Today’s reading: Exodus 1-3; Matthew 15:21-39
24 And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. 25 God saw the people of Israel—and God knew. Exodus 3:24-25
… he healed them, 31 so that the crowd wondered, when they saw the mute speaking, the crippled healthy, the lame walking, and the blind seeing. And they glorified the God of Israel. Matthew 15:30b-31
Exodus opens with an update on the descendents of Jacob (Israel) who by this time had remained in Egypt for 400 years. They no longer enjoyed favored status as they had in the days of Joseph. They had become a threat to the Egyptians and were subjected to slavery. Their male babies were to be executed. Things got worse and worse and the Israelites groaned. Did God know?
Indeed He heard, remembered, saw, and knew as the passage above points out. He had prepared a leader, Moses, to deliver them. Moses, however, went through a strange training program. He was raised as a son of Pharaoh’s daughter, but ,his first attempts at leadership were ill-conceived and rejected. He fled to the wilderness with this question ringing in his ears, “Who made you a prince and judge over us?” It took forty years (Acts 7:30), but God appeared to a now-insecure eighty year old Moses and assured him that he would lead his people out of their slavery to the land of the Canaanites that God had promised to Abraham. Israel would be free in a new land.
But that earthly kingdom of Israel would only be a shadow of the ultimate kingdom. Jesus came announcing the arrival of the kingdom of God. He set people free from the ravages, not of an earthly tyrant, but of the spiritual tyrant, Satan, through whom the world lived and lives in bondage to sin, sickness, and death. Jesus demonstrated His power as the king to liberate those who were bound. The eternal kingdom has come in part, but we are promised that Jesus will come again to finalize its establishment. Meanwhile we pray, trust God, and wait knowing that He knows our groaning, remembers His covenant, and will fulfill all His promises.
Do you know that God knows your groaning today? Trust Him.
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