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The Bible is a record of real people and events that God inspired to be written down for the purpose of communicating to human beings the truth about Him and the plan of salvation. As such, many of the people and events recorded in the Bible not only give us a record of what transpired, but they also serve as examples, types, or object lessons for us personally and for the overall plan of salvation. As the apostle Paul wrote regarding the Exodus:
Now these things occurred as examples to keep us from setting our hearts on evil things as they did (1 Corinthians 10:6 NIV84).
One of the lessons we can learn from the Bible’s written record of Exodus is God’s plan to free us from sin personally, individually, and globally—the human species at the second coming of Christ.
Most people recognize the global object lesson application of the Exodus:
- The slaves in Egypt are a type for all humanity being enslaved by sin.
- Pharaoh, who denies God and will not submit to Him, represents Satan, the sin-slave master.
- The bondage, degradation, and abuse the people received as slaves represent the bondage, degradation, and abuse sin causes in our lives.
- Moses represents Christ, who entered the enemy’s seat of power and confronted and overcame him in order to lead the people to freedom.
These lessons are powerful, meaningful, and encouraging, and they give us hope and confidence in the soon return of Jesus, who will free us permanently from sin and take us to our heavenly promised land!
What may be less obvious, and what I want to unpack in this blog, are the lessons for individual freedom over fear, selfishness, and sin and how we can experience this victory today.
Born as Slaves
The Hebrews of the Exodus generation were born into slavery. They did nothing to indenture themselves into slavery; it was their station and condition from birth. Likewise, the Bible teaches that we are all born in sin and conceived in iniquity (Psalm 51:5); this is our condition at birth. None of us ever chose to become sinners—we were born enslaved to fear and selfishness, constituted with a carnal nature inherited from Adam.
The Hebrew slaves in Egypt were incapable of freeing themselves, and we are incapable of freeing ourselves from sin.
God sent a deliverer, Moses, to confront Pharaoh in order to free the people. And,
God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son (John 3:16–18 NIV84, emphasis mine).
We are already enslaved to sin at birth. We are not condemned because we sin; we sin because we were born infected with a fearful, self-centered, sinful nature. Our freedom comes from Christ—if we refuse Christ, our station, position, and heart/mind do not change and we remain enslaved to sin; thus, we remain condemned by this terminal sin condition because we have refused the healing, the transformation, the new life, the freedom that comes only through Christ—that comes by receiving His life via the indwelling Holy Spirit.
Imagine an HIV-infected man and woman having an HIV-infected baby—what did the baby do to get HIV? Nothing! But despite the baby having done nothing wrong, it is still born infected, which is a metaphor for us being born in sin; the baby still has a terminal condition that will result in symptoms (metaphor for sins) and death (first death/sleep from HIV represents the wages of sin death, which is second death/eternal destruction that comes from sin), unless a remedy is provided. But if the child is offered free antiviral meds that will put the infection into remission (metaphor for the blood of Jesus, which is a symbol of His sinless life/spirit that we receive through faith, which replaces the terminal life/spirit we inherit from Adam) and they refuse (upon the age of accountability) to take them, they remain condemned, not for being born with the condition, but for refusing the remedy. But if they take the free remedy, despite being born infected, they are no longer condemned to die from that condition. That is what Jesus is saying in the passage above.
So, Jesus came, confronted Satan, overcame all his evil forces, purged the spirit of fear and selfishness, replacing it with the Spirit of love and trust, and opened a way for each of us to leave the slavery of sin and live a new life of freedom, a life of love and trust, by becoming our substitutionary Savior.
God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21 NIV84).
Jesus took up humanity, broken and damaged by Adam’s sin, and purged the infection, the spirit of fear and selfishness, and replaced that terminal life with His sinless, perfect life and, thereby, became the second Adam. (For more on how Jesus procuring the remedy actually cures this condition, see our blogs Salvation and the Cleansing of Our Spirit, Part 1 and Part 2. Or get our FREE magazine, Salvation and You: What It Really Means to Be Saved.)
The Passover: Rite and Reality
But in our journey from the slavery of sin to a life of victory and freedom, there are often many battles to fight. The events of the Exodus serve as a powerful object lesson to encourage us in our sojourn to freedom.
The Hebrew slaves prepared to leave Egypt by celebrating the Passover, which was instituted at that time as both a memorial of their deliverance from Egyptian slavery, but also as an object lesson pointing forward to Jesus’ becoming our Passover Lamb to deliver us from the slavery of sin (1 Corinthians 5:7). We will never succeed in escaping the bondage of sin without first partaking of Jesus. In other words, freedom from sin starts with taking Jesus into one’s heart!
The Hebrew slaves were instructed to sacrifice a lamb or goat, symbolic of Jesus’ sacrifice for us (John 1:29), to eat its flesh with bitter herbs, and to put its blood on the doorpost of their homes.
This ritual symbolizes the starting point in our deliverance from sin. Jesus is the Word made flesh (John 1:1–14). To ingest the “flesh” of Jesus means to internalize the Word, the truth of Jesus, of who God is. The truth about God will destroy the lies about Him and set us free from doubt (John 8:32) and bring us to the point where we choose to trust Him and open our heart to Him. When we open the heart in trust, we receive a new life, the life of Christ (Galatians 2:20), via the indwelling Holy Spirit, which is symbolized by the blood (the life is in the blood; see Leviticus 17:11). This is what it means to be born again; to be born of the Spirit is to surrender one’s attachment to the motivational, animating, spirit of fear and to receive, identify with, cling to, and act upon the Spirit of love and trust. Jesus described this in symbol when He said,
I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him (John 6:53–56 NIV84).
This is not cannibalism! It is a metaphor for internalizing into our hearts and minds the truth of God, which results in the elimination of lies and serves as the platform upon which we choose to trust. This trust opens the heart to receive His life. All of this was prefigured in the Passover celebration prior to their departure from Egypt. Just as the Jews ingested the meal prior to leaving Egypt, we must ingest the flesh (truth) and blood (life) of Jesus prior to our departure from the slavery of sin. In fact, it is the truth and life of Jesus that sets us free!
The bitter herbs symbolize the hardships and bitterness of this world of sin that enslaves us. Despite the nurturing and revitalizing strength and power received from the “flesh” of the Lamb, we are still living in the bitterness of a sinful world and struggling with the impact of what the enslavement to sin has done.
The Passover symbolizes conversion, the beginning point of our freedom. We cannot start our journey to the heavenly promised land until we are converted to Jesus Christ. The Passover represents, for the individual, how God has passed over our sinful lives, not allowing the full, natural results of sin (eternal separation from Him and subsequent death) to be realized, but instead has intervened (interceded) with grace to free us from this sin condition through Jesus, who provides us the truth (Word/flesh) and a new animating spirit/life (blood).
Once we have surrendered to Jesus in trust and have been reborn, the journey to freedom begins, and the experiences of the Hebrews during the Exodus provide additional powerful lessons that are applicable to our individual experience, which we will explore in part two of this two-part blog series.
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