Word of Salvation – July 2024
Egypt – No Substitute For Faith
Sermon by Harry Burggraaf B.D. on Jeremiah 42:19
Scripture Reading: Jeremiah 42:1 – 43:7; Hebrews 12:1-3
Songs: Glory be to God in Heaven (BoW 159)
Great is Your Faithfulness (BoW 359)
Safe in the Shadow of the Lord (BoW 91)
THE CERTAINTIES OF EGYPT, NO SUBSTITUTE FOR FAITH
Congregation
A favourite Christian author of mine writes that every once in a while, when he gets tired of living by faith, he goes to watch a top level cricket match. There for a couple of hours he is in a world that he can understand. The rules are clear and everyone plays by them.
Every motion and action on the playing field is considered, planned, graceful, poised.
Complex physical feats are carried out with immense skill. Sloppy behaviour is not tolerated.
Errors are instantly detected and the consequences outlined by eager commentators.
Rule infractions are punished directly; you don’t argue with the umpire; what he says goes.
The person who refuses to play by the rules is ejected.
Outstanding performance is recognised and applauded on the spot.
While the game is being played, people of widely divergent temperaments, who have different moral values, who hold a range of religious commitments and who come from varied cultural backgrounds agree on a goal and how it is to be achieved. (E.g. Sri Lanka playing Australia)
When the game is over everyone knows who has won and who lost.
Afterwards the whole experience can be summarised in the unambiguous language of numbers – so many runs per over, so many overs per hour, so many wickets per player. Precise, accurate, to the third decimal point.
It is a world from which all uncertainty is banished.
You know exactly what is going on.
But real life is not like that. The world in which we live is mixed up, messy, uncertain.
– elegance and sloppiness
– grace and unruliness
– rules and infringements
– mediocrity and excellence
– victory and defeat
– diversity and unity
– rewards and punishments
– happiness and sadness.
Instead of being clear, real life is hopelessly muddled. What is going on at any particular time is never very clear.
In family life, social life, political life, vocational life, even church life, the lines are never precise; the boundaries are not clear; the goals are often not agreed on; the means are in constant dispute; there is no agreement on who has won or lost.
Just think of our debates about…
…genetic engineering, cloning, transplants
the conflict on the waterfront; the sale of public utilities,
the euthanasia debate
what should/shouldn’t we watch on television
even overheads and puppets in worship.
Life is full of muddles and uncertainties. Life is full of ambiguities. Is there an alternative?
The Egyptian alternative
Whenever the Israelites got tired of living by faith they went 400 km southwest to Egypt, where everything was clear and precise.
‘Jeremiah, what shall we do? Life is an absolutely hopeless muddle and mess. Most of the best people in the country have been taken into exile. The Babylonians have devastated our land; the temple has been destroyed; all the institutions and norms and values and rules by which life was clear and precise have gone; we can’t cope with all this change; the few leaders the Babylonians have left are a pack of evil and corrupt incompetents; we’ve just had a most brutal palace coup where this upstart Ishmael has murdered the Babylonian appointed puppet king, Gedaliah, and just dumped him and the bodies of his advisers in the local stormwater system. The Babylonian king could come back at any time and revenge the murder. Jeremiah, what shall we do? We can’t live with this confusion. Please pray to God and see if it’s OK to go to Egypt, there at least things will be secure. Oh we know it’s a place where the God of the covenant, Yahweh, is not honoured. But at least we’ll feel secure there; life is predictable.’
God’s answer was clear an unequivocal. After some ten days in prayer this is the message Jeremiah received from God.
Read Jer. 42:9-12, 19.
Pretty clear isn’t it. What is God saying? Can there be any misunderstanding as to God’s will?
What was the response?
Read Jer. 43:4, 7.
‘They went to Egypt.’
When the Israelites got tired of living by faith they went to Egypt.
Of course this wasn’t the first time Israel had done this. The Egyptian alternative to faith had always been a temptation.
* When Abraham, the father of all who live by faith, the God-selected pioneer of faith, got tired of living by faith he went to Egypt. He hoped to find security there, but what did he get? Deceit, compromise, his wife almost lost to the harem of the Pharaoh.
* At the time of the Exodus; the Israelites had been delivered from the slavery of Egypt; can you imagine them wanting to go back to that. But living by faith in the desert was difficult. You had to rely on God for your next meal of manna, and to quench your thirst you had to wait for God to squeeze water from a rock. How many of us would last for long on a desert faith experience?
The pull to Egypt was persistent. They had been slaves there, but at least they were secure. I can never understand the attraction or desire to return to ‘leeks and onions’. Yet the pillar of cloud seemed a very flimsy successor to the rock solid pyramids of Egypt.
* And then when the monarchy was at its height, Solomon, the so called wise king, imported the certainties that Egypt brought by making a marriage alliance with the Egyptian Pharaoh’s daughter. It must have been a marvellous idea at the time – to live by faith in the Promised Land, but to have your little nest egg of Egyptian security on the side. What a disaster it turned out to be.
So here it happened again. 580 BC; the bewildering days of the Babylonian invasion; a time of incredible turmoil and change.
We think of the end of the twentieth century as a time of unsettling change. But Israel in 6th century BC is every bit as disturbing. The temple which had been the focus of worship and ritual life, was rubble; a time of traumatic dislocation. All the predictable structures of life knocked away. To live spontaneously, hopefully, virtuously, by faith, at such a time was not easy. It is easier to go to Egypt. So they went to Egypt.
In Egypt there were no uncertainties, no loose ends, no ambiguity. Every detail of life was clear and accounted for.
We need to understand the symbolism and imagery of Egypt in the Bible to see what is going on here.
* Egypt was clear geographically – (geography students: – what regulated life in Egypt; its most important geographic feature?) the great Nile river, provided a line of green and fertility right through the desert. The great river flowed at a measured pace, predictable, secure providing fertility and prosperity. All life was ordered in relation to the river.
* Egypt was clear architecturally – the pyramids and temples stood out from the landscape in precise, solid lines, mathematically exact, beautifully proportioned, the very epitome of all that was predictable and long-lasting. They were an arrogant, optimistic statement that life and death were under control.
* Egypt was clear socially – everyone knew their exact place in society, in a strict hierarchy, from the king at the apex and the slave-serf at the bottom and everyone else ranged in between. You knew exactly where you stood in job, status, relationships, hopes and expectations. Stifling… but secure.
* Egypt was clear theologically – the unseen was translated into the seen; all the gods were made into images; everything that might have been beyond understanding was reduced to the less than human; gods were reduced to images of animals – the cat, the hawk, the hyena, the bull and ibis; every image was stylised; all wonder and mystery was eliminated; spontaneity was unheard of; a religion of absolute control.
In fact Egypt was a bit like a cricket game – clear boundaries, set rules, everyone understanding the goals and expectations of the game.
So just as Babylon, Babel, in the Bible symbolises godless culture; development, achievement, technology as a declaration of autonomy from God, so ‘Egypt’ symbolises security, stability, happiness without reliance on God; the antonym, the flip side to a life of faith in a promise-keeping, covenant God.
The call to faith in uncertain times
Congregation the call of God in 1998, as it was in 580BC, as it has always been, is to a race where we don’t always know where we’re going. All we know is that Jesus has gone before and that he is running ahead of us, and we need to keep our eyes fixed on him, in the words of the Hebrews passage we read.
Today, more than ever we feel the attractive tug of Egypt – in our society and in our personal lives. Most of us find it difficult to live with change and uncertainty. I can understand people who don’t want to see things in the church change.
It wasn’t easy for the remnant in Israel to live by faith.
I mean, Jeremiah might have conveyed the message, ‘This is what Lord says, stay here in the Promised Land and I’ll bless you, I will build you up, I will plant you, do not be afraid, I’ll save you.’
Let’s face it, that hadn’t been their recent experience of God. They had experienced the sharp end of his anger at their sin – invasion, brutality, destruction, exile, emptiness, dislocation. It was all very well for Jeremiah to tell them to live by faith in such a God.
Imagine – your business has gone broke, your marriage partner has incurable cancer, your friends despise you, the fear of bankruptcy and shame hangs over your head, your children have left home in rebellion, the bottom of your life has caved in – and some pious preacher tells you ‘hang in there’, God is still on your side. Live by faith.
I can understand why the remnant opted for Egypt.
Not many people are like Job, who could say, “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised.”
Can we live by faith in a promise-keeping God in 1998?
It certainly isn’t easy?
We live in, what is called a ‘post-modern’ world. A world of tremendous change and confusion. In fact the changes are so dramatic and so fast that already in the 1970s Alvin Toffler wrote about people suffering ‘future shock’.
The ‘modern’ world said – we can explain everything by way of science and fix everything by way of technology. Our reason and rationality can provide meaning for life. We really don’t need God, but life is meaningful. Science does give us answers. There is certainty.
Post modernism has gone beyond that. There is no God. There is no meaning. We can’t even trust science and reason to explain the world. Everyone creates their own meaning and framework for life.
Post modernism has abandoned the possibility of living by revelation; the possibility that what God says might be true and that his prescriptions for living are sensible and best.
But even more than that… we live in a culture that no longer trusts in reason and rationality. It is ‘post’ the modern age of reason.
Now we each create or own truth and our own reality, our own moral categories, our own boundaries, our own structures. All absolutes are gone.
So if you read a serious novel how you interpret it depends entirely on you. What the author meant to say doesn’t matter so much, how you construct the meaning of the piece is what matters. Similarly with art and architecture and film and philosophy and religion. There are many meanings, many interpretations and each is as valid as the next. Life is completely ambiguous. There are no certainties.
It is an age and culture which has lost any coherent sense of meaning; it has lost its soul.
Leonard Cohen, a contemporary rock singer, in his deeply troubling album ‘Future’ sings ‘that the world is like a blizzard, you can’t see where you’re going’. ‘Things are going to slide in all directions’. ‘I have seen the future brother; it is murder.’
Smashing Pumpkins, a popular teenage band titles one of their latest albums ‘Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness’, their songs are full of terror and darkness – ‘the world is a vampire’, ‘tales of the scorched earth’.
You look at an MTV or Rage video clip and there is no coherence, no story line, only image after image, bits of information, from which you create your own meaning.
Post modernism is like Israel at the time of the Babylonian turmoil. Our culture longs for certainty and tries to find it in economic prosperity and organisational efficiency. Better technology, better medical care, better transport, better education. At least we can control those things – perhaps.
The American statesman and scholar William Albright once said, “Nothing could be further from the truth than the facile belief that God only manifests himself in stability and progress, in the improvement of standards of living, in the spread of medicine and reform of abuses … real spiritual progress can only be achieved through catastrophe and suffering, reaching new levels after the profound catharsis which accompanies major upheavals. Every such period of mental and physical agony, while the old is being swept away and the new is still unborn, yields deeper spiritual insights.”
A promise keeping God comes to our culture – and says, ‘Don’t go to Egypt; don’t look for certainty in the money markets, or corporate prosperity or national stability, but trust in me to build your society, to plant, to give meaning, to bring shalom. The proof that I can and will do this is the Immanuel of Christmas, Jesus, God with us, the pioneer of faith. The King.’
Congregation, how desperately our culture and society needs that gospel.
At a personal level – do we have the courage to live by faith in 1998? You see in times of dramatic change and uncertainty it is so easy to go back to the wrong securities. The past, tradition, old habits, a culture that is comfortable for us. Rather than the Gospel, rather than Christ, rather than the Kingdom principle.
Do we trust God enough to be at the centre of his action, the places where he commands, in the middle of his saving work in the world – perhaps in defiance of popular opinion, or common practise, or accepted conventions? Living by faith often means living with no applause, on the team which seems to lose, living by what can not be controlled or predicted. To be a remnant, living against the prevailing direction of economic, political, moral, social thinking and practise is not really all that attractive.
Living with change is often painful.
Egypt, with all its clarity and stability is a tempting option.
Congregation, even in this time of dramatic change God is with us, just as he promised to be in Jeremiah’s day. He is for us. His desire is to see us grow and flourish and become ‘shalom’ people. And as the only certainty, he gives us Jesus, on a cross, despised, rejected, enduring all the opposition of a sinful world, so that we might not grow weary and lose heart.
If you’re like my favourite author’s friend, and get tired of living by faith from time to time, sure go ahead, attend a cricket match, if it will get things back into perspective.
But better still heed the advice of Hebrews 12:
“Keep your eyes on Jesus, who both began and finished this race we’re in. Study how he did it, because he never lost sight of where he was headed – that exhilarating finish in and with God – he could put up with anything along the way; cross, shame, whatever. And now he’s there, in the place of honour, right alongside God. When you find yourself flagging in your faith, go over that story again, item by item… That will shoot adrenaline into your souls!”