The Bible contains the experiences of people when God intervened in their lives at crucial moments. When they could not, for instance, make sense of some natural calamity, they immediately attributed that to God. Though the Bible is divinely inspired by God’s word, the events described therein took place in concrete geographical settings.
In Egypt, the daughter of the Pharaoh found Moses, one of the greatest prophets, as a baby floating in a Papyrus basket. When the Pharaoh’s daughter found baby Moses, she said, “This is the child of a Hebrew woman”. The Hebrews or the Israelites were then the slaves of the Pharaoh dynasty, dating back a few thousand years even before Christ. The Bible tells us that God heard their cry in Egypt and made Moses their leader-liberator. Ironically, even though the Pharaoh’s daughter raised Moses, following God’s command, he stood up against the Pharaoh, to lead the Hebrews — the “chosen people of God” to freedom from the clutches of Pharaoh’s slavery.
For Christians that marks the starting of their history of salvation, culminating in the death of Jesus on the Cross, this time to free human beings from the slavery of sin. Though there is a time gap of nearly 1,400 years between Moses and Jesus, Biblical scholars find many parallels between Moses and Jesus.
The Bible tells us that before reaching Israel, “the promised-land”, the Israelites were helped by God to cross over the Red Sea. When Moses lifted his rod, the water got divided and stood like mounds for the Israelites to walk through. However, when the Pha-raoh’s army chased the slaves to prevent them from going away, they were all drowned in the middle of the sea, as Moses struck the water with his rod.
But despite the many blessings from God, the Israelites began grumbling against God, Moses and his brother Aaron. Like us in modern times, they too sought immediate solutions to problems during their journey through the Egyptian desert. They sometimes cursed God during their 40 years of treacherous sojourn. It was at this time that Moses was given the famous Ten Commandments from God for the people to observe, illustrated in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy in the Bible. While the Pyramids and the Sphinxes are certainly marvels of architecture and science, the Bible is the record of ordinary peoples’ simple faith through their life journey.
Father Dominic Emmanuel, a founder-member of Parliament of Religion, can be contacted at frdominic@gmail.com
