Exodus 6 — I Am the LORD, and I Will Redeem You

Today’s Passage: Exodus 6

At the end of the chapter before this one, Moses had come away from Pharaoh crushed and bewildered. His first errand had gone wrong, the burden of the slaves had only grown heavier, and the people who once bowed and worshiped at his coming now turned on him in their misery. So Moses did what a beaten man does. He carried his complaint straight to God, and it was a bitter one: why have You brought this trouble on this people, why did You ever send me, You have not delivered Your people at all. Chapter six is God’s answer to that complaint, and I want you to see what the answer is made of. It is not a rebuke, and it is not a lecture on patience. It is a flood of promise, seven great pledges chained one to another, each beginning with those two steadying words, I will. When His servant is at the end of himself, God does not hand him a strategy. God hands him His name and His word. He says, in effect, look away from Pharaoh and look away from yourself, and look at Me, for I am the LORD, and I have bound Myself by covenant to carry this thing through to the end. Hold that near as you read, because the whole book of redemption is folded into these promises, and behind every one of them stands the God who cannot lie.

As you read, hold this: When His people were too crushed to listen, the LORD staked His own name to a chain of I will promises to bring them out, redeem them, and take them as His own.

Exodus 6:1 (BSB)

¹ But the LORD said to Moses, “Now you will see what I will do to Pharaoh, for because of My mighty hand he will let the people go; because of My strong hand he will drive them out of his land.”

Hear how God answers a discouraged man. Moses had just accused Him of doing nothing, of making things worse, of abandoning the very people He had promised to save. And God does not answer the accusation in kind. He answers with a promise so sure it is spoken as though already done: now you will see what I will do to Pharaoh. Moses had been looking at the closed fist of the king; God turns his eyes to the mighty hand of the LORD. There is a wonderful patience in this. When our faith fails and we speak to God more sharply than we ought, He is not quick to strike back at us. He is far more likely to steady us with His word, to lift our gaze off the trouble in front of us and set it on Himself. And notice the strange promise here, that Pharaoh will not merely let them go but will drive them out, that the very hand set so hard against them will one day thrust them free. God can make even the rage of a tyrant serve the release of His people.

Exodus 6:2-5 (BSB)

² God also told Moses, “I am the LORD. ³ I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as God Almighty, but by My name the LORD I did not make Myself known to them. ⁴ I also established My covenant with them to give them the land of Canaan, the land where they lived as foreigners. ⁵ Furthermore, I have heard the groaning of the Israelites, whom the Egyptians are enslaving, and I have remembered My covenant.

Now God grounds everything in who He is, and He begins where all our comfort must begin, with His name. I am the LORD, He says, and it is the same great name that spoke from the fire at Horeb, the name of the God who simply is, self-existent and unchanging and forever faithful. To the fathers, He goes on, I appeared as God Almighty, and under that name I made and kept My promises to them. But there is a fuller knowing of God still to come, for a promise made is one thing and a promise performed is another, and now the God who swore to Abraham is about to be known as the God who saves. The patriarchs walked by the covenant word; their children will walk out of Egypt by the covenant deed.

And see what holds the whole thing together across the centuries: I established My covenant, and I have remembered My covenant. When God says He remembers, He does not mean that something had slipped His mind and now returns to it. He means that the hour has come to act on what He has never for one moment forgotten. For four hundred years the groaning of the slaves had risen to heaven, and it might have seemed to them that no one heard. But God says plainly, I have heard the groaning, I have remembered My covenant. The covenant was the anchor the whole time, holding fast beneath the storm, and the deliverance that is about to break over Egypt is nothing more nor less than God keeping a word He gave to three old men long ago. What steadies us is never our grip on the promise, but the promise itself, held fast in the hand of the God who made it.

Exodus 6:6-8 (BSB)

⁶ Therefore tell the Israelites: ‘I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians and deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. ⁷ I will take you as My own people, and I will be your God. Then you will know that I am the LORD your God, who brought you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. ⁸ And I will bring you into the land that I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I will give it to you as a possession. I am the LORD!’”

Here we come to the summit of the chapter, and I would have you slow your reading and take the promises one at a time, the way you would count out great coins into your open hand. Seven times God says I will, and each pledge is a solid link in a chain that runs from the brick pits of Egypt all the way to the promised land. I will bring you out (יָצָא) yatsa, pronounced yah-TSAH. Strong's H3318, to go out, come forth; to bring out, lead forth. The chain of promises opens with this verb, and the same word comes back again and again through the rest of the book, for it is the word that names the great event Exodus is built to tell. It means simply to go out, to come forth, and in the form God uses here it means to bring out, to lead forth, to carry a people out of one place and into another. It is the word behind the very name Exodus, the going out. What makes it precious is whose hand does the bringing. Israel could not bring themselves out; slaves have no power to walk free. So God takes the verb onto Himself, I will bring you out, and stakes His own arm to the doing of it. When at last He would number the greatest thing He had ever done for them, this is the phrase He would reach for over and over, the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. To be one of God’s people is to be one of the brought-out, carried by His hand from a bondage we could never have broken on our own. from under the yoke. I will deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem (גֹּאֵל) goel, pronounced go-ALE. Strong's H1350, kinsman-redeemer, one who redeems or avenges on behalf of a relative. This is one of the great words of the Bible, and it stands at the very center of the seven promises. It does not mean simply to rescue in a general way. It is the word for the kinsman-redeemer, the near relative whose duty and privilege it was to step in and buy back what his family had lost, to pay the price for a relative sold into slavery, to reclaim a lost inheritance, to take upon himself the burden of one who could not save himself. When God uses this word of what He is about to do for Israel, He is saying something tender and staggering at once: He is not a distant deliverer working from far off, but a near kinsman stooping close, taking their cause as His own family business, paying out His own strength to buy them back. The same word had already been spoken over the fathers, when old Jacob blessed his grandsons and called on the Angel who had redeemed him from all harm. And it runs on ahead of Egypt, straight to the cross, where the true near Kinsman took our flesh and paid with His own blood to buy back a people who had sold themselves into a bondage far deeper than Pharaoh’s. Every time you meet the word redeem in Scripture, hear this beneath it: God drawing near as family to pay what we could never pay. you with an outstretched arm. I will take you as My own people. I will be your God. I will bring you into the land. I will give it to you as a possession. From first to last it is all God’s doing, all God’s word, all God’s arm. The slaves contribute nothing to this list but their need. Every verb belongs to the LORD.

And feel the shape of it, how it moves. It begins by pulling them up and out of what holds them down, the yoke and the bondage broken, and it ends by planting them safe and settled in a land of their own, given not as a loan but as a possession that is truly theirs. But the golden verse stands in the middle, and it is not about a place at all but about a Person: I will take you as My own people, and I will be your God. That is the true goal of every deliverance. God does not merely free the slaves from Pharaoh; He takes them for Himself, binds Himself to them as their own God and claims them as His own people, and that belonging is the treasure the whole long road was leading to. Then, He says, you will know that I am the LORD. They knew the name before, but they will know it in a new and unforgettable way once they have seen it keep every one of these promises. And the passage seals itself the way it opened, with three words that need no argument beneath them: I am the LORD. When God has said that, He has said everything. The pledges rest not on the strength of the people who hear them but on the character of the God who speaks them.

Exodus 6:9 (BSB)

⁹ Moses relayed this message to the Israelites, but on account of their broken spirit and cruel bondage, they did not listen to him.

Here is one of the saddest lines in the chapter, and one of the most honest. God had just poured out seven promises of pure gold, and Moses carried every one of them faithfully to the people, and they did not listen. It was not that the message was too small. It was that the hearers were too broken. Their spirit had been crushed and their bondage had grown cruel, and long suffering had done its bitter work, until hope had been ground out of them and they could no longer take in even the best news ever spoken to slaves. I want you to be gentle with them as you read this, and gentle with yourself if you have ever been there, for a heart worn thin by hardship is not always able to receive comfort even when comfort is true. There are seasons when sorrow presses so heavily that the sweetest promises seem to slide off the soul. And here is the mercy hidden in the verse: their unbelief that morning did not cancel a single word God had spoken. The promises did not depend on the people’s power to feel them. God would bring them out whether they could believe it yet or not, and in time the doing would open the ears that the telling could not reach.

Exodus 6:10-13 (BSB)

¹⁰ So the LORD said to Moses, ¹¹ “Go and tell Pharaoh king of Egypt to let the Israelites go out of his land.” ¹² But in the LORD’s presence Moses replied, “If the Israelites will not listen to me, then why would Pharaoh listen to me, since I am unskilled in speech?” ¹³ Then the LORD spoke to Moses and Aaron and gave them a charge concerning both the Israelites and Pharaoh king of Egypt, to bring the Israelites out of the land of Egypt.

The people would not listen, and now Moses himself begins to falter, and his reasoning is easy to follow. If my own people, who long for freedom, will not hear me, he argues, how could Pharaoh, who wants nothing but to keep them, possibly listen? And besides, he adds, returning to the old wound he brought up at the burning bush, I am unskilled in speech, a man of stammering lips, no orator to sway a king. There is something very human in this. Discouragement spreads inward from others to ourselves; the closed ears of the people become the excuse for the doubting heart of the messenger. Moses measures the errand once again by his own smallness and finds himself wanting, as we always will when we weigh God’s callings against our own abilities.

But watch how God answers, for He does not stop to argue the point. He simply renews the charge and widens it, speaking now to Moses and Aaron together and laying on them both a commission that concerns Israel and Pharaoh alike, to bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt. God does not deny that Moses is weak; He never did. He only refuses to let Moses’ weakness be the last word on the matter, because the strength for the task was never meant to be Moses’ own. The charge stands, and it stands not because the man is equal to it but because the God who gives it is. When the LORD lays a command on us, He does not wait for us to feel adequate. He gives the charge, and He goes with it.

Exodus 6:14-19 (BSB)

¹⁴ These were the heads of their fathers’ houses: The sons of Reuben, the firstborn of Israel, were Hanoch and Pallu, Hezron and Carmi. These were the clans of Reuben. ¹⁵ The sons of Simeon were Jemuel, Jamin, Ohad, Jachin, Zohar, and Shaul, the son of a Canaanite woman. These were the clans of Simeon. ¹⁶ These were the names of the sons of Levi according to their records: Gershon, Kohath, and Merari. Levi lived 137 years. ¹⁷ The sons of Gershon were Libni and Shimei, by their clans. ¹⁸ The sons of Kohath were Amram, Izhar, Hebron, and Uzziel. Kohath lived 133 years. ¹⁹ The sons of Merari were Mahli and Mushi. These were the clans of the Levites according to their records.

Right in the middle of the drama, just as the two brothers are charged to go and face the throne, the narrative stops and opens a family record, and it is easy to feel the story has paused for no reason. But look closer at how the list is built, and you will see it moving with purpose. It begins with Reuben, Israel’s firstborn, and then Simeon, the next in order, and then it comes to Levi and slows down, as if it had been walking briskly down the line of Jacob’s sons only to arrive at the one it truly meant to reach. From here the record narrows, tracing Levi’s three sons and their families with care, laying the branches of one particular tree. This is not a bare heap of names. It is a road being built, name by name, toward the two men God has just sent out, and the whole point of it is to show that the deliverers were no strangers dropped from the sky but sons of a real family with a real place in the covenant people.

Exodus 6:20-27 (BSB)

²⁰ And Amram married his father’s sister Jochebed, and she bore him Aaron and Moses. Amram lived 137 years. ²¹ The sons of Izhar were Korah, Nepheg, and Zichri. ²² The sons of Uzziel were Mishael, Elzaphan, and Sithri. ²³ And Aaron married Elisheba, the daughter of Amminadab and sister of Nahshon, and she bore him Nadab and Abihu, Eleazar and Ithamar. ²⁴ The sons of Korah were Assir, Elkanah, and Abiasaph. These were the clans of the Korahites. ²⁵ Aaron’s son Eleazar married one of the daughters of Putiel, and she bore him Phinehas. These were the heads of the Levite families by their clans. ²⁶ It was this Aaron and Moses to whom the LORD said, “Bring the Israelites out of the land of Egypt by their divisions.” ²⁷ Moses and Aaron were the ones who spoke to Pharaoh king of Egypt in order to bring the Israelites out of Egypt.

Now the road reaches its destination, and the whole purpose of the list shines out. Amram and Jochebed of the house of Levi had two sons, and their names were Aaron and Moses, and there at last the genealogy stops and points. Do not rush past the two little verses that close it, for they are the reason the record was written: it was this Aaron and this Moses to whom the LORD said, bring the Israelites out of Egypt, and these were the ones who spoke to Pharaoh. Twice the passage sets their names down and ties them to the great commission, as though pinning a badge on each brother. The list has taken flesh-and-blood men, given them a father and a mother and a tribe and a grandfather, and set them squarely inside the family of the covenant, so that when they walk into Pharaoh’s hall we know exactly who they are. God’s great deliverances do not come through phantoms. They come through named men, born of named parents, in a real line the Lord had been preparing all along. And I will let you notice, without dwelling on it, how tenderly honest the record is, for tucked into this very list are Korah, who would one day rebel, and Nadab and Abihu, who would offer strange fire, and also Phinehas, who would be zealous for the LORD. The family of the deliverers was a family of ordinary people, no better in themselves than any of us, and God used them anyway. That is grace, written into a genealogy.

Exodus 6:28-30 (BSB)

²⁸ Now on the day that the LORD spoke to Moses in Egypt, ²⁹ He said to him, “I am the LORD; tell Pharaoh king of Egypt everything I say to you.” ³⁰ But in the LORD’s presence Moses replied, “Since I am unskilled in speech, why would Pharaoh listen to me?”

Having set the two brothers firmly in their family, the chapter now picks up the thread it had laid down, and God speaks to Moses again with the same great word that has framed the whole passage: I am the LORD. Then comes the charge once more, plain and simple, tell Pharaoh everything I say to you. And once more Moses answers with his old reluctance, since I am unskilled in speech, why would Pharaoh listen to me? You may wonder why Scripture lets us hear the same doubt twice over, and I think it is a mercy that it does, for it tells the truth about how faith actually grows in a real man. Moses did not step from fear to boldness in a single clean stride. He wavered, and circled back to the same worry, and had to be met by the same God saying the same steadying name yet again. If your own heart returns to its familiar fears more often than you wish it would, take comfort here. God was not finished with Moses because he doubted twice, and He is not finished with you. The chapter that began with a crushed and complaining servant ends with that servant still weak, still stammering, and still standing under the hand of the God who says I am the LORD, and that is enough. The strength was never in the man. It was always in the name.