One Nation Under God (part one)

A couple of years ago, I had a most peculiar dream. It is the only time in my life that I woke up from a dream feeling I had learned something new.

The dream started with me teaching Confirmation Class in my church. In my dream, I was teaching the kids a lesson I had been shown, I believe by the Holy Spirit, some months before this dream. The question I had asked God was, “Why was the nation of Israel made to go to Egypt and end up in slavery?”

In reading through of Genesis, what God showed me was that each of Abraham’s eight children had become a nation or tribe unto itself. Ishmael was the oldest, then Isaac, and six more with wives after Sarah died. Isaac’s children, Jacob and Esau, also became independent nations. Each of these nations ended up becoming an enemy of the Israelites. It seems likely that Jacob’s twelve sons would have followed this same pattern. If that would have happened, who would have become the “nation of priests”?

Instead, God caused a famine to fall on the whole region, and had made it so that proud Joseph, sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, was imprisoned with disgraced advisors to the Pharaoh. God showed Pharaoh by dreams that the famine was coming, and He raised Joseph up out of prison to interpret the dreams, helping Egypt prepare and store up food to last the seven long years of famine. Jacob ended up bringing his entire family from Canaan to Egypt. There they settled and lived for some four hundred years. And there, as a tribe of foreigners, in a piece of land set aside for them, the Israelites flourished. As Joseph said to his brothers, who still suspected he would want revenge on them: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good.”

At some point, the one Pharaoh’s dynasty ended and another began, one that did not know Joseph or remember or care how he had saved Egypt. Thus, the Israelites became slaves to the Egyptians. Often, peoples coming to a new land form enclaves where they can speak their own native language, keep their own culture and practice their own religion. Think of Chinatown or Little Italy in the major cities that sprang up in the US. Those were areas where the settlers were not of the same family. How much more, then, did the Israelites bond together as foreigners in a foreign land?

It was in Egypt, then, that Israel’s twelve sons become “One Nation Under God.”