We can be sure God is thinking about Egypt at this time of year. It means something deeply spiritual to Him. Thankfully, He shares His thoughts with us, His Church. God sees Israel’s history in Egypt as a parable of all human beings living life in bondage to sin (e.g. Hebrews 11:24-25).
For now, the people living in this world are blind to the spiritual meaning embedded in Israel’s Egyptian experience (Matthew 13:10-15). It’s a mystery to them. They have no idea that they are living in dreadful slavery in an Egypt-like world. God, however, sees our world as it really is. Our planet is overpopulated with grimy, gloomy-eyed, weak-willed, suffering slaves. All people on Earth (except the very elect) are held captive by the most powerful and vicious pharaoh ever: Satan the devil.
What an honor to understand this truth. Getting ready for the Days of Unleavened Bread requires us to review the God-given lesson of Egypt. Let’s do that together.
Called Out of Egypt
Out of jealous paranoia, Herod planned to murder Jesus as an infant. Warned by God in a dream, Joseph and Mary fled to Egypt to preserve His life.
Centuries before, Jacob, his sons and their families did a similar thing by moving from Canaan to Egypt. They were on the verge of deadly starvation from a global famine (Genesis 46). However, because of Joseph’s agricultural production knowledge and economic diligence, God saved their lives with the grain stored up in Egypt.
Joseph, Mary and Jesus lived in Egypt until Herod died. When it was safe for His Son, God the Father brought Jesus back to Judah. Matthew tells us that Jesus’s return from Egypt directly fulfilled God’s prophecy in Hosea 11:1, where He said, “Out of Egypt I have called my son” (Matthew 2:15). Study and meditate on Hosea’s prophecy. It speaks about God’s love for Israel. Although they were a fleshly and wanton people, He calls them His firstborn son (Exodus 4:22). Just like any loving father, God came to their defense while they suffered in Egypt. Through Moses, He commanded Pharaoh, “Let my son go …” (verse 23).
It is breathtaking to realize that God considered enslaved Israel to be a type of the young child Jesus. What is the lesson for us? Jesus Christ tells us specifically. The morning after His resurrection, He sent a message to His disciples by Mary Magdalene. He said, “[G]o to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (John 20:17; Revised Standard Version). All truly converted followers of Jesus Christ are God’s sons just as much as Jesus Christ is God’s Son. How thrilling to know that out of deep love, God calls all His sons out of Egypt. You and I have been called out of horrific slavery. Are we genuinely grateful that our time of bondage to sin is over?
The spring holy days admonish all sons of God to reflect on our personal history of deliverance from Egypt. Do we still hear God’s call to come out of sin? Are we acting upon that call every day by putting sin out of our lives? Let’s admit: It is not easy to come out and stay out of sin. The Israelites’ history proves that. Are we willing to admit that our personal history is similar to theirs? Consider this. Were it not for the spring holy days, it is unlikely that we would think much about putting sin out of our lives.
Out of the Iron Furnace
We must work our imaginations to understand the excruciating suffering and cruelty our forefathers experienced at the hands of the Egyptians. Remember the history? Because of Joseph’s high government position, Jacob, his sons and their families entered Egypt with favor as free men. That generation died. An evil king took control of Egypt and stealthily made Jacob’s descendants pitiful slaves. Wicked foremen, also slaves, were set over them. Drunk with power, the taskmasters bullied, bludgeoned and beat Jacob’s grandsons and granddaughters into submission. Many died. Moses tells us: “And the Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with rigour: And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar, and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field: all their service, wherein they made them serve, was with rigour” (Exodus 1:13-14). The English word rigour has lost some of its meaning for us today. Its Hebrew counterpart is perek. Strong’s Concordance states that perek means to “break apart; fracture, i.e., severity” and that it is elsewhere translated as “cruelty.” Perek, being more descriptive, shows that slavery broke the Israelites’ will, suppressed their emotions, and fractured their bodies.
Moses continued, “[A]nd the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage, and they cried, and their cry came up unto God by reason of the bondage” (Exodus 2:23).
God gives us the best view of that slavery in Deuteronomy. Instructing the second generation, who had been small children and infants at the time of the Exodus, Moses said, ”But the Lord hath taken you, and brought you forth out of the iron furnace, even out of Egypt, to be unto him a people of inheritance, as ye are this day” (Deuteronomy 4:20). King Solomon included a similar statement in his temple dedication prayer (1 Kings 8:51).
What a powerful image. Being enslaved by Egypt was like living in an iron furnace. This expression refers to the iron smelting process, which is the perfect picture of cruel mental subjugation and the bone-crushing severity of hard bondage.
Scorching Heat
What was it like to work at a smelting furnace? Iron melts at nearly 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit (1,538 degrees Celsius). That is a lot of heat! Even though ancient smelting furnaces could not reach the high temperatures of today, smelting slaves still struggled to labor in hostile heat. According to a March 1982 Good News article, the ancient Greeks recorded that “some of the worst conditions for slaves in Egypt were to be found in the state quarrying and mining operations, such as the gold and copper mines of Nubia, the Sudan and the Sinai. According to the Greeks, men in these mines daily dropped dead by the scores in the torrid heat, under the merciless lashes of foremen and overseers.”
Archaeologists tell us that smelting operations were almost always done at the site of Egyptian mines. Imagine—freedom-starved, exhausted men, sweating profusely, pumping oxygen into white-hot flames; heat-maddened taskmasters standing over them screaming, “Work harder!”; the slightest resistance or sluggishness bringing the razor sharp slash of the lash! That was the wretched life of a smelting slave.
Bible history shows that the Israelites suffered great cruelty in slavery under the Egyptians. Moses tells us that our forefathers built Pharaoh’s treasure cities, Pithom and Raamses (Exodus 1:11). They were the brick-and-mortar makers (verse 14). By studying ancient murals on the walls of Rekhmire’s tomb at Thebes (modern Luxor), archaeologists know that mud brick was the most commonly used building material in Egypt. Painted scenes show that brick making proceeded along an assembly line. Our modern word adobe comes from the Egyptian word tobe, meaning brick. Building on a massive scale, ancient contractors needed a colossal stockpile of bricks each day, requiring the blood, sweat and tears of a large number of humans to fill the orders.
Let’s step into the picture with the Israelites.
Imagine your first day as a slave. Looking down, you see that you are nearly naked, wearing only a loincloth. A menacing, blistering-hot sun slowly bakes your bare skin like the bricks stacked not far from you. A foreman motions you to follow. You pass by a sea of humanity undulating in constant motion—young men marching to the river, an ever flowing stream of muscle-bulging flesh stopping to draw water, then shouldering it back to pour into a mud pit full of men and women mashing mud and chopped straw with feet, walking in place going nowhere. Another stream of men, women and teens continually fill pails full of thick brown ooze, lugging them to dump on a pile. Brick makers scoop the mortar from the pile to slap it into molds that greedy-eyed foremen stack under the fiery sun.
In a panic, your first thought is to escape. Seeing the squads of armed soldiers and the whip-carrying foreman, however, you know escape is not possible. You become paralyzed when the foreman stops and points you to your assigned task. Your mind seizes as you are swallowed up by the thought of the relentless tide of endless toil. You can think of only one thing: Where is my God?
This was the wretched life of Jacob’s descendants in Egypt, the iron furnace.
Back to Egypt
How shocking, then, that when our ancestors were fully set free and standing just outside of the Promised Land, they set their hearts to go back to Egypt. Moses records them as saying: “And wherefore hath the Lord brought us unto this land, to fall by the sword, that our wives and our children should be a prey? were it not better for us to return into Egypt? And they said one to another, Let us make a captain, and let us return into Egypt” (Numbers 14:3-4). Based on the faithless report of 10 spies, our ancestors, fearing slaughtering by giants, wept all night in their tents. In the morning, they refused to take Canaan and decided to elect a new captain to lead them back to Egypt.
In the book of Acts, the deacon Stephen discussed the Israelite rebellion against God in the person of Moses. He summed it up this way: “To whom our fathers would not obey, but thrust him from them, and in their hearts turned back again into Egypt” (Acts 7:39).
Actually, the Israelites wanted to turn back to Egypt within a week. Their desire to return to the mud pits started at the Red Sea, which was only a six-day journey from where they had been living in Egypt (Exodus 14:11-12). The truth is, the Israelites never left Egypt spiritually. That is the punch of the entire lesson for us. The people of Israel had no capacity to walk out and stay out of sin! Why? God never gave them His Holy Spirit.
God used that nation as an example for people of all nations. Mr. Armstrong wrote, “He was going to prove to the world that without His Holy Spirit their [the Israelites’] minds were incapable of receiving and utilizing such knowledge of the true ways of life. He was going to demonstrate to them that the mind of man, with its one spirit, and without the addition of God’s Holy Spirit, could not have spiritual discernment—could not solve human problems, could not cure the evils that were besetting humanity. The nation Israel would be His guinea pig to demonstrate that fact” (ibid).
Israelite history is a tremendous help in our escape from sin—if we use it profitably. This knowledge must be mixed with the power of God’s Holy Spirit.
What About Us?
So, here’s the big question: Where does Egypt stand in our hearts?
Are we free of the iron furnace? We cannot take this question lightly. Even though we have God’s Holy Spirit, we are not that far removed from our ancient fathers’ problems with Egypt. Gerald Flurry wrote, “You certainly can commit atrocious acts and still have God’s Spirit” (Repentance Toward God). We must search out sins—both open and hidden ones—then come out of them! What sin is trapping us in the fiery furnace? Is there a weakness where the wily pharaoh Satan is stealthily inching us ever closer to spiritual slavery? Is he whispering in our ear, “Go on, do it—you know you want to”? Knowing his own deceitful heart, David prayed, “Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults” (Psalm 19:12). We must do the same, daily, all year long.
In his April 1985 Days of Unleavened Bread message, Mr. Armstrong warned the Church about how difficult it is to resist sin in our modern world. He said, “This is the festival teaching us to come out of sin. By putting leaven out of our houses it is. The idea is to teach us to put sin out of our lives. Well, there are more sins that have been getting into lives today than there were in the days of the early apostles! … Sins have multiplied, and increased; and there’s so many more ways to sin. Now today, instead of coming out of sin, in the world it seems that the public media (not only newspapers and magazines but radio, television—every means of reaching the people) are trying to show people how to sin and get away with it. … [A]nd one of the things that Satan is using against the world, perhaps even more than any other area of sin, is sex. … Do you ever think about what is your preference, brethren? Is it sin? Or is it righteousness?”
In light of what Mr. Armstrong stated in his sermon, we are obligated to examine our approach to sex. Sinning against the Seventh Commandment is the perfect example of a modern-day iron furnace. So many are hopelessly trapped in searing heat. Sadly for some people, sex sins are flames they are willing to live with.
Referring to sex sins, Solomon wrote: “Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned? Can one go upon hot coals, and his feet not be burned?” (Proverbs 6:27-28). Wrong use of sex always burns us terribly. Here is a modern example of what Mr. Armstrong was talking about. Decades ago there were only a few sexually transmitted diseases that promiscuous people had to worry about. Today there are over 25! Contracting an std is the kind of fire we need to run away from, and fast (1 Corinthians 6:18).
The best way to examine ourselves (married people too) in the area of sex is to analyze what films and television shows we watch, what Internet sites we visit, what books and magazines we read, and what public places we frequent, such as beaches, swimming pools, spas and athletic clubs. We must avoid all that causes us to sin! Then we must fill our minds with God’s incredible revelation of the purposes for human sex. Reading, studying and embracing The Missing Dimension in Sex (request your free copy) will free us from the iron furnace of adultery and fornication and give us the preference for righteousness.
Now, sex sins may not be the problem for you. Yet be assured, there are other areas where sin still has its grasp. Ask God to show you where you need to be made free of Egypt. Out of His deep love for you, He will show you, because He has called you—His son—out of the midst of the furnace of iron.