Introduction

The Exodus story is the great epic of the Old Testament. It takes five books of the Bible to tell the tale. It’s not just the story of the Israelites and how God led them out of slavery in Egypt and, finally, settled them in Canaan. As with many other stories in the Bible, it is a story for everyone who loves God and who would love to be able to bring their whole selves to God. It is the great template that God has left us for how we go from slavery to the world’s ways to God’s ways, to living in the Kingdom of God.

It’s easy for us to see that the Israelites were enslaved—they are foreigners in Egypt; there were Egyptian masters who beat them if they didn’t make their quotas of bricks. As the story about God leading the Israelites out of Egypt begins, they’ve just had their workloads doubled. The Pharaoh is an autocrat who uses them to sustain and grow his wealth and power, enslaving them to keep them from rebelling. They have no freedom.

Our own slavery to the world’s ways is not so easy for us to discern. First, we’ve grown up in the system that enslaves us. Second, we’ve adopted the world’s thinking about ourselves as very young children, capitulated to the self-images the world offers us, not knowing that by looking deeper into ourselves beyond what the culture taught us, we would find another way to live. A way that is congruent, integral to who we were created to be by God.

So, we buy into the kind of oppression that seems normal and convinces us that it is the only way to be. Each culture has its own version of the world’s viewpoint, but mainly we humans are so self-protective of ourselves and of our own people that anyone who is different from us is perceived as a threat. We are so self-involved, so culturally-involved, that we can only see life as we imagine it to be, using our own limited point of view. And we are so fearful of any pain and suffering that we find many ways of pushing the pain of slavery away—watching TV, playing endless video games, drinking, taking drugs, always having our nose in a book, always going shopping and spending money, always checking our phones--and many other options which become addictive.

God is calling us out of slavery, just as He called the Israelites out of Egypt. In this book, we will be exploring what the story of Exodus has to tell us about our own story and where God would take us when He leads us out of our own “Egypt.” We will follow the trajectory of the Israelites from Moses, dealing with Pharaoh, to Joshua leading them into the Promised Land - after forty years of wandering in the wilderness. We’ll be looking at what happens to us in the wilderness and why that long time there is necessary. We’ll see the huge part that rebellion plays in our human story. And we’ll be looking at the kind of challenges we will face in the Promised Land, just as the Israelites did. We will be exploring the classic four steps in a spiritual journey.

Exodus is a beautiful story, compelling and dynamic. It will teach us all we need to know to brave the adventure of leaving our own place of slavery. Thus, enabling the closing of the door on slavery, coupled with the intervening years in the wilderness, that will eventually open another door in Canaan for us, which is the land of milk and honey where all our needs are provided. We’ll look at some of the detail of the Exodus story, the laws and commandments, the reactions of the Israelites, the promises that God makes to us—we’ll examine this story in some of its wonderful detail in order to see the plan God has laid out for us. Come along with me and see what God is inviting you and me, all of us, to do and to be.

I never thought I would be so fascinated by the whole sweep of this story. But obviously, the Holy Spirit felt differently. For the last four or five years I have been reading these five books, thinking about them, incorporating what they teach us into my life and, finally, coming to this idea of the Exodus story being God’s template for us all. Of course, that idea was the Holy Spirit’s. I write with His inspiration. All error is mine; all truth is His.

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