Exodus 5

“Don’t continue to supply the people with straw for making bricks, as before. They must go and gather straw for themselves. But require the same quota of bricks from them as they were making before and do not reduce it. For they are slackers – that is why they are crying out, ‘Let us go and sacrifice to our God.’”  Exodus 5:7-8 (HCSB)

The world is out for itself. Make no doubt about it. To the world (and worldly leaders), people are nothing more than resources. They are merely a means to a selfish end.

Pharaoh had one thing on his mind, and that was productivity. Because he was solely focused on the product of their labor, Pharaoh failed to recognize a key factor in the Israelites’ productivity: their spiritual well-being.

In that sense, Pharaoh is not very different from many employers in today’s workforce. This “slave mentality” towards employees was especially true of the Big Bosses of generations past, in the era of the Great Depression. Theirs was the generation of workers fighting against the industrialist giants and forming labor laws to protect work environments.

For such employers, you and I are expendable assets. We are like gasoline in a car’s tank or an air filter in a home HVAC. When the tank runs dry, or the filter gets soiled, you just have to refill and replace it. Most important to the heartless machine operator is that the car runs and the air flows. Who cares about the well-being of “expendable parts”? But isn’t a machine comprised of the sum of its parts? Therefore, every piece is integral to the performance of the machine.

The truth is, YOU are not expendable. You are EXPENSIVE! You are of such great worth to the Lord! In the eyes of God, people are not disposable resources to robotically do His bidding. God loves us, not for what we can do for Him. To Him, we have a value beyond our productivity. He doesn’t need us, but He WANTS us. And His desire to use us is simply because of His great affection for us.  

How much does God love us? He gave His life for us.  (Micah 5:2, John 3:16)

We don’t cry out and worship God because we are “weak slackers,” as Pharaoh alleged. We cry out because God created us with the expressed intent that we worship Him! He designed us to worship, and He invites us to enter into adoption as Sons and Daughters through our belief in His “Son,” Messiah Jesus. Worship is not a weakness; it is the height of performance when we reach our most productive potential.

Bob Dylan once sang, “You gotta serve somebody.”  Given a choice between the “Pharaohs” of this world and the Lord God, should we even have to think twice?