Why did God command that Pharaoh let these slaves go?

Casual worship is a contradiction in terms.

No person ever comes into the immediate presence of a holy God in a cavalier manner.

You know the story, how the Jewish people had been enslaved under the tyranny of Pharaoh

and forced to make bricks even without straw. And they were miserable, and they cried,

and they wept, and they groaned. Until finally we read in the scriptures that God said, I have heard

the groaning of my people. And God then appeared in the Midianite wilderness to Moses. You know the story.

Moses, take off your shoes from off your feet, for the ground we're on your standing is holy ground.

And God gave the command to Moses to go to the court of Pharaoh, the most powerful leader

on the face of the globe.

And he went as a Midianite shepherd with the message from God, and he, as you know the

story, Moses goes to Pharaoh with this message from God that says simply, let my people go. Now, for the rest of the story, why did God command that Pharaoh let these slaves go. Was it simply because God was acting to rescue them from the misery of their

experience in slavery? Certainly, that was an important element of it.

But it's not the rest of the story.

It's not all of the story that Moses was commanded to speak to Pharaoh.

He said, let my people go.

So, that is for the purpose of, that they may come to my mountain and worship me there.

Now, that dramatic story of rescue in the Old Testament had as its ultimate goal that these people who were rescued might come and worship God.

And if we fast forward to the New Testament and we see the elaborate work of redemption

that Christ, the new Moses, had accomplished for us, saving his people, we know what he saved

them from. He saved them from the wrath of God. But the question is what did he save

him for? And the ultimate answer to that question, beloved, is for worship.

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