Word for the Week: Whole Life, Whole Bible (10/50) – Let My People Go

‘Word for the Week: Whole Life, Whole Bible’, from London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, is a series of fifty emails designed to look at the main milestones of the biblical story, seeking to show how whole-life discipleship is woven through Scripture as a whole, from beginning to end. Here is the tenth of the fifty emails, written this week by Helen Parry.

I have… seen the misery of my people in Egypt… So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey.
Exodus 3:7-8
 
Over 400 years passed after Jacob’s family took refuge in Egypt when famine struck the eastern Mediterranean. His descendants found themselves now effectively in slavery to the Egyptians. Did any of them hold on to the promise that God had given to Abraham, or have even the faintest vision of their destiny?

But God… All through the biblical story the theme recurs: But God… The account of the Exodus shows God as the Director, with a cast of hundreds who each have to play their part. First, the Hebrew midwives and Moses’ parents, then Pharaoh’s daughter, ensure Moses’ survival and his privileged position in Pharaoh’s court. Then Moses takes centre stage and is given the unwelcome role of hero and deliverer.

On the last evening, when the final plague – the death of the firstborn sons – was to bring Pharaoh to his knees, the Israelites were given particular instructions: to prepare a meal of lamb, bitter herbs and bread without yeast, and to paint the lintels of their doors with the lambs’ blood. And thus the feast of the Passover was instituted – when the destroyer ‘passed over’ the houses on which the blood was daubed – a feast that the Israelites were to celebrate as an annual remembrance, and which Jewish people have observed ever since.

The Passover calls to mind the sovereign call and redemptive action of God, and the identity and destiny of his people. As his chosen people, they were to receive an inheritance and be a blessing to the world. That blessing finally reached out to the world at large only when God wrought his second great deliverance. ‘Christ our Passover Lamb has been sacrificed’, declared Paul (1 Corinthians 5:7), so that, as he reminded the Galatians, the blessing promised originally to Abraham might come to the Gentiles.

Thus, God’s purpose for us, as his people today, is not simply that we might receive a blessing, but that we might be a blessing. May we always, as individuals and church fellowships, seek to be agents of that blessing wherever he has placed us.

Helen Parry

For further reflection and action:

1. The Exodus is often seen as a foreshadowing of Christ’s work of redemption on the cross. Spend some time thanking God for ‘rescuing us from the dominion of darkness and bringing us into the kingdom of the Son he loves’ (Colossians 1:13).

2. Think about God’s sovereign timing in your own life. How does this make you feel about the future?

3. Let us make a prayerful resolve every day to bless others through our words and actions.