When Deliverance Must Wait

Good morning I hope that everyone is doing well today. It is good for us all to be able to gather together.

I’m curious. Have you ever had one of those moments where you can see exactly what needs to happen, and you just cannot make it happen?

You see the problem. You see the pain. You see what would make things better. Maybe you even feel responsible to do something about it. And that is where things get difficult for us, because most of us do not like feeling helpless. We want to fix it. We want to move it. We want to make something happen.

And sometimes that instinct is good. Sometimes something really does need to be done. Sometimes faithfulness means we speak, or act, or step in, or take responsibility. But there is another line we can cross without even realizing it. We move from responsibility into control. We stop asking, “What has God given me to do?” and we start living as though the outcome itself rests on us. Then, if the thing does not change, waiting begins to do something to us. At first we are just frustrated. But after a while the question becomes deeper. It is no longer only, “When is this going to change?” It becomes, “God, where are you in this?” That is where waiting can become dangerous for our hearts, because circumstances begin preaching to us. An unanswered prayer can start whispering, “God has forgotten.” A closed door can start saying, “God is finished with you.” A failed effort can make us wonder whether we misunderstood everything. A long delay can make it feel like nothing is happening at all. Exodus 2:11–25 brings us right into that kind of place. Moses sees Israel’s suffering. He cares about it. He acts. Later Scripture tells us that this was not some random impulse. Moses really did identify with God’s people, and Acts tells us he understood something of the fact that God intended to use him in their deliverance. And yet his first attempt does not produce deliverance. It produces exile.

Then the years begin to pass. Israel is still in slavery. Moses is still in Midian. The king changes, but the suffering does not.

And yet, right at the end of the chapter, God lets us see what Israel cannot see. He heard. He remembered. He saw. He knew.

Those four phrases are really the heart of this passage. They tell us that when deliverance must wait, waiting does not mean God has disappeared. It does not mean the covenant has failed. It does not mean the story is over. It means we are going to have to trust the covenant God who forms his servants and never loses sight of his people.

YOU CAN SEE THE NEED AND STILL NOT CONTROL THE OUTCOME

Exodus 2:11–15

Verse 11 tells us Moses had grown up. He goes out to his people and looks on their burdens.

It reads

One day, when Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and looked on their burdens, and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his people.

I want us to notice that language, because it tells us something important about Moses. He has been raised in Pharaoh’s household. He has lived with Egyptian privilege. But when he looks at these Hebrew slaves, he is not looking at strangers. These are his people.

Hebrews 11 makes that even clearer. Moses refuses to be defined simply as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter and chooses to identify with the people of God. Acts 7 says he went out to visit his brothers. So Moses is not an Egyptian prince who suddenly feels sorry for a group of oppressed people. He knows where he belongs.

Then he sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew. Moses looks around, sees no one, strikes the Egyptian, and hides him in the sand. The next day he goes out again, and now two Hebrews are fighting one another. Moses confronts the one in the wrong, and the man answers him with that cutting question: “Who made you a prince and a judge over us?”

There is a lot of irony in that question, because one day the answer will be, “God did.” God really is going to appoint Moses as ruler and deliverer. Acts 7 makes that point very clearly. The man they reject here is the man God will later send back to them.

And Acts tells us something else. Moses thought his brothers would understand that God was giving them salvation through his hand. They did not understand.

So we need to be careful here. We should not flatten this story into, “Moses had no calling, Moses acted completely in the flesh, and then God had to fix him.” That is too simple. Moses is right about some very important things. Israel really is his people. Their oppression really is evil. Injustice really should bother him. And God really does intend to use him.

But here is the part Moses does not yet understand: knowing that something needs to happen is not the same thing as knowing how God intends to make it happen. And even knowing something of your calling does not make you sovereign over God’s timing.

Look at the cycle in the text. The Egyptian strikes the Hebrew. Moses strikes the Egyptian. The next day a Hebrew is striking another Hebrew. Moses sees the brokenness, but he cannot break the cycle. He can bury one Egyptian in the sand. He cannot bury slavery. He cannot free Israel. He cannot produce the Exodus.

And I think that is where this text gets uncomfortably close to us, because we often know what it is to see a need and then feel like everything depends on us.

We may have a real responsibility to speak truth, but we cannot control whether somebody receives it. We may have a real responsibility to work faithfully, but we cannot control every decision made over us. We may have a real responsibility to pray, serve, lead, protect, confront, encourage, and act wisely, but there is a difference between doing what God has given us to do and carrying the outcome as though it belongs to us.

That difference matters. Responsibility says, “Lord, what is mine to do?” Control says, “How do I make sure this turns out the way I think it should?”

And if we are not careful, anxiety grows right there. We start carrying our part and God’s part. We start carrying what we are responsible for and what we are not responsible for. Pretty soon we are exhausted because we are trying to hold something we were never meant to hold.

So let me say it as simply as I can: seeing the need is not the same thing as controlling the solution.

Moses sees the need. He cares about the need. He even understands something about his connection to the need. But he cannot make Israel free. And neither can we make ourselves sovereign over the things that matter most to us.

Now there is grace in that too, because Moses’ failure does not mean God’s purpose has failed. His failed effort is not sovereign. Pharaoh is not sovereign. The rejection of the Hebrews is not sovereign. The fact that Moses now has to run for his life is not sovereign. God is.

Moses cannot see that yet. All he knows is that the thing he thought might be connected to his future has fallen apart, Pharaoh wants him dead, and now he is headed toward Midian. But the failure of one chapter does not cancel the purpose of God.

GOD CAN FORM HIS SERVANT IN THE HIDDEN YEARS

Exodus 2:16–22

Moses arrives in Midian and sits down by a well. Seven daughters of the priest of Midian come to draw water for their father’s flock, and some shepherds drive them away. And Moses does what Moses keeps doing: he steps in.

Verse 17 says he stands up, saves them, and waters their flock.

It reads

The shepherds came and drove them away, but Moses stood up and saved them, and watered their flock.

That is worth noticing. In Egypt he sees an Egyptian abusing a Hebrew and he intervenes. The next day he sees one Hebrew wronging another and he confronts it. Now he sees these women being driven away by stronger men, and once again he moves toward the vulnerable.

The man God is going to use as a deliverer already has the instincts of a protector. God is not going to erase Moses and replace him with somebody else. He is going to form the man he has already made.

But everything around Moses has changed. He is not in Egypt now. He has no place in Pharaoh’s household. He has no position. He has no visible influence. He is a fugitive sitting beside a well in a foreign country.

And then the daughters go home and tell their father, “An Egyptian delivered us out of the hand of the shepherds.” That description is almost painful when you think about Moses’ identity. Moses knows he is Hebrew. The Hebrews reject him. Pharaoh wants him dead. The Midianites look at him and say, “Egyptian.” Moses knows who his people are, but nobody around him seems to know exactly who he is.

Eventually he marries Zipporah, they have a son, and Moses names him Gershom because, he says, “I have been a sojourner in a foreign land.” That name lets us hear a little of what is going on inside him. The life he knew is gone. The future he may have imagined is gone. His people are far away. He is living somewhere he did not expect to live, doing a life he did not expect to be doing.

If we stopped the story right there, we might say, “Well, that is it. Moses had his chance. It is over.” But we know better because we know the next chapter.

The deliverer is hidden, but God’s purpose is not dead.

That is important for us because we tend to assume that if our usefulness is not visible, then maybe it is not real. If we are not doing the big thing, the public thing, the thing we imagined, then perhaps nothing important is happening.

But Scripture keeps pushing against that assumption. Moses is not wasting his life simply because he is not in Egypt. He protects. He serves. He enters a household. He becomes a husband and a father. He becomes a shepherd. None of that looks like confronting Pharaoh. None of it looks like parting the Red Sea. And yet those hidden years are not outside the providence of God.

Now I want to be careful here, because we can preach this in a way that promises too much. Moses has a unique place in redemptive history. We should not tell every Christian, “Your hidden season is just preparation for something famous later.” That is not what the text says. Sometimes faithfulness remains quiet. Sometimes there is no public moment waiting around the corner.

But this text does give us something solid to hold onto: obscurity is not the same thing as abandonment. A hidden season is not automatically a wasted season just because we cannot see what God is doing in it.

And that means the question in a hidden season is not, “How do I get out of this as fast as possible?” The better question is, “What does faithfulness look like here?”

That is a question we can live with. Who is in front of us? What work has God given us today? Where can we serve? Where do we need to tell the truth? Where do we need to pray? Where do we need to love? Where do we need to protect the vulnerable? What ordinary obedience is sitting right in front of us while we are waiting for something larger?

Because we can spend so much time waiting for the next chapter that we neglect the chapter we are in.

We tell ourselves, “When this changes, then I will serve. When this door opens, then I will be useful. When this season ends, then I can really do what matters.” But so much of Christian faithfulness is ordinary. It is showing up. It is serving. It is praying. It is loving. It is doing the next faithful thing even when we do not know where the story is going.

Moses does not know when the burning bush is coming. He does not even know that a burning bush is coming. He simply keeps living in the place where God has placed him.

But while Moses is being formed in Midian, Israel is still suffering in Egypt. We cannot turn Midian into some sentimental story about personal growth and forget that people are still groaning under slavery. Their pain has not stopped. Their waiting has not stopped. And that brings us to the deepest question in this passage: what does God’s delay mean?

GOD’S DELAY IS NOT GOD’S ABSENCE

Exodus 2:23–25

Verse 23 begins,

During those many days the king of Egypt died,

You can almost feel the hope in that sentence. The king is dead. Maybe this is it. Maybe now something changes.

But it does not. The king changes, and the slavery remains.

We know something about that kind of disappointment. We tell ourselves that if one person changes, if one leader leaves, if one decision gets reversed, if one problem gets solved, then surely everything will finally be different. And sometimes it is. But sometimes one visible thing changes and the deeper burden is still there.

That is what happens to Israel. Pharaoh dies, and they are still slaves.

Then the text begins piling up words for their suffering. They groan because of their slavery. They cry out for help. Their cry rises up to God.

And I love the honesty of the Bible here. Scripture does not shame them for groaning. It does not tell them that if they had stronger faith they would stop hurting. Their lament is part of the inspired story. There is room in biblical faith to say, “This hurts.” There is room to cry out. There is room to ask, “How long?”

Sometimes Christians feel like faith means we have to act as though pain does not hurt. It does not. The gospel does not require us to pretend that suffering is painless. Israel groans, and God does not rebuke them for it.

Then something changes in the way the story is told. For most of this chapter Moses has been the visible actor. Moses goes. Moses sees. Moses strikes. Moses confronts. Moses fears. Moses flees. Moses saves. Moses waters. Moses settles.

But now the most important Actor comes into the foreground.

God heard their groaning.

God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

God saw the people of Israel.

God knew.

Four verbs. Heard. Remembered. Saw. Knew.

And every one of those words answers a lie that waiting can preach to our hearts.

Has God ignored them? No. He heard.

Has God forgotten what he promised? No. He remembered.

Has their suffering escaped his notice? No. He saw.

Is he distant from what they are going through? No. He knew.

Now when the text says God remembered, it does not mean that God had forgotten Israel and then suddenly had a memory come back to him. God does not forget his covenant and then need a reminder. In Scripture, when God “remembers,” it means his covenant faithfulness is moving toward action. The promise has been governing the story all along, even when Israel could not see it.

And when the text says God saw, it does not mean that until this moment Israel had been outside his field of vision. God had always seen. The point is his attentive, covenantal regard. He sees his people.

Then we get that final phrase: “and God knew.” We do not need to make the word do more than the context gives us, but it clearly means more than, “God now possesses information about slavery.” In Exodus 3:7 God will say, “I know their sufferings.” He knows what his people are enduring.

And that means something we need to hear: Israel’s experience of God and God’s actual posture toward Israel are not the same thing.

They experience delay. God has not forgotten.

They experience suffering. God sees.

They cry out. God hears.

They wonder whether anybody understands. God knows.

That is why unchanged circumstances are not reliable evidence of an absent God.

And this may be one of the most important things in the whole sermon, because we are all tempted to let our circumstances teach us theology. The prayer is unanswered, therefore God does not care. The door is closed, therefore God is against me. The suffering continues, therefore God is absent. The years pass, therefore God has forgotten.

But those conclusions go beyond the evidence. Circumstances are incomplete. We are looking at an unfinished chapter.

And the unfinished chapter does not get to define the Author.

God’s revealed character has to interpret the waiting, not the other way around.

Now that does not mean we suddenly know what God is going to do next. Israel does not know about the burning bush yet. They do not know about the plagues. They do not know about Passover. They do not know about the Red Sea. At the end of Exodus 2, from their perspective, they are still slaves.

But the narrator lets us see something they cannot see. Before they see a single chain fall, God has heard. Before Pharaoh is confronted, God has remembered. Before Moses comes back, God has seen. Before deliverance arrives, God knows.

The circumstances have not changed yet. But now we know the waiting does not mean what it looked like it meant.

CHRIST AND EXODUS

And this is where the rest of Scripture helps us see the pattern even more clearly.

Moses comes to his brothers seeking their good, and they reject him. “Who made you a ruler and judge over us?” Acts 7 comes back to that exact rejection and says, in effect, the one they rejected was the one God later sent as ruler and redeemer.

Stephen is not just giving us an interesting fact about Moses. He is showing us a pattern that reaches its climax in Jesus.

Jesus comes to his own, and his own do not receive him. The true Deliverer is rejected, mocked, condemned, and crucified. If we had been standing there on Friday, interpreting God only by what we could see, we might have said, “It is over.” The Messiah is dead. The disciples are scattered. The rulers have won. The tomb is sealed.

But Friday was not the end of the story.

The cross teaches us not to confuse apparent defeat with divine defeat. What looked like the destruction of God’s purpose was actually the accomplishment of redemption. And on the third day, Jesus rose from the dead.

That is why Christian waiting is not just positive thinking. We are not saying, “I am sure everything will turn out exactly the way I want.” We are saying something much stronger than that. We are saying, “The God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead can be trusted when I cannot see what he is doing.”

The resurrection tells us that apparent defeat does not get the final word over God’s saving purpose. The rejected Deliverer has been vindicated. Christ lives. And because Christ lives, we can trust God with unfinished stories.

LET’S LIVE THIS OUT

What does this look like when we walk out of here and go back into ordinary life?

First, we need to name the difference between responsibility and control. That is worth doing very practically. Ask yourself: What has God actually given me to do, and what outcome am I carrying that belongs to him?

Maybe there is a conversation you need to have. Have it faithfully. Tell the truth in love. But you cannot control the other person’s response. Maybe there is work God has put in front of you. Do it well. Do it with integrity. But you cannot control every decision above you. Maybe there is somebody you have been praying for. Keep praying. Do not give up. But remember, you do not control the timetable of another person’s heart.

Faithfulness is not passivity. Moses is not passive. But faithfulness is not sovereignty either.

Second, when God seems quiet, refuse to interpret the silence without Scripture. Rehearse what this passage actually says. God hears. God remembers. God sees. God knows. Those are not vague sentimental statements. They are covenant words. They tell us who God is when our circumstances are loud.

Third, keep practicing ordinary faithfulness. Moses had no idea when the burning bush would come. He just kept living where God had placed him. There are seasons when ordinary obedience feels painfully small compared with the answer we want, but ordinary obedience still matters.

Keep serving. Keep praying. Keep telling the truth. Keep loving. Keep worshiping. Keep showing up. We do not need to know the next chapter in order to be faithful in this one.

And fourth, let disappointment expose self-reliance without automatically denying every genuine burden God may have given you. A failed effort does not always mean the burden was wrong. Sometimes the timing was wrong. Sometimes the method was wrong. Sometimes our expectations were wrong. Sometimes we were carrying things that belonged to God.

Moses’ story teaches us that God is not only accomplishing his work. He is also forming the servant.

SO WHAT?

So what difference should this make in us?

I think we need to let a few questions sit with us.

What are you trying to force because somewhere down inside you are afraid that if you do not make it happen, God will not? Maybe you have been calling it responsibility, but somewhere along the way it became control. What would it look like to obey faithfully and then release the outcome?

Where have you interpreted delay as abandonment? Is there an unanswered prayer, a closed door, a prolonged hardship, an unresolved burden that has started shaping what you believe about God? What would change if, instead of interpreting God through the circumstance, you interpreted the circumstance through the God who hears, remembers, sees, and knows?

What present obedience have you neglected because you are waiting for something larger? Who is in front of you? What responsibility is already yours? What can you do faithfully today? Do not despise this chapter just because it does not look like the future you imagined.

And where do you need resurrection confidence instead of circumstantial optimism? Christian hope is not, “I know exactly how this is going to turn out.” Christian hope is, “Jesus Christ is risen, so apparent defeat does not have the last word.”

If you carry one sentence home, carry this one: do what God has given you to do, release what only God can do, and trust the God who hears, remembers, sees, and knows.

When Deliverance Must Wait

Look, we started with that frustration of seeing what needs to happen and not being able to make it happen. That is Moses in this passage. He sees the suffering. He cares. He acts. And still he cannot produce deliverance.

Then he disappears into Midian. Years go by. Pharaoh dies. Another Pharaoh takes his place. The slavery remains. Israel groans.

If we judged the story only by what was visible, we would probably say nothing is happening.

But Exodus lets us see what Israel cannot yet see.

God has heard them. God has remembered his covenant. God sees his people. God knows their suffering.

And then chapter 3 opens with a burning bush.

That is the comfort I want us to leave with. The deliverer had been hidden, but the Deliverer had never been absent. And when we come to Jesus, that truth becomes even clearer. At the cross the Deliverer was rejected. At the tomb hope looked buried. But on the third day God raised him from the dead.

So when the answer has not come yet, when the door has not opened, when the burden has not lifted, when you cannot see what God is doing, do not let an unfinished story become your doctrine of God.

You may not know what God is doing next. But we know who he is.

He is the God who hears.

He is the God who remembers.

He is the God who sees.

He is the God who knows.

And because Christ is risen, we can trust him with the ending.

Amen

Let us pray

Father, thank You for reminding us that You are not absent in the waiting.

You hear Your people. You remember Your covenant. You see what we are carrying. You know our suffering, our fears, our disappointments, and the things we cannot fix.

Teach us to be faithful with what You have actually given us to do, and give us the humility to release what belongs to You alone. Keep us from trying to control outcomes that only You can govern.

When the way forward is unclear, keep us from interpreting silence as abandonment. When the answer is delayed, keep us from believing You have forgotten us. When we are in hidden or difficult seasons, help us to remain faithful in the ordinary things You have placed in front of us.

And keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, our greater Deliverer. Thank You that the cross was not defeat and the tomb was not the end. Because Christ is risen, we know that Your saving purposes cannot fail.

So help us trust You with the unfinished chapters of our lives. Give us grace to obey, patience to wait, courage to endure, and confidence in who You are.

We ask all of this in the name of Jesus.

And now, May the God who hears, remembers, sees, and knows strengthen you to walk faithfully in every unfinished season.

May He give you wisdom for what is yours to do, peace to release what belongs to Him, and steadfast hope when you cannot yet see what He is doing.

And may the risen Christ, our greater Deliverer, keep your heart secure until faith becomes sight.

Go in peace, and trust the God who has never lost sight of His people.

Amen.

Be blessed to be a blessing