. You felt like a failure. They all hated you for what you had done. But you were only trying to do the right thing. Where was God? Keeping His commands obviously isn’t a good thing all of the time. Sometimes it really is better to ignore things or even compromise a bit so that we don’t needlessly hurt other people. This kind of experience and even just the fear of this kind of experience are the reason so many people settle into a practical atheism that may include an active role in a local church, but which results in professed believers with lives that are functionally indistinguishable from the unbelievers around them. It results in people who conclude that God really doesn’t know everything. That He isn’t completely all-powerful. That His plans don’t always work out for the good of those who love Him are who are called according to His purposes.

What are we supposed to do with this?

Well, for starters, we study stories like this one. Honestly, we can study just about any of the major stories in the Scriptures to the same effect. Time and time again, we see people step out in obedience to God’s command run into an absolute brick wall of apparent failure. Instead of quitting and going home, though, they persevered, trusted that God really was who He said He was, trusted that His plans really were going to go like He said they were going to go, and kept on pushing their way down the path He was calling them. And in time after time, their efforts were eventually rewarded with incredible success and blessing. Nations were freed, oppressors were defeated, lives were transformed.

Yet it’s not simply that we have the stories of God’s people persevering through what initially seems like a devastating defeat to find the victory waiting on the other side of the adventure, we have the story of God Himself doing and experiencing this as well in Christ. Jesus set out to do God’s will perfectly with His life. And He succeeded at this as well. He did everything just right…and then He was betrayed into the hands of the men who wanted to kill Him for it, put through a sham trial, beaten until He was only barely recognizably human still, and nailed to a cross where He died. His followers were utterly demoralized and feared they would all be rounded up and put through the same hell as well. It had every appearance of being a thoroughly profound defeat. But then came the third day.

God’s story always ends in victory. He cannot lose. He is the creator of all we see and don’t. He is the one with all the power and might and wisdom and authority. What He says will come to pass. It has to. When we follow Him in His quest to overcome the world, the world is going to push back. It will occasionally push back really hard. It won’t fight fair. In fact, it will fight ugly. It will appear at first to go about as badly as things initially did for Moses and Aaron and the Israelites. But if we will persevere with God’s eternal kingdom firmly in our sights, our efforts will eventually end in success. Indeed, if we are following Him faithfully, we can’t fail. This vision can sustain us through the early (and late) hard times. It can sustain us (and others if we share it effectively and well) even if the success we seek and know is coming doesn’t come in our lifetime. The writer of Hebrews would later celebrate the faithfulness of those men and women who persevered through persecution and didn’t see the fruits of their labors come to bear during their lives. But it did come. We know it did because we are living with it now. When things seem to go badly while following Jesus, keep at it. Kingdom success will come.