Why Should I Obey the Lord (Exodus 5:1-3)

3/18/2008 5:44 PM
SPIRITUAL DIARY
My Worship Time  Focus:  Pharaoh:  “Why should I obey the Lord?”
Bible Reading & Meditation  Reference:  Exodus 5:1-3
 Message of the verses:  “1 ¶  And afterward Moses and Aaron came and said to Pharaoh, "Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, ‘Let My people go that they may celebrate a feast to Me in the wilderness.’"  2  But Pharaoh said, "Who is the LORD that I should obey His voice to let Israel go? I do not know the LORD, and besides, I will not let Israel go."
3 ¶  Then they said, "The God of the Hebrews has met with us. Please, let us go a three days’ journey into the wilderness that we may sacrifice to the LORD our God, otherwise He will fall upon us with pestilence or with the sword.’”
God had promised Abraham that his descendents would live in a foreign country for 400 years and be treated harshly, and then God would rescue them from where they were living and bring them into the Promised Land.  This message would have been passed down from generation to generation for all of these years and therefore these people should be looking for a person to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, which I think some of them were doing.  Now comes the first confrontation with Pharaoh and first of all he believes that he is a god himself, and second he probably has never heard of the God of Israel, but perhaps he has from the slaves in Israel.  Pharaoh has a source of free labor and he surely does not want to loose them and so he must have thought that Moses and Aaron were just trying to trick them into allowing the Israelites to escape and he wanted nothing to do with that. 
Moses does at first ask Pharaoh to allow the children of Israel to go into the wilderness to sacrifice to the Lord, but does not tell them how long, and then he tells Pharaoh that they want to go three days into the wilderness to sacrifice to the Lord, however this would not be enough time to go to Mt. Sinai and so I am not sure as to why he said three days.  Perhaps because of his conversation with the Lord he knew that Pharaoh would not allow this.
Moses tells Pharaoh that if they would not go into the wilderness that God would fall upon them with pestilence or with the sword.  This statement is somewhat confusion to me because God would eventually fall on Egypt with judgments and not Israel, although God did judge Israel for sins they committed while in the wilderness and at Mt. Sinai.  If Pharaoh would have believe Moses and Aaron concerning the judgments’ from God he may have let them go just because he would not have wanted to loose his workforce.
Spiritual meaning for my life today:  I think that what I can learn from this section of Scripture is that you have to start somewhere, and maybe at first you will not get exactly what you want you still have to work at it and then when failure comes you have to go back to the Lord and ask for more direction and then continue on until the process is completed with the help and guidance of the Lord. 
God seems to be giving me directions to continue to work on this project to get our funds back from Andrew even though there has been many failures and setbacks, but to keep on praying and to keep on asking advice and wisdom from God and then be faithful to the Lord by doing what He is leading me to do.
My Steps of Faith for Today:  Trust the Lord to show me the steps he want me to follow in order to be used by Him in order to receive our funds back from Andrew.