for battle.”
Cognizant of Israel’s argumentive disposition, the Almighty led his own into faith-shaking desert wastes beyond the Red Sea, not the much easier and faster sea route through Philistia along the Mediterranean coastline. Exod 13:17. Then, at the western shore of the Red Sea, Israel’s defiance collapsed. All at once, faced with the pursuing Egyptian army, the land of bondage looked safer and better than the Land of Promise, the hand of the Pharaoh stronger than the LORD’s. Exod 14:10–11a, “When Pharaoh drew near, the people of Israel lifted up their eyes, and behold, the Egyptians were marching after them; and they were in great fear. And the people of Israel cried out to the LORD; and they said to Moses, ‘Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, in bringing us out of Egypt? Is not this what we said to you in Egypt, “Let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians”? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.’” Therewith they depreciated the third covenant promise. The bountiful space the LORD promised in the far away faded in favor of the harshness of slave life along the Nile. Within three months of leaving Egypt and before arriving at the Sinai, Exod 19:1, the untested Hebrews complained almost unceasingly about food and water, and life, constantly preferring an existence in the world to life not of this world. The people abused the covenant promises, the Gospel; God-given life, food, and space they arrogantly trampled underfoot.
• Exod 15:22–24, at Marah, they complained about water supplies.
• Exod 16:1–3, after Elim, the people again murmured. “Would that we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”
• Exod 17:1, at Rephidim, the people again complained about water sources.
Throughout, of course, this murmuring and whining stressed defenseless dissatisfaction with the LORD God and the life he promised; carried downward by a stubborn illusion, the Israelites were not impressed with the future, not with salvation thus far. The complaining recorded so far occurred before the people of the covenant arrived at the Sinai; constantly they balked at the actuality of the covenant promises, the Gospel. Rather than rely on the Savior and his promises, they preferred death in slavery to life in the covenant. In the world shone brighter and happier than not of the world. Repeatedly, they yearned for the familiar, to settle down in simpler times, there in slavery to die. All new generations of the Church in this day and long hereafter must know: Israel exercised powerful yearnings for accommodation, conformity, and complacency, tiresome pressures of the heart to live in the world and at the same time, somehow, worship the LORD, Jesus Christ and through him the Father. For the Church, it was painful to be different.
For Israel, in his morose awareness of vulnerability, what did it take to trust in the LORD?
Nevertheless, the LORD of the Hebrews, faithful in his promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, headed his people into a future he only knew and shaped, in which his own had to be different from all in the world peoples and nations.
• Exod 19:5–6, “Now therefore, if you will obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my own possession among all peoples; for all the earth is mine, and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”
• Exod 19:16–18, “On the morning of the third day there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast, so that all the people who were in the camp trembled. Then Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God; and they took their stand at the foot of the mount. And Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because the LORD descended upon it in fire; and the smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain quaked greatly.”
• Lev 19:1–2, “And the LORD said to Moses, ‘Say to all the congregation of the people of Israel, “You shall be holy; for I the LORD your God am holy.”’”
• Deut 4:32–35, “For ask now of the days that are past, which were before you, since the day that God created man upon the earth, and ask from one end of heaven to the other, whether such a great thing as this has ever happened or was ever heard of. Did any people ever hear the voice of a god speaking out of the midst of the fire, as you have heard, and still live? Or has any god ever attempted to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation, by trials, by signs, by wonders, and by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by great terrors, according to all that the LORD your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes? To you it was shown, that you might know that the LORD is God; there is no other besides him.”
Daily, therefore, the LORD God persevered; with the Exodus, in defiance of political tradition he demonstrated to a pagan nation and a watching world the consequences of refusal to listen. At the same time, he broke through Israel’s hardness of heart and lawless obstacles: his own were not of this world.
REPETITIONS OF FREEDOM
Despite the contrariness of Egypt and even more of Israel, the Almighty repeated his mandate for the covenant people, one to let go, the other to go out. Therefore, he charged Moses and Aaron to speak again to the Church-in-reformation and to the Pharaoh. The LORD ordered both men not be lax in office, but with resolve and singleness of purpose to press on, whatever hazards and obstacles.
Moses, grappling with the pharaonic pyramid of confidence, at first saw little light and much darkness in the LORD’s unconquerable strength of will to lead his people out. Nevertheless, the Savior had delegated both Moses and Aaron to advance the Church into liberty.
Hence the genealogy, Exod 6:14–27, Moses listed only descendants of Jacob through Reuben, Simeon, and Levi—Levi, Jacob’s third son by Leah—with concentration on himself and Aaron; in this manner, no one mistook the identity of the two, true descendants of Abraham and Isaac, Moses three years junior to Aaron, Exod 7:7. These Levitical sons had to walk Israel into freedom.
What is freedom?
Freedom is the exercise of justice and the absence of fear, life according to the Commandments out of reverence before the LORD God, serving him only, i.e., to love him above all else, and neighbors as oneself.
Israel, however, perceived freedom as slavery. Constantly they sought to return to Egypt in the conviction that slavery served freedom, a coping strategy devoid of hope.
In every instance, firmly, the LORD God pursued his mandate to Moses and Israel—to debase Egypt and exalt the Church. With firmness of command he destroyed the Pharaoh and his people to achieve Israel’s release. Both people had worked, the one commandeering, the other slaving, to enhance the Egyptian pantheon, in the limiting options through which the Church had slowly under grinding forces of accommodation and hardening conformity bowed before these idolatries.
• Exod 32:1–10, the spirit of idolatry Israel carried within his bosom; given a momentary opportunity they compelled Aaron to fashion a golden calf to worship it, contrary to the Second Commandment. With no end to anxiety and cheap rejoicing, immediately after the flashing radiance of the Sinai, the covenant nation ignored the renewal of the promises and obligations.
• Lev 17:7p, once free of Egyptian control, the LORD issued commandments to eschew idolatry: “So they shall no more slay their sacrifices for satyrs, after whom they play the harlot.”
• Lev 17:8, “And you shall say to them, Any man of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among them, who offers a burnt offering or sacrifice, and does not bring it to the door of the tent of meeting, to sacrifice it to the LORD; that man shall be cut off from his people.”
• Josh
