As a political libertarian I found myself somewhat irritated with the section of scripture we’re studying this morning. The Egyptians lost their money, their livestock, their land, and their freedom. The Egyptian government assumed control of their property and their persons. How did Pharaoh accomplish this? He used force in a crisis. Think about it a minute. In the story the people gave up everything for food. Pharaoh had what they needed. Where did he get those large stores of grain? He used coercion, the point of the spear, the threat of death to take 20% of every man’s produce during the 7 plentiful years. He sold back to the people the very thing he took from them by force. He used their own goods to enslave them.
What makes this even harder to swallow is that it was the plan of God’s man, Joseph. The 20% tax was his idea. He was the director of operations. Joseph was the guy who took the money, livestock, land, and freedom from the Egyptians and gave it all to Pharaoh. A superficial examination of his actions would put Joseph on par with communists like Lenin and Mao. How do we reconcile the enslaving policies of this man who was used powerfully by God with the expressed intention of this same God, who in the flesh, made statements like the following?
So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. John 8:36
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed,” Luke 4:18
The Apostle Paul consistently proclaimed God’s intention to bring liberty to captives everywhere.
Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. 2 Cor. 3:17
If the Spirit of the Lord was working through Joseph, why did his efforts bring enslavement rather than liberty? We’ll sort this out in just a minute.
My irritation studying this passage turned to shock when I realized that our nation is headed down the same path, but with slightly different means of getting there. We are headed toward generational enslavement at the hands of our government and few people seem to even care. Let me show you how similar our situation is to the Egyptians. Our government is using an economic crisis and its power of coercion to rob us of possessions and liberty.
• February 13, 2008. Economic Stimulus Act of 2008. Distributed about $160 billion in tax rebates. It increased mortgage loan limits.
• July 30. Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008. FHA guaranteed up to $300 billion in new mortgages. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were placed under the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
• October 1. Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. The U.S. Secretary of the Treasury was authorized to spend $700 billion on the banking system. (AIG, one of the recipients, recently paid $165 million in bonuses with this money.
• In February of this year an $800 billion economic stimulus bill passed Congress and was signed into law by President Obama.
Are these measures going to help turn the economy around? No one really knows. When John Stossel asked a congressman who supported it if the stimulus will help the best he’d say was, “I hope so.” Some economists say that at best it will do nothing and that it’s like taking water from the deep end of a swimming pool, dumping it into the shallow end and expecting the water level to rise. At worse, all of this spending will have the same effect as FDR’s New Deal policies. By intervening in the economy he managed to extend the Great Depression by about 11 years. If that weren’t bad enough, what our government is doing threatens to enslave us.
Where are our enlightened and generous politicians going to get the trillions of dollars they need to save us? Pharaoh’s playbook is still around. They’re going to take it from us. Get ready to be taxed out the nose. Yes, I know the president is saying that only the super rich are going to be taxed, but that’s deceptive talk. He’s going to take away deductions from while not increasing taxes on everyone else. But our politicians know they can’t raise taxes too much or they’ll be booted out of a job, so there are only two options left: borrow from foreign nations and print the money. The borrowing won’t last because countries like China are starting to suspect that they’ll never be repaid much less receive interest on their loans. When the loans are no longer coming in the government will print more money to pay for this massive spending. Here’s the catch: printing more money creates inflation. You dollars, investments, and savings lose value. Inflating the money supply is a hidden tax. What we’re looking at over the next several years is a national debt somewhere in the range of $70 trillion. This is an historical event of monstrously stupid proportions. Who is going to pay for it? You are … and your children … and their children … and their children. Who knows how deep the hole will be by the time our government finishes shoveling?
We will be enslaved like the Egyptians for the same reason. We have developed a distorted dependency on the government. Unless we detach ourselves from its tentacles, the great beast is going to take us plunging into the deep with it. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Within the same country where most of the population was enslaved one group of people flourished: the Israelites. Note the striking contrast between Jacob’s family and the Egyptians.
Now the Israelites settled in Egypt in the region of Goshen. They acquired property there and were fruitful and increased greatly in number. Genesis 27:47
The example of God’s people provides a way out of slavery. It is in Israel that we find …
Remedies for a Distorted Dependency
Establish a long-term perspective
One of the problems with godless people is that they tend to be short-term thinkers. They live only for the moment. They tend to live for immediate gratification and, as a result, consume without much thought for tomorrow. The Egyptians were no exception to this rule. They, like most ancient people, were caught up in a cyclical view of history. They didn’t view history as having a beginning and end. There was no direction or purpose for life. The present with its unending repetition was all that mattered.
For me this explains why Joseph didn’t just send out a message that the people should save their excess grain during the 7 years of plenty to use during the 7 years of famine. They wouldn’t have done it, not for very long anyway. Linear thinking was not a part of their mindset. All that mattered was the eternal now.
This is evident in their attitude toward the end of the famine. They’d saved nothing. They’d consumed all. Even though it was surely announced that the famine was soon to be over they saw it as an unending condition in the everlasting present. Rather than work, scrimp, and save to hold out one more season, they sold themselves into slavery. Please note that Joseph did not suggest they sell their lands and bodies to Pharaoh, they did:
“We cannot hide from our lord the fact that since our money is gone and our livestock belongs to you, there is nothing left for our lord except our bodies and our land. Why should we perish before your eyes—we and our land as well? Buy us and our land in exchange for food, and we with our land will be in bondage to Pharaoh. Give us seed so that we may live and not die, and that the land may not become desolate.” Genesis 47:18-19
It’s easy to enslave short-term thinkers because all you have to do is appeal to their lust to capture them. Short-term thinkers live by the philosophy that Paul decried in 1 Corinthians (15:32): "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!” They spend rather than save. They hand themselves over to pleasures of the body rather than think about the temporal and eternal consequences of their actions. They’re more likely to play the lottery than invest longer term. They focus more on their current careers and incomes than the legacy they’ll leave their children. They vote for politicians who promise quick, painless economic prosperity rather than suffer a short term market correction called a recession. Promise a short term thinker that you’ll provide them health care, retirement benefits, and redistribution of income from businesses and the wealthy and they’re yours. They will hand themselves over to the government just like the Egyptians – despite heavy taxation and legislation – as long as Big Brother or better the Nanny State is taking care of all their perceived present needs.
At this point in their history, the Israelites had a long-term perspective. They followed the teaching of their father Abraham, the first man in recorded history who thought in a linear fashion because God said, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you” (Genesis 12:1). God gave direction and purpose to his life and that of his descendants. The Israelites parked themselves in Goshen so as not to be assimilated into Egyptian culture. They knew that Canaan was their Promised Land, not Pharaoh’s real estate. As long term thinkers they grew rich, acquired land, and multiplied. They maintained their freedom through the crisis as well.
If you want to avoid a distorted dependency on the government, ignore their panicked short-term solutions. Be a long term thinker. Godly people tend to see this way. They realize that an eternal God is in control and He’s working things out according to His plan. This world and its pleasure are short-term in light of eternity. If you’re young enough to do it, think long term and provide for your own retirement. Even if Social Security is still around 15 years from now, it’s not going to pay your bills. You’ll have to take more government hand outs if they’re even available. Don’t count on or support government healthcare. Take a long term approach. Take care of your physical health as much as depends on you. Stop abusing your body with junk food and a lack of exercise and then enslaving yourself to medicine to make it all better. That’s short-term thinking. Buy major medical insurance and skip all the co-pay bull. Save and invest what you’re not spending on insurance premiums. Talk about the long term consequences of government spending to your friends and relatives until they’re sick to death of it. Vote those short-term thinking politicians out of office.
Another remedy for distorted dependency is:
Exchange government for God
Here we get to tackle the problem of Joseph’s involvement in the governmental scheme. Joseph was God’s man doing God’s will in this story. There’s an unspoken concept at work here. God brought the famine to test the Egyptians. He gave them an opportunity through the famine and their interaction with Israel to choose faith in the living God. Instead they choose Pharaoh. Here’s why:
“The king is not only instrumental in producing the ’fat of the land’; he must also dispense it. Only then is there evidence that he functions effectively. His bounty proves that he disposes, as a king should dispose, of the earth and its produce. . . . But the king also keeps alive the hearts of all those subjects who do not directly partake of his bounty. For he exercises a never ending mysterious activity on the strength of which daily, hourly, nature and society are integrated. [Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods. A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion as the Integration of Society & Nature (University of Chicago Press, [1948] 1962), pp. 59–60.]
“The king was understood to direct the very forces of nature. It was the king, and only the king, whose judgments concerning economic production were sovereign.
Gary North, “Taxation Under the Pharaohs and Today,” http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north620.html
Specifically, the Egyptians believed Pharaoh’s connection to the gods brought the blessing of good harvests. When the harvests failed apart from Pharaoh’s design they should have reconsidered their beliefs. When Joseph accurately predicted and planned for the famine it was an opportunity to turn to Joseph’s God, the One who would bring them prosperity and freedom. Instead, they chose an enslaving government, and they chose their slavery happily:
“You have saved our lives,” they said. “May we find favor in the eyes of our lord; we will be in bondage to Pharaoh.” Genesis 47:25
They recognized God’s favor upon Joseph which was extended to them, but they chose Pharaoh. Economist and author Gary North sums the situation up this way:
“Joseph in Egypt brought the Egyptian nation more firmly under tyranny. Why? For the same reason that the prophets of Israel and Judah said that God would judge them by captivity in foreign lands. The Egyptians had attributed to a man what God alone possesses: absolute sovereignty. They had declared their faith in the divine State. Joseph let the Egyptians get a taste of tyranny.”
Gary North, “Taxation Under the Pharaohs and Today,” http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north620.html
History is repeating itself before our eyes. God has presented us with an opportunity. An economic depression of our own making is upon us. Who will we choose: government or God? Right now our nation is crying out, “Hosanna, Obama! Come and save us Mr. President!” I mean no disrespect to Barack Obama. He seems like a decent guy with incredibly bad ideas. According to this story we could have a godly leader with divinely inspired ideas and we’d still be enslaved if we put our faith in that man and his government rather than God.
Our third point is the key:
Entrust your future to Christ
Jacob and his family chose God over government. Their future was in His hands. Jacob wasn’t even willing to entrust his bones to Egypt. He knew that the future of his family resided in another place. I’d go so far as to say that he entrusted his afterlife to another Person as well. His final request to Joseph was this:
“Do not bury me in Egypt, but when I rest with my fathers, carry me out of Egypt and bury me where they are buried.” Genesis 47:30
Jacob made his son swear an oath to take his dead body back to Canaan to the cave at Machpelah where Abraham and Isaac rested. He did this for two reasons. First, God told him that Canaan would be the future home of Israel. His hope was that returning his body there would prompt his descendants to return to that land. Egypt was not their future.
I think there’s another reason that is implied, but never stated in the text. Jacob expected Canaan to be his place of resurrection from the dead. Never in the book of Genesis is there mention of resurrection or the afterlife. In this case, actions speak louder than words. The people of Israel went to great pains to protect the bones of their ancestors. There’s really only one reason to keep the remains of dead loved ones in a special place. You expect bodily resurrection and reunion. The book of Hebrews tells us unequivocally that Jacob, like the other patriarch sought resurrection and everlasting life:
All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them. Hebrews 11:13-16
The Egyptians believed that association with Pharaoh could bring them eternal life by bringing the favor of the gods. They too preserved bodies and possessions and even brought food to the dead. But theirs was a false hope and one in which Jacob was not willing to entrust himself.
Jacob entrusted his future to Christ. I’m sure he didn’t understand the details of how God would bring about resurrection, but he most assuredly believed that it would happen.
If we entrusted our future to Jesus rather than government, we’d be spared the slavery that’s coming upon us. Think of the freedom we’d live in and the entanglements we’d avoid if we truly believed the staggering future promises of Jesus:
“So do not worry, saying, ’What shall we eat?’ or ’What shall we drink?’ or ’What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” Matthew 6:31-33
Our government promises to provide for us, but be aware there’s a price tag. It also makes you a pagan, a worshipper of a false god to trust the government for your future. Jesus said to trust Him with your future. Make your decisions based on building up His kingdom and living out His righteousness and the real king of the world will provide.
If we truly believed that Jesus died for our sins on the cross was resurrected after three days and that one day we’ll follow Him into new life through faith, it would alter our perception of this life. We’d put it in a proper perspective. We’d quit looking for the quick-fix, pain free, government entitlement solutions.
As our economy continues circling the drain don’t lose heart and don’t look to the government. Fix your eyes on Christ who is Lord of the future. He’s promised He will provide. And, unlike government, He’ll set you free. If you do suffer hardship and deprivation, it’s okay. This is only temporary. Paul put it this way:
Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. 2 Corinthians 4:16-18
