From Bad to Worse / Exodus 5:1-23

I invite you to have a seat. My name is Mike, and it is great to be back with you. I am thrilled to be able to enter back into the text with you. We took a week off last week, so if you were worried that you missed a chapter of Exodus, you are okay. Brad covered chapters three and four two weeks ago, and we are going to work through the bulk of chapter five this evening.

We started this series a number of weeks ago with the overarching theme of redemption. This book is a picture of something that happened thirty-five hundred years ago, but it is also very much a picture of what has happened in our lives. It is a picture of God redeeming His chosen people. In chapter one, we saw God’s people enslaved in a nation that was not theirs. The Israelites were in Egypt for over four hundred years, enslaved to the Egyptians.

In chapter two and following, God raises up Moses. We saw him as a tiny baby born during a horrific time when Hebrew male children were being put to death by the Egyptians. Moses was hidden by his mother, Jochebed, placed in the Nile, and drawn out by Pharaoh’s daughter, who raised him in the palace. About forty years into his journey, Moses got a grand idea: God is going to use me to deliver the people. He stepped in, saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, and thought, Now is the time. I’m going to show everybody who I am. He essentially beat his chest and said, “Follow me! I’m the great deliverer!” But everyone looked at him and said, “Who made you ruler and judge over us?”

In that moment, Moses failed utterly. He mistimed and miscalculated what God wanted for him. He ran and fled to Midian, spending the next forty years in the desert. Overnight, he went from a somebody to a nobody—the exact opposite of an overnight success. Brad highlighted three lessons Moses desperately needed to learn during those forty years in the wilderness: humility, obedience, and dependence.

At the end of chapter two, we read an amazing statement: God heard, God remembered, God saw, and God took notice of His people. He heard their affliction and remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God said, “Now I am going to move.” He called Moses at the burning bush and said, “You’re my guy. Forty years after you thought you were ready—now that I’ve humbled you, now that you’re ready to walk in obedience—you are the man I need.”

By this point, Moses’ humility surfaced to the point of insecurity: “Oh no, Lord, You’ve got the wrong guy. I was that guy forty years ago, but not anymore.” God told him, “You are going to go speak to Pharaoh and tell him to let My people go.” Moses offered every excuse he could muster, but God didn’t buy them. Reluctantly, Moses went.

God promised He would be with him. When Moses doubted, God gave him signs: turning his shepherd’s staff into a serpent and making his hand leprous and then whole again. Moses took these signs, along with his brother Aaron, and went to the elders of Israel.

Exodus 4:31 (NASB)

So the people believed; and when they heard that the LORD was concerned about the sons of Israel and that He had seen their affliction, then they bowed low and worshiped.

The people believed. They heard that the Lord was concerned about the sons of Israel and that He had seen their affliction, and they bowed down and worshiped. For the first time in four hundred years, hope was in the air. For generations, they had assumed slavery was just their lot in life. But now, maybe something was going to change. As Brad mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Aslan was on the move. God was about to show up.

The Emergency Brake

That brings us right to chapter five. There is hope and expectation that God is about to move. Let’s watch what happens next.

Exodus 5:1 (NASB)

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.’’

Exodus 5:3 (NASB)

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.’

Moses went to Pharaoh, and if you compare this to what God commanded in Exodus 3:18, it is almost verbatim. Moses was humble and obedient. We are seeing a very different Moses. He told Pharaoh exactly what God said.

Look at Pharaoh’s response in verse two:

Exodus 5:2 (NASB)

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.’

“But Pharaoh…” That is never a good start. Whenever you see “but,” things are about to change. Pharaoh said, “Who is this Lord that I should obey His voice? I do not know the Lord, and besides, I will not let Israel go. I don’t know your God. I am the god of this land. I am Pharaoh. I dictate terms. I make the rules.”

Then in verse four, the king of Egypt added:

Exodus 5:4 (NASB)

But the king of Egypt said to them, ‘Moses and Aaron, why do you draw the people away from their work? Get [back] to your labors!’

What just happened? It is like someone pulled the emergency brake. We expected to see God move in power, deliver His people, and begin redeeming them, but it feels like we are reading the wrong chapter. God was not doing what they expected. In fact, things immediately got worse.

Exodus 5:5-8 (NASB)

Again Pharaoh said, ‘Look, the people of the land are now many, and you would have them cease from their labors!’ So the same day Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters over the people and their foremen, saying, ’You are no longer to give the people straw to make brick as previously; let them go and gather straw for themselves. ’But the quota of bricks which they were making previously, you shall impose on them; you are not to reduce any of it. Because they are lazy, therefore they cry out, ‘Let us go and sacrifice to our God.’

Pharaoh took a very different approach than his predecessor. The previous Pharaoh tried to eradicate the Hebrews by killing the boy babies. This Pharaoh said, “No, they are useful. They are my workforce. I would be crazy to let them go.” So he commanded the Egyptian taskmasters to tell the Hebrew foremen that the rules had changed. Previously, Egypt provided the straw needed to make mud bricks for buildings, walls, and store cities. Now, the Hebrews had to gather their own straw while meeting the exact same daily quota. Pharaoh’s verdict? “They are lazy. That is why they cry out, ‘Let us go and sacrifice.’”

When Life Goes From Bad to Worse

This is not how anyone expected the story to unfold. Have you ever had one of those days where things didn’t go as planned—where you thought, I would have been so much better off if I had never gotten out of bed this morning? When things go from bad to worse?

I remember during my freshman year of high school, I took an honors biology class—which was a mistake in and of itself. I was in there with all my buddies, goofing off during the lecture on plant classification: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Then came the lab. The teacher laid out all these different plants and said, “You are going to classify these plants using your own categories.”

My buddies and I were the class clowns. We looked at all the studious groups and thought, Let’s do something different. Let’s classify them by taste. So I started picking up leaves and flowers and putting them in my mouth. I had a white flower in my mouth when I looked up and saw my teacher’s eyes wide with terror. She flew across the room, screaming, “Michael, what are you doing?!” She slapped the flower out of my hand, dragged me into the hallway, and tore into me: “Mike, that is white oleander! It’s deadly poisonous!”

I was a city boy from Texas; I had no idea. She said, “I’m kicking you out of honors biology, and you will never take honors chemistry!” I thought, Honestly, that sounds great. I figured the lecture in the hall was the worst of it. But when I got home, my mom was standing in the kitchen with her arms crossed: “Michael, I just got a call from Poison Control. Do you want to tell me what happened in biology today?”

That was a day that went from bad to worse.

Those high school stories are funny looking back. But what happens when it is real life? What happens when it isn’t ninth-grade biology, but real life, and God is doing something entirely different than what you expected and wanted?

A couple of weeks ago, when I taught Exodus chapter one, I mentioned that I have been on staff at The Well since 2004. But I didn’t share the journey of how I got here. In college, I was pre-med until God clearly called me into vocational ministry. I left pre-med, went to Dallas Theological Seminary, and in 2001 went to work at Watermark Community Church in Dallas. I loved my time there. But about a year in, leadership came to me and another guy and said, “We are reorganizing, and your specific roles are dissolving. You can pick another area in the church, or take six months to figure out what God has next.”

My buddy transitioned into marriage ministry and is still doing it today. But I didn’t see an open role that fit my calling. So I decided to call my friend Brad Bell, who had planted The Well in Fresno about a year earlier. I asked, “Hey Brad, are you looking for staff?” He said, “Absolutely! Fly out with Michelle and let’s interview.”

My wife was seven months pregnant—literally a week away from the cutoff where doctors forbid flying. We flew out to Fresno, met with elders, spent time with Brad, and had a wonderful visit. My heart was completely in; I had known Brad for a decade and thought, Lord, this would be amazing. Brad thought so too, and so did the elders.

Then we were riding in a car with Harold Pinner, looking at houses. Brad was in the front passenger seat, and Michelle and I were in the back. I looked over, and my wife was weeping. I whispered, “Babe, what are you doing? You’re embarrassing me! What is going on?” The only person who did not want to move to California was Michelle. We sat down afterward, and Brad looked at me and said, “Mike, in good conscience, I cannot offer you this job knowing Michelle’s heart is not in it. She needs to be near family right now.”

I tried to put on my godliest face and say, “Of course, brother. God has another plan.” But underneath, I was furious. I went back to Dallas, sat down with a mentor, and said, “I feel like we took a compass, stuck the point in Dallas, drew a four-hour circle around it, and declared, ‘God, this circle is Your will, and anything outside of it is not.’”

Right around that time, God opened a door for a co-pastor role at a church in Sherman, Texas—forty-five minutes from where I grew up. It seemed perfect. I would be working with a good friend from seminary. We sold our house and moved. Three weeks into the job, I realized it was not what was advertised. My senior pastor and I clashed constantly. Thirty-minute meetings turned into three-hour shouting matches. The elders were divided. I dreaded going to work, and at home, Michelle was overwhelmed with a newborn and a toddler. I felt trapped.

Not even a year in, the senior pastor called me into his office and gave me an ultimatum on how ministry would run. I told him, “Robert, I can’t do that.” He handed me a box and said, “Pack your stuff. You’re done.”

I had held two ministry jobs, and both had ended in what felt like total failure. I thought, Lord, are You kidding me? I gave up pre-med, went to seminary, and tried to obey You—and this is what I get? I burned through all our savings in three months. We were living on a credit card. I called Brad back and said, “Brad, Michelle has had a change of heart through this trial. If there is still a role, we’re ready.” Brad replied, “Mike, I hired someone for that position two weeks ago. There’s no opening.”

I was so desperate to feed my family that I stood in the employment line at Target. I interviewed with the store manager—and I couldn’t even get a callback from Target. In that moment, I felt completely crushed. I thought, My vocational ministry is over. God, what are You doing? This is not how I mapped out my life. This is not how You were supposed to act.

The Anatomy of Despair

That is precisely where Moses finds himself in Exodus 5. When things go from bad to worse, and you cannot fathom how it could get any harder, there you are.

Remember what God was doing in Moses: cultivating humility, obedience, and dependence. Was Moses humble? Yes, almost to the point of insecurity. Was he obedient? Yes, he said exactly what God commanded. But was he dependent? You cannot learn true dependence in a classroom. Dependence is only forged in the lab of real life.

Pharaoh had a calculated strategy: increase the workload, turn the people against Moses, and crush their hope.

Exodus 5:9 (NASB)

‘Let the labor be heavier on the men, and let them work at it so that they will pay no attention to false words.’

Pharaoh wanted to extinguish the hope sparked by God’s promise. He called God’s words “false words”—a fantasy. And in verses ten through fourteen, the Egyptian taskmasters enforced the decree. The people scattered across Egypt, desperately scouring the fields for stubble to mix with mud. When the daily quotas were inevitably missed, the Hebrew foremen were beaten.

Exodus 5:15-16 (NASB)

Then the foremen of the sons of Israel came and cried out to Pharaoh, saying, ’Why do you deal this way with your servants? ’There is no straw given to your servants, yet they keep saying to us, ‘Make bricks!’ And behold, your servants are being beaten; but it is the fault of your [own] people.’

The foremen cried out to Pharaoh, appealing to him: “We are your servants! Why are you doing this?” But Pharaoh doubled down.

Exodus 5:17 (NASB)

But he said, ’You are lazy, [very] lazy; therefore you say, ‘Let us go [and] sacrifice to the LORD.’

The lightbulb went on for the foremen. The people had never asked to go sacrifice in the wilderness; Moses and Aaron had. When the foremen walked out of Pharaoh’s presence, they ran straight into Moses and Aaron waiting outside.

Exodus 5:20-21 (NASB)

When they left Pharaoh’s presence, they met Moses and Aaron as they were waiting for them. They said to them, ‘May the LORD look upon you and judge [you], for you have made us odious in Pharaoh’s sight and in the sight of his servants, to put a sword in their hand to kill us.’

They said, “May the Lord judge you, Moses. You have made us odious in Pharaoh’s sight. You put a sword in his hand to kill us!”

The Hebrew word translated “odious” or “stink” is ba’ash. It means abhorrent, putrid, foul. It is the exact same word used later in Exodus to describe the rotting dead fish lining the Nile after the first plague, and the piles of decaying frogs stinking up Egypt after the second plague.

If you have ever had young kids in the summer, you know the horror of a forgotten sippy cup of milk rolling under the car seat. A month later, in hundred-degree heat, you pull out that bloated cup, crack the lid, and the smell nearly knocks you out. You don’t even try to wash it; you throw the whole thing in the trash. That is the word the foremen used: “Moses, you have made us a rotting stench before Pharaoh, and you have handed him a sword to slaughter us.”

Moses’ obedience didn’t lead to instant triumph. It led to intense backlash. The very people he came to rescue were now cursing him. Pharaoh’s strategy had worked completely: work increased, the Hebrews turned on Moses, and hope was shattered.

Honest Agony Before God

Verses twenty-two and twenty-three are the heart of this passage. I want us to slow down and linger here.

Exodus 5:22-23 (NASB)

Then Moses returned to the LORD and said, ’O Lord, why have You brought harm to this people? Why did You ever send me? ‘Ever since I came to Pharaoh to speak in Your name, he has done harm to this people, and You have not delivered Your people at all.’

Aaron is not mentioned here. Moses went off alone with God and completely unburdened his heart. The text doesn’t explicitly describe tears, but I have to believe they were there. Moses was devastated, angry, and confused. He brought two piercing questions to God: Why have You brought harm to this people? Why did You ever send me?

The word translated “harm” in the ESV is “evil.” Moses was asking, God, why did You allow evil to happen? You said You would deliver them, but You haven’t done a thing. I obeyed You, I went to Pharaoh, and it blew up in my face. You haven’t kept Your end of the bargain.

Moses experienced a twofold disappointment: he was frustrated by Pharaoh’s rejection, but deeply wounded by what felt like God’s inaction.

We see a parallel to this in John chapter 11 with Mary of Bethany. Scripture introduces us to Mary three times, and every time she is at the feet of Jesus. In Luke 10, she sits at His feet learning while Martha prepares the meal. In John 12, she is at His feet anointing Him with expensive perfume before His crucifixion. But sandwiched between those two scenes is a heartbreaking moment.

Her brother Lazarus was deathly ill. Mary and Martha sent word to Jesus, knowing that if He came, Lazarus would live. But Jesus intentionally stayed across the Jordan two days longer, and Lazarus died. When Jesus finally arrived, Mary ran out to meet Him, fell at His feet in agony, and spoke the only words recorded from her in the entire Gospel of John.

John 11:32 (NASB)

Therefore, when Mary came where Jesus was, she saw Him, and fell at His feet, saying to Him, ‘Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died.’

She said, “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died. If You had operated the way I expected, this pain wouldn’t have happened. You had the power to fix this, and You didn’t show up.”

Her grief and confusion spilled out into a raw, honest lament. She was asking the question we all ask: How could a good, sovereign God allow this to happen? Jesus did not give her a theological lecture in that moment; He wept with her.

We are reading through the life of David in our residency program right now. In this season of David’s life, God stripped away every single earthly crutch David leaned on. It was painful and disorienting. As readers, we know the end of the story—David will eventually take the throne. Mary didn’t know that minutes later Jesus would call Lazarus out of the tomb. And Moses didn’t know that chapter six was coming, where God would powerfully reaffirm His covenant.

When we are in the middle of our own chapter five, we cannot see the ending. And if we are honest, we find ourselves deeply disappointed with God.

Lecture Theology vs. Lab Theology

When we feel that God has failed us, the reality is that God hasn’t failed—our limited theology of God has failed. There is a massive difference between the theology of the lecture and the theology of the lab.

What do you do when the God you thought you knew behaves in ways inconsistent with your expectations? How do you navigate the moments when God’s plan crushes your own? Let me offer two crucial insights from the lives of Moses, Mary, and David.

1. Embrace Your Theology

Notice how Moses and Mary begin their laments. In verse twenty-two, Moses returned to the Lord and said, “Adonai—Lord, Master.” Mary did the same in John 11: “Kyrie—Lord.” In their deepest anguish, they still acknowledged who God was. They didn’t run to temporary escapes to numb their pain. They took their confusion directly to the Master.

When I was in college, a woman named Margaret in Denton was battling terminal cancer. She was young, not much older than I am now. Some young women asked her, “Margaret, how are you navigating this season?” She replied, “You lean on your theology. In your deepest pain, when you feel nothing, you have to stand on what you know to be true about God. You have to know He is good when circumstances don’t feel good. You have to know He is sovereign when life feels entirely out of control.”

Moses’ theology wobbled because he expected immediate deliverance. But back in Exodus 3:19-20, God had already told him: “I know that the king of Egypt will not let you go unless compelled by a mighty hand. So I will stretch out My hand and strike Egypt with all the wonders that I will do in it; after that he will let you go.” God had warned Moses that Pharaoh would resist. But Moses wanted God to act instantly. We must let our theology anchor us when reality defies our timetable.

2. Allow the Lab to Deepen Your Intimacy with God

Our honest reactions in suffering reveal what we truly believe about God. In Sherman, Texas, I wanted a “Superman God” who would swoop down, change my circumstances, and make my path easy. We often want a genie-in-a-bottle deity who shows up on our terms and does what we demand. But when we demand that God serve our script, who is actually on the throne in that picture?

Dependence cannot be learned from a textbook, a sermon, or a theological lecture. It is learned in the messy laboratory of life. It is learned when your bank account is empty, your children need food, you feel entirely inadequate, and the manager at Target won’t even call you back. In that place, God asks: Do you trust Me? Can I still be God in your life even when everything falls apart?

Author Carolyn Custis James wrote beautifully about Mary’s crisis of faith in her book When Life and Beliefs Collide:

“God brings us here to feel such pain and through it to know the depths of our need for him. He uses our struggles to help us realize we don’t actually know him nearly as well as we think we do and to draw us closer to him. Difficult as it is to be here, this is where we do our best learning. Not theoretical, but the deeply personal learning to trust our God when he doesn’t fit our expectations.”

That is where real faith is forged.

The Anchor of the Gospel

Many of you are in that laboratory right now. You are walking through profound pain, broken dreams, and confusion. And if you aren’t there today, a day will come when your theology is tested in the lab of suffering.

I wish I could tell you that the Mike of fifteen or seventeen years ago has magically disappeared and that I never struggle to trust God. I still struggle. When things go wrong, my instinct is to point fingers and demand that God show me the final chapter right now. But we walk by faith, not by sight.

We have a privilege Moses did not have: we look back on this story through thirty-five hundred years of redemptive history, centered on the cross of Jesus Christ. At the cross, God proved His unshakable love and commitment to redeem us. In Jesus, we have a High Priest who is not distant from our pain, but who suffered on our behalf, wept over our grief, and conquered death.

If you find yourself in Exodus 5:22-23 tonight—crying out “Why?” into what feels like silence—do not run away from God. Run to Him. Lean on your theology. Trust Him in the middle of the story, and let the lab of life draw you into deeper intimacy with your Redeemer.

Let’s pray.

Father, thank You that Scripture gives us honest pictures of real people. Thank You that Moses felt the freedom to pour out his anguish and confusion before You, and that You met him in that place. We know that chapter six is coming, and that You are faithful to deliver and redeem Your people in Your perfect time and way. When the road has more twists, turns, and hardships than we expected, give us the grace to trust You. Anchor our souls in the truth of the gospel. When everything around us shakes, be our constant. We pray these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.