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The Reason for the Promised Land—Exodus 6:8

Without the promised land, deliverance from slavery would have been incomplete. Former slaves could not maintain their freedom in Egypt, and apart from direct divine sustenance could not survive in the wilderness. They needed a land of their own.

Thus, after announcing his people’s deliverance from slavery in Exodus 6:6-7, God announces a way for them to live independently, promising their own land (6:8). In contrast to their seminomadic, patriarchal ancestors, the Israelites were now too many to subsist on their own only as pastoralists grazing their flocks on the countryside. But whether pastoralists or farmers, they needed land; and for their agrarian society, land would be capital.

In my country, we saw the limitations of officially ending slavery without providing former slaves a means to work. Originally they were promised “forty acres and a mule,” but that promise was not kept. After the official end of U.S. slavery, many former slaves were kept in perpetual bondage as sharecroppers because ultimately they did not own their own land. In an agrarian economy, one must own land or depend on others for work. God was not just ending the Israelites’ official enslavement and then leaving them impoverished and subject to oppression, what many former slaves “freed” in the United States initially experienced.

From the start, then, God’s promise had envisioned the completion of their deliverance. What he began in their deliverance, he would complete. Today there is much debate about the Israelite conquest (more about Israel’s period of conquest than about conquests by ancient empires, because Israel’s is better known to us). (See limiting factors; switching sides; God’s ideal.) But the exodus without the conquest would have been what the Israelites themselves feared after the exodus: “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” (Exod 17:3). God planned a full deliverance for his people, although in the ways used among nations in that day, not in the ways to be used by Jesus’s followers today.

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Not just what God saved us from—Exodus 6:6-7

What usually gets our attention is that God delivers us out of trouble. But God has a bigger destiny for his people than just getting us out of trouble. He brings us into relationship with himself. As part of his covenant with Israel, God said, “I will take you for myself for a people, and you will know that I am YHWH your God” (6:7). The covenant relationship meant that YHWH was their exclusive God and they were YHWH’s exclusive people.

The Hebrew expression translated “take for oneself” was often (though not exclusively) used in relation to taking for oneself or for one’s son a wife (e.g., Exod 6:20, 23, 25, in this context; Gen 11:29; 12:19; 21:21; 24:3-4; 38:6), with whom the husband would become one flesh, a new family unit (Gen 2:24). The term for “knowing” here was used for many things, but among them was marital intimacy, something later prophets deemed a fitting image of the covenant relationship with his people that God desired (Hos 2:20). Israel’s greatest privilege would be a special relationship with the living God.

They would know God specifically as the God who delivered them from their hardship in Egypt (Exod 6:7). We don’t know God just in an abstract way, but as the God we have met in our experience with him, especially in foundational acts he has performed. When the now-famous mathematician Blaise Pascal had a dramatic encounter with God, he described it this way: “FIRE! God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, and not of the philosophers and savants!”

Nothing against philosophers and savants, but if I had to choose between studying about God and meeting him in person like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, I would definitely go for the latter. They were most likely illiterate in terms of the writing of the time, which was mostly confined to scribes. If you’re reading this, you’re not illiterate, and since I typed this myself (I didn’t use voice recognition software), neither am I. We can study and have a personal experience with God. But again, if I had to choose, I would choose with Blaise Pascal. Nothing matches the experience of God.

The Israelites experienced God’s dramatic deliverance in the exodus. God’s self-revealing acts in history didn’t stop there. God has now revealed himself climactically in the cross and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, a specific, concrete act in redemptive history. We who entrust ourselves to Christ have his Spirit working in our hearts, enabling us to call God, “Father!”