2: Let My People Go

[00:00] Stephanie: Welcome to Season 2, episode 2. We are continuing our new series on the healing journey: Lessons in the Wilderness, from the Wilderness, something about lessons in the wilderness.

Hello, Father.

[00:14] Marcus: I know you’re thinking that the Hebrew name for the book of Numbers is Bamidbar. It’s ingrained there. Okay.

[00:25] Stephanie: Yes. Well, today we are not only continuing the series, we’re going to be talking about the role of Egypt in this series. So before we get into a heavier topic, I wanted to do an icebreaker.

[00:39] Marcus: Okay.

[00:40] Stephanie: And you know what? I’m so excited now that we’re on video. We’re on YouTube so people can comment and they can partake in the icebreakers. Wink, wink.

[00:53] Marcus: That’s not terrifying. Okay, go ahead.

[00:56] Stephanie: So, rapid fire icebreaker for today. Pen or pencil?

[01:00] Marcus: Pen.

[01:01] Stephanie: Yeah.

[01:02] Marcus: I almost never use a pencil.

[01:03] Stephanie: Yeah. In your whole life or as an adult.

[01:05] Marcus: In my whole life, it was pen or felt tip. I mean, I was like, pen or super pen?

[01:12] Stephanie: I’m holding a pen right now. I have to say pen, but I love pens. I almost always have a pen and a pencil in my purse or wherever I’m going. I want access to both, especially if I’m translating or doing things where I want to be able to change on.

[01:29] Marcus: Yeah. For me, pencils were about art and pen was about getting stuff done.

[01:33] Stephanie: All right, so tell us, do you prefer to write with a pen or a pencil?

[01:38] Marcus: There you go.

[01:39] Stephanie: Icebreaker. All right. Segway from there into our…

[01:46] Marcus: My super pen has a cape anyway

[01:51] Stephanie: All right, so last week we set up this series of Exodus and how God uses this in the Bible as a model for not only Christian life, but also the healing journey. And I’m excited to get more into that with you today. And we’re going to start with Egypt as a symbol of what, Father?

[02:18] Marcus: Actually, in our context, Egypt is a symbol of abuse. Because just reading from the text – this is from the Christian Standard Bible – it says, “So the Egyptians assigned taskmasters over the Israelites to oppress them with forced labor, they built Pithom and Ramses as supply cities for Pharaoh. But the more they oppressed them, the more they multiplied and spread.

“The Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. So they worked them ruthlessly, made their lives bitter, difficult.” Has the word ruthlessly again. And then later on, God looks down on them and says, “I have seen what’s going on. I have heard their cry and I’m going to help.”

So in this sense, Egypt is set up as a place of slavery, which has clear implications because the gospel is explained as freedom from slavery. Pharaoh is sort of parallel to sin, and the slavery is parallel to the bondage that is caused by sin. And then there is this abuse element that says these people were ruthlessly oppressed, and it changed their whole identity, it changed their whole mindset, and it taught them not to trust.

So the Egyptians are the bad guys in this particular thing. Now, I have Egyptian friends. Egypt isn’t like that. It’s also, I think, one of the reasons why we don’t get the name of the pharaoh, because the Bible is really less interested in teaching us history than it is in laying out a model.

[03:58] Stephanie: And that’s not to say it’s not historical, right?

[04:02] Marcus: No, it’s historical. But the point of it, if it was just to teach us history, it would be laid out totally differently. But it is laid out in such a way as to tell us a story. And the story it’s trying to tell us is, Pharaoh is the quintessential bad guy here. He is the one who’s responsible for the abuse. And because of that, he is also the one that God is going to judge very, very severely.

We see something of God’s attitude towards those who are abusive. Kind of like Jesus said, “It’d be better for a millstone to be hung around your neck than to do the abusive things to children.” And Pharaoh, in this regard is, we get to see what God did to Pharaoh in humiliating him, destroying his country and destroying his army, and all that happened between the plagues and the Red Sea.

[04:51] Stephanie: So let’s get into it. Continuing from God’s perspective, there is this concept of groaning and God hearing that gets presented and in the abuse, the people are groaning and God hears them. So will you talk more about that?

[05:10] Marcus: Yes. A lot of our listeners are probably familiar with the Immanuel journaling process developed by Dr.Wilder and some of his friends, Anna Kang and John and Sungshim Loppnow. It starts with interactive gratitude to kind of get your relational circuits on so that you’re more likely in a relational place to connect with God.

It walks through this idea where God says, “I see you.” We see this with Hagar, where God finds her in the wilderness as, “I see you there.” One of the things he says to Moses is, “I see what’s going on with my people. I am not unaware of the hardship and the abuse and the things that are going on. I see it.”

“I hear,” is the next one. God says, “I hear their groaning. I hear they’re crying out for help, and I’m doing something now.” To Moses’ chagrin, he says, “I’m sending you. Congratulations. This is my solution. I’m going to send you.” And Moses was like, “Please don’t.”

I know a lot of people who’ve been called into this sort of ministry who love it, but I also know a lot of people who are more like Moses, like, “Can you please just ask somebody else to do this, because this is hard.”

[06:27] Stephanie: But then he equips him and he gives him companions on the journey. He doesn’t do it alone.

[06:34] Marcus: But there’s a role only Moses can play.

[06:37] Stephanie: Yeah.

[06:37] Marcus: And God has reasons for this. In my own journey, I felt a strong affiliation with Moses, a strong affinity with Moses throughout my journey. In fact, my mom and dad bought me a little statuette of Moses when I graduated with one of my degrees. I can’t remember which one.

[06:58] Stephanie: It’s right there.

[06:59] Marcus: There it is. But partly this idea, that of sort of a reluctant leader who is called to help people find freedom, and fight a battle, and answer a calling, and build something new. And so I could connect all of those, because there have been a lot of times in my life where I was like, “God, you know, here am I, send somebody else.”

But when God has purposes for why he wants the person that he wants, doing the thing that he’s called them to do, my guess is that there are people out there listening to this who have felt that same way, “Here am I, please send somebody else,” and don’t understand that necessarily that this is, at some level, about you and it’s at some level about the fact that God has a reason why it’s you. It can be as much about our weaknesses as our strengths. And so that was certainly the case with Moses.

[08:04] Stephanie: Yes. Will you expound more on this concept of groaning and hearing in terms of our personal walk?

[08:17] Marcus: Yes. The idea that God says, “I’ve heard they’re groaning,” that word is used again in Romans 8, where it says, “The whole creation is groaning and looking for some kind of redemption.” And it even says, “The Holy Spirit who intercedes, intercedes with groans too deep for words.”

And so we get this idea that groaning throughout the Bible expresses this intensity of suffering, intensity of, “There are no words for what we’re going through, and there are no words for how bad this is.” And creation has no words for what it’s going through. The people of Israel had no words for it. And even the Holy Spirit, at some level, is just entering into that space of, “This is just relentlessly bad.”

I think it’s helpful for us to understand that God knows how bad it is. He is not unaware, and it hasn’t gone on simply because he doesn’t care. I’ve learned a couple things from this: one is that God always has a plan, and two is that God is not afraid of chaos.

[09:33] Stephanie: He creates order from it.

[09:35] Marcus: Right. We tend to be afraid of the chaos. We don’t want to step into the chaos. We don’t want to deal with the chaos. We want to stop it, get the order, get the organization quickly. God’s not afraid to hang out in the chaos for a while because he knows his plan for bringing order out of it down the road.

In fact, in working with deeply wounded people, I began to simply refer to the phase that we’re in right now as the tunnel of chaos. I said, “Right now we’re simply in the tunnel of chaos. And that’s sort of that space between realizing you need help, asking for help, starting the journey, getting off to a positive start, and then the bottom seems to fall out.” And you’re like, “Wait a second. I thought everything was going to be better now!”

So we sort of see the tunnel of chaos in the Moses story when he goes to the people and convinces them, “Yes, you can go represent us to Pharaoh.” And he goes to Pharaoh, and he thinks, “This is all going to be great.” And instead of it going great, Pharaoh says, “We’re going to double the amount of suffering. We’re going to double how hard this all is. And Moses was like, “Wait, what?” And he even says to God, “I told you this would happen. Why didn’t you listen to me?” And I think there’s a lot of us that feel that way. We’re like, if God…

[10:52] Stephanie: We say, “I told you so,” to God.

[10:53] Marcus: Yeah, yeah, yeah, “God, I told you so. If you’d just listen to me!” And what we’re really saying is we don’t think he quite gets it, and it’s one of the things that brings us back to the idea of the groaning. But he gets it. He does get it. He’s just not afraid of the chaos.

And he does have a plan, because God’s response to Moses saying, “This is what I told you was going to happen,” was, “Don’t worry, I’ve got him right where I want him.” That’s just the classic, “I’ve got a plan. Don’t worry. This is all part of it. I’ve got them right where I want them. And just watch.”

[11:28] Stephanie: Yeah. So next week, we’re going to get more into unfolding that plan, but I want to talk a little bit more about this idea of Egypt as a symbol of bondage or abuse, and how that impacts our ability to trust.

[11:47] Marcus: Sure. Well, one of the things that really brought this to my attention is, back in those early days when we were at my parents’ house working with several really deeply wounded people, one of the things I noticed was all of them had trouble trusting. It reminded me of that old saying, “You could lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”

It felt like we could get them right up to the brink, and I’m thinking, “Oh, we’re almost through this. This is going to be great.” And the brakes would hit, and they were like, “I can’t do it.  I’m not ready for this. I can’t trust.” And it was so frustrating for me because I just wanted this to be, let’s get this fixed fast. That was kind of my mindset.

[12:32] Stephanie: Healing is right here.

[12:33] Marcus: Yeah, healing is right there. Just take that one more step and we’re there. And I wanted this to be fast. They wanted it to be fast. But the reality is, it wasn’t going to happen without faith, there had to be trust, and they just hadn’t had enough of a journey with God yet to trust him.

[12:47] Stephanie: What is trust?

[12:48] Marcus: Trust is, I don’t have a pithy definition for trust just waiting to come out, but in my mind, this is the image: there’s a light switch on the wall, on/off switch on the wall. And what I would often tell people who are struggling to trust God is, “You don’t have to completely trust God. You don’t have to have no doubts. You just have to trust enough to flip the switch.”

In other words, trust manifests itself in obedience. And so the question is, do you trust him enough to take this one step of obedience? Sometimes that was, “Do you trust him enough to forgive this person?” And them saying, “Even though I don’t feel it, even though I don’t understand it, I know it’s what you want me to do, so I’ll trust you enough to say the words, I choose to forgive this person.”

We did that a hundred times with folks. And it’s a part of that. So I look at trust as, really, it’s confidence. It is the confidence to take a step of faith. But I also look at it as faith like a grain of mustard seed, that God’s like, “What is that?” What is faith like a grain of mustard seed?

To me, it is. “I really don’t trust God much, but I’ll give it a shot. I’ll do it his way and see what happens.” To me, that’s faith like a grain of mustard seed. I trust him just enough to give it a shot, even though I really don’t expect much.

[14:19] Stephanie: Yes, trust is a very relational word, too, because it’s not just the confidence that if I flip the switch, the light will come on. But you’re also putting trust in a person, in this case, too. So there’s the confidence aspect and there is the personal relational aspect.

[14:40] Marcus: Right. And even in the light switch thing, the point we were trying to make was, “If I tell you to turn on the light, and I tell you that turning on that switch will make a light come on, you’re trusting me enough to try the switch. And so when I tell you if you forgive this person, good things will happen. Do you trust me enough to give that a try?”

And so, yeah, it’s a very relational word. In fact, when we talk about attachment theology throughout the Bible, and bonding to God, I think that trust is one of those core words that really captures the idea of attachment well. Because I can be starting to form an attachment with somebody, and I can become more deeply attached, and as I do, if that is a love bond, trust is going to be the result of that.

Knowing God, trusting God, obeying God, are all integral parts of loving God. And so all of those things kind of work together to form a deeper attachment with him. Again, most people who are abused because they’ve gone through horrendous things, don’t trust God because he let the abuse happen. So why in the world would they trust him in the future if he’s willing to let something like that happen? “How can I trust him with things of the future?”

In the same way, the survivor mentality that comes out of that is, “Well, at least I know I’m going to get food. At least I know I’m going to get shelter. At least I can count on this.” And so all of your relationships become very transactional. There’s not a whole lot of trust in this relationship. It’s very much about I do this, you do that, you do this, I reciprocate. And so that was the mindset going that God had to deal with, that he was trying to redeem and bring them back from.

It’s a big challenge because it’s a really deeply ingrained thing. And you’re not just changing how people believe and the choices they’re making, you’re helping to transform their ability, at a heart level, to form attachments and to trust people and to trust God and to, in that process, form a deeper bond with him. And so it makes sense that that would take time.

[17:06] Stephanie: Well, we’re going to just keep unpacking this as the series goes on, and I’m loving it. Do you have any final thoughts on this episode and the context?

[17:22] Marcus: Sure. When I teach Exodus, I usually teach it almost like a fairy tale, and it’s this idea that there is a young woman who is being held captive by the evil pharaoh, almost like Dudley Do-Right back in the day. And Penelope Pitstop, I think was her name. Whatever. The fair maiden was always tied up by the evil villain and laid on the train tracks kind of thing, or the princess in the tower guarded by the dragon kind of idea.

So what’s happening here is that God had made a promise to Abraham that someday he [God] was essentially going to marry, that he [Abraham] would have an heir, he’d have a people group come up from him, and in metaphorical terms, that would be the daughter, and God was going to marry her. So now the daughter he has promised to marry is a slave, is being abused, is being oppressed, and this is the object of God’s love.

And so you look at this going, “If God loves so much, how did this happen?” Well, part of it is, God’s now going to rescue the one that he loves and demonstrate just how much he loves this bride. So in the story of Exodus, what you get is God rescues the bride, and then God marries the bride at Mount Sinai. And then he builds the tabernacle, builds a house where he can share, kind of like their first home together as husband and wife.

And so there is this element of romance that is actually over the entire picture and also re-emphasizes the idea that, despite the fact that they’re going through horrible things, it’s not because God doesn’t love them. God actually loves them enough that they are his chosen people, they are his special people, his treasured possession, that out of all the nations on earth, they’re going to uniquely belong to him.

I think that that’s the case also for people who go through deep wounds and deep hurt. It can feel like, “How could God possibly love me and let this happen?” But it’s not the whole story. As we let the whole story play out, we begin to see that, actually, sometimes some of the people who go through the hardest things are people God loves, dare I say, the most. That God has a special place of fondness for them in his heart. And I think that that’s very true.

[19:51] Stephanie: Thank you. I’m excited to continue talking this through. Thank you.

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