As I see it, Exodus is a continuation of the revelation God gave in Genesis of Himself and the human race. So the redemptive, restorative work we saw Him begin to do in Genesis, God’s living Word will continue to carry forward in time and space, throughout Exodus. He is continuing to reveal the significance and scope of the ‘covering’ (Genesis 3:21) and salvation and restoration of Adam, Eve and their human family. The humans are meant to be the image and likeness of God’s living Word. So God is not about to let the Serpent or anything else destroy them and wrench them away from His Word. He keeps sending His Word after us…to reconcile with us and to restore us to our original perfection and beyond.
But because the stakes are so important, God’s communication must be very clear. It is vital that we all understand what He is doing on our behalf and why it has to be done. The Serpent is going to continue to do everything possible to blur, distort, twist, contradict, cut and paste, and if possible, completely erase God’s Word from our minds and hearts. If he succeeds, we will remain ignorant and deceived by his lies about God. We will never understand God or our deadly situation and the coming Judgment or our desperate need for salvation. Continued deception, delusion and their resultant misinformed ignorance will keep us entrapped in the Serpent’s deadly coils and that leads to eternal doom.
“Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to Life, and there are few who find it.” (Matthew 7:13-14)
Ponder this last sobering final phrase that our Master, God’s living Word, uttered. He said there are few who find the way that leads to eternal Life. Genesis, Exodus and the rest of the Bible reveal why this is so. Few find the way because all the demonic lies, deceptions and distractions blind people to the awesome secret…the key that unlocks and opens the way into God’s eternal Kingdom. What is the secret? What is the key to that lock? God’s Truth and our alignment with it, is the key. Truth exposes and discredits the demonic lies that enable the Serpent to keep most humans trapped in his coils.
“…if you continue in My Word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you will know the Truth, and the Truth will make you free.” (John 8:31b)
The Serpent’s Ploy to Entrap Us
One of the Serpent’s greatest deceptions is this: he gets many of us to believe that life is death, and that death is life! Sin killed the human race in the Garden of Eden. God warned Adam that rejection of and separation from His living Word and His Authority would kill us and so it did. Now we are all born into a state of Sin, which is ‘living death.’ And the Serpent deludes natural, earthy, fallen men to call that mortal existence we start with, ‘life.’ To them, their state of living death is ‘life!’ The world and its citizens have gotten so accustomed to living that way that they call this living death existence, ‘my life!’ But God sent His living Word to save and deliver us from the living death to which most humans cling desperately. Their delusion prevents them from seeing, understanding and admittiong what our Redeemer has to do for us. Not until we see The Truth…that we can only truly live when we’re one with God’s Word and can freely draw everything we need from Him, will we be truly free. God’s Word is our only Source for what is real, true, living and good! So even though humans cling desperately to ‘my life’ God’s Word is here to set us free from our living death so that He can be free to be True, Eternal Life to us. That is why we must not expect God to help us continue to try to improve our living death or make it ‘work better.’ How can you improve anything that has already died? No, we must exchange that state of death for what God really designed and created us to have and enjoy – His Eternal Life!
“Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household. He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who has found his life will lose it; and he who has lost his life for My sake will find it.” (Matthew 10:37-39 Emphasis added.)
“And He was saying to them all, ‘If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow Me.“ (Luke 9:23 Emphasis added.)
Life vs. Death
From its earliest verses, Genesis reveals this life vs. death reality. Since Adam’s fall, all his descendants are conceived and born into his state of Sin. The wages or results of that Sin, is Death (Genesis 2:17; Romans 6:23). Since we all inherit that death state at conception, spiritually speaking, we’re born dead in Sin (cf. Ephesians 2:1-3). The Serpent continually deceives us into ignoring and rejecting this warning. To many, the Bible contains nothing more than myth, folklore and religious nonsense. So after they dismiss what God said, they assume that what God calls ‘death’ is actually, ‘life’. Then they keep trying to make ‘improvements’ to that living death because they’re convinced that it is as much as anyone can hope for. So since they see no need for Salvation, they never repent. And thus they remain decapitated and dead, and lost. Death will never be admitted into God’s Kingdom of Eternal Life!
So in the world system, rich, accomplished humans that achieve worldly success and acclaim, are considered paragons of ‘ultimate humanity’ and the world remains convinced that such exalted successful worldly accomplishments make humans as good as they can be. This is why so many of us cling to ‘my life’ so desperately. We’ll do anything to make it succeed, to protect it and make it last as long as possible. We educate and train and improve it so we can ‘be a success in the world.’ We do it until we finally keel over and…oh yes, that’s right…we die completely!
Deep in our hearts we know we’re mortal. We know we’re dying from the moment we’re born. But we insist on calling our slow death, ‘life.’ The demonic realm is Darkness and the deception under which it keeps the human race causes profound spiritual blindness. And that is what God’s living Word and His chosen disciples are here to invade, expose, discredit and overcome.
“God saw that the Light was good; and God separated the Light from the Darkness.” (Genesis 1:4)
God’s Word is here to reveal and proclaim His Father’s Eternal Truth to living dead people. They will never receive Eternal Life from God, as long as they labor under the delusion that clinging to their radically independent, God-less form of existence is what it means to live. That goes directly counter to true Reality. How can we truly live and enjoy well being when we were made to be God’s image and likeness but continually move in opposition to God’s Perfect nature and contradict and violate His standards of Righteousness? That isn’t life; it’s eternal condemnation and separation from our only Source of true Life!
“Jesus answered, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’” (John 3:5-7)
Our Exodus from Living Death…to True Eternal Life
We only attain true life when we die to the thing that keeps us from receiving God’s Eternal Life. When we cling to ‘my life,’ we cling to our death! That is the profound delusion of fallen flesh. God is the Creator, Sustainer, Redeemer and sole Source of real Truth and real Life. So, because of the mortal wound Sin has inflicted on us all, it is not enough to be born once. We must be born twice before we can receive and enjoy permanent union with our Creator and the Eternal Life that flows into us from that union.
So that is where the Exodus pattern comes in. We can’t have both things. If we cling to living death, we can’t have eternal Life; and if we enjoy eternal Life, death remains completely out of the picture. We must die to one or the other. So God says we have to die to our original separated-from-God existence. Until we realize that we are called to die to death, we will keep clinging to that death state and remain caught in the grip of the Serpent’s coils. So the lies must be exposed and discredited, and the Truth proclaimed, so that the delusion can be recognized and forsaken and the hypnotic trance billions of people are under can finally be broken.
“For this reason it says, ‘Awake, sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you!’” (Ephesians 5:14 Emphasis added.)
This is why, in Genesis 3, God immediately sent His living Word after Adam and Eve. He came to restore his beloved humans who had just fallen into Sin and were spiritually killed. They were created to be His human image and likeness; but the Serpent’s lies destroyed that. So God sent His Word to cover the Sin-blasted, naked ‘slow death’ corpses of Adam and Eve. He covered them…with Himself – with His own Righteousness and Atonement so that He could lead them, and all the rest of us, back to God and His Eternal Life.
In eternity past, before Sin took place, God in His foreknowledge commissioned His Word to be our Perfect Sacrificial Lamb. He was commissioned to take our place, to take all of our Sin and its curse and lethal effects upon Himself. He had to die our death…to fully become one of us. So when He died, He took our death upon Himself, and by His death He stripped Death off of whoever would believe and follow and obey Him. And because He is perfectly Righteous, Pure and Sin-less, Death had no claim or hold on Him. That’s why He was able to take His life back and walk out of the tomb. So if we acknowledge our state of living death and forsake it and join it to His atoning Death, we die to our dead existence and He joins us to Himself.
“‘It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life. But there are some of you who do not believe.’ For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were who did not believe, and who it was that would betray Him. And He was saying, ‘For this reason I have said to you, that no one can come to Me unless it has been granted him from the Father.’
“As a result of this many of His disciples withdrew and were not walking with Him anymore. So Jesus said to the twelve, ‘You do not want to go away also, do you?’ Simon Peter answered Him, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life. We have believed and have come to know that You are the Holy One of God.'” (John 6:63-69)
Thus we make our Exodus, spiritually speaking and continue to follow God’s living Word out of our tomb as we also make our mental and emotional Exodus from our former viewpoints, attitudes, God-less priorities and Sin-loving lifestyles. This removes our death shrouds and clothes us instead with our Master’s own Eternal Righteousness. That is how He leads us into His eternal Triumph over the powers of Darkness…and into His Heavenly Kingdom.
Our True Identity Comes from Him When We Abide…in Him
This is why disciples must learn to identify with God’s Word and the Salvation He came to be for us. Without Him and His finished Work, we remain dead. So we must comprehend this and align with the revelations and requirements that underlie the world’s salvation. We must all make our Exodus from Death to Life. So, regardless of whatever pain and inconvenience we may have to undergo, regardless of what that transition will require of us, we must follow God’s Word out of our original fallen state and trust Him to know what He is doing, and rest in the knowledge that despite the lies the Serpent’s lackeys may continue to hiss at us, God’s Word is our Good Shepherd and our Eternal Life and if we believe, trust, obey and go with Him to where He has to take us, the Serpent and Sin and Death will forever lose their grip and claim on us.
When we repent of our radically independent mindsets and lifestyles, we can unite and live as one with God’s Word. Thus He becomes our Head or Lord. And our union with Him gives us our new Heavenly identity that comes with the Eternal Life and Righteousness and Treasure and Destiny that are contained in Him. What He is becomes ours. And what He did becomes our personal ‘track record’ of accomplishment. God puts what our Head has done into our file. And we, as His Body, receive credit for all that our Head has done in our name. When He died, we died. When He rose from the dead, so did we. And as He abides at the Father’s right hand, so do we…in Him. Now God is free to share His Son’s Eternal Life and Reward with us as He has always intended to do. What the Head deserves, His Body deserves. And so God fills us with His Spirit, the same Spirit that fills His living Word. And the Spirit empowers and equips us to embody and release God’s Presence and Righteousness, just as He did for our Master, when He walked the Earth as Rabbi Yeshua of Nazareth!
Our Exodus from Decapitated Existence Begins
As we make our Exodus out from Darkness and Death…God Himself becomes our Life and His Word and Spirit abide within us, to permeate and sanctify our every thought, word, action, reaction and interaction of our new life. This is what it means to truly ‘leave Egypt’…and when we do, we can grow and learn to become full-fledged citizens of God’s True Israel.
In this sense, the Exodus pattern began to emerge in Genesis 3, when God’s Word came to cover fallen Adam and Eve and re-establish communication and fellowship. And He came for Cain, Abel, and all the other humans leading up to Noah. Then after He purged the Earth of mankind’s unrepentant Sin with the flood, He came again for the repentant portion of the human race…beginning with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. They were the family God first chose to make the Exodus from living death. They were to serve as the original template or pattern for what true disciples of God’s Word were to be. And the rest of the world was expected to learn from and follow that Israelite Pattern and join them by making their own Exodus from Darkness and Death…and following God’s Word along with the Israelites…into the Land of Promise and Eternal Life in God.
In God’s mind, in order for us to make a successful Exodus, we must not only begin to leave Darkness and Death; we must leave it completely and finish the journey. We must die to Sin once and for all. That’s the first part. The second part is the overcoming experience of the agonizing wilderness we will have to traverse as we make the great transition from Death to Life and from Rebellion against God’s Word, to image and likeness Obedience. We can’t make that transition effectively if we do not truly die to Egypt and forsake it completely. Then we must train ourselves to get used to the new identity, thought patterns and lifestyle of God’s Kingdom, until they become second nature to us. We can’t complete the transition, if we do not really prepare to completely enter and embrace and absorb the new identity, citizenship and ‘one with God’ lifestyle that can only be found in our new destination and eternal Homeland…which God calls, ‘Israel.’ This is what God was beginning to create even as His Word was covering the nakedness of our first parents, and revealing His Exodus pattern to Noah and summoning Abraham out of his original homeland and lifestyle. The Exodus began right after Sin mortally wounded the human race and God’s Word came to lead us out of it. The Exodus exposes demonic lies and opens our eyes to our true state of living death and shows us what real Truth and real Life are, and proves to us that what God’s Word is telling us is absolutely True.
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob obeyed God’s Word and God became one with them by bringing them into His Eternal Covenant. That Covenant contains everything the human race will ever need to be fully restored to its original pre-fall perfection, and much more. In this Covenant, everything is perfectly covered and paid for by God’s Eternal Lamb, the Word. And all of that belongs to those who are one with God through His Word. We receive all the Covenant Blessings when we become one with God…on His perfect, righteous and just terms. This is what the book of Exodus will amplify and further explain. It is all about the Restoration of God’s image and likeness.
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him…” (Ephesians 1:3-4)
Abraham’s Family Becomes a Nation
So the book of Exodus continues the ongoing chronicle of Abraham’s ever-growing Family. By the time Moses and his generation arrive, the Family has become 12 large tribes. Now it is time for God to forge them into the servant nation through which He plans to teach and deal with the needs of the rest of the Serpent-dominated human race so that He can lead all of mankind into His Eternal Salvation (Yeshua). So not only does Exodus chronicle the birth of the nation of Israel, it is also a chronicle of the onset of the Salvation of the entire repentant human race!
As we said, the first step must be the total separation of God’s chosen ones from the rest. He must take them out of Egypt’s idolatrous atmosphere and toxic, humanistic, living death, ‘world system.’ He must extract them from that noxious atmosphere so He can have His Blood Covenant People (His ‘Bride’), all to Himself. Then He can teach, train and equip them to fulfill their commission without any contradictory, polluting, corrupting interference. He must prepare everyone concerned for the massive changes to come. So God begins by making the comfort zones of the Egyptians and Israelites increasingly uncomfortable and stressful:
“Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. He said to his people, ‘Behold, the people of the sons of Israel (Jacob) are more and mightier than we. Come, let us deal wisely with them, or else they will multiply and in the event of war, they will also join themselves to those who hate us, and fight against us and depart from the land.’ So they appointed taskmasters over them to afflict them with hard labor. And they built for Pharaoh storage cities, Pithom and Raamses. But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and the more they spread out, so that they were in dread of the sons of Israel.” (Exodus 1:8-12 Emphasis added.)
God will bring the rising tension between Egypt and their Israelite slaves to a ‘boil’. Amid the increasing tension of mutual mistrust and resentment, the stages of Israel’s eventual departure begin in the first 12 chapters of the book of Exodus. But before we examine what happened, let’s consider more of the Exodus from Death to Life from a broader perspective to better understand why all of this is so necessary.
Israel…God’s Example to the World
In His wisdom, God chose Abraham’s Family, such as it was, to serve as His instrument of revelation and salvation for the whole world. That of course would require a massive re-orientation and training and disciplining and re-wiring and reprogramming regimen. It required nothing less than a disciple training ‘boot camp’! These people had been disenfranchised slaves for several centuries and generations. They knew nothing of freedom and the responsibilities that come with it. So they had to be trained, equipped and prepared to transform from whipped slaves of Darkness into God’s ‘Light to the Gentiles!’ This is what God sent His Word to announce and begin to do with Moses. Then through Moses, He began to do it with all the slaves that He had chosen for His service. And the plan was – once the slaves transformed into His True Israel, they would be the ‘Beacon’ whose light would serve to guide the rest of mankind.
So this massive undertaking that begins in Exodus is actually the continuation of the simple thing God’s Word began to do for Adam and Eve after they fell into Sin in Genesis, with many more people. He came after them, to cover their Sinful nakedness and retrieve and restore them to union with Himself. He came to lead them out of their state of living death so that He could restore and reclaim His ‘image and likeness.’ He did it with the generation of Israelite slaves and He strives to continue to do this with each new generation.
So what our Master and His New Covenant disciples were doing as it is recorded in the New Testament wasn’t anything new or different. It was the continuation of what began in Genesis 3. It is a progressive restoration and redemption…leading to the total Salvation and Fulfillment of Israel that we are told about at the end of the book of Revelation. Scripture is a ‘Seamless Robe’ of revelation…the revelation of the living Word of God who contains all of the Fullness of the Father who sent Him…so that God and Man could be made to be and live as one, once more:
“The next Sabbath nearly the whole city assembled to hear the word of the Lord. But when the Jews saw the crowds, they were filled with jealousy and began contradicting the things spoken by Paul, and were blaspheming. Paul and Barnabas spoke out boldly and said, ‘It was necessary that the word of God be spoken to you first; since you repudiate it and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, behold, we are turning to the Gentiles. For so the Lord has commanded us, ‘I have placed You as a light for the Gentiles, That You may bring salvation (Yeshua) to the end of the earth.’
“When the Gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord; and as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed. And the word of the Lord was being spread through the whole region.” (Acts 13:44-49)
What took place above in the Book of Acts was also a continuation of what began in Genesis. And God’s Word continues to bring the Restoration forward to this day. And He does it in the same way…through His God-picked, Spirit-trained, Jewish and non-Jewish disciples. God saves decapitated humans by reasserting and reestablishing the absolute Authority of His living Word over them. The Word must become our Life-giving Head. That union brings us out of living death and into Eternal Life. Obedience to the Head transforms us into His image and likeness. If this reunion and transformation do not take place, mankind remains dead and lost. God’s Word is our only true Creator, Sustainer and Provider. He is our true Lord and sole Source of all we are and do and have. To be truly, fully human, our true Head must be attached to our spiritual shoulders so that He can transmit all that He is and has…into us. And the world must have living examples of this new life so that the differences between the two races can be clearly seen and understood and what is false and unworthy of God can be exposed and discredited.
The Living Word’s Work on Earth Comes through His Disciples
What the Word must do for the world, He must first do for His disciples. We are to bring His Light into a world enshrouded in demonic Darkness. And we must be formed into a living Temple that receives His Presence from Heaven…and welcomes Him and contains and transports and releases Him into the Earth. The disciples can’t give what they do not first receive; or teach what they have not first been taught, or lead others past the point where they have not yet dared to follow where God’s Word wants to lead them. So the Word must deal with His chosen ones first. They must lead the way in repenting of their ‘Head-less’ radical independence from God. They must learn the ways of the Master first. And when they do, the rest of the world can learn from them. When the world sees God’s image and likeness in the disciples, what the rest of the world is, by comparison, is exposed and made evident. Then people can see the difference and become aware of what and where they really are, and see what they are missing. That disclosure enlightens and motivates them to make their own Exodus out of the Darkness.
When God first begins to work with us, there is no real spiritual difference between us and the headless people around us. We are all born fallen sons of Adam. So the chosen ones must be the first to go through the radical exodus changes God requires. That is why we must enter God’s disciple training ‘boot camp.’ There we will undergo a radical spiritual, mental and emotional ‘metamorphosis’, a total transformation process. We call it ‘boot camp’ because it is very similar to the radical transformations raw military recruits undergo as they are reshaped, reprogrammed and reconfigured in the course of their basic training. And when they complete that training, it’s as if they are ‘born again’. They have a new appearance; and they think, act, react and interact in new ways because they are new people! Their continuous, repetitive obedience to the training commands of their instructors changes them completely – from the inside out! They begin as a rabble of sloppy, self-indulging exempt civilians; but gradually transform into a highly trained and skilled, totally disciplined unit of combat-ready warriors. They now operate as one man. No longer are they a random scattering of disconnected body parts. They are one new man, under one commander. And that is how it must be with disciples…but it must penetrate to a much deeper level…all the way to their spirit and basic identity as creations of God:
“…remember that you were at that time separate from Christ, excluded from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who formerly were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For He (our common Head) Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall, by abolishing in His flesh the enmity, which is the Law of commandments contained in ordinances, so that in Himself He might make the two (Israelites and former Egyptians) into One New Man, thus establishing peace…” (Ephesians 2:12-15 Amplification and emphasis added.)
“So this I say, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind, being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart; and they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness. But you did not learn Christ in this way, if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught in Him, just as truth is in Jesus, that, in reference to your former manner of life, you lay aside the old self, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit, and that you be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.” (Eph. 4:17-24)
So the difference between the two races is not that one is Jewish and the other is non-Jewish. Those are differences of body genetics and soulish considerations. But the real difference that concerns God is a difference in the spirits of these two races. The spirits of one race are decapitated and therefore dead; and the spirits of the other are alive with the Life of the Head, God’s Word, to which they are connected by the obedience of true faith. So it is the inner life of the heart of a person that reveals whether or not God’s living Word is truly his or her Head, or not.
True Discipleship Requires Departure from our Former ‘Loves’
All true disciples make the radical departure from what we once were separately, to what God intends to make of us corporately. It must happen – spiritually, mentally, emotionally and physically. We must leave all traces of our former radically independent living death behind and plunge fully into ‘the New Covenant Creation’ God is putting into the Earth. And once it happens, we become God’s living ‘demonstrators,’ living proof that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob truly is the one and only true God over all of Creation. Our Word-embodying lives prove that the Serpent’s evil works have been destroyed in us. We ‘radiate’ His Resurrection Truth before the eyes of the world. Through the true children of Abraham, Jewish and non-Jewish people alike, God intends to expose and discredit the false demonic gods of this individualistic, humanistic, ego-adoring world system that the Bible calls, ‘Egypt.’
Wherever God’s Word first leads Israel, He must inevitably lead the rest of the world. The two must eventually join into one people. If Israel must die to being part of Egypt and must be led out of it, the rest of the Egyptians are required to follow and join them. But again, this is not about the disappearance of worldly nationalities or cultures or genetic ethnicities. It goes much, much deeper. It’s about former children of Adam transforming into believing, obeying regenerated sons of the true, living God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob!
Transformation – God’s Way
This is the Exodus Salvation pattern God will continue to reveal through this second book of His Torah. All Headless humanity is symbolized in Scripture as ‘Egypt’. And they must be redeemed and ‘re-Headed’. That transforms them into God’s ‘True Israel.’ If God has His way, there will be no Egyptians left on the planet in this symbolic Biblical sense. Everyone will have left the Egypt of this fallen world system, and will have migrated into and become part of His properly-Headed Israel. All men are required to be equipped to follow the believing obedient ways of our original spiritual forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and Moses. Redeemed Jews and Gentiles alike will identify and interact with God’s living Word just as their forefathers in the Faith once did. And they will do it together, as one New Man under the Headship of their Messiah, regardless of their natural, temporary genetic makeup, color, nationality, past religious traditions or gender.
“For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise.” (Gal. 3:27-29)
That is what God wanted to teach to the nation of Israel in the book of Exodus and beyond. He still does, and He will continue to do it as long as time remains. And those who insist on remaining separate from God, rejecting His Living and written Word, will in their turn, be rejected by God. Yeshua, God’s living Word made flesh, gives the world fair warning:
“Therefore everyone who confesses Me before men, I will also confess him before My Father who is in Heaven. But whoever denies Me before men, I will also deny him before My Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 10:33-34 Emphasis added.)
So in keeping with this changeless, ‘Israel first, and then the world’ pattern, our Master, God’s Living Word, says to all newly-arrived boot camp disciple recruits:
“Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ and behold, the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.
“Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.” (Matthew 7:3-6 Emphasis added.)
The Exodus Pattern
Can you see the Exodus pattern embedded in His words? Once disciples make their Exodus, they pass over to the other side. When that is done, they have the authority and experiential wisdom and skill needed to be able to speak, teach and lead those that still remain in Egypt. God reveals His Living Word to His Chosen People first, so that He can lead them out from among the Headless Egyptians. He has to take them away from the influence of the decapitated idolaters so that He can reveal Himself to them…as He really is and deal with them in a pure, Sin-less, Egypt-free environment. Then they will clearly know the difference between Egypt’s ways, and God’s Kingdom of Heaven ways. And once they learn the differences and can embrace, absorb and embody God’s truth authentically, they will transform and embody the obedience to God’s Word lifestyle and abide under His absolute authority. And that will develop traits in them that the decapitated race of humans has never known.
This is the Biblical significance of ‘Egypt’ vs. ‘Israel.’ As we said, this isn’t about worldly geography, nationality, politics, economics or ethnicity. It isn’t about God favoring one racial group or religion or status or gender or nationalistic culture over another. It goes deeper than politics and boundary lines and other flaky, temporary worldly issues and soulish priorities. All those things are symptoms of the true spiritual state of the people that espouse them. But God is going after the root and that is a profoundly spiritual matter. It’s about the dead human spirit coming back to Life. This will deeply impact and transform human nature and the human heart, mind, will and affections. It is about becoming the image and likeness of God’s Word as opposed to remaining the image and likeness of the disobedient Serpent. We began to learn about this in Genesis. But now Exodus will spell it out for us even more clearly.