To Bargain with God

Perhaps one of the first skills you learn in life is how to bargain or negotiate with people. You’ve seen this with a toddler and his mother or a teenager and his father. You see this in all kinds of contexts. In other words, you have something someone else wants and you want something they have. There is a negotiation. That is a useful life skill. However, there are times when you just cannot bargain.

Think about Pharaoh in Exodus 10. I don’t know how much Pharaoh had bargained in his entire life. Pharaoh was a god as far as the Egyptians were concerned. With whom would he need to negotiate? Whom would he see as an equal? I doubt he ever had to bargain for something. But when it came to God telling Pharaoh, “Let my people go,” Pharaoh wished to bargain with God. It was a type of soft rebellion.

Exodus 10:7 says, “And Pharaoh’s servants said unto him, How long shall this man be a snare unto us?” They were talking about Moses. The servants were saying, “Don’t you know that Egypt is being destroyed by the plagues that God is sending?” What follows is Pharaoh’s mindset on this play because Pharaoh tried to negotiate with God. There is a very important lesson here: to bargain with God is to deal with the devil. To bargain with God is to think, “God has something I want and I have something God wants. Maybe we can get together as equals and hash things out.” God doesn’t need you or me. God loves us and there is quite a difference.

So, to bargain with God assumes too much. It assumes I own things I don’t own. When God sent a message to Pharaoh, He said, “Let my people go.” They weren’t Moses’ or Pharaoh’s people, as in their property. They were God’s people.

To bargain with God also assumes I control things I don’t control. Pharaoh may have misunderstood when God said, “Let my people go.” Pharaoh heard, “You have all these people, Pharaoh, but would you please allow these people to go.” What Pharaoh did didn’t matter. God was going to accomplish His purpose with or without Pharaoh. God’s power was going to be seen. So, to bargain with God is to deal with the devil.

You can see this is in the way Pharaoh questions God. Verse 8 says, “And Moses and Aaron were brought again unto Pharaoh: and he said unto them, Go, serve the LORD your God: but who are they that should go?” He had questions. That is in stark contrast to verse 26 where Pharaoh is again throwing sand in the gears and slowing things down as to his obedience to God. Moses responds, “We know not with what we must serve the LORD, until we come thither.” He was saying, “I don’t know what we are going to need. Just let us go.”

It reminds me a bit of Hebrews’ account of Abraham where it says that Abraham obeyed “not knowing whither he went.” When God said, “Go,” Abraham said, “Yes, I will.” He didn’t know where he was going, but he knew what the next step was. That was obedience. We may not always know the long term, but we can always know the next step. That is where Pharaoh was balking. He pretended as if there were questions down the road, but it was really just the next step he was refusing. He said, “You can go, but who are they that shall go with you?”

Then, Pharaoh also just refuses. He contests God. In verse 11 when Moses tells him who will be going into the wilderness to worship Jehovah, he says, “Not so: go now ye that are men, and serve the LORD; for that did ye desire. And they were driven out from Pharaoh’s presence.” Pharaoh again misunderstood who was in ownership and control. He says, “Get out of here. You can go, but not the way you are saying.”

We do that sometimes. We know something is right, that it is in the Bible, but we question, “Is that really what God means? What is the Hebrew meaning of that word?” Now Hebrew and Greek are important, but it is funny that we don’t worry about those things unless it is something that cramps our style. We should not have an attitude of questioning, but an attitude of obedience. We should be curious. God is up to our questions, but we should not be throwing sand in the gears by questioning what God has clearly said. So, Pharaoh questioned God then resisted God as if it were a contest between Pharaoh as one god and Jehovah as another.

Finally, Pharaoh put conditions on his “allowing” Israel to do what God had said. Exodus 10:24 says, “Pharaoh called unto Moses, and said, Go ye, serve the LORD; only let your flocks and herds be stayed.” They could do what God said, but there was the condition. He obviously misunderstood who God was and who he was. He tried to put conditions on what God had said. That is a type of soft rebellion.

It is a maxim that you can only negotiate from a point of strength, meaning they have strength and you have strength; each has something the other wants. You can negotiate and bargain as equals. Ronald Reagan was a gifted negotiator. In the early years of his presidency, he fired the air traffic controllers in the country who were on strike even thou they had supported him. It was an audacious move. People didn’t think he would do it. Russia was watching however, and later on Reagan was able to negotiate with Gorbachev. Reagan got up and left the table when Gorbachev made an unreasonable demand.

The bottom line is that you can only negotiate from a point of strength. With God we have no strength. God is God. I am not. I don’t need to question Him, resist Him, or put conditions on Him. Those are forms of soft rebellion. Soft rebellion, not saying no but questioning or putting conditions on what I will do, is a hard heart. As we learned recently, a hard heart leads to a hard life.

So what do you do? You find out what God has said and you trust Him. That is what faith is. That is what Moses did. In Hebrews 11, he “by faith forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king: for he endured, as seeing him who is invisible.” To bargain with God is to deal with the devil, but to obey God is to live a life of action, progress, and strength.