Strap yourself
in, because this is going to be a long one.
I don’t speak
directly about my faith too often. For
me, faith is like the air I breathe or the sun in the sky. It is just there, a constant presence,
exerting an influence in more ways than I could count or quantify. It doesn’t need to be talked about, it is
just there.
This week I have
finally gotten around to watching The Bible on Netflix. This is the History Channel miniseries
dramatizing the Christian Bible. It is
pretty good even if at times it shows its budget. Also it keeps making me want to play Mass
Effect (a joke only gamers will fully get).
But it made me
think of a hypothesis I have about the story of Exodus and I thought I would share
it with you.
I call it a
hypothesis because one should always be careful attempting to know guess any
part of God’s plan. By definition God is
omniscient and omnipotent and so we are a bit like cave men trying to understand
nuclear physics when it comes to these things.
“Hypothesis,” therefore, is a precisely chosen term: it is an educated
guess, and not even raised to the level of theory. But I think it is a good one. Maybe.
You know how
the story goes, and for your benefit I will give you a Cliff’s Notes version. Moses was born of Jewish slaves, at a time
where the Pharaoh was murdering Jewish sons for fear of rebellion. Moses is spared and raised as the son of the Pharaoh,
only to find out that he was actually Jewish and to escape after killing a
slave driver. Then God spoke to him in
the form of a burning bush and told him to set his people free. I was always amused in particular by this
passage in Exodus 4:
10
Moses said to the Lord, “Pardon your servant, Lord. I have never been eloquent,
neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of
speech and tongue.”
11
The Lord said to him, “Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf
or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the Lord? 12
Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.”
13
But Moses said, “Pardon your servant, Lord. Please send someone else.”
14
Then the Lord’s anger burned against Moses and he said, “What about your
brother, Aaron the Levite? I know he can speak well.[”]
So you see,
dear reader, when Moses needed a lawyer, God suggested Aaron. I am well-named, indeed!
So Moses goes
back to Egypt and confronts the Pharaoh (now his former adoptive brother,
Ramses). And there is a bit here that I don’t
see anyone highlight. Over and over
again, God says that he will harden the Pharoah’s heart. For instance, from Exodus 4:21:
The
Lord said to Moses, “When you return to Egypt, see that you perform before
Pharaoh all the wonders I have given you the power to do. But I will harden his heart so that he will not let the people go.[”]
(Emphasis
added.) These are all NIV translations, but
I have seen several translations and they agree on this point. You can see a similar theme in Exodus 7:
1
Then the Lord said to Moses, “See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh, and
your brother Aaron will be your prophet. 2 You are to say everything I command
you, and your brother Aaron is to tell Pharaoh to let the Israelites go out of
his country. 3 But I will harden
Pharaoh’s heart, and though I multiply my signs and wonders in Egypt, 4 he
will not listen to you. Then I will lay my hand on Egypt and with mighty acts
of judgment I will bring out my divisions, my people the Israelites. 5 And the
Egyptians will know that I am the Lord when I stretch out my hand against Egypt
and bring the Israelites out of it.”
(Emphasis
added.) Even after they are freed, God
tells Moses he is going to harden the Pharaoh’s heart again, in Exodus 14:
1
Then the Lord said to Moses, 2 “Tell the Israelites to turn back and encamp
near Pi Hahiroth, between Migdol and the sea. They are to encamp by the sea,
directly opposite Baal Zephon. 3 Pharaoh will think, ‘The Israelites are
wandering around the land in confusion, hemmed in by the desert.’ 4 And I will
harden Pharaoh’s heart, and he will pursue them. But I will gain glory for
myself through Pharaoh and all his army, and the Egyptians will know that I am
the Lord.” So the Israelites did this.
Even as the
Jews were trapped against the Red Sea, God was urging the Pharaoh forward, also
in Exodus 14:
15
Then the Lord said to Moses, “Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites
to move on. 16 Raise your staff and stretch out your hand over the sea to
divide the water so that the Israelites can go through the sea on dry ground.
17 I will harden the hearts of the Egyptians so that they will go in after
them. And I will gain glory through Pharaoh and all his army, through his
chariots and his horsemen. 18 The Egyptians will know that I am the Lord when I
gain glory through Pharaoh, his chariots and his horsemen.”
And over and
over again, we see the Pharaoh’s heart get hardened, first going back to Exodus
7:
8
The Lord said to Moses and Aaron, 9 “When Pharaoh says to you, ‘Perform a
miracle,’ then say to Aaron, ‘Take your staff and throw it down before
Pharaoh,’ and it will become a snake.”
10
So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and did just as the Lord commanded. Aaron
threw his staff down in front of Pharaoh and his officials, and it became a
snake. 11 Pharaoh then summoned wise men and sorcerers, and the Egyptian
magicians also did the same things by their secret arts: 12 Each one threw down
his staff and it became a snake. But Aaron’s staff swallowed up their staffs.
13 Yet Pharaoh’s heart became hard and he would not listen to them, just as the
Lord had said.
Later in same
chapter, the Nile was turned to blood, but his court magicians convinced him it
was a parlor trick:
22
But the Egyptian magicians did the same things by their secret arts, and
Pharaoh’s heart became hard; he would not listen to Moses and Aaron, just as
the Lord had said.
After the plague
of frogs, Moses appeals to God to stop it and the frogs died out. And even then Pharoah’s heart becomes hard,
in Exodus 8:15:
But
when Pharaoh saw that there was relief, he hardened his heart and would not
listen to Moses and Aaron, just as the Lord had said.
And you get
the idea. In Exodus 8:19, the magicians
try and fail to recreate the plague of gnats and tell the Pharaoh that this is
the power of God, but his heart is “hardened” as the Lord said. Moses relieves Pharaoh from the plague of
flies, and in 8:32, the Pharaoh’s heart was still hardened again. Similarly the Egyptian livestock died in the
fifth plague, but in 9:7, the Pharaoh’s heart was still hard and he still
wouldn’t like the Jews go. In 9:12, in
the plague of boils it even says specifically that “the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s
heart and he would not listen to Moses and Aaron.” And so on through 9:34-35, 10:1, 10:20,
10:27... the point is that it is said
over and over again. The Pharaoh’s heart
was hardened and it was God who was hardening it. Even if some events helped, God was
ultimately responsible.
Seems like a
contradiction, doessn’t it? On one hand,
he has Moses saying, “let my people go.”
On the other hand, God is making the Pharaoh not want to let them go,
and even when he did let them go, He made the Pharaoh pursue them onto his
ruin. If God can and was willing to
change the heart of the Pharaoh, why didn’t he just soften the Pharaoh’s heart and simplify the whole thing?
Well, here’s
my hypothesis. It has something to do
with this:
If you cannot
watch the video, here’s what it is: a rendition of an old slave spiritual
called “Go Down Moses.” Although this
version is by Louis Armstrong, and thus there is a little more “swing” to it
than the original, you get the idea.
Imagine an American slave singing it on a plantation:
You
need not always weep and mourn,
Let
My people go!
And
wear these slav’ry chains forlorn,
Let
My people go!
To say that
Exodus influenced abolitionism is an understatement. Although the slaveholders cherry picked
portions of the Bible to justify their cruelty, for those opposed to slavery—be
them slaves, or mere abolitionists—this entire chapter in the bible was seen as
God’s condemnation of slavery, for all time in all places. Slaves in the South were forbidden from reading
that chapter in the Bible, lest they get the wrong idea and I am willing to bet
any slave singing that song would be beaten.
But in secret meetings, Exodus was read, and songs like that were sung.
It is common
for atheists to attack Christianity because once Christians held slaves and
some even claimed that it was sanctioned by God. But every religion has done that, and for
that matter many of the most significant reappearances of slavery has been
under atheistic regimes such as the Soviet Union, proving atheism is no barrier
to slavery, either. Those in power will
warp every institution in society to keep them in power, including religion;
there is nothing new about that. What
makes Christianity unique is that it was the first time the class of people who
were not enslaved rose up against slavery.
I mean slaves deciding that slavery was evil was nothing new: you have
to think Spartacus, for instance, believed that all slavery was always wrong,
but there was no successful movement among free romans to end slavery. By contrast free Americans, indeed White
Americans rose up against slavery—and they were explicitly motivated by their
faith.
It happened,
indeed, twice. First, peacefully in
England under the leadership of Wilberforce, and then in America through our Civil
War. Even the suffering America felt was
seen as some to be God’s plan. For
instance, in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural he spoke of how both North and South
read the same Bible and sought God’s aid in the war:
The
prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully.
The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of
offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom
the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of
those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which,
having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that
He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by
whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine
attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do
we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily
pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the
bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and
until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn
with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said
"the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
Lincoln didn’t
mention the book of Exodus, the plagues, or the pillar of fire in that speech,
but he didn’t have to. That book teaches
that slavery is an offense against God and there is a price to pay for it. It doesn’t have to be said. Every
American knew it.
And in the
aftermath of the American Civil War, we see a strong consensus that slavery is
wrong and evil. This is not to say every
person believes it. Not
even every American believes this.
But even with Boko Haram, ISIS and China engaged in sexual slavery, what
is remarkable is how many people are absolutely horrified by this, and, at
least in the case of ISIS and Boko Haram, many are speaking of military action
for no other reason than to stop them.
This is unusual
in human history! Up until the last few
centuries slavery and involuntary servitude has been the norm and few people
questioned the rightfulness of it. This
is a revolutionary change in how humans think and behave and only time will
tell if it is ever returned back to the horrifying “norm.” As Mark Steyn once wrote when discussing the
movie Amazing Grace (about
Wilberforces successful crusade against slavery):
'William
Wilberforce,' writes Eric Metaxas in Amazing Grace, 'was the happy victim of
his own success. He was like someone who against all odds finds the cure for a
horrible disease that's ravaging the world, and the cure is so overwhelmingly
successful that it vanquishes the disease completely. No one suffers from it
again -- and within a generation or two no one remembers it ever existed.'
What
did Wilberforce 'cure'? Two centuries ago, on March 25, 1807, one very
persistent British backbencher secured the passage by Parliament of an Act for
the Abolition of the Slave Trade throughout His Majesty's realms and
territories. It's not that no one remembers the disease ever existed, but that
we recall it as a kind of freak pandemic -- a SARS or bird flu that flares up
and whirs round the world and is then eradicated. The American education system
teaches it as such -- as a kind of wicked perversion the Atlantic settlers had
conjured out of their own ambition. In reality, it was more like the common
cold – a fact of life. The institution predates the word's etymology, from the Slavs
brought from eastern Europe to the glittering metropolis of Rome. It predates
by some millennia the earliest laws, such as the Code of Hammurabi in
Mesopotamia. The first legally recognized slave in the American colonies was
owned by a black man who had himself arrived as an indentured servant. The
first slave owners on the North American continent were hunter-gatherers. As Metaxas
puts it, 'Slavery was as accepted as birth and marriage and death, was so woven
into the tapestry of human history that you could barely see its threads, much
less pull them out. Everywhere on the globe, for 5,000 years, the idea of human
civilization without slavery was unimaginable.'
...
But
the costume dramatics [in the movie] and the contemporary emotionalizing miss
the scale of the abolitionist's achievement. 'What Wilberforce vanquished was
something even worse than slavery,' says Metaxas, 'something that was much more
fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: he vanquished the
very mindset that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive
for millennia. He destroyed an entire way of seeing the world, one that had held
sway from the beginning of history, and he replaced it with another way of
seeing the world.' Ownership of existing slaves continued in the British West
Indies for another quarter-century, and in the United States for another 60
years, and slave trading continued in Turkey until Atatürk abolished it in the twenties
and in Saudi Arabia until it was (officially) banned in the sixties, and it
persists in Africa and other pockets of the world to this day. But not as a
broadly accepted 'human good.'
Steyn goes on
to discuss the “reformation of manners” that was required to achieve it and it
is worth reading the whole thing (in this reprint),
but the point is that slavery was the norm and suddenly now there is a
competing norm for freedom. I think it
is a little optimistic to say that slavery is as ostracized as Metaxas says—ask
a billion Chinese if they are free to work as they choose—but he is right to
say that it is not nearly as accepted as it was even five hundred years ago.
So we circle
back around to my hypothesis. Why did
God harden the Pharaoh’s heart, even leading him to military disaster as the Red
Sea poured in on his troops? Why not simply
will the Pharaoh to let his people go?
My hypothesis
is—with the recognition that again, I am like a cave man trying to figure out
nuclear physics—that maybe this was why.
Maybe His purpose was not simply to free the Jews, but to create a story
that would echo down through the ages.
Perhaps in his omniscience he knew that if he did this, Wilberforce would
be able to end the slave trade in England, and the Republicans would agitate on
the question until there was a war over it.
Maybe His goal was even the “reformation of manners” ushered in by
Wilberforce.
I cannot
pretend to know God’s mind. There are
dozens of passages in the Bible that will tell you it is a fool’s errand to try
to understand his full plan. But for
what it is worth, this is a hypothesis that seems to fit the facts: the events
in Exodus—presuming as one of the faithful that it happened the way the Bible
said—was almost like a form of “performance art,” where God made a dramatic
statement in favor of freedom and in opposition to slavery that more than three
thousand years later, comforted slaves hurting from their labor and motivated
free men and women to labor and even bleed for their freedom. And more than that God anticipated and
intended those results and to make us better people in the process. I cannot pretend to be certain this was His
plan, but I believe it is a reasonable guess.
---------------------------------------
My wife and I
have lost our jobs due to the harassment of convicted terrorist (and
adjudicated pedophile) Brett Kimberlin, including an attempt to get us killed
and to frame me for a crime carrying a sentence of up to ten years. I know that claim sounds fantastic, but if you
read starting here,
you will see absolute proof of these claims using documentary and video
evidence. If you would like to help in
the fight to hold Mr. Kimberlin accountable, please hit the donation link on
the right. And thank you.
Follow me at
Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for
snark and site updates. And you can
purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A
Novel of Alternate, Recent History here.
And you can read a little more about my
novel, here.
---------------------------------------
Disclaimer:
I have accused
some people, particularly Brett Kimberlin, of reprehensible conduct. In some cases, the conduct is even
criminal. In all cases, the only justice
I want is through the appropriate legal process—such as the criminal justice
system. I do not want to see vigilante
violence against any person or any threat of such violence. This kind of conduct is not only morally
wrong, but it is counter-productive.
In the
particular case of Brett Kimberlin, I do not want you to even contact him. Do not call him. Do not write him a letter. Do not write him an email. Do not text-message him. Do not engage in any kind of directed
communication. I say this in part
because under Maryland law, that can quickly become harassment and I don’t want
that to happen to him.
And for that
matter, don’t go on his property. Don’t
sneak around and try to photograph him.
Frankly try not to even be within his field of vision. Your behavior could quickly cross the line
into harassment in that way too (not to mention trespass and other concerns).
And do not
contact his organizations, either. And
most of all, leave his family alone.
The only
exception to all that is that if you are reporting on this, there is of course
nothing wrong with contacting him for things like his official response to any
stories you might report. And even then
if he tells you to stop contacting him, obey that request. That this is a key element in making out a
harassment claim under Maryland law—that a person asks you to stop and you
refuse.
And let me say
something else. In my heart of hearts, I
don’t believe that any person supporting me has done any of the above. But if any of you have, stop it, and if you
haven’t don’t start.
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