Three Days After - Exodus 14:1-9

14:1-9 - As the Israelites wind their way through the wilderness, going the way that God tells them, Pharaoh is getting pretty antsy, saying, “They are entangled in the land, the wilderness has shit them in.” TB notes that this is the description of a very specific type of environment where they are more like trapped in a crevice type place with elevated areas on the sides and a large body of water in front and wilderness behind them. He says that there are a few places like that geologically that the people could have been when Pharaoh decides to go after them.

TB also makes sure to mention that even though in the minds of the Hebrews, they were free forever, as far as Pharaoh was concerned, they had negotiated a three day journey into the wilderness so that the Hebrews could worship their God, then they would return. I think about this and wonder, would God lie to Pharaoh in order to get him to agree to something then change the terms? That doesn’t sound reasonable. If that was the case, then the Egyptians wouldn’t fear the Hebrew God, they would just say that the Hebrews didn’t honor the terms of their commitment. It seems to me that it’s probably something like, when Moses initially asked for the people to be let go, he offered the stipulation that they would return in 3 days, if Pharaoh had accepted that first offer. Since Pharaoh declined that first offer, the terms changed on subsequent encounters.

It’s like when Abinadi preached repentance to the people of King Noah, and they first time he said that if they repented, they wouldn’t be enslaved by the Lamanites, but they all rejected God’s call. The second time that Abinadi came around, he preached repentance and Alma and some other heeded the call and changed their ways and were therefore spared the death and destruction that was coming for everyone else that didn’t repent. However, after Alma and his people settled somewhere for a while, they themselves were also enslaved by the Lamanites and overseen by Amulon. Why were they enslaved if they had repented? They were enslaved because they didn’t heed the first call to repentance where freedom from bondage was offered. The accepted it the second time but by then the terms had changed and they had to suffer through the consequences that they accepted by rejecting repentance the first time. This is how I see it here with Pharaoh. Pharaoh might have assumed that the deal was still only for three days, but he had rejected that offer, so God changed the terms for deliverance which was basically, “ok you don’t want to let them go for three days and you are going to make me force you to obey, then they will leave forever and never come back.”

Pharaoh might have held out just the slightest amount of hope that the Hebrews were going to come back after three days, but I bet he knew that they weren’t. Angry and assuming that the people could be coerced into coming back, Pharaoh hardened his heart against God and the people and took “six hundred chariots, and all the chariots of Egypt, and captains over every one of them… and he pursued after the children of Israel… But the Egyptians pursued after them… and overtook them encamping by the sea.” We’ve all seen in the movies the stand off between the Egyptian army and the Israelites as the millions of civilians were basically trapped between a huge body of water and one of the greatest armies in the world at the time. I could only imagine the terror that the people were experiencing at this point.

I think it’s important to remember that these people didn’t have the Spirit always with them like we do. It’s easy to judge them as fickle or uncommitted, but they lived a completely different life than us, they experienced horrors that most of us can’t even imagine and they were staring down certain death with horses and unimaginable violence.