Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile. Rob Bell
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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 things are eleven times worse than they were before. And then by chapter 6 of Genesis, just a few chapters after Cain and Abel, we find out that the whole world is headed for destruction except for one man and his family. And then by chapter 11, people have gotten together to build a tower that they are convinced will make them gods.
What started with two people and some fruit has escalated to murder among family members, to an entire civilization at odds with God.
The story is a tragic progression: the broken, toxic nature at the heart of a few humans has now spread to the whole world.
What started in a garden is now affecting the globe.
The word for this condition is anti-kingdom.6
There is God’s kingdom—the peace, the shalom,7 the good that God intends for all things. And then there is what happens when entire societies and systems and empires become opposed to God’s desires for the world.
Imagine a slave girl living in Egypt asking her father why he’s got a bandage on his arm. He tells her he was beaten by his master that day. She wants to know why. He explains to her that the quotas have recently been changed and he’s now required to make the same amount of bricks as before, but he has to get his own straw.8 He tells her that he’s been falling behind in his brick production and that’s why he was beaten. She then asks why his master couldn’t just let it slide—why the beating? He explains that if the quotas aren’t met, his master will be beaten by his master. And if his master doesn’t make the quotas, he’ll be beaten by his overseer, and so on up the chain of command, which goes all the way to Pharaoh. The father tries to make the daughter understand that yes, the beating came from one particular man, his master. But his master is part of a larger system, a complex web of power and violence and industry and technology that exploits people for its expansion and profit.
The bandage on the father’s arm is from a wound inflicted by one man, and yet it’s also from an entire system of injustice. This girl’s family is facing an evil in the individual human heart that went unchecked until it gathered a head of steam and is now embedded in the very fabric of that culture.
That is anti-kingdom.
Egypt is an anti-kingdom.
Egypt is what happens when sin builds up a head of steam.
Egypt is what happens when sin becomes structured and embedded in society.
Egypt shows us how easily human nature bends toward using power to preserve privilege at the expense of the weak.
Imagine this girl asking her father more questions—questions not just about their life in Egypt but about their history: How did we get here in the first place? If we’re Israelites, why aren’t we living in Israel?
Imagine this young slave girl being told the Genesis story of how they became slaves. The escalation of violence that began with the first sons culminates in chapter 11 with the story of the Tower of Babel. And what are they building the Tower of Babel with?