God Is Still God 

👤 Geoff

Last Sunday we saw what happened when Moses had a bad day (Exodus 5:1-23). Moses, having learned to be obedient, did what God asked him to and it blew up in his face. He went to see Pharaoh to deliver God's message ('Let my people go!') but Pharaoh hadn't read the script and said no. To add insult to injury, the Israelite people were forced to make bricks without straw. For details, listen to the sermon.

Not surprisingly, Moses ask the ‘Why?’ question (verse 22). He’s listened to God, and obeyed, and it’s gone wrong. Now his people are suffering more than they were before.

How does that work?

Why do things often get worse before they get better?
Why so much pain and suffering?
Why does God sometimes leave us in the dark?
Why so often does life feel like making bricks without straw?

Tony Campolo directs us to a story by Soren Kierkegaard, the story of a boy trying to learn maths. The teacher gives him a book full of problems to solve. In the back of the book is a list of the answers to the problems, but the teacher tells the boy never to look at the answers in the back of the book, but to work out the answers for himself. However, the boy cheats. He looks in the back of the book. 

Kierkegaard points out that while it is possible for the boy to get good marks this way, he will never really learn mathematics. As difficult as it may prove to be, the only way to become a mathematician is to struggle with the problems themselves, not by using someone else’s answers, even if those answers are the right ones. 

When we are faced with problems, we sometimes wonder why Jesus doesn’t just spell out the answers so that we know exactly what to do.  God doesn’t give us the answers because He wants us to work out the problems for ourselves. It is only by struggling with the problems as they present themselves, day in day out, that we can develop into the kinds of mature people God wants us to be.

Moses was older and wiser now, but he was still a learner. Aren’t we all? It seems that once we become obedient to him, God routinely puts us in impossible situations so that we are reminded again and again that we can’t, but he can.

Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission, knew the secret of strength through weakness. Complimented once by a friend on the impact of the mission, Hudson answered,

“It seemed to me that  God looked over the whole world to find a man who was weak enough to do His work, and when He at last found me,  He said, ‘He is weak enough - he’ll do.’” 

All God’s giants have been weak people who did great things for God because they reckoned on His being with them. Things will work out for Moses, just not in the way he was expecting. Moses discovered, and we can too, that God is still God, even when it’s a bad day, God is still God even when you don’t understand what’s going on, and God is still God even when you’re beginning to think he isn’t.