Let my people go...

Freedom... for what?

"Let my people go" is the well-known refrain of the opening chapters of Exodus, which BiOY has reached early in February.

In Exodus 3:16-18 God tells Moses to assemble the elders of Israel, tell them about the promise of deliverance to a "land flowing with milk and honey", and to go to Pharaoh to ask permission to go on a three journey to offer sacrifices to the Lord.  These words seem to carry the implication that the Israelites will then return, and so are a bit misleading, but that's what God said to do.

In  Exodus 5:1 Moses and Aaron make their first request to Pharaoh: "Let my people go, so that they may hold a festival to me in the wilderness."

This is a two faceted request.  "Let my people go" - a call for a release from the oppression they are experiencing, from the demands of the slave drivers, and from the restriction to live only where the Egyptians permit.

But also: "...that they may hold a festival to me [the Lord]..."  Their freedom was to have a purpose.  It was not to be freedom simply to do anything, or to do nothing, but to do something specific.

In many places, including the UK, we have religious freedom to 'hold festivals' - to go to church on Sundays, and to go to summer festivals, for more than three days.  What does Exodus have to say to us today?

By chapter 10, the demand has changed a little: "Let my people go, so that they may worship me."  There's still the demand for release, but the purpose has shifted from an act of worship to a life of worship.

The purpose of the Israelites' freedom was not simply to perform an act of worship, but to live in the place God had prepared, flowing with milk and honey - all that they needed, living a life of worship to God.  The laws God would give as they travelled through the wilderness describe essentially what it would mean to live a whole life of worship to God.

Which raises the question: we may be free to perform acts of worship, but do we live in the freedom to live a life of worship to God?  What prevents us, what prevents me?  Fear of standing out from the crowd?  Fear of looking odd?  Fear of losing money, friends or status?

In Psalm 18:19 the psalmist declares: "He [God] brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because he delighted in me."  

My prayer is that I (and you) will know that God has brought me out, has rescued me, because he delights in me, and that I (and you) will know freedom to worship God in the spacious place, in the land flowing with milk and honey, in the whole of my life.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is creativity anyway?

Image
Two childhood memories: One: "Our family is not creative!" I remember being told this in response to my frustration with my ineptitude with paints and pencils.*  I'm sure the intention was to encourage and let me know that I was not alone - that it was not important.  But the effect was that I grew up believing that I could produce nothing of any worth, even to myself, in the creative line.  To this day, I have a visceral pit-of-the-stomach reaction to any suggestion that I should express myself through any artistic medium. Two: "Write a story - it can be about anything at all, let your imagination run wild!" said my English teacher.  Imagination was something else I knew I didn't have, and any attempt to write a story led me into an inescapable paradox: For every idea in my head of a storyline or character, I knew its source in something else I'd seen or read.  This meant it had to be rejected as not a product of my imagination and thus unsuitable for i
Read more

1 John 4 – Abiding, loving (and testing)

This letter of 1 John has themes that come around again and again. So in chapter 4 we read again about the opponents of Jesus (which John calls antichrist), the love of God, our sins, and the idea of abiding with God. In this letter these themes are intertwined, and John seems to be saying that they can’t easily be separated. We can’t look at one of these and then move onto the next. To gain a fuller understanding we must keep turning the ideas over and over. So, thinking about others people John gives a simple test: what do they think of Jesus? ‘Every spirit that confesses that Jesus has come in the flesh is from God.’ Perhaps you’re starting to think about Christmas. What happened at the first Christmas is really important, John says. Baby Jesus was God born in human flesh, and that is really important to who Jesus is and what he did. John goes on to say that this sending of Jesus into the world was a revelation of God’s love, and through Jesus we have life because Jesus was
Read more

The original foster care story at the heart of Christmas

Image
This yea r’s   John Lewis Christmas advert   shows a fa mily preparing to welcome a teenager into their home as foster carers. The foster father’s attempts to learn to skateboard are part of his preparation for the arrival of a teenager into their home. This focus on the foster  father  is welcome. Approximately 40% of foster carers are male, but research shows that male foster carers are often seen in a negative light in contrast to female carers. Negative experiences The experience of male foster carers is that negative assumptions are often made about their ability to care for children and possibly even keep them safe. Male carers report being treated like a ‘risk to be regulated’ [1]  and feel that ‘the stigma of being a male foster carer runs deep… you are often portrayed as someone to fear.’ [2] Male carers also experience being seen as secondary to their female partner carers, who are assumed to be the main carers of the children. Even social work professionals admit to ‘resorti
Read more