Why Choose Bondage?

After God had delivered His people from Egypt’s slavery and bondage, the children of Israel evidenced a strange change of heart and openly yearned for a return to Egypt. It had been in answer to their own cries that God had released them from terrible misery, yet Israel somehow forgot how miserable that bondage was and longed for it again.

Two years after escaping Pharaoh’s control, Israel turned in unbelief from God and, at Kadesh-barnea, decided not to enter by faith into the promised land. In unbelief they reasoned, “were it not better for us to return into Egypt? …Let us make a captain, and let us return into Egypt” (Num. 14:3-4). Choosing bondage—what a tragic choice! A choice causing many of them to become “carcases…in the wilderness” (Heb. 3:17). Yet do we not at times choose bondage as well?

Leading up to this foolish choice, discontent with the miraculous manna led the Israelites to say, “We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely: the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick” (Num. 11:5). They remembered something of the food, but they forgot the misery of the slavery! And a significant influence driving this fond remembrance and desire for Egypt was agitation by the “mixed multitude” (Num. 11:4).

Similarly, the mixed multitude within us (the flesh that lusts against the Spirit) seeks to stir a longing for the desire of the flesh and not for the desire of our regenerated spirits (the real us). Giving place to such thoughts, we find ourselves as Israel, desiring a return to bondage. When we cave in to the deceitfulness of indwelling sin, we again find ourselves in bondage. Sin is binding, in the end so unsatisfying, and so destructive. But when we follow the Word and the Spirit by faith, we experience the liberating freedom of the very life of the indwelling Christ.

In light of this truth and referencing the sin of unbelief with Israel at Kadesh-barnea, we are admonished to “hear his voice” (Heb. 3:7, 15: 4:7), and to, “Take heed…lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God” and to not be “hardened through the deceitfulness of sin” (Heb. 3:12-13), and to enter His “rest” (Heb. 4:1ff). Let’s heed the admonition to regularly choose the rest and freedom of the life of the indwelling Christ imparted to us and not the bondage of the flesh.