The Book of Exodus has inspired generations of oppressed peoples. From enslaved Africans in the cotton fields who sang ‘Let my people go,’ to liberation theologians in Latin America and Africa who argued that Moses was the patron saint of all freedom fighters, Exodus has been a rallying text for those who yearn for justice. And the appeal is not hard to understand. God enters human history and, without anyone’s permission, liberates an enslaved nation from the most powerful empire on earth.

And yet, Exodus is also a book that can be gravely misread. Understanding what Exodus is — and what it is not — is essential before its riches can be properly mined.

The Longing for Liberation

Many people around the world are acutely aware of injustice, oppression, and political domination, and they yearn for freedom. The Exodus narrative speaks powerfully to such people. Some theologians have argued that Exodus provides a charter for a Biblical doctrine of revolution — what they call liberation theology. The appeal of such an interpretation is obvious, and the Bible does indeed portray God as a God of justice who calls his people to act justly, defend the suffering, and care for the vulnerable (Isa 1:17; Mic 6:8; Luke 4:18-19).

However, it must be said that involvement in such real-life struggle against injustice, whilst it may enrich study of Exodus, also runs the risk of distorting our understanding of the text. Even a quick reading of Exodus demonstrates that Moses and Israel did not win their independence through any campaign of their own. There were no Hebrew freedom fighters plotting guerrilla campaigns in the desert. God’s people are presented, particularly in Exodus’ early chapters, as oppressed to the point of utter helplessness. Other nations may sing of their struggle for liberty, but Israel was not able to struggle. Israel did not emancipate herself. She was liberated by God.¹

The Terrible Tension: Experience versus the Word

Exodus also addresses a second deep tension — one that is not unique to any one culture or century: the conflict between what we read in the Word of God and what we feel in our own human experience. The Bible tells us that God loves us from everlasting to everlasting (Psa 103:17), and yet many of us have found ourselves in situations when our experience appears to be telling us that God does not care.

Or consider God’s power. Romans 1 declares that the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ is the power of God for salvation. And yet, how often does it feel like that as we try to speak of Jesus to our friends and family? When the Apostle Paul says he is not ashamed of the gospel, it is striking precisely because we are often tempted to be ashamed of it, to view it as irrelevant and powerless.

The big mistake we make is to think that this tension is a modern problem — perhaps caused by science or the sophistication of the twenty-first century. We may imagine it was somehow easier to believe God’s Word in the first century, as if people were credulous back then. That is not only what C. S. Lewis called ‘chronological snobbery,’² but it does not stack up against the evidence of history or the Bible. Ever since Genesis 3, there has been that terrible tension between the voice of human experience and the Word of God. And that is precisely why we need the Book of Exodus. It will not only reveal God to us and speak to us about his salvation. But, as it does so, it will teach us why the voice of human experience is ultimately unreliable, and why the Word of God, despite all appearances, turns out to be totally trustworthy.

1. See, for example, Martin Meredith, The State of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence (Simon & Schuster, 2011). ↩︎
2. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (Collins, 1955), 207-8. Lewis defines chronological snobbery as ‘the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.’ ↩︎