My Power and the Stregth of My Hands

“When you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses, when your businesses become larger and your bank accounts grow – then you will say: ‘My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me!’”

For 400 years, a people, who claimed to be God’s special possession, God’s anointed people, God’s chosen ones, this people slaved under the hand of the most powerful military/industrial complex in the world. So great was the power of Egypt, so vast were its resources, so influential were its artisans that the world still bears the marks of this empire more than 5000 years later.

And it’s under this empire’s rule that “God’s people” were slaves. They owned no land. They worked for someone else’s gain. They were beaten, abused, and murdered without any course of justice.

It’s here that the people cry out to God.

It’s here that God hears their cry.

As exiles.

As slaves in a foreign land.

In preparation for Christmas, we’ve been looking at the 1000 year blank most Christians draw when they think about the Old Testament scriptures in their Bibles. The time between Solomon and Matthew where most Christians lose the central thread of the Biblical Narrative – they lose the plot of the story. It’s been in this exercise that we’ve begun to take a long look at the story of the Hebrew people: rescued, rebellious, and ransacked – only to find the central hope of the exiles is salvation through the Lord’s Anointed One, through his Messiah.

It’s as God rescues his people out of Egypt “with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm” that God says something absolutely incredible.

For 400 years, this people had been abused through systematic injustice. For 400 years, they’d planted no crops of their own, raised no livestock of their own. They had nothing but that which they took with them in the night as they fled the land of Egypt.

God takes his special people into the wilderness. It’s almost as if God wants some alone time with his people.

And God says something incredible: “You will plant your own crops.” “You will raise your own livestock.” “You will lie down and rise up in peace.” “Your families will live in houses.” “You will dwell in a land of safety.”

400 years of slavery, and now, while wandering in the wilderness, God promises that his people will have lives of their own again.

But God issues a warning – “When you have eaten and are satisfied, praise your God for the good he has given you. Be careful that you do not forget your God. Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses, when your businesses become larger and your bank accounts grow, then your heart will become proud and you will forget that God brought you out of slavery, through the wilderness providing for you along the way.”

“If you ever forget the LORD, your God, and follow other gods and worship and bow down to them – you shall surely be destroyed.”

How easy is it for us to look around our lives and begin to claim ownership of the things around us? To fret over my mortgage, drive my car, invest in my personal savings account. It doesn’t take long for us to begin imagining that we deserve, own, created these things.

How easy is it for us to look at our church and claim ownership of it? My church. My worship. My God.

How easy is it for us, after recieving God’s lavish generocity over us, to turn away on our own path and wander, like slaves in a foreign land, in search of rescue.

~ by sholander on November 12, 2008.