Exodus 1: The Coexistence of Blessing and Death, and the Responsibility to Respond

"So God was kind to the midwives and the people increased and became even more numerous. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families of their own. Then Pharaoh gave this order to all his people: 'Every Hebrew boy that is born you must throw into the Nile, but let every girl live.'" (Exodus 1:20-22, NIV)

Exodus 1 opens with a stark revelation: how God's faithful blessing becomes the very seed of the cruelest tragedy. The gift of fruitfulness and multiplication—considered the highest blessing of that era—returns to the Egyptians as fear and envy. God's blessing upon Israel paradoxically becomes the trigger that plunges them into the abyss of forced labor and genocide. Before this unsettling reality where blessing and death uncomfortably coexist within a single passage, we find ourselves asking: How can God's grace become the cause of suffering?

In this darkness, the midwives emerge like a ray of light through their decision of faith. They feared the invisible God more than human authority, and for this act of faith, God blessed them with flourishing households. Yet when we widen our lens even slightly, we see that this beautiful expression of faith immediately provoked an incomparably harsher and more systematic massacre order—to throw every Hebrew boy into the Nile. While the midwives' personal faith was rewarded, the entire community sank deeper into the mire. Here we confront the tragic limitation of human existence: even when we do good, we cannot fully bear the weight of the consequences our good deeds may trigger.

To make sense of this contradiction, we might speak of fourth-dimensional providence beyond our three-dimensional world, or suggest we must simply embrace the mystery like an ellipse with two focal points. But before the anguished cry of a mother forced to throw her son into the river, all theological explanations ring hollow. This life-and-death situation where God's blessing teeters on the edge remains a problem beyond our rational grasp. Our best understanding seems only to acknowledge the coexistence of blessing and curse, to extend time without immediate answers, and to long for God's kingdom.

Yet it is precisely at this point that Exodus reframes the nature of responsibility for us. God does not require us to perfectly control all outcomes or produce flawless results. That belongs to God's domain as the Lord of history. What God asks of the midwives—and of us today—is the responsibility to respond. To say "no" to the world's command to kill life, and "yes" to God's heart to preserve it. Our responsibility extends only that far. What butterfly effects that response may trigger, how much darker it may seem to make the world—these lie beyond our control.

This is by no means irresponsibility. Rather, it is the deepest form of faith confession: acknowledging our finitude and entrusting all outcomes completely to God's infinity. The midwives' righteous "no" provoked Pharaoh's frenzied command, which paradoxically led to a child being placed in a basket of reeds and set afloat on the river—and that very child later became Israel's deliverer. God uses even the worst consequences of human good deeds as the most dramatic staging for His salvation drama. Therefore, our task is not to hesitate while calculating outcomes, but simply to say "yes" when it's time for "yes" and "no" when it's time for "no," right here, right now. We must trust that these honest responses will gather together to accomplish God's salvation beyond anything we could dare imagine.