God Hears, Remember, Sees and KNOWS

Exodus 2:24–25 (ESV) And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. 25 God saw the people of Israel—and God knew.

Exodus 2 ends on a strange phrase: "and God knew." We understand God knew things, but what does this text mean that He knew? It doesn't seem to finish the thought. We'd like to know what it is that God knew at that moment.

But that's just the point of the passage. God knew! That's all there is to it. And because God knows, it really doesn't matter what we think of it. It's going to end up being the perfect plan.

Think about this story from this phrase onward. Immediate the attention shifts from the Israelites suffering to Moses in the wilderness about to meet God.

From this phrase, God will call a reluctant Moses into the midst of their pain. Moses will first seem make things worse and the Israelites will question him and reject him once more. Then God will start sending plagues upon Egypt. Not random acts of power but specified acts that demoralize the Egyptians' trust in their own "gods" and prove there is no other God. The number 10 is significant. It is God's number for order, structure and creating life out of chaos. God said 10 things in Genesis 1 to create the ordered world. God will send 10 plagues to create His "new" people and give them 10 laws to enact His new ordered society.

In spite of all God does, the Israelites will go from moaning about Egypt to moaning about manna in short order. They will doubt Moses some more, complain about not being in Egypt and pretty much disparage the whole plan. It will go very badly at Kadesh Barnea when they refuse to trust His power to provide the promised land. On and on it will unfold: God will act and His people will not understand it.

THAT is the point of this last line in Exodus 2: "and God knew". It is this: to remind us simply that God knows what to do and many times we argue fuss and fight with him while He's doing it. The issue is not what we know or understand about God's ways and means of deliverance and work. The real beauty is God knows and we don't have to understand it all while He's doing it.

This matters for every stage of our lives. The stages when we wait for deliverance that seems to never come... God still knows. The stages when we do our best for God and encounter more resistance... God still knows. The stages when we are drifting and not even realizing how far we've faded away from Him... God still knows.

He knows! What a promise! He knows you, your situation, the right person to send, the right powerful work to perform, the right way in which to perfect His plan and purpose for your life.

God knows.

And that will often be all we can understand.