Out of Egypt · Question 4 of 4
What is God revealing through this process?
This God is teaching this people who God is, and who they can be.
In Exodus
Across the whole book God keeps self-revealing. This is not the absent or distant God; this is the Lord who delivers you, who leads you, who provides for you today. This is the God who is so committed to be with the people that God imagines a tent with God's abiding presence in their midst. And this is the God Moses came to know for himself: when God commanded Moses to go, Moses refused, and God's anger burned against Moses, but then God came up with another way. That experience changed Moses. Moses learned something about God: God is the God of endless possibilities.
The summit of the whole book comes right after the people's worst failure. To be sure, God is angered by the people and what they do, but God is portrayed, again and again, as responding to the anxieties that fuel the people's fears without compromising the vision God has for an alternative society, a renewed world, a transformed people. It isn't a punishment scene. It's a self-description: Moses tells us something significant and important about God.
“The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. (Exodus 34:6–7)”
In Acts
The same God shows up in Acts with the same character, in a new key. Standing in a Roman centurion's house, Peter says he now realizes how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts those from every nation who fear him and do what is right, and while he is still speaking, the Spirit falls on everyone listening. This is what the Spirit of God is doing in the world: the Spirit is pouring out on all flesh, forming a new multi-ethnic, worldwide family. God welcomes us and our culture to join God's worldwide family.
And when Paul and Silas are stripped and beaten in Philippi (not for following Jesus, not for freeing a woman from an evil spirit, but for being Jewish), the question is where God is in that. Church, the whole point of Jesus is that God is right there on the inside. In Jesus, God too got beaten up for his ethnic identity, abused by soldiers who were good at torture and bad at justice. In Jesus, God is saying, I know what it feels like when you experience injustice, when you experience violence. I don't want that for you.
Underneath all of it is the resurrection. God is going to great lengths to expand how the resurrection changes everything, signaling that the kingdom is breaking into their present reality with forgiveness, mercy, grace, and new life.
“Empire, poverty, hunger, despair and death aren't the only options. The resurrection says: It doesn't have to be this way.”
The Common Ask
Every week of this series carries the same invitation:
Name your Egypt. Trust the God who brought you out. Take one step toward the family God is forming.
Trust doesn't arrive all at once. It grows by watching who God proves to be: compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness. Naming your Egypt is only the start. Courage: it doesn't have to be this way. You can put your faith into action and partner with the Holy Spirit.