The New Exodus Perspective

From the Mars Hill website:

Today, Egypt can be seen as a picture of what we’re all born into. We’re all born into oppression by sin. We’re born with a sinful nature that pulls us, distorts things and takes us in directions that are destructive to us. Every single human being is born into bondage to sin. God wants to liberate us from sin, and he has a plan to do this. In the same way that the Jewish people were called by God to use their wealth and influence to bless those who need it most, so God has called the Church to do the same, to be his flesh and blood - his body - in the world, so the Church is called the Body of Christ. When we begin to use our resources, energy and power to preserve our own comfort and empire, we are sinning. Eventually, our sin will cause us to lose our power, wealth and influence. And God’s plan for blessing the world will be lost for a time.

The reason we study the Exodus is because we want to understand who Jesus is and what he’s doing. He wants to liberate the world from physical, spiritual and cultural bondage. Most of us have been given great wealth, talent and energy. And God wants us to share it with others who don’t have enough. What if the Church began to understand that God wants to fix this entire planet?

Let's move through this...

1. "We're all born into oppression by sin." This is certainly true, and the slavery under which the Israelites suffered is a parallel for the spiritual slavery humans have to sin. Now if we are slaves to sin, then it is our master, and we are under its control.

2. "God wants to liberate us from sin, and he has a plan to do this." This is also true, and the plan is laid out in plain text after plain text in the New Testament (and in prophecy and promise in the Old). We are joined by the Spirit to Jesus Christ, so that we die to the power of sin and are raised up with Christ into a newness of life.

3. Here is where we begin to understand the profound failings of the theology laid out here, how it attacks the center of the gospel. For this substitutiary death and resurrection, the gospel of Jesus (I Cor. xv: Christ died for sins according to the Scripture...) is replaced. What takes its place? The idea that our sin, to which we are supposedly in bondage (though it appears that what is meant by bondage here is not in fact slavery but closer to ignorant influence), is the keeping of our resources, wealth, influence, etc for ourselves, and that freedom from this bondage comes in using it instead to help those less fortunate and thereby "heal the world."

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Let me be perfectly clear. The squandering of the resources given to the American church is a sin, a waste, and a tragedy. We are certainly called in plain text after plain text to share with those less fortunate, and more profoundly, to care for the members of the body of Christ as though we ourselves were the one suffering. If we wanted to exhort people to action, we need only quote one verse, from Hebrews 13...

Remember those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoner, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.

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But this is contained within the gospel. "God's plan for blessing the world" will never "be lost for a time," because behind it is not the impotent power of man, but the sovereign power of God. Read Psalm ii; The One enthroned in heaven laughs.

Keep the gospel as it is in the Word. Understand the perspective on the end of time as it is in the Word. This world is dying, and no humanitarian effort, no plan of God is intended to stop that. In fact, this world, this sin-stained world is to be remade, not by the church, but by God himself. This is what the church waits for. And while we wait, we are to preach the gospel "until the full number of gentiles has come in." We are to care for the weak and poor and hungry with every resource we have, but not from a vain and human-centered effort to create a new society, a new utopia here on earth.

We are citizens of heaven, who wait for the day when our flesh will be made new. The body of Christ is not visible, but invisible. This world will be destroyed by fire, but around the throne will be men from every tribe, tongue and nation.