Today’s social media feed featured a picture of one of my Pastor friends. Actually, it was a before-and-after picture. They look very different, and not because of age. He wrote alongside the picture, “I am 20 years free from heroin addiction today.” It is a lovely post. It ends with, “If He can do this for me, He can do it for anybody. Roll on the next 20 years. God gets all the glory.”
Very timely as I turn to verse 9.
“Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt.” (Exodus 23 v 9)
You know this, for you were foreigners. You’ve been there, and you know how it feels.
That’s what God was saying to them about foreigners.
God was causing them to remember the difficult days, not so they would look and become hardened, but so they would remember how it felt and become compassionate toward those in the same position.
Painful times can sometimes make us even harder. But God insisted that they must never do to others what had been done to them.
God doesn’t erase our history; instead, He redeems it and puts it to work.
Paul reminds Gentile believers that they were once “foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12). Every Christian was once an outsider; we had a past. We were brought near, not because we belonged but because Christ made room for us at great cost.
Have we forgotten where we came from? A church that remembers its own Egypt will never be a hostile place for the outsider. It will be the place where strangers discover they’ve come home.
We know how it feels. Let’s make sure no one else has to feel it among us.
