Salvation and Human Response— The Exodus: 07-24-15

Three biblical stories or narratives provide overarching paradigms for the whole concept of salvation. And those stories suggest some significant ways for human involvement and response.

The Exodus: The first is the story of the Jewish exodus from their bondage in Egypt. Our human predicament or problem in this story is shown as bondage and slavery. Though Pharoah was a historical despot in Egypt during those years, Pharoah is also a metaphor for what holds human beings hostage and in bondage, internally and externally. We, too, live in the “land of Egypt”, a place of slavery and bondage marked by hard labor and the sense of being trapped, incapable of personal deliverance and freedom, a position of helplessness and victimization.

Salvation, in this story (the solution to the predicament), is an “exodus,” liberation, a way out of bondage. In the New Testament, Jesus is viewed as the second Moses who comes to deliver people from their bondage in an evil empire, whether personal or social bondage. Jesus is the liberator in our exodus story, the one who has come to set the captives free.

As in the original exodus from Egypt, the human response that encompasses the salvation story is twofold: recognize one’s state of bondage and slavery, one’s need for liberation and deliverance into a life of freedom and wholeness and maturity (symbolized in the original story by God’s goal of taking the people to the Promised Land flowing with milk and honey, a place of abundance and flourishing life); and second, the willingness to accept God’s act of deliverance, the means of liberation and freedom.

In this story metaphor for salvation, the Gospel is about liberation. Salvation is liberation into a life of wholeness, completeness and peace. We recognize our need, the truth about ourselves that we have places of brokenness and bondage that keep us from living in complete freedom. And we willingly accept our journey into deliverance through the means God offers. The point is, without our response (as Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, calls our admitting our need for a power greater than ourselves to free us), we remain in bondage, little or nothing will change in our lives or in the life of the world.