Friends (column below), First: Here’s a “tip” … MCA, the school where Pam and I teach, is raising funds to put a basketball floor in our huge (currently plain concrete floor) “warehouse” area.  Feel like helping?  Donation link: Mission Christian Academy Gymnasium Fundraiser. THANKS! (Psst …we’re off to a fabulous start! Campaign just tipped off last Tuesday, Sept. 19). Give us a hand!

Now, here is Common Christianity column #880 (9-26-23), “Teacher as Student.” It’s funny what you learn when you are teaching others. Blessings!  Bob

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Spirituality Column #880

September 26, 2023

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Teacher as Student, Part 1

By Bob Walters

“Pharaoh said, ‘Who is the Lord, that I should obey his voice and let Israel go?’” Exodus 5:2

I have been reading the Bible diligently and coherently since coming to Christ as a middle aged adult in September 2001.

At that time, suddenly and miraculously, the Bible began making sense which previously, to me, it had not.  I don’t just mean about the basics of the Jesus story … I got that in my childhood in Episcopal Church Sunday school and teen years as an altar boy.  I mean the Bible “sense” one gets when the Holy Spirit is aboard, opening our eyes and heart to growing faith horizons and scripture’s truth, eternity, and love beyond.

I was an encyclopedia nerd as a kid, always on the intake of history, geography, random information, how things worked, where things were made and who made them.  I would, say, pull out volume “S” from the World Book white-with-green-trim deluxe set on our family book shelf and spend hours perusing what it had to offer. I loved to learn.

Now I’m immersed in information daily, unexpectedly teaching high school history (world and U.S.) and American government.  And I’ll add, as an aside, that yes, it is one wacky time to try to explain the current government of history’s greatest experiment in democracy (and for you sticklers out there, yes, I am aware America is a republic).

But … at a Christian school – Mission Christian Academy here in Fishers where I teach and where my wife Pam is the high school English teacher – one can learn astounding things that one misses when one studies history without a sense of the Bible, or the Bible without a sense of history.  Our textbooks include both dimensions.

For example, World History.  We all know about Joseph and the Jews going to Egypt (Genesis 37-50), and then Exodus: the slavery, Moses, God’s plagues, parting of the Red Sea, wandering in the desert, etc., a great Bible story. But what about Egypt?

Well, when Joseph arrived in Egypt it was in a peaceful era called the “Middle Kingdom,” the “Time of the People” following the less hospitable “Age of the Pharaohs.” The Pharaohs did little for the people, instead building pyramids and other monuments to themselves. I never understood; the Jews arrived as refugees but became slaves?

Here’s how.  In their 430 years in Egypt – 1876 BC to 1446 BC – the Israelites at first were allowed to keep to themselves peacefully. Around 1650 BC a warring people called the “Hyksos” took over Egypt, and it is believed it was they who began enslaving the Jews.  By 1570 BC, Egypt’s own warrior kings expelled the Hyksos and Egypt became a powerful nation, conquering Palestine, Syria, and “Upper Egypt” – i.e., the southern Nile area. Thebes was Egypt’s capital, and the Israelites remained in slavery. 

A rare woman leader of this newly toughened Egypt, named Hapshepsut (hap-SHEP-sut), ruled peacefully.  But earlier as “Pharaoh’s daughter,” she is thought to be the young princess who rescued Moses from the bullrushes of the Nile (Exodus 2:5-10).  

Her reign was followed by Thutmose III (thoot-MOS-uh), a warrior king, the “Napoleon of Egypt” who, if modern Egyptology is correct, is the “Pharaoh” who refused Moses’ pleas to free the Israelites (Exodus 5:2, 7-14).  It was his reign that endured God’s ten plagues, and his army that drowned in the Red Sea.  I learn new stuff every day.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) wonders if he is the only one who errantly thought the Pilgrims on the Mayflower were Puritans. That – and a word about “1619” – next week.