The book of Exodus opens with an improbable cast of characters taking on Pharaoh: five women, four of them slaves, one, a princess. This text’s rich tapestry of detail invites us to consider God’s love for the downtrodden and his contempt for unjust power. I hope that this historical record of God’s action will encourage you in your own struggles.

In Exodus chapter 1, a tense plot arises: first, the king of Egypt enslaves Israel living in the land. Then, he places two principal midwives (presumably the two head midwives) in charge of culling the population by executing newborn baby boys.

Exodus 1:17-20. But the midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live. So the king of Egypt called the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this, and let the male children live?” The midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.” So God dealt well with the midwives. And the people multiplied and grew very strong.

This is one of few examples in Scripture where lying was a good thing to do. The midwives, asked to defend the growing Hebrew baby boy population, bluff. I can see them now, shrugging and holding up their hands, these Hebrew women just give birth so fast! God loves that they fear him over the Egyptian king, and in contrast to Pharaoh, who remains unnamed throughout the entire Exodus account, both midwives’ names are memorialized in the text.

This people group had Pharaoh concerned, but his initial plan to crush them failed; in verse 20, the text reads that “the people multiplied and grew very strong.” Nothing Israel’s principal enemy did could halt the growth and expansion of the people of God—on the contrary, their population exploded.

It’s here that the hero of Exodus is born:

Exodus 2:1-4. Now a man from the house of Levi went and took as his wife a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son, and when she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him three months. When she could hide him no longer, she took for him a basket made of bulrushes and daubed it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child in it and placed it among the reeds by the river bank. And his sister stood at a distance to know what would be done to him.

The desperate courage of Moses’s mother shocks me. In response to the midwives, Pharaoh has incited his people to commit genocide, killing the Hebrew boy babies. And by Moses’s mother’s actions, we can tell that the danger is real; she carefully hides him. Around three months of age, she hatches a do-or-die plan: put him in a waterproof basket on the river and see what happens next.

This 12-week-old infant could suffer death by exposure, drowning, or a wild animal. Why is it Moses’s sister who waits? Is the baby’s mother too afraid to watch?

Exodus 2:5-6. Now the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her young women walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her servant woman, and she took it. When she opened it, she saw the child, and behold, the baby was crying. She took pity on him and said, “This is one of the Hebrews’ children.”

When Pharaoh’s daughter sees Moses, she knows immediately that he is a Hebrew. The textual implication—he has been circumcised. Where the midwives dissembled (and rightly so), Moses’s courageous parents chose brutal honesty. They rejected the temptation to pass him off as an Egyptian, instead bestowing on him the quintessential mark of their people and effectively saying, “Here. A Hebrew.”

Exodus 2:7-9. Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and call you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?” And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Go.” So the girl went and called the child’s mother. And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child away and nurse him for me, and I will give you your wages.”

Many children fear talking to strangers. But here, Moses’s sister speaks first to a member of the royal family oppressing her people and offers to find a nursemaid. The princess’s shrewd response emphasizes that she will pay, not Pharaoh’s household. We get the sense that, in her mercy, Pharaoh’s daughter plans to keep her Hebrew baby a secret.

Someday, he will grow into the man who leads Israel out of Egypt. Pharaoh doesn’t know it yet, but he has been foiled by five brave women: two midwives, a courageous mother, a sister willing to address a princess, and finally, his own daughter.

When I read this masterful, brief narrative, my heart exults; but unlike us, reading this story in a book thousands of years later, God’s people were not in on the plan. Israel was crying out to Yahweh in their suffering. And while God planted the seeds of their deliverance, preparing the ground little by little for an epic showdown that would culminate in Israel marching out of Egypt in power, no one knew.

Are you enslaved, burdened by circumstances? Do you feel trapped by a person, a disease, a situation, an inability? It may be that the change you’re waiting for is just around the corner, and God hasn’t told you because he doesn’t need you to know the details; he needs you to walk in faith. The Exodus text records that Yahweh’s people begged him for help, and “their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. And God heard their groaning” (Exodus 2:23–24). We are privileged to cry out to the same God who rescued them.

Our culture obsesses over the evils of American slavery. But do our secular counterparts know that millennia before the Civil War, it was Yahweh who set the captives free? Pray to him, the original deliverer, the first redeemer, in your troubles, and encourage people you meet to do the same. In the end, we await the return of the Lord Jesus, who will set it all right in this cursed and difficult world. While we walk in the circumstances of this troubling life, our deliverer is coming.