The Pleasure Principle (2)

Then Moses returned to the Lord and said, “Lord, why have You brought harm to this people? Why did You ever send me? Ever since I came to Pharaoh to speak in Your name, he has done harm to this people, and You have not rescued Your people at all.”  Exodus 5:22-23

Have not rescued – First, a look at the etymology and the interpretation.  The verb here is nāṣal.

Fisher writes:

The Qal stem of this verb does not occur in biblical Hebrew, but an Arabic cognate confirms the judgment that its basic physical sense is one of drawing out or pulling out.^[1]

The predominant occurrence of this verb is in the various aspects and moods of the Hiphil (causative: “make separate”) and that generally with the sense of deliver or rescue. . . Very close in basic concept are the three verbs (q.v.): gāʾal “redeem, release, set free,” ḥālaṣ “break away, withdraw; deliver, set free,” and pādâ “redeem, deliver, rescue, ransom.” ^[2]

Moses is complaining that ever since He took up God’s instructions, the people have suffered and God has done nothing to prevent this or to rescue them.  The verb makes it clear that Moses expected God to deliver Israel from the hand of Pharaoh.  He came with a message of freedom and redemption, and the result has been more tyranny and oppression.  In Moses’ view, God has failed to make good on His promise.  Serving God has not only caused distress for him personally, it has resulted in significant additional hardship for everyone.  There is certainly no pleasure in being God’s appointed liberator.

Why?

Avivah Zornberg adds some insightful analysis.  It’s worth reading all her remarks here.

“And it is because of this new awareness that the word of salvation becomes possible: ‘I know their pain—Therefore, I have come down to rescue them . . .’ (3:7-8)”[3]

‘Na’akah—the form of crying that God hears—is understood as the voice of the nechenak, the suffocated.”[4]

“At the heart of Moses’ skepticism about redemption lies a question—not about God’s power to liberate nations, on the historical plane—but about His concern, His love for those who are crushed, sunk into the larger structures of history.  His question ‘for the sake of Israel’ notably ignores any resort to the comforts of worlds beyond this, to transcendent rewards and revisions of reality.”[5]

“ . . . John Berger writes of the ‘finality of modern despair,’ which translates  the figure of death into scientific principle:

            In most earlier cosmogonies . . . time was cyclic and this meant that the ‘ideal’ original state would one day return or was retrievable . . . With entropy and the nineteenth century view of time, we face only the irretrievable and only dissipation . . .”[6]

“ . . . God defines Himself as the God of continual redemption; implicitly, catastrophically, God intimates that Jewish history will be one of continual crisis.  There will be other slaveries, other redemptions.”[7]

“What God wants is a hunger that has been worded.  An awareness of desire, of emptiness; and a narrative that connects this with a history, in which God is the source of the most basic satisfactions of the mouth.”[8]

What do these citations teach us?  First, that there is an inextricable connection between redemption and suffering.  What we experience in this world is not really abnormal.  It is the essential process of being redeemed.  Redemption isn’t possible in a perfect world.  Second, redemption is not about escape; nor is it about some coming perfection that will eliminate all forms of struggle.  If redemption is continuous, then God’s history, and our history with Him, will never be finished.  The “end of time” idea isn’t biblical.  We are not returning to an updated version of the Garden.  While the scientific world has fallen into the despair accompanying the Second Law of Thermodynamics, God offers another view—hope in a continual redemption.

Now the question: “How can I find pleasure in serving God?”  Apparently, it isn’t based on some future blissful reward.  It has to be experienced here and now.  Remember ḥāpēṣ?  aréskō?  eudokéō?  Those terms are not about blissful feelings.  They are about delight in performance, that is, understanding the greater purpose of divine partnership and being pleased because God is pleased.  I don’t measure pleasure serving God as sensual gratification, entertainment, or happiness for me.  I measure it in terms of its alignment with God’s goals and purposes.  It may be that the role I am asked to play leads to a cross, but it is still “the joy set before me” because it pleases Him.  That is the deepest, and perhaps the only, real pleasure.  Not some mansion in the sky, not honor and glory among men, not sensual indulgence; rather alignment with the Creator in whatever He asks.

Topical Index: ḥāpēṣ, aréskō, eudokéō, pleasure, service, Exodus 5:22-23

^[1] Fisher, M. C. (1999). 1404 נָצַל. In R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 594). Moody Press.

^[2] Ibid.

[3] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus (Schocken Books, New York: 2001), p. 36.

[4] Ibid., p. 41.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus (Schocken Books, New York: 2001), p. 43 citing John Berger, Keeping a Rendezvous (Vintage International, 1992), pp. 29-31.

[7] Ibid., p. 74.

[8] Ibid., p. 130.