Never Doubt in the Dark What You Heard in the Light

A portion of scripture that I have been pondering for several weeks is the story of Moses returning to Egypt leading to the exodus. 

In our modern day culture we want everything to happen instantly.  But it doesn’t and it never has.

We try to reason out with our human intellect how things - even those things that God has promised us - can come about.  Those of us who are true believers call out to God to help us and even ask (intercede for) Him to intervene on our behalf, especially when we believe we are interceding for something that He has promised or is part of His plan.  But, if we’re honest, we usually have figured out how we think He should do it and often pray accordingly.  Rarely does He oblige us.

In meditating on the story of Moses returning to Egypt and all of the events that lead up to the children of Israel actually becoming free of Egyptian bondage, it’s not a story of ease nor one of great jubilation ... UNTIL you get to the END.

When Moses first returns, he is welcomed by his brother Aaron and the elders of Israel. Exodus 4:31 tells us that they believed Moses and worshipped God.  But their faith in what God has said and in Moses soon wanes.

Instead of things getting suddenly better for the Israelites, they get worse.

I heard a modern day proverb recently that often comes to mind. “Never doubt in the dark what you heard in the light.”  (For those who watch Flashpoint, Gene Bailey also quotes this frequently.  It came from Vision Church, pastored by Apostles Tom & Jane Hamon.)

Once we know God has spoken, we can’t afford to let go of what He said because darkness sets in - when things seem to go in the exact opposite direction.  We can’t see in the darkness.  We must hold on to what God has said until we get through it and back into the light (until breakthrough comes). We must not stop nor change directions in the middle of the darkness.

Back to the story...
The Pharaoh decides that if they have time to be petitioning him to go out in the desert and sacrifice to their God, they must have too much free time on their hands.  So now he demands that they continue to make their daily allotment of bricks, but first they must go gather their own straw with which to make them.

Of course, this was impossible.  While many of us today work an 8-hour day or 40-hour week, as slaves the Israelites were likely working sun up to sun down already.  Now they had additional work piled on to go find and gather the straw before starting to make the bricks, yet produce as many bricks as they had been each day. Because they would obviously fall short of the quota, the Israelites who had been set over them to oversee their work were being beaten for this failure. 

They appealed to Pharaoh. Surely he did not know what his taskmasters were requiring. But he did. He had ordered it. He let them know those were the new requirements.

So here we have Moses showing up to be their God-sent deliverer, but instead of bringing deliverance he has made their lives even more unbearable. The Israelite people are now upset (angry) with Moses because he has only made their lives more miserable. He’s gone from being the hero to being the villain.

Then the plagues begin.

At first, the Israelites were suffering the same plaques that were being brought on the Egyptian. Life continued to get more and more challenging.  Over the course of time that begins to shift, and there is a distinction made for Goshen, where the Israelites lived. 

They’re still living under very miserable conditions and their men are being expected to do things that are not possible.  But, that difference, God's people being protected from the plagues, begins to build some hope in the people.  Maybe God really is going to do something for them after all ...

Remember that all of this is prolonged, according to Scripture, because God continued to harden Pharaoh’s heart. We don’t get that! Why would God do that?  Why would He prolong moving and freeing His people?  Didn't He realize how bad conditions had gotten?

God was about to judge this evil Pharaoh once and for all. He had already planned to kill him and his entire army before he ever sent Moses back to Egypt.  Rather than end it quickly, God was pushing Pharaoh to show his true colors & just how evil he was.  On the other side, this also gave Pharaoh many opportunities to repent (change his attitude and actions) and do what God said do - let His people go.  God is always more than gracious” (abundantly merciful) to us.  His desire is for EVERYONE to repent and be restored to Him so that NONE are eternally damned with Satan.

Moses may not have been aware of God’s full plan - how long or how many afflictions it would take nor their eventual severity.
Aaron may not have been aware of that plan.
And the people certainly weren’t aware of that plan.
But God had a plan from the very beginning, even from before He spoke to Moses through the burning bush.

FINALLY, the death of Pharaoh’s first-born son (along with the first born of every Egyptian) caused him to cave in to God’s demands.

Side bar:
There is something we need to note here.
These were God’s demands, not Moses’ demands & not the people’s demands.
This was God’s idea that Moses was sent to carry out.
It was a plan instigated by God, but in which Moses had to be willing to participate.

God had told Abram (before He changed his name to Abraham) that his seed would go into a foreign land and be afflicted there for 400 years later, but afterwards be delivered.

13 Then He said to Abram: “Know certainly that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and will serve them, and they will afflict them four hundred years. 14 And also the nation whom they serve I will judge; afterward they shall come out with great possessions. 15 Now as for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried at a good old age. 16 But in the fourth generation they shall return here, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”  (Genesis 15:13-16, NKJV)

There is nothing in scripture that indicates the Israelites were aware of or expecting that to happen.  There is no indication of a Daniel among them to realize the time appointed for captivity was up and to begin interceding for God to fulfill His promise given by His prophet. 

Yet even though it was a plan instigated by God and one in which God would be victorious, it certainly didn’t look like victory in the middle.  Selah.  We need to press through to the breakthrough and not quit in the middle!

Back to the story:
Once again Pharaoh’s heart is hardened and he calls his army and goes after God’s people to bring them back.

In the meantime, God has set up a trap.  In the natural, it began to look like a trap for His own people.  Because of where God had led Moses to have them camp, they were caught between the Red Sea and the Egyptian army coming after them.

This emboldened Pharaoh.

It looked to him like these poor, ignorant slaves and their leaders are too stupid to know what they had done to themselves. They had made themselves easy pickings for him to come and either  bring them back into captivity or kill them. They were hemmed in and defenseless.  To Pharaoh, their recapture, or demise if they refused to return, was certain. Victory was sure. 

But God had a different plan.

The trap He set was not for His people, but for those driven by evil who pursued them to persecute and kill them.

We know the story. And we know that the children of Israel were not seeing this as a victory for them and for God.  They, too, were seeing that they had been set up to be slaughtered and they were angry with God‘s servant, Moses, for causing them to be in this position.  (Read Exodus 14:10-12.)

BUT GOD was executing His plan.

In spite of all the grumbling, complaining, and lack of faith in the majority of His people, He was still determined to deliver His people.

WHAT AN AWESOME GOD!

Why was He blessing them when they (in our view) didn’t seem to deserve it?

Because of a covenant He had made with their forefather, Abraham, and a promise He made to Abraham.

Because of covenant and a promise given to Abraham, God sent a very unlikely person back to deliver them.  We think of Moses in the terms that we know him after this episode and 40 years in the desert leading these people.  Think of who he was at that time.

A Hebrew baby that had been raised in the Egyptian palace.  Wealthy.  Different culture.  Not like them.  A silver spoon in his mouth.  Then he became a murderer and fugitive.  Why should they get behind him or accept him as their leader?

But it was his love for his own people that caused him to commit that murder, which then caused him to flee from Egypt. The destiny and desire to deliver his people was already in him. He just didn’t have the revelation on how to go about it ... because it was not yet God’s time.

So he returns to Egypt as a former fugitive.

And apparently he doesn’t view himself as a leader because he can’t even speak plainly.  God has to allow Aaron to speak for him to get Moses to go.

Yet Moses, not one of their own leaders who had lived among them and suffered with them all of these years, was God’s chosen leader. God picked someone who didn’t fit their mold.

It’s up to God to choose and anoint whom He wills.
It’s up to us to recognize whom He has anointed and get on board with His plan.

That doesn’t make that person perfect. Nor does our recognition of their calling and anointing and getting behind them make us their “worshipers” as we are sometimes accused of being.  It simply means we choose to recognize and put our resources (time, energy, money, and prayers) behind the one whom God has chosen.  In these cases, we’re not asking God to get on our side; we are choosing to get on His.  That’s a position of sure victory!

I don’t think I have to spell out for this audience the parallels to today.  Except that some of you are now saying that we didn’t get to “the End” - to freedom - but rather are watching efforts to strip our freedoms from us.

My response: WE ARE NOT YET AT THE END.

God was not unaware of anything that has happened.  He knew ALL that would happen before He called 45 to run the first time.  And He knows how this will all end.

Again, it is not about 45 any more than it was about Moses.  They are both unlikely vessels He chose to groom & use.

God didn’t decide to remove His call on Moses or His anointing to carry it out because Pharaoh kicked him out of his court.  Nor did He do so when the people rebelled (many times) in the wilderness.  His promise to them was delayed (40 years!) because of their lack of faith. But He kept His promise to them because of His covenant with their forefather, Abraham.

Do I need to break this down?

God has spoken many things about our current time and situation through many different prophets.  Some of these prophecies were received and recorded 10 or 20 years ago.  Many are much more recent.

Some believers who initially embraced these words from God (given through prophecies, dreams, and visions) and even warred with them, along with some of the prophets who prophesied them, have now begun to “doubt in the dark what God said in the light.”  They have gotten stuck in the middle. 

For those of us who are still choosing to not only believe God so we are established but also believe His prophets so we can prosper, we need to pray for those who have gotten “stuck” in the darkness. We also MUST continue to contend for the victory, the breakthrough.

I don’t know how God is going to do what He has said He would do.

I don’t know when He is going to do it.

But I know He is up to something.

And it’s a “new thing.” I strongly sense that. It will be something that hasn’t happened that way before.

God had never sent plagues like that before.
God had never parted the Red Sea for His people before.
God had never fed anyone, let alone an entire nomadic nation, with manna before.
Need I go on?

Again, God rarely does things the way we expect or when we expect.
He moves in His way.
He moves in His timing.

We cannot become discouraged and “throw in the towel” when things don’t happen as we expect.

If you’ve gotten stuck in the middle, take a deep breath. Breathe in strength from the Holy Spirit. Tell your heart to beat again. And get back in the fight to contend for God’s expressed will to be done.


Let me add a final exhortation for those who believe that things didn’t turn out as expected ("as prophesied") because we, His people, called by His name, didn’t war enough in prayer, we didn’t repent enough, or because of God not overriding “the will of the people.”

Let me start with the will of the people. Anyone who is even half-way objective in looking at the overwhelming evidence has to realize that the votes counted do not accurately reflect the legitimate votes cast. The will of the people, the person who received by far the most votes and should have had an overwhelming number of electoral votes, is not the person declared the winner or currently residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  I will not belabor that point. If you do not see that, it’s because you choose to ignore the evidence.

So God did not withhold His promises through His prophets because of the will of the people.  The majority did NOT ask for the person that was declared the winner nor for the agenda he promotes.

Further, there is no indication that the Israelites repented or warred in the spirit or even asked for deliverance.  Scripture records only that they cried out because of their taskmasters.  It was God who took note of their oppression.  But He knew the oppression (slavery) would happen when Jacob moved his family to Egypt during a famine.  He knew it even before that time because He told Abraham about it.  With that, God promised deliverance.  He had a destiny for His chosen people to fulfill so He could send His Son to earth in human form to become our Savior.  It wasn’t about their “goodness” or them doing everything just the way He wanted.  (They didn’t!) It was about the destiny God had for them as a nation and His covenant with their forefather. He would see that His plan was fulfilled.

The same is true today.  God did not raise up “a deliverer” because America deserved it or had earned it.  (Wow! I can feel even as I type that statement the reaction of some to my use of that word.  But that is what I heard Holy Spirit say, so I’m staying with it.)  God raised him up because of the destiny God Himself has for this nation and the covenants our forefathers made with Him.

This is the only nation that was ever founded for the purpose of being able to freely worship God.  And some of our forefathers made covenant with Him to spread the gospel of the Kingdom not only from shore to shore here, but from here to the nations of the world.

God remembers His covenant.  He remembers why He allowed this nation to be formed.  He remembers why He provided a victory for independence from the most powerful nation with the most powerful army & navy in the world at that time to the ragtag group of colonists.

God chose to create a nation called Israel to bring His Son to earth the first time as the suffering Servant and the spotless Lamb that was slain so that He could become our Savior and Redeemer. God chose to establish a nation called American to play a key roll in making sure the gospel of the Kingdom has been preached to all nations, tribes, and tongues so His Son can return to earth as Lord of Lords & King of Kings.

God has not given up on America.  Nor has He abandoned her.
He is as intent on us fulfilling our nation’s destiny as He was on Israel fulfilling theirs.
For those who think our sin is too great, I ask you to read through the Old Testament. You don’t even have to read it all. Just read through Judges and 1st & 2nd Kings.

I’ll close with one of my favorite verses, one I often “bring to God’s remembrance" in prayer. 

“Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purposes that prevail.”  (Proverbs 19:21)

Just remember that we, His people, must partner with Him to bring His will from heaven to earth.  It doesn’t happen automatically; but He will use those who make themselves available to cause it to be. 

BE ENCOURAGED!!