Exodus review part 1

Over the next few posts, I want to step back and offer a few lessons learned by traveling through the book of Exodus at this point in my life.

First insight is that Exodus echoes Genesis.  So many of the themes encountered in Exodus can be found in Genesis.  In the first book of the Bible, God fashion and forms all that seen and unseen.  In the second book of the Bible, God brings forth and births a people.  In the first book of the Bible, God's generative creativity hovers and hangs over the chaotic crashing waters.  In second book of the Bible, God's generative creativity stirs and splits open the Red Sea making a way where there is no way.  In the first book, God crafts and calls and cultivates relationships with individuals (Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, and others).  In the second book, God calls and cultivates connection with a whole community.  God speaks and sings, God listens and leans into those who struggle, and God is willing to be part of the messiness to bring forth something new.  All those themes as well as many others are found in both first two books.

Second insight is that Egypt is more than a physical place, it also refers to spiritually being in a narrow, confined, rock/hard place kind of location.  The people of God find themselves forced to make more and more bricks.  Pharaoh has an insatiable appetite for stuffing his life with stuff.  That still rings true for us today.  We struggle with the question, "What is enough??"  In times when we are physically, emotionally, and spiritually in an Egyptian state.  We find ourselves stuck and struggling trying to find a wide open space where we can actually breathe!

Eventually, the people of God are liberated and leave Egypt,  It is then, we encounter that truth that sometimes we leave a place, but it takes awhile for a place to leave us.  The sand of Egypt left an impression on the soul of the people.  They struggled trying to find liberation for all that confined and defined them.  In Exodus, the people look back at the past through rose colored glasses.  "Egypt was so great with the tiny morsels of bread and constant working."  "Egypt was swell when we never got a day off but at least we got a little bit to eat."  It is amazing what a difference distance can make in our lives.  Suddenly that which we could not wait to leave, the place we left skid marks in the sand when we sped away, from a few miles away looks suddenly better.  We look back and think, "Aw the warts and bad breath and brokenness I couldn't wait to leave...that wasn't that bad."  Sometimes we leave a place and it takes time for the place to leave us.

I pray these three initial insights from Exodus stir and swirl and open you to more than a trace of God's grace.

Blessings ~