Sodom and Egypt
We all, at least to some degree, are wanting to run; for we are either running to, or running away from something, and sometimes we are doing both. Our life on this earth is like an addiction, a drawing back to the familiar places of our past. Many times this yearning to go back far exceeds our ability to resist; and within our own strength, we will fail. Man is self-centered, self-occupied, and conditioned to his very core to be consumed by his own thoughts and familiar territory of what this earth-life has given us. We can talk about wanting greener pastures, or a fulfilling life, but our past is like an anchor, that is holding each back to the traditions of our accustomed lifestyles. The repetitious order of our life, that is, the ingrained persistence of the life that we are being called out from, whether it was abusive, thrill seeking, or just plain common, takes a hold upon us, that man within himself is not able to break that stronghold; but God within us is, by faith. We just don’t want to change, nor do we want unfamiliar; for if in truth we did, we would shed the old-man of our past; thus looking forward to the Life that is ours to behold.
Moses, born of the house of Levi, chosen by God before birth, and thru a set of circumstances, was raised by the Egyptians to be an Egyptian from shortly after birth, until he was fully grown. It was the only life he knew. But far before the Egyptians nurtured him, God had a purpose for him, but at this time Moses didn’t know that he knew God; but God had a plan for him. After the set-up of seeing his native countryman (an Egyptian) abusing a Hebrew, and then killing the abuser, he had, at this time, no other choice but to flee into the wilderness, Midian. After an encounter with the burning bush, Moses now had purpose that was immediately realized. God spoke; “I have surely seen the oppression of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters, for I know their sorrows. So I have chosen to come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up from that land to a good and large land, to a land flowing with milk and honey… Come now, therefore, and I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.”
Before we take a look at the above scriptures, let’s look at some of the allegoric terminologies. Egypt represents this world and all that man has built; and Pharaoh as the mind that built it. Now in the allegoric and esoteric layers of meanings, we are to look at this time, mainly, at but one of them. Israel and the Israelites are God’s chosen people, and represents us today, and can be associated with this assembly called ‘church’, and those that attend it that are called by His name. The land of milk and honey is exemplified by the teachings of Christ on the Kingdom of God.
So as we read the above text in Exodus chapter 3, that after Moses ran into the wilderness of Midian, a foreign land, that the Lord God spoke to him from the burning bush about His people being enslaved in the land of Egypt, by the every conniving thought of Pharaoh; they were suppressed and oppressed in every way possible by that system of thought and being. God came to Moses to talk with him about deliverance, a total calling away from that state that His people were placed in. Moses was told, by God, to go to Pharaoh and demand ‘to let My people go’.
Joseph, the eleventh son of Jacob, the first born of his wife Rachel, which was ‘the love of his life’, brought his whole family to Egypt to escape the world wide famine, because he found favor with Pharaoh and was made Governor of the whole land. So it was this set of circumstances that took Jacob and all his family, his twelve sons, there to begin with. The story of Joseph is also a wonderful message from God that he is giving to us, but for right now, we’ll stick to the story of Egypt, Moses, and the Promised Land. I just wanted to touch on how the Israelites got there to the land of Egypt.
After a series of catastrophic plagues the chosen ones gathered what they could of the past, what they thought valuable, and left heading east. The Israelites, led by Moses, wandered in the desert, the wilderness, for forty years as God was proving Himself and showing them a way to a completely different life. And it was not long before the people started murmuring about everything that was now different, and wanted to go back to the Egypt from whence they came. They whined about being thirsty, and God gave them water to drink from the Rock; they were hungry, and God gave them a new food called manna; griped about not having meat to eat, and God gave them quail. It appears that these folks, being rescued from Egypt, belly-ached about every provision that God gave them that didn’t fall into the familiar territory of their past life in the land of Pharaoh. They had lived there for so long, and even though it was a life of oppression, and they knew of no other life, the addiction to that accustomed life in the past kept drawing them back to it, and retaining their familiar valuables wasn’t helping. So they murmured about going back to their life left behind, unsatisfied with anything God was providing; so do we.
Let’s read what they said from Exodus 16: “Then the whole congregation of the children of Israel complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. And the children of Israel said unto them: Oh, that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the pots of meat, when we ate bread to the full! For you have brought us out unto this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” As all this began, God was with His people, but the people weren’t with God; for Jehovah, the I AM that I AM, was looking out to rescue and help His people, but the Israelites, couldn’t go anyplace that they couldn’t see with their eyes, only wanting that which their sensual faculties could absorb, which was the known life they had in Egypt. Even to be brought into the Kingdom of God, the Promised Land, a place of unfamiliar territory, was not in the hearts of those traveling across that ‘dry place’, the wilderness; and so we do the same.
This story is very typical to that which is going on today. We have somehow deadened our spiritual sense, our relationship with the Father, and at the same time heightened our lustful senses of the flesh, so that the carnal man can be appeased. The masses that meet on the first day of every week, have conjured up just about every scheme and invention to pull in as many would-be’s into their standard of what they want us to think is the ordination of the things of God; and it certainly is not. If these organizations that we call ‘church’ were going to work, wouldn’t you think that we’d have some sign of that happening in the last century or so? Jesus said, more than a few times, that the Kingdom is in your heart, and will not come by observation; so why do we, as a people, continue to attempt to feed the masses with a carnal version of the image of man?
God kept these many folks in the wilderness for forty years, just long enough for the ‘old man’ to die off, before He’d let them enter into Canaan, for their unbelief and carnal thinking kept them out. Moses was not to enter, for the law could not settle into the same place as the ‘Ark of our covenant’, therefore this burning-off of the ‘old man’ had to first take place, and even then the complete reality of His Promised Land was still not obtained.
The Israelites, and those of today that are called by His name, are the same people. And the exact same situation is going on today, as it was during these earlier times; therefore these scriptures were written for us, the history may be interesting, but the impact of this should be heeded in our time also. In the birthing of Christ’s Church, the early days of the apostles, a revelation of His Holiness, and the justification of us saints, and the faith to live by, was soon outwardly polluted as carnal man began to organized the True Church into an institution that is now called ‘church’. This process, what God called His people into. the religious aspect, didn’t take all that long before it was soon unrecognizable as the Rock that the foundation was built upon; thus evolving into the ‘thing’ that we now call ‘church’. This downward spiraling process is not Abram’s nephew Lot, after living in Canaan, chose to go to the plains of Jordan, and pitched his tent near Sodom, while Abram stayed in the land of promise. After many years of mingling among the inhabitants and growing accustom to the life style of the folks of Sodom, three men of the Lord came to him and ask Lot to move his family to the mountains, but Lot wanted to go no farther than a little city near the plains. His whole family was told to escape the pending disaster, and while running for their lives, not to look back. During his escape, the two cities of Gomorrah and Sodom were destroyed. After being told to face toward the mountains, and to escape with your life, they were not to look back in the direction of their past life. And, of course, we know the rest of the story.
Both of the stories mentioned above, have several layers of an allegoric parable value, and depending on where one is at in their walk, will be able to identify with one of them. But for now, I just wanted to show that when God wants His people to move to a higher level of living, the mountains, it is man’s carnal nature to want to go no farther than a little city, and looking back to the place from which we came from, has consequences. To know and understand what the Israelites, and Lot and his family did, may be interesting, and have some historical value; but to see no more than this, leaves us with very little growth.
Jesus told us that when placing our hands to the plow that we are not to look back. The idea is exactly the same, once God begins to move in our life, it’s then time to look toward the Land of Promise, the Mountains, or the untilled ground, having faith that God is able to sustain us in every step; and to not allow our minds to anchor us to the place we’ve been stifled, for then our forward growth has no other alternative, but to stop. Moving forward, and by God’s direction, is the new birth of our growth.
I said all that to say this. God is not calling His people away from His Way, Truth, and Life; of course not, but He is calling His people to come out of her. It is our time, in the plan of this earth, to ready ourselves for the movement of God’s Spirit. As I am convinced that, at least to some, babylon is falling, and the great harlot is being revealed; “watch ye therefore and be prepared for you know not what hour the thief may enter.”
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