First of all. I wrote this all out once before and then I lost it. 🙁
The other day I was sitting on my bathroom counter listening to music when the Holy Spirit spoke loudly into my soul. My heart started fluttering and I couldn’t sit down anymore. I’ve been washing the rags of thought in the water of these words over the past few days and my heart is so convicted to share this. Here is what the Spirit said:
The desert may suck… but Egypt was worse.
The book of Exodus is one of my favorite books in the Bible because we see brought to life a small-scale version of our liberation from sin and death. Moses acting as Christ the Mediator, the Israelites acting as ALL OF HUMANITY, and Egypt representing us being enslaved to sin.
Quick recap so we’re all on the same page about where the words of the Spirit were referencing. God’s people were slaves in Egypt. The Egyptians made them build stuff and basically were life ruiners, making them kill their babies and stuff. In the middle of the infant genocide comes the baby Moses, miraculously discovered by Pharoah’s daughter, spared, given to his sister to be raised by his mother, and returned to Pharaoah when he was old enough. He got a great education, had a lot of power and influence and (if you ask me) was in the perfect place to politically liberate God’s people.
But then Moses impulsively killed an Egyptian who was mistreating an Israelite. He fled to Midian where he spent FORTY YEARS (!!!!!) as a shepherd. Then God spoke to Moses through a burning bush and was basically like “You’re still my guy, Moses.” Moses goes to Pharoah, equipped with the power of God, and finally Pharoah lets them go. Moses is leading the people out of Egypt, and then Pharoah changes his mind again and sends armies to get the Israelietes back.
God’s people find themselves with the Red Sea in front of them and the approaching Egyptian army behind them. You know what they do?
They start telling Moses about how he should have let them stay in Egypt. How they had never asked to be delivered. That it was better to have died in Egypt.
And then with God’s power, Moses parts the Red Sea. The Israelites walk across on dry land, and then the waters drown the Egyptian army. The Israelites, according to the Bible, put their trust in God.
We then read about God giving them sweet water to drink. They complain about being hungry, and say “If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted.”
Exodus 1 describes the Israelites oppression in Egypt like this:
- oppressed with forced labor (v11)
- worked ruthlessly (v13)
- lives were made bitter with hard labor in brick an mortar an all kins of work in the fiels (v14)
- infant genocide (v16)
None of that sounds like sitting around eating to me. But when we leave a bad situation and are faced immediately with another challenge, for some reason that comfortable old place sounds good, even if it was a terrible place to be. History gets rewritten and the mountain in front of us will more often than not seem way bigger than the one behind us.
The problem isn’t the mountain behind or before us. The problem is the mountain within us, the lack of faith (God refers to the Israelites as “stiff-necked people” a lot..) despite overwhelming proof that God’s promise to never leave nor forsake still stands.
Or, as Captain Hilary put it while we were texting about it,
The problem is we take ourselves everywhere we go.
Until we learn to trust in an unchanging God in the midst of uncertain circumstances, every battle we face will seem harder and more overwhelming than the one before it. Once we have stepped into a place of alignment to God’s purpose, plan and path we are able to see the difference between the mountain behind us and the hill before us.
The desert may suck
but Egypt was worse.