Exodus 5 - 10: The Exodus in Us
Sunday, October 25, 2026
The Rev. Megan Collins
Dave and I have found that living in an apartment these past two years has changed our dog, Stella. She knows things she didn’t know when we lived out our house, like that the icecream shop that’s just downstairs has a special treat, just for dogs. It has pumpkin and peanut butter and is frozen onto a dog treat so you can hold it like a popsicle. They say no one is as ridiculous as the only pet of an empty nester couple. Our dog probably shouldn’t recognize the door of the icecream shop.
She has also decided, for a reason only she knows, that the laminate floor in our apartment is dangerous. Only the carpet is safe. Apparently turning around on the hard floor is especially dangerous, so she will tentatively venture out onto the laminate floor to get her ball, then slowly walk backward onto the safety of the carpet.
She is definitely accustomed to being on a leash anytime she is outside. We sent Stella to stay with some friends for a week. They have this wonderful, large back yard that she can run around in. But they said Stella did something strange. They would open the door to their yard, and Stella would just stand there, at the open doorway, waiting. She was obviously physically free to just go, to run and play outside. But something in her felt stuck. She was still leashed.
Stella is a little ridiculous.
But I’ve also found her to be a constant, and admittedly adorable, illustration for our relationship with God.
Most of us have something in our lives that we were once stuck in, but we aren’t anymore. Maybe you even have things you feel God helped you get out of. You are totally free to move forward. But for some reason we can still feel like we’re stuck. We feel like we are still on this leash that is holding us back.
Maybe you retired from a job that was horrible. You couldn't wait to retire, to walk out that door and never come back. But you find yourself ruminating about your old job. Maybe you even feel a little lost without the routine, and the schedule, it provided, even if you hated it and it wasn’t good for you.
Or maybe you grew up in a situation that wasn’t healthy for you, and you couldn't wait to move out. But now you still hear the voice of that parent or relative in your head, making you think you aren’t enough.
Maybe you fought to get away from an addiction or a behavior that had a hold on you, but you still feel this strong pull of it, especially on a hard day.
This is certainly true of us as a nation. There are plenty of groups - women, people of color, the LGBTQ community - that have hard won freedoms. But it seems the unjust ways of the past keep our nation tethered to them, keeping all of us from really moving forward.
We are free and still stuck . . . and this is not a new story. I always find it comforting that the challenges we face are mostly not new, which means we can find ourselves in the Bible story and see what God does with it.
We’ll pick up on our story from Exodus again today. Moses, along with his brother Aaron, has been sent by God to confront the Pharaoh, who has the people captive. It says:
5:1 Afterward Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Let my people go, so that they may celebrate a festival to me in the wilderness.” 2 But Pharaoh said, “Who is the Lord, that I should listen to him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, and I will not let Israel go.”
They petition the Pharaoh on behalf of God, but the Pharaoh says no. Then things get much, much worse for the people.
5:4 But the king of Egypt said to them, “Moses and Aaron, why are you taking the people away from their work? Get to your labors!” 5 Pharaoh continued, “Now they are more numerous than the people of the land] and yet you want them to stop laboring!” 6 That same day Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters of the people, as well as their supervisors, 7 “You shall no longer give the people straw to make bricks, as before; let them go and gather straw for themselves. 8 But you shall require of them the same quantity of bricks as they have made previously; do not diminish it, for they are lazy; that is why they cry, ‘Let us go and sacrifice to our God.’ 9 Let heavier work be laid on them; then they will pay attention to it and not to deceptive words.”
Pharaoh does not relent. He doubles down. They have to work harder, and longer. But the Lord is determined. God will get them out of Egypt. Oppression is not, is never, God’s plan. Notice how almost every sentence in these next verses begins with “I will.” God will get them out.
6 “I am the Lord. . . . I will free you from the burdens of the Egyptians and deliver you from slavery to them. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great acts of judgment. 7 I will take you as my people, and I will be your God. 8 I will bring you into the land that I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; I will give it to you for a possession. I am the Lord.”
God makes these huge promises. I will free you. I will deliver and redeem you. I will be your God. I will give you land. The people should be so excited. But Pharaoh is a skilled oppressor. He has followed the oppressor handbook to the letter. Keep the people busy and they won’t have the energy to resist. Make the work harder, the oppression tighter if they push back, and they will be afraid to try again. The power of Egypt not only crushes them physically, but it also breaks their spirits. After God’s big speech, it says:
6:9 Moses told this to the Israelites, but they would not listen to Moses, because of their broken spirit and their cruel slavery.
The people don’t have the hope to resist. But God keeps going on their behalf anyway. The next few chapters will detail a series of plagues that the Lord will bring to Egypt to will both put pressure on the Pharaoh, and also show who God is to all of the people, the Egyptians and the Israelites. But it starts with this troubling verse:
7 3 But I will harden Pharaoh’s heart,
There’s a lot to be said about this. Why would God do this? Why not change Pharaoh’s heart to hear them? That seems out of character for God? But one scholar I read this week wrote something interesting. Perhaps the Lord hardens Pharaoh’s heart here as a direct response to how Pharaoh’s oppression broke the hearts of the oppressed people. If Pharaoh’s cruelty made it so the people couldn’t hear God’s promises, then Pharaoh shouldn’t be able to hear them either.
The Lord hardening Pharaoh’s heart is strange, but it’s about to get stranger. The next few chapters after this are a crazy sequence of events involving water turning to blood, swarms of frogs and gnats and locusts, hail storms and disease outbreaks and then, darkness. (It sounds a little like summer in Florida). It’s all very mythical and strange.
But if if we zoom out from the piles of frogs, we will see that it doesn’t have to literal to show us something about God. If we step back, it looks like the whole creation is in chaos in these plagues. Slavery was such affront to the goodness of God’s created order that God uses the whole creation to fight back.
There’s a lot of back and forth during these plagues, but eventually, it happens.
God gets the people out of Egypt.
They are finally physically free. It’s something to celebrate.
When God gets us out, we celebrate. When we make progress for the equality of a group of people, or even when God gets you out of a bad job or a bad relationship, or when we finally move past a sin or behavior that has a hold on us, we celebrate.
But (and here’s where we get stuck) it doesn’t mean the work is done. There’s an equally as important process that is much harder to see. It takes much longer to accomplish. And without it, we are stuck in the doorway, feeling like we are still on the leash.
There is something in the Israelites that is still keeping them captive.
They are physically out of Egypt.
But now God will have to get Egypt out of them.
As the story goes on they will talk about missing the food in Egypt, the place that they were enslaved. They will make a golden calf and worship it. They will even ask, beg, for a king. The people God freed from slavery are still so leashed to it that they ask for another king.
They are physically out of Egypt, but Egypt isn’t out of them.
Much later in the Old Testament, in Ezekiel 20, the Lord says:
5:6 On that day I swore to them that I would bring them out of the land of Egypt into a land that I had searched out for them, a land flowing with milk and honey, the most glorious of all lands. 7 And I said to them, “Cast away the detestable things on which your eyes feast, every one of you, and do not defile yourselves with the idols of Egypt; I am the Lord your God.” 8 But they rebelled against me and would not listen to me; not one of them cast away the detestable things on which their eyes feasted, nor did they forsake the idols of Egypt.
It felt like it took a long time for God to get them out of Egypt.
But getting the Egypt out of them would take much, much longer. It's a good thing God is patient. Getting the Egypt out of the people would take another walking through the parted seas kind of miracle, the kind of thing only God could do.
Look at Luke 9:
28 Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James and went up on the mountain to pray. 29 And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning. 30 Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. 31 They appeared in glory and were speaking about his exodus, which he was about to fulfill in Jerusalem.
Up on the mountain, Jesus is joined by Moses, the one who led the Israelites out of Egypt. As they talk about what is about to happen, Jesus’ death and resurrection, it says in some translations that they were speaking about his "departure." But the word in the Greek is exodos, which the NRSVUE accurately translates. They were speaking about his exodus.
A full study on what we believe about Jesus’ death and resurrection is more than we can cover today. But one thing we can see clearly here, is this connection between Jesus’ work and the exodus. The physical exodus from slavery happened at a moment in history, as the seas parted and they walked through unharmed. But the release from the captivity of their hearts? That took a lot longer.
It took God coming down, to do it for us.
The God who said “I will free you, I will deliver and redeem you, I will be your God" didn’t just make that promise for the one time exodus in history.
God got them out of Egypt.
Then God came here, to get the Egypt out of all of us.
The promise made in Exodus is the same one we find in Jesus Christ:
I will free you. I will deliver and redeem you. I will be your God.
And that promise takes time.
It took a while but now, when Stella goes to a friend’s house, she doesn’t hesitate at the door frame. She doesn’t feel the leash. She just takes off into the backyard. She’s free.
Jesus has opened that door for you.
God can help you look forward to the future, instead of staying stuck in the past.
God can free you from the sins that are holding you back.
God can speak louder in your life than the voices that lie to you.
God can give you the hope to believe change is coming, in our world.
We are no strangers to corrupt pharaohs today, and I have to believe that the God who said let my people go, didn’t mean just once. Oppression was never God’s plan, then or now. The pharaohs today are just as skilled as the one Moses faced. Pharaohs throughout history, and the ones we are facing now, are well versed in how to make people believe that there is no hope, that to resist will only make it worse. When God brought the plagues to Egypt, it tells us he brought them not just to put pressure on the Pharaoh, but so that
7:5 the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord
God was determined to change the hearts of not just the Israelites but the Egyptians too.
Maybe today it won’t be with piles of frogs. (I wouldn’t say no to frogs, if it works). But it was never about the plagues. It was about getting the Egyptians, not just the Israelites, but the Egyptians too to see and know God, and be changed. The ways of the pharaohs, the greed, the violence, the power, the hatred, it can corrupt any of us. On the other side of the cross, the way things change starts with helping people see Jesus, so Jesus can get the Egypt out of them, out of us, free us from the hold of sin.
That freedom, whether it’s the external oppression we see in our world, or the stuff inside of us that is holding onto us, doesn’t happen all at once.
Exodus seldom does.
But God hasn’t given up.
It was God who said “Let my people go.”
It was God who moved for freedom in exodus, the physical freedom of the people, and the freedom from that leash that keeps us tethered to the things that enslave.
It seems God won’t settle for anything less.
Comments