Proverbs 3: 5 – 8

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge Him and He shall direct your path.

Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the lord and depart from evil. It shall be health to thy navel and marrow to thy bones”.

I believe the major reason why the Israelites gave Moses such a hard time was that they did not trust God enough.

On the first instance they had been taught to trust in the cover or protection of Pharaoh; it was so deep a trust that even liberty from the yoke of Pharaoh’s oppression was not enough a price to pay to forgo his protection. They had leant by culture that those who ran away from Pharaoh met their waterloo in the desert; they died or were killed by bandits. Though they were slaves, belonging to the great god-king Pharaoh had some advantages in that people feared to torch or oppress them for fear of the wrath of Pharaoh. Tradition had taught them to trust Pharaoh so completely that they could not imagine life without his yoke.

Pharaoh was not only worshiped as the great protector, but as a fertility god. Remember the time of Joseph; the famine was so bad that no other nation under the earth had food; they all had to come to Egypt for food. So great was the provision of God’s miracle that Egypt fed the whole world and had more than enough to spare. After most of the people in Egypt became slaves to Pharaoh, they were fed free of charge for the better part of seven years without labour or stress. Because the people of the world did not know God, they gave God’s glory to Pharaoh who they thought made the great provision possible, they even gave him the Egyptian variant of the name El-shaddai (the great provider).

Egypt prospered exceedingly because of that miracle to the extent that it was also the ancient world’s source of horses, it inherited the iron chariot; Egypt was the greatest military power on earth at the time. No nation dared to challenge Egypt and no nation Egypt challenged survived it. Egypt was at the time, the greatest glory of human achievement (or so the people thought).

No wonder that, even after almost a thousand years after the exodus, the people of Israel still were tempted to trust in the cover of Pharaoh and Egypt. In trusting Pharaoh and Egypt so much, they took their trust away from God;

“No man can serve two masters. He would love one and hate the other”.

It is like laying a bet on who could save; your bet could either be with God or with Egypt.

It like manner,  we could be guilty of the same thing; for the same reason, many Christians are afraid of witchcraft, many Christians give bribes, they put more time and energy to work and leisure than they will ever put in knowing God, we trust more in connections than in divine provision. Even in the church, we trust societal teachings and rules more than we trust the teachings of Christ; we believe that the image for leadership is that of oppressors, and followership, that of slaves. Whenever it is time to take major decisions, nobody ever tries to find out what God has to say, we would rather trust God to give us the wisdom to decide on our own. This is why we leap ahead of God’s time and fail because we trust in our own understanding of the times rather than in God’s wisdom and power to save. No wonder the church is failing.

Proverbs 19: 23 says;

“The fear of the Lord tends to life; he that has it will abide satisfied; he shall not be visited with evil.”