Bound or Bound for the Promised Land?
By Audrey Stallsmith
After mentioning in my last article that the children of Israel leaving Egypt is a metaphor for spiritual progress, I decided to explore that idea a bit. For those of you who aren’t as familiar with the term as we writers are, metaphor means “a thing regarded as symbolic of something else, especially something abstract.”
And our spiritual life is about as abstract as you can get! So metaphors often can help us think more clearly about it. Of course, the story of the Israelites marching to the promised land would also become a symbol of literal freedom—not just the spiritual kind—for the African Americans once enslaved in our own country.
Few metaphors are perfect, of course, since some things don’t quite fit. For example, I couldn’t decide where the plagues came in. Granted, many people turn to Christ due to extreme difficulties in their lives. But, in the Bible story, the plagues didn’t happen to the Israelites, but to the ones holding them in bondage.
Still, I doubt the Israelites would have listened to their deliverer Moses and decided to get out of Egypt, as in the sense of get out of Dodge, if it weren’t for the plague of slavery to which they were subjected by a new Pharaoh who “felt no obligation to the descendants of Joseph.” (Exodus 1:8b TLB) Up until that point the Israelites had been prospering in their assigned “state” of Goshen, so much so that the name had come to symbolize a place of comfort and plenty.
That fertile plain probably seemed much preferable to the hardscrabble nomadic life they’d led back in Canaan where they’d had to travel constantly over hilly and often barren country in search of new grazing and water for their flocks. Though a homesick Joseph had assumed his people would want to leave the land of Egypt as soon as possible, they didn’t appear all that eager to do so until life got much tougher for them there.
But Joshua 24:14 tells us that their spiritual condition hadn’t been good in Goshen, since they had fallen into the habit of worshipping the idols of the Egyptians in whose land they dwelt, much—we can imagine as they had taken to worshipping its prosperity. So Egypt can symbolize the lure of materialism as much as it symbolizes evil.
It can delude us into thinking that this life is our permanent home, when it actually only is very temporary. (Please remember that this just is a metaphor. I’m not implying that the actual country of Egypt is any more evil than any other nation!)
Even if we don’t become entangled in the more obvious sins, we can become much too preoccupied with this world to worry about the condition of our souls until it is too late to prepare them for the next. Though few of us set up literal gilt idols these days, if we make prosperity, power, and pleasure our gods just as the pagan culture around us does, that is evil enough.
The fact that God put the prohibition against idolatry first in the Ten Commandments—and elaborated on it more than he did the others—proves how vital that prohibition is. If God isn’t the most important thing in our lives, after all, He really isn’t our God, no matter how much we might claim that He is.
Like the Israelites, we often don’t see the need to separate ourselves from this world and its gods until it has us in an iron grip which we can’t escape on our own. That is when we are most likely to start listening to the voice of Christ, our deliverer—also a Prince, as Moses was.
As for Pharaoh, if he really had enslaved the Israelites simply because he thought they were becoming dangerous to have around, he should have been happy to see them go. But, as the slave owners in our own country found out, that kind of power over other lives can become addictive—until the person who has it feels that he or she can’t get along without it. And, like Satan, the Pharaoh couldn’t bear to admit his power was no match for that pitted against him.
Of course, when we begin to struggle against our bondage, it is likely to get worse, as the forces of darkness fight to keep us. In that case, we may think—as the children of Israel did after their overseers turned even more harsh—that they were better off before Moses came along and encouraged them to hope for something better.
The symbolism of the Passover lamb whose blood was splashed on the doorposts is pretty obvious. That innocent animal stood for the other Lamb, Jesus, whose blood would really deliver his people from the wrath of God and the curse of death. Such is spelled out in the old hymn, “When I See the Blood.” It advises, “Sprinkle your soul with the blood of the Lamb, and I will pass, will pass over you.”
So we might say that Passover meal stands for salvation and the choice to accept it. Of course, to do so, we have to eat and drink down the reality of our sins and the realization that we can’t save ourselves from them.
There always was the possibility that, once given the opportunity to leave, the Israelites would refuse to go. If I were Moses, I would have worried about that, since those he was attempting to deliver had been far from decisive up to that point.
Bound, after all, can mean either “restricted or confined” or “going or ready to go toward a specified place.” At some point in our lives, we all decide which definition will define us.
And it appears that most people opt to stay in bondage to their sins and false gods rather than strike out for freedom with a God they can’t see. Any other choice would force them to leave too much behind in blind trust that there would be something better out there to replace what was lost.
But, just as the Israelites took many of the treasures of Egypt with them, I’m thinking that God allows us to keep the best of the world which He created, especially the poetry and metaphors with which it supplies us. What we must abandon really isn’t worth all that much, since we can’t carry it with us to that other land anyway.
However, it is possible that the Israelites were forced to view all that they were giving up, since Goshen is believed to have been on the eastern edge of Egypt. So they may actually have marched through it on the way to their first obstacle.
Even though God had given them the easier route so they wouldn’t have to fight the Philistines right away, they found themselves confronted by a body of water instead. It must have looked huge to people who had been nervous about the drastic step they were taking anyway—only to look back and see their old nemesis pursuing them. Like the idiom says, they seemed to be “caught between the devil and the deep, blue sea.”
At that point, the people concluded that they never should have let Moses convince them to leave Egypt since “it would be better to be slaves to the Egyptians than dead in the wilderness.” (Exodus 14:12b TLB) But Moses assured them that, since they had made the choice of following God, He would take the responsibility to deliver them.
However, even after God cleared a path for them through the sea and defeated their enemies in dramatic fashion, the people continually forgot Whose they now were. It seemed that, every time they encountered another difficulty, they would discount previous miracles, fall into complaint, and recall how much better things had been back in Egypt. Hindsight obviously isn’t always 20/20!
Human nature hasn’t changed much. We, too, frequently gripe about what God isn’t giving us while ignoring all the manna which showers down around us every day. Like the Israelites, we become frightened of the giants we will have to defeat to get where God wants us to go, so we spend too much time wandering in the wilderness rather than moving forward.
Perhaps our main problem is that we lack enough love for and faith in the One doing the leading. Those of us who have good fathers, after all, trust them implicitly (without qualification) because we know who they are. So we often follow their lead without quibbling, because we know they have our best interests at heart and aren’t going to desert us.
Can’t we have even more confidence in God? There are some things our earthly fathers can’t do for us, after all, but God can do anything. That doesn’t mean He always will intervene every time we think He should.
My guess is that beginning Christians, like the Israelites who had just emerged from slavery, get more obvious answers to prayer because they need them. Once we are farther along in the trek, our recollection of prior deliverances should enable us to retain our faith in our Leader without as much proof of His presence.
And we can remember the words of an old spiritual when we get discouraged, as Mary of Bethany must have been over the death of her brother:
Well, Satan got mad and he knows I'm glad
Missed that soul that he thought he had
Now, didn't Pharaoh's army get drowned?
Oh, Mary, don't you weep.
As a character in the movie The Reason points out, we trust our doctors to know what is best for us even when we can’t understand what is behind our illnesses as well as they do. So, on our torturous trek to the promised land, we certainly can trust God to know what is best for our spiritual well-being. And that—we need to remind ourselves—is much more important than either the physical or financial type!