December 9

Let My People Go

Some of what shapes a life gets decided in rooms we never enter. A committee meets, an office says it will be in touch, a landlord makes up his mind, and the waiting happens at our end while the deciding happens somewhere else. December runs on top of all of it, and the lights go up outside houses where something important is still unsettled.

Israel had no standing in a room like that. Moses and Aaron came before Pharaoh and told him what the God of Israel had said, and Pharaoh's reply was short: he did not know the Lord, and he would not let Israel go. That same day he ordered the work made heavier, and the first visible result of God's word was a harder week for the people it was spoken for.

Moses took the complaint straight back to God, and the answer came in the first person. God told him what he was about to do to Pharaoh, then gave him a message for his own people. What God says at length here, he says to the people who were still in the middle of the trouble.

Afterward Moses and Aaron came, and said to Pharaoh, "This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: 'Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness.'"

Therefore tell the children of Israel, "I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will rid you of their bondage, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm, and with great judgments; and I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God; and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who brings you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians."

Exodus 5:1; 6:6-7

Five times in two sentences, God says I will. He will bring them out, he will rid them of their bondage, he will redeem them with an outstretched arm, he will take them for his own people, and he will be their God. The speech opens on the name: I am the Lord. The deliverance is all his own work, and the one thing left to Israel is the knowing, which comes at the end of that list, after the bringing out.

Moses carried all of it back, and Scripture records plainly that the people did not listen to him, for anguish of spirit and cruel bondage. Nothing in the promise depended on their hearing it well. God had said what he would do, and he did it.

God promises two things here and does both himself. He will bring his people out of what holds them, and he will take them to belong to him. The New Testament says those same two things about Christ. Paul writes to Titus that he gave himself for us to redeem us from all iniquity and to purify for himself a people for his own possession, and both halves arrive together in that one sentence, a people brought out of what held them and taken to be God's own.

Whatever is being decided in a room you are not in, God has already spoken about his people in his own name, and he was not waiting on anyone's permission when he said it. He gave his Son to redeem us. He has taken us to be his own. He said so before anything on our side had changed. He has not taken it back.

You said what you would do, Lord, and you did it. Thank you for redeeming a people to be your own, and for speaking your promise to people who could barely hear it. I rest on your word today.