Читать книгу Soup Kitchen for the Soul - Renee Crosby - Страница 12

My story goes back to my forefathers, the Israelites that came to fill the land of Egypt as foreigners. The sons of Jacob all came to live in Egypt through Joseph their brother. Joseph was a great Israelite who held a high position in Egypt during his day, second only in command to the Pharaoh himself. When Joseph was reunited with his family, they all moved to Egypt. But those days are long ago. Joseph and all of his brothers have passed on since then, but left a legacy of many descendants.

My ancestors may have been respected and worked in harmony with the Egyptians, but that is not so now. It is apparent how different we are today. The Egyptians are a people with deep cultural roots. They worship many gods and are great builders. You should see these pyramids that they built. But we on the other hand have the hearts of wanderers which is why many of my ancestors were shepherds, not builders. And though they worship many gods, we worship only one. We don’t even really live among them as we reside in Goshen and they don’t. This separation of ways and place only lends to more tension and disharmony. We have felt the strain of being foreigners here since we don’t even have the rights of the native Egyptians in recent years, but it has gotten much worse.

This new Pharaoh that rules knows nothing of the days of teamwork between us and them. This king sees us only as a threat because there are so many of us. We heard rumblings that this Pharaoh thinks that since our numbers are so great we might organize against him and try to take over the kingdom. So, to remove that threat from his reign, he forced us into slavery to oppress us and kill our spirit and our growth. He not only stripped us of our freedom, but of our dignity. We are the underclass, the lowly, the hungry, the thirsty and the outcasts.

We feel defeated in so many ways. Our bodies are worn and ache from the long hours building with bricks and from lack of sleep. However, even in the midst of this suffering and torture, we are being blessed as God causes us to multiply and grow even stronger.

We live in times filled with fear, anger, horror, dread, anxiety and downright panic as the Pharaoh even ordered our own midwives to kill all of our baby boys being born. By the grace of God, the midwives stayed true to what was right and spared our Hebrew babies. Just when we thought our God spared us this horror, Pharaoh found out that the midwives disobeyed the orders. “Then Pharaoh gave this order to all his people: ‘Every boy that is born you must throw into the Nile, but let every girl live’” (Exodus 1:22). A state sponsored campaign of genocide for God’s chosen people, who would have thought?

Years have passed, but we are still under the yolk of slavery. We groan under the burden of slavery. Yet we cry out for help with pleas of deliverance to our God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob our forefathers. We have faith in our God, for, “He administers justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the stranger, giving him food and clothing…for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 10:18, 19b).

We know He hears our cries for help. It is later documented in the scriptures that this great God is about to execute a mighty work in saving His people. We are told that, “He looked down on the people of Israel and knew it was time to act, and acknowledged his obligation to help them,” (Exodus 2:25) to deliver us from our oppression, our exploitation, our genocide.

In our need of deliverance, God has been preparing a man to lead us, Moses. Moses has come on our behalf to help us by mediating with Pharaoh, requesting that we be allowed to leave for three days to go and offer sacrifices to our God.

Pharaoh is not impressed with this God that we worship. He figures this God only wants to distract us from doing our work for the Pharaoh, and that we obviously had too much time on our hands to plan such things.

So Pharaoh responds with retaliation as we are now required to continue to build with bricks, but we now have to go and get the straw to make the bricks, and still have to meet the same building quota, which we know is impossible.

Some good Moses has done for us! We are angry at Moses. Perhaps we should have sent someone else to mediate with Pharaoh.

Moses then takes our grumblings and complaints to God, telling Him that this isn’t working. We were hoping for some other plan to be given to Moses. But Moses comes back with the same plan. However, the LORD has sent Moses with more than the plan. He comes back to us with new promises from God, promises of our very own. These promises are our lifeline and we hold fast to them.

God has promised to free us, to redeem us, to make us His own special people. He will be our God. He promises we will know Him (Exodus 6:6-7).

Can you imagine that this great mighty God wants to know us and be in relationship with us? Our God promises to bring us into the land promised to our forefather, Joseph. We long for the day when He will give it to us as our own land (Exodus 6:8). It almost seems unreal to us that we could come from our slavery and oppression to a land of our own flowing with milk and honey, but the hope of it keeps us going for now.

Even though we have been in Egypt for over four hundred years and pray for deliverance, little do we know that tonight, things will change in regards to our being released.

Moses has prepared us by telling us what God wants us to do regarding a new tradition of the Passover (Exodus 12:1-13). So we prepare for it by setting aside a lamb for slaughter, and now the time has come. Moses has told us to slaughter the lamb. We slaughter the lamb and drain the blood. Using hyssop branches, we dip them in blood and strike the top and sides of the door to mark our homes.

God has promised to do great and mighty things tonight. He will bring disaster on our oppressors, the Pharaoh and the land of Egypt, one more time. We have seen God bring about nine plagues in the land of Egypt already. “The court officials have even come to Pharaoh and appealed to him, ‘How long will you let these disasters go on? Please let the Israelites go to serve the LORD their God! Don’t you realize that Egypt lies in ruins?” (Exodus 10:7 NLT). Shockingly, the oppressor still won’t let us go to worship the LORD.

Now we enter the safety of our homes, marked by blood stained door frames, and close the door. Tonight, it will be so peaceful, serene, and quiet that we won’t even hear a dog bark. Yet the oppressor’s land will be filled with terror, death, wailing and mourning as God kills all of Egypt’s firstborn sons and firstborn male animals, while he will pass over our houses secured in the sacrificial blood on our door posts. “Then they will know that the Lord makes a distinction between the Egyptians and the Israelites” (Exodus 11:7b).

Tonight we will come to experience a peace like we have never known. This peace God will grant us is part of the promise to redeem us. Tonight, this peace will redeem our dignity. This peace will liberate us. This peace showers us with the love of our great God. This peace blankets us with God’s presence, and makes us feel how special we are to him. He is our hope. God is doing our justice work for us. He hasn’t forgotten us lowly, tired, oppressed slaves. He is working for us against evil and injustice.

As we sit to eat our meal of roast lamb with bitter herbs and bread without yeast, we wear our traveling clothes and our sandals. We have our walking sticks with us, and we eat quickly. God has asked that we do this as if prepared for a long journey. Little do we know that soon we will be gathering our kneading bowls, and will be receiving many goods from the Egyptians.

Then we will be encouragingly and helpfully ushered out by those that torment us. Then our journey of freedom begins. Four hundred and thirty years and ten plagues later, it is finally our time to go.

We are being released from our captivity, our oppression, our humility. Our time to sit under the Passover blood that marked our door frames was short and sacred. This time of Passover will forever remind us of God’s protection, of God’s amazing peace for His people, of God’s faithful fulfilling of promises, of God’s redeeming and restoring our value and dignity by the blood on our doorposts. The experience is overwhelming and surreal. We cannot fathom, grasp, or contemplate what God has planned for us now. We just walk in faith and awe as we follow Moses, led by the LORD, out of Egypt.

It has been many hours since we started our journey, and no one has yet said a word. We are finally about to settle for a while so the animals can graze. Oh wait, I hear Moses now. He is telling us that this is a day to remember forever, and that every year we are to celebrate a great feast on the anniversary of our Exodus and to explain to our children what we are doing (Exodus 13:3-16). We all chuckle and laugh thinking how funny that is to think that we might forget. I must go for now, Moses is still telling us what else God wants us to do.

This, dear friend, is our story. This is the story of our ancestors, God’s people, sitting under the Passover blood for a short but sacred time while being spared the sacrifice of their first born sons, unlike the Egyptians. The Israelites were sequestered in a place of quiet, contentment, peace and tranquility while the world around them was filled with terror, grief, crying, death and pain.

This is us safely secured behind the door frame stained with the blood of Jesus. As Ray Stedman describes it, “The angel of death passes over us. The angel of judgment will never pass our way because we are resting under the blood of the Lamb of God, a wonderful truth.”²

The Passover story becomes our story, our heritage, our legacy the moment we believe, the defining moment when, “We have been made right in God’s sight by faith, we have peace with God, because of what Jesus Christ our Lord has done for us” (Romans 5:1 NLT).

In the defining moment of our justification we are made right with God because we have come to accept the gift given to us in Jesus. At this defining moment at the foot of the cross, before God, He blesses us with an indescribable sense of tranquility and peace. It’s a sacred time in our life when all the scrambling, the attempt at control, the confusion over a lack of meaning in our lives, a lack of direction or misdirection, the constant heaviness of a cold and lonely world, and the struggling of our individual life...ceases.

It’s like we were ourselves homeless, meandering, sojourning, feeling lost as if we didn’t fit in this world, feeling exhausted from having walked a long journey to arrive nowhere. As we approached what we thought the end of our destination, we were now inch by inch crawling along a sandy dry desert earth, only to realize our destination was merely a mirage.

Then suddenly we look up and see that we have somehow arrived at the doorstep of home, marked by blood stained sides and top. It even smells familiar at the doorstep with that roast lamb dinner cooking, and boy does it feel safe inside.

In those moments following the embarking action engaging us into a sacred covenant relationship with God, we enter the house where the Passover meal is about to be served, and we are astounded at the peace and tranquility of our wonderful Savior found within. I often think of the word savor when I think of our Savior. May we taste the amazing sweetness, or savor the flavor of a meal like we have never tasted before, like the Passover meal.

Then, just as the Israelites were soon asked to leave their place of sequestered peace to go into the world on a journey and follow the LORD, we too are asked to go into the world and follow the LORD. Within the life altering Christian experience captured in the fleeting Passover moments of our modern faith walk, our Christian experience is much like those of our forefathers. It’s easy to think that the memory of such a unique and profound event filled with such peace and grace would stay with us forever, but somehow we come to forget. Just as our ancestors would forget, we too forget. Just as I forgot those beginning moments of peace through the saving grace of Jesus in that childhood kitchen in Indianapolis, Indiana.

God knew our sinful nature would eclipse the spectacular sunshine of our defining Passover moments. That is why the first thing His people are told to do upon exiting is to remember. Let us heed the instructions from our God to remember and proclaim to our children the story of our Exodus from captivity.

For in our modern faith walk, may every thought, word and deed be offered up to the LORD as a sacrifice readily and verbally proclaimed to our children, “I do this because of what the LORD did for me when we came out of Egypt” (Exodus 13:8). We too must work at remembering our heritage. We too must realize that we are leaving an old way of life behind for a new life of freedom. We too must tell the story to our children.