And We Forget...

Pillar of Protection 2010

  Chalk Pastel

Above is a drawing I created for an assignment in my Intermediate Drawing class in the Spring of 2010. When I see artwork depicting a scene from the Bible, I think how cliche that so many have recreated the picture time and time again. But as I read the text in this book that I base my life on, I have no pictures to place a reference. As God has made me a visual person, I crave an image to set in my faith in motion. So I drew a picture as to help in this narrative.

In the book of Exodus, we have heard of the story numerous times when Moses, with the help of God, took the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. We hear about how the Pharaoh changes his mind and chases after the thousands of Israelites into the Red Sea. We hear about how God pulls-through for His people by splitting the sea so they can be freed from Pharaoh and his army. We stop there, it's the end of the story. 

But often we don't hear about what it took to get out of Egypt and past the Red Sea. Prior to getting to the Red Sea, and even out of Egypt, God continuously hardens Pharaoh's heart. 

As I've been reading through this book, I saw this line repeated, "But the LORD hardened Pharaoh's heart..." As each plague took place, God kept Pharaoh non-respondent to Moses' requests. I read and I read hoping it would say something different like, "Pharaoh's stubbornness and pride kept him from giving the people up,..." not that my God was delaying the process of freeing His people. 

But then He showed me something. He showed me the phrase that usually followed the phrase I disliked and it was,"...that you might know that I am the LORD." 

How many times in a movie, sitcom, or drama, will a character look up to the sky and plead for a God they wonder about and ask Him to show them a sign of Himself?  How many times in our lives do we ask God the same thing?  We want to see a physical sign that He is in our lives and that He's got our backs. Back in Exodus when God hardened Pharaoh's heart, what would have happened if God performed one miracle and    Pharaoh let the Israelites go right away? As this repeated phrase says, they wouldn't have known that He was LORD. 

We ask and ask for deliverance from God and when we get it, we don't realize that it's His doing and that He's trying to reveal some of His character to us. 

Back to my drawing above, which relates to one of  my favorite sections in this book. It refers to Ch. 13, where God lead them out of Egypt in His presence through the form of a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. How magnificent would it have been to know that He was literally guiding you among thousands of others (approximately 600,000 to be exact) to a promised place? But sadly, we read later, that this feeling will not last as the Israelites will be in the desert for 40 more years waiting for the promised land. 

The Israelites forgot. They knew what God had done for them in the past with the miraculous signs in Egypt, the cloud and fire to guide, and the parting of the Red Sea, (and so many more after that) but it doesn't have as much of an effect on their lives as it did when they were experiencing it. In our lives, we have the same potential as the Israelites. In fact, we do it all the time. As each day goes by, we forget what He did to show us who He really was. But maybe we don't JUST forget, but we stop looking for how He shows Himself in our lives. 

We need to keep looking. We need to trust that He is who He says He is.