We said about Genesis: to grasp a Bible book we need to grasp its beginning and end. So now Exodus, the book about how God sets people free, starts with Israel in slavery. How will this feed us now?
The first thing, if reading Exodus is to bless us, is to recognize ourselves in its story. Like we said, we are in bondage: maybe to wrong behaviours, past hurts, failures and fears; to our work environment or internal workaholism; above all, to guilt, sin, and death… We can of course say that, well, everybody’s like that (`We have never been enslaved to anyone`, the Jews told Jesus, disastrously (John 8)). But then we exclude ourselves from God’s rescue that Exodus will show us.
Having said that, what we see in the first chapter is horrific evil. The Egyptians get scared that the immigrants (Hebrews) are `out-breeding` them and taking over the country (1:7). (Some of this sounds oddly familiar.) So first they enslave them (they `worked them ruthlessly. They made their lives bitter with harsh labour`, Ex 1:13-14); then this hatred moves into genocide when the order goes out to throw every male Israelite baby into the Nile. (Imagine the incredible pain for the parents.) God takes this evil extremely seriously, and the nature of His judgment on Egypt at Passover will match it closely; although in fact the Egyptians first had a whole series of obvious warnings nationwide to repent, culminating in a public warning from Moses of what would happen to their own sons (11:4-7); yet there’s no sign that too many Egyptians repented and took shelter under the blood of the passover lamb, which was the only way the Israelites were kept from the same judgment.
But that’s God. What about us? God cares and understands, and his judgment on the slavers is going to be very, very serious indeed. But how do we respond when we see such massive evil? Chapter 2 shows us the wrong way. Seeing it might well make us feel like responding with violence. And at age 40, ch2 tells us, Moses, who has been brought up in the palace, sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, acts in tune with the surrounding climate of violence, kills the Egyptian, buries his body. But the results are disastrous. This is not God’s way of liberation.
What are the politics of the cross? Godly Christians disagree over this, but it seems to me that, when we look through the cross, the central reality through which we understand the world, we see that ultimately evil isn’t dealt with by violence; it was dealt with when Jesus took all the violence on Himself, without retaliation. As Jacques Ellul says, we the people of the cross are called to absorb the evil out of the world, like a sponge; whereas violence tends to lead to more violence, the Spirit of the cross breaks the cycle of violence by our forgiving and loving our enemy, instead of demonising them and retaliating. (Matthew 5:38-39, 26:50-52.) Very, very easy to say, not easy at all to do; only by the power of the Spirit can we live this way. (Lord, please empower us when this is us…) But ch2 shows us what happens when Moses does things his own way not God’s, acting by the oppressors’ own methods not God’s. The problem with his turning to violence was that Pharaoh was better still at violence, and (2:15) Moses has to flee the palace and flee the country. (Lord, please help me not to do things my way, but to discover and do things Your way…) The cost of rashness and Moses doing things his own way (he looked this way and that, some people have observed, but not upwards to God (v12)), is that things get worse and worse: a whole forty more years of horrible suffering for his own people.
And then there’s what happens to Moses himself. He runs away to the desert land of Midian, and ends up spending all the next forty years in exile there. It becomes an incredibly sad picture. The would-be liberator, with all his potential and past position, settles down sadly to domesticity and a trivial job, leading his father-in-law’s sheep round the desert (3:1). He could have achieved so much more; but this is the price of rashness and doing things his way not God’s. And forty years go by, and no doubt as he turned 50, then 60, then 70, there was an agonizing sense of failure and squandered potential. No way back now. And finally he’s 80, and all he has to show for his life is this little flock of sheep he’s leading round the desert. So much he could have achieved, and all thrown away in one act of rashness.
And then, and then – it’s so moving – one day, as this aged failure leads his mangy sheep across the dunes – suddenly he sees a bush on fire…
