Marching Forward
Updated: Aug 31, 2019
“The Lord shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace.And the Lord said unto Moses, Why do you cry unto me? speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward” Exodus 14:14-15
Read: Exodus 14
There is lesson to be taken from the Israelite voyage from Egypt - away from slavery: it is that deliverance is difficult to accept both by the slave & the slave-holder.
The Egyptians would never have let the Jews go without God’s extraordinary intervention. Now they pursued their former slaves aggressively after a realization of what they had lost.
The Israelites, on the other hand, took every challenge as an opportunity to lament on how much they missed slavery instead of seeking the God who had delivered them from slavery. They preferred to return into slavery as soon as they faced the first obstacle.
Sometimes, as believers we act like the Israelites: while God has set us free, we are all too willing to step back into the bondage of sin and the devil as soon as we face challenges.
God has promised that His name is a strong tower and that the righteous can look to that name for safety…even in the face of the greatest challenges. God does not break his promises, we are safe in Him.
There will always be a part of us that feels that returning to the slavery of sin is an easier way to achieve our objectives: why work hard when we can succeed through corruption, why study hard when we can pass an exam by cheating etc.
Like slavery, sin is wrong.
One of the biggest reasons to live free of sin is that it does not empower the sinner, in a strange twist of words, Sin enslaves. This is not just word play, the bible says as much in Romans 6:16. In the best case, it enslaves the sinner only, but in most cases sin affects both the sinner and victims of his sin. Sin is the root of many dysfunctional communities, addiction, crimes etc.
Cheating in an exam may appear to harm no one but it enslaves the cheat, it says "You can't succeed without help". Creating a mindset that goes beyond exam halls, many students already feel l they cannot succeed without cheating. Many students already believe that they are not good enough to succeed in proper terms - this is slavery.
What must we do about this? More than at any other time, we must rely on God’s words, whether things are tough or going smoothly, this is the time to have faith, to trust God’s promises. Forget the bondage of the past, hold on to God’s hands as he guides you into his future. Move forward.
