the glorious future

 

God creates a famine in Canaan where Israel is living with his 11 sons. Joseph his 12th and most favorite son is off in Egypt getting ready to save everybody from starvation. But Israel, his dad, doesn't know that, Israel thinks that Joseph is dead. So God creates this famine and essentially drives Israel down to Egypt looking for food. After some shenanigans by Joseph, he convinces the whole family to move to Egypt. So the point is God creates a famine, God provides food in Egypt, and God moves his chosen people out of the promised Land and into a pagan land that God wants to punish. Then God waits for everybody to die of old age, and then rather than having the people of Israel, now multiplying, move back to Canaan and back to the promised land where they belong, God has them stay and become victims of cruel Egyptian kings. You may have noticed that God is doing all this. So now God gets ready to bring the nation of Israel out of Egypt and back to the promised land where they belong. The process is to torment and to some degree torture and kill Egyptians, until they release the nation of Israel. Now this whole process is somewhat a grueling emotional roller coaster for the people of Israel. This guy shows up out of the desert named Moses who says God has sent me to set you free. So all of their emotions soar with joy, because they're going to be free. God said so, and this Moses guy, who we don't really know who he is, but he claims to be Aaron's brother, so yeah we're ready to go, so everybody, let's get out of here. So the first thing Pharaoh does is start beating them and making their lives even more miserable. So now they're super bummed out. So they go from being on a roller coaster high to down in the valley of death and destruction. Well this sort of keeps rocking along until finally pharaoh kicks them out. But of course it can't just be a smooth ejection over the Red Sea, we've got to have a big drama of scaring the people to death, so they hit an emotional high as they leave, but now they're getting thrown back in the dumpster as they're trapped against the Red Sea. Now these are slaves, they don't have the Bible, they don't have the Old testament, the New testament, they don't have Jesus, they don't have anything. They don't really remember that much about God frankly. All they know is they got this crazy guy named Moses who seems to be able to do some magic tricks at times and he's sort of beating the Egyptians into submission by continuously evoking this name of God. But it's not a smooth process. So we haven't even gotten out of Egypt and God has already had them on an emotional roller coaster of elation and thrill and despair and disaster. So they really haven't even gotten started yet, but that's what they're going to get more of out in the desert. The interesting thing is this actually makes God angry that they're just not super thankful and super excited all the time about all the wonderful stuff God's doing for them, even though they are going through all kinds of trials and tribulations. So maybe I'm supposed to get with the program and just learn from all this, because I do have the Old testament, I do have the New testament, I do have Jesus, I do have a promise that we're going to go to a new heaven and a new earth with no pain suffering or sorrow. There will be no death. So maybe I should just lighten up. Quit worrying about God's crazy plan and just be excited about the final result. Now I have one small problem in that I'm human and fairly short-sighted at times and I also have needs very similar to what the nation of Israel had; food, water, shelter, and wanting a sense of dignity and respect. So those things tend to cloud and some times distort the glorious future.