Exodus 5:7 (ESV)—“The Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord, when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring out the people of Israel from among them.”
The arrow on the GPS screen bounced like a Ping-Pong ball. It faced north, then south, then east and west. It located my husband and I on at least three different Chicago streets. We needed only the one direction, the way to the interstate. We drove onward until the arrow meandered along the blue line for blocks at a time.
Moses and Aaron, too, pressed onward to travel to the wilderness to offer sacrifices to God. Like our route, their route to exodus from Egypt included a few trials. Pharaoh’s sorcerers and magicians repeated God’s signs—a staff into a snake, the plague of blood, the plague of frogs—to Moses and Aaron. Even once Pharaoh’s people couldn’t repeat the signs, Pharaoh reverted his promise to release Moses and Aaron along with the Israelites into the wilderness to offer sacrifices to God.
However, God had a plan for these signs and wonders: irrefutable proof of his sovereign reign.
In the trials of everyday life, the route we travel is not perfectly mapped out. Road blocks force a change of direction. Fog makes it hard to see where we’re going. Severe weather stops our trip altogether. Yet God is always leading us toward his truth during these uncertainties, toward hope.
To walk toward hope, we cannot harden our hearts as did Pharaoh. Instead, we can open our hearts to God’s divine direction and seek irrefutable proof of his sovereign reign.