Escape - 27 November 2006

 

 

The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God.  God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob.  So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them. Exodus 2: 23-25

 The book of Exodus is meant as an historical account of an actual escape from captivity of the nation of Israel, the descendents of Jacob.  They began to live in Egypt to escape a famine but then found themselves treated as slaves building cities for the Pharaohs.  God decided to rescue His people in answer to their prayers for deliverance and the epic tale of the plagues of Egypt is one that many of us learned in school or Sunday school.  It ends in the telling of the great miracle of the Red Sea parting to let the children of Israel pass through and crashing down to drown their Egyptian pursuers.  My mental picture invariably includes Charlton Heston as Moses in the film The Ten Commandments, complete with long white beard and hair blowing in the wind.

So the journey of the Israelites became a journey of trust in a God that many of them barely knew, and the first lesson in trust was the Passover.  The blood of a lamb sprinkled on the doorpost protected them from the angel of death which killed the firstborn of the Egyptians.  That is the first lesson in trust that we learn as Christians, we have to trust God completely for our salvation.  It is no good trying to pretend that we can do it ourselves.  As we commit our lives to the Lord we acknowledge the death of Jesus on the cross and the blood of the Lamb that cleanses us from sin and protects us from the death of the soul.

For the Israelites the next step was to live in the desert between Egypt and Caanan for forty years before at last being allowed to enter their promised land.  And in a way that is what all of us are doing.  We are saved, we have escaped the slavery of sin but we are not quite in heaven yet.  We wander around in a wilderness between the two.  This sounds quite depressing (and it often was for the Israelites too) but it is important to remember that God himself is with them in it as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, ever present and always able to save them and bring them intact through the various dangers of their nomadic existence. 

During the next few days I will be sharing with you some of the experiences that shaped the journey of these ancestors of our faith and also shape our own faith journey but right at the beginning it might be useful to remember what we were saved from.

Sometimes the ‘fleshpots of Egypt’ seemed a siren call to these nomadic people in the dry dusty land they inhabited, or a least the famous irrigation methods which grew thirsty melons and cucumbers in a land that was naturally a desert.

What is your Egypt?  What have you been saved from?  Are there things that you miss about your old life? And where are you heading? Are you aware of God’s presence in the wilderness?