Exodus 5:1-21 "Who Is the Lord? Scott Hoezee

According to biographer Nigel Hamilton, Joseph P. Kennedy, father of President John Kennedy, was a high, lofty, and utterly proud man. This led to a number of different behaviors but one thing it meant was that he would not abide the presence of anyone who contradicted him. If just once a dinner guest at the Kennedy home in Hyannis Port made the mistake of raising a question or even an eyebrow over something Mr. Kennedy said, that person was banished forever from the home. Only the obsequious, the mousy, the useful, or the unremonstrative were allowed in the compound. As a result, other voices--voices and opinions that could sharpen one's mind and broaden one's horizons--were kept at bay, allowing the status quo to remain undisturbed.

In this morning's sermon I mentioned General Douglas MacArthur, easily one of the most vain and proud men of the twentieth century. Even people who were on a first-name basis with world leaders knew better than to address MacArthur as anything other than "General." Even MacArthur's wife called him General! He had no diminutive and would abide none. Had someone ever called him "Mac" or "Doug" to his face, the response would have been arctic. MacArthur wanted and needed to be revered. So he installed a fifteen-foot high mirror right behind his desk to increase his stature in the eyes of people who entered his office. He insisted on being photographed as often as possible with pictures of Lincoln in the background so as to invite interesting comparisons. He also developed the habit of referring to himself in the third person ("MacArthur will be leaving for Fort Meyer now.")

Among its many aims and aspirations, pride or hubris not only desires the limelight but becomes fiercely protective of that limelight once it is gained. The proud person looms larger in his own mind than does anyone else. Over time, fewer and fewer people register on the consciousness of the proud person's imagination. We have all witnessed something of this phenomenon. If you've ever watched someone who wants to arrive some day in the limelight of great power but isn't there yet, then you know that very often this is someone who will work hard at reaching out to other people, who will labor to remember the names of lots of people. And so if he forgets a name, he'll feel terrible and will apologize profusely. On your way up to the top, you need other people. But once you get there, it can be a different story.

Once some people reach the top, they suddenly become more interested in sensing that you know their names, even though they no longer need to bother with remembering you. I know that I have had the experience of meeting up with some well-known person for perhaps the second or third time. But I also know that at least once I have made the mistake of saying to this person, "We actually met before a few years ago when you were in such-and-such a place." And after I said that, I saw a rather bored look flash across this person's face, as much as to say, "Big deal. Why would I even care to be reminded of having met you before!?"

The Pharaoh of Egypt was revered as a god. For years and years he had been hailed as divine by his people. His rule was absolute, his word was powerful and sharp as a two-edged sword. Over time, he came to believe his own publicity. And if some morning he felt weary and ever-so-human and so doubted whether or not he was truly divine, all he had to do was look into the eyes of the various sycophants and yes-men with whom he surrounded himself. He looked into their eyes, saw their reverence of him, and so felt reassured that indeed, he was Pharaoh of Egypt, lord of all he surveyed, master of all and second to none.

Hence it is no surprise that things went the way they did on that day when Moses and Aaron shuffled into the throne room for an appointment with this divine Pharaoh. As these two men bowed in respect before the throne, the Pharaoh did not even deign to look up from the sheaf of papyrus he was reading and rifling through. (I once heard that CEOs of large companies are advised to not look up for the first ten seconds when a lesser employee enters the office. It puts people in their place and lets them know who is who in this office.) So with his nose still buried in work more important than anything these two Hebrews could ever possibly say to him, the Pharaoh grunts, "Yes, what is it?" Moses' reply is short and to the point. "This is what Yahweh, the God of Israel says, 'Let my people go so they may hold a festival to me in the desert.'"

Now the Pharaoh does look up and, with a look of mock confusion on his face, replies, "Who? Yahweh? Never heard of him. Be gone." Pharaoh didn't know of anyone named Yahweh. Did Moses say this was some god? Well, if so he must be a lot lower on the divine scale than the Pharaoh himself and so the divine one, the ruler of all Egypt, was not about to take orders from some lesser deity. To the Pharaoh's ears this sounded a little like if someone today were to march into the Oval Office and say to the president, "Sir, Rev. Stuart Peabody of McBain, Michigan, asks you to change your stance on global trade." Hearing that, probably any president would respond, "Who? What? Well, thanks for sharing and see you later!" This isn't the kind of thing an exalted leader needs to take too seriously.

But Moses pressed on a bit more. "Listen, O Pharaoh, Yahweh met with us and has requested this. So authorize this leave-of-absence or else Yahweh is going to come after you with plagues and a sword." Barely suppressing a smirk, the Pharaoh responds, "Ooooh, I'm all aquiver! Yikes!" But then his visage hardened and his tone became deadly serious. "Moses, Aaron: get out of here. Why are you keeping this nation's key workforce from their tasks? As soon as you dangle a three-day pass in front of people, they get all distracted and start to get sloppy as their minds wander over to the upcoming vacation. I won't have it and so will find ways to bend their attention back to the work at hand."

And so Moses and Aaron depart with the score apparently Pharaoh 1, Yahweh 0. Round One goes to the man on the gilded throne. In fact, before this chapter is finished, Pharaoh will further demonstrate his complete disregard for the supposed decrees of Yahweh by issuing a new decree of his own: from now on the Israelites would make bricks without straw. Pharaoh would beat these dreams of leaving Egypt clean out of the people's heads. Pharaoh's word ruled the land. Yahweh's word was a joke. Like all cruel dictators, the Pharaoh was skilled at torture and manipulation.

The Russian poet Irina Ratushinskaya has related numerous experiences she had in a gulag prison. She noted that on most ordinary days, the food the prison officials served them was pathetic: stale crusts of bread and a thin soup called "skilly" that consisted of tepid broth in which were floating fish guts and other exceedingly unappetizing things. But every once in a while Ratushinskaya and her fellow prisoners would stage a hunger strike to protest some bad policy. No sooner was a hunger strike declared, however, and the prison officials would, three times a day, bring in platters heaped with sumptuous, fragrant, piping hot food.

Similarly, the Pharaoh knew how to show who was in charge. He knew how to make people miserable. He also knew how to mock God. But in so doing, Pharaoh sets up the drama that will occupy much of Exodus. "Who is Yahweh?" the Pharaoh asks. In a real way the rest of this book will be one long, extended, dramatic answer to that very question. Pharaoh asked the question, Yahweh will now give Pharaoh the education of a lifetime. "Who am I?" Yahweh asks behind the scenes of Exodus 5, "Well brace yourself, Pharaoh, because you are about to find out!" Ironically, the Pharaoh makes the life of the Israelites more harshly terrible as a way to get their attention and drive all thoughts of freedom from their minds. But his sneering question, "Who is Yahweh?" will now cause the God of Israel to adopt the exact same tactic with regard to the Pharaoh. Yahweh will soon make the Pharaoh's life miserable as a way to get his attention and also in order to drive from Pharaoh's mind his proud and vain belief that he alone was the master of the universe.

Because make no mistake: God is not mocked. By asking the question he did, by tossing down this particular gauntlet, the Pharaoh has inadvertently widened the scope of this drama, turning it into a kind of cosmic battle between a human who fancies himself a god and the true God of the universe. This is no longer, if it ever really was, just Moses versus Pharaoh, Israel versus Egypt. The stakes are higher now and God must vindicate himself in the wake of the Pharaoh's consigning of God to the garbage heap.

This must happen. This will happen. This always happens, even yet today. "If anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing," the apostle Paul once wrote to the Galatians, "then he deceives himself. Do not be deceived: God is not mocked. A man reaps what he sows." Our great God has laid down a certain order for this creation. It is God who has placed us in a certain position in the grand scheme of things and it is our human duty to accept, with glad hearts, the place assigned to us. But we chafe. We grow restless. We have been created just enough like God to want to be gods ourselves. "You have made humanity just a little lower than the angels," the psalmist writes in Psalm 8. Indeed, but not a few of us in history have assumed we can improve on God's work and ascend a little higher than the angels.

Ever since Adam and Eve assumed that they could improve on creation by becoming like God themselves, humanity has found a myriad of ways to mock God by trying to reconfigure the created order, by picking up God's moral boundary fences and moving them to more convenient locations. Sin, as Neal Plantinga has reminded us, is an approach-avoidance phenomenon if there ever was one. In our pride and sin we either fly right into the face of God to tell God that he is mistaken when he tells us that we should run our lives thus and so. Or alternatively, we fly off away from the face of God and out into a darkness of our own making in which we pretend that we've never even heard of God and so if someone says, "You know, the Bible says you shouldn't do that," our response is the feigned ignorance of, "I never heard that before and I don't agree with it now."

But God is not mocked. In the short run as well as in the longest possible run, we reap what we sow. We're never going to make it if we pretend there is nothing God can teach us. In altogether too many places in even the contemporary church today, there is a roaring resistance to the traditional idea that in God's holy Word there are precepts, principles, rules, and guidelines we simply must accept whether or not they resonate with modern consciousness and sensibilities. And so I have met up with even fellow pastors who say things like, "I regard the Bible not really so much as an authority as a friend. And you know how it is with a friend: sometimes you agree, sometimes you disagree and part ways." Today we want in Scripture a dialogue partner, not an drill sergeant who will actually tell us what to do (of all things!). I even heard an Episcopal clergy suggest that before reading the words of the apostle Paul, we need first to filter out Paul's theological bias. But that's a little like saying that before you eat at a fine restaurant, you should be sure to strip the chef of all his culinary training. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure that would yield a bad meal. So also I'm pretty sure that filtering out Paul's theology would leave us with nothing worth reading. "Who is God that I should obey him?" The question keeps getting asked.

But there is a sense in which my use of these extreme examples is the proverbial shooting fish in a barrel. Probably just about every person here tonight is devout and traditional enough in his or her faith as to be merely scandalized by those who reduce the Bible to just a reference point that a person can take or leave at will. But does that mean that the counter-example of the Pharaoh in Exodus 5 presents no challenge to us? Despite our overall desire to be orthodox, are there areas of our lives where we, too, behave in ways that as much as convey the idea that we also resist being told what to do? Isn't it so that we also can be affected by (and infected by) the modern ethos that wants to keep various parts of our lives in neat and separate compartments?

When I listen to reports from our elders, it seems sometimes like the flow of information in the church has been reversed from how it once was (or at least it has become a largely one-way flow). These days as pastors and elders, we are expected to sit up straight and take with utter seriousness every criticism, complaint, suggestion, and piece of feedback that flows from the congregation to the Council. If we receive information that some don't like how things are being run, how worship is being conducted, what songs are being sung, or whatever, the expectation is that this should yield some changes. But how willing are we to receive information that flows the other direction? What would be the response among us if on the basis of Scripture, prayer, and considered reflection an elder said to a family that they were not being good stewards and their lack of giving financially to the church reveals this weakness? What would happen today if we communicated with a family that the lifestyle choices they were making seem to be pulling them farther and farther away from the church and so we think they need to give up this or that aspect of their lives?

Even some of us who, all things being equal, would rail against those in the wider church who refuse to submit to the authority of God's Word, even we might well find ourselves becoming uncomfortably resistant if we felt the church was trying to tell us "our business." "Who are you to tell us how to live?" we might be tempted to say to an elder or pastor. Now, of course, even if we did say something like that (or felt tempted to say it), that hardly makes any member of the average church the equivalent of a Pharaoh who refused to take God seriously at all. I don't wish to over-extend this analogy tonight. But these modern tendencies may reveal our perennial human difficulty to accept that we are not the top of the heap and that God, and God's church, do have a prior claim on us.

That's why a key exercise of the Christian life is finding ways to rehearse in our hearts again and again the fact that Jesus is our Lord and we are, as we said also this morning, his followers. It is not our place to try to get out ahead of the Lord so we can lead the way to the place we'd rather go. It is not our place to keep coming up behind the Lord to tap him on the shoulder so as to kibbutz by requesting compromises here and there and everywhere. Our place in life is to follow where he leads. That's what we do if we want to own Jesus as our very Lord.

Thankfully, few if any of us ever say with Pharaoh, "Who is the Lord that I should obey him?" Still, as disciples we do well to ask ourselves, "I know who the Lord is, but am I obeying him?" Amen.