REVIEW OF EGYPTIAN RELIGION
Much has been written about the influence of ancient, pagan religions and the Abrahamic religions. Since it has all been written by historical scholars and not theologians, however, Jews and Christians are inclined to discount these writings because, on the surface, they seem to dismiss Judaism and Christianity as mythology which argues against their strong tendency to interpret the Bible literally.
This attitude by Jews and Christians is a big mistake. What they ignore is that God, in his wisdom, saw fit to include references to pagan religious practices in the Bible. Ancient Israelites understood these references because they lived in that pagan environment. But most of us who live in these modern times are not familiar with those pagan religious practices, and that handicaps us from understanding how God has used them symbolically to represent spiritual truth. Our challenge is to learn how these references to pagan religion are useful for training in righteousness. If we do not make an effort to understand what God wants us to learn, we greatly reduce any claims we might make about trusting God and the Bible.
A simplistic understanding of the deliverance of Israel from Egypt is that they were slaves that needed to be set free from the control of an oppressive king. And a simplistic understanding of the reason why God called his people out of Babylon is that just wanted them to return to the promised land. The spiritual message of these stories, however, is that God’s abiding love for his people compels him to deliver them from slavery to Old/First Covenant religions so that they can become New Covenant disciples.
We who live in these modern times must come to accept that God’s love still compels him to deliver his people from religion — including the religions of Judaism and Christianity. Jews and Christians of today are no less enslaved by religion and religious leaders today than the Israelites were enslaved by Pharaoh Egypt and Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon.
To understand how the issue of slavery applies to all religious people, we must take a close look at the story of Ham in Genesis 9. There we find that Canaan is cursed because of what his father Ham did to Noah. We must also study Genesis 10 where we find that the sons of Canaan included the nations that occupied the promised land, Mizraim (i.e. Egypt), and Cush, father ofNimrod whose kingdom was Babel in the land of Shinar. What God is trying to say in these genealogies and obscure stories is that all these people and nations represent religion in all ages because they all are antecedents of Ham and Canaan. They are not descendants in natural terms, of course, but they are spiritual descendants who carry and pass on the spiritual gene of religion to their children. This spiritual gene is the curse of religion.
More to the point, these nations/religions are all siblings in conflict with Shem who is the spiritual father of Abraham and Israel. To simplify this conflict further, we can say that it is the ongoing conflict between Old/First Covenant religion and New Covenant disciples.
With respect to Egypt, the Bible says that it is the land of Ham. This means that the curse of religion that Noah placed on Ham’s children extends to Egypt. And, since Nimrod, a rebel toward God and the builder of the Tower of Babel (i.e. Babylon), is a grandchild of Ham, we read that the curse of religion fell on him and his offspring also.
With these understandings about the origins of the curse of religion, we see that the reason God wants to deliver his people from Egypt and Babylon is to break the curse. This is the same curse to which God refers when he talks about blessings and curses where blessings are code language for the New Covenant and curses are code language for the Old/First Covenant.
But we cannot be deceived into thinking that deliverance from religion is something that God just does unilaterally for people without their involvement. He calls them to “come out” of religion with repentance.