You can take the ___ out of ___, but …

You can take the ___ out of ___, but …   Let’s fill in the blanks.  Sort of.  As in – through Moses, God took the Israelites out of Egypt, but you can’t take Egypt out of the Israelites.   Or, as Philip Yancey wrote, “He dragged them out of Egypt only to find they had kept Egypt inside them”.  1Yancey, Philip. The Bible Jesus Read (p. 77). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

The original version of “You can take the ___ out of ___, but …”

You can take the ___ out of ___, but ...Remember that?  God set Moses to rescue His people, who were slaves under the Egyptian Pharaoh.  Life was so awful for them that they cried out to God to save them.

But before too long, we read this:

Ex 16:1 The whole Israelite community set out from Elim and came to the Desert of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt. 2 In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. 3 The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the LORD’S hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.”

That is so not true!  Pots of meat and eating all the food they wanted?  What happened to:

Ex 2:23 During that long period, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. 24 God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. 25 So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them.

Long forgotten.  As the title says, You can take the ___ out of ___, but …  

God used Moses to take His people from Egypt.  But He didn’t take Egypt out of the people.  Why not?  Surely, God could have taken Egypt out of the people.  He could have made them realize that even this life, wandering through the desert, preparing for life on their own with freedom from slavery – surely this was better than being slaves.

Yes – God could very well have done that.  But He didn’t.  He doesn’t.  There’s this thing called free will.  Even in the Garden of Eden, God gave Adam and Eve the free will choice – love God or eat from that tree.  They were warned.  But they did it anyway.  And God allowed it.  For more on why, please see Why were Adam and Eve kicked out of the Garden of Eden?

Footnotes

  • 1
    Yancey, Philip. The Bible Jesus Read (p. 77). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

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