Jesus was a Middle Eastern man who lived in an occupied country and was killed by the superpower of his day.
The Roman Empire, which put Jesus on an execution stake, insisted that it was bringing peace to the world through its massive military might, and anybody who didn’t see it this way just might be put on a cross. Emperor Caesar, who ruled the Roman Empire, was considered the “Son of God,” the “Prince of Peace,” and one of his propaganda slogans was “peace through victory.”12
The insistence of the first Christians was that through this resurrected Jesus Christ, God has made peace with the world. Not through weapons of war but through a naked, bleeding man hanging dead on an execution stake. A Roman execution stake. Another of Caesar’s favorite propaganda slogans was “Caesar is Lord.” The first Christians often said “Jesus is Lord.” For them, Jesus was another way, a better way, a way that made the world better through sacrificial love, not coercive violence.13
So when the commander in chief of the most powerful armed forces humanity has ever seen quotes the prophet Isaiah from the Bible in celebration of military victory,14 we must ask, Is this what Isaiah had in mind?
A Christian should get very nervous when the flag and the Bible start holding hands. This is not a romance we want to encourage.
And the Ursprache continues to echo within each one of us, telling us that things aren’t right, that we’re up against something very old,
and very deep, and very wide, and very, very powerful.
For a growing number of people in our world, it appears that many Christians support some of the very things Jesus came to set people free from.
It’s written in Genesis that when Cain killed Abel, God said to Cain, “Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.”15
God can hear Abel’s blood?
Blood that cries out?
To understand this cry, the noise that it makes across human history, and its importance to the times we live in, we have to go back to the first book of the Bible, the book of Exodus.
Chapter One The Cry of the Oppressed
The first book of the Bible . . . Exodus?
Well, yes, and, of course, no.
No, because the first book of the Bible is Genesis. At least when a person picks it up and starts reading from the “in the beginning God created” part.
And yes, because many scholars see Exodus, the second book of the Bible, as the book in which the central story of redemption begins—liberation from Egypt.1
Egypt, the superpower of its day, was ruled by Pharaoh, who responded to the threat of the growing number of Israelites in his country by forcing them into slavery. They had to work every day without a break, making bricks, building storehouses for Pharaoh.2
Egypt is an empire,
built on the backs of Israelite slave labor, brick by brick by brick.
But right away in the book of Exodus, there is a disruption. Things change. And the change begins with God saying:
“I have indeed seen the misery of my people . . .”
“I have heard them crying out . . .” “I have come down to rescue them . . .” “I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them . . .”3
A God who sees and hears. A God who hears the cry. The Hebrew word used here for cry is sa’aq, and we find it all throughout the Bible. Sa’aq is the expression of pain, the ouch, the sound we utter when we are wounded.4
But sa’aq, is also a question, a question that arises out of the pain of the wound. Where is justice? Did anybody see that? Who will come to my rescue? Did anybody hear that? Or am I alone here?
Sa’aq is what Abel’s blood does from the ground after he’s killed by his brother.
The Israelites are oppressed, they’re in misery, they’re suffering—and when they cry out, God hears.
This is a God who always hears the cry.
This is central to who God is: God always hears the cry of the oppressed.
The cry inaugurates history. It kicks things in gear. It shakes things up and gets them moving. The cry is the catalyst, the cause, the reason that a new story unfolds.
But God in this story doesn’t just hear the cry. God does something about it. The exodus is how God responds to the cry.
Think about your life. What are the moments that have shaped you the most? If you were to pick just a couple, what would they be? Periods of transformation, times when your eyes were opened, decisions you made that affected the rest of your life.
How many of them came when you reached the end of your rope?
When everything fell apart?
When you were confronted with your powerlessness? When you were ready to admit your life was unmanageable? When there was nothing left to do but cry out?
For many people, it was their cry,
their desperation, their acknowledgment of their oppression, that was the beginning of their liberation.
When we’re on top, when the system works for us, when we are capable of managing our lives, what is there for God to do?
But the cry—the cry inaugurates redemptive history. These slaves in Egypt cry out and God hears and something new happens. Things aren’t how they were. Things change.
These slaves are rescued from the oppression of Egypt.
Egypt
In the Bible, Egypt is a place, a country, a nation where the story begins. But it’s much, much more. To understand how central Egypt is to the flow of the biblical story, we have to go back to the introduction to the Bible, to the garden of Eden.
We’re told Adam and Eve chose to go their own way, to explore outside of the boundaries given to them by their maker, and as a result, their relationship suffers. This story is immediately followed by the story of their son Cain killing their other son, Abel.
This is a rapid, dramatic progression from Adam and Eve to their sons. We’ve gone from eating fruit to murder in one generation. Things are falling apart very quickly.
Not only that, but right after the murder, a close descendant of Cain’s, Lamech, laments that if “Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times.”5 The escalation of societal violence is so intense that a close relative of Cain’s says
