Do you remember starting work on your first day or week? Do you remember the many times in your working life when you helped a newbie because you never forgot what it felt like?
What about supporting a new parent? You will never forget the exhaustion of a crying baby and having no sleep, so you cook a meal; you offer support.
The examples could go on. Here is another.
“Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” (Exodus 22 v 21)
After three severe verses about sorcery, bestiality, and idolatry, the tone shifts. But the subject has not changed. The God who demands exclusive worship is the same God who cares about outsiders, and how his people treat the vulnerable is part of what it means to be loyal to him.
The word for “foreigner” is someone living among Israel without family, land, or legal protection. These people had no one to speak for them, and people easily exploited and ignored them. God names two sins: mistreating them (by what you do) and oppressing them (by what you take). He sees both.
The reason: “for you were foreigners in Egypt.” Israel was not being asked to imagine what it felt like. They already knew. They had no rights or voice, worked under a hard master, and God had heard their cry. Now that they had power, they were to remember their weakness and act like the God who had rescued them.
That pattern applies to the whole Christian life. We are meant to show others the mercy that we have been shown.
Paul reminds the Ephesians that they were once “foreigners and strangers” to the covenants of promise, without hope and without God. Now, through Christ, they are “fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household” (Ephesians 2:19). The Saviour who brought us in knew what it was to be an outsider himself. As a child, he was carried into Egypt as a foreigner (Matthew 2:13-15).
So we dare not close the door behind us. We were the ones standing outside, and someone opened it.
