1 And the Lord spake unto Moses, Go unto Pharaoh, and say unto him, Thus saith the Lord, Let my people go, that they may serve me.

Now begins the back-and-forth exchange between God and Pharaoh. There is a basic pattern that these discussions will follow:

• God demands that Pharaoh let the Israelites go serve Him
• Pharaoh refuses
• God sends a plague upon the land
• Pharaoh begs Moses to take the curse away, promising to let the Israelites go
• Moses beseeches the Lord and the curse is removed
• Pharaoh reneges on his promise

There might be some variations on that pattern here and there, but that’s generally how it will continue until Pharaoh finally relents. And this, of course, is the pattern that we so often see in our own lives. God calls us to live a better life, but we turn down those impulses to maintain our hedonistic pleasure or quiet complacency. Something goes wrong in our lives and we ask God to take it away, in the moment dedicating ourselves to Him, body and soul. God shows us grace, and we are grateful…but we don’t make good on our promise to better serve Him. We go back to our old ways and so it repeats. Our instinct might be to shake our heads at the strange actions of Pharaoh, but he is a representation of our own faithlessness.