I want you to picture living as a slave in Egypt around the 1400’s B.C. Life is cruel, you are beaten and forced to work in the hot sun day in, and day out. You’re also in fear for your family, because Pharaoh has put out an edict that says all male children are to be killed to keep your people from growing any bigger than they are now. There is no hope for you to rise to a higher social class, no hope of living a life you want, no hope of ever amounting to anything more than working to please your captors until you die (and watching your children and their children go through the same thing).

You certainly would have been taught, growing up, about the land that your forefathers left. The land “flowing with milk and honey” a promised land that God had set aside for your people. A land where your people would be free to live as a nation that was not subservient to a stronger power. Where perhaps you would even be able to rise to be a great nation on par with the one that was currently oppressing you. I imagine you would have spent many nights dreaming about a better life for you, a better life for your family, a better life for your people. And who wouldn’t have? So what do you do?

The book of Exodus informs us that the people of Israel cried out to God for help (Exodus 2:23). They have hopes for a better life, so they request that God sends them deliverance. For any Christian, this shouldn’t be a surprising course of action. In fact, for any person who has grown up in the west, whether they are Christian or not, it is not uncommon in times of great anguish to call out to God for help. In this case, God promptly hears their pleas for help and sends them Moses and Aaron to demand that Pharaoh release the people. They arrive in Egypt, convince the people they are sent by God, and the people believe and wait for their better tomorrow (Exodus 4:28-31). Here’s the thing about this narrative though: the people don’t want God’s better.

Granted, God’s better was pretty confusing. It started with their work becoming substantially harder as they now had to make bricks without straw (Exodus 5). It continued with more harsh treatment, some terrible plagues (although the Israelites were protected from many of them), and eventually being pursued by the most powerful army of the known world. Ultimately, it lands them wandering through the desert and looking to God to provide for their every need, daily. They had no way of producing their own food, no way of procuring enough water, no way of knowing where to go or when to leave. They were completely dependent upon God. And how did they feel about it? They grumbled, they complained, they wished for their old lives, they argued, they plotted rebellions, they even built their own idol out of the gold God had secured for them from the Egyptians as they fled from Egypt. They didn’t want God’s better, they wanted their own better.

Now, you may be thinking “that’s great, good for them, what does this have to do with me?” Well, when we turn to the discipline of psychology, we find that the people of Israel were not unique or particularly ungrateful people, in fact, they’re no different from us. Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson in his book Maps of Meaning explains the struggle between Order and Chaos. Order being defined as the things in our life that are predictable and therefore “safe” and chaos being the unknown, things we cannot predict. He goes on to explain that our natural response to chaos is to form an imaginary future based on our understanding of the ordered world.[1]

In essence, you take what you know and lay it on the future, to make the future feel more ordered and less chaotic. Then, as life progresses, if things that occur confirm your imaginary future, they build your confidence that this imaginary future is attainable. If, however, things work against what your imaginary future, your false order begins to become chaos, causing you to reassess the future and search for a new (and more likely) imaginary future based on your new understanding of things. To make sense of this, it is easier see how this played out for the people of Israel.

Their world was extremely ordered. They knew that, from the time they were born to the time they died, they would be serving Egypt. Prior to God’s intervention through Moses and Aaron, their imaginary ordering of the future looked pretty bleak: their children dying at the hands of Pharaoh, forced labor all their lives, serving the Egyptians… etc. So they call out to God and in walk Moses and Aaron saying that God was going to deliver them. Now they begin to create a new picture of what the future may look like. A promised land, the crushing of the Egyptians, milk and honey, and so on. The future suddenly looks pretty fantastic, the possibilities are endless. And we begin to see an idol forming. This is shown by their reaction to God’s deliverance which doesn’t look like the imaginary future they had created for themselves. They were worshiping the “better tomorrow” that they had created in their mind and they weren’t happy that God’s deliverance was getting in the way of that.

So here’s the lie the world tells you: “things are going to get better.” And this creates the question: “what is better”. If we allow the world to define this for us, it will make better mean the positive version of the future we have imagined for ourselves. That is, the promotion at work, the full bank account, the new car, a life free of health problems, a European vacation… etc. We then put the onus on God to give us this future. We, like Israel, look to God to produce for us the “better tomorrow” that we would like to see, and get frustrated, angry, grumble and so on, when His deliverance looks different from what we want to see. But here’s the thing: when we are too focused on our imaginary future, we lose sight on all the ways God is working in our day-to-day lives.

Take Israel for example. God broke down Egypt’s resolve through His might, He parted the red sea, He led them by day in a cloud and a pillar of fire by night, He provided for them miracle food in the desert and brought water from the rocks, but it was never enough. The people were so focused on getting what they wanted, they could care less about God’s daily providence for them. We are no different. We get fixated on one thing, turning our “better tomorrow” into our idol. We hope for it to resolve, and we blind ourselves to all the other ways God is working for us. We look for Him to bring us our desired future and we downplay things He is actively working in our lives. So how do we combat this?

Well, first we have to hold our nose and bite down on the bitter truth. Here’s the down-and-dirty of the matter: you don’t know the future. You can make an educated guess of how things are going to work out and many times you may be right, but man if your treasure lies in your “better tomorrow”, you’re setting yourself up for a massive disappointment. But what if there was another way to live? A better way to live?

Jesus says in His sermon on the mount that, rather than always looking for things to get better, we should instead look to God’s work in our lives in the here-and-now. He puts it in this way:

“But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” – Matthew 6:33-34

Notice He doesn’t say “do not be anxious about tomorrow because I promise tomorrow will be better.” He isn’t hiding the truth, He acknowledges that tomorrow is going to have troubles. As long as we are under the curse of sin, we will experience troubles in our lives. Instead, He tells His hearers to fix their eyes on the kingdom of God. Why? Because that is where our deliverance comes from.

To us, our immediate future is unpredictable, but the ultimate future has already been secured for us in Christ Jesus, our Lord. In Him lies our victory and our deliverance from ourselves, this world, and the power of the devil. Your true enemy has been defeated and disarmed by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Yes, you will still experience loss. Yes, you will still have bad days. Yes, you will still face a myriad of uncertainty and be left to wonder “how could this possibly be God’s plan?” But anytime you feel like you are sitting on the banks of the Red Sea, cornered by the armies around you that seem like an overwhelming force, resist the urge to dig your feet in and hope for better days.

Instead, look to Christ. Realize that you are already through the sea. Your enemy has been crushed under the waves of your baptism, which have brought you from slavery to freedom… from death to life. You are clothed in the righteousness of Christ and there is no power on this earth that can take God’s promise away from you. And this, my friends, is what makes every day a day in which we can rejoice, sometimes with tears and other times with laughter, but either way: today is the day that the Lord has made, rejoice and be glad in it!

“… I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”

– Philippians 4:11-13

[1] Jordan Peterson, 1999, Maps of Meaning, Penguin Random House, pg. 57

Coming up next week: Lie # 2 “You deserve it…”

Lie #1 Things Will Get Better…

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