Exodus 3:18

Moses has met God at the burning bush (Exodus 3:1–6) and been sent to bring Israel out of Egypt (Exodus 3:10). God has told him his name, “I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus 3:14), and that he is to be known as the LORD God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob (Exodus 3:15). Verse 16 turns from who God is to what Moses must do first. “Go” is yâlak, the ordinary word for walking, here a command to set out.

The message begins with the one who sent it. “The LORD God of your fathers” joins the covenant name Yᵉhôvâh, which the KJV prints as “the LORD”, to ʼĕlôhîym, the usual word for God. ʼĕlôhîym is plural in form, and when it names the true God it is read as a plural of majesty. The three names that follow carry Israel back to the start of their story: God’s call of Abraham (Genesis 12:1), his covenant with Isaac (Genesis 26), and his meeting with Jacob at Bethel (Genesis 28:10). The God now speaking to Moses is the one who made those promises, and he still holds to them. Just before the bush, Israel groaned under its bondage, “and God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob” (Exodus 2:23–25). A psalm praises him for the same faithfulness, for remembering “the word which he commanded to a thousand generations,” his oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Psalm 105:8–10). This name also set Israel’s God apart from the many gods worshipped in Egypt.

“Appeared unto me” is Moses’ warrant before the elders. He comes as a man to whom God himself has shown himself.

Then comes the heart of the message: “I have surely visited you, and seen that which is done to you in Egypt.” The verb pâqad means to attend to, visit, inspect, muster, appoint or punish, and whether a visit brings good or harm depends on why God comes. Here he comes to help his people, and the KJV’s “surely” carries the emphasis of the Hebrew. râʼâh, “seen”, is the common word for seeing, and set beside “visited” it tells Israel that their suffering is known to the one who is able to end it. God had said the same to Moses a few verses earlier: “I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt” (Exodus 3:7–8). Long before, he told Abraham that his descendants would be afflicted in a land that was not theirs, that he would judge that nation, and that afterward they would “come out with great substance” (Genesis 15:13–14). The visit announced here is that promise coming due.

What was done to them was hard. A new king “which knew not Joseph” rose over Egypt (Exodus 1:8), set taskmasters over Israel to build the treasure cities Pithom and Raamses (Exodus 1:11), and made their lives bitter “with hard bondage, in morter, and in brick” (Exodus 1:14). Exodus 1 tells the whole of it. Into that long affliction, foretold to Abraham as four hundred years, God now speaks.

“And I have said” uses ʼâmar, the everyday verb for saying, telling or commanding. The weight lies in what God goes on to say, which is a purpose he has already settled: “I will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt.” ʻŏnîy, “affliction”, comes from a verb meaning to depress or bow down, and it names the misery of the bondage, the toil of body and the grief of heart. God will lift his people up out of it.

The land is named by the peoples living in it: the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites. Five of these peoples are among those God listed when he made his covenant with Abraham and promised the land to his seed (Genesis 15:18–21). Naming them makes the promise concrete. Canaan was a real country with real inhabitants, and Israel would have it only as God cleared the way. He had promised it to Abraham (Genesis 12:7), to Isaac (Genesis 26:3) and to Jacob (Genesis 35:12), and in Joshua’s day Scripture records that every good thing the LORD had spoken to Israel came to pass (Joshua 21:43–45).

“And they shall hearken to thy voice” is God’s promise about the elders. shâmaʻ means to hear with attention, often with the sense of obeying what is heard. When God has finished speaking, Moses answers this very promise with doubt: “But, behold, they will not believe me, nor hearken unto my voice: for they will say, The LORD hath not appeared unto thee” (Exodus 4:1). God had already told him how the elders would respond.

Moses is to go “unto the king of Egypt” with the elders beside him, so that Pharaoh hears the united request of Israel’s leaders. They are to say, “The LORD God of the Hebrews hath met with us.” The verb qârâh means to light upon or to meet, and here it is the LORD who has come to meet his people. “The God of the Hebrews” names him to Pharaoh as the God of this particular people, with a claim on them even while they are slaves in Egypt.

The request is courteous, “we beseech thee”, and its purpose is worship: “three days’ journey into the wilderness, that we may sacrifice to the LORD our God.” zâbach means to slaughter an animal, usually in sacrifice, the central act of Israel’s worship. God frees his people so that they can serve him, and the demand to Pharaoh later says so in plain words: “Let my people go, that they may serve me” (Exodus 8:1). It took faith to stand before that king, and Hebrews says of Moses, “By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king” (Hebrews 11:23–27).

“And I am sure” is yâdaʻ, “I know”. God speaks of Pharaoh’s answer as a thing he already knows, before Moses has said a word to him. He is the God who declares “the end from the beginning” (Isaiah 46:10). Telling Moses in advance prepares him for the refusal, so that the first failure will find him already warned, and it makes plain from the outset that Israel will be freed by God’s power and by no skill of Moses in persuading a king.

Pharaoh had reasons of his own to hold on. He was the absolute ruler of a great empire, and the enslaved Israelites were a large part of Egypt’s labour force. “No, not by a mighty hand” puts his refusal as strongly as possible. châzâq, “mighty”, means strong, hard or intense, and yâd, “hand”, is used throughout Scripture as a picture of power and of the one who acts. Pharaoh will hold out against pressure and against every lesser show of strength, and he will yield only to the overwhelming hand of God, which verse 20 promises at once. “Mighty hand” becomes one of Scripture’s great phrases for the power by which God brought Israel out of Egypt.

God’s knowing beforehand leaves Pharaoh’s choices his own, and he answers for them. God takes even that stubbornness into his plan and uses it to show his power, as he later tells Pharaoh: “for this cause have I raised thee up, for to shew in thee my power” (Exodus 9:16). Behind it all stands the covenant God remembered when Israel cried out to him.

“I will stretch out my hand” uses shâlach, to send or stretch out, especially the hand. yâd here is the open hand, which Scripture uses as a picture of power, means and direction. People ask why the almighty God would need to stretch out a hand at all. Scripture speaks of him in human terms so that we can understand what he does, and the picture tells us that God himself is acting, directly and personally, with power no one can resist. The same picture comes in the promise that “the Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD, when I stretch forth mine hand upon Egypt” (Exodus 7:5).

He will “smite Egypt with all my wonders”. pâlâʼ may come from a sense of separating or distinguishing, and so of being great, difficult or wonderful. These are deeds only God can do, and they are the plagues that fill Exodus 7 through Exodus 12: the river turned to blood, the frogs, the lice, the flies, the disease on the cattle, the boils, the hail, the locusts, the darkness, and the death of the firstborn. They are done “in the midst thereof”, openly, in the heart of Egypt, where the whole land would see them. Each one showed the LORD’s power over all creation, over Pharaoh who was honoured as a god, and over the gods of Egypt. They also confirmed Moses as God’s messenger, and the psalms remember them: “Thou art the God that doest wonders” (Psalm 77:14), and God sent Moses and Aaron, who showed his signs among the Egyptians (Psalm 105:26–27). The smiting was God’s righteous judgment on the nation that had oppressed his people, and by the same acts he redeemed them.

“And after that he will let you go.” So it happened. After the last plague Pharaoh called for Moses and Aaron by night and told them to go (Exodus 12:31), the LORD brought Israel out of Egypt by their armies (Exodus 12:51), and at the sea he made a way through the waters (Exodus 14:21). “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent” (Numbers 23:19).

The New Testament speaks of God visiting his people again, this time in his Son. Zacharias blesses God because “the dayspring from on high hath visited us” (Luke 1:78), and Paul says that the gospel was preached beforehand to Abraham, the same Abraham whose God speaks at the bush (Galatians 3:8). The Word who was made flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14) is the voice his people now hearken to, and he is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29).

Israel needed the mighty hand of God against Pharaoh, and we needed the same power against sin, death and the devil. Through his death Christ destroyed him that had the power of death and set free those who all their lives were held in bondage by the fear of it (Hebrews 2:14–15). God “hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son” (Colossians 1:13–14). Jesus said, “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (John 8:36), and Paul says that we are made free from sin and become servants to God (Romans 6:22). As Israel was freed to sacrifice to the LORD, we are freed to worship the Father in spirit and in truth (John 4:24) and to present our bodies as a living sacrifice (Romans 12:1).

Israel left Egypt laden with its spoil, and the KJV uses the same English word of the cross, where Christ, “having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it” (Colossians 2:15). God gave his Son so that whoever believes in him should have everlasting life (John 3:16), sent him so that we might receive the adoption of sons (Galatians 4:4–7), and has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in Christ (Ephesians 1:3–14). Israel’s silver and gold built the tabernacle, and believers are built together into a dwelling of God through the Spirit (Ephesians 2:19–22). The land of milk and honey points ahead to the rest that remains for the people of God (Hebrews 4:9–10), and at last to the new heaven and new earth, where God dwells with his people and wipes away every tear (Revelation 21:1–4).

These verses give us God’s own account of how he saves. He sees what is done to his people and comes to them. He remembers what he promised to their fathers, even across four hundred years. He tells his servant the hard parts in advance, the refusal as well as the victory, so that nothing that comes is outside his plan. He works through the leaders he has given his people, sets his hand against the proud, turns the hearts of their oppressors, and sends his people out with their hands full and their children dressed in gold.

Every part of what God said at the bush came to pass. The elders listened, Pharaoh refused, the wonders came, Pharaoh let them go, and Israel walked out of Egypt carrying its silver. The same God is our God, and his word to us in Christ is as sure as his word to Moses.