Deliverance

Chapter 6 - The Story

I often find myself in that place between slavery and freedom.  That bitter valley where the Red Sea stretches endlessly across the horizon before me and behind me stands six hundred chariots, horses, horsemen, and troops ready to overtake me.  While I want to choose God and trust him in that moment by pressing into the Red Sea, the glint of the armor shining in the sun is a more immediate and visible reminder that says, "We are real.  Work for us or we will kill you."

How then can I choose God when I can't see him?  I find myself whining with the voice of the Israelites as I fear my own destruction, "It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!"

That first step into God's way often feels like dying, or at least coming face to face with death.  We are often surprised to read that the Israelites wanted to go back to Egypt.  Why?  Wasn't it awful there?  But what we often forget that the Israelites not only feared death in that moment, they feared the unknown, the uncertain.  At least in Egypt, while a slave you know when your food is coming and how to get it.  At least you know how hard you have to work before your legs cave out, or what each day will be like.  There is comfort in the certainty, even if it's an unpleasant one. 

But God's way - that is anything but certain.  We would often rather choose the tangible slavery we can see than risk a kind of freedom that is boundless and unexpected.

We each approach our own Red Seas before us and are unsure how to get through.  All we have to go on is some leader telling us, "Do not be afraid.  Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today...the Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still."

Be still?  How can I be still when everything around me seems to tell me if I stop working, I will fail? 

Our culture trains us to be workaholics.  Like many of us, I find myself a slave to work or a slave to control.  God has been showing me lately how He wants to free me of this - of the nagging feeling that if I don't do x, y, and z, somehow the world will come to a screeching halt.  While there is the world's praise for the hard-working individual in our culture, it breeds a kind of self-ego that says that we are in control of our success and that everything in our lives is dependent on it.  In reality, it's the kind of pride that gives us the illusion that we are God.  After all, if everything is dependent on us - we uphold the world around us, right?  Like God?  Even in ministry, there is the temptation to strive as though the ministry's success or failure ultimately depends on me.

Yet choosing God's kind of freedom is costly.  It means laying down my ambitions and acting in faith that God will do what He's said He will do - build His church.  It means taking a Sabbath and leaving some things undone, believing that He isn't hindered by it. 

When reading the passage, God seemed to tap me on the shoulder and say "Bette, you're so afraid of what you'll lose by choosing me - the comfort of security, the routine, the certainty of what to expect.  But you haven't thought about what you'll gain - milk, honey, a Promised Land, my protection, a new identity.  Freedom."

When I allow myself to be still, it is an act of faith that God will fight for me and that I won't be crushed by the Egyptians.  And when He delivers me, I am freed to partner with God, seeing what I do as a privilege and delight as opposed to a necessity for survival.

This passage begs the question: Will we choose God's way of freedom, trusting that He will provide a way through the Red Sea?  Or will we stay a slave in Egypt, comfortable and secure, but never knowing what kind of adventure God wants to lead us on?

Bette Dickinson
Bette serves with an InterVarsity ministry called Imago Dei on the campus of Western Michigan University.  Check out Facebook for more on her work with fine and performing arts students.