The main narrative arc of the book of Genesis took about forty chapters covering four generations: the stories of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and his wives, and Joseph and his brothers. The saga is told with many rich details and many side stories. In particular, we can read of many prayers, and many appearances of God to various individuals.

Israel’s sojourn in Egypt extended for a bit over four centuries. The book of Exodus tells us very little about this time. It gives us its “coverage” of this time in one brief chapter (Exodus 1:8-22). The book records for us not one single incident of “God spoke to so-and-so” throughout these years. It gives us no story about someone’s devout prayer. It does not even include the listing of any names of any Israelites during those four centuries except for two Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah (1:15).

Yet the text does manage to let us see the anguish of the people of Israel in bondage in Egypt. “The Israelites groaned under their slavery, and cried out. Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God” (2:23). At this point in the story, God heard their cry and sent Moses to call upon Pharoah to let the Israelites go. But think about that. That could not have been the first time they had cried to God for help. Their time in Egypt had lasted four hundred years; at the beginning their situation had been good, but after a few generations that decayed and they had ended up as slaves, and for three centuries or so their lives had been miserable. Surely they had been crying for help all that time.

And God had not delivered them. From generation to generation they had prayed that God would set them free, but they were still slaves. And even though God had not rescued them, they had taught their children to trust in the Lord, and to keep on praying that God would set them free from their terrible suffering. Each generation learned this lesson: each generation prayed for deliverance, taught their children to do the same, and then died still in slavery. I am in awe of their astonishing steadfast faithfulness across fifteen or twenty generations, despite there being no record of any appearance of God, and certainly no deliverance, during those centuries.

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Blessed be your name, O Lord: you are the deliverer of your people, setting us free from all our bondage. But we are not patient: we cannot imagine waiting for freedom for generations and centuries. Teach us to trust in you, teach us to be steadfast in faithfulness, even when it involves a future hope that we cannot even see.