- 6 - The second generation of Abraham’s human descendants, Jacob and his sons, were led into Egypt, where they settled in the fertile land of Goshen, there to become a great nation, isolated from the idolatrous inhabitants of Egypt, and free to uphold the true faith. • But continuing worldly prosperity always endangers a nation’s faithfulness to God. That is why God permitted the pharaohs to sorely oppress the Hebrews, as Abraham’s descendants had come to be known, and to hold them in rigorous servitude. It was not God who instigated Pharaoh to pursue this course, but the spirit Powers of Evil, which had realized that the Hebrew nation, as the bearer of the true faith, was a dangerous weapon in Christ’s hands and might be used by him against them. Hence, it was to be wiped out, and since this end was not being accomplished by the forced labour the Hebrews were compelled to perform, the demoniacal powers drove the pharaohs to exterminate them by the simplest and most effective method. Every Hebrew man-child was to be killed at birth. As a justification for this measure, the Powers of Hell had filled the king’s mind with the thought that the Hebrews within his dominions, having already waxed strong in numbers, might become a source of danger by allying themselves with the enemies of Egypt. Evil well knows how to attack men, and the rulers of men in particular, at their weakest point. Which, with a king, is always a fear that his throne is in peril. Hence Pharaoh fell a ready victim to the insinuations of the evil ones, and began the slaughter of all the newborn male infants of the Hebrews. According to Pharaoh’s plan, this would have resulted in the extinction of all Hebrew men within a comparatively short period. The Hebrew women would then have become the wives or slaves of Egyptians, would have been absorbed by that people and, like it, have fallen into idolatry. Thus, all the efforts of Christ and his spirit world to provide for human bearers of the true faith would have been nullified at one blow. But once again it happened, as it happens so often in nature and in the lives of men, that the very force that was intent upon doing evil promoted the cause of good, for the moment at which a people is driven to the greatest desperation through the slaughter of its children by a ruler is also the most favourable moment for persuading that people to leave the scene of its sufferings. There was still another, more important reason why it was high time for the Hebrew people to be led out of the land of the pharaohs. During the 400 years of their sojourn there the Hebrews had gradually drifted toward Egyptian idol worship, and quite a few of them were already participating in the pagan rites. This grave danger to the Hebrew people's faith in God could be prevented only by an exodus from Egypt, and this was the most appropriate moment for that, since the massacre of their infants was making their stay in Egypt a living hell for the Hebrews. “Leading so numerous and unmanageable a people out of Egypt was a task that called for a great human leader. Christ selected one of his high heavenly spirits for the purpose, and caused it to be born as a human being., It was Moses. The son of Hebrew parents, he was saved from death by Pharaoh’s daughter, who saw to it that he was instructed in all of the sciences of the time, thus equipping him, as a mortal, with the skills he would need as the head of a great people.
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