Mon 28th Nov 2022 - Daily Reading:
Exodus 23:20-33
Freedom for a Purpose
Now that the covenant law has been given to the people, the Lord brings the people reassurances and promises about what is to come in the future.
He has not brought them out of Egypt to let them wander in the desert. He has not brought them out of Egypt purely to give them the Law. He has not even brought them out of Egypt just so that they can be free.
Of course, they are free in the sense that they are no longer slaves, but God’s freedom is not the type of freedom that leaves us to find our own way in the desert. God doesn’t just set his people free from something, he sets them free to something else.
The Israelites are no longer slaves of Egypt, but a nation of God’s own. They are no longer subject to cruel laws, but to God’s perfect law. They have miraculously escaped from a foreign land so that they can go to the land that God has promised them.
As Christians, we declare our freedom and give thanks for it but, just as the freedom that God gave the Israelites was freedom for a purpose, so is ours. The Israelites did not sit forever on the far shores of the Red Sea. They pushed onwards, further and further away from Egypt and towards the purpose and promise of God.
We claim freedom from slavery to sin through Jesus, but we waste that freedom if we do not use it to push more and more into the purposes and promises of God. If God has set you free, what does he want you to do with that freedom?