You know the ones... they sorta fit you just right.... loose and tight in all the right places, but, above all, COMFORTABLE!
the children of Israel were held in torturous captivity in Egypt.
against their will, they were enslaved. Their freedom was taken from them.
they were forced to work long, hard, inhumane hours to make bricks for construction of whatever the Egyptian Pharaohs wanted to build.
what they were forced to endure - for generations - is almost unimaginable.
then they were liberated. By God through Moses.
you saw the movie, right, the Ten Commandments? yeah, you remember, don't you, how Moses presented Pharaoh with several chances to 'let my people go' only to have Pharaoh obstinately refuse to free his slave work force? ....all the while enduring epic-sized plagues too horrible to even think about today.
finally he relented, then reneged, then was thwarted by God when he attempted to recapture his slaves.
THEY WERE FINALLY FREE!!!!!
God uses this real-life story as a metaphor for us...I mean, the remainder of our Bible is replete with comparisons to our modern-day 'law-sin enslavement' and 'freedom in Christ'...
but the metaphor doesn't end with that, right?
because the real-life story doesn't end there....
I mean, we read in abject astonishment of the ungrateful Israelites who complain about the conditions of their new found liberty... the degree to which they complain is capsulized in the account of their outright rebellion as they build a golden calf to worship...
we scoff as Edward G Robinson portrays the chief complainer and incites people by saying things like 'at least we had a roof over our heads when we lived in Egypt'...
The entire old testament seems to be dominated by the story of His people falling away and God reconciling them to Himself.... over and over and over again, His people fall for the lie that is always told, convincingly, by routine and status quo: that IT (routine) is the way! and that IT (status quo, the old way) is the truth!
and, time and time again, God arrests His people's comfortableness to 'slap them back to their senses' and refocus them on His Way and His Will.
and we smirk at their ignorance and point fingers at their almost pathological habit of self-destruction... "how?" we wonder "how can they so thoroughly miss it? why do they keep making the same mistakes, reverting to type and returning to enslavement?... how can they be so blind that they don't see the obvious result of their addiction to the their comfort zones?"
but how similar are we?
as we are freed from the tyranny of Legalism, the ink on our release papers is not even dry before we are complaining about the conditions of our liberty and wishing again for the 'safety' of the jail cell of legalism.
so much so that we replicate the comfort of our old bondage by creating self-made chains of rules and laws which we bind on each other and everyone else... and we call it truth.
and before long we are miserably 'happy' again; steeped in the 'routine' of traditional legalism and resting comfortably in the blue jeans of 'what-we-know'...
and meanwhile God weeps for us as He sees what we could be. and He mounts plans to arrest our comfort to spur us on yet again to be His Church, His People.
We LOVE routine. We crave status quo. We want comfort.
and those things are the enemy of authentic Jesus life and real Christian community.
Thank God that the He is not only the God of Imagination and Lord of Creativity, but the Supreme Exemplar of Patience!
when will we learn?
we are free! He expects us to act like it!
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