Exodus Old and New

A Biblical Theology of Redemption

L. Michael Morales, Benjamin L. Gladd

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780830855391
• eBook ISBN: 9780830855407
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The Gospel Coalition Book Award
Center for Biblical Studies Book of the Year Award
Biblical Foundations Book Award

With Israel's exodus out of Egypt, God established a pattern to help us understand the salvation of all his people—Israel and the nations—through Jesus Christ.

In Exodus Old and New, L. Michael Morales examines the key elements of three major redemption movements in Scripture: the exodus out of Egypt, the second exodus foretold by the prophets, and the new exodus accomplished by Jesus Christ. We discover how the blood of a Passover lamb helps us grasp the significance of Jesus' death on the cross, how the Lord's defeat of Pharaoh foreshadowed Jesus' victory over Satan, how Israel's exodus out of Egypt unfolds the meaning of the resurrection, and much more.

The second volume in the ESBT series, Exodus Old and New reveals how Old Testament stories of salvation provide insight into the accomplishments of Jesus and the unity of God's purposes across history.

About the Series

Essential Studies in Biblical Theology (ESBT), edited by Benjamin L. Gladd and L. Michael Morales, explore the central or  essential themes of the Bible's grand storyline. Taking cues from Genesis 1–3, authors trace the presence of these themes throughout the entire sweep of redemptive history. Written for students, church leaders, and laypeople, the ESBT offers an accessible yet rich introduction to biblical theology.

Chapter One

EXILE BEFORE EXODUS

THE OPENING ELEVEN CHAPTERS of Genesis unfold a theological history of humanity that serves as the backdrop for the rest of the Bible’s story of redemption, including the role of Israel within that story. This backdrop, as we will see, narrates humanity’s exile from God’s presence and life-yielding fellowship. Separated from Yahweh God, the fountain of life and being, humanity’s condition is one of death. As such, the return to God—the exodus—can only be life from the dead, deliverance from death.

CREATED TO LIVE WITH GOD ON EARTH

The story of the Bible begins with a creation account that sets forth humanity’s fellowship with God on earth as the goal of creation. Created in the image and likeness of God, humanity’s highest purpose—the meaning of life and existence—was to be found in the awe-inspiring prospect of engagement with the uncreated Being who transcends all creation. Genesis 1 portrays God as a workman who builds the cosmos as a three-storied house (heaven, earth, and seas) and then takes up Sabbath rest and refreshment on the seventh day. More than this, he sanctifies the Sabbath day as time set apart to enjoy fellowship and communion with humanity. This divine relationship was set within the context of the earth as home, a place of security and joy. While being made in God’s image both qualified and commissioned Adam to rule caringly over the house of creation on God’s behalf, yet the chief delight and privilege of such likeness to God was in humanity’s unique ability to gaze heavenward, to lift our faces to God and relate to him—no other creature could enjoy such friendship with the Eternal.

Genesis 2 elaborates further on the intimate nature of God’s relationship with his first human creatures within the land of Eden. Yahweh God personally formed Adam’s body, breathed into him the breath of life, brought him into paradise, a well-watered garden filled with life-giving fruit. Finally, God created a woman for Adam so that together the couple would know human companionship, the embrace of love, the yielding of new life in children, and the daily fellowship of mutual help in their God-given labors. Adam would shepherd his family, and all creation, in the knowledge and praise of Yahweh’s name.

HUMANITY’S ALIENATION FROM GOD

The idyllic life in the Garden of Eden did not last long. Deceived by the serpent who would later be identified as the fallen angel Satan (Revelation 12:9; 20:2), the woman took fruit from the only tree God had forbidden and then gave some to her husband Adam, who also took and ate. Rather than using God’s single command as an opportunity to demonstrate loyalty—loving obedience—to their Maker, to show fealty through grateful submission to his authority, humanity rebelled against God, grasping at the serpent’s lie that by doing so they could become as gods themselves. Adam’s sin changed the nature of humanity, corrupting it with the principle of rebellion, the power of sin. As a consequence, the human couple was spiritually severed from God, whose purity and holiness were now a threat, and they fell under his just sentence of death—for “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). Adam and the woman were cast out of the Garden of Eden, and God stationed cherubim (fierce, composite creatures) and a flaming sword to guard the Garden’s entrance, barring humanity from the tree of life. Crucial for understanding the theology of the Bible, the expulsion from the Garden of Eden means that the restoration of humanity must be in the form of an exodus back to God, a deliverance out of exile.

In being driven out of the Garden of Eden, humanity did not merely lose life defined as paradisal existence. Rather, people lost the fountain of life and source of all peace, joy, and fulfillment—that is, they lost their relationship with God himself. What’s more, exiled from God they lost something of their own selves as well. Created for life with God, to find their highest satisfaction and rest in him, banished humanity lost its defining purpose and basis for significance. Possessing the divine gift of a rational soul with its wondrous and fearful capacity to relate to God, set apart from all other creatures in being created in his divine image and likeness, human beings, whose natures are now deeply bent by the principle of sin, reject the purpose of God’s gift and live instead for things like bodily pleasures alone. Seeking happiness in carnal ambitions, people live with aims no higher than the mongrel skulking in the streets—a denial and utter waste of the image and likeness of God. In this way, humans squander the divine gift of life, of the soul’s noble openness to the Infinite. As Shakespeare put it: “What is a man, / If his chief good and market of his time / Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.”1

Soberingly, divine justice may give human beings over to becoming as the beasts in whose image and likeness they have lived and then finally, apart from God’s mercy, to lose forever the possibility of fellowship with the Creator, along with the fruits of peace, joy, life, and contentment that only communion with God yields. The path of exile through Eden’s gates was, therefore, a path from life to death, from light to darkness, from harmony to dysfunction and strife, from health to sickness, from security to violence, from compassion to inhumanity, from wholeness to brokenness, from peace with God to enmity—from a life of friendship with God to alienation. This is the anthropology of our fallen world, an integral aspect of what it now means for us to be human. This fallen condition is also the genuine cause of our fears, anxieties, depression, and restlessness—we are exiles, alienated fugitives, within a cosmos that was created to be our home with God. And yet there is nothing within creation itself that can fulfill our soul’s capacity and longing to have fellowship with the One who transcends the night sky and all the works of his hands.

THE EXILE INTENSIFIES

In addition to disrupting humanity’s relationship with God, the plummet into sin affected every other possible relationship—between husband and wife, between brothers, with animals, with the earth’s soil, with one’s vocation and labor, and with childbearing. The shadow of divine judgment, the curse of God, was cast over all of life. Nature, life, reality—all writhe too in the pollution of death unleashed by humanity’s sin. The bitter reality becomes manifest in the next story as Cain murders his brother Abel and ends up banished farther east of Eden (Genesis 4). In response, Cain builds a city. Within its literary and theological context, this city can only be understood as an effort to replace Eden’s framework for humanity’s life together with God. As such, Cain’s city building marks corrupt humanity’s transition to a new goal of fulfillment, a fabricated purpose, the quest for self-realization apart from God’s own agenda for creation and human history. Cain has set in motion the city-of-man project. The narrative betrays his city building as founded on three motivations: the desire for glory, protection, and permanence.

First, Cain built a city and named it after his son—this marks the quest for glory and immortality. In the ancient Near East as elsewhere, one’s name lived on through building projects, battle glory, or childbearing. In the ancient Sumerian poem The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest recorded story in the world, when Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality from the gods fails, he resolves to build up his royal city of Uruk—indeed, the story’s prologue guides the reader to gaze with wonder at Uruk’s walls, temple, and foundations as a tribute to the hero’s lasting glory. Similarly, in Homer’s Iliad the warrior Achilles faces the choice of gaining immortality, a name, either through death in battle glory or by returning home to a quiet, if obscure, life wherein his children would live on in his stead. He chose the former. Cain both bears a son and builds a city, uniting them by naming the city after his son.

Second, his city also marked an attempt to claim safety and protection. Separated from the refuge of God, he had said that “whoever finds me will kill me” (Genesis 4:14), and then, slighting God’s protective mark, he built his city. The impulse rings true from a sociological perspective, as ancient cities, encircled by walls, developed from a posture of defense.

Third, and more deeply, in exiling Cain, God had cursed him to be a “fugitive and wanderer on the earth” (Genesis 4:12-14). Estranged further from God, Cain’s place on earth is no home, but a vast, no-man’s land bare of comfort. In Hebrew the word for “wandering” is nod, so there is no small irony when the narrative goes on to recount how Cain departed from the face of Yahweh and dwelled in the land of Nod—that is, he made his home in the land of wandering, located east of Eden. The farther one is removed from God, the greater one’s disorientation becomes. Such rebellion, welling up out of a heart polluted by sin, is all the more tragic as the Maker of heaven and earth reveals himself to be abounding in mercy and steadfast love.

Alongside the city builders of human history, there are also the sojourners, those who by divine grace understand that God is both willing and able to return his original gift of paradise and who now wait on him in humble submission. While Cain’s family builds a city, the family of his brother Seth would become known as those who “call upon the name of Yahweh” (Genesis 4:25-26), an act that portrays a life of dependence on and loyalty to God, expressed liturgically by invoking Yahweh’s name in worship. Such sojourners understand that before Yahweh will descend out of heaven to reestablish paradise on earth, the unleashed evil residing within the human heart must be dealt with, and humanity’s sins and consequent death sentence must be resolved by God himself. These two gestures, city building and worship, are paradigmatic: Abraham will later build an altar and call on the name of Yahweh (Genesis 12:8), and when Pharaoh enslaves the Israelites to build Egyptian cities, he is conscripting them for the city-of-man project, that is, for rebellion against God’s purposes for human history (Exodus 1:10-14).

The narrative history of Genesis 1–11 continues with other tragic stories of exile, tracing the ever-deepening path of humanity’s separation from God. And this growing alienation is matched by an intensification of sin and rebellion as human civilization is increasingly marked by injustice and violence. Genesis 6 describes a great transgression, a boundary crossing, understood traditionally either as the intermingling of heavenly beings with humans or of Yahweh worshipers (“sons of God”) with the line of Cain. As a result, the way of Yahweh was corrupted, that is, the knowledge of how to have a restored relationship with God was forsaken and almost completely lost. The earth was filled with the tyranny of “men of renown” (literally “men of name [shem]”), people set on self-glorification to godlike proportions, rather than on the praise of the living God. We are told God saw “that the wickedness of man was great upon the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the day” (Genesis 6:5). Grieved in his heart, God destroyed most of humanity, putting a temporary halt on the advance of wickedness. Yet, even after cleansing the earth of an utterly corrupt generation, saving only Noah and his household through the deluge, God’s verdict on humanity is no less dismal: “the imagination of the human heart is evil from youth” (Genesis 8:21), a divine assessment that would soon prove fully justified.

THE NATIONS SCATTERED FURTHER INTO EXILE

Turning to the last story of the primeval era (Genesis 11:1-9), the Tower of Babel portrays humanity in ways remarkably like the earlier depiction of Cain. “Come,” the people say, “let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its summit in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered over the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 11:4). As with Cain, there is here the reciprocal interplay between fear and colossal pride, betrayed in similar desires for the immortality of vain glory, self-preservation, and permanence as an end to wandering.

First, the city builders desire to make a “name” for themselves, name again being an expression of human glory, a grasping effort at immortality. The people unite to build, brick by brick, a name for themselves, a ziggurat city to display human achievement. Somewhat mockingly, the story ends without our ever discovering the names of these builders. Their clutching after immortality through prideful love of self proves to be a grasping after the wind.

Second, the temple-ziggurat, with its summit reaching into heaven, also stands as a monument to human enterprise and perverse religion, the attempt to access heaven and its divine power for self-preservation. Out of fear, the people endeavor to create a channel to heaven, to access heavenly power by human device—occult power tapped for protection. (The actual name of the city is “Babylon,” which in Akkadian means “gate of god,” reflecting their understanding of the ziggurat as a gateway to heaven, but the title is punned in the Hebrew as Babel, as in “nonsense” or “confusion,” reflecting God’s judgment.)

Third, the builders, as with Cain, desire permanence, rootedness—“lest we be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” And yet once more the result is only the bitter reverse of their aim. Unm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Author’s Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Exile Before Exodus
• Part 1: The Historical Exodus out of Egypt
• Part 2: The Prophesied Second Exodus
• Part 3: The New Exodus of Jesus the Messiah
• Further Reading
• Author Index
• Scripture Index
• Also Available
• Notes
• Praise for Exodus Old and New
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright