The Backfire of Obedience: A Covenant Lawsuit Text: Exodus 5:22-23
Introduction: When Doing Right Goes Wrong
We have a very tidy, very sanitized view of what obedience to God is supposed to look like. We get our orders from headquarters, we march out to the field, we execute the mission, and we return to a ticker tape parade. We obey, and God blesses. We do our part, and God does His. It all works out, and everyone can see that we were on the right side from the beginning. This is a thoroughly American and thoroughly unbiblical way of thinking.
The Scriptures present us with a far more robust, and frankly, a far more jarring picture of what it means to walk with the living God. It is a walk that often leads directly into what appears to be a catastrophic mess. This is what we find Moses in. He has done everything right. He overcame his reluctance. He trusted the signs. He went to the elders of Israel, and they believed him. He went to Pharaoh, the most powerful man on the planet, and delivered God's message verbatim. He has checked every box. And the result? Complete and utter disaster. The bricks are still required, but the straw is gone. The whips of the taskmasters are now falling on the backs of the Hebrew foremen. The people who just a short time ago bowed their heads and worshiped are now seething with resentment, and they blame Moses entirely. His approval rating is somewhere south of Pharaoh's.
So Moses does the only thing a man in covenant with God can do. He doesn't resign his commission. He doesn't complain to his wife or murmur to Aaron. He turns around and marches right back to the one who sent him. He goes directly to Yahweh and files a formal, legal complaint. This is not the whining of a disgruntled employee. This is a covenant lawsuit. Moses, as God's representative, is bringing the apparent facts of the case before the high court of heaven and demanding to know how these facts square with the covenant promises of God. This is a raw, honest, and startling moment. And in it, we learn a profound truth about the nature of faith, the character of God, and the strange and wonderful way that God builds His kingdom, not with straight lines, but with jagged lines that only He can make straight.
The Text
Then Moses returned to Yahweh and said, “O Lord, why have You brought harm to this people? Why did You ever send me? Ever since I came to Pharaoh to speak in Your name, he has done harm to this people, and You have not delivered Your people at all.”
(Exodus 5:22-23 LSB)
An Honest Complaint (v. 22)
We begin with Moses's direct return to his commanding officer.
"Then Moses returned to Yahweh and said, 'O Lord, why have You brought harm to this people? Why did You ever send me?'" (Exodus 5:22)
The first thing to notice is where Moses takes his grievance. "Moses returned to Yahweh." He did not take it to the court of public opinion. He did not grumble and murmur among the people, which is what they were doing to him. The Bible makes a sharp distinction between two kinds of complaint. There is the horizontal murmuring of the faithless, which God detests. This is the whining, critical spirit that always assumes the worst of God and His appointed leaders. But then there is the vertical complaint of the faithful. This is the cry of the psalmist, "How long, O Lord?" This is the lament of Jeremiah. This is the argument of Abraham, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" This is not the sin of unbelief; it is the language of covenant.
Moses comes before God and essentially says, "You are the covenant Lord, Adonai. You are the sovereign master. And you are Yahweh, the one who makes and keeps promises. So explain this. Why have You, the promise keeper, brought harm, ra, evil, calamity, upon Your own people?" This is breathtakingly blunt. Moses is not accusing God of being sinful. He is accusing God of being the ultimate cause of this current disaster. And he is absolutely right. God is sovereign. Pharaoh is not some rogue agent who has slipped God's leash. The taskmasters are not an unforeseen variable. God is the one who hardens Pharaoh's heart. God is the one running this entire operation. Moses understands the doctrine of divine providence, and that is precisely why his complaint is so sharp.
He follows this with a personal lament: "Why did You ever send me?" You can feel the weight of the burden here. The people hate him. The mission is a failure. He has made everything worse. From a human perspective, his entire calling has backfired. This is not a crisis of faith in God's existence, but a crisis of faith in God's plan. Moses believes in God, but he cannot for the life of him understand what God is doing. And this is a place where every true saint will find himself at one time or another. When obedience leads to affliction, when faithfulness results in failure, the temptation is either to jettison our theology of sovereignty or to charge God with mismanagement. Moses does neither. He holds fast to God's sovereignty and brings his confusion directly to God Himself.
The Unvarnished Report (v. 23)
Moses then lays out the evidence for his lawsuit, a summary of the facts on the ground.
"Ever since I came to Pharaoh to speak in Your name, he has done harm to this people, and You have not delivered Your people at all." (Exodus 5:23 LSB)
Here is the case in a nutshell. "I did what You said. I went to Pharaoh. I spoke in Your name, invoking Your authority. And the result, the direct consequence, is that Pharaoh has intensified his oppression. And on the other side of the ledger, Your promised action is completely absent. You have not delivered them. At all."
This is a crucial point. God's plan often requires that things get worse before they get better. Why? Because God is after something far bigger than a simple jailbreak. He is not just trying to get Israel out of Egypt. He is trying to get Egypt out of Israel. He is forging a nation. Slaves who are comfortable do not cry out for deliverance. A people who can negotiate better working conditions with Pharaoh might start to think that Pharaoh is a reasonable man. God is demonstrating to Israel, in the most visceral way possible, that there is no middle ground. There is no compromise with the Egypts of this world. Pharaoh is not a negotiating partner; he is a wicked tyrant who must be crushed. The system is not reformable; it must be judged and overthrown.
God is teaching His people, and Moses, a fundamental lesson about redemption. It must be an act of sheer, unadulterated power from God alone. If deliverance had come easily, the Israelites might have thought their own cry, or Moses's rhetoric, or some other factor had contributed to it. But God orchestrates events so that the situation becomes utterly, comprehensively hopeless. He removes all props. He strips away all human solutions. He drives them to the point where they have nowhere to look but up. The deliverance, when it comes, must be so obviously the work of God that no one could possibly take credit for it. The glory must go to Him alone.
So when Moses says, "You have not delivered Your people at all," God's answer, which comes in the next chapter, is essentially, "Exactly. I haven't started yet. But you are about to see what I will do." Moses is looking at the first quarter stats and concluding the game is lost. God, who sees the end from the beginning, is just setting the stage for a fourth-quarter comeback that will be talked about for millennia.
The Backfiring Gospel
This pattern of apparent failure preceding ultimate victory is not an anomaly. It is the deep structure of God's redemptive work throughout history. It is the pattern of the cross.
The Lord Jesus Christ came to speak in His Father's name. He did everything His Father commanded Him. He was perfectly obedient. And what was the result? The religious leaders hardened their hearts. The political powers conspired against Him. His own disciples abandoned Him. The crowds that hailed Him as king one day were screaming for His crucifixion the next. His obedience led Him to a Roman cross, where He cried out, much like Moses, but with infinitely more weight, "My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?"
From every human vantage point, the cross was a catastrophic failure. The mission backfired. The promised kingdom did not arrive. The deliverer was dead. God had not delivered His people at all. That was the perspective on Friday afternoon.
But God was not finished. In fact, He was doing exactly what He had planned from all eternity. He was making things as dark as they could possibly get, so that the light of the resurrection would be blindingly glorious. He was allowing sin and death to do their absolute worst, so that He could utterly defeat them by His power. The moment of greatest apparent harm was the moment of greatest redemptive accomplishment. The cross was not a setback; it was the centerpiece of God's entire plan to deliver His people, not from a brickyard in Egypt, but from the tyranny of sin and death.
This is the pattern for us as well. When we are obedient to the gospel, we should not be surprised when things get harder, not easier. When you take a stand for righteousness in your workplace, you may get fired. When you seek to order your home according to God's Word, you may face rebellion. When the church proclaims the crown rights of Jesus Christ to a hostile culture, that culture will increase its persecution. The world, the flesh, and the devil do not give up their territory without a fight.
In those moments, when our obedience seems to backfire, we are tempted to despair. We are tempted to think we misheard God, or that God has failed us. But we must do what Moses did. We must return to the Lord. We must lay our case before Him, standing on His promises, and wait for His answer. His answer is always the same. "Wait. I know what I am doing. This apparent defeat is simply the necessary prelude to a victory that will be all the more glorious because of the darkness that came before it."
Our God is a God who specializes in bringing life out of death, hope out of despair, and glorious victory out of what looks for all the world like a total mess. This is the logic of the gospel. And so we, like Moses, must learn to trust the author of the story, especially when we cannot make any sense of the current chapter.