Abraham and Moses

Abraham was part of God’s solution to the problems described in a previous post. God needed a land where he could work and a people to watch over it, so that he would have a safe place to send his son as a Messiah. Sending Jesus as a baby was a huge risk. If God got this wrong, the spiritual powers of evil would kill Jesus as soon as he was born, and his deliverance plan would fail.

Abraham provided the people through his growing family of descendants. The land came when Moses led the people out of Egypt into the promised land. The law allowed the people to live in peace in the land.

Israel was called to be a light to the nations by operating a different system of government: local judges applying God’s law. This dealt with one of the problems listed in the previous post, but it could not deal with the rest.

If Israel had implemented God’s way, many nations would have copied them. Instead, Israel chose not to be a light and copied the darkness of the nations by adopting a king and military power. They hid their light under a bushel of kingly power.

If Israel had fulfilled its calling to live under God’s law, they would have established a place of safety, relatively free of the spiritual powers of evil, where it would be safety for God to send the Messiah.

Israel chose to have a king, giving the spiritual powers of evil a home.

God used Rome to establish a place of relative order using military power and system of law. This was not ideal, but it provided sufficient peace for God to send the Messiah as a baby. However, he had to send Jesus to refugee to Egypt to be safe from the attacks of King Herod, and the principalities and powers that controlled him.