Leaving Egypt
On Christ, Rome, and Palestine
“And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: ‘Out of Egypt I called my son.’”
Matthew 2:15
In the book of Exodus, the ancient Israelites are liberated from the physical bondage of Egypt. While this first liberation under Moses achieved physical freedom, the internal mindset of the people remained unchanged.
As soon as the journey became difficult in the wilderness, the immediate reaction was a desire to return to the predictability of Egyptian captivity, bringing the golden calves of their religious, cultural, and social bondage along with them. The people failed the subsequent tests in the wilderness due to internal doubt.
This pattern became a multi-century cycle of systemic failure, culminating in a conquest and displacement of the Canaanites, through which the very people who had been freed from Egypt adopted the exact behaviors of the systems they believed they replaced. They built a society defined by genocide, power, corruption, tribal division, and hatred.
By the time of Jesus, this cycle had fully manifested again under Rome. Rome was simply the new iteration of Egypt, an oppressive, militarized empire driven by power, control, materialism, and greed. The religious and political institutions compromised with Roman power to maintain their status. Religion became transactional and external, turning sacrifice and ritual into a rigid, commercialized mechanism of control, leaving the population divided, isolated from God, and crushed under the weight of imperial trauma.
In a stark historical inversion, Christ fled a Pharaonic tyrant in Judea and arrived in the physical land of Egypt, the only place that was ironically safe from the Egypt operating inside Judea in plain sight.
The narrative of Christ descending into Egypt as a child serves as a deliberate reset of the entire historical arc. Fixing a system requires returning to the source code. When Christ comes out of Egypt, he leaves a safe sanctuary to step directly into the spiritual battleground of the real Egypt now sitting in Jerusalem.
By facing the wilderness temptations and choosing truth and trust over power, Christ dismantles the spiritual mechanics of slavery that the Israelites failed to break. Without this internal liberation from Egypt, the same oppressive system is inevitably replicated regardless of religion, nationality, or geography.
Physical freedom is incomplete without freeing the human spirit from the mechanics of empire, survival, and fear, and establishing a direct connection to God that external systems can no longer manipulate or destroy.
מצרים
مِصْر
Also worth noting, while the teachings ascribed to Christ are valuable, there is also no evidence a literal Jesus ever existed. He was not mentioned by contemporary historians nor by the Romans or Herodians. The first mention came from a Roman historian, Josephus who was born around 30 years after Jesus is said to have died, so, one presumes he began as an adult which means 50- 60 years after Jesus died. In the times many people died young so whatever Josephus used was hearsay.
The Bible stories about Jesus were written 100 to 200 years after his death so four to eight generations later. Interestingly the attributes for Jesus are word for word those of the Roman God Mithras and for Mary, his mother, word for word those of the Great Mother Goddess Isis from Egypt. There are also claims the teachings of Jesus and the Lord's Prayer have been transcribed from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
None of this is surprising. All religions plagiarised because myths have universal appeal and because it was a way to entice people to join the religion. The Catholics certainly did this, picking up many pagan Gods and Goddesses and turning them into Saints to lure the populace into converting.
Judaism drew on the religions of its time, Christianity the same and deeply on Judaism, Islam the same and deeply on Judaism and Christianity. Any study of religions shows at core they have the same innate wisdom and core teachings. Again, not surprising because such things have emerged from the universal mind and the human minds.
The direct connection to God exists, and cannot be broken by external forces or systems. This is the meaning of "The Kingdom of God is within you."