Covenant Essays. T. Hoogsteen
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However, throughout the Old Testament dispensation, the Church chafing to be comfortable in the world identified with and bowed before the expansionist idols of the times. During the Middle Ages, the Church dominated the political processes, bearing witness to the spirit of the Roman Empire. As recent as the twentieth century, those who claimed they follow the Lord Jesus, Savior, nestled comfortably in Western culture, fearful of being perceived different, which marks in every generation the dark side of Church History. Nevertheless, at the end of his ministry, notably at the Passover celebration with the Twelve, Jesus reasserted the Church’s calling to be in the world, but never of the world. To this day, all in Christ confront and live this paradox.
2–4
Exod 5:22–6:27 (6:10–13)
“And the LORD said to Moses, ‘Go in, tell Pharaoh king of Egypt to let the people of Israel go out of his land.’ But Moses said to the LORD, ‘Behold, the people of Israel have not listened to me; how then shall Pharaoh listen to me, who am a man of uncircumcised lips?’ But the LORD spoke to Moses and Aaron, and gave them a charge to the people of Israel and to Pharaoh king of Egypt to bring the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt.”
IN THE WORLD/NOT OF THE WORLD
A FREEDOM-AND-SLAVERY PARADOX
The LORD, Savior, whom God the Spirit, Luke 1:35, later revealed as God the Son, executed Israel’s release from Egyptian slavery, thereby accomplishing a prophecy he granted Abraham, Gen 15:13–14. During the Exodus from out of the house of bondage, the LORD, God Almighty, Exod 6:3, recreated for the full force of salvation his dominion over heaven and earth, all of which he brought to bear only on Abraham’s numerous descendants. Throughout, the LORD persevered for and in Israel’s freedom from slavery, however much the sacrilegious Pharaoh and even Israel shamefully balked at his omnipotent grace. When hell-bent Egypt and the people of the covenant confused freedom with slavery, the LORD God revealed a paradox—freedom in slavery—for the liberation of the Old Testament Church at that time.
Much later, by mystifying slavery with freedom, Caesarianism suppressed the Church; at the same time, Pharisaism and Sadduceism confined the Savior’s own in a legal perversion of liberty, the Tradition of the Elders. During the Middle Ages, Scholasticism oppressed the Church with another cunning design. More recently, the Enlightenment and French Revolution infatuation stifled the faith of the Church, relegating Christ Jesus to private opinion. Now, secularism aided by humanism and Postmodernism strangles the Faith by touting freedom from the Lord and Savior. As at the time of the Exodus, the Lord Jesus Christ, almighty over heaven and earth, always perseveres to release his people from a freedom actually slavery and for a slavery actually freedom.
New generations of Christ in the tangible Church caught by the ageless in the world/not of the world paradox confront this eschatological perplexity between freedom and slavery. In the Exodus, as the paramount work of liberation in the Old Testament dispensation, the LORD revealed for all unsettled skeptics his perseverance in recreating the Church.
REPETITIONS OF A COMMAND
Egypt, dominant in the lapsed world, expected all people equally ensnared in the world to submit to its tyranny, a degenerate enough fantasy, specifically the yoke of slavery for the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The reigning Pharaoh resisted the Exodus to the death, determined to oppose the LORD God.
In many ways, Israel submitted to this worsening repressive regime and presented brawling obstacle upon obstacle to the Exodus, preferring death in slavery to life in freedom. Exod 14:10–11a, 15:22–25a; etc.
Exod 6:10–13, therefore, reiterated past commands, both to the offending Pharaoh and to unruly Israel; the LORD willed the provocative Exodus, adding to the extensive body of evidence that his people lived in the world, yet were not of this world. Because the LORD had heard the groaning of his own and remembered the covenant promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob for life, food, and space, he reversed Egypt’s religious violence and dark compulsion to violate the Hebrews. Exod 2:23–25. With pastoral intensity and incorruptible commitment, he listened. “In the course of those many days the king of Egypt died. And the people of Israel groaned under the imposed bondage, and cried out for help, and their cry under bondage came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. And God saw the people of Israel, and God knew their condition.” To achieve the Exodus, the Lord clarified with determination his mandate to Moses and to the callous Pharaoh.
To begin the Exodus, Moses and Aaron in the name of the LORD commanded the ruling Pharaoh to allow Israel initially a brief respite from slavery in order to call upon the Name in communal worship. Exod 5:1, “Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, ‘Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness.’” Over centuries, deplorably pressured by servitude, the numerous descendants of Abraham had lost the sacrosanct ethic of worship. Seven days of slaving per week washed away freedom to call upon the name of the LORD. Obvious to the Egyptians, this people differed from all others; even under the hard conditions of enforced labor, they resisted assimilation. Circumcision and multiplication marked them a cohesive people. Though the Pharaoh ordered the immediate death of newborn sons by drowning, the Hebrews grew numerically, for the Egyptians at an alarming rate. With the initially, “Let my people go,” the LORD, the Almighty, for Israel’s liberty planned to reveal to the observant world along the Upper Nile and far beyond his omnipotence in salvation.
At this stage of history, Egypt dominated the known world; all proximate nations and peoples bowed before the Pharaoh. At Genesis’s end, Joseph’s vice regal rule revealed the far-flung and subduing powers of the Egyptian king. He, conscious of his authority and god-like confidence, responded blasphemously to Moses’s command. Exod 5:2, “Who is the LORD, that I should heed his voice and let Israel go? I do not know the LORD, and moreover I will not let Israel go.” God Almighty did not belong in Egypt’s pantheon and Israel, as far as this Pharaoh was concerned, belonged in the world subject to him alone in the large space he dominated by force of arms, his to do with as he pleased.
Moses and Aaron, Aaron speaking, Exod 4:16, refused the Pharaoh’s negative response. In the name of the God of Israel and commissioned to represent him, these two spoke once more. Exod 5:3, “The God of the Hebrews has met with us; let us go, we pray, a three days’ journey into the wilderness, and sacrifice to the LORD our God, lest he fall upon us with pestilence or with the sword.” When the LORD God speaks at any time he expects obedience, not only from his own, also from all outside the covenant boundaries. The foolish king of Egypt, however, had his own ideas about the LORD’s commanding presence. Exod 5:4, “But the king of Egypt said to them, ‘Moses and Aaron, why do you take the people away from their work? Get to your burdens.” Thus he concluded that first confrontation uneasily bulging with disaster.
Slavery for Israel meant: serving the king of Egypt, a god (so-called), a recent member to the ancient collaboration of sinister deities worshiped in Egypt; thereby all of the LORD, even if forced and unwilling, served multitudinous Egyptians idols by constructing store-cities, Pithom and Raamses. Exod 1:11. Slavery in this instance also required submission to the Egyptians’ legal system as imposed and enforced by the reigning pharaoh. Long days the Hebrew men slaved, dawn to dusk, seven per week, preparing bricks and building cities under watchful eyes of whip-carrying taskmasters as well as coerced Israelite overseers.
Under these aristocratic pressures, worshiping the LORD God faithfully fell away, except for the circumcision rite, the only aspect of covenant obedience mentioned. However, for this servitude God Almighty had not called Abraham, nor for his descendants to slave away in subservience generation upon generation, uncertain of life, maltreated into the wild factors of unbelief.
The Pharaoh out of formidable reverence for his gods and for himself was a man hard to persuade. Instead of acquiescing to the LORD’s command, combatively he increased Israel’s crippling workload. Exod 5:6–9, “The same day Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters of the people and their foremen, ‘You shall no longer give the people straw to make bricks, as heretofore; let them go and gather straw for themselves. But the number of bricks which they made heretofore you shall lay upon them, you shall by no means lessen it; for they are idle; therefore they cry, ‘Let us