Liberating Planet Earth

The God of Liberation 33
God as Liberator
God announces in the introduction to His Ten Commandments
that He had intervened decisively and miraculously in the lives of
the Hebrews. This intervention was radically personal. The
events of the exodus cannot be cogently explained as a series of
impersonal natural events. There could be no doubt in the minds
of the Hebrews of Moses’ day that God had been the source of
their liberation from Egypt. There was certainly no doubt about
this in the minds of the people of the Canaanitic city of Jericho, as
Rahab informed the spies a generation later (Joshua 2:10-11).
By identifying Himself as the source of their liberation, He announced
His total sovereignty over them. A God who intervenes
in history is not some distant God. He is a God of power. He possesses
the power to reshape nations, seas, and history. No other
God has this power; therefore, they are required to worship only
Him.
He is also their king. Eastern kings of the second millennium
B.C. used a formula for announcing their sovereignty which was
similar to this announcement and also similar to God’s announcement
to Moses of His name (Exodus 6:2). Even when their names
were well known, they announced them in the introduction to
their proclamation. Then it was customary for him to record his
might y deeds. The Jewish commentator Cassuto summarizes
God’s announcement: “1, the Speaker, am called YHWH, and I
am your God specifically. Although I am the God of the whole earth
(xix 5), yet I am also your God in the sense that, in consideration
of this sanctification, I have chosen you to be the people of My
special possession from among all the peoples of the earth (xix 6);
and it is I who brought you out of the land of E~pt, not just bringing
you forth from one place to another, but liberating you from the
house of bondage. Hence it behooves you to serve Me not out of fear
and dread, in the way that the other peoples are used to worship
their gods, but from a sense of love and gratitude.”1
1. U. Cassuto, A Comm.mta~ of the Book of Exodus (Jerusalem: The Magnes
press, [1951] 1974), p. 241.