cry of the oppressed
Egypt, the superpower of its day, was ruled by Pharaoh who responded to the threat of the growing number of Israelites in his country by forcing them into slavery. They had to work sunrise to sunset without a break making bricks, building storehouses for Pharaoh. Egypt is an empire built on the backs of slave labor; brick by brick.
Imagine a little slave girl living in Egypt during this time asking her father why he has a bandage on his arm. And he tells her that he was beaten by his master today. She is of course inquisitive as to the reason. He explains that his recent quotas have been changed and he is now required to make the same amount of bricks as before; only now he must gather his own straw.
He tells her he has been falling behind on his brick production and that is why he has been beaten. She asks why the master couldn’t just let it slide – Why the beating? He explains that if his quotas aren’t met then his master will be beaten by his master, and if his master doesn’t meet his quota then his overseer will beat him and so on up the chain of command all the way to Pharaoh. The father tries to make his daughter understand that yes – the beating came from one particular man, but that man is just a part of a larger system, a complex web of power and violence and industry that exploits people for its expansion and profit. The bandage on the father’s arm is from a wound inflicted by one man, yet it is from an entire system of injustice. This girl’s family is facing an evil in the individual that has gone unchecked until it gathered a head of steam and is now embedded in the very fabric of that culture.
But right away in the book of Exodus there is a disruption. Things change; and the change begins with God saying,
Exodus 3:7
And the LORD said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows;
The Israelites are slaves, they are in misery, they are suffering and they cry out. They are starved, beaten, oppressed. Their children are mistreated. Their wives are second class citizens in a foreign land. They live in poverty and degradation. The culmination of 400 years of growing oppression at the hand of a tyrant dictator. They begin to make their supplication known and the bible says that God hears. This is central to who God is: God always hears the cry of the oppressed.
It is this cry that inaugurates history. It kicks things into gear. It shakes things up and gets things moving. The cry is the reason God moves. The plea of his people is what attracts the involvement of God. We focus on the miracles, the signs, and wonders of deliverance. We focus on the joy of deliverance but before they are carried on eagle’s wings to deliverance there is a cry of desperation. There is a voice of pain and weeping. The cry is the catalyst, the cause and the reason a new story unfolds. And it is all because of the cry of the oppressed.
Think about your life. What are the moments that have shaped you the most? If you were to pick just a couple, what would they be? Periods of transformation, times when your eyes where opened, decisions that you have made that have made you the person you are today. How many of them came when you reached the end of your rope? When everything fell apart? When you were confronted with powerlessness? When you were ready to admit your life was unmanageable? When there was nothing left to do but cry out? For many people it was your cry that set in motion your deliverance. It was their desperation, their acknowledgement of their oppression; that was the beginning of their liberation.
When we are on top, when the system works for us, when we are capable of managing our lives ourselves we have very little for God to do. But when we have exhausted all tangible resources the trajectory of our complaints begin to shift. When there is only one option and no other alternative, you lift up your head and raise your voice and begin to cry unto the Lord and he will doubtless deliver your life from destruction. It took Israel 400 years of back breaking oppression to finally cry out to God. It is a testimony of human dependance and self reliance. Shift your posture and realign your cry; stop complaining and cry out to some one who can actually do something about it. He always hears the cry of the oppressed.
