“During those many days the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel—and God knew.”
This image is really built around that last phrase, ” – and God knew.” The Hebrew word for “know” there can mean simply “to know” or “to be aware of”, however it can also mean “to know by experience.” Now, when Moses wrote this passage, he was certainly not intending his readers to think that God “knew by experience” the suffering of His people in Egypt. However, from our post-Calvary vantage point, we can say with biblical authority that our God DOES know our sufferings BY EXPERIENCE (Is.53:4, Hebrews 2:17, 4:15).
When Christ lived a human life on this earth, bore our sins on the cross and was crushed under our punishment, He – Our Lord and God – knew by experience every facet of suffering that a human being could undergo.
So, we can look back at this passage and say – with biblical authority – that when it says, “and God knew,” bound up in that phrase is the truth that God experientially knew the sufferings of His people in slavery…and He knew this through His incarnation and suffering and death….
Because of the Incarnation, because of the Cross, we will never experience something the likes of which God Himself does not know by experience….There is, without question, no God like YHWH.
