Why Are You Crying to Me?

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to move on

Exodus 14:15

Don’t you just love the leadership of Moses? Well, I do. Imagine him leading the people to the bank of the Red Sea and there was nowhere else to go. Going forward was death by water, and going backwards was death by the sword.

This was when the people started looking at Moses with very uncomfortable gazes. “They said to Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? Didn’t we say to you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone; let us serve the Egyptians’? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!” (Exodus 14:11-12).

So, Moses turned to God to cry for help but God’s response to Moses was quite interesting. “Then the Lord said to Moses, “Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to move on. Raise your staff and stretch out your hand over the sea to divide the water so that the Israelites can go through the sea on dry ground” (Exodus 14:15-16).

Why are you crying out to me? God asked Moses. I thought to myself, “Why doesn’t he cry out to the Lord?” But God went on to explain why Moses’s cry was needless. He said to him, “Use the staff in your hand.” With this staff, Moses had turned the Nile into a pool of blood, having mesmerised the magicians of Egypt. Yet, somehow, he didn’t think this staff could make a way through the Red Sea until God opened his eyes to see that the staff in his hand could do so much more than it was being used for.

PRAYER