When reading the Exodus story again I saw I really simple lesson that I think could be helpful to us today. if you’ve read the Bible before you will know the story. The Israelites have been away from their land for 400 years and whilst their move to their current location, Egypt, began favourably it quickly turned from a place of refuge to a place of slavery for them. They were suffering terribly at the hands of the Egyptians and must have been crying out to God to help them.

As we know God uses a boy raised in Egypt with Hebrew heritage to deliver them from their slave drivers; Moses. When God calls Moses in the wilderness he tells him the following.

GOD said, “I’ve taken a good, long look at the affliction of my people in Egypt. I’ve heard their cries for deliverance from their slave masters; I know all about their pain. And now I have come down to help them, pry them loose from the grip of Egypt, get them out of that country and bring them to a good land with wide-open spaces, a land lush with milk and honey, the land of the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite. Exodus 3:7-8

There’s something so revealing about God’s nature in this passage. I’ve highlighted in the passage;

God sees – God is not blind to the pain that His people are experiencing in Egypt. They haven’t been struggling hidden from His sight, His eyes have been on them. While we might not understand why He doesn’t act at the first sight of our struggle the fact that we know that He sees us in the middle of our pain is such a comfort. God’s gaze is always on us.

God hears – God is not deaf to our cries and prayers. God heard the groaning of His people who were bending and breaking under the weight of their slavery. This is such a comfort to me when I pray. Sometimes it can feel like my words are falling on deaf ears but that is never the case. He is always listening, always attentive, always invested in our conversations with Him.

He helps – He’s not a God who simply sees and hears but sits idly by with His popcorn waiting to see what will happen next. His desire is to help, to step down, to intervene. We don’t always know how He will help or when He will help but we must trust His ways. When I met someone who is an expert in their field I trust what they tell me even if it doesn’t make sense to me. They understand the situation better than I do, they have been there before, it isn’t their first rodeo and they have learnt that even that which seems without logic to the untrained mind is the way to go. This is how it works God x1000 because He isn’t just an expert in His field, He created and sustains the field!

He delivers – I guess this is part of helping but there is a difference between helping someone in their pain and delivering them from it. God could have stepped in and made the slavery better for the Israelites, He could have made the situation more bearable for them, more manageable. In fact, I reckon the people would have settled for that as they probably couldn’t have imagined any other future than what they and their ancestors had faced for 400 years. However help in its basic form isn’t enough for the God of the universe. He wants to deliver us from where we are into a full space of His goodness. He is the God of deliverance, not the God of a little bit better than it was.

Remember the 4 step God sees us, hears us, desires to not just help us but to deliver us.