Covenant Essays. T. Hoogsteen
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to Mount Sinai, and beyond.
If Pharaoh resisted the LORD’s command to let Israel go, in this convincing narrative the people of the covenant balked as well. To be precise, the Egyptians in the frightening night of the tenth plague, bewailing the deaths of numerous first-born, forced the LORD’s own to leave. Exod 12:31–32, “. . . [Pharaoh] summoned Moses and Aaron by night, and said, ‘Rise up, go forth from among my people, both you and the people of Israel; and go, serve the LORD as you have said. Take your flocks and your herds, as you have said, and be gone; and bless me also!” In fact, they of Egypt became desperate, Exod 12:33, “. . . the Egyptians were urgent with the people, to send them out of the land in haste; for they said, ‘We are all dead men.’” Even stronger, Exod 12:39, with Egypt’s ideological scaffolding shattered, Pharaoh, for a moment in touch with reality, thrust them out of the land. Were the maddened Egyptians forceful, the LORD even more; he compelled his reluctant people to leave the proximity of death—proving they were not of the world. No more were they to be comfortable and free among pitiful gods generated by a pagan nation.
Demonstrating that Israel’s sojourn in the world ended suddenly and forcefully, the Savior by various ways revealed the Exodus entirely his dominical doing; in the uproar of Egyptian agony, he hurried his people off in early dawn not to another day of slave labor, but into the beckoning darkness of an unknown future:
• Exod 12:42, “It was a night of watching by the LORD, to bring them out of the land of Egypt.”
• Exod 12:51, “. . . on that very day the LORD brought the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt by their hosts.”
This fact Moses called Israel to remember. Constantly throughout the Exodus book, Moses pointed to the LORD who delivered his people to the not of this world life. Some excerpts:
• Exod 13:3p, “Remember this day, in which you came out from Egypt, out of the house of bondage, for by strength of hand the LORD brought you out fromthis place.”
• Exod 13:8, “. . . you shall tell your son . . . ‘It is because of what the LORD did for me when I came out of Egypt.’”
• Exod 13:9p, “. . . for with a strong hand the LORD has brought you out of Egypt.”
• Exod 13:14p, “By strength of hand the LORD brought us out of Egypt, from the house of bondage.”
• Exod 13:16, “. . . for by a strong hand the LORD brought us out of Egypt.”
Instead of Israel voluntarily and eagerly striding away from the house of bondage, on one level the Egyptians, on another the Savior pushed them hard, away from the Nile Valley and into the wilderness, Exod 13:18, “equipped for battle.”
Cognizant of Israel’s argumentive disposition, the Almighty led his own into faith-shaking desert wastes beyond the Red Sea, not the much easier and faster sea route through Philistia along the Mediterranean coastline. Exod 13:17. Then, at the western shore of the Red Sea, Israel’s defiance collapsed. All at once, faced with the pursuing Egyptian army, the land of bondage looked safer and better than the Land of Promise, the hand of the Pharaoh stronger than the LORD’s. Exod 14:10–11a, “When Pharaoh drew near, the people of Israel lifted up their eyes, and behold, the Egyptians were marching after them; and they were in great fear. And the people of Israel cried out to the LORD; and they said to Moses, ‘Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, in bringing us out of Egypt? Is not this what we said to you in Egypt, “Let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians”? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.’” Therewith they depreciated the third covenant promise. The bountiful space the LORD promised in the far away faded in favor of the harshness of slave life along the Nile. Within three months of leaving Egypt and before arriving at the Sinai, Exod 19:1, the untested Hebrews complained almost unceasingly about food and water, and life, constantly preferring an existence in the world to life not of this world. The people abused the covenant promises, the Gospel; God-given life, food, and space they arrogantly trampled underfoot.
• Exod 15:22–24, at Marah, they complained about water supplies.
• Exod 16:1–3, after Elim, the people again murmured. “Would that we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”
• Exod 17:1, at Rephidim, the people again complained about water sources.
Throughout, of course, this murmuring and whining stressed defenseless dissatisfaction with the LORD God and the life he promised; carried downward by a stubborn illusion, the Israelites were not impressed with the future, not with salvation thus far. The complaining recorded so far occurred before the people of the covenant arrived at the Sinai; constantly they balked at the actuality of the covenant promises, the Gospel. Rather than rely on the Savior and his promises, they preferred death in slavery to life in the covenant. In the world shone brighter and happier than not of the world. Repeatedly, they yearned for the familiar, to settle down in simpler times, there in slavery to die. All new generations of the Church in this day and long hereafter must know: Israel exercised powerful yearnings for accommodation, conformity, and complacency, tiresome pressures of the heart to live in the world and at the same time, somehow, worship the LORD, Jesus Christ and through him the Father. For the Church, it was painful to be different.
For Israel, in his morose awareness of vulnerability, what did it take to trust in the LORD?
Nevertheless, the LORD of the Hebrews, faithful in his promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, headed his people into a future he only knew and shaped, in which his own had to be different from all in the world peoples and nations.
• Exod 19:5–6, “Now therefore, if you will obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my own possession among all peoples; for all the earth is mine, and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”
• Exod 19:16–18, “On the morning of the third day there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast, so that all the people who were in the camp trembled. Then Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God; and they took their stand at the foot of the mount. And Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because the LORD descended upon it in fire; and the smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain quaked greatly.”
• Lev 19:1–2, “And the LORD said to Moses, ‘Say to all the congregation of the people of Israel, “You shall be holy; for I the LORD your God am holy.”’”
• Deut 4:32–35, “For ask now of the days that are past, which were before you, since the day that God created man upon the earth, and ask from one end of heaven to the other, whether such a great thing as this has ever happened or was ever heard of. Did any people ever hear the voice of a god speaking out of the midst of the fire, as you have heard, and still live? Or has any god ever attempted to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation, by trials, by signs, by wonders, and by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by great terrors, according to all that the LORD your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes? To you it was shown, that you might know that the LORD is God; there is no other besides him.”
Daily, therefore, the LORD God persevered; with the Exodus, in defiance of political tradition he demonstrated to a pagan nation and a watching world the consequences of refusal to listen. At the same time, he broke through Israel’s hardness of heart and lawless obstacles: his own were not of this world.
REPETITIONS OF FREEDOM
Despite the contrariness of Egypt and even more of Israel, the Almighty repeated his mandate for the covenant people, one to let go, the other to go out. Therefore, he charged Moses and Aaron to speak again to the Church-in-reformation and to the Pharaoh. The LORD ordered both men not be lax in office, but with resolve and singleness of purpose to press on, whatever hazards and obstacles.
Moses, grappling with the pharaonic pyramid of confidence, at first saw little light and much darkness in the