The Israelites frequently forsook God, and he as frequently forsook them. But when they repented and returned to him, he remembered his covenant and delivered them from their distresses.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The story of the Jews in the Bible is replete with incidents of their ingratitude to God for His gifts to them: incidents that just as repeatedly merit and receive punishment.
Commanded by God dozens of times in the Hebrew Bible to remember their past, Jews historically obeyed not by recording events but by ritually re-enacting them: by understanding the present through the lens of the past.
The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.
If one accepts the terms of the covenant and obeys God's law, he or she receives the blessings associated with the covenant.
God permits war in order that men may bear the consequences of their sins as punishment. How clearly this is shown time and time again in the story of the children of Israel!
Don't complain. The Israelites wasted forty years murmuring and complaining in the wilderness, when they could have just obeyed God and entered into their Promised Land.
In the Bible, we first encounter God when he sides with a bunch of slaves against a powerful Pharaoh, an act of grace freely given.
Throughout the Old Testament, God warns his chosen people about the perils of assimilation, shiksappeal and false gods.
Those who are believers in God find strength from their faith in the face of suffering. They are compelled to give sacrificially to help those in need. And they have the hope that comes from knowing that, with God by their side, the tragedy they are facing is never the final word.
The Israelites' slavery in Egypt is the equivalent of our slavery to sin. God sent Moses to deliver them from bondage, and He sent Jesus Christ to set us free.