Exodus 4:24-26 As You Know It Is Not There

Nothing in Exodus 4:24-26 is anything like what it says, at least not as most people understand it, which is as history. You might not be familiar with the passage: God has just revealed himself to Moses at the burning bush and has told Moses to go to Egypt to free the Israelites from their horrible bondage as slaves -- "Tell Pharaoh, 'Let my people go!'" Here, on the way back to Egypt with his wife and kids, Moses stops at an inn, and God comes to kill him! Moses' wife saves him by circumcising their son and casting his foreskin at his feet -- "I have a bridegroom of blood!" -- so that everything is cool with God. Not your average trip to Egypt.

I see everything as happening within one person, a summary of what he has just gone through psychologically, and from this happening the creation of a success manual. This person had exposure to the ancient myths and religions, and had become a son born of the "waters" of Egypt. He had grown a conscience and an awareness of success, that God operates in the sphere of man to bring about salvation, the provision of whatever man needs to succeed. Sometimes. What is up with that, sometimes? How do we get divine success, salvation (jethro) all the time? This question of the divine provision of success came to bug the heck out of Moses, chirping away in his mind all the time: "How do we get . . . Jethro?!" He withdraws to meditate and to follow the idea of Jethro, and in the meditation he is accosted by God, who wants nothing more in the world than for us to listen and learn about him. "Oye! Finally, a live one, a listener, who acts!"

Yes, Exodus 4:24-26; I'm getting to it.

So God explains to this son born (in Exodus) all the things that are in the book of Genesis: that God is one and has become everything by imagining: "I Myself as Creative Imagining come AS your success" (my personal best translation/interpretation of Exodus 3:14). This is worldview changing news to Moses. He is in a real thing with God. This is not a switch in philosophy; this is an encounter, the real nitty-gritty -- the revelation of the Almighty! Moses is convicted to serve the REAL, here he is -- GOD, with holy devotion OF MIND. Out with the flesh imagination, in with the spiritual imagination (for God's sake, what else can you do?). This is circumcision. Because if all the myths, religions and philosophies of the world are "water," this is BLOOD, Life, the real thing!

Hence Exodus 4:24-26: Moses concludes that this meditation experience was the real deal. Moses was not at an inn; Alexander notes that in the literal sense of the Aramaic, Moses was "between two houses," between the mind of the spirit and the mind of the flesh. He knew that the Lord had accosted him in the meditation for real; and it was to kill the mind of the flesh. It was not a dream or hallucination. This was a new world: everything he thought he knew was wrong, or at least was inadequate as understanding. God wanted him for circumcision, a life practicing the nature of God. That chirping "seek Jethro" which had controlled Moses' mind grabbed God's "feet" or reality (in mental comprehension) and said, "Yes, I accept life in Your Reality and will live circumspectly, devotedly in mind." Mind being imagination. Success is God becoming our salvation THROUGH creative imagining. This creative imagining he has given to the son -- US! It is by our word, which is our expressly imagined intention. Imagine clearly and believe that we HAVE, that it is RECEIVED, and be faithful to the idea that it is intended to have been BEFORE.

No, there was no motel in the middle of the desert, no murderous rampaging God, no emergency clipping of the kid. There was just a man finding resolve to severe holiness and becoming a Pentecostal, all in-house in a son's inner man. The Bible is literal and it is historic, but it is not literal-historical (to be read like a secular history). It is the history of one inner person: you.