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When Faith Causes Problems
Our faith stands on knowing that God does what He will do in His name.
Afterward Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said, "This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: 'Let my people go, so that they may hold a festival to me in the desert.' "
Pharaoh said, "Who is the Lord, that I should obey him and let Israel go?
I do not know the Lord and I will not let Israel go."
Then they said, "The God of the Hebrews has met with us.
Now let us take a three-day journey into the desert to offer sacrifices to the Lord our God, or he may strike us with plagues or with the sword."
But the king of Egypt said, "Moses and Aaron, why are you taking the people away from their labor?
Get back to your work!" Then Pharaoh said, "Look, the people of the land are now numerous, and you are stopping them from working."
That same day Pharaoh gave this order to the slave drivers and foremen in charge of the people: "You are no longer to supply the people with straw for making bricks; let them go and gather their own straw.
But require them to make the same number of bricks as before; don't reduce the quota.
They are lazy; that is why they are crying out, 'Let us go and sacrifice to our God.' Make the work harder for the men so that they keep working and pay no attention to lies..."
... The Israelite foremen realized they were in trouble... they found Moses and Aaron waiting to meet them, and they said, "May the Lord look upon you and judge you!
You have made us a stench to Pharaoh and his servants and have put a sword in their hand to kill us."
Moses returned to the Lord and said, "O Lord, why have you brought trouble upon this people?
Is this why you sent me?
Ever since I went to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has brought trouble upon this people, and you have not rescued your people at all."
Then the Lord said to Moses, "Now you will see what I will do to Pharaoh.
Because of my mighty hand he will let them go...
I am the Lord.
I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as God Almighty, but by my name the Lord I did not make myself known to them.
I also established my covenant with them...
I have heard the groaning of the Israelites, whom the Egyptians are enslaving, and I have remembered my covenant."
Exodus 5:1-6:5
Dr. Boris Cornfeld was a Jew who lived in Russia during the early years of Communism.
Although he was a brilliant, able, informed, and literate young man, he made a mistake.
During the great purges of Stalin, he chanced one day to make some kind of political remark.
No one knows exactly what he said.
Perhaps it was a remark calling into question the absolute wisdom of Stalin or a similar statement.
But for some reason, he was immediately arrested and transported to a concentration camp in Siberia.
And there a remarkable thing happened to his life.
Over the months in his cell, he found he was rich in one commodity—time.
And he reflected on the roots of his life.
He came to see that Marxism—Communism—did not hold the answer to life's deepest needs.
He became a prison doctor, and at just that time, God brought across his path a devout Christian who shared gently, quietly, but repeatedly, about Jesus Christ.
At first, it was absolutely out of the question for Boris Cornfeld to turn to Christ.
For two hundred years the Russian Orthodox Church has persecuted his Jewish people, and he could not turn his back on his Jewish heritage and the atrocities of the church.
But his friend persisted, and soon the power of the gospel found a lodging place in his heart.
He found himself reciting the Lord's Prayer to the other prisoners as he treated them for medical reasons.
Finally, Christ broke through and he quietly but definitely gave his life to Christ, feeling for the first time an overwhelming peace.
But a concentration camp is a dangerous place to live a Christian life.
Boris began to live for Christ anyway, in every way, every day.
He had watched orderlies steal food from dying prisoner patients, so he began reporting them at the risk of his own life.
He began refusing to sign the certificates stating that prisoners were in good enough health to be put in solitary confinement when he knew it would kill them.
And he began to share his faith with his patients.
One evening, the doctor was sitting by the bedside of a young man on whom he had performed surgery for cancer of the intestine.
As the boy moved in and out of consciousness, the doctor began to share his witness about what Christ had done in his life.
The feverish young man would listen to him, as he faded in and out, and Boris stayed by his bed long into the night telling the boy about his faith.
Later that night, the young man heard a commotion in the adjoining room.
He found out the next morning that Boris Cornfield had been clubbed to death by the guards in the concentration camp.
Boris' faith had brought him problems—to the point of death.
But the young man to whom he witnessed that night was Aleksandr Solzhenitzyri, the prize-winning Soviet dissident now known the world over.
Was Boris' faith worth the problems it caused?
Solzhenitzyn would say yes.
But would we?
If we were honest, we'd have to admit that when our faith sometimes causes problems in our lives it is altogether confusing.
We're not taught that believing will cause problems: we're taught that it solves problems.
But it seems that both of these statements are true, to a very real extent.
In fact, there are times, especially for new Christians, that believing has created more problems than it has solved.
Even though we may know that faithfulness to God brings long-term dividends—in spite of the fact that it may bring short-term pain—we still find it surprising when our faith causes difficulties in our lives.
!! The Message of Moses
Moses would confess to that.
Fresh from the experience at the burning bush, he went to confront Pharaoh.
And there he found rejection not only from Pharaoh but also from the very Hebrew people he was supposed to deliver.
Moses, the eighty-year-old, tongue-tied shepherd, found that faithfulness to God brought him expected problems but also unexpected ones.
How could he have guessed the people he was to free would turn on him?
Sometimes we know in our hearts that we are doing what God wants us to do.
We can just feel the leadership of God in our lives.
But then We begin to hit brick wall after brick wall.
The pharaohs of this world don't understand.
And what may be worse, the very people we're trying to communicate with, to help, aren't accepting us either.
These are the two major causes of problems when we choose to live our Christianity on a daily basis.
It was that way for Moses, and it is still that way for us.
Yet, whether we believe it or not, we are promised that when our faithfulness causes problems, God's faithfulness will see us through.
Moses found that to be true—but not before he had experienced his share of frustrating problems.
Part of Moses' story in particular tells of God's promise—and helps us understand how to cope, just as Moses did.
Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said, "This is what the Lord the God of Israel says, 'Let my people go so they may hold a festival to me in the desert.' "
!! Pharaoh's Response
Pharaoh said, "Who is the Lord that I should obey him and let Israel go?
I do not know the Lord and I will not let Israel go."
They tried again, but Pharaoh just shrugged them away.
The Pharaoh (probably Ramses II) knew all the gods that counted in his world.
In fact, /he/ was one of them, according to the way Egyptians believed.
He had descended from 3000 years of divine ancestors.
His very name meant the "one who is born from the sun god."
At that time there were more than eighty major deities in Egypt.
Someone once said that if it flew in the air or slithered in the mud or swam through the water, the Egyptians worshiped it.
Ramses told Moses that this god Jehovah hadn't made his list.
He knew the sun god and the river god and the frog god but not this Jehovah God.
So why should he heed his wishes?
Ironically, within a very short time Pharaoh would be the most informed man in his nation on who Jehovah God is!
But at that moment, Pharaoh, supreme ruler in the secular world, didn't even recognize the God Moses represented and neither was he impressed by His people.
Pharaoh would have measured the Hebrew people's God by how successful the people were.
It only made sense.
That was the way of the ancient world.
And so, the Egyptians thought, since they were the most powerful nation on earth, their gods obviously were the most powerful.
If the God of these Hebrew slaves wanted to impress Ramses, He'd have to do better with this nation of slaves.
But there's nothing unusual about that, is there?
The same is true today.
Yet God always seems to choose the foolish things of this world for His work to shame the wise, as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians.
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