Exodus 3:16, commentary and pictures

The first work given to Moses was to go and gather the elders of Israel together, and this gathering was to take place before he went in to confront Pharaoh. The elders to be assembled were the most noble and righteous men among Israel, those who had long grieved over the bondage of the people. His message to them was that the Lord God of their fathers, the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob, had appeared to him, had surely visited them, and had seen what was being done to them in Egypt. The Pharaoh whom he would then face was not the king who had sought his death, but a later king, since nearly all the kings of Egypt bore the title Pharaoh.

That divine attention to their affliction, joined with remembrance of the covenant, meant that the appointed time for Israel's deliverance had come. The visitation carried with it the promise to bring them up out of the affliction of Egypt into a fertile land of abundance, a land flowing with milk and honey. Moses himself would have preferred to lead Israel as a general in war against the Egyptians, but deliverance was not to come by warfare with Moses as military leader. Instead God would magnify Himself before His people and before the Egyptians, teaching both that there is a living God who has power to save and power to destroy.

The mission was God's work and not the result of human power, for God worked signs through Moses to prove to Pharaoh that God had sent him. Those signs backed the demand that Pharaoh release Israel so that they might serve God, showing that the great "I AM" had sent Moses. In this, Moses' deliverance of Israel from Egypt foreshadowed the first coming of Christ to free people from the power of Satan.