Why Does God Act to Save?
Our text is short but worth spending time on because it’s a transitional text, linking what’s before it with what’s after it, showing us why Moses was delivered as a baby and why God is about to call him as a man.
This passage is also crucial because it shows us why God delivers Israel from Egypt. Amazingly, this passage tells us that God would have brought Israel out of Egypt even if their life there was great.
Why does he deliver them? To reveal his character as a covenant-keeper (v. 24). If he didn’t bring them out he’d be a liar and Israel and all the nations would have reason to never trust him. But he made a covenant with Abraham to give him a people and a land (Gen. 17:4-8). And God always keeps his promises.
The main reason God works to save Israel is to reveal his character, to make himself known as a God who can be trusted, as a God who loves his people so much that nothing will stop him from giving them the good gifts he’s promised them. What’s at stake in the exodus is nothing less than the character of God.
The main point of this text is that God is a covenant-keeper. In this text, we’ll look at Israel’s situation (v. 23) and God’s response (vv. 24-25). Then from this text, we’ll consider our problems in light of what we learn here.
Israel’s Situation
In verse 23 the scene shifts from Moses’ prosperity in Midian to Israel’s suffering in Egypt. The death of Pharaoh didn’t bring any relief for the Hebrews. The new king didn’t remove old sorrows.
The text says that they “cried out” or “groaned” four times in verses 23-24 and mentions their “slavery” twice in verse 23, emphasizing how bad their situation was. The word for “cried out” is usually used when someone cries out in agony, like with David cried out over his murdered son Absalom (2 Sam. 19:4). It’s a “loud and agonized crying of someone in acute distress and calling for help.”[1]
Honest about Pain
It’s often said that “time heals all wounds,” but this verse means that time was no healer for Israel in Egypt. After 400 years there, their pain was greater than ever, so acute that they’re crying out in agony.
Have you ever been in so much pain that all you can do is cry, so much agony that weeping and wailing and “groaning” comes upon you? Have you ever had so much physical or emotional or psychological or relational pain that all you could do is cry and weep and wail?
This is good and healthy because it means you’re letting yourself actually express the things you feel, rather than pursuing a stoicism that’s more Greek than Christian. We’re all wired in different ways temperamentally, but we all feel things that are painful. If we didn’t, God wouldn’t have put a book in the Bible with over sixty songs of lament. Lament, or grieving over painful things, is part of a normal, healthy Christian life. Lament is having honest and unedited conversations with God. Lament is taking our pain to God.
Pain Led to Prayer
This is what the Hebrews did with their pain. They took it to God. Verse 23 says they “cried out for help.” It doesn’t explicitly say that they cried out to God, but we learn elsewhere that their cries were to God (Num. 20:16, Deut. 26:7).
Time or political change didn’t bring them relief, so what was it that activated their deliverance? Prayer, their suffering led to prayer. As Kathy Keller said, “Suffering is the school where we learn to pray.”[2] The Lord loves to answer the cries of hurting people (Ps. 34:15-18). As Irish Old Testament scholar Alec Motyer (Maw-tear) says, “The prayer of the people of God is the beginning of their deliverance because prayer brings God into the situation.”[3]
But, you may say, “God was already in the situation, working things out behind the scenes. He acted to save Israel because of his covenant promises. What does their prayer have to do with that?”
God doesn’t need our prayers, of course. He can fulfill his promises without our help. But the Bible tells us to pray. Jesus tells us to pray, even about things that belong solely to God’s control, like the timing of the tribulation (Matt. 24:20). We should pray simply because God hears and answers prayer.
In our text, the narrator presents things as if God’s action is in response to the people’s cries: “They cried out for help…and God heard their groaning and remembered his covenant.” In this text, it’s prayer that moved God to action.
Again, Alec Motyer explains this beautifully:
“The prayers of the people of God have such a key role to play that the Bible can make it clear only by speaking of it in terms we can understand. It…depicts the unforgetting God as though he were capable of forgetting and depicts our prayers as having the marvelous effect of causing him to remember. Our prayers are so effective and so delightful in his ears, that God condescends to accommodate his eternal, sovereign, providential working to what we can understand, as though to say, ‘Oh, thank you for reminding me.’”[4]
Our heavenly Father is fully in control and yet chooses to order his plans so that some things only happen in response to our prayers. Like a good Father, he knows what his children need before they ask him. But he loves to respond to the asking.
God’s Response
In verses 24-25, we see how God responds to the prayers of his people. He’s neither deaf nor indifferent to the needs of his people.
He responds to his people’s prayers in four ways: he hears, remembers, sees, and knows. These four verbs summarize God’s posture toward his people.
First, he “hears their groaning” (v. 24). This doesn’t mean that God’s ears were finally working or that he hadn’t heard their cries before. The sense is that he hears in a way that leads to a response (cf. 3:7-8).
Second, “God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob” (v. 24). This doesn’t mean that he forgot about the covenant, or that Israel’s prayers jogged his memory. God “remembering” doesn’t mean he’s recalling information. It means he’s about to act, just as “God remembered” Noah during the flood and then made the waters subside (Gen. 8:1).
God “remembering” something tells us that he’s about to fulfill a prior commitment. Here the specific commitment he’s about to act on is his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He promised to put Abraham’s people in the land of Canaan, but they’re in Egypt, so something must happen if God wants to keep his word.
This means that God saves Israel to be true to his word, not just because he hates slavery. As I said earlier, even if their stay in Goshen was great, God would still act to move them because he said he would. He couldn’t be faithful to his covenant and do otherwise.
Third, verse 25 says that “God saw the people of Israel.” This doesn’t mean he finally makes eye contact with them or that he hadn’t noticed them until now. When God “sees” someone in Scripture, it means that he begins to move toward them with mercy and acts in their favor (cf. 3:7-9). As Jacob says to Laban, “God saw my affliction and the labor of my hands and rebuked you last night” (Gen. 31:42).
Fourth, it says “and God knew” (v. 25). There’s no object to the verb, but the end of 3:7 lets us know that what God “knows” is their sufferings. This isn’t mere head knowledge, as if God is gaining new information. God never learns anything. He knows everything.
This kind if “knowing” is an intimate, relational knowledge, like when a man “knows his wife” (Gen. 4:1). It’s sharing an experience with someone so that the experience can be called their own. God was intimately aware of Israel’s pain and suffering. He felt what they felt.
All four of these verbs are essentially telling us the same thing: God was fully aware of how his people were being treated and he was getting ready to act. What will he do? Starting in chapter 3, we’ll find out.
Our Problems
What can we take away from a passage like this? First, it teaches us that God sees everything. This “seeing” is both good news and bad news.
It’s bad news because it means that sin isn’t hidden from God’s sight. As Jesus said, “Nothing is covered that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known” (Mt. 10:26). Or the writer to the Hebrews, “No creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account” (4:13).
God sees everything, even things not visible. He sees our bitterness and bigotry, our denial and dishonesty, our gluttony and gossip and greed, our laziness and lust and legalism, our pride and people-pleasing. He sees individual and corporate sins. He sees corporations who care more about profits than people. He sees nations who mistreat or oppress minorities made in God’s image. He sees when his people are mistreated (2 Thess. 1:5-7).
What God sees provokes him to anger because he loves his creation and those made in his image and those who belong to him. He wouldn’t be good and just if he looked at the sins of the world and in our hearts and didn’t feel angry. His response to what he sees in Egypt is judgment.
God Sees You
God “seeing” everything is also good news because it means that our suffering isn’t hidden from him. In Matthew 9, Jesus sees the woman in the crowd who touched his garment and heals her. Jesus saw the lame man at the pool of Bethesda and healed him (Jn. 5:6). He sees the lepers, the blind, the lame, the poor, the prostitutes, and the tax collectors and moves toward them with kindness and compassion and changes their lives.
God sees your suffering. He sees your loneliness, struggles with singleness, despair, mental health struggles, suicidal ideation, difficulties in marriage, futility you feel in your work, the struggle to know what to do with your life, the broken home you grew up in, the tears you cry when no one is looking, financial insecurity, health challenges, chronic pain, your anxiety about living in a new country or new city, the abuse you’ve endured, the pressure you feel to please your parents or to perform well, same-sex attraction, addictions.
That God sees all this is good news, but it feels like bad news because the voice of shame tells us that these things define us. We believe that satanic voice and run into hiding behind our work, school, screens, even our spirituality, afraid that if anyone really knew us they’d reject us. So we put on the fig leaves of a godly and productive life and hope that we feel better soon. But the longing to really be seen and known doesn’t go away, the longing for someone to move toward us, to know what it’s like to be us, to feel what we feel, is still there.
The good news of the gospel is that God does see you and his heart is moved to work for your good. He sees our sin and suffering and has worked to remove the one and be with us in the other. He “remembers” his covenant with us and moves toward us, not away from us.
Because he remembers us, we remember him. When we sin, we remember his forgiveness. When we’re anxious and afraid, we remember that he’s with us. When we’re struggling with hopelessness, we remember the glory he’s promised us. When we’re tempted, we remember his satisfying love. When we’re isolating, we remember that he’s called us into community. When we see someone hurting, we move toward them because he’s moved toward us.
The Covenant Is for Those Who Know They Need It
The other thing this passage shows us is that this is the way God has always saved his people. This passage describes what happens when God saves any of us. He hears our groaning, understands the bondage to sin and death we’re in, sees our helplessness, knows our guilt and shame, and remembers his covenant.
What covenant does he remember? The new covenant that Jesus created by his blood (Lk. 22:20). Jesus came to fulfill God’s covenant with Abraham (Lk. 1:54-55, 72) and bring God’s blessing to all the nations. If you’re in Christ, you’re part of the people of God, a new Israel, and God will never forget you because he’s forgotten your sin (Jer. 31:34).
The new covenant is only for those who understand they have sin that needs to be forgiven. God saved Israel in response to their honesty about their situation. The psalmist says that the Lord “saves the crushed in spirit” (Ps. 34:18). And Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Mt. 5:3).
To be “poor in spirit” means to acknowledge your spiritual poverty apart from Christ. It means realizing your unworthiness before God. It means acknowledging that you’re a sinner who deserves nothing but the judgment of God. The “kingdom of heaven” is given to those who realize how spiritually poor they are.
God Knows Us and Still Comes Close
Our sin and shame make us wonder if God really sees us. But this text tells us that God never forgets his people. He always remembers his own. You never forget the one you love, the one who’s in your heart. Through the cross, God has brought us into his heart, so no matter what we feel or think or do, we’re his.
As John says, “Whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything” (1 Jn. 3:20). God knows everything about everything about you and he still loves you. His omniscience is meant to relieve us, not terrify us. His all-knowing love quiets our anxious hearts.
I heard something this week that really stuck with me. It was, “You can’t be fully loved until you’re fully known.” God fully knows us, and therefore, he fully loves us. He sees every corner of our lives, every part of our story, every sin and every suffering. And none of that knowledge pushes him away. It actually draws him in.
It draws him in because that’s the essence of the gospel, God identifying with us, meeting us where we are.
Like Moses, Jesus identified with the suffering of his people. Like Moses, Jesus experienced firsthand what it’s like to be rejected. Like Moses, Jesus was scorned by his people in order that he might redeem them.
Like Moses, our Redeemer Jesus Christ, identifies with us, and he identifies with us in order to enter into a covenant with us, a covenant that he’ll never forget. He’s made promises to us, and he’ll stick with us no matter what.
As the hymn “The Solid Rock” says, “His oath, his covenant, his blood support me in the whelming flood; when all around my soul gives way, he then is all my hope and stay.”
Even if you lose everything else in your life, you won’t lose God if you belong to him. He’ll keep you because he’s a covenant-keeper.
[1]Victor P. Hamilton, Exodus: An Exegetical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 41.
[2]“A Word From a Mule” — Kathy Keller (youtube.com)
[3]J. A. Motyer, The Message of Exodus, The Bible Speaks Today (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2005), 43.
[4]Ibid., 46.