When “the Israelites saw the great power the Lord displayed against the Egyptians,” Exodus 14:31, it was then that “they feared the Lord and put their trust in him and in Moses his servant.”
It was Yahweh’s show of power that did it. Not only was it hugely effective in focusing the Israelites’ trust in him, it would stir their kids’ imaginations at story time too, when telling of what happened back there in Egypt and how “With a mighty hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery,” Exodus 13:14, and all the amazing miracles he did to make it happen.
So Yahweh wasn’t shy about showing his power to kickstart trust in him. He clearly took into account that trust takes time. Abraham’s trust, for instance, was a bit shaky to begin with. How, for instance, could his children inherit the land of Canaan as promised in Genesis 12:7, when Yahweh hadn’t given him any children, Genesis 15:3? And how did Abraham know the land of Canaan would be his (8), when at this point in time there was no evidence to show that any of this would come true?
So Yahweh put on a show for him in verses 9-17, involving cutting a three year old heifer, goat and ram in half, arranging the pieces opposite each other, and at sunset “a smoking fire pot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces.” Whatever that meant, it succeeded perfectly in removing all doubt from Abraham’s mind.
Moses too was a bit hesitant to begin with when Yahweh said, “I’m sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt” in Exodus 3:10-11. Moses not only doubted he was the man for such a job, he doubted the Israelites would go for it too (4:1). So Yahweh put on a show for him, and later the Israelites too, by having Moses throw his staff on the ground and it turned into a snake, and then grabbing the snake by its tail to turn it back into a staff again (4:2-4). And what was Yahweh’s reason for this little display of his power? “This,” verse 5, “is so that they (the Israelites) may believe” – which they did (29-31).
So Yahweh wasn’t requiring blind trust in him. He happily provided evidence for trusting him in a show of his power. “For forty years the Israelites saw whai I did” (Hebrews 3:9): bitter water became sweet, their demand for bread and meat in the middle of a dry desert was met. So they had no reason to wonder in Exodus 17:7, then, “Is the Lord among us or not?”….(next blog)
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