When Obeying Makes Things Worse

There is a kind of Christian teaching that implies obedience produces quick and visible results. Exodus 5 is the corrective. Moses and Aaron go to Pharaoh and say what God told them to say: let my people go so that they may hold a festival to me in the wilderness. Pharaoh's answer is contempt. Who is the LORD that I should obey him? And then, rather than releasing the Israelites, he removes the straw supply while keeping the brick quota fixed. The people scatter across Egypt gathering stubble, fall behind, and are beaten. Their foremen appeal to Pharaoh and are called lazy. On their way out they meet Moses and Aaron and say, in effect, may the LORD judge you, because you have made us a stench to Pharaoh and put a sword in his hand.

Then comes one of the most honest prayers in the Old Testament. Moses goes back to the LORD and asks why he has brought trouble on this people, why he sent him at all, and points out that since he began to speak in God's name, Pharaoh has brought trouble and God has not rescued anyone. Moses is not being faithless here. He is being accurate.

The one idea from this chapter is that obedience and immediate improvement are not the same thing, and that God knows it. Notice that the LORD does not rebuke Moses in chapter 6. He answers him, with a fuller statement of who he is and what he intends. The worsening was not a sign that Moses had misheard. It was the first move in a confrontation that would take ten plagues to finish, because Pharaoh had to be shown, in public and beyond dispute, that the LORD is God.

For us the application is plain and uncomfortable. When you do the right thing and it costs you, when you tell the truth and lose the contract, when you set a boundary and the relationship gets harder, when you begin to pray for someone and they seem to get worse, do not conclude that you were wrong. Take it to God as Moses did, without softening the complaint. Then wait for chapter 6. It nearly always comes, and it comes as a word about who God is rather than a quick fix to the brick quota.

The turn toward life is to name the place where obedience has made things harder, and to stop apologizing to God for noticing.