Have you ever felt like God committed a big mistake?
Like, you wonder if God was right when He placed you in a dysfunctional family? Or a job where your boss and your co-employees like picking on you because of your faith? Or God seems silent when you badly needed an answer?
Moses and the Israelites felt that edge-of-your-seat kind of situation when God commanded them to encamp in a land facing the Red Sea.
For reasoning’s sake, the Israelites and Moses were supposed to be running as far away as they can after the famed “exodus” from Egypt, the land they served as slaves for more than 400 years.
Pharaoh, after sensing that he made a “big blunder” of letting go a labor force that could have probably built more pyramids and edifices in Egypt more than he could imagine, rallied his troops to pursue the Israelites.
As Pharaoh and his troops drew near the Israelites who were encamped in Pi-Hahiroth, guess how the former slaves reacted—they grumbled and complained, then began the blame game on Moses.
Exodus 14:11-12 (English Standard Version)–11They said to Moses, “Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us in bringing us out of Egypt? 12Is not this what we said to you in Egypt: ‘Leave us alone that we may serve the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.”
I could relate very well with these scaredy cats-like Israelites!
Many times in my walk with God, I also complained.
I complained as if it’s the end of the world and as if the traffic situation I was in at that time would cost me my very life; or that the financial stress we go through sometimes would pull the plug of life from us.
But then, read through that chapter, and we’d see that God never committed a big mistake after all.
In fact, God specifically commanded them to break camp in Pi-Hahiroth, not for them to be gobbled up by the raiding army of Pharaoh, but so that He could reveal to them what He could do in the midst of chaos.
Verse 31—“Israel saw the great power that the LORD used against the Egyptians, so the people feared the LORD, and they) believed in the LORD and in his servant Moses”.
Here’s what I learned: when it seemed to us that God committed a big mistake, hit the breaks, don’t grumble, pray for Hs will to be done and watch Him pull off those “Red-Sea-dividing” miracles.
Photo Source: http://www.ramdasstapes.org/moses_parting_the_red_sea.jpg