Exodus 8:1

LET MY PEOPLE GO!

‘And the Lord spake unto Moses, Go unto Pharaoh, and say unto him, Thus saith the Lord, Let My, people go, that they may serve Me.’

Exodus 8:1

I. Perfect freedom is not the thing demanded of Pharaoh, nor is this the prize of their high calling held out before the eyes of the Israelites. To serve God is the perfect freedom held out: to change masters, to be rid of him who had no claim to their allegiance, and to be permitted without hindrance to serve Him who was indeed their Lord and their God. This was the boon offered to the children of Israel, and demanded on their account by Moses as the ambassador of God.

II. This feature in the deliverance of the Israelites is worthy of special notice, when we regard it as typical of the deliverance from sin and the bondage of the devil, which our heavenly Father is willing to effect for each one of us. ‘Let My people go,’—not that they may be free from a master, but that they may serve; let them go, because they have been redeemed by Christ, and are not their own, but His. The deliverance from sin which God works for His people is, in fact, a change from one service to another: a change from service to sin, which is perfect bondage, to service to God, which is perfect freedom.

III. The blessedness of the service of God is not estimated as it ought to be; men in these days are too like the children of Israel, who seemed to think that they had conferred a favour on Moses by following his guidance, and that the least reverse would be a sufficient excuse to justify them in going back again to Egypt. There is nothing in their conduct more strange or more blameable than in the conduct of men calling themselves Christians, who do not perceive that in the earnest discharge of God’s service is their highest happiness as well as their principal duty and most blessed privilege.

—Bishop Harvey Goodwin.

Illustration

(1) ‘Once more did the object of worship prove their curse. Is there not a great law here? Our idols ever tend to grow into tyrants and cruel despots. We have only to give to the creature, no matter how fair and good, that trust, and service, and love that belong to God, and it will become a bane, perhaps the bane of life.’

(2) ‘This plague of frogs was a natural and ordinary occurrence intensified. Every year high Nile brings them in vast numbers. “The supernaturalness lay in their extraordinary number and troublesomeness, and in their appearance and disappearance at the bidding of Moses.” This reminds us that God deals with us, teaching and correcting, guiding and protecting, as far as possible through the natural. He hides Himself in the natural; to see Him we need purged eyes. (“Glory over me,” etc. is equal to “Thine be the honour to appoint the time when I shall entreat for thee and thy servants.”)’