As some of you may know, I've been reading Josephus about the Exodus from Egypt. Coupled with our Sunday School lessons the past month in the Book of Exodus, several important lessons emerge from that study as well as recent ones that illustrate to me how the journey Out of Egypt is a metaphor for our own lives. It asks us to change ourselves and our destination and come closer to Christ.
Moving Out of Egypt
As long as Moses and his people remained in Egypt, they remained slaves to the baser nature of man and his oblique albeit futile quest for power. Under the Pharoahs, men are counted based on their associations rather than on merit, on their wealth rather than their virtue, and on the favor of another fallen man rather than on their favor with their Creator. In Egypt, everything was proscribed and provided. You did what you were ordered to do and received what others were ordered to give you. Someone else decided what options were available, and most men were condemned to slavery and death in a miserable existence. Men lived in fear of one another, and the law was up to the whim of a man.
The elites in this society justified it because they are bullies. In their arrogance, some people believe themselves to be better due to circumstances beyond their control or due to luck rather than on virtue or skill. In order to feed these delusions, they luxuriated and engaged in whatever their hearts desired, thinking it acceptable because they believed themselves better. This attitude persists today as people practice the pernicious and punish the penitent. We claim to be people of virtue and then play favorites. We claim that we want to be good when the desires of our hearts manifest in the things we actually choose. The Exodus asks us to consider both what manner of men we are as well as what manner of men we choose to be. Do we follow false gods like the Egyptians or do we humbly bow before the one true God like Moses does? Elijah might ask us as well as Israel "How long halt ye between two opinions?" God asks us to do things, and we do the opposite.
Ultimately, miracles are and were required to free us. Great manifestations convinced Pharaoh to let Moses go just as the Resurrection and Suffering of Christ persuades death and hell to surrender control over us. It takes many miracles because men are loathe to submit themselves to something higher, insisting that they matter and that some scintilla of power on earth matters a hill of beans. If the universe desired, it could destroy us immediately, yet in our hubris we think that we can alter fate, alter time, and control powers we don't even understand. We frequently forget that we have seen miracles because we haven't seen ones we recognize from scripture or because the ones we see don't change our lives into a panacea and because we misunderstand God's true end.
Moving Egypt Out of Us
Men cannot change their own nature. We treat people the way we really feel about them. We love those who hurt us and hurt those who love us. Our ends are short term and selfish, and so we find it hard to understand why God asks the things of us that He does. While in Egypt, we enjoy bread and circuses. We have jobs and food and a roof over our heads. We enjoy our iPADs and flirt with our neighbors and change the channels. We think we are free. We forget the precedence of the past. We forget that God has given us hope when He persuaded Pharaoh to let us choose our own adventure, defeated his army at the Red Sea and then cured the waters of Marah. In order to move Egypt's influence out of us, we must learn to rely on God rather than on man. We must learn to trust inspiration and direction rather than science and sophistry. We must trust that even when things don't turn out as we hope or even in a way that makes any sense that the universe does things that matter.
In order to purify ourselves for another place, we must travel through the Wilderness. In the wilderness, Jesus, like Moses, was purified from the vestiges of Egyptian society. Like any purging experience, it clears us of the diseases that plague most of the family of man. Like any kind of meditation, it directs us to a place where we can recognize God's blessings. It teaches us to rely on God rather than on ourselves or on other people, and we realize our true relationship both to God and to each other. Imagine how it might change your life if you truly recognized the hidden rudiments of a child of God in every person you encountered. Would we cheat one another, lie to one another, alienate one another, fill each other with narcotics, take advantage of other people's kindness or know people we should not in every sense, including the biblical? God asks us to love our neighbors as ourselves, but we treat our MyFaves with extra mercy and demand justice from strangers and enemies. Far too often, we claim to love others and then do things to them that lie far from love. Out of His love, God patiently invites us to return and revise our lives. We learn to do things in God's way, in His timing, and for His ends rather than for our own, and we learn to trust that His promises, though not always swift, are always sure.
Like the Red Sea and the wanderings in Sinai, the journey out of Egypt teaches us that God protects and provides for us. He feeds us and waters us and leads us and defends us. Even in Canaan, the first battle fought involved no combat and only obedience to Divine Direction to topple Jericho. We learn by slugging out in the wilderness that even when nobody with skin on is around that we are never really left alone. We are afraid that we will be left alone and left to fend for ourselves. We fear to trust a God we cannot see and a future He promises while we decide to follow false gods on equally asinine future projections. In order to change our nature, we must turn to Christ to erase the old and make us new men. This process asks us to give up all of our sins to know God and to acknowledge that His end is something different than we might imagine and something better. Since when do we really know what we truly desire and what's best for us? God desires to fill the universe with copies of Himself.
Eventually we find our way to the mount where God asks us by whom we truly desire to be led. As CS Lewis wrote in Screwtape, He sends us sweet manifestations that seem significant and then leaves us to decide whether we truly desire to be led. Our choices when God withdraws His incentives tell us what kind of people we truly desire to be. In this moment, we learn things about ourselves, and if we don't like what we see, He invites us to change and provides us a Way. We are purified in the troughs and in the wildernesses. All pretense and pretending vanishes away when the trappings and adornments of Egypt vanish behind us, and we get to choose as they did to either stay in captivity or press forward to a land of promise.
Getting to the Land of Promise
Very few people who left with Moses arrived in the Land of Promise. Joshua and Caleb alone saw Egypt because they sought God's favor rather than man's. Rather than rely on the representations and experiences of men, they followed God's way. They were the ones willing to journey partway up the mountain with Moses and seek the true God rather than rejoice in the revolting.
Only those who are willing to trust God find their way to the Promised Land. God cannot dwell in the presence of the unclean, and so He asks us to rise up and rise above and go up on the mount. To do that, we must leave behind the things that burden us, the treasures of the world, and the pleasures of instinct and habit. To do that, we must focus our energies on things that really matter rather than on the lusts of that matter of which our bodies are comprised. To do that we must leave behind the interested albeit uninspired opinions of other people, even those who claim they love us, and trust God whose motives are always completely pure. In order to reap what He Who Subjected All Things Beneath Him has, we must subject ourselves beneath all things He asks. We must draw near to Him rather than ask Him to draw near to us. We must forsake the notion of commanding Him and be commanded of Him. To find God and happiness, we must leave everything from Egypt and everything about Egypt and everything Egypt had for us behind and rise up. Few find this way because we are not willing to change everything He asks to obtain everything He promises. We prefer to have our cake now and eat it too, even if there could be more.
All around us, people seek solace in the same old worn theories of man. Unable or unwilling to plan long term, they accept something small today rather than waiting for future blessings. This attitude is easy to understand because life is fragile and fleeting, and with nothing more than an awareness of the mortal realm, it becomes hard to imagine anything greater than we have been able to explore and experience. Reliant on the measurable and mutable, far too many men mock faith and stick with things they can see even while they talk of things they can't. If that is all you desire, then it promises you whatever you like whenever you like today while denying you other future things. If you desire more and really believe in and hope for a better world, then the Exodus shows you how to achieve it. You must get out of Egypt, get Egypt out of you, and then get Christ into your life. It's not enough to do a bunch of things and check off a list. You must change your nature if you desire to change your fortune. Sometimes, you must change your location, your vocation, your peer group, or your attitude, but always you must change your mind about who really rules the world. You can follow God and have everything or you can have today and risk no future increase.
God allows any who desire to partake of His promises if they do so of their own free and full will. Half-hearted measures will not suffice. You either follow Christ, or you follow the gods of Egypt. You turn to the Savior if you desire to go up on the mount and be where and what God is. The invitation persists. You are always welcome to get on the bus and ride out. There is a cost, and it's difficult for the proud, the vain and the powerful to admit that they are unclean no matter what THEY do. I have invited people to leave Egypt who ultimately decided that they were not willing to risk it. Consequently, they remain either in bondage or wandering in the desert until God purifies them. You are a choice generation. So many choices are available to you. You must make them eventually or they will make you. As Joshua said after becoming the Prophet, Choose ye this day whom ye will serve. As Elijah admonished "How long halt ye between two opinions?" All I have ever asked of those I meet is to find out the will of God and do it wholeheartedly. I invite you all to come out of Egypt. I testify that the rewards are worth it. Even if I'm still single, I enjoy a peace of mind because I started trusting Him to lead me through rather than assuming I have all the answers. Some day, maybe the rest of my hopes will come true too. Until then, I trust where He leads, because I know from the Exodus that it's always worth it in the end to trust God's inspiration and direction if you are really willing to leave Egypt.
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