Throughout the Bible so far, God has continually expanded his relationship with his people. He began by entering into a marriage-like covenant with Adam and Eve, chose a family of people to carry His flame of faith in his covenant with Noah, chose a tribe based around an extended family when he entered his new covenant with Abraham. Israel is God's First-born, the son of God's heart, the apple of His eye. He's not just the Creator, He's a loving Father, and he wants to be father to all nations once again. In Exodus, in particular during these passages of struggle against Pharaoh, we see the loving Father God go to bat for His children Israel in the most tremendously real way they have seen in four hundred years. As Jesus said, "Would any father give his son a stone when he asked for bread?" God the Father wants to give the Hebrew people an amazing gift, a gift he promised Abraham almost five hundred years before, of deliverance and restoration. It is to be a gift they're never supposed to forget.
When Moses challenges Pharaoh directly for the first time, he is challenging a man raised to believe himself divine. When God sends Moses to him to pry Israel from his grip, God is saying to Pharaoh, "Want to be a god? Be a father." A good father feeds, protects, guides his children, as God does after he frees Israel. Pharaoh believes that divinity is about receiving whatever praise, whatever sacrifice he can get. To be divine is to be adored and feared, to control by fear and to take whatever your power can rip from people. Hebrew people were his Cinderella stepchildren, to be used to the benefit of his "real" subjects.
Moses asks, humbly and respectfully, for a few days to offer sacrifice to Yahweh, but Pharaoh refuses for many reasons. First, he sees sacrifice as a zero-sum game...if sacrifice of material goods, of time, of love is given to Yahweh, they do not come to him. Pharaoh believes in many gods, of which he is one, but he is tempted to consider himself the greatest, and a people who openly deny this are a danger to his self-image, his adoration by the Egyptian people, and his political power. The fewer the better, and since infanticide didn't work, working the people to death is a pretty good Plan B. Pharaoh laughs off Yahweh as no threat to him, and decides to prove his godlike power by ordering a ridiculous and petty extra burden (straw-gathering) on already tapped-out people. God, as a father, is waiting on the correct moment to most effectively demonstrate just how powerless and wrong Pharaoh is. He is no father, only a foolish dictator.
Moses fears he has failed because of his trouble communicating, his "uncircumcised lips," but in the moment of crisis he turns to his Father for help. God responds by reminding him that He has been a father to Israel throughout the centuries...Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob knew him as a loving father...but that, in the symbol knowing God's Name, Moses and the Israelites of his day had come to know God so much more than they. God would, as a father does, bail them out of difficulty at a moment He knew to be precisely the right one, that four hundred years of waiting was perfect timing. He would see that Israel's perserverance would make them stronger and more virtuous, and that they would know His fatherly love even more now. As a teenager, one often struggles against one's father, but they come to know his love when he comes to the rescue. Sadly, the people were not ready to allow themselves a spark of hope, so crushed were they.
God the Father had not been idle during those four hundred thirty years of slavery. He had watered the family tree of Levi, preparing the branch that would bear Moses and Aaron. Their credentials were "legit," as one might say...and the legacy they would leave is highlighted by the mention of Aaron's grandson Phinehas, a man we'll meet later, honored for his burning zeal for God. God has pruned and prepared, waiting for this man Moses whom He would use to restore his people to His own loving care. Yet one more time, however, Moses does not fully realize what God has done to prepare for him, and reminds God of his weakness, difficulty in communicating his message. The Father is going to use him in a spectacular way, but Moses cannot do it alone.
