“Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles’ wings, and brought you unto myself.” (Ex 19:4, KJV)
The story of the exodus is incredibly horrifying and beautiful at the same time, the themes run parallel. Horrifying in that the story exhibits what happened to the nation (Egypt) and individual (Pharaoh) that set itself up to oppress and bully the children of the living God. Beautiful in that the victims of slavery were rescued by God and whisked away to go home as any Father would do for their despairing children (Ex 6:5). All that said, Exodus is a beautiful love story, not so much between a husband and wife, but between a parent and His children, which when seen can give us such a wonderfully different aspect as to why God’s wrath was stirred.
You see Israel had gone to Egypt as a guest in their house because they would have died of famine if they stayed in their own land (Gen 47:13-27), that’s what they were, they were guests in the house of Egypt and never intended to call that place home (Gen 15:13-16). Yet over the years as they were blessed by their father and multiplied in number, Israel’s hosts became more and more aggressive towards their visitors (Ex 1:12-22) and ended up pretty much putting them under house arrest and forcing them into slave labour by the head of the house, namely pharaoh (Ex 3:7-10). Now I don’t know about you, but if my children went to go and stay at somebody’s house and then I heard that they were forced into doing all the dishes, doing all the gardening, painting all the walls and that they were hardly fed and smacked, that would be bad enough, but imagine getting the call and being informed that the head of the house told them under no circumstances they could leave…I would have one word for that and that is called kidnapping.
Well that is the scenario with Israel in Egypt, they were a guest people who were essentially kidnapped by their host nation and not allowed to leave under any circumstances (Ex 5:1-22), but more than that, they were made slaves and beaten and even murdered when the Egyptians felt threatened (Ex 1:15-22). So Exodus isn’t just a great basis for a cinematic visual experience (who remembers “The Prince of Egypt”), no it’s actually a beautiful love story of an affectionate father coming up against a decrepit sycophant who had locked his children up. Now a lot of fathers would go in punching first and asking questions later, but not so with God. No he chose a man named Moses to go into Egypt and appeal to Pharaoh first to let his children go before there would be real consequences to his actions (Ex 4:22-23), and unfortunately for him and the resistant nation, Egypt was rebellious and experienced the hand of God, which wrought incredible devastation on their people (Ex 15:6).
The new Testament reveals that every one who God has come to rescue out of “the iron furnace of sin” is a child of God because we have been adopted into the family of God (Eph 1:5, Gal 3:26) Now, as you read through the Scriptures God sometimes took what seemed like an eternity to come and relieve his children’s burdens, but at the end of the day God has always proven faithful to his word. Again the two themes of horrifying and beautiful run parallel with judgment. On the one hand horrifying because there will come a day where tyrants and nations will come under the full wrath of God, but on the other hand beautiful because we will see fully and finally the salvation that was purchased for us all those years ago at Calvary. So take heart my dear brothers and sisters, life can be hard, but because of Jesus Christ we are no longer slaves to sin, and more than that, there is coming a day when our father in heaven will bring us to himself for all eternity.