Praying for Help when You are Helpless: A God who Hears, Remembers, Sees, and Knows

Israel’s Cry for Deliverance

After almost 400 years of slavery in Egypt, Israel is recorded to have groaned and cried out for help.

During those many days the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. (Exodus 2:23)

Although there is no specific mention here as to whether the people are crying out to God, elsewhere Israel claims that the Lord heard their cry to Him.

Then we cried to the Lord, the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. (Deuteronomy 26:7; cf. Numbers 20:16)

God’s Response to Israel’s Cry for Deliverance

Israel’s cry for rescue “came up to God.” How did God respond?

And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel—and God knew. (Ex 2:24-25)

Moses records 4 verbs that explain God’s response to Israel’s groaning, their cry for help.

God heard their groaning.

Israel’s prayers did not go ignored. And this narrative is not the first in which God is recorded to hear distress. After Isaac was born and weaned, Hagar and Ishmael were sent away by Abraham into the wilderness with bread and water. After their water was gone, Hagar put Ishmael under bushes far away from her so she wouldn’t watch him die. She wept, and it seems that Ishmael did too, for this is what God said:

And God heard the voice of the boy, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Fear not, for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. (Genesis 21:17)

Even before Ishmael was born, God had earlier told Hagar to call him Ishmael, which means, “God hears.” He told her to name him this “because the Lord has listened to your affliction” (Genesis 16:11).

God is a God who hears when people are distressed.

God remembered his covenant.

Beginning in Genesis 12 (and repeated and expanded throughout Genesis), God promised Abraham land, blessing, and great number of descendants. Israel had certainly grown into a greater number, but they had no land and were experiencing oppression rather than blessing. But God had not forgotten his covenant.

“For God to remember is not to recollect accidentally, but to take action deliberately on what is recalled. . . . Even if they had not cried out, even if life in Goshen had been serene and idyllic, God still would have delivered them. He cannot be faithful to his covenant and do otherwise.”¹

God is a God who remembers and is faithful to keep his promises.

God saw the people of Israel.

As noted earlier in Deuteronomy 26:7, God not only saw Israel, he saw their toil, their affliction, and their oppression. God himself told Moses:

“I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings.” (Exodus 3:7)

Again, this is not the first time God saw people in their distress. When Hagar fled from Sarai the first time and God gave Ishmael his name (as we noted above), he told her to return to her mistress and gave her a promise that he would multiply Ishmael’s descendants into an innumerable multitude. Hagar responded:

“Then she called the name of the LORD who spoke to her, You-Are-the-God-Who-Sees; for she said, “Have I also here seen Him who sees me?” (Genesis 16:13, NKJV)

God is a God who sees people.

God knew.

Although there is no direct object in that sentence, one can assume that what God knew was their sufferings, as he said to Moses in Exodus 3:7: “I know their sufferings.” Not only did he know, but he cared. He also told Moses to tell this to the elders of Israel:

“I am indeed concerned about you and what has been done to you in Egypt” (Exodus 3:16, NASB).

God is a God who knows what is going on in peoples’ lives.

We recall that God did indeed deliver Israel from Egypt. He promised that he would.

“I promise that I will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt to the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, a land flowing with milk and honey.” (Exodus 3:17)

And he delivered on that promise.

And the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great deeds of terror, with signs and wonders. And he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. (Deuteronomy 26:8-9)

What an encouragement it is to see examples of people in distress crying out to God and being heard, remembered, seen, and known. We know that God is a God who is faithful. We’ve seen him over and over keep his promises throughout the Old Testament, culminating with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ in the New Testament. We know that he will always be faithful to continue to keep them.

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Holly Huffstutler serves with her husband David, the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Troy in Troy, MI. She has a master’s degree in Biblical Ministries and blogs with him here where this post first appeared. Holly is a homemaker, raising and putting her four children through school.

Image by Pawel Grzegorz from Pixabay

1. Victor Hamilton, Exodus: An Exegetical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), p. 3). [↩]