So who do they blame? Just at the end of the last chapter they had bowed their head and worshipped and said, essentially, "This is a good plan." And here, by the time we get to the end of the next chapter, they are ready to string him up. They blame Moses for all their problems. You know, several hundred years later, Ahab called Elijah the troubler of Israel. That is essentially what they are saying about Moses at this point. "You brought this on us, Moses. It's all your fault. All your big demands from Pharaoh and he turned them around, and we've gotta pay, not you." I can imagine the conspiracy theorists among them thinking that Moses and Pharaoh were in this together. This was a grand conspiracy between Moses and Pharaoh because Pharaoh wanted to get more out of the Israelite slaves. So Moses had riled him up thinking that they were going to be sent out of the country and free. And now this was just a reason to make them work harder and produce more.
Here was a similar thing where God had promised him to be able to go before the throne of Pharaoh and get them out of Egypt. Instead, what does he get? Well, the waters get turned to blood, you know, that sort of thing, and Pharaoh's heart was made stubborn against him. So Moses questions God's purpose even before things had really gotten started.
We went to a couple scriptures last time. We went to Exodus 5:22 and saw there how Moses, after he had gone to Pharaoh and been rejected, thought that God was afflicting him for some reason. He could not see that there was something else building in God's work with Pharaoh through Moses.
