Two of the Seven "I Wills'

 

I am preparing next week’s Bible study in Exodus 6. Here is the specific passage:

"Say, therefore, to the sons of Israel, ‘I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from their bondage. I will also redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments. Then I will take you for My people, and I will be your God; and you shall know that I am the LORD your God, who brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. 8 I will bring you to the land which I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I will give it to you for a possession; I am the LORD.” (Exodus 6:6-8)

These so-called seven “I Wills” are often compared with what the New Testament tells us about our redemption, deliverance, salvation, and being made a people of God.

Let’s look a moment at the first two ‘I Will’ statements:

I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians

I will deliver you from their bondage.

Every Christian has learned the hard way this simple lesson: Sin will ALWAYS take us where we do not want to go, ALWAYS keep us longer than we want to stay, and ALWAYS cost us more than we want to pay.

Was sin a burden for you when you lived without Christ? You might not have realized at the time that it was terribly burdensome, but now that you’ve been set free, do you recognize that it was, indeed, a heavy burden? Do you now understand how it distorted your life, your relationships, even altered your future because of the bad choices you made? 

 

I hope so, because if you do not recognize how sin horribly hurt your life and relationships, then you might need to make sure you really belong to Christ. You should make sure Jesus’ salvation is not for you a mere mental assent, but that it has reached into and changed your heart.

After all, if sin was not a burden, if sin did not bind you, then from what did Jesus deliver you?