Becoming Like Jesus: Who Is God?Sample

The God of the Exodus

The Bible is the story of God and the story of us. It’s one unified story that leads to Jesus and invites us to become like Jesus. From beginning to end it tells of God’s redemptive plan to rescue humanity and restore creation. The Bible is the story of the Redeemer and what His redemptive work means for us—now and forever.

In fact, the first five books of the Bible, the Torah, are written specifically to a group of freed slaves. The Israelites knew God as their Redeemer experientially. They lived through a rescue first-hand, called the Exodus.

After over 400 years of slavery in Egypt where, for generations, the people of Israel were told that they were only as valuable as the number of bricks they could make, they encountered a God who thought they were worth rescuing. A God who literally moved heaven and earth and parted the sea to deliver this group of people from their bondage.

The Israelites’ rescue story revealed the character of God in a tangible way and it foreshadowed another rescue that would take place. The one where God would rescue you and me and all of humanity from our slavery to sin and death.

Our rescue story starts all the way back in the beginning. God created everything, including us, in an act of love and called it good. The world was as it should be. Heaven and earth were united. God walked in the garden with Adam and Eve and taught us how to be human and rule with Him. He commissioned people with a blessing to fill the beautiful earth He created and to tame it. To cultivate it with the same creative power that God displayed when He set it all up. After all, we are made in His image.

But instead of ruling by God’s side, we wanted to rule in His place. Our rebellion invited the forces of sin and death into a world that had only known goodness and life. Sin is aggressive and it enslaves us.

Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? Romans 6:16 NIV

We were enslaved to sin because of our desires and decisions. And sin corrodes and corrupts. It blinds us to the image of God in ourselves and others, which leads to horrific abuses and injustices. Good things are used for evil. Right things are used wrongly. And truth is exchanged for a lie. But God was not okay with that.

The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord. Romans 6:23 NIV

Our story doesn’t end in sin and death because our God is the God of the Exodus. He’s the God who rescues us. He is the Redeemer.

For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. Colossians 1:13-14 NIV

This story is your story. You have been set free. There is nothing that is too broken for God to heal or too far gone for Him to redeem.

Think about this: The Exodus is so integral to Jewish history that every generation is taught to see themselves as the ones God rescued from slavery in Egypt. Do we, as sons and daughters, brought into this story of freedom by Jesus, identify as deeply with our rescue as they do with theirs? What if that is the central factor of who we are? We’ve been brought out. Out of death and darkness into the Light of Life. What if the Gospel really was our defining story? Our Exodus. Because the same God who rescued the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt has rescued us from slavery to sin and death. He is still the Redeemer.