Moses and Aaron brought together all the elders of the Israelites, and Aaron told them everything the LORD had said to Moses. He also performed the signs before the people, and they believed. And when they heard that the LORD was concerned about them and had seen their misery, they bowed down and worshiped.

Afterward Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said, "This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: 'Let my people go, so that they may hold a festival to me in the desert.' "

Pharaoh said, "Who is the LORD, that I should obey him and let Israel go? I do not know the LORD and I will not let Israel go."

Then in this chapter Pharaoh gets mad and makes the people make bricks without straw. Skip down to the end of that to verse 22:

Now, skip down to chapter 7, verse 8:

This is God's holy, inerrant, and life-giving word to us; thanks be to God.

Mrs. Oliver was a third grade teacher at my elementary school. I think by the time I was in second grade, she had been a third grade teacher for at least 80 or 90 years. She was one of these people with one of "those" reputations where just going by her room was kind of like going by a haunted house. You just don't look over there and don't think about it. She was kind of like Mrs. McCreedy from Chicken Run: she's going to turn all of the chickens into chicken pot pie. Woe to you if you were in her class. I had an older brother who had Mrs. Oliver, and he would tell horror stories of "woe to you if you asked a question in the wrong way -- woe to you if you asked a question." For many years, I kind of thought, God is a little bit like that: woe to you if you ask a question of God. And yet, one of the things I noticed this week, questions in these four chapters just kept jumping out -- three questions that are in this passage and that give us a glimpse into ourselves and into God himself. That's all we're going to look at.

Question #1: Who is the Lord?

You see it in chapter 5, verses 1-2: "Afterward Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said, 'This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: "Let my people go, so that they may hold a festival to me in the desert." ' Pharaoh said, 'Who is the LORD, that I should obey him and let Israel go? I do not know the LORD and I will not let Israel go.' " Who is the Lord? Who is God? It's interesting: this is not a question of an atheist or an agnostic. Pharaoh is not saying, "Is there a God?" Pharaoh is saying, "Who is this God?" It's not a question of agnosticism or atheism; it's a question of pluralism. I think that if we could take Pharaoh out of where he lived, he would really fit pretty well in 2006. You can almost hear Pharaoh saying, "Look, Moses, Yahweh gives you inner peace, but Ra gives me inner peace. You have your God; I have mine. Come on, we're basically going to the same place anyway." Pharaoh is happy to be a pluralist. He doesn't get mad at Moses for believing in Yahweh. He gets mad at Moses, ultimately, for two reasons: one, because God says, "I'm not a god -- I'm the God," and two, because Moses is going to take his money and his power away, his slaveforce of millions. What you find a lot of times, especially in this culture, is "Believe in God all you want; we're not going to get mad at you. You just better not believe that your God is the God."

A couple of years ago U2 put out the album "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb," which had very explicitly Christian lyrics. I don't know if Bono or any of the other guys are Christians. But here's what was interesting: as long as U2 kept their spirituality vague and inoffensive, people loved them by the millions. But I was reading some reviews this week of that album, and people were just destroying U2 and Bono because they dared have a song on there called "Yahweh." "As long as you have a vague spirituality, that's fine; we affirm that. But you better not get specific." And they were saying he's egotistical because of this belief in Yahweh. This is really what Pharaoh is saying. You've heard this, maybe you've said this, maybe you say this now. I have a friend of many years who would say, "I just cannot believe, I will not believe, this view that the Bible has that there is only one God, that there's only one way to heaven." I used to say that. I asked him at that time, "If there is a God, if there is an afterlife, any of that stuff . . . how do we come to know that?" and he said, "You've gotta be sincere." So he was saying sincere adherents of every religion all end up in the same place. I thought about this years later, and I thought, "You know what...what about the insincere people? How judgmental. How exclusive. You're excluding the insincere people!" You see, the thing is, as soon as you reject one perceived exclusive way, you have to substitute another. "All the sincere people can go. All of the insincere people? Tough luck." Because our minds and our bodies work that way.

I met with a girl not too long ago, not in this congregation, who was raised in the church and had seen some really nasty things, as some of you have. She's pretty disillusioned. One of the things that she said as we talked was "I've seen some really awful things happen. You know, those people who believe that there's only one way, they make me so mad. They make me so mad. I hate that belief." Now, hear what she's saying. One of the things she's saying is, "I've seen a lot of awful stuff, and it's disillusioned me." But listen to the other thing she's saying: "Those intolerant people, I will not be tolerant of. I will be tolerant of everything and everyone except those that I perceive as intolerant." You see, we can't help but substitute some sort of standard. As soon as you reject one, you have to put another one in its place. So you say, "There is not one way to God. There is not one way. There are many ways." And the second you've said that, you've said, "There is one way: many ways. And if you believe there's only one way, then that's the wrong way." Are you with me? Now, what does that mean?

If you're not a follower of this Jesus -- and you came here this morning because it's family weekend and you don't want your parents to lecture you about not going to church, or it's family weekend and you feel like you ought to set a good example for your kids and go to church, or something's happened in your past and you're disillusioned about this Christianity stuff and you just don't believe it -- let me invite you to do something, and I mean this with the utmost respect that I possibly can. Consider, just consider, that possibly in your rejection of this one way, you've just put another "one way" in there. Just consider that the simplistic, superficial, artificial answers that sound so good in philosophy class, sound so open-minded, at the end of the day cannot help you, and that they really are artificial and simplistic answers. That when you say, "Who is the Lord?" there might really be an answer. Just consider it.

Question #2: Why are we suffering?

Pharaoh gets mad: "Ok, Moses, you make trouble for me, I'm going to make trouble for you. Those people who've been making bricks with straw that I've been supplying? Now they're going to have to go get their own straw, but the quota's not going down." And this is a horrible thing that brings all sorts of problem. Look at verse 22 of chapter 5: "Moses returned to the LORD and said, 'O Lord, why have you brought trouble upon this people? Is this why you sent me? Ever since I went to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has brought trouble upon this people, and you have not rescued your people at all.' " Last week I used this analogy: Israel has come running onto the field before the game, they've gotten the pregame pep talk from the coach, everybody's jumping on top of each other yelling, "Yeah! yeah! yeah! we're gonna win!" and like that [snaps fingers] you're down by four touchdowns in the first quarter. That's what's happening here. "God is going to deliver you!" "Go make bricks without straw."

Does that sound familiar? "Why have you sent this trouble on us, Lord?" This has to sound familiar to those of you who began following Jesus and life started getting tough, and it's getting tougher, and "I'm beginning to wonder about this whole following Jesus thing. Is this the way it's supposed to be?" Part of the problem is us preacher-types. Let me apologize on behalf of them everywhere. Because some of you were sold the same bill of goods that I was sold when I started following Jesus, and it was this: "Follow Jesus and your life is going to be really cool. Things are going to be great. It's going to be like Christmas every day!" And there are days that are like Christmas, and my life is full in a way that it never was, but the reality is there are bricks without straw chapters. They are hard chapters. Because why? Because souls that have been in slavery for 400 years need a lot of work, a lot of fixing and restoring.

It's a little bit like surgery. Some of you have gone into surgery and the doctor says something like this: "Look, there's this thing in your body. If you leave it alone, it's going to kill you, make your life very difficult from here on out if you don't deal with it. Therefore, we recommend that you go in and have surgery." So you agree to have surgery. If you have had surgery, you know that this is how it is: You wake up after the surgery with people prodding you and asking you questions that you want to go away. You wake up and feel like you've been hit by not just a semi, but a whole nation full of semis. You are just so wasted, really, in the worst sort of way. And all you want is to go back to the way it was. At that moment, that's all you want. "I don't care if they fixed me; I just want relief from this pain. I don't care that I needed this surgery or I'm going to die." Really, what is going on, in part, in this "bricks without straw" scenario, is that God is beginning the process of teaching his people that he is going to deliver them. That he is going to deliver them, not like a fairy tale, but like real life. In the crap, in the mud and the muck of real life, God is going to deliver them.

Here's what I want to say to you, to those of you who are brand new followers of Jesus, some of you who are thinking about being followers of Jesus, some of you who have been followers for several years and things are tough. Count on this: The moment you begin to look at the world, the universe, yourself, God, and everything else, the moment you begin to look at those things the way God looks at those things, you can count on it: there are going to be tough things. There will be difficult times. God is doing surgery, and you may not feel better, but you are better.

God has to get 400 years of slavery out of their souls, so God speaks promises into their lives. Did you hear these promises? Hear these doubts at the end of chapter 5, and how does God respond? Look at verse 1 of chapter 6: "Then the LORD said to Moses, 'Now you will see what I will do to Pharaoh: Because of my mighty hand he will let them go; because of my mighty hand he will drive them out of his country.' " And there's just promise after promise after promise: "I will...I will...I will...." Eight verses of him heaping promises on them. Look at verse 8: " 'And I will bring you to the land I swore with uplifted hand to give to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob. I will give it to you as a possession. I am the LORD.' Moses reported this to the Israelites, but they did not listen to him because of their discouragement and cruel bondage." That's got to sound familiar to you too. Slaves don't respond to promises alone. God still gives them. When you're a slave, and you've been a slave, and you're so discouraged -- some of you are there right now, and if you're not, you will be -- you're so discouraged and in slavery, and God heaps promises, he backs the dump truck up and heaps promises, but you're so discouraged you can't even hear what he has to say.

So, what's God's answer? In the next section, how does God answer their discouragement? A genealogy. Those of you who have your Bibles open, you see it there. He then goes in to talking about the family of Moses. Well, man, I feel better already. Don't you? Let's talk about the family history. What's going on here? Remember that they're deeply discouraged, God gives his promises, they're still discouraged -- more discouraged than ever -- and God gives this genealogy. Now what's going on? I tried to think of a way to explain this. A genealogy is just a family history, and this is a short one. Now, I'm going to give you two pictures to try to explain what's going on here. One is for the sports-minded person and one is for the literary-minded person.

For the sports-minded person: Moses is riding at the end of a national championship year. We won the national championship. But Exodus 4, 5, and 6 are about game #2 when we were down by three touchdowns in the fourth quarter. You with me? And Moses is saying, "Here's this genealogy from when you were not a nation in Jacob, to this guy named Phineas." You don't know who Phineas is, but the people who are listening to this do. Phineas is like a folk hero. He's a local hero for the Israelites. He does all sorts of wonderful things in the next few books. Moses is saying, "This is where you were, this is where you are, but this is where you're going! To Phineas. The national championship is out there; you just need to make it through game 2."

Now, for those of you who are literary minded: Moses is writing a story, a true story, a history. It's got 35 chapters in it. You're in chapter 6. And the genealogy is this: "Chapter 35 is coming! At the end of all of this is a hero."

Now, what's the point here? Wherever you are this morning -- and you may be right there making bricks without straw -- you're wondering, "Where is God? He said he was going to deliver me. Where is he?" At the end of your story is a hero. If you could only trace the line to the very end! Part of the problem is that when you have been a slave for so long, and you have thought like a slave, and you have lived like a slave, you can't even hear that. One of the reasons we gather here every Sunday and we tell the same story over and over and over again is that you have to soak the slavery out of your soul. You gotta get it out. Because you don't believe that you live like a slave. How do I know that you live like a slave? Because when things get tough you say, "God has abandoned me." You're just like these folks. And this genealogy makes all the difference. What it says is this: "I give you promises, heap my promises." Do you live there? Does this just sound good, or do you live there? Do you soak in it?

A couple of things that that means: You can't stop if you're in chapter 6. Some of you are in chapter 6 right now, you're making bricks without straw. At the end of your story is a folk hero. Who is this hero? Look, Phineas is not our hero. Christianity is about Christ. You are not the hero. Moses is not the hero. Phineas is a movie trailer for Jesus. He lived a life that you could never live, he died a death that you should have died, that I should have died, and then he walked out of the grave. He's the hero. And at the end of your life, at the end of your story, is this hero. A promise kept, a person. Look, this is unlike any religion; you couldn't dream up anything like this. God says to his people, "I'm going to call you my own, but you're not going to be able to keep your end of the bargain. But I will." Nobody would make that up. Nobody would make up that kind of religion. Is that where you soak, is that where you live, is that where you live today? Or does it just sound kind of interesting? Is that your story?

Question #3: Why should anyone listen?

Look at verse 10 of chapter 6: "Then the LORD said to Moses, 'Go, tell Pharaoh king of Egypt to let the Israelites go out of his country.' But Moses said to the LORD, 'If the Israelites will not listen to me, why would Pharaoh listen to me, since I speak with faltering lips?' " Why would anybody listen to me? Look at me, God; I can't even talk! I can't even speak. Why would anybody listen to me? And God's answer, finally, after seven chapters is "No more talk. We're going to act." We read this next chapter in this story. Moses and Aaron are shepherds from the middle of nowhere walking into the court of a man whose own people think he is a god, the most powerful man alive. They walk in and say, "God says that my people gotta go." Pharaoh does what you and I would do: he asks, "Who is this god?" And God says, "Let me show you." And they bring out the staffs. "Aaron, throw down your staff." He throws down his staff and it turns into a snake. Pharaoh says, "I can beat that," and he brings out his sorcerers and magicians, and with maybe occult ways their staffs turn into snakes too.

What's with the snakes? Have you ever seen pictures of the pharaohs, King Tut, and the gold figures? They have a strange headdress. You may not have ever noticed this before, but that strange headdress is a cobra. Sitting right there on the head. The point is this: snakes represent power. Why is this the first thing that happens? Snakes vs. snakes. Because it represents the whole of all 10 plagues. It represents the whole of the Bible. It represents all of human history. God says, "There is a conflict between the power of the people and my power. And, Pharaoh, your days are numbered. My snake is going to win. It will swallow you whole." It's representative of all of history. If you don't believe that, some day you will find out. God is saying, "I really am God. 'Who is the Lord?' Let me show you."

That makes some of you nervous because you are thinking, "Well, Pharaoh's not such a bad guy." Let's take a look at what we looked at last week. God is restoring the neighborhood. Beautification project of the world. And Pharaoh is the gang leader who says, "No, you can't restore. No, I'm going to keep people addicted to crack. No, you can't fix up those houses. No, God, I am opposing you; your people cannot leave; they will be slaves." And God says, "Then I will oppose you. Pharaoh, your days are numbered."

The point is this: "Reality does my bidding, not yours. I can push the override button on physical laws, and reality does my bidding." If God really exists, and if God really made the universe, then God programmed certain things into the DNA of the entire universe. "This is the way it works; this is the way it won't work." Are you with me? If you spend your life opposed to God, you spend your life banging your head against a wall. Some of you are doing it this morning and you are wondering why it keeps hurting. Because God made reality, and to go against the way God made reality is to rip your soul apart. To go against the very fabric of the universe. It's to take this blueprint that engineers and architects have pored over and said, "This is the only way these walls will stand up; this is the only way this house will work" -- and you reject it as a falsehood and then wonder why your life is falling apart.

Listen, you don't need me to prove that to you. You see it every day where you live, in your very life. In the woman you've known who for 20 years has sought love in the arms of men, who has a whole history of a broken heart, who is so bruised and battered and has a mountain of regret. She's just been banging her head against the wall. The man who has finally come to the top of his career only to find a very expensive dust. You know it because you live it. That many, many, many men in this room have had your view of sexuality so twisted and deformed, because you're the porn generation, and you think it's just a bad or even funny habit. You don't realize that you are ripping your soul apart. And you know what you're doing to the women? And you know what's happening to you, women? And we don't believe that we are destroying ourselves? I see it all the time. "I'm going to have relationships soaked in alcohol. I'm finally at college. Parents aren't looking over my shoulder any more. It's my time; it's my life. It's going to be great." And you know, that card gives out somewhere around your junior or senior year, if you're lucky. If God is being merciful to you, it gives out around your junior year, and you go, "Those relationships are so superficial." For some of those folks it doesn't give out until 40 or 50, and the scars are so numerous by that time. This is what the Bible says, and just consider that it might be true. God knows how your soul works, what is healthy for you, what would bring you life and health, and he wants to give it to you. Whenever we say, "No, God, I don't want to do it your way" we are ripping ourselves apart. He doesn't have to destroy you. We will destroy ourselves. Pharaoh destroys himself.

The other side of the coin is this: Reality is made by God, my soul, relationships, marriage are made by God, and I do it his way. Guess what? It doesn't become easy, but it becomes a blessing. You begin to reintegrate. There's a verse in Colossians that says, "In Christ everything holds together." You know what that means? If you are not in Christ, you are falling apart. And you may have fallen apart to such a degree you don't even know you're falling apart. In Christ your soul begins to integrate and to reintegrate and to become more what it's supposed to be again. And so, what that looks like is this: For your marriage, you have to forgive each other because God says that's the way marriage works. You have to quit keeping accounts, because that's how marriage breaks. You've been keeping accounts for 20 years and your marriage is falling apart because you may be a Christian, but you're not doing Christian marriage. Christian marriage is this: You have to really forgive each other, which means you take that account, you lay it before the Lord and say, "I will absorb this cost instead of you," and you throw it away. And guess what? Your marriage begins to come back to life again. Do you understand what I'm saying? Because God brings healing.

I just want to tell you a little bit about my life, real briefly. There was a time in my life when I was falling apart, and I began to wonder, "Who is the Lord?" And I began to believe that he is who he says he is, and that Jesus enters into people's lives, as crazy and as wild and as wonderful as that really sounds. He really comes into people's lives. He's like Aragorn in Return of the King, and he goes into the houses of healing, where nobody else will go, and he begins to heal people. The hands of the King are healing hands. He began to heal my life 24 years ago. I began to believe that he really was the Lord, and he took me through some "bricks without straw" time that didn't last for just a day or a week or a month. I put myself through some. This room is full of people who need healing, who need the King. And God says, "I am the Lord." Now, at some point that has to be more than information that you receive, something that you really do business with for the first time or the thousandth time. Is he Yahweh? Is Jesus the unplague? The unplague who puts things back together?