Bondage in Our Egypt

The history of man has moved in a strange rhythm over-and-over from the downbeat of bondage to the upbeat of freedom. In this strange cycle, man is his own greatest enemy. He is hell-bent for his own destruction. Despite the many options for freedom that he is presented with, man has an incredulous ability to get entangled, once and again, in the yoke of bondage. Let’s look at the record. 

Man’s story begins on the upbeat of freedom. In Genesis 1 and 2, man emerges from his creator’s hand as a being made in God’s image placed in dominion over the world. He lives in a beautiful garden, where he can walk about in freedom, fulfilling himself in creativity, and enjoying the extreme ecstasy of communion with God. In the cool of the evening God comes down into the garden and walks with man. In one fell swoop, man goofs everything up. 

His sin was not so much that he ate the forbidden fruit, as that he doubted the integrity of his God who created him. Soon, he found himself driven from his garden of freedom. His work that was to be his creative fulfillment turned out to be his curse. This curse enslaved him. 

Man now ate bread by the sweat of his brow, until he returned to the ground from which he came. His iniquity was visited on his children. Cain’s anger was kindled against God and his brother. He murdered his brother. He was driven by his guilt to run from God as a fugitive and a wanderer without roots. It is interesting that Cain builds the first city, trying to bring people near to him again. Trying to find roots. Man tried to escape from the bondage of estrangement from God and other men that resulted in the bondage of loneliness. God tried to rewrite the story of man with a new beginning with Abraham. 

He calls on Abraham to take his family and go to a new land. God will lead him to the new land. This new land would be a new beginning and a new Eden. Before long, this new people find themselves in bondage in Egypt. How did they become enslaved there? 

It is an interesting enslavement that came out of economic necessity. The sons of Jacob, Abraham’s great-grandchildren, found themselves in the midst of famine. The people of God were enslaved because they needed bread. They made their pilgrimage to Egypt and into slavery to obtain their bread, and by the sweat of their brow, they were eating bread. The people of God were enslaved by a Pharaoh who knew not Joseph. They were enslaved by the body politic. The people of God were reduced to slavery by the political despotism of the Pharaoh, who was totally selfish. 

They grew used to the good life of Egypt. They were frightened by the wilderness through which they must pass to obtain their freedom in the promised land. It is quite evident as they were enslaved, they had lost the name of their God, the one existing God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They had succumbed to the Egyptian gods of fertility and materialism. When Moses led them out of Egypt, they took some of the Egyptian gods with them for insurance, in case Yahweh the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob failed them.  

I now suggest that you and I are in bondage today as the people of God, the same as the people Moses took out of bondage in Egypt. You remember what caused the children to go into Egypt in the first place, famine. The famine was brought on by the law of supply and demand, economic necessity. They sold their soul for a mess of pottage. 

There is one thing that the rebellious ones, the younger generation, the hippies and the hang loose ones are trying to tell us. They ask, “Don’t you see you are enslaved by the economic system, by the spiral towards status.”

Now many people are working at jobs today they wouldn’t be caught dead working at, if it were not for the salary they pay. Economic necessity has enslaved many of us. More than that, we are hooked by the leeks and garlic of Egypt the same as the Hebrews were. We are like the Hebrews who were the forced labor of Egypt. We move in the strange spiral of the luxury of yesterday and the necessities of today. Are we not all hurt by the spiral in economic order? 

Many of us today are living on next year’s salary. We have spent our salary of this year and the year after that for our luxuries of today. When we finance a car for four years, we are actually spending our salary for the next four years. This cycle of luxury that becomes necessity, and we become enslaved. We could no longer tithe, because we have already spent it. We can no longer do the things we ought to do. We live because of the economic enslavement. We miss contributing to the important things. This behavior means less than ever in the church. 

We live in a world of “economic distribution” enslavement. Today, there are many haves and many more have nots. We are faced with oversupply and overproduction in America and Europe. Yet, there are many who live in poverty, starvation, and underdevelopment in the rest of the world. The gap widens more every year. 

We live in a slavery of political alliances. There is the Vietnam issue. There’s not an American who does not wish we were out of Vietnam. There is no way out. There is the sterility of the old parties and the old ways, as Adam Clayton Powell says, “man serving his own ends with no solutions for poverty and racism.” What do we do with our suffering minorities, our Hebrews in Goshen?

 We live in a bondage of disease. People are dying before their time. Just when you get to know someone, they deteriorate and die of a new disease. We live in the bondage of people who are in disunity and fragmentation. How sick the children of God must seem to the world. 

We have adopted the gods of the Egyptians. In our world, might has become right and we are frustrated in our alliances. Education has become a fetish, a sort of sacred cow. The computer and the irresistible power of automation gives us the powers to produce more and to destroy more. These have become our false gods enslaving us. 

One day the Hebrews walked out of Egypt into the sheer wilderness. They followed Moses, who was led by God. They were pilgrims once again. They had no signposts. They had no highways in the desert. The Egyptians was chasing them. The Red Sea was ahead. But God was leading Moses, and Moses was leading them. This is where Abraham’s people found themselves, free and in the wilderness. In the Exodus from Egypt, God was calling them to become a new people, the new children of God called Israel. The Exodus was being led by God and he was leading them out of Egypt. This became their confession of faith.