“Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?”
This is the question Morpheus puts to Neo early in The Matrix (1999). But Neo has sensed that something is wrong long before anyone asks him. A respectable software engineer by day and a hacker by night, he carries a persistent, nameless unease: a sense that the world around him is hollow and performative. Morpheus later calls it a splinter in his mind.
The first sign that he is right comes from outside. One night he falls asleep at his computer and wakes to find words typing themselves across the screen: “Wake up, Neo.” Then: “Follow the white rabbit.” A moment later there is a knock at the door. A customer has come for his illegal software and invites him out to a club. Neo begins to refuse, then notices a white rabbit tattooed on the shoulder of the customer’s girlfriend.
At the club he stands alone at the edge of the crowd until a stranger greets him by his hacker name. Her name is Trinity, and she knows what he has told no one: why he hardly sleeps, why he lives alone, and why he sits at his computer night after night. “It’s the question that drives us, Neo,” she says. She does not need to say what it is. Neo says it himself: “What is the Matrix?” His private inner world is not private at all.
Later, Morpheus offers him a choice: the blue pill and a return to comfortable ignorance, or the red pill and the truth. Take the red pill, Morpheus tells him, “and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” Neo takes it. He does not just wake up in a new world; he wakes up in his real body and assumes his real name. Until now “Neo” was only an alias, used in secret while he lived as Thomas Anderson. Over the course of the film, he grows into his new identity.
The Christian life is also a passage between worlds and identities. Christian theology calls it ‘awakening’ or being ‘born again’: the crossing from being outside Christ to being in Christ. But in being awakened we do not just become Christian drones. Our new identity cannot simply be built out of Bible verses and wise sayings. It is given by God, and then it has to be assumed and nurtured, forged through a God-guided process of change.
Yet, from my experience within the Protestant Church over the past thirty years, it has often seemed that I was being encouraged to become a Christian automaton, at the expense of freedom and growth. Nobody laid this out for me. There was no contract to sign, no checklist to manage. But, nonetheless, there was an underlying assumption that I needed to fit within a version of Christianity that values appearance over substance, one that would rather take a shortcut to redemption than trust God’s plan for each individual believer. Whether you have followed Christ for three months or thirty years, you may have felt this too: the tension between the life you were supposed to be living and the one that you were actually experiencing.
One example is the purity ring movement, which began among Southern Baptists in Nashville in 1993. Within a decade an estimated 2.5 million American teenagers had taken the pledge. The premise was simple: wear a ring as a visible pledge of sexual purity until marriage, a physical reminder of an internal commitment. It was well intentioned, but an outward sign cannot change the heart, and plenty of those who wore one broke the very promise it represented. It also reduced a whole vision of holiness and identity in Christ to a single, narrow and highly visible marker, one that made an entire moral life legible from across a room. For many, the ring became less a source of freedom and confidence and more a source of private shame, when the reality of their lives did not match the public symbol on their finger.
The same thinking reaches well beyond a ring, however. It can grow into a vision of the Christian life, stretching from the age you marry and the work you do down to the kind of personality you are supposed to have. It is a familiar one: a good Christian marries young, raises children who believe and never misses a Sunday. The Bible is read before breakfast, prayers come fluently and the answer to “How are you?” is always a cheerful one. None of these things is wrong in itself, and many of them are good. The trouble comes when this one vision becomes the measure of every life. The woman still single at forty, the parents whose son has walked away from the faith, and the man in the pew with questions he dare not ask, all learn the same thing: anyone whose life does not match the standard is assumed to have wandered off course.
The prosperity gospel applies the same thinking to faith itself. Where the ring made purity visible, health and wealth become the proof of real belief. The promise is simple: believe firmly enough, speak with enough confidence and give generously enough, and God will reward you with a healthy body and a full bank account. But consider what happens when the promise fails. When the cancer returns or the business collapses, the sick and the struggling are not only left to carry their loss. They are told that their suffering shows how weak their faith is. Joni Eareckson Tada is the answer to that charge. Paralysed in a diving accident in 1967, she prayed for a healing that did not come, and has spent the decades since as one of the most trusted voices in American evangelicalism. No one who has heard her could call her faith weak.
Most of us would reject the prosperity gospel when it is stated this plainly. But it has subtler versions, and they are harder to detect. Christians living with a difficult childhood, an old trauma or a long struggle with addiction may never be told outright that their faith is weak. They are told, often kindly, to shelve it: to put it behind them and move on, as though faith meant never looking back or falling again. The result is the same. What cannot be healed on schedule has to be hidden. What the ring, the vision and the promise all share is this urge to cover over the messiness and uniqueness of each person’s path of redemption.
Many people, especially new believers, expect the Christian life to follow a clean upward trajectory: accept Christ, grow in faith, become a better person, repeat. But that is rarely how it works. The Christian life is not a linear path to awesomeness. Real spiritual growth looks more like a winding trail than a straight highway. When we absorb the cultural obsession with progress, optimisation and ‘life hacking,’ we map those expectations onto our spiritual lives. The result is a crushing theology of performance, in which the burden of keeping up the climb rests entirely on our own shoulders. So when we hit a dry season, a time of doubt or a moral failure, we assume that God has abandoned us or that our faith is a sham.
But we are not meant to live like this. The Christian life is not about our upward climb; it is about God’s constant presence through every twist and turn of the journey. It is on the winding parts of the trail that grace becomes most visible. In those very failures and dry seasons, in the backsliding and the honest prayers of desperation, God’s faithfulness shines brightest. God intends us to live in freedom and confidence: the freedom to be who he has made us to be, and the confidence to live without inner anxiety, spending less time worrying about the opinions of others and more time enjoying the presence of God.
The good news for us is that the Bible contains just such a vision of this life of freedom: the Exodus. It is the story of a people who had known nothing but slavery being transformed into a free nation who could at last hope to live in the land long promised to them. For hundreds of years, generation after generation, the Hebrews had been born into slavery and died in it, their lives made bitter with hard labour under Egyptian taskmasters. When they grew too numerous for Pharaoh’s comfort, he ordered their newborn sons thrown into the Nile. All they had was a promise made to their forefather Abraham centuries before, and no conceivable way out. Then God acted. He sent Moses, broke Pharaoh’s hold plague by plague, and brought his people out of Egypt, free to dream of that promise again.
Yet God did not take them from Egypt to Canaan by the shortest route (Ex. 13:17). He led them through the wilderness, and there he reshaped their identity, their trust and their worship. He gave them the Sabbath: a people who had worked every day without rest were now commanded to stop. Under Pharaoh their worth had been counted in bricks; under God, one day in seven, they were to produce nothing at all. He gave them manna: each morning it lay on the ground, food they had not grown or earned, enough for the day. Those who tried to stockpile it found it rotten by morning (Ex. 16:20). Meal by meal, they were learning what it meant to belong to God rather than to Pharaoh: not self-sufficiency, not self-management, but daily dependence on God’s provision.
But this new freedom was not a licence to become whoever they wanted. Our own age understands freedom in just that way, as the right to invent ourselves. For Israel it was the freedom to become who God had made them to be: a holy nation through whom all other nations would be blessed (Gen. 12:3, Ex. 19:6). The old Egyptian ways had to give way to God’s ways. The old generation faded away, as a new generation emerged. But their new identity, as God’s chosen people, was never self-authored. God had named them as his own while they were still slaves. “Israel is my firstborn son” was his message to Pharaoh (Ex. 4:22), and the wilderness was where they grew into that name. It was God who did the work of transformation. That is the pattern this book will trace in the Christian life: an identity given by God, which we grow into through the work of the Holy Spirit, on the path of redemption he has laid out for each of us.
For many of us, though, being born again was presented as little more than a ticket: say the prayer, receive forgiveness, and your place in heaven is secured. Sometimes it is presented as a pass code: know the right verse, quote it when asked, and the door opens. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor hanged by the Nazis in 1945, had a name for this: cheap grace. “Cheap grace,” he wrote in The Cost of Discipleship (1937), “is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.” Salvation is not a ticket we hold or a code we enter. It is a person we are joined to. As Rankin Wilbourne reminded the church in Union with Christ (2016), to be saved is to be united with Christ himself, and in him to be given a new identity.
Inheriting a new identity has its cost, but it is the only way to true freedom, because Christ himself is the way (John 14:6), and “if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36). The cost is the old life, and the Hebrews felt it keenly. Barely a month out of Egypt they were longing for the pots of meat they had left behind (Ex. 16:3), and at the very edge of the Promised Land they talked of choosing a new leader to take them back (Num. 14:4). Slavery was at least familiar. But God never asked them to remake themselves, and he does not ask it of us. If you remember nothing else from this Introduction, remember this: your new identity is not your building project. It is God’s. He founded it in Christ, he knows who he created you to become, and he will finish what he has begun (Phil. 1:6).
In being awakened, an irreversible change happens within us. We enter a strange new world, not a mystery to be solved but a reality to be lived. We have left Egypt and we can never go back. In this new world, we are who we are not: no longer our old selves, but who we are in Christ. We keep the same body, the same memories, the same gifts, yet we are no longer animated by our false gods. It is Christ who animates us now, living in us by the Holy Spirit, and it is his Kingdom we live for. Our old self still feels familiar, but it is no longer who we are. We have been set free, and we are still learning to live as people who are free.
The Exodus is not simply a useful picture of the Christian life, the way a film like The Matrix might be. It is our own story. We were once in slavery too, a slavery that only Jesus could lead us out of. For the Hebrews, slavery under Pharaoh kept them from becoming the nation God had called them to be. For us, slavery to sin and to our false gods, whether success, approval or control, kept us from becoming the people God created us to be. The God who broke Pharaoh’s hold and went ahead of his people in cloud and fire is the same God who has freed us.
To call Jesus the new Moses is not my invention. It begins with Moses himself. Near the end of his life he told Israel, “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your fellow Israelites. You must listen to him” (Deut. 18:15). The books of Moses close with that promise still unmet (Deut. 34:10), and Israel waited. Jesus claimed to be the one they were waiting for: “If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me” (John 5:46). The Gospels show it as well as say it. He teaches from a mountain, as Moses did (Matt. 5:1). He feeds a crowd in the wilderness, and they draw the conclusion themselves: “Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world” (John 6:14).
When Jesus is transfigured before his chosen disciples, it is this same Moses who appears along with Elijah. Most English Bibles say they spoke of his “departure”. What Luke recorded was ἔλεγον τὴν ἔξοδον αὐτοῦ: “they spoke of his Exodus” (Luke 9:31). It is a remarkable choice of words. They are not speaking of the Exodus that Moses led centuries before, but of his new one. The man who led Israel out of Egypt stands beside Jesus and speaks of a New Exodus: one that Jesus himself will fulfil, not in Egypt but in Jerusalem, and not through the sea but through his death and resurrection. Then a voice from the cloud says, “This is my Son, whom I have chosen; listen to him” (Luke 9:35), the very command Moses had given about the prophet to come. The first Exodus was always pointing to this one.
Jesus is not only a new Moses but a greater one. The writer of Hebrews says that he “has been found worthy of greater honour than Moses” (Heb. 3:3), and the New York pastor Tim Keller called him “the true and better Moses who stands in the gap between the people and the Lord and who mediates a new covenant.” The freedom he brings is greater too: freedom from sin itself. It is through him that the Passover and the crossing of the Red Sea are finally understood. Paul calls Christ “our Passover lamb” (1 Cor. 5:7) and writes that Israel was “baptised into Moses in the cloud and in the sea” (1 Cor. 10:2).
Reading the Exodus in this way has a name: theological analogy. It is not the same as typology. Typology shows how a figure like Moses points forward to Christ; it is about him, and we cannot read ourselves into it. Theological analogy lets us enter the story: what God did for Israel becomes a way of understanding what he is doing in us. Paul teaches the Corinthians to read like this. In the same passage where he speaks of the cloud and the sea, he tells them that “these things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us” (1 Cor. 10:11). The Greek behind “as examples” is τυπικῶς, from τύπος, a pattern. Theologians later took the word “typology” from it, but Paul’s point here is about us: Israel’s story is a pattern for our own. Jesus did the same. At his last Passover he took the bread and the cup of Israel’s rescue and gave them to his followers with the words, “do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19–20). Not every event in the Bible’s history is meant to be applied to our own lives in this way. But with the event of the Exodus we are directed to do so, by Jesus himself and throughout the New Testament.
In baptism we have crossed the Red Sea. Just as the Hebrews walked into the sea as slaves and came out the other side free, so in Christ we have died and been resurrected to new life, raised up out of the wreckage of our old lives (Rom. 6:4). In the same way that the Hebrews entered the depths of the Red Sea with Moses and survived it, we die with Christ and are preserved through him, emerging out of the water as our new resurrected selves. We are what Paul calls a “new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17). To be in Christ is to share in the life of the triune God, here and now. We are not waiting for it; we live in it every day. Peter writes that God’s divine power “has given us everything we need for a godly life,” so that we may “participate in the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:3–4). We have all we need to walk in freedom, and to become everything God intends us to be. No amount of effort can add to what we have already been given. Teaching, preaching and books, this one included, can only point us back to Christ and what he has achieved for us.
The crossing of the sea can be read in this way, but not every detail of the Exodus can. It gives us the shape of our redemption: a map of the country, not an itinerary for each traveller. To treat it as an itinerary was the error of Origen (c. AD 185–253), one of the first Christian theologians, who read each of Israel’s forty-two camps in the wilderness (Num. 33) as a fixed stage in the soul’s progress towards God. He matched the forty-two camps to the forty-two generations in Matthew’s genealogy, so that the soul climbs to God by exactly as many steps as Christ came down. In the twelve springs and seventy palm trees of Elim (Ex. 15:27) he found the twelve apostles and the seventy disciples. Every number, every place and every name was made to stand for something else. The story had become a code to be deciphered. We make the same mistake, less elegantly, whenever we turn the Christian life into a set of stages that everyone must pass through in order.
Yet Origen saw something true: that we can understand ourselves through the story of the Exodus. Protestants have been wary of readings like his ever since the Reformation, and with good reason, since a code can be made to say anything. But that wariness has come at a cost. We have learnt to study the Bible verse by verse and word by word, but in doing so we can miss how all the verses fit together and how we fit into the grand narrative of the Bible.
The answer to Origen’s error is not to abandon the story, for it is essential to how God has revealed himself. God has not presented himself as an ethereal figure floating above our reality. He has made himself known within it, through the story of Israel and finally in Jesus Christ. We cannot understand Jesus apart from that story, and we cannot understand ourselves apart from that story. The redemption God worked in Israel through the wilderness is the shape of the redemption he is working in us today, more than three thousand years later. Our camps will not be Israel’s camps, and each of us walks the particular journey he has laid out for us. But it is the very same God who is leading us in our journey of freedom.
Each of us has a life narrative: the overall direction of our life when we look back over it as a whole, the kind of thing a eulogy tries to put into words. But that narrative is not defined by the moments we post online or by how we appear to other people. Nor is it defined by our greatest success or our worst failure. It is defined by our own path of redemption, from slavery to freedom, on which Christ is leading us. We may not cast as long a shadow in history as the Hebrews, the twelve disciples or the apostle Paul, but we are not lesser disciples for being born later.
I believe that an accurate, vibrant and compelling vision of this path of redemption is vital to living the Christian life. Too many of us have only a surface-level grasp of what life in Christ really is, and where the true vision is thin, a false one can move in, to the point that we end up with what Paul called “a different gospel” (Gal. 1:6). One mark of a false vision is that it sorts Christians into ranks, as the ring and the prosperity promise both did. But as Francis Schaeffer, the founder of the L’Abri community, put it in the title of his 1974 book, there are No Little People in the Kingdom of God: no extras whose job is to make the important people look important. All of us are children of God in the same family, with real roles in his Kingdom, in this age and the next.
All of us are also on a journey of redemption. Redemption begins with a rescue, but it does not end there. Nor does it shelve the past. It is the whole process by which God puts our past right, makes sense of all that has happened to us, and makes us into who he created us to be. He works it out through the ordinary material of our lives: the people he gives us, the things that happen to us and the lessons that take years to learn. The more accurately we understand that journey, the more clearly we can see what God is doing in us and the better able we are to walk in freedom and confidence. Revelation, redemption and reconciliation are not just doctrines confined to textbooks and lecture halls. They are what God has done in Christ, and what he is working out in us for the whole of our lives.
You do not have to enrol in a seminary to begin to understand these doctrines. That is the genius of the way God has revealed himself, in the Exodus and in the Bible as a whole. A new believer can easily follow his or her journey from slavery to freedom. Someone who has walked with God for decades can still plumb its depths for new insight. A systematic theology has to take the great doctrines one at a time; a story shows them at work together. In the Exodus we can see them side by side: revelation at the burning bush, election in the confrontation between Moses and Pharaoh, judgement in the plagues, atonement and reconciliation at the Passover, and redemption begun at the Red Sea and worked out in the wilderness. Running through all of it is the person of Christ and even, in outline, the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrines are not added to the story; they are already in it.
But there is another dimension in which the Exodus can be read: these were real people, people like us, who took this journey with God. It is not a parable. Exodus does not dress them up: their flaws are on full display, Moses’ included. Through archaeology, we can see traces of their world. At Tell el-Dab’a in the eastern Nile Delta, the site of ancient Avaris, excavators have uncovered a large settlement of Semitic people. A painting in the tomb of the Egyptian vizier Rekhmire, from around 1450 BC, shows foreign slaves making mud bricks under overseers. By about 1208 BC, the pharaoh Merneptah could boast on a stone monument that he had defeated a people called Israel in Canaan. It is the earliest mention of Israel outside the Bible. None of this proves the Exodus, and I do not offer it as proof. But these are hints, in history, that the world the Bible describes was real. In that world, Scripture tells us, these people really did face Pharaoh, leave Egypt and dream of the Promised Land. Neo is ultimately a fictional character in a film, but Moses was a real man on a journey with God.
Like Moses and the Hebrews, each of us has a vision of what life with God is, and we need to ask ourselves: does it line up with the truth? This book begins from a problem: the thin and often false vision of the Christian life that many of us were handed. It offers the Exodus as the true one: a real God leading real, flawed people into a freedom they did not earn. It does not set out to retell the Exodus, but to read it as the story of our own journey with God, with Christ at the centre. It has three aims. The first is to give you a clear and accurate understanding of your new identity in Christ, and of the journey by which you grow into it, so that you can see what God is doing in you. The second is to show how the great doctrines of the faith work together, in a story anyone can follow. The third is to point you back to Christ, in whom you already have everything you need. All three serve one hope: that you will live your new life in freedom and confidence, as God intends. Chapter by chapter, we will follow the story from the burning bush, through the Red Sea and into the wilderness, and at each stage understand more about the life we have inherited through Christ and what he has accomplished in us.
You now have the heart of what this book has to say, and if you are ready to begin, you can turn to Chapter 1. Nothing in the next section is essential to understanding this book. But there are many books on the Exodus, and you are entitled to ask why another one is needed. The next section, “Why Another Exodus?”, is my answer to that question. It looks at how some of the best-loved accounts of the Christian journey have told the story, where I think they fall short, and who taught me to read it differently. If those questions are important to you, read on. If not, turn to Chapter 1, where the journey begins.