When Moses and Aaron first go before Pharaoh they are faced with his scorn, and the scorn of the all the wisdom of Egypt. “Who is the Lord?”
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He is going to find out. We know how the story goes for Pharaoh, but at this point Moses and Aaron still are not clear about that. They don’t understand how implacable Pharaoh is, how much he can endure, and what it will take. They actually try to get him to relent by suggesting that that he is more merciful than God.

The God of the Hebrews has met with us, they say, and if you don’t let us go . . . uh, he’s going to punish us or smite us or something.

That is a strange thing to say. It is a strange thing to say because God never said any such thing. He told Moses he had seen the oppression of his people and remembered his covenant. As a result, he was going to visit them and rescue them. Moses was instructed to tell Pharaoh to let God’s people go, not instructed to tell the people that if they didn’t leave they would be punished. It is a strange reversal. It is also strange because of the only possible reason Moses has for doing this: he’s trying to soften the imperative, to massage the message, to appeal to Pharaoh’s goodness. But can there be mercy with Pharaoh?

There is, of course, no mercy with Pharaoh. Pharaoh grows suspicious and as a result makes things worse for the people of Israel. They find themselves in a bind that is worse than before. The new policy is unreasonable and for Israel, hopeless.

So the elders of Israel go and try to appeal to the king. They are helpless, they think they have no one else to turn to. Maybe there was some oversight, maybe some underling exceeded his authority. Egypt’s economy no doubt changed: its markets were flooded with straw. All the supply of straw going to the brick industry was diverted elsewhere and no doubt the price of straw collapsed. Perhaps the elders of Israel wondered if Pharaoh understood what was going on in his country. Perhaps if Pharaoh knew what was really happening he would not be so harsh. Could there be mercy with Pharaoh?

Instead of turning to the Lord, they turned to Pharaoh. And there was, of course, no mercy with Pharaoh. He berated them and remained implacable. And the end was that everybody was bitter and discouraged, including Moses. Why, he asks the Lord, are you bringing trouble on this people? What am I even doing here?

The Lord had his purposes. He was preparing to abase Pharaoh for one, and no one will question his procedure when all is done. He was also showing his people that they have no help or hope apart from God who alone hears their cries and alone can rescue them. They will learn soon enough that there is no mercy with Pharaoh, because they will soon enough know there is only mercy with the Lord.

Exodus 6:5 And I have also heard the groaning of the children of Israel whom the Egyptians keep in bondage, and I have remembered My covenant.

Here the question is, how can God remember?

Does God forget? Did God not think of his covenant for 400 years? That is not possible.

Does he have too many things to do?             I used to think that when I was a kid. That God had a bunch of things to do, obviously, and so there were things he didn’t concentrate on. Of course, nothing was ever neglected, but many things were deliberately put aside while other projects were undertaken. I used to think, in other words, that God had a series of really accurate internal alarm clocks.

But that is untrained and ill-conceived theology. Many of God’s attributes are violated by that notion of God’s being and activity. So that is not the way to understand it.

When it says that God remembers, it does not mean that God forgot. It is impossible for God to forget the slightest thing—that we know! Theology guiding us, then, we have to say that Moses is talking to us in language of accommodation. We have to understand that language the way Calvin understands the expression El Shaddai—not as literal but metaphorical. He is saying things that do not mean quite as we might naturally take it, because he is talking about something that goes beyond our experience.

It has to do with God’s eternity. God is not limited by time like we are. God’s eternity certainly means that he is everlasting, but it also means that he has no past and no future. We are limited to a slice of time called present, with the past irrecoverably gone and the future constantly out of reach. God is not so limited; his eternity is an eternal, unlimited present. God does not remember because he has no past from which to fetch his memories.

When God, then, tells us he remembered, it is something to do with us. It means that it looks to us like he remembered. It is language of accommodation. It is speaking of God’s eternal purpose to save his people. It is speaking of God’s eternal activity of deliverance – in its totality—manifested partially and progressively in time. In other words, it means it didn’t look to us like God was doing anything before, and now it looks to us like he is – we are aware of his saving activity from our limited perspective. That is what it means that God remembers.

There is a lot of theology in that. And it is there because God expects us to interpret, to think, to meditate, to study and understand these things: this is how God reveals himself, not just in obvious statements, but in more difficult expressions that require reflection and the coordination of what we know to evaluate our interpretive possibilities. What do we learn?

• God expects us to interpret corporately – this is not something we can do individually. I think in America especially we resist this. You can see the argument in Mark Noll’s America’s God. We tend to be suspicious of religion that the individual with his own few resources can’t figure out, and as a result are more contemptuous of training and the authority of tradition than we would be naturally. But we need to listen to the church as a whole when it comes to the interpretation of Scripture. We need to understand that the Holy Spirit has led his people into some truth, and recognize it as truth, so that we may continue being led into all truth.
• Because God expects us to interpret difficult things, and we need training to be able to do so, we also need that. Without speculative thought, you can’t formulate the doctrine of the Trinity. Speculative thought requires training. This is the problem with just going back to the New Testament and refusing to say more than Paul did. I am not arguing that we need to go beyond the things that were written, but I am saying that what was revealed needs to be developed. If it is not developed, it cannot be faithfully transmitted. Its implications need to be worked out, and those implications require an approach that goes beyond what Paul did, though not beyond what Scripture says. It requires concepts and methods developed subsequently, tested, tried by trained men, and assimilated so deeply that without them we can no longer confess what the church in all the ages has confessed.