When God came in and delivered Israel from slavery, the whole thing was to be a major picture of the ultimate salvation from sin. It was so significant in Israel’s history that the Passover and the deliverance from Egypt were forever marked in the history as how to identify God as Savior. Israel did not remember all the times that God saved them from the Philistines, from Moab, from Midian, from Assyria throughout the Judges and the Kings like they did the deliverance from Egypt.
While much can be said about how God delivered Israel regarding the plagues and the Red Sea crossing, I only want to touch on that before getting to the main point. God sent the plagues not merely to showcase His own glory and prove that He was the God over all gods but to showcase that Egypt only had power as long as God let them have power. He demolished the worship of their major gods by sending plagues that would directly attack such idolatrous worship. Then He crushed Egypt’s military by burying them in the Red Sea. Egypt was dead. As a nation, they were left powerless to retain Israel as slaves and powerless to try to kill them so no one else could have them either.
That is a picture of sin. Egypt represents sin, and Pharaoh, while an actual historical person, showcases the hardness of the heart of sin. Sin will utterly defy God until its death because that is what sin is – defiance against God. In Romans 7, Paul uses marriage to showcase the legal bonds here. We are born in sin. That generation of Israel was born in slavery to Egypt. There was no escape. No one had the leadership to bring about a rebellion (though we can be sure some tried) to get anyone out. And if they were to leave, where would they go? It was all desert all around them. It took the death of Egypt to finally get Israel freed, and it takes the death of sin to get us free from sin. And this leads us to the main point that most never pick up on and one I never caught until my pastor mentioned it as he has been going through his series on Exodus: Israel was not delivered from Egypt to be a free people but to be a people that would serve God.
Israel was not delivered so they could go do what they wanted. They were delivered so they could be the people that God would raise, through whom would come the Savior. They would be a people who would teach the world about Him and to serve Him. The common refrain through the Pentateuch is, “I will be their God and they will be My people.” The second half of Exodus, Leviticus, and much of Deuteronomy are about how God is to be worshiped, and He was quite specific. Why? Didn’t Jesus say that one day we would worship in spirit and truth? Be careful with that phrase because Jesus was not saying that the day would come when we would have a free for all in how we worship.
One of the biggest themes throughout the Kings is the handling of idolatry and high places. God did not save Israel so that they could worship in the way of the world, at the venues of the world, or alongside the world’s idols. He saved Israel to worship Him alone and to do it His way. Israel was to worship at the Tabernacle, which would then transfer to the Temple: at the holy place where sin would be removed and the people cleansed. We don’t worship at a physical temple today, but instead we worship at the cross which dealt with our sin and cleansed us.
Israel was saved to serve God. They were to transfer their servitude from a wicked master, Egypt, to the good master, God. They were still slaves, but now they were slaves to a good master. There are good slaves and bad slaves, and there are good masters and bad masters. In Israel, we see the combination of these categories.
Egypt was a bad master. They forced Israel into slavery and didn’t truly care about their well-being. They slaughtered their babies in fear of them (likely in fear of rumors of a deliverer as well) and made their labor brutal. Their purpose was to keep them subdued and under their control. Israel was actually a good slave under Egypt. They did what they were asked, submitted to the authority, and did not think about leaving, even though they cried to God for freedom. They were not rebellious to Egypt. They grew comfortable in Egypt and liked what Egypt let them have.
Then God rescued them. God is the good master. He fed them, gave them water, gave them shelter, never let their clothes wear out, and eventually brought them to the Promised Land. He gave them excessive amounts of mercy despite all their complaints. Israel became a bad slave of God. They constantly defied Him, whined against Him, wanted to go back to their old masters, turned to idols, committed grievous sins against God, and did not want to serve Him. Even after arriving at the Promised Land, they repeatedly sought to do things their own way however they wanted. They still prided themselves in being God’s people, but so few of them actually obeyed God as He commanded them. Israel was not a good slave before God; however, we see how good of a master God is by how He treated His slaves. Anyone less than Him would have destroyed Israel long ago, and there were times where God was about to do that too. God was patient with them and still kept His promises.
Israel is a picture, a type, and an example of Christianity. Israel was rescued from Egypt, but they never got Egypt out of them. They still held on to what Egypt had to offer. God had to make them let go of Egypt entirely, and the only way to do that was to wipe out the generation that grew up attached to Egypt so the children, who were teenagers and younger, would know and learn to depend upon their new master. Likewise, we are currently in the wilderness stage of our deliverance as God is working on getting sin out of us. It won’t be finished until we cross over out of this world, but it is in progress. That said, it is done one way: God’s way. As we go through Scripture, we will see that there is only one means of salvation. In all the times God rescued His people, there was one way and one way only to escape. We’ll examine that next week.
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