Wednesday 11th March - Preferring Chains

DAILY BYTE

Over and over again, we teach our children stories about the liberation of God’s people in the Exodus out of Egypt. We teach about deliverance and about release from the chains of slavery. We show pictures of Moses parting the Red Sea, watch Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, and talk about the Promised Land and God’s promises of new life and hope and freedom.

But why do we tend to ignore the fact that once the Israelites were freed and sent on their journey to the Promised Land, their memories seemed to become a bit fuzzy? And oh, how they grumbled! Where had God taken them, they asked? What was the point of this miserable wandering?

It WAS BETTER IN EGYPT.

Not only was it better in chains of slavery, but it would have been better to have died in Egypt, as long as they could have died with satisfied stomachs. Death would have been better than travelling on a journey where their only satisfaction was that the Lord could supposedly be trusted to lead them.

Even in the greatest story of freedom ever told, a story that has been woven into the stories and struggles for peoples’ freedom from all sorts of bondage ever since, the people given freedom express their desire to return to slavery.

In this story, the free Israelites become enslaved in a different kind of way. They are enslaved by a past that they cannot remember rightly.

American writer and Civil Rights activist, James Baldwin writes in his essay, “Letter to my Nephew”:

“You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason… Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words acceptance and integration. There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.”

What part of your history do you need to re-evaluate and re-understand? Do you look at your past and see it as a time of freedom, when really it was a time of bondage? What must you do to glimpse and take hold of the freedom available to you now, through trusting God’s promises for the future?

PRAY AS YOU GO

Liberating God, you deliver your people out of the chains of slavery time and time again. And time and time again, we look back on our chains with longing instead of grasping onto the freedom you offer us. Show us true freedom, since it is, indeed, for freedom that Christ has set us free. Help us to stand firm and not submit ourselves again to the yoke of slavery. Amen. – Galatians 5:1

FOCUS VERSE

Exodus 16: 2-3

The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”