Today’s Passage: Exodus 5
We come now to a hard and honest chapter, and I would not have you skip past its hardness, for it is one that many a believer has lived through without a name for it. Moses has met God at the bush and been sent with a word of deliverance, and here at last he stands before Pharaoh and speaks it: let My people go. And instead of the doors of Egypt swinging open, they slam shut with a bang. The king does not tremble, he sneers, and he asks the question that the whole rest of the book will spend itself answering: who is the LORD, that I should obey Him? Then, out of pure spite, he makes the slavery worse than it was before, taking away the straw and demanding the same tally of bricks, until the very people Moses came to rescue turn on him in their misery and blame him for their deeper pain. And Moses, bewildered and stung, carries the whole thing back to God with a complaint on his lips. Hold this near as you read, because it is a truth every honest walk with God eventually meets: the first result of stepping out in obedience is not always relief but a heavier load, and the God who sends us does not always spare us the valley on the way to the deliverance He has promised.
As you read, hold this: Pharaoh scorned a God he did not know, the burden grew heavier, and Moses learned that obedience often deepens before deliverance comes.
Context The world of Exodus 5
To read this chapter rightly you must understand who Pharaoh believed himself to be. He was not merely a king among kings. In the religion of Egypt the Pharaoh was reckoned a god in his own right, the living son of the sun, the divine link between heaven and the land, and every knee in his kingdom bent to him as to a deity. So when Moses walks in and tells him that another Lord, the God of a nation of slaves, commands him to release his workforce, the demand strikes at the very root of everything Pharaoh thinks he is. His scornful reply, who is the LORD, that I should obey His voice, is not idle rudeness. It is the honest ignorance of a proud man who has never met the true God and cannot imagine a power above his own. And that one question, tossed off in contempt, is the very question the plagues will be sent to answer, until this god-king learns in ruin what he would not learn in a word.
You must also understand the labor these people did, for the Bible is not speaking in poetry when it names their misery. The Israelites made mud bricks by the thousands, the standard building block of Egypt, mixing river clay with chopped straw and treading it out and pressing it into molds to bake hard in the sun. The straw was no small thing, for its fibers bound the brick and kept it from crumbling, and until now the masters had supplied it. Pharaoh’s cruelty is exact and calculated: he takes away the straw but demands the same daily quota as before, so that the slaves must now scatter across the land to scavenge stubble for themselves and still deliver every last brick. It is a burden designed to break both the back and the spirit, dressed up in the lie that the people are merely lazy.
And see how the cruelty runs downhill and lands, as it always does, on the weakest. The Israelite foremen, their own countrymen set over the work gangs, are held to account when the quota falls short, and they are beaten for a failure that was never theirs. Bruised and desperate, they appeal to Pharaoh himself and are met only with contempt, and then, on their way out from that hopeless audience, they turn their bitterness where bitter men so often turn it, upon the very men God sent to save them. May the LORD judge you, they say to Moses and Aaron, for you have put a sword in Pharaoh’s hand to kill us.
That is the hardest truth this chapter lays down, and we must not soften it. The first fruit of Moses’ obedience was not freedom but deeper suffering, and the first thanks he received was blame from the people he came to rescue. It is no wonder that the chapter ends with Moses himself carrying his confusion straight back to God, asking why He has brought this trouble at all. He is learning what every servant of God must learn sooner or later, that the path of obedience often dips down into a darker valley before it ever climbs toward the promised deliverance.
Exodus 5:1-2 (BSB)
¹ After that, 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 feast to Me in the wilderness.’” ² But Pharaoh replied, “Who is the LORD that I should obey His voice and let Israel go? I do not know the LORD, and I will not let Israel go.”
Notice the quiet boldness of how Moses and Aaron begin, for they do not come with a request of their own but with a word from Another. This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: let My people go. They stand before the mightiest man on earth as mere messengers, and there is a great steadiness in that, for a servant who carries God’s word need not lean on his own authority. The demand is plain and it is holy, that the people be released to hold a feast to their God in the wilderness, to worship the One who made them and to whom they belong. From the very first sentence the contest is drawn as a contest over worship, over who has the right to the lives of these people, the god-king of Egypt or the living God of heaven.
And then comes Pharaoh’s answer, and I want you to hear the full weight of it, because it is the darkest sentence in the chapter. Who is the LORD, he says, that I should obey His voice? I do not know the LORD, and I will not let Israel go. Here is a man looking straight at the demand of the Almighty and shrugging. He does not yada, pronounced yah-DAH. Strong's H3045, to know, especially by experience or intimate acquaintance. When Pharaoh sneers that he does not know the LORD, it is one of the great words of the Old Testament beneath that “know.” It does not mean only to have heard a name or to hold a fact in the head. It means to know by acquaintance and by experience, to know deeply and truly, the way a man knows a friend or a shepherd knows his sheep. So Pharaoh is confessing more than ignorance of a name. He is declaring that this LORD is nothing to him, unmet, unrecognized, unacknowledged, a stranger he owes no allegiance. And that single word becomes the hinge on which the whole book will turn. For the same verb that Pharaoh throws down here in scorn, God will pick up again and again in the chapters ahead, until the plague-struck king and all his people and all the Israelites too will know by hard and undeniable experience that He is the LORD. Pharaoh boasted that he did not know God. God resolved that he would. The distance between those two sentences is the distance the plagues were sent to close, so that a proud man who would not know his Maker by a gentle word would come to know Him by an outstretched arm. this God, and worse, he does not care to know Him, and out of that ignorance flows his defiance. It is a terrible thing to see a soul so wrapped in its own greatness that the very name of God stirs nothing but contempt. Yet mark this well, for it is the seed of the whole book: Pharaoh has asked a question, and God will answer it. He has said he does not know the LORD, and before the story is done, he and all Egypt will know Him, whether they will or no. The God who is scorned here is the God who will make His name unforgettable.
Exodus 5:3-5 (BSB)
³ “The God of the Hebrews has met with us,” they answered. “Please let us go on a three-day journey into the wilderness to sacrifice to the LORD our God, or He may strike us with plagues or with the sword.” ⁴ 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 labor!” ⁵ Pharaoh also said, “Look, the people of the land are now numerous, and you would be stopping them from their labor.”
See how humbly Moses and Aaron press their case a second time, for there is no arrogance in these two men, only faithfulness to their errand. The God of the Hebrews has met with us, they say, and they ask again for the three-day journey to sacrifice, warning gently that it is dangerous to leave the command of such a God unheeded, lest He strike with plague or sword. They are not threatening Pharaoh with their own power; they are pleading with him to reckon honestly with a God he does not yet fear. It is the kindness of a warning, the last soft word before the hard ones come.
But Pharaoh will not hear it, and notice how his mind works, for it is the mind of every hard master since. He does not weigh whether the demand is true or right. He sees only labor and its interruption. Why do you draw the people away from their work, he snaps, get back to your labor. To him these are not souls made in God’s image with a right to worship their Maker; they are hands, units of production, and their groaning for God is nothing but idleness that must be stamped out. Look how numerous they are, he adds, as though the very increase God had promised Abraham were now only a larger threat to be managed. A heart set against God cannot see people as anything but tools, and a heart set against God cannot hear the cry for worship as anything but laziness. Pharaoh’s blindness is the blindness of every power that has ever valued the work of hands above the worth of the ones who bear them.
Exodus 5:6-9 (BSB)
⁶ That same day Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters of the people and their foremen: ⁷ “You shall no longer supply the people with straw for making bricks. They must go and gather their own straw. ⁸ But require of them the same quota of bricks as before; do not reduce it. For they are lazy; that is why they are crying out, ‘Let us go and sacrifice to our God.’ ⁹ Make the work harder on the men so they will be occupied and pay no attention to these lies.”
That same day, the Bible says, and the speed of it tells you how the demand for worship enraged him. Pharaoh does not merely refuse; he retaliates, and he does it at once. He calls in his taskmasters and issues the order that will crush the people harder than ever: no more straw, yet not one brick fewer. Let them scatter to find their own binding for the clay, and still deliver the full daily count. It is a cruelty engineered to be impossible, a quota that cannot be met, so that failure and punishment are built into every single day.
And listen to the lie Pharaoh tells to justify it, for it is the oldest slander of the oppressor. They are lazy, he says, that is why they cry out to go and sacrifice to their God. He takes the deepest and most sacred longing of these people, their hunger to worship the LORD, and calls it a cover for sloth. Make the work harder, he commands, so that they are too exhausted and too occupied to pay attention to these lies. There it is laid bare, the strategy of every power that would keep a soul from God: bury it in toil until it has no strength left to lift its eyes. Pharaoh knows, in his own dark way, that a people crushed beneath endless labor will have no breath for prayer. It is a grievous thing to see worship named a lie and rest from labor withheld on purpose, and yet how often the enemy of our souls still works this very way, piling on the burdens until we are too weary to seek the God who calls us.
Exodus 5:10-14 (BSB)
¹⁰ So the taskmasters and foremen of the people went out and said to them, “This is what Pharaoh says: ‘I am no longer giving you straw. ¹¹ Go and get your own straw wherever you can find it; but your workload will in no way be reduced.’” ¹² So the people scattered all over the land of Egypt to gather stubble for straw. ¹³ The taskmasters kept pressing them, saying, “Fulfill your quota each day, just as you did when straw was provided.” ¹⁴ Then the Israelite foremen, whom Pharaoh’s taskmasters had set over the people, were beaten and asked, “Why have you not fulfilled your quota of bricks yesterday or today, as you did before?”
Now watch how the king’s cruel word travels down through his officers and lands with full force on the backs of the poor. The taskmasters carry Pharaoh’s decree out to the people almost in his own words, a bitter echo: no more straw, gather it where you can, and no reduction in the count. And so the whole nation is set running. They scattered all over the land of Egypt to gather stubble, the Bible says, and you can picture it, a people already worn thin now spread across the fields, snatching at the dry leavings of harvested grain, hauling it back, and still expected to press out every brick that had been pressed when the straw was handed to them ready. The task has become a treadmill that never slows and never can be satisfied.
And here the suffering finds its sharpest point, and it falls on the foremen, the Israelite overseers caught between an impossible demand from above and their own struggling people below. When the quota inevitably falls short, they are the ones dragged out and beaten, held to account for a failure no man could have prevented. Why have you not made your quota, they are asked, as though the answer were not written plainly in the empty place where the straw used to be. There is a special grief in this, that the blows land not on Pharaoh who ordered the cruelty, nor even on the taskmasters who enforced it, but on the weakest and most helpless men in the chain, punished for the very injustice done to them. So it often is in a world under sin, that the burden runs downhill and the innocent bear the bruises, and it is exactly such misery that the God of heaven had already come down to end.
Exodus 5:15-19 (BSB)
¹⁵ So the Israelite foremen went and appealed to Pharaoh: “Why are you treating your servants this way? ¹⁶ No straw has been given to your servants, yet we are told, ‘Make bricks!’ Look, your servants are being beaten, but the fault is with your own people.” ¹⁷ “You are slackers!” Pharaoh replied. “Slackers! That is why you keep saying, ‘Let us go and sacrifice to the LORD.’ ¹⁸ Now get to work. You will be given no straw, yet you must deliver the full quota of bricks.” ¹⁹ The Israelite foremen realized they were in trouble when they were told, “You must not reduce your daily quota of bricks.”
In their desperation the foremen do the only thing left to them; they take their case straight to the top, to Pharaoh himself, and their appeal is honest and just. Why are you treating your servants this way, they ask, no straw is given yet we are commanded to make bricks, and now we are beaten though the fault lies with your own officials. It is a fair and reasonable plea, laid before the one man with the power to lift the burden. They still imagine, poor men, that if only the king understood, he would relent. They do not yet grasp that the king understands perfectly, and that the cruelty is not a mistake to be corrected but a plan to be defended.
And so Pharaoh gives them no mercy, only the same slander twice over. You are slackers, slackers, he throws back at them, that is why you keep asking to go and sacrifice to the LORD. Once again he names their longing for God as mere laziness, and once again he refuses the straw and demands the bricks. The door that the foremen hoped to open is shut and bolted in their faces. They came seeking relief and left knowing there would be none, realizing, the Bible says, that they were in serious trouble, trapped between a quota they could not fill and a master who would not bend. There is a hard lesson here about the limits of appealing to earthly power, for there are hearts so set against God and so hardened against mercy that no reasonable plea will move them. When Israel’s help finally comes, it will not come from softening Pharaoh’s heart; it will come from the hand of God overpowering it.
Exodus 5:20-21 (BSB)
²⁰ When they left Pharaoh, they confronted Moses and Aaron, who stood waiting to meet them. ²¹ “May the LORD look upon you and judge you,” the foremen said, “for you have made us a stench before Pharaoh and his officials; you have placed in their hand a sword to kill us!”
Here is perhaps the most painful moment of all, and it is one that every servant of God should mark well. The foremen come out from Pharaoh crushed and bitter, and there stand Moses and Aaron, waiting anxiously to hear how it went, and the whole weight of the people’s anguish comes down on the two men who came to help them. May the LORD look upon you and judge you, the foremen cry. You have made us a stench before Pharaoh, you have put a sword in his hand to kill us. Think of it. Moses had brought them the greatest news in four hundred years, that God had seen their misery and come down to save them, and now, because the first result was pain, they curse him for it and wish God’s judgment upon his head.
We must be tender with these worn-down men, for their bitterness is the bitterness of people who have been beaten and can see no farther than their fresh bruises. But we must also learn from their error, for it is one we are all prone to. They measured Moses’ obedience by their immediate comfort, and when obedience made things harder before it made them better, they concluded he must be wrong. They could not yet see that the deepening of their trouble was the very birth pang of their deliverance, that God was letting the darkness thicken so that His light, when it broke, would be unmistakable. How many a faithful servant since has met the same sting, blamed by the very ones he sought to bless, because the good God intends had not yet arrived and the cost had already come. It is a lonely place to stand, and Moses stood in it. Yet notice where the story goes next, for a wiser man than his accusers, Moses does not turn on them or on himself. He turns to God.
Exodus 5:22-23 (BSB)
²² So Moses returned to the LORD and asked, “Lord, why have You brought trouble upon this people? Is this why You sent me? ²³ Ever since I went to Pharaoh to speak in Your name, he has brought trouble on this people, and You have not delivered Your people in any way.”
And so the chapter ends not in triumph but on Moses’ knees, with a complaint on his lips, and I love the Bible all the more for showing it to us plainly. Moses returned to the LORD, it says, and he does not come with polished praise but with the raw and honest ache of a confused heart. Lord, why have You brought trouble on this people? Is this why You sent me? Ever since I spoke in Your name, things have only grown worse, and You have not delivered Your people at all. Here is a servant of God at the end of his understanding, unable to square the promise he was given with the pain he now sees, and pouring the whole contradiction out before the God who sent him.
Do not be quick to scold Moses for this, and do not miss the mercy in where he takes his trouble. He does not abandon the errand, he does not curse God as Pharaoh scorned Him, and he does not, like the foremen, turn his bitterness on other men. He takes it to the only place it belongs. He returns to the LORD, and he lays his confusion honestly at the feet of the One who alone can answer it. That is faith, even when it wears the face of a complaint. Faith is not always the calm assurance that all is well; sometimes faith is simply refusing to take your questions anywhere but to God. And here is the great encouragement folded into this dark ending: the chapter closes with a question, but the next chapter opens with God’s answer. Moses cries that God has not delivered His people in any way, and God is about to say, now you will see what I will do to Pharaoh. The complaint was not the end of the story. It was the doorway into the mightiest display of God’s saving power the world had ever seen.
Study notes Going deeper
Read Pharaoh’s defiance and you might imagine, for a moment, that God’s plan had been knocked off its course, that a hard king had somehow cornered the Almighty. Scripture will not let us think so. Even the hardened heart of the mightiest ruler on earth is not outside the reach of the God who made him, and the very question Pharaoh flung down in scorn, “who is the LORD?”, is the question God had already determined to answer in full.
"The king’s heart is a waterway in the hand of the LORD; He directs it where He pleases." Proverbs 21:1 (BSB)
Take comfort in that, for it means Pharaoh was never truly in charge of this story. His defiance did not defeat God’s plan; it served it. The proud heart that would not bend was, all the while, a channel of water in the hand of the LORD, turned exactly where God pleased, so that in resisting deliverance Pharaoh only set the stage for a deliverance more glorious than a willing king could ever have allowed. Long afterward the apostle Paul looked back on this very Pharaoh and told us plainly what God was doing.
"For the Scripture says to Pharaoh: “I raised you up for this very purpose, that I might display My power in you, and that My name might be proclaimed in all the earth.”" Romans 9:17 (BSB)
There is the answer to Pharaoh’s question, and there is the reason God let the burden grow heavier before He broke it. Pharaoh asked, who is the LORD, that I should obey Him? He was about to find out, and so was all the world, for the God he scorned would make His power known through the very man who defied Him, until His name was proclaimed across the whole earth. So do not be dismayed when your first step of obedience is met with a heavier load and a harder road, and do not conclude too quickly that God has failed you. The darkness of Exodus 5 was the setting in which the light of God’s mighty deliverance was about to blaze, and the God who let Moses carry his complaint back up the mountain had already resolved to answer it. Obedience often deepens before deliverance comes, but the God who sends us has never once lost His grip on the outcome.