Saturday, February 12, 2011

Let My People Go: Of Moses, Jesus and the Mysterious Prostitute

The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your fellow Israelites.
[Deu 18:15]
One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls then came and spoke to me, saying, Come with me! I will show you the doom (sentence, judgment) of the great harlot (idolatress) who is seated on many waters, with whom the rulers of the earth have joined in prostitution (idolatry) and with the wine of whose immorality (idolatry) the inhabitants of the earth have become intoxicated.

And [the angel] bore me away [rapt] in the Spirit into a desert (wilderness), and I saw a woman seated on a scarlet beast that was all covered with blasphemous titles (names), and he had seven heads and ten horns. The woman was robed in purple and scarlet and bedecked with gold, precious stones, and pearls, [and she was] holding in her hand a golden cup full of the accursed offenses and the filth of her lewdness and vice.

And on her forehead there was inscribed a name of mystery [with a secret symbolic meaning]: Babylon the great, the mother of prostitutes (idolatresses) and of the filth and atrocities and abominations of the earth.

[Rev 17:1-5, Amplified Bible]

Moses was rejected by his people, and so was Jesus; Moses returned from outside Egypt to save his people, and so too will Jesus return one day to Earth to save his people.

And Moses told the Pharaoh, "Let my people go."

But to whom shall Jesus make such a demand?

Of course to the one who is keeping his people in bondage and slavery. Not so obvious however is who this one is, and what is the nature of this slavery.

The simplistic view is that this one is Satan, and the people are in bondage to "sin", ie it is Satan who is causing, even compelling, us to "sin", and if Satan's compulsion on the people is broken then the people will no longer sin, and are then free. But is this so?

For firstly it is not Satan that causes you to sin. Satan may whisper in your ears and make you see in your mind eyes to tempt you, but unless you are tempted by such and thereafter act to those ends, you have not sin, eg unless you are a smoker, imagining or seeing a cigarette is no temptation to you, and no sin certainly too.
... each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.
[Jam 1:14,15]

So at the root of sin are our "own evil desires", and not whatever outside us.

Eve would not have sinned, if to be like God, to know good from evil, was not tempting to her (and this was even before the Fall) but it was - and I suppose for all of mankind too - and the rest is history.

Secondly sin is the breaking of law, and strictly speaking under the covenant of grace there is no law, and we are already free from sin, ie Jesus' death on the cross have set us free - by the demonstration of the power of the grace of God (and for the Jews, the fulfillment of the Law) - and we need not wait for Jesus' return to be so set free. Death no longer enslaves us: O Death where is your victory?! [1 Cor 15]

If there is a "law" for the free - a contradiction of sorts, for with any law there must be punitive measures to enforce compliance, which is ultimately death - it is to love God with all your heart, mind and soul, and to love your neighbour as yourself. To those free this is not a law, but just part of the essence of being free, like breathing is for those alive, a natural thing, even as having two arms, a left and a right arm, is natural to being a man, or that the offspring of a kangaroo is also a kangaroo. So if you are free, you love, naturally, for God is love.

But many strive to keep the above as "law" or to seem so.

For not a little will put strenuous effort to fulfil some minutiae of the Mosaic law - even if these be irrelevant or inapplicable per se - but hardly noticed their neighbours, if any, let alone think about their needs. The Pharisees have always been around, even today.

And free men returned themselves to slavery, unto themselves and their desires, and not unto God, even as the Israelites complained and desired to return to Egypt after the Pharaoh have let them go.

And thirdly, far many more love money, truly.

You cannot serve both God and Money at the same time, for no man can serve two Masters, and the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, even the evil desires within us.

So why do so many love money?

OK sure it is indispensable, particularly in a modern economy, where barter is no longer practical and then there is not much of value that a pair of hands can toiled into being, eg the garbage scavengers in Lagos, Manila, etc. And to depend on love gifts is just as impractical: deemed parasitic, irresponsible and unethical, even to those who claim to love you. Finally manna from heaven have stopped falling to earth a long long time ago.

And so you need money even to merely survive, to subsist, to live from day to day. But with money you need not stop there, you can have more than just bread for food, maybe have a toy or two to keep yourself amused, throw in a holiday once in a while too, and even start to dream; and with just your own two hands, work to make that dream true.

Therefore you are now free from the limitations of your ownself, and no need to be slavishly dependent on others too. And you give thanks to God, or god or gods, for your blessings and pray that he or they or whatever helped you on your way to attain your dreams.

It should be obvious now that you cannot serve God and Money at the same time. With the latter you feel yourself empowered and in control of your own destiny, and God is optional; if you opt for God it is only to enlist his help, blessings, protection, to advantage yourself in your handiwork, etc, but not to subject yourself to him as Master.

And there is no need for faith but only for that in other's confidence in money or need for such confidence, as evidenced in the recent global financial crisis and in the measures to prop the euro, etc.

And the spirit of man is emboldened within himself, even to see and act as if he is god himself - even as being like God tempted Eve - and nothing he plans to do will be impossible, even as the people in the ancient times came together to build the Tower of Babel.





And this is the Mysterious Prostitute: namely the spirit of man, the spirit of idolatory within him to worship himself, and be his own god. And this Prostitue rides the scarlet Beast and is seated on many waters, the latter being angelically interpreted as "peoples, multitudes, nations and languages", ie the whole world. And the scarlet Beast is the spirit of the nations of the world, driven by the same spirit, the Prostitute.

Thus this is the global power, namely the spirit of man, the spirit of prostitution and idolatory, to which Jesus will say, "Let my people go." It is obvious too that this bondage is very strong, far stronger than the physical bondage Pharaoh exerted over the Hebrew slaves.

As an analogy, and twisting the Pharaoh's tale, imagine Moses asking the Pharaoh not to let the Hebrew people go, but instead to surrender his Pharaohship and to let himself go to another land which is far greater than the Egypt he rules but one where he is not king.

For the spirit of man must surrender his own spirit, for only than can the spirit of man be joined with the spirit of Christ, even as the Bride is married to the Bridegroom, to become the Holy City, the new Jerusalem. Until then it is Babylon, the Harlot.




PS: This article was triggered by the fall of Pharaoh Mubarak on 11 Feb 2011 (11022011) and a protester on BBC News, an Egyptian Christian, thanking Moses for the phrase, "Let my people go."