3.1

Birth of a nation
Around 3,500 years ago, a man called Jacob and his family left their home to survive a famine that was starving their region and moved to Egypt. Egypt’s Pharaoh invited them to come and stay because Joseph, a son of Jacob who was already living in Egypt, had prepared a warm welcome for them. Joseph prophesied there would be five more years of famine, so his family moved to Egypt, to a place called Goshen, for their temporary home. Maybe because the land was so good, they stayed far longer than five years. Maybe their multiplying family and cattle became too many to return to their own land, so they continued staying. Maybe Goshen became just too comfortable to leave, so they stopped longing for their own home and let its memories recede into the past. Whatever were their reasons, this family remained in Egypt for 430 years 

At some point during their stay, the terms first set by Egypt’s Pharaoh changed. A future Pharaoh decided Jacob’s family had grown too large to accept any longer as a guest. Instead, he would force them to stay as his slaves. They would no longer be free to multiply because this Pharaoh ordered their firstborn sons to be killed. What had been a welcoming place of refuge became a murderous prison; their temporary home turned into a permanent house of slavery (Exodus 1:6-22). The Bible’s exodus account does not detail the changes that so transformed Jacob’s circumstance in Egypt from refuge to bondage. What is recorded is that with the passing of time, this family’s relation to its host radically changed. The exodus dramatically portrays the potential for even a great good to turn foul and deadly with time. When the temporary assumes a permanent role, the freedoms so necessary for life to move and grow through its necessary changes are lost

Eventually, Jacob’s family cried in despair to God, and He answered (2:23-5). The Bible doesn’t specify when they cried, or how soon God answered them. We only read that they cried and He answered. They were helpless and trapped in their situation so they looked outside their situation to God, who was not constrained by their despair or hedged in by their circumstances. Out of this encounter between Israel and God — a people enslaved in history and God who liberates time — history gave way to the miracle of the exodus and was transformed by it 

Israel’s slavery that took centuries to form was violently overthrown overnight. After waiting so many years, God delivered with a speed that is essential to the Passover story. Many places in Scripture reflect time’s extreme elasticity with God. Time is incomprehensibly malleable in His hands, stretching beyond many life spans to achieve one discrete outcome, or splitting open an instant to reverse everything by one divine act. God does not follow His processes in creation or our expectations. God’s timing can sometimes seem irrational or simply wrong because He is either too fast or too slow for our understanding. Since we cannot fully see God’s work - since so much of what He does follows the rhythm of a different time - we can easily judge His timing impractical, insensitive or even cruel. It seems He would have done much better by rescuing Israel from slavery far sooner than He did. When we assume knowledge of His ways, we inevitably judge His timing is inferior to ours. God’s time on earth responds to a time we cannot reason out or measure. “For a thousand years in Your sight” wrote Moses, “are like yesterday when it passes by, or as a watch in the night” (Psalm 90:4) 

The immediacy of God’s deliverance in the exodus is seen, touched and tasted in the matzah, an unleavened cracker-like flat bread Jews eat on Passover. Matzah is so important to the exodus story that the day long observance of Passover is followed by the seven day long Feast of Unleavened Bread. On the night Israel left Egypt, there was no time to make provisions for her journey, not even time for her bread’s dough to rise (12:39). After 430 long years in Goshen, God forced her out in an instant. So long a wait for so sudden a delivery. God’s perfect timing forged together the extremes of a nearly unendurable waiting with an immediate exodus. It was not a moment too slow or a second too fast. When the time to go finally came, everything to do with Israel’s deliverance focused on a speed that would bring together the chosen time, circumstance and readiness with God’s salvation. Not even the all important Passover meal could slow the race to freedom. The lamb and matzah and bitter herbs had to be eaten “with your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it in haste” (12:11). In one night, Israel was forced out of her home, leaving behind all that was familiar to her and secure 

God’s timing has no lack or excess in it. What we judge as too late or too soon reflects a blindness to what He is doing in and around us. Learning to see and trust God’s use of time frees us to live more fully in this present moment and receive it as His to give. God’s timing is not random but is ordered by His intentions that create all He is doing with details He enables us to glimpse at different places and times with wonder. When the limited and limiting time of space assumes the place God gives it, it becomes a kind of medium for His works to establish and manifest the beauty of His will 

God’s time unites the continuum of time as a single expression of His eternal intentions. When we look back at the steps of our chosen path, God can show them coming together as one life journey that is made whole in Him. There was nothing arbitrary in God’s timing to deliver Israel from slavery. In the Torah, it is written: “And at the end of four hundred and thirty years, to the very day, all the hosts of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt” (12:41). On that day a family was pushed out of slavery with loud groans and much spilt blood into an unknown desert, into the arms of their holy Other. On that day, not a moment too soon or late, a nation was born